The Canadian Government's Department of Public Works has recently announced a change to their hiring policy - a change that would ensure that only women or visible minorities are given new jobs in that department. The change has given rise to accusations of racism, especially coming from a government that has described itself as "colour blind". The Deputy Minister of Public Works, David Marshall, has ordered the new policy to be put into place for the next five months, at which time it will be reviewed.

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I find it a convenient shorthand to tell people I live in New Orleans, but since 1992 I've actually lived in the nearby bedroom community of Mandeville. As many people who actually do live in New Orleans will tell you, though, Mandeville isn't New Orleans. It isn't even close, no matter how easy it is to drive here from there.

The movies would have you think the culture of New Orleans is Cajun French, but that's not so. Cajun culture is centered almost 150 miles from here, in the Acadian parishes surrounding the city of Lafayette. If you want a culture that belongs uniquely to New Orleans, you'd find it in Chalmette and the Ninth Ward, where the language, food, and customs are like no place else on Earth.

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The arcane art of tracking takes what I like to think of as a hacker's approach to making music. The interface is primarily numeric, notes are entered via the keyboard, length, parameters, effects are often entered in hexadecimal notation, and code flies across the screen as if you were looking at the opening credits of The Matrix. What's not to like? This article is a tutorial for beginners, more specifically for nerds with no musical training, on how to start making electronic beats using the most sampled break in the history of recorded music.

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While visiting my native land--the Faroe Islands--this summer, I became bored and looked for somewhere even more remote and isolated to venture to: somewhere in the Arctic I'd never visited. Having seen most of Scandinavia and much of northern Russia, my choices were limited but had to be apt. I ended up going to Scoresbysund, Greenland and then to Longyearbyen, Svalbard. These are some of the most remote parts of the world and their isolation and insular situation both makes them spellbinding places to visit and also reflections of broader Nordic culture.

This is the story of my journey.

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On Thursday October 27, 2005, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna, French teenagers from the outskirts of Paris, were electrocuted while hiding from the Police in an electric substation. An official denial from the police was not enough to stop a night of rioting: the police spent the night clashing with groups of young people from the banlieue. That first night, 27 people were arrested. In the eleven nights since, the rioting has spread to more than thirty cities, from discontented community to discontented community all over France. Thousands of cars have been destroyed. Many public buildings have gone up in flames, including schools, stores, and police stations. More than one-thousand arrests have been made

And yet, the police are unable to control the rioters who, in a country where guns are illegal, shoot live ammunition at them. Every night, as the sun sets, France erupts in flames. In cities like Paris and Lyon, but also in smaller cities like Avignon, small communities like Valréas and Carpentras. Why is this happening? Why are rioters saying that it will not end until there are two dead cops?

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On November 2, the residents of Denver, Colorado passed the Alcohol-Marijuana Equalization Initiative. With 100% of precincts reporting, the final tally for the vote was 56,001 YES votes to 48,632 NO votes, approximately 54% - 46%. The measure changed city law to allow for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for adults 21 and over. The act is largely symbolic, though, as state and federal laws supersede local law, and authorities have already stated that state possession laws would be applied. However hope remains, for the passage of the initiative marks Denver as the first area in the nation to legalize private use of marijuana, for recreational as well as medical use. Is the legalization of marijuana at the federal level now within our reach?

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Life, I've been told, is a school. I've always thought that it was more like a college, where your participation determines what you get out of it. I never made it through college, but I've learned a lot in life, and over the past year, I've been engaged in a sort of group learning experience - one of me, thousands of them. They are honeybees, and they teach the lessons of the hive.

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During the spring semester of my sophomore year at the University of Colorado Boulder, I took an entry-level sociology class called Deviance in Society. I registered for the course after a long pot smoking session with this sociology major named Ruthie who'd taken it her freshman year.

"Is that class really as cool as it sounds?" I said, passing the green plastic bong down to where she was sitting barefoot on the rug. I'd been burned before on courses that had cool sounding names, like the Chaos Theory and Non Linear-Systems class that actually expected you to do some pretty intense math.

"Hell yeah," Ruthie said before taking a hit. I watched the brown bong-water bubble at the bottom and realized I really needed to change it. "I loved that class. You learn a lot of neat stuff," she said as she exhaled.

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Perhaps it sounded good on paper, but Intel's latest ad campaign "Experience Entertainment in Your Lap" doesn't really go where you want to go today.

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The science of genomics is the study of genes and their function. Recent advances in genomics are bringing about a revolution in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of disease, and are providing new ways for scientists to develop pharmaceuticals by targeting the specific genes, or the corresponding proteins responsible for the disease. The details of the process are summarized at Decision Resources. They write "Genomics-based drug discovery now offers the improved ability to identify greater numbers of drug targets. Genomics is based on the concept that a gene's function is to generate a certain effect or group of effects in the body. Genes achieve this functionality through the proteins they produce. Although the genes themselves might become therapeutic targets, the pivotal rationale behind this approach is that, by linking public genomic data with proprietary genomic sequence information, pharmaceutical companies can then launch a focused search for proteins expressed from these genes, providing additional therapeutic targets."

The new genomic approach to drug design may have a significant impact on the quality and scope of pharmaceuticals available, it also raises some important questions with regard to social justice, that is, how can you insure that certain groups of people are not disadvantaged with regard to drug development? It is conceivable that the pharmaceutical industry, driven either by profit or prejudice, will avoid developing drugs that will be vital to a minority population.

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