• February 05, 2010

Globe and Mail:  Vulnerability to behaviour and learning problems boosts potential with the right kind of care and attention, study finds

They are called “orchid children,” highly sensitive youngsters who are vulnerable to behaviour and learning problems if they live in a stressful environment, but nevertheless can outperform their peers if they come from a supportive home.

Research published Friday bolsters a new theory that there is a positive side to traits and genes associated with susceptibility to emotional problems and cognitive deficits.

It recasts those vulnerabilities as potential strengths, and says they can help children excel, given the right kind of care and attention.

The findings should help teachers, daycare providers and parents understand and harness the potential of children who are highly reactive to stress, and as a result may be more anxious or disruptive, said Jelena Obradovic of Stanford University in California.

“Parents and teachers may find that sensitive children, like orchids, are more challenging to raise and care for, but they can bloom into individuals of exceptional ability and strength when reared in a supportive, nurturing and encouraging environment,” Dr. Obradovic said.

She and her colleagues, including University of British Columbia researcher Thomas Boyce, followed 338 kindergarten children in the United States to test the orchid hypothesis.

For years, scientists who study the brain, genetics and child development have reported that children who live in adverse environments are not equally at risk of developing problems.

The stress of having a mother who suffers from depression, for example, seemed to be more damaging for some children than for others.

Sensitivity to stress is one of the traits shown to make children particularly vulnerable. But according to the orchid theory, advanced by Dr. Boyce and a number of other researchers, sensitivity to stress might have an upside.

These children might be more attuned to other elements in their environment, including attention and nurturing. Perhaps they would thrive – do better than average – in certain circumstances. This experiment, led by Dr. Obradovic, was designed to test this idea.

The children, age 5 and 6, were assessed for how they reacted to mildly stressful tasks, including interviews with strangers and being asked to recall sequences of numbers – and being corrected if they made mistakes.

Afterward, the researchers measured their heart rates and levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva.

They also assessed the difficulties each child faced at home by surveying their parents about financial stress, parental overload, marital conflict and how much anger, contempt and hostility was shown by family members.

In a paper published today in the journal Child Development, they report that the highly reactive children fared worse at school if they came from a home with a lot of stress. But if their home environment was more stable, they did better than their peers at school, both academically and socially.

Some parents may already know if their child tends to be reactive.

“These are the kids that if you approach them too quickly, or make too loud a noise in their face, get fussy and irritated,” Dr. Obradovic said.

But it is not black and white, she said, and children may react more to one kind of stress than another. As well, some may be able to calm themselves quickly.

This study focused on a trait rather than a specific gene. Dr. Boyce and his colleagues are now studying how a child's environment affects the way particular genes function.

The work focused on stress sensitivity, said Dr. Obradovic, but the orchid theory also applies to genes associated with increased susceptibility to attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, anxiety or depression. The idea is the same; with increased vulnerability comes increased potential.

“There is a plasticity here. It really depends on environment. No one is walking around with inherently vulnerable genes or an inherently vulnerable physiology,” she said.

HOUSEHOLD STRESS

Six sources of family stress that researchers looked at in their study of children who are more likely to falter in difficult circumstances but thrive in a more stable environment.

    * Financial stress: Money problems, difficulty paying bills and how finances limited opportunities.
    * Parenting overload: Whether parents felt overwhelmed by their duties and juggling conflicting obligations, and whether they had time to relax.
    * Marital conflict : How often parents openly argued, criticized each other in front of their children and showed physical or verbal hostility.
    * Negative/anger expressiveness: Overt anger, contempt and hostility among family members, as well as frequency of passive sulking, crying and disappointment.
    * Maternal depression: A 20-item questionnaire assessed whether a child's mother was suffering from depression.
    * Harsh and restrictive parenting: This was assessed on an 18-item scale.

Anne McIlroy, Science Reporter, Globe and Mail

Original Article:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/with-support-orchid-childrens-stress-can-bloom-into-strength/article1457007/

Jelena Obradovic is a Junior Fellow in CIFAR's Experience-based Brain & Biological Development program

Thomas Boyce is the co-director and fellow of CIFAR's Experience-based Brain & Biological Development program

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• January 29, 2010

Montreal Gazette:  Imagine a world where doctors carry portable MRIs and power lines transport five times more energy than they do todayit may not be far off, thanks to a Quebec physicist.

The intriguing yet largely mysterious field of superconductorsmaterials that offer little or no resistance to electricityhas taken a significant leap thanks to just-published findings by Université de Sherbrooke professor Louis Taillefer.

His latest discovery portends big changes in our daily lives that could be only a decade away, Taillefer said, likening it to the breakthrough discovery of the transistor in 1947.

"That was a huge revolution," he said. "That led us to the semi-conductor, which led us to computers. Sixty years later, we have Google."
Taillefer, who collaborated with University of British Columbia scientists, published the team's most recent findings on high-temperature superconductivity in prestigious science journal Nature on Thursday.

They explain the "pseudo-gap" phase, when copper oxides are cooled to minus- 100C, and the electrons move in the same direction, enabling electricity to flow flawlessly.

The findings reveal an underlying force not previously understood, 50-year- old Taillefer said.

While superconductors work best at the lowest theoretically possible temperatureabsolute zero, or minus-273.15CTaillefer's work focused on the relatively higher and easier to achieve minus-100C. His findings also reduce the theories explaining high-temperature superconductivity from dozens to just a few.

The holy grail of the field would be superconduction at room temperature, Taillefer said. "Now we're pretty sure we know how to get there."

Achieving that would mean MRIs could be much smaller, even portable, since they would not need large and hugely expensive cooling systems. Five times more electricity could be transmitted in the space now required for standard transmission lines.

"This is our next challenge," Taillefer said. "We will try to figure out what's behind the magic with superconductors" at warmer and room temperatures.

The research involved years of painstaking observation on crystals of yttrium barium copper oxide super-cooled in a special refrigerator. The cleanliness of the crystals, produced by the team at UBC, went a long way to providing the best results, he added.

Taillefer, a Montreal native, was first attracted to the field of study in 1992 as a professor at McGill University and then later at UBC.
"I like it because it's a bit of a jungle," he said. "Superconductivity is easy to see. It's not easy to understand."

Derek Nichols, a high-school science teacher at Montreal's Royal Vale School, said Taillefer's work has fascinating potential for young students interested in science.
"I'm excited by it," he said. "Unleashing the power of magnets will make a lot of things more affordable and more practical. It's really easy to excite young students with these kinds of possibilities."

Scientific discovery is moving much faster than most people realize and government support for such research is crucial to the technology sector, Nichols said. "Most kids in elementary school right now will be in jobs that don't yet exist."

At Taillefer's Sherbrooke lab, the next step toward the holy grail of superconductivity is buying some equipment with $10 million in new funding just received from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which pairs tax dollars with private grants to fund science projects.

Taillefer plans to buy a coil of superconducting wire that will create the largest magnetic field in Canada.

By Max Harrold, mharrold@thegazette.canwest.com

Louis Taillefer is a Fellow and Director of CIFAR's Quantum Materials program.



 

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• November 13, 2009

Globe and Mail:   Why are some societies more successful than others at promoting individual lives and the collective development of the community? Social scientists rarely ask this obvious question, partly because we fear imposing our values in our answers and partly because it is so complicated to answer. With the support of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, however, a diverse group of social scientists has been considering it, and here is what we've found.

A wide range of outcomes can be associated with successful societies, including open access to education, civic participation, cultural tolerance and social inclusion. However, we chose to measure societal success by elemental health indicators such as life expectancy – a goal most human beings agree is valuable.

Health outcomes pose many sets of puzzles for social scientists. Consider two examples. When the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell after 1989 – in a set of developments some described as the “end of history” – one might have expected daily life to improve for those people who had been given new freedoms and, for some, it did. After dipping during the transition, male life expectancy in the Czech Republic, for instance, began to improve rapidly under the new regime, reaching 72 years by 2001. Male life expectancy in Russia, however, dropped sharply during the transition and remained so low that it was barely 59 years in 2001. Why did a historic development improve collective well-being in one nation and erode it in another?

Recent movements in life expectancy in the United States and Canada are equally puzzling. In the two decades after the Second World War, Canadians and Americans gained years of life at about the same pace. Since the 1970s, however, U.S. life expectancy has been increasing more slowly than in Canada. The average Canadian now lives two years longer than an American. And although women live longer than men, they are losing their relative advantage at a faster pace in the U.S. than in Canada. These gaps translate into millions of years of productive life. Why are they occurring?

In all countries, people of lower socioeconomic status tend to have worse health than those in higher socioeconomic positions – a phenomenon so pervasive that some describe social inequality as the “fundamental cause” behind disparities in population health. We think the origins of this “health gradient” lie in the “wear and tear of daily life.” Many studies show that the emotional and physiological responses generated by the challenges people encounter in daily life condition their susceptibility to many of the chronic illnesses that have become the dominant causes of mortality in the developed world. The poor fare worst not only because they face more challenges but because they have fewer “buffers” to protect them from this wear and tear.

While some of these buffers are tied to personality and behavioural inclinations rooted in early childhood development, many others are not personal but social in character, and we examine them in a recent book, Successful Societies: How Institutional Culture and Institutions Affect Health. We argue that societies that recognize a wide range of people as full members of the community deserving of recognition and support, for instance, provide more extensive buffers than societies that stigmatize those who are different. This is also true of societies where ethnic boundaries are not strongly policed (e.g. Canada versus the U.S.) and interracial relationships not stigmatized (e.g. Brazil versus the U.S.).

Buffering societies are also ones that empower people by providing them collective narratives of empowerment and shared hope, as Barack Obama did right after the last U.S. election. They give people in all walks of life the tools they need to imagine “possible selves” that offer them routes to a more positive future. Images such as these help people resist negative messages and buffer them against the daily injuries of class and race – against the wear and tear of inequality that gets under the skin to sustain poor health, including unhealthy behaviours.

There are lessons in this for policy-makers concerned about health. Ann Swidler's chapter for Successful Societies compares AIDS prevention programs in Botswana and Uganda. Although Botswana is widely seen as better-governed, these programs have been much more successful in Uganda. Why? In Uganda, prevention campaigns were able to tap into the social imagery of the local community, invoking the obligations ordinary people feel to friends and neighbours. They were designed to resonate with the way people understand their lives. Many kinds of policies will be more effective when they are designed to build on concepts of community and shared values specific to local or national context.

Important though it is, the current U.S. debate about health care misses most of these points. Universal access to health care is crucial. But the health of a society will ultimately depend on quality of life, and quality of life has to do not only with social policy and income distribution, but also with how we treat one another, how sharply we draw the line between “us” and “them,” and what the experience of daily living feels like. In this respect, the secret of successful societies is not only in the hands of our governments and health reformers, but also in the choices we all make about how we deal with one another.

Peter A. Hall is a professor of European studies and government at Harvard; Michèle Lamont is a professor of European studies and sociology at Harvard. The authors are co-editors of Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health. 

Original article:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-wear-and-tear-of-our-daily-lives/article1363167/

Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont are co-directors of CIFAR's Successful Societies program.

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• October 15, 2009

Harvard Gazette:  As health care moves to the forefront of the national discourse, new research in the social sciences argues that the health of the population and the success or failure of many public health initiatives hinges as much on cultural and social factors as it does on doctors, facilities, or drugs.

Michele Lamont and Peter A. Hall of Harvard University are co-editors of a new collection of essays that analyze how the cultural frameworks and institutional practices that structure day-to-day life influence societal health. The work is titled “Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

“While access to health care is important to people’s health in broad terms,” says Hall, “we think that the health of the population turns less on the quality of the health care, or on the amount of spending that goes into health care, and more heavily on the quality of everyday life.”

Hall, Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, and Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, professor of sociology and of African-American studies, are both in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. They led an interdisciplinary group of social scientists — from fields such as epidemiology, psychology, and political science — who contributed to this volume posing the scholarly question: What makes a successful society?

Societal success has many potential definitions; the researchers focused their research agenda on issues of public health. Better health outcomes such as lower infant mortality or longer life expectancy can be perceived as universally desirable and benchmarks for assessing societal success.

While the book examines many themes relevant to contemporary debates about health care, it also moves beyond issues of economic resources to consider the social and cultural factors that affect health.

Previous research has demonstrated the effects of social networks on health. Building on work in social epidemiology about the adverse health effects of inequality, the book’s essays examine the factors feeding into the wear-and-tear of everyday life, as well as the social resources people can rely on to reduce the daily stressors that take a toll on their health.

“These questions of culture, collective faith that empowers people, and collective identity simply haven’t factored very much so far into the ways that epidemiologists think about questions of public health,” says Lamont. “The chapters of this book are meant to put these questions onto the table, to begin a conversation around them.”

In her chapter, Lamont examines how African Americans react to discrimination. She considers whether they internalize this message or develop their own empowering message, and in turn, how that sense of identity affects physical health.

In another chapter, Ann Swidler, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, compares the response to the AIDS epidemic in Uganda and Botswana. While Botswana is typically perceived as the better-governed country, Uganda has been more successful in combating the disease. Swidler finds that networks of social solidarity in Uganda’s local communities support more effective programs than in Botswana.

Funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the researchers in CIFAR’s Successful Societies Program intend to continue their inquiry through further statistical analyses of inequalities, by examining how individuals deal with negative stereotypes, and by investigating the conditions under which effective institutional practices can be transferred across nations and societies.

“This country is locked in an intense debate about whether it should expand access to health care, and whether it can afford to do so,” says Hall. “What we suggest is that access to health care is not ultimately the solution to better health. That solution has to lie in measures that improve the quality of social relations across the entire population. The health care debate is only the tip of an iceberg.”

By Amy Lavoie

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/10/book-successful-societies/

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• October 08, 2009

The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research would like to extend congratulations to one of this year's Nobel Physics Prize winners, Willard Boyle. Dr. Boyle is an outstanding physicist who helped pave the way for future generations, in part through is work with CIFAR. Twenty-three years ago, Dr. Boyle made exceptional contributions to the establishment of CIFAR’s Quantum Materials program by leading and furthering the mission of the Materials Science Taskforce.

CIFAR is honored that Dr. Boyle holds such an important place in the history of the institution. Today, Quantum Materials has distinguished itself by developing new methods of producing and studying superconductors, and has advanced both basic and applied research in this area. The program pursues an understanding of superconductivity and the development of related applications. This week, Dr. Boyle was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with co-researcher George Smith, for the invention of the Charge Coupled Device, a semiconductor circuit that is the basis for digitizing images in cameras, scanners, fax machines and other devices.  Dr. Boyle’s discovery also had a great impact on scientists from a wide range of fields. Cosmology and Gravity program director, Dick Bond recalls meeting Dr. Boyle at a CIFAR event. 

“He told me that while he was working in Bell labs he had created something that was being used in astronomy that I may have heard of, this of course was the CCD.  The device revolutionized astronomy by taking us from the photographic plate era into a digital image era."

Dr. Bond says he is fond of telling this story because "Dr. Boyle was so modest and yet had done something so amazing."

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• October 07, 2009

Globe and Mail: Canadian whose work in physics led to the development of digital photography says politicians need 'an appreciation for the free will, free spirit of scientists'

The Canadian inventor of technology that led to the birth of digital photography won a Nobel Prize Tuesday. But physicist Willard Boyle had to move to the United States to do his cutting-edge work.

Dr. Boyle, who won the award with former colleague George Smith, warned that managers need to give scientists leeway to come up with the kinds of transformative inventions that are too often stifled by paperwork and red tape.

What scientists face today is “almost disgraceful … The bureaucrats want to get a hold of the money and ask for business plans. Now do you think that George Smith and I ever wrote a business plan? Not at all,” Dr. Boyle, now 85 and retired, told a reporter Tuesday. “You don't have time to do that kind of baloney.”

Early in his career, Dr. Boyle got a job at Bell Laboratories, a private research lab in New Jersey where he was given free rein to pursue his interests. He and Dr. Smith, who is American, came up with their invention while sketching possibilities on a blackboard in October, 1969.

“There was something about that institution,” Dr. Boyle told The Chronicle-Herald in Halifax, where he lives with his wife of 62 years, Betty.

“I guess it was the management and the style and the general environment of the place.”

The former co-workers shared part of the Nobel Prize for physics for inventing the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor: the charge-coupled device, an imaging semiconductor circuit that serves as the “electronic eye” of digital cameras. In addition, the technology, which quickly transforms light into a large number of image points, or pixels, is used in microsurgery instruments and was used to take the first photographs of Mars.

Dr. Boyle, who retired from Bell Labs in 1979, said policy-makers should look at the practices of think tanks that produce Nobel Prize-winners and their useful technology, instead of “pouring money randomly into [things], expecting the same results.”

“Usually most of the management people or the politicians haven't got the foggiest idea of what science is all about,” he told the paper. What is needed is “an appreciation for the free will, free spirit of scientists. Give them a chance to do the things they want to do.”

Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Charles Kao, who discovered how to transmit light signals over long distances through thin glass fibres.

Dr. Boyle, who was born in Amherst, N.S., was home-schooled by his mother until he started high school at Lower Canada College in Montreal. He attended McGill University, earning a PhD in physics in 1950.

News of the prize comes as scholars in Canada and around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the tendency of governments to wade into research by putting strings on funding. In Canada, moves by the federal government to fund projects directly rather than through arms-length granting councils have come under fire by the academic community, as have restrictions on some money given to the councils.

Chaviva Hosek, head of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a non-profit group that receives federal and provincial funding as well as private sector support, said there needs to be a mix of funding that includes support and freedom for researchers taking “the big risks.”

Opportunities to do research in the private sector are rare in Canada, where research and development investment by business lags that of other developed nations. Business spending on R&D is equal to about 1 per cent of GDP. That's well below the 1.56-per-cent average for OECD countries and the 1.89 per cent spent by U.S. industry.

“The question we really have to ask is where are the next Bell Labs?” said Arvind Gupta, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia and scientific director of MITACS, a national organization that promotes the value of research to businesses.

While Canada has attracted scholars and fostered talent with programs such as the Canada Research Chairs, the country is struggling to hold on to top graduates and create the kind of culture of research in industry that exists in the United States, Prof. Gupta said.

“How can you get young people to stay here when the research jobs are in the U.S.? I think we as a country have to think about how we can encourage more research-intensive jobs here and who are going to be the research drivers of the future. We are punching below our weight on this one,” he said.

Tom Jenkins, chief executive officer of Open Text Corp., a software company that grew out of the University of Waterloo, said research capacity in Canada is evolving. In the past decade, he noted that Open Text and RIM, the Blackberry maker based in Waterloo, Ont., are in the top 20 spenders on research in the private and public sector in Canada.

“This is a natural outcome of our shift from a manufacturing economy to a services economy,” he said in an e-mail from Japan where he is attending a science and technology conference.

by Jill Mahoney and Elizabeth Church
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canadian-winner-bemoans-bureaucracy/article1314594/

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• July 08, 2009

University of Toronto astronomer part of team that finds new way to study supernovae

E! Science News: An international team of astronomers has found a better way to examine the origins and evolution of galaxies that form following supernova explosions – the starting point for the formation of galaxies when a star explodes – and they have discovered new supernovae in the process. "We've devised a technique to discover supernova explosions at greater distances than previously known," says team member Ray Carlberg of U of T's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. "The most distant one occurred during the time when galaxies were at their peak phase of star formation activity, approximately 10 billion years ago, twice the age of Earth."

The ultra-distant supernovae were discovered in images acquired as part of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. "Our trick was to add together six months of images to create a very deep image of the sky," says Carlberg. "This allows us to look for objects that changed in brightness over a long period of time," says Carlberg of their ability to measure the changing intensity of light emitted by cosmic debris following a supernova explosion. "The specific type of supernovae we discovered have bright light emission lines even after the original explosion has faded away, "says Carlberg. "This emission is a result of the supernova explosion colliding with unusually dense gas around the exploding star. Future studies of the line intensities will reveal the ongoing development of the explosion and give information about the chemical composition of the gas at this early time."

The discovery opens a new avenue to study the details of how galaxies and their components evolve with time. "During a supernova explosion, virtually all of the elements heavier than oxygen – calcium, silicon, iron, all the way to up uranium – are produced," says Carlberg. "These metals, along with the tremendous blast of energy they release into the surrounding gas, make supernovae of great interest for studying the build up of the galaxy and its component stars, and even the rocky planets like our own."

A report on the discovery appears in the July 9 issue of Nature. In addition to Carlberg, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, contributors to the study included Jeff Cooke, Elizabeth J. Barton, James S. Bullock and Erik Tollerud of the University of California, Irvine, Mark Sullivan of the University of Oxford, and Avishay Gal-Yam Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Funding was provided by the Gary McCue Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Centre for Cosmology at the University of California, Irvine, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Royal Society.

Source: University of Toronto

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/08/university.toronto.astronomer.part.team.finds.new.way.study.supernovae

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• June 15, 2009

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• May 25, 2009

The Globe and Mail:  With Tamil-Canadian protesters clogging the country's streets, and recently published research showing that many children of immigrants don't feel a sense of belonging, you could forgive critics of multiculturalism for questioning the model.

But according to a leading expert, Canada has an unprecedented track record around the world for its successful integration of immigrants.

Unlike in many European countries, almost all of Canada's immigrants become citizens, says William Kymlicka, the Canada Research Chair in political philosophy at Queen's University. And their children outperform offspring of non-immigrant families when it comes to education - something that doesn't happen in any other Western democracy, he adds.

To be sure, there are problems. Highly skilled newcomers have trouble finding employment - a trend that experts predict the current recession will likely exacerbate. But that has nothing to do with multiculturalism, Prof. Kymlicka says.

He talked to The Globe and Mail about the issue.

What does the recent spate of protests by Tamil-Canadians in Toronto, and the attitude of other Canadians toward the disruptions, say about the success of Canada's integration model?

I think the Tamil case was exceptional.

[It's] not an indicator of any general breakdown in the way the concerns of ethnic groups are entering the political process. Canadians generally understand and accept that immigrants have strong concerns about events in their homeland, and will mobilize in times of crisis, and normally politicians would find a way to create channels of communication.

But in this case, politicians were terrified of being caught in a photo where someone was waving the Tamil Tiger flag, and hence being labelled soft on terrorism, so they stayed away from the initial peaceful demonstrations. It therefore took dramatic action by the Tamils to get any attention from the politicians.

Recent research on social cohesion by Toronto academics Jeffrey Reitz and Rupa Banerjee shows that children of visible- minority immigrants feel less of a sense of belonging than offspring of white immigrants. Does this concern you?

The findings about feelings of belonging in Canada are indeed worrisome. But it's not necessarily evidence of deep alienation or ethnic polarization. If we look instead at questions about feelings of pride in Canada, we find a different story. Visible minorities, including the second generation, express very high levels of pride in Canada, on par with white Canadians.

What is working about multiculturalism?

We need to distinguish economic, political and social integration. We are doing very badly on economic integration.

It is taking much longer for immigrants to catch up to native-born Canadians in earnings and longer for them to get out of poverty. One reason is that all people entering the labour market today are doing much worse than they were 20 years ago. Entry-level wages dropped in the early 1980s and never recovered.

The second reason is immigrants get virtually no credit for any experience they've had working outside Canada. And that wasn't true 30 to 40 years ago. These are disturbing trends, but have little to do with multiculturalism, which is focused on political and social integration.

Canada does well in terms of political integration of newcomers. Immigrants don't just get passports: We have made it easy for them to participate politically. Political parties reach out to them. Socially, Canadians feel comfortable having immigrants as neighbours and co-workers, and with intermarriage. There are anxieties and misunderstandings, but not the kind that give rise to the far-right, anti-immigrants parties or to skinhead attacks. The anxieties co-exist with high levels of support for immigration and low levels of prejudice. Muslims feel more welcome in Canada than elsewhere, for example.
What problems do you foresee with Canada's immigration model?

If the economic trends continue, it will put enormous stress on Canada's model. If increasing numbers of highly skilled immigrants feel they made a mistake to come here because they cannot get work, we may see higher levels of resentment in first-generation and second-generation immigrants.

The other thing that concerns me is the impact of larger geopolitical issues that could derail our model. If Canadians see pictures on TV of groups in other parts of the world saying they want to blow up Canadians, or if we get dragged into a situation of the war of the West against the rest, it will have reverberations here. When people have deep existential concerns and feel life and liberty are under attack, it's hard to know what would happen.

Are Canada's ethnic enclaves cause for concern?

Patterns of residential concentration aren't particularly different today than they were for earlier waves of immigrants. It's only natural that immigrants want to live with other people like them, whether Italians 50 years ago or Pakistanis today. But these neighbourhoods aren't ghettos: They don't lock people into poverty or social isolation, unlike the banlieues in Paris. There is no reason to be worried about ethnic concentration per se.

What about the diversity within diversity? Some groups, such as Chinese and South Asian, do very well over time while other groups, including those from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, don't experience social mobility.

In the 1980s and 1990s, we lumped together all non-European groups. The employment-equity program uses the category of visible minority as a target, based on the assumption that all people of non-European descent are subject to the same kind of discrimination. Yet that isn't the case and never was.

There may be some groups much more in need of benefits of employment equity than others. It would be perverse if banks met employment-equity targets by hiring Hong Kong Chinese-Canadians, but didn't hire any blacks. We need to make sure our policies help those most in need.
Final word?

We shouldn't look at the Canadian experience through the lens of the European backlash against multiculturalism. We don't have the same kind of underclass as Europe. We are not sleepwalking towards segregation, as some critics predict.

Prof. Kymlicka will deliver the keynote lecture this week at Ottawa's Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a festival expected to attract 8,000 academics from more than 75 scholarly associations.

By: Marina JiméNez

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/canadas-ethnic-mix-a-success/article1151375/

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• May 13, 2009

CIFAR SCOPE LITE This is an update from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. On occasion, we will provide information to members of the CIFAR community about events, exciting research findings and highlights from the world of advanced research. CIFAR supports innovative programs that enable the brightest and most talented minds across Canada to collaborate with each other and with their international peers on questions of global significance.

Planck cruising to orbit, credit: ESA – D. Ducros	Live Webcast: Planck Launches tomorrow As a follow up to the story "Map my Universe: BMW of telescopes gets into action" in the last edition of Scope, we invite you to join the CIFAR community tomorrow morning to watch a live webcast of the Planck satellite launch. The broadcast comes live from Kourou, French Guiana where Planck will be launched on board the same Ariane 5 rocket as the Herschel Space Observatory. Live web streaming of the Herschel-Planck launch will start Thursday, May 14 at 8:40 EST until 9:52 EST. The launch itself is scheduled to take place at 9:12 EST. We will also post a video of the broadcast 1 day after the launch on the cifar.ca website. Click on one of the two links below (many people will tune in, so if one doesn't work, please try the other) European Space Agency Webcast   Arianespace (the rocket launcher) Webcast CIFAR congratulates Cosmology and Gravity Program Director Dick Bond, who has been involved with the Planck project since 1993, and Member Barth Netterfield, who originally created the Kst software to be used aboard Planck.
	Invitation: THE MICROBIAL ‘WE' Appetite for Discovery Event: Edmonton, Thursday May 21, 2009 “What do our microbes do that we cannot and vice versa?” There are ten times as many microbial cells in the human body as human cells. Most of these microbes are completely unknown. But we now know that microbes play crucial roles in human health and development, from improving nutrition to protecting us from disease. We invite you to satisfy your Appetite for Discovery. Please join Steve Perlman, a Scholar in CIFAR's Integrated Microbial Biodiversity program, for a surprising, engaging conversation about the rich world of microbes living inside all animals. His presentation will be comprehensible and compelling for a lay audience. To RSVP and for details, please visit www.cifar.ca/events or call (416) 971-4450. Seating is limited so please register early and apprise CIFAR if you plan to bring guests.

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• April 18, 2009

National Post:  For one group, the future of science lies outside one's area of expertise

As Canada's top young scientists gathered this week for a cross-disciplinary strategy session in a hip downtown hotel, the demon on everyone's mind was specialization -- the academic imperative that says it is best to be a big fish in a small intellectual pond.

Once a natural consequence of high-level science, specialization is becoming a liability as those ponds shrink toward the vanishing point. In their place, critics say, is an arid scientific culture that discourages co-operation, curiosity, creativity, synthesis and, ultimately, new ideas.

"When species have done this, they've gone extinct," said Geoffrey Hinton, a leading global authority in neural networks and machine learning.

Today, a single new discovery can leave a specialized career obsolete, while the most urgent problems and questions -- climate change, social inequality, the origins of the universe, the genetics of disease -- seem to demand an interdisciplinary approach. And so the future of science is starting to look a lot like its distant past, in which the breakthroughs came from Renaissance men and women, the polymath renegades who occupy the borderlands between the traditional disciplines.

This, at least, is what the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research has bet the house on.

Its new Junior Fellows program was conceived as an answer to this specialization problem, and it is the "highest priority" for the privately funded non-profit research institute.

Obviously, traditionalists need not apply.

"I didn't leave physics to buttress the status quo in economics," said Christopher Barrington-Leigh, a NASA physicist turned happiness expert, and a Junior Fellow in the Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being program.

This week's inaugural conference for the Junior Fellows in the "urban chic" Pantages Hotel across from Toronto's Massey Hall offered plenty of gee-whiz moments, about everything from human vision to the elusive quantum theory of gravity to the impending collapse of "Moore's Law," which says computers get exponentially more powerful every two years.

There were some terminological problems, as are inevitable whenever scientists open their mouths. "Equilibrium," for example, turns out to mean different things in physics and social science.

But otherwise, it was a fast-paced and fascinating layman's romp across the leading edges of academe, featuring Junior Fellows such as Latham Boyle, an expert on black holes and cosmic origins, who gave an accessible overview of modern theoretical physics despite feeling "naked without formulas."

There was the Chinese Yongqiang Wen and his plan to use DNA to assemble nanoparticles into useful structures; and Xavier Robert, the Frenchman who hiked across the Himalayas to learn how single molecules move through mountain ranges at speeds of a dozen kilometres every million years, and how erosion can make entire mountain ranges rise up, just like an unloaded canoe.

Mark Ferguson, a Junior Fellow who studies the psychology of climate change and drives an SUV, which seems a bit like the Marlboro Man studying oncology, explained the extraordinary motivational power of guilt in getting people to go green, as compared to the much weaker effects of anxiety. "It's not our worries about what will happen; it's our guilt for what we've done," he said.

Listening to the expertise of his fellow Fellows, Mr. Ferguson said he felt intellectually overwhelmed, "somewhere between a caveman and an organ grinder."

A common theme in their talks was the unification of knowledge, and how the techniques of one field can advance another.

The fancy word for this is consilience, from the Latin for "jumping together." It is attributed to William Whewell, a 19th-century Anglican priest and "natural philosopher" (who is also credited with the synonym "scientist"). But it was popularized in 1998 by Edward O. Wilson, the U. S. biologist, humanist and unrivalled ant expert best known for coining "sociobiology" to describe the biological basis of behaviour.

His book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, explained why scientific education in the Internet age must promote these convergences, even though it cannot foresee them.

"Profession-bent students should be helped to understand that, in the 21st-century, the world will not be run by those possessing mere information alone," Wilson wrote. "Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis."

This was why the Toronto scientist and physician Fraser Mustard founded CIFAR in 1982, to promote the work of the creative generalist.

"To crack the big nuts, it was almost imperative to use tools from various disciplines," said Mel Silverman, CIFAR's vice-president, research. "That may seem self-evident now, but at the time it was against the grain."

Philosophy and psychology offer a good case study for the history of specialization. They are concerned with the same sort of questions, and used to be the same department in universities until they split in the early 20th century. Psychology aimed to join the pure sciences, leaving philosophy with the humanities. Today, however, the hottest trend in academic philosophy is known as X-Phi, or experimental philosophy, which aims to follow psychology into the more objective realm of data analysis.

Specialization, in this case and others, may turn out to be a brief aberration. Either way, its opposite, consilience, is shaping up to be a guiding principle in modern Canadian science.

Pekka Sinervo, a particle physicist, gave an overview of Canada's science funding in a global context, which was more positive than the current tone of public discussion about scientific budget cuts. He said Canada's spending on higher education as a percentage of gross domestic product is about 90% of the OECD average, but is rising faster than average. That figure was 1.94% in 2006, or about $27-billion.

The problem, according to Dr. Silverman, is that these funds are controlled by granting agencies and departments that have a "corporate organization," "dogmatic" peer review committees, and a "formalized approach to searching for [academic] positions."

"If you fall between those lines, you've got a problem," he said.

CIFAR's Junior Fellows program is funded with an initial investment of $100,000 per year to each of 12 programs, which supports two post docs for two years each. Sixteen have been appointed so far, with another eight to come. Not all are Canadian. At least two barely speak English. It is intentionally global.

As to what they will do as a group, they are not quite sure. There was talk about political advocacy, or public outreach, and a warning not to become a "support group for post docs." Mostly, it seems, they will be meeting and sharing ideas on Facebook, or rather GroupSwim, a similar social media website.

Given all this excitement, it would have been a disappointment not to see consilience in action. Luckily, Junior Fellows Ryan Adams and Bill Coish got talking over a break.

Mr. Adams, soon to return to Toronto from the University of Cambridge, works on computer modelling of human vision, a project that puts him at the intersection of theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence and statistics. He explained that the brain gets no information from the eyes when they are moving, only when they fixate. This spot, where visual information is rich, is no bigger than a thumbnail at arms length, and all the rest of the visual field is a blurry mystery.

"Our brains piece together little patches and fool us into thinking we see everything at once," Mr. Adams said. Later on, Mr. Coish explained why a quantum computer could both break all current security codes on the Internet, but also create a new kind of unbreakable encryption.

"This is why everyone is here, basically," he said. "You cannot solve complex problems easily on classical computers."

Both Mr. Coish and Mr. Adams deal with "noisy" data, in which useful and irrelevant information are mixed together. Over coffee, they realized that a promising solution for both is Bayesian experimental design, a technique for sorting through noisy data and extracting the good stuff.

Mr. Adams described it as optimizing the sequence of questions to put to a computer, just like you could theoretically predict the best order of places in which to look for your lost keys. Starting in the freezer would be wrong. Checking your jacket pockets would be better.

This convergence of scientific strategy, between computer science and theoretical physics, was a minor success for consilience that may turn out to be nothing special. But it speaks to a greater potential, embodied in this program, of synthesizing new knowledge from diverse expertise, and breaking the academic cult of specialization. They may still be Junior, but these Fellows are pushing over the walls their senior colleagues built years ago. "It's not an accident that they find each other," Dr. Silverman said.

jbrean@nationalpost.com
Published: Saturday, April 18, 2009

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1508693&p=1

For more information about CIFAR's Junior Fellows click here

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• April 10, 2009

Globe and Mail:  Communities? Caring? Harrumph. Any economist worth his salt knows that people only care about money. To be fair, it's not the money they care about but the good things it can buy.

This fact has not put off those in the business of caring about caring. To the contrary, they have been reinvigorated by their newest marketing slogan: "social capital." It sort of appeals to the marketer in me because of the way it gently slides "capital" into the caring cause. The term - famously associated with Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital - deals with social connections and their value for society. More humbug. We can all agree that more capital is better, especially during this financial crisis. But is more social connectedness better? Financial firms are nothing if not social networks of connected managers, and some of these firms developed a culture of avarice that has brought the global economy to its knees. It is easy to think of much, much worse social capital - skinheads form a tight social community.

Social capital can be exclusionary and downright harmful. And this is what I was expecting to hear as I listened to a new research paper by economics professors Tommaso Nannicini and Guido Tabellini about social capital, earthquakes and politics in Italy. The timing of the study is unfortunate. The sad and traumatic earthquake in L'Aquila this week has left hundreds dead and tens of thousands homeless. I was expecting Professors Nannicini and Tabellini to tell us about how social capital was not enough to prevent corrupt politicians from stealing the resources intended for those in need. To my surprise I was wrong. Social capital in Italy has been a tremendously positive force.

Italy, like any country, has very considerable variation in how its citizens feel about the welfare of others. There are many ways of measuring this, but Prof. Nannicini and Prof. Tabellini have a unique one. For each region of Italy they gathered data on the number of people who donate blood. They find that regions with a high proportion of blood donors are able to organize themselves better. For example, they are better able to put a lid on corruption and force politicians to invest in local schools, hospitals and policing.

Prof. Tabellini has written a lot about blood donors, trust and other indicators of positive, inclusive, social capital. He is only now thinking about Italian earthquakes. In the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, the central government in Rome transfers huge sums of money to local governments for earthquake relief. Most politicians do everything in their power to get that money to where it is needed most. However, there are always a few local politicians - the corrupt ones - who ignore the needs of those broadsided by Mother Nature and simply steal the earthquake relief funds.

Corrupt politics is not news. The interesting thing is that corrupt politicians can be defeated by social capitalists.

Let's start in those regions with a low proportion of blood donors. When an earthquake hits these regions and some politicians are revealed corrupt, nothing changes. The same politicians are re-elected without any punishment.

A very different scenario unfolds in those Italian regions with a high proportion of blood donors. When an earthquake reveals that some politicians are corrupt, citizens organize for change and defeat the corrupt politicians.

The key element here: a community's sense that each member cares about others forms the basis for co-ordinating responses and mobilizing change. I suspect that this is as true for local communities as it is for profit-minded firms.

As an economist I hate to admit it, but it appears that there are caring people in this world. It appears that caring people organize themselves into communities. And it appears that those communities fight in common interest against those who care only about money. This economist had it wrong after all. Time for a stroll down to my local blood donor clinic. It's what the brave citizens of L'Aquila are doing right now.

by DANIEL TREFLER

Guido Tabellini is Rector of Milan's Bocconi University and a researcher at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Tommaso Nannicini is an associate professor at Bocconi University. Their studies are not yet publicly available.

Daniel Trefler holds J. Douglas and Ruth Grant Canada Research Chair in Competitiveness and Prosperity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
 

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• April 02, 2009

Brockville Recorder and Times:  Happiness is about living in a town where everybody knows your name. It's a place where neighbours return lost wallets and where you would hand over your house keys, without even flinching, to the people living beside you when away on vacation.

It's where life satisfaction is high and residents feel connected to their community. In Canada, that place is Saint John, N.B.

We end Sun Media's series examining the country's most beautiful, smartest, most caring and quirkiest cities with the happiest place in Canada. It's this elusive pursuit of happiness, after all, that trumps the value of the divinely beautiful or a stratospheric IQ.  According to a 2007 study conducted by the University of British Columbia, residents in Saint John reported a life satisfaction rate of 8.6 out of 10, making it among the happiest cities not only in Canada, but in the world.

Globally, Denmark, the happiest country, reports a life satisfaction rate of about 8.2. Canada's score is 7.6.

More than wealth and income, community engagement and trust in neighours are what increase a person's chances of happiness - a surprise to no one but economists, said study co-author Christopher Barrington-Leigh.  "We're social animals. People have evolved to be driven by those around us," he said. "If you have a social economy where people are well-connected, that means you're happier and better adjusted."

The wallet-test - where residents express confidence a lost wallet would be returned - is a good barometre for measuring neighbourly relations and shouldn't be under-estimated.  "It's a telling measure and has a high correlation with life satisfaction," he said.

Meanwhile, in a study of incivility in the metropolitan landscape, Statistics Canada found that residents in Vancouver, Halifax and Montreal reported the most instances of social incivility - noisy drunkards, drug use and homelessness - in their neighbourhood.  The happiness study, sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, also found truth to support the old adage, "Money can't buy you happiness," as bigger, richer cities were found to be less satisfied than smaller communities with smaller incomes.  Maritime cities such as Charlottetown, Moncton, N.B., Halifax, and St. John's, Nfld., for instance, also made the top 10 list of happy cities, while the country's major urban centres - Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver - are conspicuously absent.  "It's harder to be engaged in bigger cities where there are transient populations and many don't know their neighbours," Barrington-Leigh said.

A 2005 Statistics Canada study also found that between 52 per cent to 61 per cent of rural residents reported that they knew their neighbours, three times the proportion of urbanites in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa who could say the same.

The pursuit to measure happiness began in the 1970s, when countries were undergoing huge growth in their GDPs. People were getting richer, but not happier.

"It seemed at odds with economic theories. So people started trying to figure out why," said Barrington-Leigh.

In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says our shrinking involvement with church, social clubs, political parties and even bowling leagues - all considered forms of "social capital" - is making us increasingly disconnnected with friends, family and neighbours and poses a "serious threat to our civic and personal health."

According to Putnam's research, people are even bowling alone. While more Americans are bowling than ever before, they're not bowling in leagues, he writes.  There is strength in numbers, he says, as getting married is the equivalent of quadrupling your income, while attending a club meeting regularly is the equivalent of doubling your income. Participating in a social club also cuts in half a person's odds of dying the next year, he says.

But suburban life, work, TV, computers, family structure and shifting female roles have eroded socialization.

According to a 2006 Statistics Canada report, heavy Internet users - defined as spending more than one hour online a day - devoted less time to socializing with their family and friends. Heavy users were alone two hours more than non-users, and tended to stay at home, showing less interest in outdoor activities.  Understanding what makes people happy is a key building block in city planning, adds Barrington-Leigh, and could prove useful for policymakers.

"We'd have more insight into which policies make for better lives," he said.
Like the song goes, it seems, "The more we get together, the happier we'll be."

Happiest cities

1. Saint John, NB
2. Quebec City
3. Charlottetown
4. Moncton, NB and Kitchener, Ont. (tied)
6. St. John's , NFL
7. Saskatoon
8. Regina
9. Winnipeg
10. Halifax

BY VIVIAN SONG, SUN MEDIA

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• March 12, 2009

The Globe and Mail:  The collapse of the massive ice sheet covering West Antarctica has always been one of the nightmare scenarios of global warming. So much water is locked away in the ice that if it were distributed evenly in the world's oceans, it would raise sea levels by an average of five metres.

But a Canadian-led research team has made an unusual discovery about what will happen if the ice melts: Not all coastlines of the world will be affected equally.

Some lucky areas, notably in Southern Chile and Argentina, will experience no sea-level change on their coasts. But other places along the populous Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada and the United States would have seas rise by six to seven metres, inundating cities such as Vancouver and New York with a much worse-than-expected increase.

"When an ice sheet melts, sea level does not change uniformly," says Jerry Mitrovica, a geophysicist at the University of Toronto who led the research team that made the discovery. "You get this whopping amplification of sea-level rise in North America."

Although no one is predicting the imminent demise of the West Antarctic ice sheet, some scientists worry that it is at risk from global warming. It would likely take centuries or even millenniums to melt, so it is a modest near-term threat to humanity - but a possible major problem over the longer term.

A research study issued last month indicated that temperatures on the ice sheet are beginning to increase, suggesting that additional melting is more than a remote possibility. Among the world's ice sheets, the one on West Antarctica causes an unusual amount of fretting among climate scientists because it rests on bedrock that is beneath sea level, making it more vulnerable to washing into the ocean.

It might, at first glance, seem intuitive that if an ice sheet melts, the world's oceans would be affected equally, just like adding more water to a bathtub causes the same rise everywhere. Most previous reports on the Antarctic ice sheet have assumed just that.

But in a paper in today's issue of the journal Science, Dr. Mitrovica and a pair of other researchers say this seemingly common-sense, bathtub type outcome won't occur.

One reason is that there is so much ice on West Antarctica that it exerts a huge gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean water, much like the moon causes tides on Earth.

If the ice were to melt, this attractive force would vanish and cause sea levels around the ice sheet in Antarctica to plunge, perhaps by as much as 30 metres, according to Dr. Mitrovica. But the water now attracted by gravity around the coast of the southern continent will flow away if there is melting, causing additional sea-level rise elsewhere.

Another odd effect identified by the researchers is that the Antarctic bedrock on which the ice sheet rests will rise if there is melting. The ice is so thick it has caused the bedrock to be depressed by an estimated 500 metres to one kilometre. That means some land will rise, Atlantis-like, out of the ocean, if the ice melts.

The water displaced by this rebounding would flow into the world's oceans, adding to the sea level elsewhere, although Dr. Mitrovica said this would take thousands of years.

The researchers also believe the melting would cause the Earth's rotation axis to shift by about 500 metres, causing the equator to move northward by that amount and water to shift from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere.

According to Dr. Mitrovica, these physical properties would cause sea level to rise 25 per cent more than is currently expected along some coastlines. The worst effects would be in places such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and the coast of California. Southern Florida would disappear if sea levels were to rise more than six metres.

"We aren't suggesting that a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is imminent," said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University, who also worked on the study.

The third researcher was U of T graduate student Natalya Gomez.

The study was funded by a number of organizations, including the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Oceans rising

A new study concludes that, if global warming causes the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse, sea levels would rise much higher in some parts of the world than current models predict.

WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET

Covers the portion of Antarctica west of the Transantarctic Mountains.

Onshore ice flows continuously out toward the coast.

Ice continues to flow outward onto the water, creating a floating ice shelf attached to the continent.

Melt water flows under the ice sheet and weakens it close to the coast.

Floating ice shelf has largely broken away in places.

Weight of ice has pushed bedrock below sea level.

UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION

The new model predicts that, if the West Antarctic ice sheet were to melt, sea levels would rise most in the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans. Much of Asia, though, would still see levels rise by five metres or more.

Gulf of Mexico

The new model predicts sea levels could rise as much as 6.4 metres above current levels.

Western Europe

Sea levels would rise about 5.5 metres, devastating the Netherlands and Belgium.

The Indian subcontinent

Sea levels could rise by five metres - the global average - overrunning the Ganges delta.

By Martin Mittelstaedt

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090206.ICE06/TPStory/Environment

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• February 26, 2009

Times Colonist (Victoria) :  If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.

If a recent survey is correct, about 76 per cent of Victorians are clapping right now.

Interim results of the well-being survey conducted by the Happiness Index Partnership -- a group of government, academic and non-profit agencies -- show that we're a happy lot. About 2,400 Capital Regional District residents responded to the questionnaire, which was mailed out in late 2008.

The results were compiled by B.C. Statistics and analyzed by research staff at the health authority and the Community Council of Greater Victoria.

Michael Pennock, epidemiologist with the Vancouver Island Health Authority, said the survey explores well-being beyond physical health. "It is not only about the absence of disease."

In addition to questions about physical and mental health, the survey asked people to rank their satisfaction with social networks, material comforts, financial state, community and cultural vitality and quality of their environment.

The good news is that Victoria scored high on social support, a factor that ranks as the most important for overall well-being, said John Helliwell, co-director at the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research at the University of B.C. "It's as simple as the wave of the hand you get from drivers as they pass you," Helliwell said. "There's a sense of connection."

The bad news is respondents reported high levels of stress due to demands on their time (46 per cent). Helliwell said that could mean they're working longer hours, but it also applies to over-committing in other areas of life, such as participating in an overwhelming number of leisure or hobby activities. "Moderation is key," Helliwell said.

Overall, respondents scored high on social and community vitality (77 per cent), cultural vitality (71 per cent), material well-being ( 73 per cent) and health status (70 per cent).

Pennock said he was intrigued that 92 per cent of respondents said they have freedom from deprivation -- sufficient food, housing, clothing and medicine -- but satisfaction with finances was much lower (53 per cent).

The Happiness Index Partnership includes the CRD, City of Victoria, Community Council, B.C. Ministry of Healthy Living and Sport, United Way, University of Victoria, VIHA and the Victoria Foundation.

The survey results are considered accurate plus or minus 1.5 per cent.

by Joanne Hatherly jhatherly@tc.canwest.com

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• February 23, 2009

The National Post:  Child abuse can indelibly mark and alter genes in its young victims, leaving them less able to cope with stress later in life, according to new Canadian research.

Michael Meaney is a member of CIFAR's Experience-based Brain and Biological Development program

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• January 12, 2009

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• January 12, 2009

CNN:  We all make bad decisions sometimes. In some contexts, to a certain extent, psychologists know why.

Chess players, with experience, learn how to make rapid judgments about their moves.

Much research on the subject was done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for their models of how intuitive reasoning is flawed in predictable ways. Kahneman is now professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Tversky died in 1996.

But other researchers are working on showing that, when it comes to more basic judgments, we're not so bad.

Research in the current issue of the journal Neuron offers a mathematical model for how people make decisions about visual stimuli on a computer screen. They found that humans make accurate judgments about cues they can see.

"We're discovering that humans aren't so stupid after all," said Alexandre Pouget, co-author of the study and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester in New York.

Participants were asked to look at moving dots on a screen. Many of the dots moved randomly, but some moved in one clear direction. Researchers found that people very quickly realized which way the non-random dots were going.

The work complements that of Kahneman and Tversky in that it shows humans are good at lower-level, nonlinguistic tasks, while perhaps not so good at higher-level probability problems involving words, he said.

"In simple perceptual decisions -- you have a visual stimulus on the screen and you have to make decisions about it -- it looks like you do accumulate the evidence optimally, given that uncertainty," Pouget said.

Psychologists believe the human mind has two systems for decision-making: intuitive and reasoning. The intuitive system is emotional, fast, automatic but slow-learning, while the reasoning system is emotionally-neutral, slow, controlled, and rule-governed. Neither, of course, is always right, but there are certain simple problems that reveal flaws in intuition.

A classic example that Kahneman has often used in lectures is this math problem: A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Your intuitive system may quickly tell you that the ball costs 10 cents. That would be an easy solution, but it would also be incorrect.

In fact, if the ball costs 10 cents, that would mean the bat costs $1.10, so the two together would be $1.20 -- violating the first piece of information you had. A little algebra, or a little more thought, reveals that the ball must have cost 5 cents. Oops.

Which is more likely: heads-heads-heads-tails-tails-tails or tails-tails-heads-heads-tails-heads?

You might think that the second one seems more random, so it's more likely. That error would fall into what Kahneman and Tversky would call the representativeness heuristic or, more specifically, the misconception of chance -- in other words, we tend to go on our intuitive notions of what an unrigged coin toss should look like rather than actually calculating.

If you think about the probabilities of each, you'll realize the two combinations are equally likely.

A related concept is called fundamental attribution error, demonstrated by Edward Jones and Victor Harris in 1967. The researchers gave people texts, some of which opposed Fidel Castro and some of which supported him. Most subjects said the writers held the beliefs expressed in the essay, even after the experimenters told them that an instructor or experimenter had previously dictated the essay's stance to the writer. The point is that the subjects did not take into the account all of the situational factors when making a decision about the writers' attitudes.

Intuition is not always wrong. Expert chess players, for example, develop extraordinary speed in making moves, and learn to instantly recognize the available moves and strategies based on the board. Team sports players operate in much the same way.

There are, however, limits to what intuition can offer. Experts say it's important to distinguish between decisions that should be made by intuition and those that require careful calculation.

"With respect to accuracy, it all depends on the nature of the decision. I would not rely on my gut judgment when picking stock options for my retirement portfolio, for example," said Alexander Todorov, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.

Some of the most remarkable mental feats are done entirely without awareness, such as color vision, said Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. Other tasks require more effort, with less impressive results -- for example, humans can't navigate as well as a honeybee, which has a brain the size of the head of a pin.

Todorov and Shafir both said the conclusions of Pouget's moving dot study -- that people make good decisions about certain perceptual problems -- make sense.

"We -- like every other biological organism -- do some things remarkably well, and often unbeknownst to us. Other things, we do remarkably badly, even if we might think -- sometimes with great confidence -- otherwise," Shafir said.

By Elizabeth Landau

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/12/decision.making/index.html

Alexandre Pouget is a member of CIFAR's Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program. 

Eldar Shafir is a Fellow in CIFAR's Social Interactions Identity and Well-Being program.

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• December 17, 2008

Welcome to the December edition of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research e-News magazine. You will notice a few changes with this edition, starting with the name: We hope the name Scope captures the essence of the publication, which is to provide you with new ways to look at the world.

Scope has been redesigned, and so has our website. If you haven't already done so, please visit the new cifar.ca to find out about upcoming events, recent discoveries, CIFAR in the news and much more.

Scope is distributed quarterly to members of the CIFAR community to provide ideas, information and issues emerging from the world of advanced research. This edition of Scope focuses on apologies, superconductors, microRNA, and a new Big Word that escaped from a fairy tale to find a home in advanced research.

CIFAR supports innovative programs that enable the brightest and most talented minds across Canada to collaborate with each other and with their international peers on questions of global significance.
 

Read Now

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• December 16, 2008

The Gazette (Montreal): Catherine Suret was in her early 20s when she arrived in New France in1669, a poor girl from Paris dispatched by Louis XIV as part of the king's "go forth and multiply" campaign for the distant colony.
Like those other young women known as "les filles du Roy," Suret brought a handsome royal dowry when she immigrated and agreed to marry one Nicolas Fasche of Charlesbourg.

But Suret carried something else, which she unknowingly handed down to her 10 children and their countless descendants - a genetic mutation that can be traced through maternal lines to the overwhelming majority of young men of French-Canadian ancestry who have been stricken with a type of blindness known as Leber's hereditary optic atrophy.

The legacy of Catherine Suret, which was unravelled three years ago, has special resonance for Eric Shoubridge. A genetic researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, he specializes in diseases resulting from flaws in mitochondrial DNA, maternally transmitted cells that regulate the body's energy systems.
In a study published this month in the scientific journal Nature Genetics, Shoubridge and students Timothy Wai and Daniella Teoli identify how genes mutate in the journey from apparently healthy mother to offspring.
Their findings are expected to shed new light on the origins of more than 40 metabolic diseases and disorders, including stroke, epilepsy, diabetes, deafness and blindness.
Working with lab mice, Shoubridge's lab used green fluorescent protein - the breakthrough component for which three scientists shared this year's Nobel Prize for chemistry - to label and track mitochondrial DNA. First found in jellyfish, the protein's fluorescent quality allowed the researchers to watch which cells mutated, resulting in diseases that affect brain and muscle function.

Shoubridge, who studied at the University of British Columbia and Oxford before coming to McGill in 1985, says what his team discovered was a "genetic bottleneck" that occurs during development of the eggs of these mothers.
Only a limited number of mitochondrial DNA cells are transmitted from mother to child, where they then replicate. The more of those cells slip through and then clone themselves, the higher the proportion of sick cells and the greater the risk for metabolic disease.

"The proportion of mutated DNA copies shifts rapidly and unpredictably from mother to child, making it very hard to predict what proportion of mutated DNA will be passed on," Shoubridge said.
Shoubridge suggests that explains why not all children from the same mother will inherit the disease or if they do, exhibit such severe symptoms.

A professor of neurology, neurosurgery and human genetics whose work is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Institute, Shoubridge is counting on their findings to broaden scientific understanding of how mitochondrial cells are transmitted, and what, if anything, can be done to prevent a mutant genome from spreading and spawning.

Eventually, he also sees practical applications for genetic counselling and risk assessment, notably for in-vitro fertilization cases or prenatal screening for debilitating or potentially fatal conditions.
All, alas, 350 years too late for Catherine Suret.

By: Peggy Curran
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/columnists/story.html?id=20fe727a-4a01-458f-b538-61ff9f905059

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• December 14, 2008

New York Times Magazine:  Are women set up to fail — by being appointed to positions of power only in hopeless situations?

Two British academics say so, and they claim to have proved it this year. In one study, they took 83 businesspeople — roughly half of them women — and described to them two companies, one that was steadily improving in profitability and another that was steadily declining. The subjects were told to pick a new financial director for the firm and were presented with three candidates: a man and a woman who were identical in experience and a lesser-qualified male. The subjects were slightly more likely to pick a man to lead the successful firm but were far more likely to pick the woman to lead the failing one. Two other experiments with similar designs yielded the same result: When presented with men and women to lead a company that’s going down the tubes, people pick the woman.

What’s going on? In a write-up of their experiments in The Leadership Quarterly in October, the academics, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam , called it “the glass cliff,” which they contend is an invisible form of prejudice. In other words, people will give women a position of power only when there’s a strong chance of failure. Why? “If someone has to be the scapegoat to take the fall, you’re not going to put your best man forward,” Ryan says.

Women are thrust into desperate situations precisely because they’re likely to fail, generating “proof” that women can’t handle responsibility. The theory has some historical evidence to back it up too. When the academics examined the performance of the 100 biggest firms in Britain, they found that women were disproportionately hired as C.E.O.’s only after their firms had been struggling for years. When firms were doing well, they rarely appointed women to lead. Ryan and Haslam say the data also suggest the glass cliff applies to minorities.

When you consider this year’s American presidential election, the glass-cliff theory becomes particularly tantalizing — because it might neatly explain the rise of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama . Perhaps it was only during extremely hard times that America would finally consider a woman and a black man for the highest office.

8th Annual Year in Ideas, New York Times Magazine: Women in Power Are Set Up to Fail
By CLIVE THOMPSON

Alex Haslam, is a member of CIFAR´s Social Interactions, Identity, Well-Being Program

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• December 04, 2008

HEALTH.com:  If your friends are happy, you’re often happy too. That’s a no-brainer. But what about your next-door neighbor—can his happiness rub off on you? A new study says yes.

Using data from the comprehensive Framingham Heart Study, James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School analyzed the happiness and social networks of 4,739 people from 1983 to 2003.

After figuring out how everyone was related, the researchers looked at participants’ answers to four questions on a commonly used depression index. They found patterns of happiness among groups of friends, spouses, family members, and neighbors.

Not surprisingly, an individual’s happiness was influenced by that of the people around her. But the study, published Thursday in the British Medical Journal, also revealed that the subjects were affected by the happiness of people who were as many as three degrees removed from them.

The findings show that if you have a happy friend, you’re 15% more likely to be happy. But if a friend of a friend of a friend is happy, your chances of being happy are still about 6% greater than they would be otherwise. In other words, your friend’s buddy—even if he’s a stranger to you—may have a significant effect on your outlook on life.

“We’ve known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized,” says Daniel Gilbert, PhD, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Distance plays a role
Physical proximity was a strong predictor of how happiness spread in social networks. Nearby friends—those who lived within a mile of the subjects—who were happy increased a subject’s chance of being happy by 25%. Distant friends—those living more than a mile away—had no significant effect on someone’s happiness.

So the faraway folks we keep in touch with on our iPhones and Facebook pages may not have as great an influence on our emotional life as the neighbor we wave to when we take out the trash.

“This means that life is much more local than people think it is,” says John F. Helliwell, a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. “Modern technologies allow you to maintain these very long-distance networks, but it’s the local ones that really count.”

Can co-workers make you merry?

Sitting next to a jolly cubicle mate does not mean you’ll catch the bliss bug. The study found no relation between the happiness of coworkers. This suggests, the authors write, “that the social context might moderate the flow of happiness from one person to another”—meaning that the office environment may not be fertile ground for gleefulness to grow.

The researchers didn’t investigate why your downstairs neighbor may influence your mental state more than your sister three hours away. And because it was conducted in one New England town, the results may not translate to other communities, wrote Peter Sainsbury, the director of the Division of Population Health in the Central Sydney Area Health Service, in an editorial accompanying the study. “Perhaps Framingham [Massachusetts] was unique in some way,” he surmised. “Don’t drop your unhappy friends yet.”

Why the study matters
The discovery adds to a growing body of research that proves social networks are powerful predictors of behavior. Two recent studies found that you’re more likely to be obese or a smoker if those close to you are. The authors of the BMJ study note that those findings could have significant implications on how we approach public health. Better care for people who are ill, for example, may end up making lots of people—some of them strangers—healthier or happier.

The results are also fuel for scientists studying the importance of positive states. By understanding the conditions in which happiness spreads, they argue, we may be able to foster well-being, rather than trying to restore it once it has been lost.

“Traditionally, we’ve waited until something goes wrong and then we’ve tried to fix it,” says Helliwell. “We ought to be thinking of how to improve people’s well-being, because the things that make people happy transmit positively to their neighbors.”

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• December 02, 2008

NATIONAL POST: The level of trust in a workplace is a predictor of happiness, respected economist John F. Helliwell has discovered. Dr. Helliwell applies the tools of economics to the subject of well-being and discovered a number of factors that affect happiness. Work is chief among them, of course, and trust in co-workers and management has an enormous effect. In this interview, Dr. Helliwell explores the connection between trust at the office and happiness.

Q What have you found regarding the effects of workplace trust on life satisfaction?

A When we ask about life satisfaction and trust, it turns out that trust is highly correlated with life satisfaction. Just moving up one point on a 10-point scale of trust in your management has the life satisfaction equivalence of something like a one-third increase in income.

Of course, a variety of aspects of what goes on in your life are more important than your income. To work in a pleasant atmosphere, one in which you feel you can trust the people around you, turns out to be very important for people. Lots of people routinely overestimate the life satisfaction they will get from consumption, and they routinely underestimate [the life satisfaction] they will get from human interactions.

So when choosing jobs, people routinely do things like concentrating on income. That ends up making them less happy than they would have been had they chosen a better workplace.

Q How trustworthy do most people find their workplaces?

A The average is 7-1/2 on a scale of 10, so it isn't as though the typical workplace is poisoned. The vast majority of responses are in the top half. But moving from average to something super still has a pretty big payoff. Think what it would be like to move from an average workplace into an environment where you really felt you were in a team. That's where you get a high-trust environment because that means other people are going to be looking out for you, and you'll be looking out for them.

Q Why is trust in the workplace so important for life satisfaction?

A Trust in the workplace is important because it characterizes a good part of the space in which you live your life. I think, in human terms, it's not so strange that people are unhappy in an environment where they have to watch their back, and they're much happier in an environment where people do care for each other. That's another way of saying people like caring for each other as well as being cared for.

Q So why do so many of us create workplaces entrenched in politics? Why do we set ourselves up to be unhappy?

A I don't know. But trust is asymmetric: Once you've lost it, it's very hard to build it up again. So there are probably a lot of offices and workplaces where people realize it's a low-trust environment, and it's just hard work trying to re-establish trust. But remember, all humans need to connect. If you can't use your connection time at the office to do things that everyone shares in that are positive for the venture, a lot of that connection time will end up being unproductive office politics. But you're still connecting.

We don't talk about the weather because it's so fascinating; the weather is just a way of getting started with people. The people connection is what matters, and you want to do something that ends up making you feel better, both of you, than before. Of course, griping against the common enemy turns out to be the most natural thing, but as you can imagine, that makes it a little harder to re-establish the trust with the person you're griping about.

Q What should managers do when they take over departments characterized by distrust? What should they do to start making people trust each other?

A You can't just say, "trust me." President Nixon ran that one into the ground. You've got to actually do something in terms of behaviour, and it's ideal if you don't do it as a trust-building exercise.

So one of the things that some of the organizations that rank very high on these measures do is encourage the people throughout the organization -- and it's important to be bottom-up and not top-down for all the reasons you can imagine -- to foster community engagement. These have to be ideas coming from the people in the organization themselves. It can't be a command from the top. Now, I'm just talking here because I haven't got any science on this, but you know those retreats where you take all the trainees off and have them rappel down mountains or climb trees together for a weekend? That's wheel spinning.

Q Then what genuinely builds trust?

A I think you build trust by doing things together that embody two of the other key elements of well-being: engagement and efficacy. Pro bono work is great for that. You're working together doing what you normally do, but in a different context.

It's also a good recruitment method. People joining a workplace are acutely aware of this sort of thing. They want to go to someplace where the right things are done for the right reasons in the right ways.

The Gallup Organization

• John F. Helliwell is the Arthur J.E. Child Foundation Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has taught at Oxford, Harvard and the University of British Columbia, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada. This is a shortened version of a more extensive interview conducted by The Gallup Organization.

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=906300

Jennifer Robison, Financial Post  Published: Friday, October 24, 2008

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• November 21, 2008

We wanted to let you know that CIFAR is running an advertisement in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star and La Presse today. While it is in a different page in each paper, you can find it on a right-hand page in the front section of each publication. We hope you enjoy it.

Also, CIFAR has relaunched its website with new features and a more intuitive interface. We invite you to get to know us better through our new site.

Finally, we are pleased to let you know that our new Annual Report - "The T-shirt Edition" - is mailing today. You can already view it online at our new website. If you do not receive a print copy of the report, and would like to, please send us a message, or call 416-971-4450.

We are always happy to hear your thoughts on our research, events and publications.

Thank you for being a part of the CIFAR community.

View ads in English and French.

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• November 17, 2008

Do you lead an antiseptic lifestyle? If so, you’re not alone.

With so many products now billed as “antibacterial” or “antimicrobial,” it seems that microbes are one of the great enemies of modern humanity. Each time we hear reports about microbes in our lakes, on our bodies, and in our food, our instinct is to go on the counterattack.

But remember: If it weren’t for microbes, we wouldn’t be here. Right now, you are walking around with some 100 trillion microbes – about 10 kilograms – living in your skin and hair and mouth and intestines. In fact, a human body houses 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells. These bacteria help you do everything from digest food to fight off illness.

Bacteria are just one kind of microbe, a term that refers to any microscopic organism, including viruses, fungi, plankton and, and my research focus, algae.

Despite their small size, microbes play some huge roles. They create most of the oxygen that we breathe and remove almost half of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Without microbes, in fact, the Earth would never have had an atmosphere in the first place.

Microbes are also crucial to healthy ecosystems. They play vital roles in breaking down organic waste and helping plants grow. They also can be harnessed for industrial processes such as extracting natural gas and treating wastewater, and for environmental remediation.

An Ontario high school student recently won top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair for his innovative, microbe-based solution to a plastic problem. He showed that a combination of two types of bacteria – Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas – can break down the polyethylene in plastic bags by 43 per cent in six weeks. He estimates that these microbes would entirely break down plastic bags in a matter of three months.

Of course most people still think of microbes in terms of human health. And of course, some bacteria and viruses do make us sick. But in our rush to deal with them, we should remember that not all microbes are harmful. Instead of just fighting back with one new antiseptic product after another, we should keep in mind that we are engaged in an important interdependent relationship with the microbial world.

Already researchers have found that we can’t fight “bad” germs without the help of other “good” germs that are integral to our immune system. Many people have now heard the term “superbug” which describes infectious bacteria that have become resistant to our overused antibiotics. But another, less well-known consequence of our war on microbes is that some strains of bacteria that keep us healthy are actually disappearing, leaving us more prone to infection.
Microbes’ beneficial aspects are becoming better known. We’re starting to see as many probiotic products as antibiotic products. But we have a lot of work to do before we can use these products most effectively.

Leaving our own bodies aside, across the planet, these organisms thrive in greater numbers, greater volume and greater diversity, than all other living things combined. If every non-microscopic organism – people, whales, trees, bugs, and so on – were wiped off the planet, the vast majority of the Earth’s biodiversity would be preserved in the microbial world.

And yet, these tiny creatures, that are the targets of our antibiotic and probiotic whims, are virtually unknown to us.

I am engaged in a program with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research called Integrated Microbial Biodiversity whose mandate is to change that. Our program – a collaboration among some of the world’s foremost microbial biologists, statisticians, geneticists, immunologists, Earth scientists and botanists – is shedding unprecedented light on the microbial world. Many of us tackle the genetic part of the puzzle, which is a colossal endeavor: Estimates show that the microbes in our bodies alone carry 3 million genes, in contrast to the human genome that contains only about 20,000 genes.

Our ultimate goal is to take the vast quantities of information from the microbial world and turn it into knowledge that people can use. My hope is that one result of our research is that people’s attitudes towards microbes will change. These are truly some of the most prevalent and hardworking beings in our lives, and not only do they demand research, they also demand respect.

John Archibald is a scholar in the Integrated Microbial Biodiversity program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Dalhousie University. He was also a speaker at a recent gathering of the world’s foremost microbe experts in Halifax. 

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald:  Look on the bright side of microbial life

By CIFAR Program Member John Archibald

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• November 16, 2008

A new Statistics Canada report shows that median home values drastically outpaced inflation between 2001 and 2006. Home values increased by nearly 50 percent; overall inflation was only about 11 percent. Meanwhile, in the past 25 years, the bottom 90 percent of Canadian earners saw their incomes stagnate or decline. In short, housing has become dramatically less affordable for most Canadians.

Some of the problems with the growing gap between income and affordable shelter may be obvious, but Canadians should be aware of one of its most damaging and less intuitive effects: its impact on health.

You don’t have to be a housing expert to know that access to a safe, affordable home makes a big difference to your health. But most people don’t realize exactly how far that influence extends: it goes far beyond basic protection from the elements.

Unaffordable housing has steep consequences. First, it erodes people’s sense of control over their home. This makes sense – your home is the only space in your everyday life where you are supposed to have complete control. If you live under constant threat of eviction, or if you live with another family (or more) to save on rent, your home may seem more like a prison than a refuge. My research with a random sample of Vancouver households, for example, shows that people who spend more than 30 percent of their income on shelter costs are 31 percent more likely to have fair or poor general health and more than twice as likely to have symptoms of depression.

What is more, low-income households have little money left over after paying housing costs to cover other necessities (e.g., child care, transportation, food) and even less money to engage in health-promoting activities such as recreation. Recent data shows that households with high housing costs relative to income are more likely to have poorer diets and to have had instances in the past year where they did not have enough to eat. Kids in low-income neighbourhoods are also more likely to be overweight or obese and much less likely to participate in formal sports or recreation programs.

These households are also likely to have arrears on utilities, credit cards and other debts, along with other unmet financial obligations. This compounded situation contributes to the stress levels that worsen health.

Housing affordability is at its worst level since 1990. The most recent data say that 20 percent of Canadian households spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on shelter costs. For renter households, this number is 40 percent and among low-income households – the poorest 20 percent of Canadians – 57 percent were living in unaffordable housing. Almost half of low-income households spent more than 50 percent of their income on shelter. Worst of all, more than 45 percent of lone parent families headed by women are living in unaffordable housing.
The one piece of seemingly good news in Statistics Canada’s report is that home ownership is at its highest level since 1971. But consider that most of these gains were due to condominium ownership, that prices went up drastically, and that the number of home owners spending more than 30 percent of income on shelter costs increased. So although home ownership rates are rising, households are getting less space at a much higher price and diverting spending from other areas of their household budget to afford it.

Many of these new home ownerships are financially precarious. If interest rates go up appreciably as we enter a period of economic slowdown, many thousands of these households will see their dream of home ownership turn into a nightmare. This uneasy scenario is one reason why research in the United Kingdom has shown a relationship between high levels of mortgage debt and general health status.

I am involved in an international, mutli-disciplinary research program run by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research called Successful Societies. This program works on a broad scale to understand what makes societies succeed or fail. This group has shown how everyday environments link fundamentally to the health and wellbeing of individuals. We have pinpointed high-quality, affordable housing as a vital building block of any successful society.

Despite its recent and unprecedented prosperity, Canada has been unable to meet the housing needs of a substantial proportion of its population, which significantly undermines their health and well-being.

Governments in other countries are taking radical steps to improve the housing standards for their populations. A study in New Zealand showed that providing a standard package of insulation to more than 1,300 previously uninsulated homes had a positive impact on residents’ health. The effects went beyond respiratory health or physical warmth; psychological health also improved substantially. A similar program in Scotland is now providing free insulation and central heating for more than 140,000 homes.

We are learning that having control over your home and having your home be a place of refuge and comfort drives health benefits.

Some of my Toronto colleagues and I are exploiting the links between housing and health to help improve housing and community design. One example is the redevelopment of Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood, one of Canada’s oldest and largest public housing developments. The plans for Regent Park include: incorporating families of mixed income, using the land both residentially and commercially, restoring pedestrian-friendly streets through the neighbourhood, and creating mechanisms for citizens to participate in governance of their own community. These housing improvements are experimental; our research will continue to evaluate their impact on residents’ health in coming years.

The results will pave the way for many future housing developments. Right now there are dozens of other sites across the country ready for facelifts similar to Regent Park.

Despite these important initiatives, housing investment is still a much higher priority in other societies. It's time that Canada recognized the full consequences of unaffordable housing. We need urgent action to reverse this toxic mix of stagnating incomes and high housing costs. Housing is established as an economic and community issue. But let us never forget that housing is also a matter of human health.

James Dunn is a Fellow in the Successful Societies program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a CIHR-PHAC Chair in Applied Public Health at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

The Toronto Star, Opinion, Wednesday, June 18, 2008

By CIFAR Program Member James Dunn

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• October 21, 2008

Could a previously unknown type of electron crystal help the future of electronics?

McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much alike those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have momentous implications for the development of new electronic devices. Currently, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore’s Law. But there are limits, experts say. As chips get smaller and smaller, scientists expect that the bizarre laws and behaviours of quantum physics will take over, making ever-smaller chips impossible.
 

This discovery, and other similar efforts, could help the electronics industry once traditional manufacturing techniques approach these quantum limits over the next decade or so, the researchers said. Working with one of the purest semiconductor materials ever made, they discovered the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal in a device cooled at ultra-low temperatures roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The material was then exposed to the most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth. Their results were published in the October issue of the journal Nature Physics.
Two-dimensional electron crystals were discovered in the laboratory in the 1990s, and were predicted as far back as 1934 by renowned Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner.
“Picture a sandwich, and the ham in the middle is your electrons,” explained Dr. Guillaume Gervais, director of McGill’s Ultra-Low Temperature Condensed Matter Experiment Lab. “In a 2D electron crystal, the electrons are squeezed between two materials and they’re very two dimensional. They can move on a plane, like billiard balls on a pool table, but there’s no up and down motion. There’s a thickness, but they’re stuck.”
Until an accidental discovery during one of Gervais’s earliest ultra-low temperature experiments in 2005, however, no one predicted the existence of quasi-three-dimensional electron crystals.
“We decided to tweak the two-dimensionality by applying a very large magnetic field, using the largest magnet in the world at the Magnet Lab in Florida,” he said. “You only have access to it for about five days a year, and on the third day, something totally unexpected popped.”

Gervais’s “pop” was the startling transformation of a two-dimensional electron system inside the semiconducting material into a quasi-three-dimensional system, something existing theory did not predict.
“It’s actually not quite 3-D, it’s an in-between state, a totally new phenomenon,” he said. “This is the kind of thing the theoreticians love. Now they’re scratching their heads and trying to fine-tune their models.”
The importance of this discovery to micro-electronics and computing could be profound. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, Moore’s Law has powered the ever-accelerating home electronics, personal computer and Internet revolutions which have changed the world. But, Gervais explained, Moore’s Law is not an irresistible force, and some time in the next decade, it will inevitably collide with the immovable object of the laws of physics.

“In a standard transistor, you have a gate and the electron flow is controlled by it like a a faucet would control a gas flow,” he said. “You can understand the particles as independent units, which lets us treat them as ones and zeroes or on and off switches in digital computing.

“However, once you get down to the nano scale, quantum forces kick in and the electrons may condense into a collective state and lose their individual nature. Then all sorts of bizarre phenomena pop up. In some cases, the electrons may even split. Concepts of ‘on’ and ‘off’ lose all meaning under these conditions.”

“This issue is academic, but it’s not just academic. The same semiconductor materials we’re working with are currently used in cellphones and other electronic devices. We need to understand quantum effects so we can use them to our own advantage and perhaps reinvent the transistor altogether. That way, progress in electronics will keep happening .”

http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/news/item/?item_id=102307

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• September 13, 2008

2004 WAS a bad year for astronomer Michael Shull. His problems began when a key instrument on board the Hubble Space Telescope failed, abruptly ending his promising observations of the wispy ionised gas that drifts between the galaxies. Things might not have seemed so bad had NASA not been forced to ground its shuttles following Columbia's fatal crash the year before. One of the cancelled missions was to Hubble to install a new instrument, partly developed by Shull, that would have had him back up and running. But with the instrument firmly grounded, Shull, who works at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has been stuck analysing old data ever since.

That's why Shull will be watching keenly when the space shuttle Atlantis blasts off on 10 October or thereabouts from Kennedy Space Center in Florida for one last visit to Hubble before the fleet is retired in 2010. During the 11-day mission, Atlantis's crew will make five space walks to fix a handful of broken instruments, service worn components and install brand new ones. The visit is intended to give the world's favourite telescope brand new vistas onto the universe, and prolong its already extended life for at least another five years.
For the past 15 years Hubble has been charming us all with stunning images, and thrilling astronomers with an avalanche of spectroscopic measurements that have revolutionised our understanding of the universe. However, since its last service in 2002, the telescope has been showing its age. Three of the six gyroscopes whose job it is to align it with target stars have failed. A camera used in 70 per cent of its observations failed in January 2007. The spectrograph Shull was using has died. And the telescope's batteries are steadily fading. In short, Hubble needs a major makeover.
Hubble's stunning images have revolutionised our understanding of the universe
This is a mission that almost didn't happen. After the Columbia disaster, a safety review panel recommended that astronauts should be able to take refuge at the International Space Station if a shuttle ever became unsafe for re-entry. But the shuttle does not carry enough fuel to reach the station from Hubble's orbit. NASA's administrator at the time, Sean O'Keefe, was unwilling to make an exception for a visit to Hubble, and cancelled the 2004 service mission.

Outraged by what amounted to a death sentence for Hubble, astronomers put pressure on NASA. Following a 30-month hiatus in shuttle flights, and once it was clear that the surviving craft were back and flying well, O'Keefe's successor Mike Griffin decided a mission to Hubble was worth the risk. The astronauts were more than willing; Hubble is their favourite destination. The prospect of doing science and taking lengthy space walks has astronauts clamouring to make the flight.

Astronauts are more than willing to make the journey to Hubble. The telescope is their favourite destination

Because Hubble was designed at a time when NASA expected shuttle flights to be routine, its scientific instruments were packaged in modules that astronauts can swap in orbit (see diagram). On their first space walk in the forthcoming mission, astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel will remove the Wide-Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) installed in 1993. It is famed for its iconic images, including the Hubble Deep Field, which shows some 10,000 young galaxies near the edge of the universe. Yet its four camera chips can claim no more than 640,000 pixels each - fewer than most cellphones. Nevertheless, WFPC2 showed what can be revealed by staring into deep space for long periods.

In its place, Grunsfeld and Feustel will insert Wide-Field Camera 3, which sports the latest optics. Its single 16-megapixel chip will snap images over a wider range of wavelengths, from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. It also carries a 1-megapixel chip that can pick up light from distant galaxies red-shifted to much longer infrared wavelengths. All the gyros will be replaced on this first walk, and two sets of batteries will be installed during the first two excursions.

In the second space walk, the astronauts will also fit a new instrument called the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph in a slot now occupied by a module that corrected a flaw in Hubble's mirror, and which is no longer needed because all the instruments now incorporate their own fixes. Ground controllers will spend about six weeks testing and calibrating the new spectrograph before the observations can begin. "I hope we'll have our first data in November or December," says Shull, who helped to develop it.

The trickiest part of the mission will take place during the third and fourth space walks. NASA was caught off guard by the instrument failures of 2004 and 2007. The new wide-field camera and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph were both designed to work with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) - which broke down four years ago - and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) which failed last year. Happily NASA scientists know exactly what is wrong with STIS. "We are replacing one circuit board," says lead scientist for the servicing mission David Leckrone of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Fixing a failed circuit on terra firma is usually a simple matter of opening the case and replacing the defective component. But nobody has tried it in space. Getting access to the circuit board will require removing the 111 screws that secure the access panel. And floating 600 kilometres above Earth, in zero gravity and wearing a bulky spacesuit, will make the task both delicate and tedious. A single stray screw could disable STIS or even Hubble itself. So astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good will fix a transparent "capture plate" over the access panel, then insert a special tool through holes aligned with each screw. The idea is that as each screw is removed, it will be trapped in the holes in the capture plate. Massimino and Good will then remove the panel together with the capture plate, along with the screws held between the two. With the circuit boards
exposed, they can remove the failed board and snap a new one into place. They will then install a new cover that attaches with a couple of flip levers. No screws required.
 

The ACS poses a different problem. Its power supply failed catastrophically last year, cutting off power to its two most important camera chips and leaving it all but redundant. The astronauts will give it a new power supply that will fully restore its main camera and possibly the second one too on their third and fifth space walks. The good news for the astronauts is that the job requires removing only 32 screws.
If all goes well, Hubble's revamp will open up a raft of new possibilities for astronomers. For Shull it will mean he can get on with tracking down missing baryonic matter - similar to the ordinary atoms that make up stars and galaxies but which has so far eluded observation. He thinks the missing matter lies between galaxies, where it should reveal its presence by absorbing ultraviolet light from distant quasars. In May, Shull reported finding about 40 per cent of the missing material but could only give a sketchy picture from the painstaking analysis of old data from STIS and a NASA satellite called FUSE, which was launched in 1999 and suffered a series of problems before failing in July 2007. The new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is 20 times as sensitive as STIS, so he expects it to find more of the intergalactic will-o'-the-wisp at greater distances, as well as tracing how it flows.

Meanwhile Richard Ellis of the University of Oxford and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena will use the new wide-field camera to hunt for galaxies near the edge of the visible universe. His search relies on gravity to concentrate light from the distant galaxies enough for Hubble to detect it. In July, he reported finding 10 objects that appear to have red shifts of at least 7, dating them at about 900 million years after the big bang. But those observations were only just possible using the combined abilities of Hubble and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and Ellis says only five of these objects "are particularly convincing".
With Hubble's new Wide-Field Camera 3 able to see further into the infrared than its existing instruments, Ellis hopes to find many more distant objects. "More important," he says, "the quality of data will be better." The camera should be able to measure red shifts up to 10, corresponding to about 500 million years after the big bang.

A second group hunting distant galaxies, led by Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, will fix the new camera's gaze on the same patch of sky as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. By staring for a total of 200 orbits, the camera will be able to record still younger galaxies and push our knowledge closer to the edge of the universe. We can expect Illingworth's team to produce another iconic Hubble image.
Plenty more is in the works for the revived Hubble, including searches for planets passing in front of other stars. Astronomers have their fingers crossed that Hubble can keep going long enough to overlap with the James Webb Space Telescope. Scheduled for launch in 2013, it will observe much deeper into the infrared than Hubble. With two telescopes operating, astronomers will be able to study the same objects in different parts of the
spectrum simultaneously, a technique that has been very productive in studying supernovae, for example. 

Hubble won't last forever though. The service mission also will install a grapple so when the inevitable failure comes, a robotic spacecraft can grab the hulk and dump it harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean. Astronomers are already planning a successor to Hubble called ATLAS. With a mirror measuring 8 metres across, ATLAS will dwarf Hubble's 2.4-metre mirror. "It would be fantastic to have something that big in the ultraviolet and optical," says Shull. "It's probably 10 to 15 years off, but you have to start planning now."
Sputnik's Legacy - Learn more about humanity's first 50 years in space in our special report.
The Return of the Space Shuttle - Learn more in our continuously updated special report.

Jeff Hecht writes from Auburndale, Massachussetts

From issue 2673 of New Scientist magazine, page 33-35.

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