Waiting for yesterday’s technology

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 45 Comments

Photo by Bonnier R&D

Picture this: you wake up to discover your baby has a weird rash. You log on to the Medicare website which connects you to an available physician via video chat. She checks your baby’s digitized health record, has a look at the rash, prescribes an ointment, and keeps you from burdening your pediatrician or the local E.R.

You then drive your other kid to school. You punch in the destination on your smartphone. A predictive GPS traffic database is pinged, which determines that though traffic is smooth now, it could soon get jammed up, based on 300 other drivers who just punched in similar destinations. This group is split up and directed to a dozen alternate routes, and congestion remains light.

While you drive, your kid finishes his homework on a tablet computer. It’s a French translation assignment, conducted in collaboration with a sister class in Paris that’s working on an English translation assignment. Your kid finishes the work, IM chats a bit with the French kid he was paired with, and then forgets the screen in your car. No biggie—the school will lend him a tablet for his classwork. They’re as cheap and ubiquitous as USB keys, and he can pull the finished homework assignment from the cloud.

You get to work and slack off a bit, checking out a song your friend just posted online. It’s a clever remix of a Beatles track. You send it to your car for the ride home, and an automatic payment of 99 cents is handled by your ISP—66 cents goes to your friend, 32 cents to Yoko and Paul et al., and a penny to your ISP, who dropped monthly access fees and now posts record profits by providing an insured and encrypted payment layer over the Web. You then quickly vote on a municipal bylaw through Facebook, and finally get to work.

So:

Is the above a techno-utopian dream of the future? A starry-eyed vision of what next year could be? No, it’s a description of what last year should have been. All of the technology described above has existed for years now. But we are being held back. Legacy industries, lazy governments, obsolete laws, and pokey bureaucracies are among the culprits.

Meanwhile, as technology itself becomes more open and inclusive, our conversation about it gets more geeky and insular. We obsess over industry horse-races—LCD vs LED, HDMI vs DVI, 3G vs HSPDA—and the relentless, ever-tightening cycle that starts at novelty and ends at obsolescence. We are addicted to the promise of the next gee-whiz invention.

But invention isn’t the issue; implementation is, and that’s what I’ll be focusing on in this space. I’ll be posting thoughts, opinions and stories about the worldwide push to upgrade to yesterday’s technology. I’ll be featuring news of those who refuse to wait and are working around the barriers.

Hell, I may even review a gadget.

Ask the expert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 19 Comments

Surely the Canadian Federation of Independent Business’ moment of universal respect and deference must not pass without noting its opinion on the elimination of the long-form census.

CFIB is highly experienced in the design and conduct of surveys, relying on them to form accurate pictures of the small- and mid-sized business community. We therefore understand the strengths and weaknesses of voluntary questionnaires, managing response burden and dealing with sensitive subject matter. Because of our experience with authoring surveys and with purchasing Census long-form data, CFIB has grave concerns about how your proposed changes could diminish data quality and harm comparability with previous Census years.

Why you should let your teenager sleep in

By the editors - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:23 AM - 4 Comments

“The difference is like night and day.” So, perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek, says retired principal Wayne Erdman of Eastern Commerce Collegiate Institute’s experiment in late high school start times. Eastern Commerce C.I., located just off Danforth Avenue east of Toronto’s Greektown, is in the middle of its second year of starting classes at 10 a.m. That’s a shockingly late hour by contemporary North American standards, and some traditionalists will never learn to like the idea. The working world that Eastern’s students are about to enter, they say, doesn’t compromise with late sleepers; it fires them. The sooner the kids learn the harsh truth, the better.

But Erdman tells the Toronto Star that the late-start concept, though not yet subject to its first full scientific analysis, looks like a hit when it comes to educational outcomes—and parents and students seem to agree. Local trustee Cathy Dandy is an aggressive advocate of research showing that there are good reasons to give adolescents a break that neither children nor adults may need; if she had gotten her way, Eastern classes would be starting as late as 11:30 a.m.

That sounds crazy, but it might be less crazy than the old way of doing things. It is starting to look as though a forward shift in sleep patterns is a natural accompaniment to sexual maturation—not just in humans, but in mammals generally; rats and monkeys, it seems, engage in their own version of what parents witness in their recalcitrant 16-year-olds. Teenagers have an ability to stay up late and sleep in that a 2004 Dutch-German study characterized as “unsaturable,” and even proposed it as a defining feature of adolescence. You’re officially an adult when you can’t stay up all night anymore.

Continue…

Desperate to cut their teeth

By Erica Alini - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 10:06 AM - 108 Comments

Jessika Hill /AP

Though she could use more hours, Maria Di Bartolomeo, who works in three different  dental offices, considers herself “pretty lucky.” That’s because the 23-year-old from Woodbridge, Ont., is a recently graduated dental hygienist practising in the profession’s toughest provincial market. “Right now I have to take what I can get,” says Di Bartolomeo, who splits her time between offices in Woodbridge, Richmond Hill and Etobicoke. Competition to land even a few hours a week is ruthless, she says: “There are just stacks and stacks of resumés that come in.” And graduates are so desperate for a job they’re willing to work for as little as $20 an hour—about 30 per cent less than the going rate in recent years for newly minted hygienists.

Every source Maclean’s spoke with had the same answer for what’s gone wrong in Ontario: there are too many private schools, too many graduates, and the market is flooded. And the problem seems to be spreading. Data collected by the Canadian Dental Hygienists Association (CDHA) shows that between 2006 and 2009 salaries have declined 6.5 per cent and the share of dental hygienists younger than 29 was up 17 per cent. Part of the issue is that Ontario has 28 dental hygiene programs, 24 of which are private colleges. By comparison, second-place Quebec has a total of eight private and public schools, while Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia all have one school each. And Ontario schools are pumping grads into other provinces, chiefly Alberta and British Columbia, says CDHA acting executive director Ann Wright.

The proliferation of schools in Ontario started after the provincial government passed an act in 2005 that allowed private dental hygiene programs to seek accreditation after opening, says Wright. While all dental education programs must still demonstrate to the Commission on Dental Accreditation of Canada that they meet certain minimum standards, since September 2006, in Ontario at least, the schools have been able to start training students before passing the quality test. With barriers to entry into the lucrative Ontario market so low, schools started springing up everywhere. At one point there were more than 40 schools, says Wright. (Numbers have declined as several schools failed to achieve the required accreditation and were subsequently shut down.)

Continue…

Someone call Larry Bertuzzi to sort this out

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 9:03 AM - 21 Comments

The Conservatives may or may not allow gas tax revenues to be used to build a hockey arena in Quebec City, but the mayor of Quebec City isn’t open to using the city’s gas tax funding to build that arena and he and Quebec Premier Jean Charest are now ready to go ahead without the federal government’s involvement. Regardless, the mayor of Edmonton is upset, the city of St. Catharines is interested and the city of Regina is befuddled.

Chuck McDonald, director of finance for the City of Regina, said out of the $10.66 million in gas tax received for 2011, $4 million will go to bridge renewal, $1.18 million is for street renewal, $3.66 is for new buses and $1.82 million is for the new landfill. Such spending is typical for the gas tax dollars.

“If I understand correctly and they would designate that facilities would be eligible, it really is a question of robbing Peter to pay Paul, because if we were to dedicate it to a facility, it means we’d have to find other funding for street infrastructure or the fleet. The pie stays the same size,” McDonald said. ”It would provide more flexibility, but we’ve got our core things that we have to invest in. We would have to find funding somewhere else for these things.”

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of February 7th, 2011)
Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

The End: Antonio Montenegrino | 1974 – 2011

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 8:41 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Team Macho

Antonio Montenegrino was born in late 1922 to a poor peasant family in a small village in southern Italy. When he was three, Antonio’s father, Joseph, left to find work in Argentina to support the family. He never returned, and his mother, Angela, was forced to give the baby up to her brother, George Raso. But Raso starved and beat the boy, forcing him to work as an indentured servant at his flour mill. At 16, Antonio pulled a gun on his uncle. “He said, ‘You will not hit me anymore. I’m leaving,’ ” says Emanuel, his youngest son.

Antonio spent the next two years knocking on his neighbours’ doors with a spade on his shoulder, offering to till land in exchange for a bale of hay or a bucket of olives. At 18, he fell in love with Stella Mammoliti. But the Second World War had broken out, and Antonio was drafted. He was stationed at a small airport in a rural village, where he worked as a smoker, creating cover to foil strafing Allied planes. “He didn’t care about war,” says Emanuel. “He had this beautiful woman he was in love with, he was afraid of losing her, so he said to hell with this and on pain of death went AWOL.” Antonio married Stella, but was eventually dragged back by the military.
In 1945, after the war, the couple had their first son, Joseph. He died in infancy, but was followed by five more boys in the next 10 years.

One day, while walking home from church, Antonio heard women screaming and came upon a blaze at a neighbour’s house. Dousing a blanket in water and wrapping it around himself, Antonio ran inside and pulled out a badly burned man just as the building collapsed. Though he became a hero in his village, the family still lived in a dilapidated farmhouse with no electricity. Being uneducated and illiterate, Antonio couldn’t earn enough in buckets of olives and hay to feed the family. So, in 1959, they decided to move to Canada.

Continue…

Cindor Reeves, the Vancouver Sun, and more on the government's response

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 8:02 AM - 0 Comments

Colleagues in the Maclean’s Ottawa bureau can attest to the fact that during the almost four years that I have been writing about Cindor Reeves, I have often fumed and ranted about the fact that other Canadian media refused to follow this magazine’s lead on the story. I’m pleased that changed this week. Here’s the Vancouver Sun’s take.

In other developments, Rick Dykstra, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s parliamentary press secretary, tells the Toronto Star’s Tonda MacCharles that Reeves has not given the government permission to speak about his case. This is not true. Reeves may not have given the government permission to speak to the Toronto Star. But Reeves provided the government with written permission to talk to me about the case in 2009. After demanding such permission as a precondition to talking, the government still refused to say anything.   Continue…

The Commons: Bow before the independent business owner

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 6:55 PM - 101 Comments

The Scene. At the risk of giving away the surprise ending, let us start with this afternoon’s profound revelation. You may wish to sit down first and are advised to put on a helmet or some other kind of cranial reinforcement to prepare for the fact that what was revealed here today may well blow your precious mind. Moments of such insight into the meaning and workings of the world that surrounds us are so rare. Indeed, it is possible that some of you may not yet be prepared to process and accept what was made clear to those of us in the House this afternoon.

But let us now say and hear what needs to be said and heard. Let us be honest with ourselves and each other. And, specifically, let us know this: according to a national organization whose stated purpose is to advocate on behalf of independent business owners, most of this country’s business owners would prefer to pay less in taxes on the revenues their businesses generate. Not more, less. Surely not since the Canadian Federation of Independent Little Girls announced in 1925 that its members would not, if offered, be adverse to accepting the gift of a pony has our understanding of human behaviour been so fundamentally altered.

And let the record show that it was Pierre Poilievre—a man they call “Skippy”—who brought this reckoning upon us. Continue…

Now This Is a Superhero

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 4:37 PM - 4 Comments

This makes me feel happy and wistful all at once: Robb Pratt, who worked on many Disney animated movies of the ’90s and ’00s (as both an in-betweener and a full animator; he’s credited with doing some animation on the lead character in Atlantis: The Lost Empire), decided to do a tribute both to old-school Superman and old-school animation. He designed and created a hand-drawn animated Superman segment, about a minute long, set to the music from old Superman movie serials and with all the old-fashioned things in place: Superman in the phone booth, Superman fighting robots, Superman as a good guy around kids. The design for Lois Lane is not what I think of when I picture the character, and the designs in general remind you that Pratt worked on Kim Possible, but the love of real hand-drawn animation and its power to convey personality does come through in the short. It’s followed by a segment where Pratt explains why and how he made the film.

"Lights" Out

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 4:17 PM - 5 Comments

Tonight is the series finale of Friday Night Lights on DirecTV in the U.S., though many will catch up with it later (the last DVD set is apparently scheduled to be released even before NBC starts airing the final season). James Poniewozik has a tribute to the greatness of the show in the print edition of Time, and Alan Sepinwall mentions some of the show’s greatest moments.

I have a feeling that eventually the fan rage over season 2 will fade, if it hasn’t started to fade already. Yes, the dead-body storyline came off as a sop to the demands of network audiences — both broadcast and cable — for melodrama. But I didn’t feel the show had crossed over into full-blown sensationalism; if it had, it wouldn’t have bounced back from that story as easily as it did. It was more a sophomore slump of a forgivable nature, where a show is trying to broaden its appeal and come up with new ideas, and comes up with some weaker stories as a result — like The Rockford Files season 2 or some other show that became a bit too broad in its second season, but snapped back in its third. (Not that FNL is anything like The Rockford Files; I’m just using that as an example of a show whose second season produced some good episodes, but others that seemed to be trying too hard to make the show more of a mass favourite.) The DirecTV seasons were better, but they do grow out of what came before, including the second season, and eventually it may be forgiven for its lapses in style. If Buffy season 6 can be forgiven by many fans, why not FNL season 2?

North and South Korea talks collapse

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 3:01 PM - 1 Comment

Talks between North and South Korean military officials have collapsed on their second day, after colonels from both sides met in Panmunjom, the ‘truce village’, on Wednesday. A unification ministry official in Seoul told Reuters that the talks were over and that a date had not been set for another meeting. North Korea refused Seoul’s demand that it apologize for the shelling of Yeonpyeong island in November and for the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship last March, according to South Korean media reports. North Korea maintains that it was not involved in the Cheonan, and that the Yeonpyeong shelling was provoked by the South. Prior to Wednesday, relations between the North and South appeared to be improving when both sides agreed to discuss reuniting families separated during the Korean war. North Korea has recently pushed for talks between Red Cross agencies on either side—a move attributed to the North’s concern about the effects of international sanctions and a near-halt to trade with the South, the Guardian reports.

The Guardian

Berlusconi government threatens "total war" if case against him goes forward

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 10 Comments

The government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is threatening to launch a “total war” against the country’s judiciary after prosecutors in Milan suggested he the frisky PM should be put on trial for sex crimes. Berlusconi and his parliamentary allies say the case against him should have been dropped following a vote in Italy’s lower house stipulating the prosecutors have no right to pursue the investigation. A judge is set to rule early next week on a request by the prosecution that Berlusconi’s case go straight to trial given the obviousness of the evidence” against him.

The Guardian

Napolitano on the myth of 32 miles

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 2:44 PM - 2 Comments

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was asked at a congressional hearing this morning about the recent US government report that DHS has “operational control” over only 32 miles of the Canada-US border.

Congresswoman Candice Miller, a Republican from Michigan who chairs the subcommittee on border security, said in the course of her comments that, “We were very concerned about what the GAO [report] said about essentially no operational control, for all practical purposes, along the northern border.”

In her response, Napolitano emphasized that “operation control” is a “term of art.”

“I’ll be brief, Mr. Chairman.  And first of all, again, on the GAO report, we’re — I encourage the committee — the term “operational control” is a very narrow term of art, and it does not reflect the infrastructure and technology and all the other things that happen at the border.  And so it should not be used as a substitute for an overall border strategy.”

Napolitano went on to say:

“One of the most significant things that has happened in the last month, quite frankly, or even in the last year, was Prime Minister Harper and President Obama signing the shared security strategy, border strategy between our two countries.  It is our number one trading partner.  Canada is now beginning to do or conducting some of the same kinds of things around its perimeter that we used to be concerned about coming across inland on the border.  We will be working more in light of this shared vision statement on an integrated northern border strategy.  Indeed, we have prepared one.  It is in review right now at the OMB because, as you recognize, Representative, borders are — they’re law enforcement jurisdictions and you’ve got to protect the borders from that regard, but they are also huge trade jurisdictions, and you’ve got to be able to move the legitimate trade and commerce.”

“We are very much in favor of looking at ways to preclear certain things before they — cargo, for example — before it gets to the border so that we can relieve the pressure on the line, and the echnology for being able to do that kind of thing gets better all the time.  And so that’s one of the things we’ll be, I’m sure, working on and implementing over the coming months and years.”

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I am now on Twitter at luizachsavage

Napolitano: pre-clearance at Peace Bridge is dead

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 2:30 PM - 5 Comments

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was pressed on pre-clearance for the Peace Bridge border crossing:

“Representative, I will be very clear. We have looked into preclearance on the Canadian side. We cannot do it.  The position has not changed.  When and if the bridge and the facilities are expanded on the U.S. side we are fully prepared to provide the staffing and support for that on the U.S. side.  We understand the importance of the span for trade and tourism and so forth. But we are not going to be able to resolve the preclearance issues in Canada.”

Video and more details here.

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I am now on Twitter at luizachsavage

Spidenfreude

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 2:02 PM - 4 Comments

Not my word, but the only word possible to describe the reviews for Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.

When I saw it back in January, I wondered in print if the critics would respect the endlessly-postponed “opening” date. Most of them have chosen to review it on the previous announced official opening date, and I think that was the right thing. First, the show was taking advantage of the lack of reviews to rake in money; with few notices to tell the public that the show was bad, it functioned as a heavily-publicized, critic-proof production. The nastiness of the reviews, while deserved, might have something to do with critics’ suspicion that Julie Taymor and company were trying to take advantage of an old tradition (not reviewing the show until the official opening) by postponing the opening until it was too late to stop it from becoming a long-running hit. It might still be too late, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s not a good show.

Second, the reason critics wait until previews are over is that a show is supposed to get fixed during those early performances, and the show a critic sees in tryouts might be different, and worse, than the show that opens. But the amazing thing about Spider-Man is that despite having the most previews of any musical, it doesn’t appear to have changed that much. Taymor has spent a lot of time tweaking the special effects, and the ending, but the songs — the things that most need to be cut and changed and added during previews — appear to have remained mostly unchanged; Bono and the Edge weren’t there for most of the preview period, and when they came back, they reportedly added “no new songs.” When I was there, it was obvious that the score was not good and that there were severe problems with even hearing the score: everyone complained about the sound system, which rendered most of the lyrics as unintelligible mush. Yet a month later, preview audiences were still hearing the same songs and still complaining about the bad sound system that wouldn’t let them hear the lyrics. If the show isn’t really going to be substantially fixed, then there’s less necessity for critics to wait.

If the show does not do well, and I still have this fear that it might yet prove indestructible, the refusal to re-think the score may turn out to have been the biggest problem. It’s as if Taymor thought the real highlights of the show would be the flying sequences and other effects, and they just aren’t; people have been flying in the theatre for over 100 years and there’s only so many times the audience can be “wowed” by such sequences in one show. Most musicals depend on great numbers. They need a good strong book, too, which this ain’t got, but they also need to have a couple of showstopping numbers, or why have we even gone to a musical? It’s a truism that this show doesn’t have a single song as good as the old Spider-Man cartoon song, because that one had a memorable musical hook, lyrics that were specifically about Spider-Man, and was mixed so that you could understand most of the words.

But Bono and the Edge were busy, and the creative team was apparently focused on making the special effects safer, and little attention seemed to be paid to the problem of the songs sounding the same and the numbers sort of beginning and ending without any real shape to them. This is why it’s important to have the songwriters there during the preview period. An anecdotal example: during tryouts, a little show called Fiddler On the Roof had serious second-act trouble. So the creators threw out all but one song in the second act, and went to work coming up with new ones: a song to solidify a key relationship and lighten the mood (“Do You Love Me?”) and a new final song that would establish a sense of community and make us understand what the characters were leaving behind at the end (“Anatevka”). Musicals, good and bad alike, need to throw out the songs that don’t work and add new ones.

Otherwise, my impression of the show was closest to Ben Brantley’s in the New York Times. Mostly because, at a different performance, he noticed the same thing: the audience only really got excited when something went wrong. That’s the main attraction. And it’s really not enough of an attraction to justify that kind of money.

Another problem, but one I’m more sympathetic about because it’s built into the material, is that Spidey’s costume is just really bad for the theatre. In the comics, it works fine: Spidey talks constantly with the help of speech balloons, and it doesn’t matter that you can’t see his mouth. On film it’s trickier, and in the theatre it’s very difficult to have any sound coming out of a character whose entire head is covered by a mask. (Most heroes have their mouths or even their whole faces uncovered. Not Spider-boy.) That means that when Spidey is in costume, he really doesn’t project any personality at all on the stage. Taymor has tried to deal with this — by making Spidey more of a pantomime character and having Peter go around with his mask off as much as possible — but it doesn’t really work. There’s a reason there are few musicals about characters who don’t sing, and while Peter Parker sings a lot, Spider-Man really can’t express himself on the stage.

Magical Maxime

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 1:42 PM - 40 Comments

An anonymous Conservative explains Maxime Bernier.

“It’s useful in inspiring the base and broadening public debate,” said one Conservative. “He’s mostly harmless, especially since the media knows he doesn’t speak for the government. I love what he’s saying.”

Meanwhile, the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair thinks Mr. Bernier should be ejected from the Conservative caucus if he has expressed an opinion that Mr. Harper disagrees with. From Mr. Mulcair’s scrum on Monday. Continue…

Does Bill Gates think Microsoft is a bad investment?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments

In the past 12 months, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has sold off 90 million shares, effectively reducing his holdings of Microsoft common stock by 13 per cent. He now holds roughly 591 million shares (of the 8.4 billion shares outstanding), and remains the company’s largest single stockholder. Gates’ rapid shedding of shares may set off alarm bells among investors, InformationWeek reports. Some critics would point to Windows Vista or the KIN phone as evidence that Microsoft is losing its grip. However, Microsoft officials have explained the selloff as smart investing—Gates is simply diversifying his holdings. And presumably, like most investors, Gates would like to see a decent return on his investment.

InformationWeek

Mubarak releases 34 political prisoners

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 1:07 PM - 0 Comments

Over 20,00 factory workers joined the hundreds of thousands of protestors across Egypt demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down, as anti-government demonstrations in the country entered their 16th day. Cairo’s Tahrir square continued to be occupied by protestors, who have also gathered outside the parliament building. Many Egyptians abroad have returned home to join the protests. The government is struggling to function under pressure from its citizens and the international community. While Mubarak still refuses to step down immediately, the government did release 34 political prisoners as a gesture of good will. But human rights groups in Egypt have said that there are an unknown number of people missing since the unrest began on January 25th. Vice President Omar Suleiman maintained that Mubarak would not step down and called for an immediate end to protests. “If a coup happens,” said Suleiman, “[that] would mean uncalculated and hasty steps, including lots of irrationalities.” Opposition spokesman Abdul-Rahman Samir feared Suleiman was implying martial law, but remained defiant, saying “but what would he do with the rest of the 70 million Egyptians who will follow us afterward.”

Al Jazeera English

TMX and LSE join forces

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 1 Comment

Toronto’s TMX Group and the London Stock exchange announced on Wednesday they will be merging. Xavier Rolet, currently the LSE’s CEO, will become the chief executive of the merged group. The combined fiscal clout of the new group is substantial – both groups have 6,700 listings combined, meaning a collective market value of $5.8-trillion. But the merger only puts the LSE-TMX group seventh on the global trading stage, beneath the Honk Kong Exchanges, Exchanges & Clearing Group and Deutsche Borse. While critics call the merger a “defensive” action to cut costs that diverts management’s attention from developing growth strategies, executives involved say it is seizing a growth opportunity that will create a global leader in resource and energy stocks. The deal will require the approval of government departments in Canada and the U.K., including Investment Canada, the Ontario and Quebec securities commission and the Financial Services Authority. If approved, the TMX-LSE group will become the trading leader in the European Union.

The Globe and Mail

David Blackwood finally gets his moment in the sun

By Sara Angel - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

In 1964, months after David Blackwood graduated from Toronto’s Ontario College of Art, he had a moment every artist dreams of. His etching The Search Party was selected—over the work of his teachers—by the New York-based art guru and guest curator William S. Lieberman to be part of an exhibition of prints and drawings at the National Gallery of Canada. It was a star-making moment, and one that should have sealed his future as an artist. “But after that, forget it,” whispers Blackwood, 69, explaining how his show Black Ice, opening this week at the Art Gallery of Ontario before it travels to St. John’s in 2012, is the first time in his career a major Canadian public institution has comprehensively showcased his art.

Understated and reserved, Blackwood holds no grudge over the fact that he was also shut out by the AGO, back in the 1980s when the gallery’s contemporary committee rejected a donation of his art. “You can be doing important work,” he says with a shrug, “but the curatorial and academic world can be caught up with what’s new and exciting so things become ignored.” Paradoxically, while being overlooked by the tastemakers, Blackwood—a recipient of the Order of Canada for his potent visual encapsulation of Newfoundland life—passionately connected with audiences, even the ones who knew his work was out of fashion. “Every major collector bought a David Blackwood,” says Katharine Lochnan, senior curator at the AGO and the curatorial visionary behind Black Ice, “but usually placed it behind the bedroom door.” Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 12:19 PM - 39 Comments

David Mitchell suggests Parliament should become a travelling road show once Centre Block is closed for renovations.

Think for a moment about the potential impact of convening a parliamentary session in Saskatchewan or New Brunswick or Manitoba or the Yukon. Wouldn’t each and every province or northern territory enjoy the opportunity to host this important national institution and showcase their regions and their issues. And imagine the possible impact on our politicians. What might be the effect of our Parliament meeting in Quebec? Or of Bloc Quebecois MPs being required to meet in Alberta? In my own experience, Canadians don’t know as much about each other as they sometimes believe they do. This would be a chance to familiarize our elected representatives with their country. It would be an exercise in nation-building.

Why the 'price of sex' is at an all-time low

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 35 Comments

When it comes to having a career and education, women have more opportunity than ever. But their chances of finding a stable, long-term relationship have actually declined, argues Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. In his new book, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying (co-authored with Jeremy Uecker), he says that the “price of sex” is at an all-time low.

Q: What do you mean by the “price of sex”?

A: Sex is, at bottom, an exchange between a man and a woman. One can use this exchange in [homosexual] relationships, but I didn’t go there; it would double the size of the book. It’s not a simple pleasure-for-pleasure exchange: men and women tend to seek different things from the act of sex. They often mean different things by it. This isn’t to suggest that women don’t like sex or that they don’t gain pleasure from it. We know that they do, but there’s more to it than that. Women tend to prefer sex that comes with commitment, attention, conversation, love and, sometimes, material gifts. As the price of sex diminishes, that commitment becomes harder to get.

Q: What’s driving down the price of sex?

A: Part of the story is women’s success: they make up the majority of college students today. When you look at the college campus, 57 per cent of American college students are women. In Canada, it’s comparable. And that’s a big imbalance.

Q: You argue that when women outnumber men on campus, it gives men more power to dictate the terms of sex. Your book notes that virginity, for example, is more common on campuses where men outnumber women.

A: Isn’t that interesting? When men outnumber women, women tend to get more commitment in exchange for sex. And women tend to like to marry someone of a comparable education status. But I don’t know how that’s going to happen 10 or 15 years from now. If the college imbalance remains stable, there will be a large oversupply of college-educated women interested in marriage, and there won’t be enough college-educated men. So they’ll have to marry down, and I know some who have. It’s not that it can’t work, but it is a little bit different.

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Why Twitter is Doomed

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 2 Comments

Via The Comics Curmudgeon, here is the second and last panel of today’s Mary Worth:

That’s it for Twitter, then. It’s not just that once a legacy strip acknowledges the existence of a fad, it means the fad is almost over. It’s also that once Mary knows what Twitter is, it doesn’t stand a chance. She will not stop until a) The evil, newsprint-threatening technology is dead and buried next to her “mysteriously” dead husband, or b) Twitter is married off and happy like a respectable technology is supposed to be. One way or another, once Mary’s meddling begins, nothing is safe, and now she’s got her sights set on Twitter. You’re next, Netflix.