[PHOTO] Front yard trellis

Front yard trellis
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I snapped a picture of this trellis at the beginning of the month. I've seen these trellises before in my neighbourhood, but these skeletons for vines--grape vines usually--have usually been hiding in back yards, not on the street.

[LINK] Some Tuesday links

For obvious reasons, I wasn't doing an extended links post on Christmas Day.

• Andrew Barton suggests that human genetic engineering might start off by offering parents the chance to increase their progeny's height.


• Laura Agustin writes about how some male sex workers in Kenya want, need, HIV education but are afraid of getting it openly for fear that they might be found out by homophobic neighbours.


• Daniel Drezner work on Iran. Targeted sanctions could send the message that the West would still want to deal with the government, general sanctions could help trigger regime change but aren't likely too given how Iran's major trading partners aren't likely to join in, and who knows who things will go?


• The Global Sociology blog is unimpressed by the Facebook campaign that saw rage Against the Machine take the #1 position on the UK's Christmas music charts. "A virtual flash mob does not a social movement make."


• Language Log's Mark Liberman writes about how users of standard English (whatever the standard may be) have made fun of speakers of non-standard English, from the 17th century through Dickens up to Sarah Palin.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer wonders whether Rwanda, in the course of its years-long occupation of large swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, did profit from looting the territory after all.


• Scott Peterson at Wasatch Economics suggests that New Zealand might follow the United States in making very significant deep-water finds of oil and natural gas.

[META] Blogroll Addition

I've added Mark Graham's Zero Geography to the blogroll. Zero Geography has a lot of interesting posts on the ways in which human geography interaqcts with electronic geography, for instance in noting how the Czech- and Portuguese-language versions of Wikipedia concentrate very heavily on Czech and Lusophone content (the English and German Wikipedias, by his estimation, are the only ones which transcend language boundaries).

[LINK] "NFB downloads a hit outside Canada"

I'm sure that people my age remember National Film Board of Canada short animations like the "Log-Driver's Waltz."

"The Tragically Hip - Ahead By A Century" (Watch on YouTube)

The Globe and Mail reports that the National Film Board is apparently becoming a bit of an international success.

The National Film Board of Canada's new iPhone application has proven to be a hit beyond this country's borders, with 40 per cent more people downloading NFB content from abroad than in Canada.

Since its launch on Oct. 21, there have been nearly 80,000 downloads internationally and just over 56,000 in Canada from people seeking out the NFB's documentaries and animation. Among the top five plays on the iPhone are The Cat Came Back, Canada Vignettes: Log Driver's Waltz and HA-Aki.

The iPhone app is just one of the international successes recorded in the 70th anniversary year of the NFB, the national producer and distributor of films, documentaries, animation and shorts.

Besides looking back at its fabled past, chair Tom Perlmutter said the NFB continued its efforts to position itself solidly in the future by exploring new markets.

[. . .]

“The National Film Board, especially with their online offerings, is a really easy and accessible way to tell our stories not only to Canadians but internationally as well,” said Stephanie Rea, a spokeswoman for Heritage Minister James Moore.

NFB.ca, the board's retooled Web site, has had almost three million views since it launched a year ago. About 1,700 of the NFB's 13,000 productions are online and more are constantly being added.

Ms. Rea said Mr. Moore often praised the board and considered it “a great way to show off Canadian talent and Canadian content around the world.”

Norm Bolen, the president of the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, said Canadians don't really appreciate how highly regarded the NFB is abroad and how much it is regarded as “a real player in the international marketplace and (as) a model for other countries.”

I ask my international readers, is Canada's model of government production and distribution of Canadian filmic works a model for other countries?

[LINK] "Canadian recession a 'Made in the U.S.A.' phenomenon; report"

According to the the Canadian Press, Canada's recession is the United States' fault.

Dale Orr Economic Insight says the Canadian domestic economy largely stood still during the 2008-2009 slump that shaved $100 billion from where economic output would have been.

That is precisely the loss in the value of exports from where they would have been had the economy continued to chug along at a stable 2.7-per-cent rate of growth that preceded the downturn.

Economist Dale Orr says since most of those exports would have been bound for the U.S., the recession was mostly a "Made in the U.S.A." phenomenon.

Although Orr says all provinces fell into recession, the downturn impacted Ontario and Newfoundland the most.

The hit to Canada's most populous province was so severe that it elevated Saskatchewan into second place in terms of standard of living, past Ontario and behind Alberta.

Orr says the standard of living of residents of Saskatchewan, as measured in terms of per capital gross domestic product, rose to 104 per cent of the Canadian average, past Ontario, which fell to 103 per cent of the national average.

The report in question is here. In it, he makes the interesting point that the recession has been least severe in Québec, partly because of an industrial structure less vulnerable to the American recession (aerospace, not autos), perhaps also--when talking about GDP per capita--because of the province's relatively lower rate of population growth.

[LINK] "Network effects"

Doug Saunders at Twitter linked to this article from the Economist examining the impact of the telegraph on journalism in the mid-19th century. The newspaper survived, amazingly enough.

CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some publications “must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.” With many American papers declaring bankruptcy in the past few months, their readers and advertisers lured away by cheaper alternatives on the internet, this doom-laden prediction sounds familiar. But it was in fact made in May 1845, when the revolutionary technology of the day was not the internet—but the electric telegraph.

It was only a year earlier, in May 1844, that Samuel Morse had connected Washington, DC, and Baltimore by wire and sent the first official message, in dots and dashes: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT”. The second message sent down Morse’s line was of more practical value, however: “HAVE YOU ANY NEWS”. (There was no question-mark in Morse’s original alphabet.) As a network of wires spread across the country, referred to as “the great highway of thought” by one contemporary observer, it was obvious that this new technology was going to have a huge impact on the newspaper industry. But would the telegraph be friend or foe?

James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald and author of the gloomy prediction of May 1845, concluded that the telegraph would put many newspapers out of business. “In regard to the newspaper press, it will experience to a degree, that must in a vast number of cases be fatal, the effects of the new mode of circulating intelligence,” he wrote. He returned to his theme in another editorial in July. “All those papers which serve merely as vehicles of intelligence will be destroyed,” he declared. “The scissors-and-paste journalism of the country will be annihilated.”

The newspaper did survive, since it served as a convenient distribution method for the news, adapting quickly enough to the timely arrival of news from all points. "The telegraph was first seen as a threat to papers, but was then co-opted and turned to their advantage."

Today, papers are doing their best to co-opt the internet. They have launched online editions, set up blogs and encouraged dialogue with readers. Like the telegraph, the internet has changed the style of reporting and forced papers to be more timely and accurate, and politicians to be more consistent. Again there is talk of news being commoditised and of the need to focus on analysis and opinion, or on a narrow subject area. And again there are predictions of the death of the newspaper, with hand-wringing about the implications for democracy if fewer publications exist to challenge those in authority or expose wrongdoing.