Ontario Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli confirmed Thursday that the province scrapped a plan to spend as much as $10 billion on new nuclear reactors as part of its long-term energy strategy, reported The Globe and Mail Oct. 11. The Energy Ministry’s decision “is a psychological blow, although not a huge surprise,” said Mark Winfield, an environmental studies professor at York University in Toronto, who follows the nuclear industry. “The writing has been on the wall for several years,” he said, since the provincial government balked at an earlier plan for new reactors back in 2009. Read full story.
John Greyson, Tarek Loubani on way to Canada after Egypt release
Canadians John Greyson and Tarek Loubani have left Egypt after being detained for seven weeks without charge and are on their way home to Canada, reported CBC News online Oct. 11. “We cannot wait to see our families, who will be waiting for us in the city where we can share hugs, tears and laughs privately,” they said in a statement. “We can’t wait!” Greyson, a Toronto filmmaker, and Loubani, a London, Ont., doctor, had been in the country since their arrest in mid-August. The two were arrested after being caught up in violent anti-government demonstrations in Cairo, but never faced any formal charges. Read full story.
Prospects brighter in 2014 for new business graduates
In a recent survey by Deloitte consultants, 42 per cent of more than 100 senior executives in Canada, the United States, Britain and China say their employees lack skills in analytics to manage so-called Big Data and communicate the implications to company leaders, reported freenewspos.com, The Globe’s biweekly business-school news roundup, Oct. 11. “It tells me there is an opportunity in the education space to identify and target programs that will help fill the gap,” says Peter Husar, a partner of analytics and information management for Deloitte in Canada. “It would result in a strong desire in the marketplace for those skills.” He is an adviser in Toronto to York University’s Schulich School of Business, which introduced a master of science in business analytics in 2012. This year, Queen’s University School of Business in Kingston offered a master of management analytics, still one of only two such programs in Canada. Read full story.
Change management: The MBA is being transformed, for better and for worse
“Big data” is currently one of the hottest study areas, in business education, reported The Economist in its Oct 12 issue. York University in Canada, for example, recently launched a Master’s in Business Analytics. It recruits students with solid quantitative backgrounds, such as mathematicians and engineers, who spend half their time poring over mathematical models and half taking MBA classes. It is not enough to be a top-notch statistician nowadays, says Murat Kristal, director of the program. Firms want people who can also understand the business implications of their analysis. Read full story.
Art installations embody the past and future of Markham
In LandSlide Possible Futures, an ambitious show of installation art at Markham Museum, 30 artists set out markers of a past we are already forgetting and a future we can’t yet see, wrote The Globe and Mail Oct. 11. Janine Marchessault, the York University film and media studies professor who curated the exhibition, links it to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of art as a probe that jars us into perceiving environments that feel normal but that may be far from natural. Read full story.
The CB Guide To The New Golden Age Of Television
Is the TV commerical doomed? asks Canadian Business in its Oct. 28 issue. It’s true the traditional 30-second spot seems a little old-fashioned in the age of the Internet (legendary UK adman Trevor Beattie recently declared that ads should run no longer than five seconds), but it isn’t going away. “There’s no evidence that the 30-second commercial has lost its power,” says Alan Middleton, a professor of marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business. Advertisers, however, are operating in “a very noisy environment,” he says, and have had to find new ways to communicate messages. Read full story.
Funny business: Public-service announcements have rediscovered their funny bone
Advertisers have long known that humour can help to sell things, but more companies and public bodies now recognise that it can also help customers pay more attention to safety drills, reported The Economist in its Oct. 12 issue. Research by Jim Lyttle, then of York University in Canada, suggests that jokes affect how people process information – if they laugh at something, they are less likely to disagree with it. Read full story.