[PHOTO] Taylor Creek Park streamside

Taylor Creek Park streamside (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Taylor Creek Park streamside (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Taylor Creek Park streamside (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] "Healing Chile's Malaise"

In Business Week, Geri Smith writes about how Chile's very significant quantitative economic growth--Chile's economy is arguably the best performing in South America, and the country might well join the First World in a decade or two--hasn't led to significant qualitative changes in the structures of Chilean society or economy. The country's comparative advantage remains now as before in its mineral exports, especially copper.

Valeria Garcia has come a long way in the past two decades. As a high school dropout, she lived in a wooden shack with a dirt-floor kitchen and a tin roof in San Ramón, one of the Chilean capital's roughest neighborhoods. But at age 33 she went back to high school and then earned a degree in psychology from a local university. For seven years she commuted an hour each day by bus to classes, all the while taking in washing to make ends meet.

Now 52, Garcia is a psychologist at a center for battered women and is sending her children to college with no government aid. Her $1,200 monthly income disqualifies her for financial assistance, although she still lives in San Ramón, a desolate expanse of makeshift houses and vacant lots. "If I'm now considered middle-class, why do I feel so poor?" she says, looking around the four-room cinderblock house she shares with her three daughters. "The world thinks Chile is successful, but many Chileans can't do much more than work, sleep, and eat. People aren't satisfied."

Chile has come a long way since 1990, when democracy was restored after 17 years of military rule. The economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing, inflation is a distant memory, the poverty level has fallen to 13% from 45%, and per capita gross domestic product has quadrupled, to $10,100.

Yet like Garcia, many Chileans feel a certain malaise. They know their country is one of the most prosperous in Latin America due to fiscal discipline and the profound free-market reforms of the past 30 years. But Chile's explosive, Asian-style growth of the 1990s has given way to expansion averaging just 3.5% annually this decade. And despite efforts to diversify, volatile copper earnings continue to account for more than half of total exports. So Chile's leaders are seeking to reduce that dependence and nurture a knowledge-based economy via better schooling and more innovation.

For the well-to-do, it's business—and pleasure—as usual. Glittering new office towers and luxury apartment complexes abound in Santiago's wealthy neighborhoods, and on Sundays well-heeled families flock to the Club de Polo San Cristóbal for a sumptuous buffet of prime rib and king crab. They dine overlooking immaculate fields where thoroughbreds are groomed for afternoon races. But in the sprawling, dusty communities where Chile's nascent middle class lives, health clinics, parks, and public transportation are in short supply. In spite of its progress, Chile remains a class-bound society of haves and have-nots. "Chileans have advanced, but not as much as they'd like, and those who feel left behind are bitter," says Marta Lagos, an economist who heads Latinobarómetro, an opinion research firm.

The situation sounds vaguely similar to that of Canada, which remains dependent on natural resources exports. Then again, Chile's situation is similar to Canada save in all the ways in which it isn't.

[MUSIC] jacksoul, "Can't Stop"

Haydain Neale, lead singer of the acclaimed Toronto-based multi-genre urban music group jacksoul, died Sunday after a couple of long medical struggles.

More than two years after being knocked off his scooter and sustaining serious head injuries, Jacksoul lead singer Haydain Neale made his first public appearance in the audience of Bravo's Motown At The Concert Hall which was recorded Oct. 4 and aired Nov. 10.

After the house band, comprised primarily of his bandmates, announced that their performance was dedicated to Neale, the camera panned to him. He didn't smile or wave with that erstwhile exuberance, but jerked his head as wife Michaela put an arm around him.

It wasn't a long-enough glance to gauge the lingering effects of the Aug. 2007 accident.

And with the Nov. 3 release of a new Jacksoul single "Lonesome Highway" and an album of new material, Soulmate, slated for Dec. 1, fans couldn't help but think the Hamilton-born Neale was on the upswing.

His family has always been optimistic, but tightlipped, about his condition and intensive rehabilitation.

In a press release about the production of the new tunes – written, and seemingly recorded, prior to his accident – Neale says: "It takes me more time now, but I still orchestrate the room."

Sadly, Jacksoul's fifth album will now be the posthumous legacy of its gravelly-voiced frontman. Relatives announced late Monday that Neale died in hospital on Sunday after a seven-month battle with lung cancer.

Below is the jacksoul song "Can't Stop." Enjoy, and remember.

"Purple Rain - Theatrical Trailer" (Watch on YouTube)

[CAT] "Cats Against Climate Change"

Dave comes up with the best cat videos.

"Sign of the times" (Watch on YouTube)

[LINK] "'Passport please': new fences for a border town"

This AFP article on how new border controls on the US-Canadian frontier have divided the Québec community of Stanstead from its Vermont sister community of Derby Line reminds me, for all of the differences, of an article last year on the impact of the European Union's Schengen frontier on cross-border relations between Belarus and Lithuania.

Canadians in Stanstead and Americans across the border in Derby Line, Vermont once lived in harmony as one community, mostly ignoring the imaginary line that separates them.

But all that changed six months ago when authorities started enforcing rules for travel between Canada and the United States: all must now pass through customs offices and show a valid passport.

And now, barricades also separate the two towns.

The change is most evident on Canusa Street. Homes on the north side are in Canada. On the south side is America. And it is no longer acceptable to go over to a neighbor across the street to ask to borrow their lawn mower.

"You have to register with US Customs and Border Protection at the end of the street, and stop in at the Canadian customs office when we return," says Raymond Fluet.

[. . .]

"It used to be practical to do some shopping in Quebec," Hanna Cornelius-Bouchard, who lives in Vermont with her husband and their two children, told AFP.

"But I'd rather spend my money on other things than four passports for the family ... so we haven't crossed the border in several months."

The lone structure spared in the divisive exercise is a library-opera house built on the border itself. The Victorian structure's front door is on the American side while its stage is on Canadian soil. A diagonal line on the floor indicates the border.

"The Canadians have one dispensation: they don't have to pass through customs if they park on their side of the border and do not stray from the sidewalk leading up to the building," said its director, American Nancy Rumery.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the results of Singapore's language planning

Language Log's Victor Mair took a look at the consequences of Singapore of the "Speak Mandarin Campaign,", a government push from 1979 inaugurated by then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on to encourage Singapore's speakers of different Chinese regional languages--and, by extension, Singapore's non-Chinese--to create a homogeneously Putonghua-speaking environment, with an integrated ethnic Chinese community that could support a stable bilingualism.

Within the short space of eight months, Singapore's founding Prime Minister and current Minister Mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, has done a nearly complete about-face in his attitude toward promoting the use of Mandarin in the republic. As late as March of this year, when he was celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the campaign to "Speak Mandarin," Lee was claiming that "In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue.”

In those days, Lee was asserting that people have only so many “gigabytes” in their brains to devote to languages. Though admitting that speaking “dialects” in some situations can provide “extra warmth,” he warned that, by using such languages, “You are losing important neurons with data which should not be there. And like the computer, when you delete it, it doesn’t really go away. It’s there at the back, and you’ve got to go to the rubbish channel and say ‘destroy.’ And it’s still disturbing your hard disk.” (See this useful summary and detailed list of references by Mark Swofford.)

Thus, those rubbish languages must be destroyed “dialects” must be let go, he intimated.

This fairly coercive policy, one news article suggests, didn't pay off.

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said his insistence on bilingualism in the early years of education policy was "wrong". Instead it caused generations of students to be put off by the Chinese language.

Speaking first in Mandarin and then in English at the official opening of the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language on Tuesday, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew gave a blunt assessment of Singapore's bilingual policy.

He said: "We started the wrong way. We insisted on ting xie (listening), mo xie (dictation) - madness! We had teachers who were teaching in completely-Chinese schools. And they did not want to use any English to teach English-speaking children Chinese and that turned them off completely."

Mr Lee added: "At first I thought, you can master two languages. Maybe different intelligence, you master it at different levels."

But his conclusions now, after over 40 years of learning Mandarin, cannot be more different.

MM Lee said: "Nobody can master two languages at the same level. If (you think) you can, you're deceiving yourself. My daughter is a neurologist, and late in my life she told me language ability and intelligence are two different things.

"Girls are better at languages because their left side of the brain to learn languages, as a general rule, is better than the boys. Boys have great difficulty, and I had great difficulty.

"Successive generations of students paid a heavy price, because of my ignorance, by my insistence on bilingualism. And I wasn't helped by the ministry officials, because there were two groups - one English speaking, one Chinese teaching."

Lee's Gender issues aside, briefly put it looks like in Singapore's language ecology the Speak Mandarin Campaign did successfully diminish the rate of inter-generational transfer of the various Chinese regional languages in Singapore and increase the rate of second-language knowledge of Mandarin, but--perhaps complicated by other language policies like the push for English-language fluency--helped encourage a broad language shift to English among younger generations through coercive policies. Are there similarities to Ireland's language policy, perhaps?