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This week marked the last episode of CBC’s Dispatches, a news programme that covered issues big and small from the world around. Officially it was a victim of the latest rounds of budget cuts at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, though one could argue this was also part of a larger international trend towards the reduction of state-sponsored journalism. Radio Netherlands, another credible producer of news, have also slashed their programming, as have the BBC.

This is quite unfortunate, because the likes of CBC and Radio Netherlands had produced some of the highest quality reporting available anywhere. Dispatches was particularly valuable as its extended format allowed journalists to go beyond the formula demanded by condensing stories to thirty seconds for newscasts. Instead of the standard “there was a bomb/riot/flood, thirty people are dead”, we could actually go behind the stories and get valuable insights into unfolding events.

Dispatches had no real equal, magnifying the loss of this kind of perspective. Everyone who appreciates the world for all its wonder will be the poorer for it. As unfortunate as it is unsurprising, the archives of the show are also only to stay online until December 2013.

The world is moving away from spending big money on journalism. Newspapers have been closing foreign offices for years now, with their own domestic reporting being substituted for material obtained from news agencies. Public broadcasters have seen cuts after cuts, dumping their more intellectual programming for the sake of easy sells to remain palatable in the face of its commercial competition. Rare are the likes of The Economist, who have survived this tumultuous transition period in consumer preference.

The Internet, and the rise of free news have been the catalyst for this shift. The is much good in this, in the form of greater accessibility. The cost, meanwhile, has been content. You need money to be able to conduct good journalism in foreign places, and that’s just no longer possible. The solution ought to be to invest more in public broadcasters to pick up the slack where private entities have no capacity or interest, but that seems counter to public sentiments. So instead, we are closing our eyes off to the world. What a loss for us all.

Listen to the final episode of CBC’s Dispatches here.

This is my go at answering this age old philosophical question.

The very premise of the question is flawed as it incorrectly assumes that there’s an answer. The idea of an answer would make sense if I believed that my life was covertly dictated by some ethereal being. I don’t.

I believe that I’m the product of energy differentials that caused things to happen. In this context, I don’t believe that I have any more meaning than the fact that this grain of sand is in one place as opposed to a single millimeter to it’s left. The interactions that led to its genesis, evolution, and placement have no more thought behind them (that is to say, none) than those series of interactions that led to the primordial soup, millions of years of evolution, and culminated into my being.

So meaning wasn’t given to me. Not that I should have been surprised, given that this is a construct of our mind to begin with. But if the answer isn’t handed down, and I know that it’s relevant only to my little human brain, then this becomes a question only suitably addressed by myself.

In other words, the meaning of my life is whatever I choose to make it. How liberating is that?

I don’t quite remember how the conversation started, but I was talking to a coworker about the changes we had made in our lives to make it better. I told him about how I got rid of my dependence on a watch and how I hadn’t ever regretted the decision.

“Try waking up without an alarm,” he said. “You’ll feel so much more refreshed.”

So I did. I’ve been going to bed at a reasonable hour, and waking up every morning at around six or so to get ready for work. All without the annoying buzz of the alarm to jolt me up from the sleep.

My coworker was absolutely right. I don’t wake up feeling groggy and tired like I used to. I suspect the key in all of this is that I go to bed earlier, which means I sleep more overall. With an alarm, you can stay up later knowing that you’ll wake up on time regardless. When that option goes away, earlier bed times become essential.

I’ve also been going to work earlier, catching the 6:40am bus. This means that should I wake up “late”, I’ll still show up on time. There’s no stress; I get there when I get there.

I’ve been doing this for a few months now and I don’t regret it one bit. If I have a late night, then of course I’ll set the alarm, but I try to avoid it as much as possible.

You might be wondering why I’m churning out book reviews with such great frequency. It’s because I’m fully aware that my return to school will kill my love of reading, so I’m trying to get as much of it done now.

Trick or Treatment is a book by renowned science journalist Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter. The pair joined forces to release a book that evaluates popular alternative medicine approaches on the basis of whether they work.

Under the microscope are acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, and herbal medicine. The authors also look into, but devote fewer pages to, such treatments as osteopathy and crystal healing.

The book sparked a lawsuit against Singh by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), which was widely perceived as an attempt to silence criticisms of their work. Singh had taken issue with the fact that the Association “claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence.” The BCA withdrew their action after Singh won an appeal, but not before costing the author thousands in legal fees.

The book itself is a mixed bag. I feel like a third of its 300+ pages could have been tossed without losing content. The history, studies, and criticisms of the treatments are good. I found it informative, for instance, to learn that homeopathic remedies dilute the ingredients claimed responsible for the healing to the point where the most potent cures have a 1 in a billion billion chances of even having a single molecule of it. I also enjoyed finding out about how the placebo effect was discovered and how it is accounted for in medical trials.

The authors show that not all alternative medicines are bogus. Some herbal medicines do have legitimate uses, and it is from such medicines that Aspirin and modern anti-malarial treatments were initially derived. St John’s wort does have demonstrable impact in treating depression. However, the authors note it’s really about cost-benefit. Modern drugs will condense the active ingredients while reducing the side-effects that may accompany these herbal treatments.

Furthermore, the authors also state that if evidence is found in support of such treatments, then it is no longer considered “alternative.” The term is relegated to unfounded claims rejected by evidence.

The book is worth a read. It won’t change the minds of those who view anecdotal evidence of one as superior to anecdotal evidence of hundreds in a controlled environment, despite the best efforts of the authors. But for those of us who adhere to a willingness to test claims in the most objective manner possible to see if they hold water, it’s an informative text.

It’s interesting to note that my latest project, the book Diets Suck, was completed without spending a single cent. I accomplished this by using open-source software, liberally licensed fonts, and royalty-free imagery. To contribute back into this commons, I am releasing my own work under an open copyright license which allows people to do what they wish as long as they don’t sell it.

The book itself was written using LibreOffice, the open-source equivalent to Microsoft Office. Setting up the book’s formatting with it was a breeze, including making sure that the margins were different depending whether it was a left or right page (you want the content to be further away from the spine) and automatically updating the page references found throughout the text.

For the text inside the book, I used the Liberation Fonts released by Red Hat, the company best known for its enterprise Linux distribution. Contrary to mainstream thought, having a font installed on your computer does not give you carte blanche on its use. That Times New Roman font that comes with Windows isn’t free – Microsoft obtained proper licensing for it from Monotype Imaging Holdings. As for the book’s cover, I made use of two additional fonts: Bebas Neue and Vegur.

Keeping with the theme of the cover, it was made using the open-source GIMP. It’s closest analogue familiar to most readers would be Adobe’s Photoshop.

The image of the doughnut used on the cover came from a royalty-free stock photography website, stock.xchng.

GIMP wasn’t the only tool I used to create imagery. I also used the excellent Inkscape. Whereas GIMP specializes in raster graphics, Inkscape does vector graphics – it’s brother in the proprietary world would be Adobe’s Illustrator. Vector graphic formats are more appropriate when creating images involving simple shapes.

Finally, the book’s electronic edition was completed using a combination of Sigil and Calibre. Sigil to format the text in the ePUB format of electronic books, and Calibre to put the finishing touches such as embedding the cover.

The advent of print-on-demand services such as Lulu meant that publishing paperback copies didn’t cost me either. Even a few years ago, publishing meant a significant investiture, with the printers requiring that I order batches of hundreds of books at a time.

These days I just upload PDFs of the book interior and cover to my account with Lulu, and they do the rest. People can just go to the Diets Suck website, click on a link, and end up on a page hat lets them purchase a single copy. Within days, Lulu will manufacture that book and ship it off to the customer. Best of all, the price for these one-offs is comparable to that of other titles found in bookstores.

This brings me to the last piece in the development of this book, its website. I used Geany as the code editor, and the aforementioned GIMP and Inkscape to create the graphics. I used the W3C Markup Validation Service to make sure the code checked out.

I’m very grateful to the culture of sharing that flourishes online. It is thanks to people who devote their time to making open-source software, who create fonts for others to use, who take pictures and share them, that I was able to create this work.