Interamnia

One happy weekend day at the beginning of this month, I walked down a residential street in the Annex just when the yellow leaves were settling down into the future leaf-mulch carpet.

Fall in the Annex (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Fall in the Annex (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Fall in the Annex (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Leaving an apartment building downtown, I heard a group of men talking.

- Is your security cute?

- Um?

- There's nothing worse than coming home and seeing security being ugly.

In the comments to my Remembrance Day post on the disproportionate number of Atlantic Canadians in the army, Noel suggested that Canada get a draft in order to even things out.

The idea has some sense to it. In European countries, conscription helped build up national identities by taking people from different regions and of different backgrounds, putting them together, and letting an "official" national percolate all the more freely. More, as I noted in my Demography Matters post, there's abundant evidence that soldiering is a fairly important method of migration, as motivated and educated people leave relatively less prosperous environments for one where their living standards are subsidized and they often learn skills and get connections.

Against this, there's the fact that conscription is wildly unpopular. During the First World War, the federal government's decision to impose conscription nationally, including in an isolationist Québec wary of an Anglophone military, triggered a massive national crisis. Without any perceived need for the mobilization of the proper age groups into the ranks of the military, there'd be no political will to do so, here or in countries which have abolished conscription. The same holds for national service, if to a lesser degree: Trudeau's Katimavik program is widely seen as a joke.

What do you think?

Located oddly close by the Don Valley Parkway, Cullen Bryant Park has its own little joys, like the below beautiful yellow-leafed tree you see below in two shots, one with Jerry and one under the canopy.

Jerry by Cullen Bryant Park's yellow-leafed tree
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Under the canopy
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

It's amazing how much the sunsets, as seen from the west of the Art Gallery of Ontario on Dundas Street West between Spadina Avenue and University Avenue, differed in the space of minutes.

Art Gallery of Ontario Sunset (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Art Gallery of Ontario Sunset (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is worth noting, not least because the thesis that the study disproved runs completely against my own experiences.

Contrary to popular belief, technology is not leading to social isolation and Americans who use the Internet and mobile phones have larger and more diverse social networks, according to a new study.

"All the evidence points in one direction," said Keith Hampton, lead author of the report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released Wednesday. "People's social worlds are enhanced by new communication technologies.

"It is a mistake to believe that Internet use and mobile phones plunge people into a spiral of isolation," said Hampton, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The authors said key findings of the study -- "Social Isolation and New Technology" -- "challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology."

"There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs," Hampton said.

"This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite.

"It turns out that those who use the Internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages," Hampton said. "People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities."

The study found that six percent of Americans can be described as socially isolated -- lacking anyone to discuss important matters with or who they consider to be "especially significant" in their life.

That figure has hardly changed since 1985, it said.

The study examined people's discussion networks -- those with whom they discuss important matters -- and core networks -- their closest and most significant confidants.

It found that on average, the size of people's discussion networks is 12 percent larger among mobile phone users, nine percent larger for those who share photos online, and nine percent bigger for those who use instant messaging.

The diversity of people's core networks tends to be 25 percent larger for mobile phone users, 15 percent larger for basic Internet users, and even larger for frequent Internet users, those who use instant messaging, and those who share digital photos online.

The Pew report mentioned is available here. Hampton et al. abstract their findings as follows.

. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network. They depicted the rise of internet and mobile phones as one of the major trends that pulls people away from traditional social settings, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and public spaces that have been associated with large and diverse core networks.

The survey results reported here were undertaken to explore issues that have not been probed directly in that study and other related research on social isolation: the role of the internet and mobile phone in people’s core social networks.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

I like these links. I also like posting without HTML errors--sorry!

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew remarks--with pictures--on how there isn't very much old Toronto at all.
  
• Anthropology.net reacts to a neuroscientist, one David Eagleman, who seems to argue that he human capacity for synaesthesia--briefly, the ability for people's sensory impressions to cross-connect in an unusual way--has interesting implications for human consciousness.


• Bad Astronomy reacts to the news that astronomers have found a correlation between the likelihood that a star hosts planets and that of low lithium abundance. Centauri Dreams pays attention to the same findings.


• A BCer in Toronto's Jeff Jedras considers the ongoing Romanian presidential election campaign from his position on the ground.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber argues that the European leaders who started the First World War are mass murderers on the scale of a Hitler or a Stalin.


• Daniel Drezner is skeptical of the idea that China will escape the nearly iron-clad law that countries of a certain income will democratize, based on China's past precedent.


• English Eclectic's Paul Halsall pronounces himself decidedly in favour of the European Union and the Lisbon Treaty.


• Everyday Sociology makes the argument that the exceptionally tight structure of military life helps create people predisposed to random violence.


• Far Outliers describes anti-Greek violence by Ottoman authorities in Thessaloniki in 1821, and quotes Niall Ferguson's suggestion that 1979, not 1989, saw the biggest break from the past with the rise of China and radical Islam.


• Global Sociology examines the arguments of Afghan woman parliamentarian Malalai Joya and her despair at the continued fundamentalism of Afghanistan's leaders and reports on findings that although women tend to live longer than men, they have a lower quality of life.


• The Grumpy Sociologist points out that the selection of Laos as host of the Southeast Asian Games makes the poor country into a field for economic competition between powerful neighbouring states for influence.


• Language Hat takes note of the ubiquity of Hungarians.


• Language Log's Mark Liberman really doesn't like the idea that differences in landscape necessarily translate into huge differences in language and meaning.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Sek rightly despairs for Camille Paglia's good sense.


• Erin's Lost & Found, heavy on art, features an excellent picture of me.
  
• Marginal Revolution hosts a discussion on whether or not the sheer size of the economic gap between many developing countries and their developed counterparts is promoting an unproductive despair on the part of the former.


• Noel Maurer reports that the fact that uranium production is tightly-linked to particular states means that there isn't any integrated, elastic, uranium market.


• Slap Upside the Head reacts to news from the United States that same-sex couples behave quite similarly to opposite-sex ones in terms of parenting and whatnot.


• Torontoist reviews Torontonian David Sax's work on the deli and its decline as related to Jewish assimilation.


• Towleroad announces that an opposite-sex couple in the United Kingdom want a gay civil partnership in order to protest the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage. (Peter Tatchell has pronounced himself in favour of the extension of these basic rights to opposite-sex couples.


• The Yorkshire Ranter reports on Nigeria's defeat of the various Niger Delta militias demanding control of local oil reserves.

Any number of observers of the Canadian political scene--opponents of the Conservative minority government, true--have accused said government of being addicted to secrecy. I'll quote at length from BCer in Toronto. Links are at the original page.

Gov't program wants job applicants' views on Tory budget: An elite federal program to recruit the cream of new graduates suddenly wants to know the applicants' views on the government's vaunted Economic Action Plan before they get a job interview.

Cities stuck with bill for Tory 'propaganda': The federal government is being accused of wasting millions of taxpayers' dollars by forcing cash-strapped Ontario and municipalities to help pay for billboards advertising the Conservatives' economic program at thousands of infrastructure projects. The Liberals and NDP slammed the Conservatives for requiring provincial and city governments receiving infrastructure cash to buy an additional sign at each building project specifying that the federal government paid part of the bill under its Economic Action Plan.

Raitt accused of expense abuse: Federal cabinet minister Lisa Raitt signed off on her own expenses on at least one occasion – more than $3,000 spent on a trip to London, England – when she was president and CEO of the Toronto Port Authority.

Torch relay has a lot of stops in Tory ridings</b>: If MPs strutting at hometown torch relay celebrations was a Winter Olympic sport, the federal Conservatives would be turning in a solid gold performance. When federal riding maps are superimposed over torch relay community events, the flame's pit stop standings are as follows: Conservatives: 126 New Democrats: 29 Liberals: 21 Bloc Quebecois: 18.

Duffy blasts NDP MP as 'faker': Conservative Senator Mike Duffy called MP Peter Stoffer a "faker" Thursday after the Nova Scotia New Democrat released a report questioning the expenses of new Tory senators.

Stimulus money favours key Tories: The biggest winners of the Conservatives' stimulus extravaganza include one of the prime minister's closest friends, a riding the Tories desperately hope to win in a byelection next week, and a longtime party stalwart. Eastern Ontario MP Scott Reid, the Nova Scotia riding of Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley and British Columbia MP Jim Abbott are three of the clearest winners in the distribution of stimulus spending, a broad analysis by The Canadian Press shows.

And that's all just from this past week, and never mind the H1N1 story. Each one in isolation merits a head-shake, but in aggregate it's quite a picture.

What news item sticks out for me?

according to Canadian government officials, a biography of U.S. President Barack Obama provided to Prime Minister Stephen Harper shortly after Mr. Obama's inauguration last January qualifies as a state secret.

Under the Access to Information Act, Canwest News Service requested all briefing materials provided to the prime minister ahead of Mr. Obama's visit to Canada in February.

Mr. Obama's whirlwind stop in Ottawa on Feb. 19 was his first visit to a foreign country after being inaugurated. After a series of icebreaking meetings, the prime minister and the president pledged to co-operate on everything from the financial crisis to clean energy and Afghanistan. But the trip will perhaps best be remembered for the rock-star treatment accorded to Mr. Obama, who charmed the public by declaring his love for Canada and picking up a Beavertail dessert on an impromptu stop in the national capital's Byward Market.

The 77 pages of heavily censored documents released to Canwest include memos to Mr. Harper from his foreign-policy adviser, a letter from Canada's former ambassador to the United States, Michael Wilson, as well as talking points to prepare Mr. Harper for the meeting. It also includes biographies of the president and officials who accompanied the president on the trip to Canada, including National Security Advisor James Jones, National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

In blacking out the biographies of the president and his entourage, officials cited a section of the act that allows the government to refuse records whose disclosure could be "injurious to the conduct of international affairs, the defence of Canada or any states allied or associated with Canada."

[. . .]

Retired colonel Michel Drapeau, an expert in access-to-information law at the University of Ottawa, said it's not surprising that much of the briefing material on such a high-level meeting was being withheld. Canadian courts have tended to support the government's view that releasing such materials could hurt relations with other countries, he said.

But he said it was "silly" for Canadian officials to withhold the biography of such a prominent public figure.

"He's not the former director of the CIA, or anything. I mean, this guy's as public as it comes," Mr. Drapeau said, adding that it's highly unlikely that Canada would be privy to personal or professional information about the president that had not already been disclosed.

Is this sort of thing common outside of Canada, I ask my non-Canadian readers?

Thanks to one of my Facebook Andrews for this news.

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.

Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.

The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.

"We're unlocking the mysteries of our nearest neighbor and by extension the solar system. It turns out the moon harbors many secrets, and LCROSS has added a new layer to our understanding," said Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Scientists have long speculated about the source of vast quantities of hydrogen that have been observed at the lunar poles. The LCROSS findings are shedding new light on the question of water, which could be more widespread and in greater quantity than previously suspected.

As much as I dislike John Baird, a Canadian federal parliamentarian and Conservative government minister who--like George Smitherman in the Liberal government of Ontario--has traditionally served as an attack dog for the government, with comedy sketches suggesting that he is incapable in speaking in any way other than a shout, I am sorry about his cat, confusion with a notable political figure aside.

Canada's Transport Minister John Baird on Tuesday among colleagues spread the simple message, "Thatcher is dead." The message reached members of the Canadian Parliament who attended a gala event in honor of Army families. Also, the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was present.

As the Canadian news agency CanWestNews reported was to the consternation of whether the big news - especially feels the Canadian Conservative government party of the "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher, who governed Britain from 1979 for eleven years combined, very.

Prime Minister Harper told immediately, the message can be verified by the death of the politician in Britain. But in 10 Downing Street one was surprised - Lady Thatcher, 84, was alive and kicking.

As it turned out a little later, Baird had said Transport Minister Thatcher, a very different - namely, his cat, which he had given in honor of the politician whose name.

This story sounds too good to be true. It is, however, assured as a "CanWestNews" spokesman SPIEGEL ONLINE: "Our chief political reporter was at the gala reception there and has seen the story live."

Steve Ladurantaye's Globe and Mail article does, as the author notes, say a lot about the perception of big finance in the United States.

Never let it be said that the fat cats on Wall Street don't care about the stray kittens living in their gutters.

Indeed, Goldman Sachs wants the world to know that it did not abandon unfortunate felines after reports suggested the world's most influential and profitable investment bank skipped out on a $2,000-ish veterinarian bill for five black kittens found on the construction site of its New York headquarters.

“We want to make this very clear,” a Goldman representative said Thursday. “All of the kittens have been adopted and we paid the bills. We are very happy they have found homes.”

Underscoring the bank's commitment to all things adorable, the company called back minutes later after making the statement to elaborate: “I would also like to add that we would never abandon kittens. Thank you.”

The rapid spread of the story, through a newspaper report and the Internet, points to a more serious image problem at Goldman: No matter what it does, critics and conspiracy theorists are quick to seize on any story that casts the bank as a symbol of Wall Street excess and greed.

The kitten saga started in August, when Rich Brotman found them near Goldman's nearly finished $2-billion (U.S.) head office.

Mr. Brotman, who runs a rescue service called City Critters, approached the bank about paying for any associated medical costs, and took the kittens home to get them used to humans.

Mr. Brotman convinced Goldman to canvass its employees to see if any would open their homes to the kittens, which were nicknamed BlackBerries because of their dark fur.

And that's where things started to get a little hairy. An editorial in a weekly Manhattan newspaper suggested Goldman had not delivered the promised veterinary cheque as of the end of October, months after the kittens were rescued. Worse, the paper alleged the bank hadn't bothered to help to find loving homes for the hapless strays.

The blogosphere ignited with indignity – how could a bank that posted a $3.18-billion quarterly profit refuse to help? Maybe its critics were right, and it really was a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” as a Rolling Stone profile characterized it in a recent issue

Then again, this Gawker post does suggest that Goldman Sachs delaying paying by two months.

I know that the speed and scale of this week's blogroll expansion is significant indeed, perhaps akin to that of a uchronical European Union that had decided to expand to include such cities as Tirane, Vladivostok, and Diyarbakir by 1995. In my defense, all these are very good blogs.

• Phil Plait's blog Bad Astronomy is a famous blog, one that not only takes a look at the wonders of outer space but one that deconstructs superbly ridiculous claims, like the one suggesting that the Jupiter probe Galileo's end-of-life collision with Jupiter was intended to trigger stellar ignition, terraforming the Jovian moons and bombarding the Earth with debris, in order to demonstrate that God didn't exist. Or something.


• Dan Hirschman's A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book is a blog interested, among other things, in the concept of "economics," how it got started and how it was used.


• The Grumpy Academic is the weblog of an American sociologist concerned with all manner of things relating to Asia, especially Southeast Asia, with a focus on sports.


• Kieran Healy's Weblog is, as it happens, the blog of Crooked Timber contributor Kieran Healy.


• My dear friend Erin Gallé's Lost & Found shows how wonderfully a person can engage with art and with this city.

After its Frank Gehry redesign, the Art Gallery of Ontario has many nice things about it. The sculptural staircase is one of these things.

Read this which is Jennifer Crusie first draft of a scene, and then read this which is her analysis of how she's going to fix it.

This is a kind of writing about process that people don't do enough, and which people learning to write could really do with. I said in comments there that this isn't the way I work, but in a way it is. I don't formally ask those questions, but this kind of shaping is what I do when I go back through what I just wrote. It's how I stop things being flabby and heading off in the wrong direction. In a way I'm constantly doing this -- that's why I have the whole file open when I'm writing, so I can go and put in the tightening or the set-up where I need it when I figure that out.

Both of these pictures were taken in the afternoon, but because my camera can't pick up the full darkness I just get these eerie images.

Looking north at Bloor/Yonge
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Looking north at Summerhill
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Located a bit north and below of the Summerhilll TTC station and old railway station that I blogged about in February of this year, the usual slopes by the track reveal that this part of the track used to be aboveground. I've been told that some tree stumps are still visible.

In his 28 October post "I am not a journalist", Prince Edward Island blogger Peter Rukavina reacts to the admittance and rejection of a blogger to the press gallery at the Legislative Assembly. I'll copy the relevant CBC article in full below.

Members of the two-week-old press gallery of the P.E.I. legislature voted a local blogger out of the organization at a public meeting on Monday evening.

In an 11-2 vote, Stephen Pate lost his accreditation to cover the legislature as a member of the media. Pate runs a blog called the NJN Network.

The press gallery will recommend to Legislative Speaker Kathleen Casey that Pate be removed from the list of accredited media.

Gallery president Wayne Thibodeau, who is also the senior political reporter for the Charlottetown Guardian, argued Pate is not a journalist and that other press galleries in the country do not allow bloggers, lobbyists or special interest groups.

Pate described himself as a journalist, satirist and blogger, and said he occasionally advocates for people with disabilities. He argued the effort to vote him out was an attempt to stifle freedom of speech.

The press gallery of the P.E.I. governs media accreditation for the legislature. Non-media members can attend but cannot use the media room or second floor of the building.

The Charlottetown Guardian seems to be pretty uniformly hostile to the blogger's entry.

Guardian Editor Gary Macdougall used the phrase “hobby journalists” to describe what bloggers do, and underlying the CBC panel discussion was the notion that we all need to consume this stuff called “the news” and that there’s a battle between bloggers and journalists to see who’s going to deliver it in the future.

That, well. Perhaps Macdougall thinks of journalism as a zero-sum game, with bloggers inevitably displacing journalists through bloggers' own material (isntead of, say, referring their readers to the source material). Perhaps he shares in the general gloom surrounding the collapse of the newspaper industry in the face of the dispersion of traditional media. Who knows? Rukavina, interestingly enough, agrees with Macdougal about the non-journalistic qualities of bloggers but for different reasons.

Comparing journalists to bloggers is like comparing journalists to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests: yes, we all interpret the human condition in our own peculiar ways, but the blogger is no more treading on the domain of a journalist than the poet is.

I’m a committed and passionate blogger: it’s deeply woven into the fabric of how I live. But the exciting thing about blogging for me is not its perceived abilities to “recast the news landscape,” it’s the notion that regular everyday citizens have, in the Internet, a publishing platform the likes of which we’ve never seen: low cost, low barrier to entry, global distribution of words and images.

And what’s exciting about that has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the process.

What happens when, for all intents and purposes, everyone has a printing press and a television studio and is responsible to no entity but their own conscience when using it? How does that change public discourse? How does that change how people think about themselves in relation to society’s institutions? In a world where anyone can publish anything at any time, how do we attach value to our own small bit of the dialogue?

Rukavina's hiving off of bloggers from journalists doesn't strike me as sound. From the journalist's perspective, Andrew Sullivan is a journalist of international renown who integrates this with his personality as a blogger, while Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbisias does the same. From the blogger's perspective, The Huffington Post and its writers have had a huge effect on American journalism over the past couple of years. The boundaries between the two categories are blurred, and the writing and researching skills involved are pretty much comparable.

Moreover, why can't journalists be compared to poets or novel writers or songwriters or graffiti artists or priests? Seriously. The first three professions also involve writing, while I can imagine an arts journalist whose work is informed by street art like graffiti, and let's not forget any number of clerics who've also gained renown as writers. This is a secondary point, granted, since neither graffiti artists nor priests use the same skills sets as journalists or bloggers, but nevertheless.

As for attaching value to our own bits of dialogue, isn't that what every writer does regardless of whether they're bloggers or journalists? Writers in any medium have traditionally not fared very well, or been that likely to achieve stardom.

If you happen to read what I write here, that’s great, but I’m not writing for you, and while I may be interested in your reaction to what I write, this blog is not about you, or what I’m writing about. It’s about how my life is enhanced by the very fact of writing itself.

That’s not journalism.

Um, personal interest stories?

I agree that there are serious differences between blogging taken as a whole and journalism taken as a whole, a relative lack of editing on blogging's part, say, greater spontaneity, greater interactivity. Those are averages, however. Those are not representative of the entire enterprise of blogging, nor are they representative of the entire enterprise of journalism. Blogging can very well be a useful form of journalism because of its more personal and individualistic scale, ferreting out stories that larger and perhaps less nimble journalistic enterprises might not get. Again, bloggers can transition to journalism, just as journalists can transition to blogging, just as people can fulfill the expectations of both activities without undue stress. Bloggers, in turn, depend heavily on traditional media for their information, whether that information is reproduced verbatim or made the subject of commentary.

In the meantime, granted that provincial legislatures don't admit bloggers. Maybe they should. Everything counts in small amounts, after all.

I've a post up at Demography Matters that tkes a look at how relatively poorer regions and classes within countries seem to be considerably more likely to provide military recruits than otherwise. Go, read.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Like swords, but awesomer: made up words in science fiction and fantasy, The Magus, Lord of Light.

Susannah Kelly's Canadian Press article "Jobs go begging in Waterloo, Ont., home of RIM, while some live on streets" takes a look at the widely differing unemployment rates of workers in different sectors of the economy of the city and Regional Municipality of Waterloo, home to a half-million people. The Blackberry isn't enough.

When most people think BlackBerry they think of the booming high-tech company Research In Motion Ltd. making billions - an outfit with thousands of employees, easily bankrolling a millionaires' row in its hometown of Waterloo in southwestern Ontario.

And indeed, in Canada's so-called Technology Triangle - the cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge - as many as 2,000 high-paying, high-tech jobs are going begging.

But in a startling juxtaposition, the region is also registering an unemployment rate of 9.2 per cent, higher than the national average of 8.6 per cent.

Why?

Though 30,000 people work in the [computer industry, community leaders believe they may have a classic skills mismatch on their hands.

Many of those available, well-paying, high-tech jobs are highly specialized or require significant experience, or both, says Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, a 600-member, high-tech industry association.

Salaries ranged from $50,000 to more than $177,000 in 2008, but the qualifications are steep.

"It's not just about smart people, its about smart people with some very specific skills, abilities and experience," Klugman said.

"Filter tuning is a very specific kind of area that is not a common skill, working in optics and optical engineering is a very specific skill, software space is a very specific skill.

"So that's really the problem."

The collapse of the manufacturing industry in the Regional Municipality, one of the centres of southern Ontario's industrial belt, doesn't help. The migration of hopeful workers who often lacked qualifications to the region-"36 per cent of pure labourers and 27 per cent of the more than 20,000 people employed in processing and manufacturing in the area had not finished high school, according to Statistics Canada 2006 census data"--didn't help either.

Might Canada be heading for the 1980s' European-style structural unemployment? Canada's above or roughly on par with western European rates. The Economist recently suggested that Europe's lower unemployment rates can be traced to superior policy, like the subsidization of jobs. The Canadian government is certainly not subsidizing jobs. Granted, this 2003 paper and this 2004 anthology both suggested that structural unemployment was falling in the wake of population aging and reforms to the unemployment system. But national trends don't necessarily apply everywhere. Might it be possible that the Regional Municipality will be an unlucky area? The possibility seems to exist.

The labour market in Ontario is in the midst of a long-term adjustment, which was likely accelerated by the ongoing crisis. A VicinityJobs.com hiring demand report focusing on the suburban GTA that we published recently (found here) also found that in the first quarter of 2009, the demand for lower-skilled jobs declined the most. Those types of jobs are like often found in the manufacturing sector.

We expect to see continued increases in unemployment in Ontario during the next months, because for employment to start growing, hiring demand must pick up. Hiring demand has yet to start growing – although it seems to have at least stopped deteriorating. And even when hiring demand does pick up eventually, many lower-skilled jobs that were lost in Ontario will likely never return. They will be replaced by jobs in other occupation classes – Healthcare, Social Services, Technology, etc. The real danger for Ontario is that it may end up with high structural long-term unemployment: People available to fill new jobs may not have the skills that these jobs require. To avoid this fate, Ontario must step up efforts to retrain workers who have lost their jobs in the past months – and those who will join the ranks of the unemployed in the months to come.

Thoughts? If I've gotten this wrong, please, tell me.