Paul Sullivan is an award winning journalist and communications strategist in Vancouver , British Columbia.
47 posts
Doctors believe, not without justification, that the Internet is a cesspool of medical misinformation. But we use it because it's there. It may take two years to get an appointment with a bricks and mortar dermatologist, but there's no shortage of acne experts ready with free advice online 24/7....
Meet the future: Eugene Goostman. He's a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy; his father is a gynecologist and he owns a gerbil. He's also not a real boy, but a computer program. A chatbot, to be precise.But this assemblage of hopped up bits and bytes managed to fool some real humans into believing he was one of us...
Every now and then, the issue of keeping whales in captivity crops up at the Aquarium. Now is one of those times. One of Vancouver's top tourist attractions, the Aquarium is undergoing a $100 million expansion, and when it's finished in 2016, the plan is for belugas to be the centrepiece of the brave new facility....
If you're having a bad day here on Earth, consider the alternative. How about a bad day on Mars? Applications are now open for people who want to be the first settlers on Mars....
Business Insider has done one of those unscientific reader's choice surveys and on the strength of 2200 responses has determined the Best Fast Food in America. We can take that to include the rest of North America, because most of these epicurean delights do not require a run to the border...
How many shopping days left till Christmas? How many days till you have to mail out Christmas cards - if indeed you send any? Paul Sullivan has answers and more questions....
It turns out those people wearing the tin foil hats are right:They" are messing with our minds."They" in this case is Facebook, and "they" decided to find out how we react to an increase or decrease in positive or negative posts by manipulating the news feeds of 600,000-plus randomly selected social media lab rats...
In British Columbia, which has some of the toughest drunk driving laws in North America, the attorney general is aghast that, with one third the population, we have more distracted driving deaths than Ontario.Maybe that's because Ontario has already jacked up its distracted driving fine from $155 to $280. In an amusing touché, it goes to $500 if you contest it and lose, which should clear up a lot of nuisance court cases....
Pumpkins are for Christmas? Christmas trees are for Halloween? Paul Sullivan looks at why the madness begins earlier each year....
Ho-hum. Another day, another prophet of doom. Today's Cassandra du Jour is someone named Benjamin Strauss from something called Climate Central. Benjamin concludes that without an immediate deep reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 1700 US cities will be under water by the end of this century....
