[PHOTO] MaRS Centre, 101 College Street, April 2012

The MaRS Centre at 101 College Street, opposite the Queen's Park subway station to the north across College Street and east across University from the gleaming Ontario Power Building visible in the background, houses the MaRS Discovery District, a public-private partnership that aims to commercialize Canadian medical research.

The core of the complex is the Heritage Building, once a wing of the Toronto General Hospital. Being built at the time the photo was taken, and still being built with a targeted completion date of Fall 2013, is a 20-story tower.

The contrast of the old brick building with the gleaming modernist towers is something that quite appeals to me; the delicious architectural tensions click for me.

[LINK] "What Will Washington Do Without the BlackBerry?"

What happened to my country's high-tech future? If Washington D.C. is losing its taste for the blackberry, can the end of Canada's Research in Motion be far off? Mashable's Sophie Quinton reports.

Walk a city block in Washington and you’re sure to see more than one person glued to a BlackBerry. President Obama famously fought to keep his personal BlackBerry after his inauguration. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton uses one, as do many members of Congress.

But Washington’s well-documented BlackBerry addiction is on the wane. For many D.C. denizens, whether or not they’ll switch from BlackBerry to iPhone or Android isn’t a question of if, but when.

“You can play with an Android a lot more,” said Andrew Trembley, a consultant at the World Bank. “I wouldn’t bother with the BlackBerry; they’re business phones.” Good for email and little else.

“I enjoy typing with ease,” said Cammie Flippen, a paralegal at Wiley Ryan and a BlackBerry user. But, she said, “in two months, I’m switching over.”

[. . .]

BlackBerry’s continuing presence in D.C. is largely driven by the federal government’s purchasing decisions. The BlackBerry’s security protections have kept it the phone of choice for federal agencies as well as private-sector companies, such as law firms, that deal with sensitive information.

[. . .]

More than 85% of congressional staffers use a BlackBerry for work, as do about 45% of lobbyists, according to a March survey by the George Washington University Graduate School of Public Management, the Original U.S. Congress Handbook and ORI. More than 1 million government employees in North America use BlackBerry, according to RIM.

“Nobody has a BlackBerry in the private sector,” said Stryk Thomas, a management consultant at Key3 Strategy. Additionally, he said there’s no way he’d consider trading in his iPhone for a BlackBerry.

But BlackBerry’s reign as the government’s PDA of choice may not last forever. The White House’s most recent Digital Government Strategy, released in May, lays out the steps toward security standards for a bring-your-own device policy. That move could erode BlackBerry’s prominence, as more and more people are choosing iPhone and Android devices over BlackBerry for personal use.

The U.S. General Services Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have already started to issue iPhones to some employees, Reuters reported. The GSA is also issuing Android-based devices, and testing a bring-your-own device policy. Both agencies were able to make the switch after they switched to using Google Apps for Government.

Many Washingtonians who have ditched their BlackBerries aren’t looking back.

“I still kind of miss the keyboard,” said Amy Phillips, vice president at Monument Realty. But the iPhone is “so much better,” she said, noting that it’s particularly easy for viewing PDFs and other files that her business needs.

[. . .]
“I think BlackBerries are sort of falling behind,” said Alejandro, a World Bank employee who didn’t want his last name to be used. “Washington is one of the few places they still get used. This is their last market.”

[LINK] "Montreal’s English-language media faces troubled times"

David Sherman's recent Toronto Star article framing the recent closure of the free Montréal English-language weekly the Montreal Mirror in terms of existential problems for media in the Anglophone community in Canada's second-largest city surprises me.

Anglophones in Québec amount, depending on the definition, to nearly eight hundred thousand people, with the Anglophone population of Montréal proper accounting for three-quarters of that. Surely that's a large enough of a population to sustain a weekly--Ottawa does it with a similar total, right?

The editorial in Montréal English-language weekly The Suburban suggesting that better business models and owners than most of the closed-down media had would have saved them makes a lot of sense.

The city’s English media is dying a protracted and painful death.

This month, the closure of the all-sports radio station TSN 990 was announced and the Mirror, an alternative weekly, also shut down. But they are only the latest casualties.

Another smaller alternative weekly, the Hour, folded in May. The Gazette, the city’s last English-language daily, owned by Postmedia, recently directed another 20 newsroom employees to walk the plank within the next few months. And it’s been years since the city’s two glossy English monthlies, Montreal Magazine and MTL, were laid to rest.

Mitch Melnick, host of 990’s afternoon show, was quoted as saying: “When we started this station 11 years ago, a lot of us had great belief, unwavering belief, the city could support a sports station in both languages. We are part of the landscape (now) and, unfortunately, we’re going to disappear.”

[. . .]

David Novak, a retired newspaperman and film publicist, worries the recent losses are a sobering harbinger of tough times for Anglos.

While Montreal supports several French-language dailies — Le Devoir, La Presse, Le Journal, a free metro newspaper and the weekly alternative Voir — Novak says English print media is hurting. The city’s English population is declining, he says, and younger Allophones and Anglophones prefer screens and the Internet to newsprint.

“It’s a sign of the slow death of the traditional Anglophone community in Montreal,” he says. “My son is completely comfortable in French and even the Jewish community, which used to be Ashkenazi and speak English and Yiddish, is now increasingly Sephardic and speak French.”

Henry Aubin, a prizewinning longtime urban affairs columnist at The Gazette, says older readers “are not digitally oriented” and the loss of the two free weeklies and the cutbacks and staff shrinkage at the Gazette “are blows to the Anglo community’s ability to inform itself.”

“Staff cutbacks and a distant head office that devises uniform policies for its papers coast to coast have weakened The Gazette over the past decade or two,” he said in an email.

And, The Suburban's take:

[C]ommunity weeklies such as the Suburban, the Westmount Examiner and the Independent are prospering, says David Price, editor of the weekly Westmount Independent. They have a simple game plan — distribute door to door, deliver local news and go after local retailers for ad revenue.

“We focus on a community as opposed to a demographic,” says Price.

The Suburban, which has for decades served suburbanites with local news tidbits and ads for area shops, has quickly revamped itself, adding a downtown section heavy on entertainment to attract former Mirror readers.

Suburban editor Beryl Wajsman says publishers cutting back in order to fulfill promises of quarterly increases in share value only put their newspapers on life support.

“The philosophy of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell,” he says, pointing out that his circulation has expanded in the last year from 105,000 to 145,000 a week by trying to improve the paper, not reducing staff or page counts.

Thoughts?

[LINK] "Wernher von Braun’s Martian Chronicles"

At The Smithsonian's Paleofuture blog, Matt Novak wrote at length about German-American scientist Wernher von Braun's widely-publicized plans, published in American popular magazine Collier's in the early 1950s, for a manned mission to Mars.

The post features beautiful vintage art. Go, see.

From 1952 until 1954, the weekly magazine Collier’s published a series of articles on space exploration spread out across eight issues. Several of the articles were written by Wernher von Braun, the former Third Reich rocket scientist who began working for the U.S. after WWII. The Collier’s series is said to have inspired countless popular visions of space travel. This impact was in no small part due to the gorgeous, colorful illustrations done by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman and Rolf Klep.

The last of the Collier’s space-themed series was the April 30, 1954, issue that featured a cover showing the planet Mars and two headlines: “Can We Get to Mars?” and directly underneath: “Is There Life on Mars?” The article, “Can We Get to Mars?,” by von Braun is a fascinating read that looks at everything from the impact of meteors on spacecraft to the stresses of living in cramped quarters during such a long journey. Even when astronauts finally arrived on Mars, they’d still be subjected to claustrophobic living conditions, as you can see from the illustration above by Fred Freeman. The astronauts—who in this illustration have landed on an icy Martian pole—live in inflatable, pressurized spheres that are mounted on tractors.

Von Braun’s story in the 1954 issue explained that he didn’t believe he’d see a man on Mars within his lifetime. In fact, von Braun believed that it would likely be 100 years before a human foot would touch Martian soil. But there was absolutely no doubt that we would get there.

[. . .]

But unlike NASA’s current Mars mission, von Braun’s vision for travel included humans rather than simply rovers. As Erik Conway, historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains, “There have also always been—since at least Wernher von Braun—people proposing expeditions to Mars with humans, with astronauts. Von Braun’s idea was to send a flotilla of spacecraft, not just one. As you’ve seen in the Collier’s magazines and so on, he was a big promoter of that. And that affected how the American public saw Mars as well. So it was being promoted as a future abode of life for us humans—and it still is in a lot of the enthusiast literature. That hasn’t changed. It’s just the funding isn’t there to actually accomplish it.”

[LINK] "Project 714 and Shuguang-1: The First Chinese Space Program"

As part of his fascinating False Steps blog describing space travel possibilities that never were, pauldrye blogs about the surprisingly precocious space program of the People's Republic of China. Had things been different, China might have launched astronauts into orbit three decades before it actually did.

The Chinese first planned to put up a satellite in 1959, but the usual delays pushed the date into the Sino-Soviet split and the USSR withdrew the technicians and plans the Chinese were relying on in June 1960. Nevertheless, the Chinese committed to an indigenous missile and space program and pushed on. By 1966 the first steps to a manned space flight had begun. China’s first suborbital animal test flights on top of a DF-2 ballistic missile were scheduled for May 1966 but that month marked the start of the Cultural Revolution. The Academy of Sciences was taken over by the Red Guards and outside of the ballistic missile program (which was protected by Zhou Enlai) rocketry research in China ground to a halt for two years.

In April 1968 the main scientists involved (particularly Qian Xuesen, the American-trained father of Chinese rocketry) had been rehabilitated and the manned space program reorganized under military control, which gave them a degree of cover from the Red Guards. In April 1970 China launched its first unmanned satellite, Dongfanghong-1 (“The East is Red-1”), and Mao Zedong publicly announced that China was working on a manned craft.

The manned program ultimately was aborted because it was a very complex program launched in the middle of the Cultural Revolution when China was still a very poor country.

The proximate cause of the program’s cancellation was the apparent closeness of the project to General Lin Biao. The anointed successor of Mao Zedong, he fell out of favour and then died in a plane crash under murky circumstances on September 13, 1971. The Chinese government announced that he had been involved in a plot against them, and they eventually came to the conclusion that Project 714 was the hub of the conspiracy (some of their evidence was the fact that 7-1-4 in Mandarin is a homophone for the words “Armed Uprising”). Though the space program supposedly continued through the rest of the decade, there’s no evidence that any progress was made after May 1972. Wang Xiji was targeted, but remained free to work on unmanned satellites; Xue Lun, head of the taikonaut group, was purged and the cadre of taikonauts was released back to their units. Mao apparently changed his mind about the manned space program too, and refused to give even minimal funds when asked for them.

More basically, Project 714’s problem was that it took place almost entirely within the Cultural Revolution—which makes it astonishing that it even got as far as it did. Scientists and engineers were at considerable risk of exile and imprisonment during the time period and universities were unable to train anyone, so skills were in short supply. As the program was officially secret, they were unable to gain official protection from any Politburo member and were a wide-open target.

China’s economy hit a nadir in the same time frame, and so money was an enormous issue too. In 1970 the entire Chinese GDP was about US$110 billion, and the Apollo program cost roughly US$2 billion per year at a time when the US economy ranged from six to nine times larger (and almost 40 times per capita). Even the USSR’s economy was about 40% the size of the US’s. There was no possible way the Chinese government could come up with those kinds of funds and there’s evidence that they didn’t try very hard. One source reports that the project headquarters had a grand total of one telephone.

Follow the blog.

[LINK] "Syria border standoff a new front in Iraq-Kurdish rift"

Patrick Markey's Reuters article analyzing the tensions between autonomous Kurdistan and the Iraqi central government over their respective approaches to the Syrian civil war--Iraqi Kurdistan is closely allying itself with the anti-central Syrian Kurds, at least, while the Iraqi central government dominated by Shi'ites doesn't want the current Iranian-allied government to be dislodged--makes for cheery reading. Oil makes things wonderfully complicated, too.

Might we yet have another Kurdish war in Iraq, or maybe even a broader conflict?

Over a few days last week, Baghdad and Kurdish officials separately rushed troops to the Syrian frontier, ostensibly to secure it against unrest in the neighboring country; but the mobilization brought Iraqi Arab and Kurdish soldiers face to face along their own disputed internal border.

Washington intervened and a potential clash was avoided. But the standoff opened a new front in Baghdad's already dangerously fragile relations with the Kurds in their push for more autonomy from central government.

"We don't want to fight, we are both Iraqis, but if war comes, we won't run," said Peshmerga Ismael Murad Khady, sitting under a straw awning to ward off the sun, the battered stock of a BKC machine gun pointing not towards some foreign border but at fellow countrymen manning the Iraqi army post.

Just visible are Iraqi army trenches and tents beyond the empty stretch of road that is now a de facto no-man's land in this small frontline. Nearby, local cars kick up dust as they take sidetracks to skirt the two posts.

Behind the Peshmerga, a title that means literally 'those who lay down their lives', a battery of Kurdish 122-mm howitzers directs its barrels towards the Iraqi line. They are part of the heavier armour reinforcements Kurdistan and Iraq drafted into the disputed area just a kilometre from the Syrian border.

Always a potential flashpoint, tensions between Baghdad and Kurdistan escalated after U.S. troops left in December, removing a buffer between the Iraqi Arab dominated central government and ethnic Kurds who have run their own autonomous area since 1991.

Iraq's national army units and Peshmerga have faced off before, only to pull back before clashes as both regions tested each other's nerves, lacking however any interest in confrontation.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki, a Shi'ite muslim, and Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani have sparred more aggressively since America's withdrawal, as Kurdistan chaffs against central government control.

At the heart of their dispute are contested territories claimed by Iraqi Arabs and Kurds and crude reserves now attracting majors like Exxon and Chevron to Kurdistan, upsetting Baghdad, which says it controls rights to develop oil.

Though autonomous, Kurdistan still relies on Baghdad for its share of the national oil revenues.

Kurdistan is growing increasingly closer to neighbour Turkey as it talks about ways to export its own oil and not rely on Baghdad. Maliki's government accuses Kurdistan of violating the law by signing deals with oil majors.