 | IDEAS airs Monday to Friday on CBC Radio One
at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) and 4 a.m. (4:30 a.m. NT) | |  | Monday, May 15, 2023 | |  | | Amazon's Echo Dot, the company's second speaker featuring its voice-controlled assistant, Alexa. Alexa, like many other digital assistant programs on the market, is named after and — at least in most marketing — voiced by a woman. (Zapp2Photo/Shutterstock) | | | MONDAY, MAY 15 | | | A Harem of Computers | | Digital assistants, in your home or on your phone, are usually presented as women. While you can choose a male voice for your personal assistant, the default is usually female. In this documentary, Jill Fellows, philosophy instructor at Douglas College in British Columbia, traces the history of the feminized, non-threatening machine, from Siri and Alexa, to a chatbot invented in the 1960s named ELIZA, to the "women computers" of 19th century. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 26, 2022. | | | TUESDAY, MAY 16 | | | Ukrainian Internment | | It's a hidden chapter of Canadian history that's now slowly emerging. For decades leading up to the outbreak of World War One, Canada actively courted immigrants from Eastern Europe — thousands upon thousands, including 150,000 from what is now Ukraine. They ravelled across the ocean to farm and fill a growing demand for manual labourers. But as World War One broke out, those migrants, including some who were Canadian citizens, were labelled as 'aliens of enemy origin' and targeted by the state. Descendants of those imprisoned in forced labour camps share their stories with documentary producers James Motluk and Jeff Preyra. | | | WEDNESDAY, MAY 17 | | | Judge Rosie Abella | If the term “employment equity” means something obvious to you — that we all, men, women, people of colour, the disabled — have the right to be treated in an equitable manner in the workplace, then thank Judge Rosalie Abella. She came up with the concept when she chaired a Royal Commission. A couple of years ago Rosie (as many people call her) retired from the Supreme Court of Canada, honoured both here and around the world for her groundbreaking work in so many areas, particularly in human rights law. Judge Rosie, in conversation with David Goldbloom at the Stratford Festival. And she’s funny too. | | | THURSDAY, MAY 18 | | | Man Up! Masculinity in Crisis, Part One | | Recent books, articles and films point in a similar disturbing direction: "what's wrong with men?," "boys adrift," "patriarchy blues." Social scientists have over the decades noticed this trend: that men are dropping out of the workforce, and their addiction rates are climbing. Men are also three times more likely to commit suicide than women. In Canada, female undergraduates are outperforming males. In Sweden, researchers say there's a pojkkristen or "boy crisis." While scholars agree there is indeed a problem, they don't necessarily agree on the cause. But if we trace the history of conceptions about masculinity, the evidence suggests that masculinity itself has always been in crisis. | | | FRIDAY, MAY 19 | | | Decolonizing English | Over the course of 400 years, English went from being a small language spoken in the British Isles to becoming the most dominant language in the world. But is English Britain's "greatest gift" to the world as some say it is, or is it, as critics contend, "a behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief?" As English gains ground and pushes local languages aside and acts like a "linguistic imperialist," is there a way to rethink English not as a language with a universal standard upheld in a faraway place, but rather as a global language with multiple versions existing on equal footing? | | |  | Listen whenever you want.
Get the latest or catch up on past episodes of Ideas, CBC Radio's program of contemporary thought. Subscribe to the podcast | | | |  | A mushroom cloud from the first test of a hydrogen bomb, ‘Ivy Mike,’ loomed over the Pacific Ocean in 1952, packed with Plutonium-239 that spread around the planet. Some scientists suggest the proposed geological epoch known as the Anthropocene began around then, marked in sediments by Plutonium and other human wastes. (Reuters) | | | IDEAS IN THE AFTERNOON | MONDAY, MAY 15 at 2 p.m. | | | | | We’ve heard of the Anthropocene: how human activity has altered the planet. But the Great Acceleration? It’s that period from 1950 onwards, when the same human activities revved up even more, and are still accelerating. IDEAS contributor David Kattenburg examines the crucial, and sometimes contested, meanings of this age of Great Acceleration. | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
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