Female fertility newsflash!

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 11:26 AM - 4 Comments

Scottish scientists have finally figured out why female fertility drops off so rapidly with age: a woman’s “ovarian reserve,” or the potential number of eggs she is born with, declines by almost 90 per cent by age 30. The study from the University of St Andrews and Edinburgh University found that most women are born with 300,000 potential egg cells but by age of 30, only 12 per cent are left on average; by age of 40, the reserve is down to just three per cent.  Though women continue producing eggs throughout their 30s and 40s, the reservoir of potential eggs from which they are taken shrinks to almost nothing. And though the body chooses the best eggs from the reserve, the likelihood is that the quality of the eggs will suffer with age, increasing the difficulty of conception and the risk of an unhealthy baby. The lesson, says study co-author Dr Hamish Wallace, is that women shouldn’t wait too long to try to conceive: “Our research shows that they are generally over-estimating their fertility prospects.

The Telegraph

PM heads to Swiss alps

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 11:12 AM - 7 Comments

As the cold front sets in back home, Prime Minister Stephen Harper finds himself at an elite Swiss ski resort this week, schmoozing with CEOs and academic types. Soon though, he’ll be getting down to business. The ski lodge will host the 2010 Davos World Economic Forum, an economic policy conference attended by a range of world leaders. On Thursday, Harper will give a keynote address, discussing the two international summits that Canada will be hosting this summer: the G8 and the G20. Also on the agenda: global banking systems, stimulus funding, and Haiti’s recovery.

Canada’s Olympians No. 5: Michael and Britt Janyk

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 11:06 AM - 1 Comment

When Britt Janyk was four years old, she and her mother Andrée harboured a deep secret. Britt’s two-year-old brother Mike couldn’t know that she had mastered the two-wheeler, because anything big sister did, Mike would surely try. “I knew he could ride it, that wasn’t the issue,” says Andrée. “It was whether he knew what a stop sign looked like.” Mom held off for a year before letting him catch a glimpse of Britt on her bike. From Mike came the inevitable demand for the removal of his bicycle training wheels, “and off down the road he went,” says Andrée.

As for stop signs, they’ve never figured large in the imagination of either Britt or Mike, Whistler’s World Cup alpine duo and—if life goes according to plan—Olympic teammates. By the time each had turned five, they were skiing double black diamond runs—the extreme, expert-level drops that many skiers will sensibly avoid their whole lives.

Continue…

52 Haitian children arrive on Wednesday

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 10:49 AM - 1 Comment

Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET, a plane from Haiti will touch down at Ottawa International Airport. On board: 52 Haitian children whose adoptions were fast-tracked by the Canadian government, in light of this month’s tragic earthquake in Port-au-Prince. The first plane carrying Haitian children arrived on Sunday. In total, 90 adoption proceedings have been cleared by Haitian authorities. The rest of the children will be arriving in Ottawa shortly to meet their Canadian families. Last week, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney pledged to “extract” Haitian children whose Canadian adoptions were already underway.

CBC News

Toyota's sticky situation

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 10:43 AM - 0 Comments

Toyota is recalling 270,000 vehicles in Canada—and about two million in the U.S.—to address a problem with accelerator pedals that stick. There are eight models affected by the suspension and recall, including the 2009-2010 models of the Corolla, Matrix, and Camry. As part of the plan, Toyota is halting production at seven factories on the week of February 1, including the Cambridge and Woodstock plants. This recall comes just months after Toyota recalled 4.2 million vehicles due to gas pedals becoming stuck under floor mats, causing the car the accelerate.

CBC News

'The need for more inspiring public discourse on things that matter'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 8:51 AM - 41 Comments

For whatever reason, Stephen Woodworth, Conservative MP for Kitchener Centre, felt it necessary Tuesday night to explain his day in a rapid succession of Twitter messages.

a good meeting this morning with a senior’s advisory council I have formed

also this afternoon a chance to announce $298000 to support young mothers

this evening a briefing on the Cdn Int’l Peace Project from its founder

also this evening an excellent conversation with a constituent about the need for more inspiring public discourse on things that matter

earlier today a meeting with an aspiring municipal candidate to encourage and advise him

i’ve spent almost 13 hours today “not working.”

Rights and Democracy: And now, a two-bit burglary

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 8:49 PM - 162 Comments

The Globe breaks the latest in the increasingly weird tale of Rights and Democracy: on Saturday, while the staff of Rights and Democracy were at the funeral of former president Rémy Beauregard, somebody broke into the organization’s Montreal office and, it seems, stole two computers, including the one for R&D’s communications director.

The Globe is unable to find any hard evidence that would show this is anything more than a random break-in and an odd coincidence. Still, the paper is breaking this story legitimately because the question arises: what the hell is going on here?

For my money, almost the most interesting sentence in this whole story is the following: “Mr. Braun, a University of Toronto professor, issued a directive on Monday forbidding staff from any further public communication without prior written approval.” This from the guy who runs around accusing everybody else of being enemies of transparency. Recall that Aurel Braun teaches political science at one of our finer universities, not logic.

Shout! Factory To Complete "Leave It To Beaver" On DVD

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 6:44 PM - 6 Comments

This is one of the most worthwhile projects Shout! Factory will undertake this year. Leave It To Beaver only had two seasons released by Universal. Shout! has licensed the show and will continue with the individual season releases; but they will also release a complete series set on June 15. The complete series set will contain remastered versions of the first two seasons, which means that if you want the new remastering/special features you’ll need to buy the complete series.

This is a technique that Shout! and other companies are using more often: releasing the whole show as a package, and then, later, releasing the seasons individually. Ally McBeal, Get Smart and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show are other shows that have been released this way, and Shout! just split its Sports Night set into individual season releases. It’s a sensible practice if only because it’s the only way to guarantee that all the seasons are released; if you start with the first season only and then the stores decide they don’t want to carry the second season, fans are pretty much doomed.

This is also good news because Leave It To Beaver is one of those “classic” shows that actually deserves to be called a classic, a gigantic influence on virtually every comedy and drama about growing up, and a milestone in the way a TV series could do observational comedy based on real-world situations. (It wasn’t the first show where the plots had to be based on things the writers had seen or experienced, but that was certainly not as common then, in U.S. series television, as it became.) Also, Eddie Haskell is one of the greatest characters ever created for television; everybody knows an Eddie Haskell in every possible setting.

The show’s impressively detailed and analytical Wikipedia page gives a good indication of why it’s important.

Shout! has also made a deal to release the fourth season of The Facts Of Life, which does not have the same historical importance but does have a catchy Alan Thicke theme song. Also, I never really thought about this before: Nancy McKeon got the “…and” billing, which she did not have in an earlier version of the intro. That doesn’t happen very often to people who don’t get that kind of billing from the moment they join the show. Alison Hannigan got the “…and” after Tony Head left Buffy, and Valerie Bertinelli’s status as the only reason anybody watched One Day At a Time was acknowledged when the producers made her an “…and.” In all three cases, the actress had gotten popular enough that she might have had offers to leave for some other show, so the extra billing might have been an extra inducement to stay.

Our brains can't handle all of our Facebook friends

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 6:29 PM - 3 Comments

Turns out, most of your 500 Facebook friends don’t really matter to you. Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University, developed a theory in the 1990s known as “Dunbar’s Number” which claims the size of our neocortex—the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language—limits us to managing around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we try to be. Dunbar found that in the real world people tended to self-organize in groups of around 150 because social cohesion beings to deteriorate as groups get larger. And his preliminary results point to Facebook being no different. “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people,” says Dunbar. So I guess we all have an excuse for not talking to our long-lost friends from second grade.

London Times

Obama wants a spending freeze

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 6:20 PM - 5 Comments

Administration officials say U.S. President Barack Obama will announce a proposal for a three-year spending freeze on some domestic programs during his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The proposal would apply to discretionary funding, which is used by domestic agencies with a congressionally-approved budget. Discretionary spending represented $477 billion of the $3.5 trillion budget last year. It is expected to grow by 10 per cent in 2010, adding to a deficit already projected to reach $1.3 trillion this year alone. Obama wants the freeze to start in 2011, which would initially lead to a small savings of $15 billion—a number that could grow to $250 billion over the next ten years. Critics on the left claim the White House shouldn’t be cutting spending while trying to fix the ailing economy, while Republicans, fresh off a major Senate victory in Massachusetts, insist the government should do more to cut into ballooning deficits.

CBC News

It's not the banks I hate, it's their fans

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 5:52 PM - 24 Comments

$39.8 billion: That’s how much Quebec’s Caisse de dépôt et placement lost in 2008.

After watching a quarter of its total value vanish into the ether, the Caisse naturally opted for the most reasonable course of action—it sought to reinsure nervous investors by preaching and exercising extreme caution in the face of what could very well have been a devastating economic and political crisis.

Wait, you didn’t believe that did you? Continue…

The watchdogs

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 5:09 PM - 54 Comments

The Globe, Canadian Press, Star, and CBC report from the appearances of the former president of the Nuclear Safety Commission, the former chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission and the former chair of the RCMP public complaints commission at a Liberal forum this morning. From the Globe’s account.

More diplomatic was Peter Tinsley, whose term as chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, was not renewed last year. The commission made news for probing the Afghan detainee controversy, the same hot-button issue that many observers say forced the Tories to prorogue Parliament this winter.

“The perception has become widespread that something is not quite right in the system,” Mr. Tinsley said. Too often, he said, political “horsetrading” and unelected staffers play key roles in hiring and firing watchdogs that serve at the whim of the government they are appointed to criticize. ”The potential for abuse itself does not bode well for good governance,” Mr. Tinsley said.

20 is the new 50

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 4:56 PM - 0 Comments

A new report says that Canadians in their 20s and 30s are now commonly at risk of heart disease—a group that has typically been mostly immune to the threat. Unsurprisingly, a combination of unhealthy habits and increasingly sedentary lifestyles has created the “perfect storm” of cardiovascular disease in Canada. Between 1994 and 2005, rates of high blood pressure among Canadians rose by 77 per cent, while diabetes rose 45 per cent, and obesity by 18 per cent. Even more troubling is that more than 250,000 Canadians in their 20s and 30s had high blood pressure, making them the newest at-risk group.

CBC News

Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 4:50 PM - 3 Comments

Psychologists are suggesting that young girls may learn to fear math from their earliest female teachers. The U.S. study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that over the course of a school year, the more anxious teachers are about their own math skills, the more likely their female students were to agree that, “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.” Ninety per cent of U.S. elementary school teachers are female, as were all the teachers in the study. “If the next generation of teachers is going to teach their students effectively, more care needs to be taken to develop both strong math skills and positive math attitudes in these educators,” the researchers wrote.

CBC News

Trow to leave Toronto Humane Society

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

Tim Trow’s second tenure as president of the Toronto Humane Society has ended much like his first: with his resignation. Trow, who served as president in the early 1980s and most recently from 2001 to 2009, is expected to submit his resignation as he faces criminal charges for animal cruelty, obstruction of a peace officer, and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. “The whole board should resign,” said THS critic Marcie Laking. “If they care about the reputation of the Toronto Humane Society, and they want the Toronto Humane Society to be fixed, they should leave with him.”

Toronto Star

OMG: U.S. bans truckers, bus drivers from texting while driving

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 4:39 PM - 9 Comments

The U.S. has officially banned truckers and bus drivers from texting while driving in an effort to curtail driver distractions. The move is being seen as a step towards banning cellphone use by all drivers. The announcement comes after a Virginia Tech study found that truckers texting were 23 times more likely to be involved in a crash or a near-miss. However, the new law is regarded as more symbolic than practical: “The enforcement problem here is enormous,” said Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “How does anybody spot a trucker or any driver on the road using some device that they’re holding below window level?” Texting and cellphone use while driving is already banned by major commercial fleets, such as FedEX and UPS, as well as by federal employees driving government vehicles.

Washington Post

Always look on the bright side of life

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 4:04 PM - 39 Comments

Conservative MP Barry Devolin finds the teachable moment.

Devolin added that Canadians should use this current controversy over prorogue as a way of learning more about their Canadian parliamentary system. ”It’s kind of interesting that it’s like a civics lesson for the whole country, because we’re learning about how Parliament works which I think is a good thing in the long run,” he said.

A musical Olympic bid of his own

By Janelle Muntz Lassonde - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 3 Comments

The song began as a burst of inspiration, years before anyone was thinking about an Olympic theme. In his loft apartment in Toronto, Stephan Moccio cradled a newborn baby swaddled in white flannel as he belted out a snappy jingle into his own telephone answering machine, a handy substitute for a tape recorder: “Da-na-Naa-daa-Na-na-naa-Naaa!” Beneath his baritone, his daughter gurgled. “Ideas for potential Vancouver Olympics 2010,” he added at the end. Four years later, Moccio plays that original clip in his Toronto studio. The melody merges into a trumpet fanfare, then blooms into a majestic anthem orchestrated with rich horns and sweeping strings. The 37-year-old pianist and composer’s songs have already been recorded by stars like Céline Dion, Sarah Brightman and Josh Groban. His latest spark, conceived while he was bleary from new parenthood, has evolved into the new CTV Vancouver Olympics theme song.

Over two decades ago, living in his hometown of Niagara Falls, Ont., Moccio was so inspired by David Foster’s Calgary Olympics score he told his new girlfriend, now his wife, he’d write one someday. And so he did. When Vancouver won its 2010 bid, Moccio seized the home-court advantage. The tune came to him in a flash—but he had no idea how to launch his own Olympic bid.

Continue…

Ontario's $7-billion green energy investment upsets enviros

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 19 Comments

Last week, when Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a new $7 billion investment in the province’s green energy sector—perhaps the largest such investment in the world—he earned himself an unlikely adversary: the Green Party of Ontario. “We’d like to see the provincial government scrap this deal,” said Mike Schreiner, the Green leader, in an interview with Maclean’s.

The province signed its deal with a South Korean consortium, which includes Samsung. And at first glance, it seems like an environmentalist’s dream come true. The consortium is committed to developing 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power across the province (about enough to light 580,000 Canadian homes). In the process, it will create an estimated 16,000 jobs, 4,000 of which will be permanent. The goal is to make Ontario “the place to be for green energy manufacturing in North America,” McGuinty explained.

That’s all well and good, says Schreiner, whose party celebrated the passing of the Green Energy Act last year. But “this deal essentially throws [Ontario companies] under the bus.” Ontario-based projects are shovel ready, he insists. “So why are we offering special deals to multinational corporations?” The Association of Power Producers of Ontario is equally upset. David Butters, the group’s president, says it’s not Samsung’s presence that bothers him so much as the preferential treatment that the South Korean behemouth is getting. Ontario has guaranteed Samsung a higher-than-market value for its energy and  priority access to the power grid. “Now we have two kinds of developers in Ontario,” laments Butters. “Samsung and everybody else.”

Consumers, at least, can take solace in the fact that the power they’re getting will be clean and green. But at a cost, say various critics. The province will shell out $437 million to the consortium, who in turn are investing the $7 billion. At the household level, that amounts to $1.60 a year, for the next 20 years.

Please refrain from enjoying the trip

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:46 PM - 13 Comments

Welcome to the airport security checkpoint. Please pay attention to all instructions and signage as we guide you through new procedures and attempt to minimize travel delays to and within the United States.

Important: if you need to expedite the screening process in order to make your flight, please identify yourself to uniformed security personnel, who have the authorization to point at you and laugh.

You are now entering the Transportation Security Administration screening zone. Only passengers and masochists are permitted past this point.

Continue…

CHUCK and Bottle Shows

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:23 PM - 4 Comments

Last night’s episode of Chuck was clearly what is known as a “bottle show,” an episode filmed in such a way as to come in under budget. The episode had very few guest stars — fortunately, one of them was Stone Cold Steve Austin, and another one was Josie Davis from Charles In Charge, so no one could claim we were short-shrifted — and very few sets. Much of the action took place on the regular standing sets, while almost the whole spy mission was confined to an airplane. And you know what? This obvious cheapness didn’t hurt the show at all. It was, in my opinion and other people’s, one of the most enjoyable episodes so far this season.

I often feel that, unlike clip shows, bottle shows aren’t really a bad thing at all and may even be a good thing. You wouldn’t want every episode to be like that, but sometimes when the writers are told to do a show with few sets, few characters, no outdoor shooting, they are forced by necessity to come up with creative solutions, focus more on the characters they’ve got, not waste time with extraneous scenes or characters who aren’t essential. (Even the Buy More subplot was pretty good in last night’s tightly-controlled script, though that aspect of the show is still incredibly awkward. It’s like if Star Trek included “meanwhile, at the Federation bureaucratic headquarters…” subplots with wacky comedy music.) A show may actually be more likely to go wrong by trying too much — doing large-scale things that don’t fully come off even on a larger-than-usual TV budget — than by narrowing its scope to the things that people like best about the show.

As a way of saving money, the “bottle show” technique goes back to the days of theatrical shorts, where producers/directors would sometimes spend extra money on one instalment and make up for it by spending less on another. (Chuck Jones used to say that one of the advantages of doing Road Runner cartoons was that, with only two characters and not a lot of elaborate animation, they could be done faster and cheaper than usual, freeing up some extra time for expensive projects like “What’s Opera, Doc?”) Particularly now that clip shows and re-used footage are harder to get away with for most shows, almost every show will do a couple of bottle shows a year to make up the over-spending on other episodes.

Big brother alive, well, highly profitable

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 2:22 PM - 11 Comments

Ages and ages ago I wrote a column wondering why the powers that be spent so much money on street cameras to scare drug dealers, harass hookers and comfort the paranoid, and not on cameras to scare speeders, harass red light dodgers and comfort pedestrians. Someone must have been asking themselves the same question; last August, the Quebec government instituted a pilot project in Quebec targeting some of the biggest trouble spots in Montreal and Quebec City. You practically have to be blind (or talking on your phone, another no-no) to miss the warnings. Still, people do:  nearly 24,000 tickets were mailed  out in five months, to the tune of nearly $4 million. That’s $10 million in a year in revenues from a pilot project–which is set to expand further across the province in the coming year.

Meanwhile, drug dealers remain one of Berri Metro’s most consistent charms, cameras and residents be damned. Sometimes big brother doesn’t quite work. But when he does, boy, he pays off big.

Rights and Democracy: Mr. Broadbent regrets

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 2:14 PM - 40 Comments

Writing for the National Post’s website, the former NDP leader says the idea that he has “taken the lead in rejecting calls for transparency and accountability” is “ludicrous, if not legally actionable.”

There Seems To Be a Dr Pepper Craze

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 2:14 PM - 12 Comments

Dr Pepper, the soda I refused to drink as a kid because the name made me suspicious (perhaps I thought, with the “Doctor” thing, it must have some drugs in it or something), celebrated its 125th anniversary yesterday by sending David Naughton to the New York Stock Exchange to perform his famous “I’m a Pepper” musical number. So we’ve got a commercial, a strange combination of nostalgia and ironic distance, all performed in one of the places where the financial collapse took place. I somehow feel like the world we now lived live in is completely summed up by this one clip.

[vodpod id=Video.2935961&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

Here’s one of Naughton’s original commercials:

And here’s the SCTV parody with Eugene Levy and Rick Moranis: