Canada is a world leader in economic mobility, right up there with Denmark, Norway and other Scandinavian countries.

A recent front-page story in The New York Times highlighted new research that “turns conventional wisdom on its head” – namely, that Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in, gasp, Canada.

Yes, the U.S. is richer, but it’s also significantly more unequal, and a lot less mobile. [...]

University of Ottawa professor Miles Corak … has quantified the opportunity divide between the two countries and his conclusions are startling. Canadians are up to three times more economically mobile than Americans, and it’s almost entirely due to the conditions faced by those living at the very top and bottom of society, according to a new study he co-authored: Economic Mobility, Family Background, and the Well-Being of Children in the United States and Canada.

“What distinguishes the two countries is what’s happening at the tails,” Prof. Corak explained in an interview. “Rich kids grow up to be rich adults and poor kids stay poor. In Canada, that’s not so much the case.”

The American dream that anyone can rise from humble beginnings to vast wealth has become a myth. And as the gap between rich and poor widens, the middle class is shrinking.

For now, at least, the dream of upward mobility in Canada is still alive. Canadians can thank a legacy of sound public policy and a more progressive tax system.

Even the poorest of Canadian children have access to good schools, quality health care and decent homes (Attawapiskat notwithstanding).

A new Finance Department analysis found that seven million mainly low-income Canadians out of 24 million tax filers got a net cash transfer from the federal income tax regime in 2008. The Child Tax Credit, for example, has successfully mitigated poverty by shifting federal tax dollars to poor families.

The labour market, thanks partly to the paid parental leave benefits of Employment Insurance, likewise encourages parents to be parents. Canadian children are also more likely to grow up in two-parent homes and in homes where at least one parent works part-time to provide home care.

Compare that to the United States, where schools are financed primarily by wildly variable local property taxes rather than state income taxes. Neighbourhoods with low home values and marginal businesses have underfunded and failing schools, which become magnets for perpetual failure.

But it’s a country of extremes, and life is good if you’re at the top in the United States. A child’s chance of staying at the wealth pinnacle is much greater than in Canada.

The divergence of opportunity in the U.S. grows even more pronounced with higher education. Tuition fees, which can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars per year, essentially put the best schools out of reach for many Americans. Wealthy Americans, on the other hand, can literally buy opportunity for their children, paying their way through the best colleges, hiring tutors and providing access to family connections.

“It’s not that the fathers are getting their sons jobs, but they are getting them into the right college and networks, and that pays off a lot more in the U.S.,” Prof. Corak said.

Canadians shouldn’t be complacent. Ottawa and most of the provinces are running large budget deficits, and education and health care are already targets as governments hunt for savings.

There’s another cause for concern. Rising income inequality is chipping away at the opportunities of future generations. Prof. Corak worries that wealthy Canadians may be forming exclusionary institutions in a drift toward Americanization. It’s reflected in increasingly polarized cities such as Toronto, where neighbourhoods are becoming more sharply divided along income and ethnic lines, he said.

From “In Canada, unlike the U.S., the American dream lives on” | Barrie McKenna | Jan. 16, 2012 | The Globe and Mail” at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/in-canada-unlike-the-us-the-american-dream-lives-on/article2303230/.

Study as “Economic Mobility, Family Background, and the Well-Being of Children in the United States and Canada” | Miles Corak, Lori Curtis, and Shelley Phipps | March 2010 at http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4814.html

Mention of “Living the American Dream (in Canada)” | Timothy M. Smeeding | Jan. 8, 2012 | New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/08/is-the-us-still-a-land-of-opportunity/canadas-economic-mobility-creates-a-land-of-opportunity

Commentary by Miles Corak as “Is the U.S. Still a ‘Land of Opportunity’?” | Jan. 10, 2012 at http://milescorak.com/2012/01/10/is-the-u-s-still-a-land-of-opportunity/

When ABC News asked viewers to contribute questions for Cynthia McFadden’s interview with Madonna, the most popular request by far was that McFadden find out how the singer feels about Gaga.

McFadden did, starting with the question of whether Madonna felt Gaga was “copying” her. [....] The  Material Girl became coy when the conversation turned to “Born This Way.” “When I heard it on the radio …I said that sounds very familiar,” Madonna said.

Asked if that felt annoying, Madonna responded, “It felt reductive.” Pressed as to whether that was a good or bad thing, Madonna told Cynthia McFadden to “look it up” — we did; the term means “minimal” or “crude” — before smiling slyly and taking a sip from her tea cup.

via Madonna Breaks Silence on Gaga ‘Born This Way’ Controversy; ’20/20′ Exclusive Tonight – ABC News.

Watch video: http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/0_fsksi9em/uiconf_id/5590821

Possible tie through “Systems Theory and Mystical Kabbalah” | Johannes B. Schmidt | Dec. 2007 | Fielding Graduate School

Preview a definition of reductionism by Russell Ackoff from Creating the Corporate Future (1981).

PERLMUTTER, Howard Victor 86, of Weston, MA, formerly of Haverford, PA, born in Framingham, MA, died Tuesday, November 8, 2011. [....] His international experience in education included posts at Harvard, MIT, Yale, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Universities in Switzerland. He has been advisor to numerous world organizations and leaders, and contributed to international conferencesand forums. He was Professor of Social Architecture and Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the first chair of the Multinational Enterprise Unit. He believed that there is a fundamental need to build deep dialogue – including spiritual – with associates and adversaries in order to ensure mutual trust and cooperation. He was an author of many scholarly books and articles, as well as of three volumes of poetry, and an exhibition of his paintings was reviewed as “boldly colored, abstract and allegorical images.” He was respected and beloved by family, colleagues, and students.

via Howard Victor Perlmutter Obituary: View Howard Perlmutters Obituary by The Boston Globe.

In business sense, there’s operating capital (i.e. everyday pocket change) and investment capital (i.e. something that takes a longer time to develop and show a benefits).  Some of the thinking about sustainability in the longer term could be related to regenerative design (in the way John Lyle thought about it).

I found myself slipping from the feeling of an abundance of time to the feeling of a scarcity of it, to be carefully portioned out among too many demands.  [....]

So now I’ve got a couple of ways to rethink how this fits into my life.

I can promote these extracurriculars from the category “Work – Other” to “Discretionary – Other” or something similar, and budget myself four or five hours a week. It’s not work, it’s learning.

Alternatively, I can keep it under “Work – Other” and add an effective 10% overhead to my billable work. Many people have told me that I’m a fast developer, anyway, so scaling my output down to that of a somewhat above average developer will still mean that we do good stuff. The cognitive surplus goes into process improvement, self-development, and happiness, which is definitely worthwhile. I get stressed when I feel like I’m letting my other priorities slip, so spending time on them is important too.

These extracurricular interests can create a lot of value. I should adjust my measurements accordingly so that my measurements don’t lead to conflicting feelings.

Comment on Work, extracurriculars, and measuring time: an epiphany | sacha chua :: living an awesome life.

In interview with Robert J. Sawyer at Appel Salon.

At interview at Appel Salon, Toronto Public Library

At the interview by Robert J. Sawyer at the Bluma Appel Salon.

Alcohol has been creeping up during the past quarter-century – by some estimates, 1.5 percentage points.

The rise of warm-climate regions, such as California, Southeast Australia and much of Chile and Argentina, accounts for some of the gain. Sun yields higher levels of grape sugars. Yeast feeds off sugar to produce alcohol. Blammo.

Fashion is another factor. Quality-oriented producers have been chasing bolder, more concentrated flavours, allowing grapes to hang longer on the vine in autumn. In many cases, they prune more assiduously to coax vines into faster ripening. Again, more sugar, more ethanol.  [....]

Maturation is a delicate dance. In warm regions, sugar levels accelerate ahead of physiological ripening, forcing producers to push for longer hang times to weed out the green. By the time those tannins soften, sugars can enter the danger zone. Presto: 15-per-cent alcohol.

It’s less of a problem in the best, cooler-climate vineyards, notably in Europe, where, for complex reasons linked not just to weather but also to soil composition, physiological ripeness can be achieved in a 12.5-per-cent wine that won’t fry brains.

Fear of frying may be the root of a more insidious industry practice: the tendency to understate alcohol levels. In a study of 91,432 wines from vineyards around the world produced during a 16-year period, researchers found last year that 57.1 per cent contained more alcohol than stated on the label. Among those, the average alcohol was 13.6 per cent versus a declared average of 13.1 per cent.

Incidentally, the study, published by the American Association of Wine Economists and co-written in part by George Soleas, senior vice-president of logistics and quality assurance at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, based its findings on wines sold in Ontario. The reason? Ontario is one of the few jurisdictions to test alcohol on every product.

Lowball reporting is largely legal because various governments permit significant latitude between fact and fiction. The LCBO permits a tolerance of plus or minus one percentage point for wines at less than 14 per cent; for higher-alcohol wines, it’s plus or minus 0.5. In the United States, a producer can understate by as much as 1.5 percentage points. That’s a substantial error margin, deceptively placing many wines in the hot, head-numbing zone – it’s like secretly adding roughly half a glass of wine to every bottle you think you’ve consumed.

Based on informal discussions with winemakers, the study’s authors reported that some “admitted that they deliberately chose to understate the alcohol content on a wine label, within the range of error permitted by the law, because they believed that it would be advantageous for marketing the wine to do so.” In other words, Château Fruit Bomb believes that consumers are turned off by big alcohol. (Another incentive for distortion: Wines with more than 14 per cent generally are charged a higher tax rate.)

Other questionable practices are taking root to assuage consumer fear. Some producers resort to such technologies as reverse osmosis and spinning cones to extract alcohol, but these tweaks can yield off-balance wines. Then there’s the blunt garden-hose method: adding water, which is illegal in many regions.

Decry high-octane reds we may, but there is one advantage to excessive alcohol …. “It binds the free water in the wine and enhances the body,” Dr. van Vuuren said. “The wine becomes more viscous.” Velvety bombs are prized by many consumers, not to mention wine critics.

Reported as “What do you drink if you want lower-alcohol wine?” | Beppi Crosariol | Jan. 11, 2012 | Globe and Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/wine/beppi-crosariol/what-do-you-drink-if-you-want-lower-alcohol-wine/article2297759/singlepage/#articlecontent.

Reference source is ”Splendide Mendax: False Label Claims about High and Rising Alcohol Content of Wine”, Julian M. Alston, Kate B. Fuller, James T. Lapsley, George Soleas and Kabir P. Tumber, American Association of Wine Economists Working Paper No. 82, at http://www.wine-economics.org/workingpapers/AAWE_WP82.pdf, found at http://www.wine-economics.org/workingpapers/

As science has gotten too big to know, we’ve adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all.

[....] A new science called systems biology studies the ways in which external stimuli send signals across the cell membrane. Some stimuli provoke relatively simple responses, but others cause cascades of reactions. These signals cannot be understood in isolation from one another. The overall picture of interactions even of a single cell is more than a human being made out of those cells can understand. In 2002, when Hiroaki Kitano wrote a cover story on systems biology for Science magazine — a formal recognition of the growing importance of this young field — he said: “The major reason it is gaining renewed interest today is that progress in molecular biology … enables us to collect comprehensive datasets on system performance and gain information on the underlying molecules.” Of course, the only reason we’re able to collect comprehensive datasets is that computers have gotten so big and powerful. Systems biology simply was not possible in the Age of Books.

The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just “the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism” (to quote Kitano) but properties that don’t show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we’re robust — our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don’t. Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may “sacrifice themselves” so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.

The problem — or at least the change — is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It’s not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It’s a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.

Models this complex — whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic — often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens.

Edited excerpt as “To Know, but Not Understand” | David Weinberger | Jan. 3, 2012 | The Atlantic at   http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/.

In 1963, Bernard K. Forscher of the Mayo Clinic complained in a now famous letter … Titled Chaos in the Brickyard, the letter warned that the new generation of scientists was too busy churning out bricks — facts — without regard to how they go together. Brickmaking, Forscher feared, had become an end in itself. ”  [...]

… the sort of brickyard Dr. Forscher deplored — information presented without hypothesis, theory, or edifice — except far larger because the good doctor could not have foreseen the networking of brickyards.

Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.

Indeed, networked fact-based brickyards are a growth industry. [....]

There are three basic reasons scientific data has increased to the point that the brickyard metaphor now looks 19th century.

• First, the economics of deletion have changed. We used to throw out most of the photos we took with our pathetic old film cameras [....]. Now, it’s often less expensive to store them all on our hard drive (or at some website) than it is to weed through them.
• Second, the economics of sharing have changed. [....] The Internet makes it far easier to share what’s in our digital basements. … [Innovators] … created its own technical protocol for sharing terabytes of data over the Net, so that a single source isn’t responsible for pumping out all the information; the process of sharing is itself shared across the network.
• Third, computers have become exponentially smarter. [editorial paragraphing added]

Edited excerpt as “To Know, but Not Understand” | David Weinberger | Jan. 3, 2012 | The Atlantic at href=”http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/.