Customers checking out at Sonic Boom Music, a 14,000-square-foot record shop in Toronto, April 15, 2010.

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A key episode in Jay Ferguson’s music career came about when, at age 12, he landed a job at a small record shop in Halifax.

“Another guy got fired while I was in the store,” Ferguson recalls. “So the owner looked at me and was like ‘do you want a job?’”

He worked at the store for the next four years, immersed in music by artists such as Elvis Costello, The Kinks and The Who. Those years changed his life.

“Working in that environment opened up a whole other world of music to me. I just really fell in love with it and wanted to play in a band ever since,” Ferguson said. “Everything else went by the wayside.”

Nearly three decades later, Ferguson and his bandmates from veteran power-pop quartet Sloan are joining dozens, perhaps hundreds of bands around the world by playing a free in-store concert on Saturday, in a collective gesture of support for the embattled neighbourhood record shop.

The performances are being held as part of Record Store Day, an annual campaign held on the third Saturday of April. This is a day to remind music listeners that, in the face of changes wracking the recording industry, independent music retailers would love their support.

More than 1,400 stores are participating in this year’s festivities, mostly in the United States and Britain. About 70 Canadian shops are taking part, including Vancouver’s Zulu Records and Sonic Boom in Toronto, where Ferguson will be playing with Sloan.

Record Store Day was dreamed up three years ago by Chris Brown, an employee at a New England indie music shop. Since then it has grown into a major international undertaking.

A long list of industry giants including The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Velvet Underground, R.E.M. and Emmylou Harris are marking this year’s event with limited edition releases available only at independent record stores.

“It seems to have grown at a phenomenal rate,” says Spencer Hickman, a spokesperson for the event who runs Rough Trade East, a three-year-old record shop in London, England. “But I work in a busy store so I know how much people love record shops still.”

Industry changes

The Internet has visited sweeping changes on the recording industry, changes that are still playing out and that no one seems to fully understand yet.

Many specialized independent record shops, particularly in major cities, say they’re doing well. Others are closing their doors due to competition from music piracy, online retailers and big-box stores.

The number of indie record shops in Britain dropped from 734 in 2005 to 269 last year, according to the Independent Retailers Association. An estimated 3,000 stores sell recorded music in the United States, down from 12,000 a decade ago.

In Canada, sales of compact discs and vinyl fell nearly 7 per cent last year while digital sales jumped 42 per cent, mirroring changes in other markets. Business is quickly migrating online to outlets like iTunes, which boasted in February that it had sold an astonishing 10 billion songs.

Phil Gallo, an American journalist who has been writing about music for 25 years and co-authored a new book called “Record Store Days,” says neighbourhood music retailers are still coping with industry decisions that were taken more than a decade ago.

In the 1990s, the major labels embraced large chain stores as a way to sell huge volumes of “hit” CDs, ignoring small independent shops, Gallo said. Then the Internet collapsed the market.

But record labels such as Warner Music are starting to pay attention to small retailers again, he said, because they’re learning that such shops “drive the pace, either in the types of music or how it’s sold.”

“I think they’re starting to realize how vital they are to telling them what consumers want.”

Bouncing back?

If the 21st century has been tough on brick-and-mortar music shops so far, Record Store Day might be a sign of better times ahead.

EMI, Universal Music and Warner Bros. Records are among the event’s sponsors in the U.S., and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the date will be officially recognized in New York City.

Audiophiles are also turning to vinyl records in greater numbers, a format that many independent music shops never stopped stocking. In the U.S., vinyl sales shot up 33 per cent last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Still, in the Internet age, big questions loom over many independent retailers, particularly those outside major markets like Toronto or Montreal.

“We’re a dying breed,” said Chris Boyne, an employee at Encore Records in Kitchener, Ont. “I mean it’s sustainable for now. But who knows?”

On Record Store Day in 2009, there was a line-up out the door of the 29-year-old shop, he said. But overall, sales have been dropping since he started working at Encore six years ago.

“We all love good music, and we like to try and share it with people,” Boyne said. “You can find that stuff on the Internet by yourself. But it’s not the same — it’s really not.”

An oilsands processing plant near Fort McMurray, Alta., Sept. 7, 2008. (Rodrigo Sala)

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The meeting of Arctic states held in Chelsea, Que. earlier this week was billed as a way to spur international efforts concerning global warming and the Far North.

Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Ottawa for failing to invite more foreign governments and other stakeholders, such as aboriginal groups, that are concerned with Arctic issues.

“We need all hands on deck because there is a huge amount to do, and not much time to do it,” Clinton said in a prepared statement. “What happens in the Arctic will have broad consequences for the Earth and its climate. The melting of sea ice, glaciers and permafrost will affect people and ecosystems around the world, and understanding how these changes fit together is a task that demands international co-operation.”

Yet when it comes to understanding how the climate of the Arctic will change in coming years, scientists say Canada is falling off the map.

Last week, a climate research centre at the University of Montreal, known by the acronym ESCER, warned that such groups are being forced to close across the country.

A lack of federal funds for climate and atmospheric science has “sounded the death knell for research groups working in this field in Canada,” Rene Laprise, ESCER’s director, wrote in a statement.

His centre has lost two staff, who found government jobs after learning that their salaries would not be guaranteed past September 2010, Laprise told CTV.ca by email. Five others are expected to leave “any time,” he wrote.

Climate scientists across the country say they’re in a similar situation — with dwindling funds and poor prospects to secure more money, they’re preparing to shut down major projects while their staff seeks jobs abroad.

Financial woes

Laprise and other scientists in his field are frustrated that the 2010 federal budget, made public last month, set aside no new money for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the main source of federal funding for climate-related research.

CFCAS was founded in 2000 and has doled out $116 million on 198 research grants at universities from Victoria to Halifax.

Canadian scientists who have contributed to international initiatives such as the World Climate Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on the foundation for a large part of their research money.

And while CFCAS’s mandate runs to March 31, 2012, it hasn’t received any new cash since 2003, and the money it has received was “fully committed” two years ago.

“There are no more funds to be distributed,” Kelly Crowe, a spokesperson for the foundation, told CTV.ca by email. “Our researchers are all looking at wrapping up their projects for good.”

A spokesperson for Environment Canada said that last year, the ministry received a funding request from CFCAS for $50 million to be spent over three years. But the request hasn’t been approved.

“The government will continue to consider this proposal, in the context of our current fiscal constraints,” Tracy Lacroix-Wilson wrote in an email. “We cannot speculate on any future funding at this time.”

Brain drain

Meanwhile, climate and atmospheric science researchers have begun to leave the country.

In December, Katrin Meissner quit a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria and moved her family to Sydney, Australia. She now studies climate change at the University of New South Wales, with two other researchers who also recently left Canadian universities.

“The possible closing of the CFCAS was certainly part of it,” Meissner said, referring to her decision to leave.

Theodore Shepherd, a veteran physicist at the University of Toronto who studies atmospheric dynamics, said people like Meissner are pulling up stakes because the international landscape for climate-change funding no longer favours Canada.

When CFCAS was created in 2000, Shepherd said Canadian universities began attracting climate scientists from Europe who would otherwise have gone to the U.S.

But economic stimulus programs introduced in the wake of the recession injected cash into climate-change research in the U.S. and in many European countries. That’s made them more attractive destinations for scientists in related fields.

The situation is changing “partly because they’ve got more money, partly because we’ve got no money,” Shepherd said.

He admits he has started to look for opportunities abroad, due to persistent funding problems in Canada.

“Not super actively,” he said. “But I’m realizing it’s going to be very hard to do what I want to here.”

Atmospheric research on the Arctic, an area that experts say will be hit particularly hard by climate change, is also being threatened by federal funding problems.

James Drummond is an Oxford-educated physicist at Dalhousie University, and the principal investigator for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, located 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole.

He expects the lab will be forced to close unless Ottawa announces additional public money to pay for salaries and operational expenses.

“At the moment, we’re operating on the principle that something will turn up,” he said by phone from Halifax. “The reality is that the funding stream has been broken.”

In recent years it has become harder to get federal money in all areas of atmospheric science, Drummond said. And while many scientists in that field don’t expect to run out of funding until later this year or early 2011, he said they need new money now in order to map out their work next year.

“It’s not research that can be turned on and off like a tap,” Drummond said.

With no additional money, he added, the issue of brain drain has become “very real” in the world of Canadian atmospheric science.

“And once those people leave it will be very hard to get them back, because they’ll say ‘well, look what happened last time.’”

The sign outside Google China headquarters in Beijing, adorned with flowers and notes from local Internet users. (Mike Dong)

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For nearly two months, Internet users in China have been waiting anxiously to find out whether the world’s largest online search engine will close in their country.

As ecologist Xiong Zhenqin told the journal Nature recently: “Research without Google would be like life without electricity.”

The Internet giant announced in January it was reassessing whether to continue its operations in China, where 384 million people surf the Web under tight government controls.

Google discovered that hackers had broken into its popular Gmail application. The attacks appeared to originate from mainland China. The culprits were looking for information about Chinese human rights activists and that suggested government involvement, Google alleged.

Citing concerns over security, human rights and freedom of speech, the California-based Internet giant said it would either find a way to stop censoring its search results in China or leave.

Whether Google and Beijing are in negotiations is unclear, but the company has made no public decision on the matter. Meanwhile the cyber attacks, which Google said hit at least 20 other firms, have reverberated through Washington.

The U.S. National Security Agency probed where the hackers were based, tracing the attacks to servers in Taiwan, then reportedly to a pair of Chinese schools. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also demanded that Chinese authorities conduct a thorough and transparent investigation.

“The Google attacks were taken extremely seriously — more than just an incident of potential industrial espionage but a major body blow to the American political system,” said Ronald Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Toronto.

Deibert is one of the people Google has been soliciting advice from in its dealings with China. He delivered a presentation about the rise of cyberspace control at Google’s headquarters a week before the company uncovered the hack. And officials informed him of their discovery before they went public.

Deibert told CTV.ca the hackers went one step further than was widely reported, ostensibly trying to access directories of data that Google collects, as required by U.S. national security laws.

The company tapped Deibert’s expertise after he co-wrote a 2009 study into cyber attacks against the office of the Dalai Lama. Researchers uncovered an extensive online spy network dubbed GhostNet that they traced back to China. It had compromised 1,295 computers across 103 countries — including some in Canada.

Domestic appeal

Deibert says Canada needs to confront the issues of censorship and government intrigue on the Web that incidents like the Google hack raise.

In a paper published on Feb. 22 by the Canadian International Council think-tank, he called on Ottawa to develop a cyberspace strategy that includes:

• Fixing Canadian laws that foreign governments could use to justify controlling the Web, such as with content filtering or online surveillance
• Scrutinizing whether Canadian technology exports are being used by foreign governments to restrict Internet access
• Encouraging “arms control in cyberspace” by, for example, proposing a UN treaty to make the Web more open and peaceful

The idea of “arms control” may seem extreme, but governments have started using the Internet to help them wage war.

During the 2008 conflict in Georgia, hackers took down key government websites in the capital of Tbilisi while Russian tanks rolled across the border. Military powers including France, Israel and the U.S. have adopted such cyberwar tactics as part of their defence policies.

The Internet is “entering a dangerous and chaotic phase, essentially a cyber-arms race,” Deibert said, and that’s led to spiralling computer espionage and computer network attacks.

“We need at least some government to stand up and say ‘how are we going to restrain this?’”

Policy ‘vacuum’

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government pledged, in this week’s throne speech, to create a cybersecurity strategy that would protect Canada’s “digital infrastructure.”

So far, however, there has been a “surprising vacuum in Canadian policy around cyberspace generally,” Deibert says.

Ottawa has been considering legislation on the issue. “The Investigative Powers of the 21st Century Act” was tabled last June. It proposed that Internet service providers be required to hand over data and personal information about their customers to police. But the bill hadn’t become law by the time Parliament was prorogued.

The federal government’s existing cybersecurity efforts are organized around Public Safety Canada. For example, CSIS and the RCMP’s technological crime unit probe Web-based threats or attacks and report to Public Safety.

The department is also “leading cross-government efforts to produce a cybersecurity strategy,” David Charbonneau, a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada, told CTV.ca by email.

The strategy will incorporate input from private companies and foreign governments, Charbonneau wrote, “and will build on significant efforts that have been underway.”

Meanwhile south of the border, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed a White House cybersecurity co-ordinator in January. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a similar position in 2005, and Washington unveiled a national cybersecurity plan in 2008.

As governments in North America and elsewhere develop policies on cyberspace, they’re influencing how the Internet will evolve.

“The dominant trend right now is the growing militarization of cyberspace,” Deibert said. “That leads down a path towards islands of territorialized Internet that are not connected to each other.”

“Another path I’d prefer to see is one where there’s perhaps a treaty articulated by countries of the world that lays out basic principles for how cyberspace should be governed,” he added. “Hopefully that would be in an open, public way.”

For the time being, efforts to keep the World Wide Web peaceful and open are centring on China, which passed a new round of Internet controls last week.

Without an international cyberspace treaty, the U.S. government is considering whether to lodge a complaint about China’s online censorship with the World Trade Organization.

But China isn’t alone. The list of countries where Internet censorship has become a hot-button issue has grown to include democracies like Germany, France and Australia.

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Ancient earthworks recently discovered in the Amazon that are challenging assumptions about the region's history. (Courtesy of Denise Schaan)

One of the many Hollywood films that will hit theatres this year is “The Lost City of Z,” in which a group of explorers set out to find a colleague who vanished in the Amazon rainforest.

Based on a true story, the movie stars Brad Pitt as Percy Fawcett, a world-famous British explorer who disappeared in 1925, during an expedition to find the mythical city of El Dorado, which Fawcett codenamed “Z” to keep his plans secret.

The premise of the movie, and its name, are taken from a book by David Grann, who retraced Fawcett’s route through the Amazon to investigate what happened to him.

Along the way, Grann learned of a group of archeologists who are unearthing evidence that, just as Fawcett believed, there were indeed large communities thriving in the Brazilian rainforest before Europeans arrived.

As the evidence mounts, it’s challenging conventional wisdom of the Amazon as a place so inhospitable it could only support small, nomadic tribes.

Instead it seems that large, complex societies may have tamed parts of the Amazon centuries before Spanish explorers sailed across the Atlantic. As that idea gains momentum, it’s also gaining more attention beyond archaeological circles.

“There is now becoming, not just in the scientific and academic work but in the public world, a sense of the breadth of these discoveries,” Grann told CTV.ca from New York. “They’re transforming our view of what the Americas looked like before Columbus.”

“It’s finally kind of breaking through.”

Turning point

Last month, a major archeological find was published in the British journal Antiquity. Using Google Earth and other satellite imagery, researchers found 260 geometrical shapes dug into a now-deforested 250-kilometre stretch of the upper Amazon basin.

“We know they’re spread over this wide region and they display very similar construction techniques,” said Denise Schaan, an archeologist from Brazil’s University of Para who co-authored the study. “So if it was not a single people building them, they had a kind of culture or religion that was spread over that territory.”

“We want to know who built these structures and for what reason,” Schaan added, speculating that they could have been fortified villages or ceremonial centres.

Some of the earthworks may date as far back as AD 200, a millennium before the Incan empire was founded. As many as 60,000 people lived in or near the “perfect circles, rectangles and composite figures” carved into the ground, the researchers reported. And many were linked by bridges or “avenue-like” roads.

What’s more, Schaan and her colleagues suspect there could be 10-times as many earthworks in surrounding areas, where the jungle is still standing.

The people who inhabited the sites disappeared around the same time that Spanish conquistadors ventured into South America, suggesting that diseases from Europe may have wiped them out.

A number of earlier discoveries suggest the Amazon was by no means virgin rainforest before the Age of Discovery began.

Archaeologists came across a series of 127 granite blocks on a Brazilian hilltop in 2006. Some of the blocks appear to be arranged astrologically, and may have been placed there as long as 2,000 years ago. The site has become know as the Stonehenge of the Amazon.

In 1996, American archaeologist Anna C. Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, found a series of 11,000-year-old wall paintings in a Brazilian cave. The paintings are so old they’re challenging long-held assumptions about when the Americas were first settled and by whom.

More to come?

Technology may be one of the things driving these cascading discoveries. Grann says a lot of the archeologists who are investigating the Amazon’s pre-Columbian settlements are using high-tech tools such as satellite imaging and ground-penetrating radar.

Excavating ancient ruins is still important, but it’s now being aided by space-age tools.

And the trend isn’t limited to the Amazon. Growing numbers of archeologists around the world are using satellite imagery, according to Sarah Parcak, a professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Multispectral satellites, which can provide images in a range of light including infrared, were first launched in 1972. Parcak said her fellow archaeologists are realizing just how useful the devices may be for their research.

“They give us this ability to see beyond what we normally see,” Parcak said, adding that she has discovered hundreds of ancient sites in Egypt using satellite images. “They allow you to differentiate between ancient and modern pretty easily.”

Members of the Kuikuro tribe, who American archeologist Michael Heckenberger believes are the descendants of a much larger Amazonian people. (Tiago Brandao)

During Grann’s trip into the Amazon to find Fawcett, he met with an American archeologist named Michael Heckenberger, who had been living for years with an aboriginal tribe near to where the British explorer disappeared in 1925.

Heckenberger has used satellite images to help identify nearly two-dozen ancient settlements in the southern Amazon. He believes the tribe he was staying with is made up of their descendants.

Time will tell whether the movie adaptation of Fawcett’s Amazonian quests will touch on the ancient societies that eluded the explorer, and are now being discovered.

But a world away from Hollywood, archaeologists appear to be on the cusp of rewriting the Americas’ ancient history.

Customers browse through rows of vinyl records at Rotate This in Toronto, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009.

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Carlin Nicholson is itching to get his hands on the test pressing, or vinyl prototype, of his band’s debut album. It’s currently being mastered in Los Angeles and should arrive next week, he said.

In a few months, the 12-track LP by Zeus, Nicholson’s Toronto-based rock band, will be released in North America, Japan and Europe through indy music label Arts & Crafts.

In keeping with the band’s preferred medium, the vinyl LP will hit store shelves two weeks ahead of the compact disc. And the downloadable version of the album will be recorded from the vinyl master, making the tracks sound more like a good old fashioned record.

“Really, we’ve been looking forward to vinyl the whole time,” Nicholson said by phone from a recording studio in the city’s east end. “If it’s about listening to music, then it’s got to be about music that sounds as good as it can.”

Thanks to devoted fans of vinyl LPs in the indy music scene, and to DJs who have been spinning electronic music or hip hop on their turntables, the record has survived on the fringes of the music industry for years.

But that may be changing as artists, listeners, technology companies and record labels come back around to the music format that dominated the 20th century.

Yearly vinyl sales are on course to surpass 2008’s total by 37 per cent, according to Nielsen Soundscan, which tracks music sales at 14,000 vendors across Canada and the U.S.

Last month, Soundscan announced that vinyl LP sales broke the two million mark for the first time since the company started keeping tabs in 1991.

The market may be significantly larger, however, because Soundscan excludes many independently owned retailers that stock vinyl, as well as second-hand sales.

‘Obsessive’ listeners

Brian Zirk has been listening to records for decades. About three years ago he decided to beef up his collection, now 3,000 strong, by searching his Vancouver Island community, and the Internet, for anyone selling used rock, jazz and blues records.

“It’s quite obsessive. Always looking for that perfect sound I guess,” Zirk said in a phone interview from Campbell River, B.C., where he runs an audio-video equipment store.

The 50-year-old owns several turntables and eschews the MP3 format, describing it as “the scourge of the world” because it offers inferior sound.

“There’s more colourations to the vinyl,” he added. “It’s a better way of listening, it’s more personal.”

Catering to the small but growing base of consumers with Zirk’s tastes, manufacturers are bringing new turntables to market.

“Certainly in recent years there’s been an upswing in sales,” said Simon Wilson, the manager at Audio Ark, an Edmonton store that sells audio and video systems. “Quite possibly we stock a greater variety of turntables than we did back in vinyl’s heyday.”

To stand out from the competition, some newer models come with USB ports, allowing vinyl fans to connect the turntable to their computer and digitize their collection.

“There seems to be a growing number of younger people who are getting interested in the format,” Wilson wrote in an email. “It’s almost as if they’re content with the iPod for digital but, at least presently, make a stronger connection with the whole ritual of playing a record.”

Turning the tables

When the compact disc was introduced in 1982, it seemed like the writing on the beginning of the end for vinyl LPs. And as recently as 2006, vinyl sales were dropping steadily.

Canada lost its only remaining commercial record press two years later, when the long-time operator of a plant in Pickering, Ont., retired.

“We were having trouble finding someone to take over physically running the operation,” said Lindsay Gillespie, president of Music Manufacturing Service, which owned the factory.

Then vinyl sales started to rebound, and a new vinyl press called Rip-V opened in the Montreal suburb of St. Lambert, Que. It’s currently pressing a new live album by Tom Waits.

Meanwhile, CD sales dropped more than 20 per cent in Canada last year, according to the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

Even though vinyl still makes up a tiny fraction of the overall market for music, devotees are asking whether their beloved analog medium will outlive, or even help bring down the CD.

Staff at Rotate This, a music store in downtown Toronto that arguably has the largest vinyl selection in the city, estimates they now move at least 10 records for every compact disc.

Vinyl sales at Vancouver’s Zulu Records are up at least 30 per cent compared to a few years ago, and are now on par with CD sales, the store’s general manager, Nicholas Bragg, told CTV.

“A lot of record labels are thinking, ‘well, we’ve got to make up these losses that we’re incurring with CD sales,’ and I think that they’ve looked to the niche market of records,” Bragg said.

“In some ways (records) are going to become the most vital part of the market, because it’s analog and because it represents something different than the MP3 format,” he added. “I’ve got to be frank — it’s cool, too.”

A "fan photo" from Veterans Affairs' "Canada Remembers" Facebook page.

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Every year, the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ottawa organizes a week of activities to jog peoples’ memories in the days leading up to Nov. 11.

A persistent dilemma for the department, which is responsible for pensions and services for war veterans and retired RCMP officers, is how to capture the attention of young Canadians each Remembrance Day.

Wars may seem remote for children and teenagers, particularly if they have no living relatives who have served in the military on overseas missions. And in an increasingly wired world, capturing the interest of tech-savvy youngsters poses a challenge. But it’s an essential demographic in order to keep alive the tradition of commemorating Canadian soldiers who fought and died in wars far from home.

Previously, Veterans Affairs reached out to younger audiences indirectly by providing learning material to their school teachers. It still publishes background information on historical events, such as the campaign to liberate Italy from the Nazis, which teachers can use to instruct their students.

But in an effort to keep up with young Canadians who are spending more of their time online, the department has added a new strategy to the mix.

“We’re taking the message of remembrance to where youth are: social media,” Heather MacDonald, a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs, told CTV.ca. “It’s a big launch for us.”

The department has set up a webpage called “Canada Remembers” on the popular social networking website Facebook. It’s designed to relay details of events surrounding Nov. 11. It also serves as a venue where people can describe what Remembrance Day means to them.

Messages posted on the "Canada Remembers" Facebook page.

As of Friday evening more than 60,000 people had signed on as members of the webpage, a number that had been rising steadily over the past week.

The page houses more than 400 photos posted by users, and countless comments, the overwhelming majority of which were positive.

“I am an ex-British Royal Military Policeman, and was proud to have served with your country’s forces, proud and honourable soldiers, and now have the fortune to live in your great country,” wrote Shaun Hanson. “Exemplo Ducemus. We will not forget.”

Others paid their respects to soldiers sent more recently to Afghanistan.

“Our son, Myles Mansell, was a reservist and volunteered to go to Afghanistan because he thought it was the right thing to do and that maybe he could make a difference in this world. On April 22, 2006, he and three other soldiers were killed,” wrote Nancy Mansell. “We will always be so proud of him and what he was trying to accomplish.”

‘Report’ button still needed

But not all of the comments were so respectful and eloquent. At one point this week, a user appeared to confuse Nov. 11 with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Angry users quickly made light of the mistake in a string of vulgar attacks.

The exchange was later removed from the page. And Veterans Affairs, which administers the site, said it is monitoring comments using internal guidelines, and those set by Facebook.

“We want to maintain the open environment found on social media networks, where people feel comfortable about sharing their thoughts on remembrance without being censored,” MacDonald wrote in an email. “However, inappropriate comments or postings that are offensive to and individual or an organization, rude in tone, or abusive will be removed.”

Alex Brown, a Facebook spokesperson in Toronto, told CTV.ca that the company’s staff also investigates reports of inappropriate comments, in line with its terms of service. The goal is “to strike a very delicate balance” that allows users to express their opinions while making sure everyone feels safe, Brown wrote in an email.

This isn’t the first year that Veterans Affairs has tried new mediums to encourage youth to get into the spirit of Remembrance Day. For the past several years the department has also been making Nov. 11-themed temporary tattoos, hoping that they would make a mark on a younger demographic.

But this is the first time the department has tried to harness the Internet to spread Remembrance Day to youth.

Veterans Affairs is also hosting a multimedia contest on its website. Users are encouraged to download photos, videos and audio clips to create “mashups” they can repost on the department’s website, the official Facebook page or the popular video site YouTube.

On television, Veterans Affairs has partnered with MuchMusic and MusiquePlus to get “modern day” veterans, meaning those who have served since the Korean War, in front of younger viewers on Nov. 11.

The show “VideoFlow,” for example, will be devoted to veterans who wish to request a favourite song or deliver a Remembrance Day message, MacDonald said.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology under construction in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.

With few signs of homegrown Silicon Valleys on the horizon, Gulf states are spending billions more to attract high-tech knowhow. (TRENDS magazine, May 2009)

Last year, 21-year-old Huawei Technologies did something unthinkable for a Chinese company. By investing a tenth of its revenues and 40 percent of its staff in research and development (R&D), the networking and telecommunications giant registered more patent applications than any company worldwide (unseating Philips Electronics in the process).

Huawei’s focus on R&D seems to be paying off. Its sales jumped nearly 50 percent to $23 billion in 2008, and are projected to keep growing this year. A small but growing portion of that income was generated in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries where, since 2003, Huawei has been serving clients like Saudi Aramco and Etisalat. “It might be easier to count who isn’t our client,” laughs Ihab Ghattas, assistant president of Huawei’s Middle East arm. “We have been very aggressive in the market.”

Like the rest of Huawei’s regional management, Ghattas is based out of the firm’s Middle East headquarters in Dubai Media City. The company also has marketing staff scattered across the Levant and Gulf region, as well as a few hundred technocrats that serve major local clients.

But when it comes to R&D, Huawei, like most technology firms in the Gulf, does most of its heavy lifting many time zones from the Arabian desert. The company has research centers from Silicon Valley to Beijing, but the nearest such facility to the GCC lies across the Arabian Sea in Bangalore, India.

“You have to select a place where there is a suitable amount of manpower to generate ideas,” Ghattas says. “The GCC has a reasonable amount of expats living in it – that might not be the best situation for an R&D center, because people do come and go.”

While the GCC’s diversification endgame involves huge technology investments, experts say a lack of stable scientific expertise and resources stands in the way of creating a homegrown Huawei of it own. With few outputs in sight, the question looms: will the Gulf’s embryonic “post-carbon” economy include technology production?

Microscopic returns

In the UAE, Dubai is adding Silicon Oasis, billed as a magnet for software developers, and Dubiotech, a potential hub for life sciences firms, to its slew of industry clusters (each one costing several hundred million dollars to build, is adorned with attractive tax-free perks). Abu Dhabi is also spending $22 billion to create Masdar City, an imagined community of 40,000 that’s expected to grow into a leading center of green-energy research and commercialization.

Elsewhere, the $600 million Qatar Science and Technology Park in Doha was inaugurated in March. And on Saudi Arabia’s west coast, workers are building the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, which is slated to house the world’s sixth most powerful supercomputer, as well as 20,000 students, staff and faculty when finished.

But there are few signs yet that Middle East-made Microsofts will flourish along the Gulf. Not because of a lack of effort, but because other corners of the world have enjoyed a giant head start in the global competition for prowess in high-tech production, while the GCC has had to start more or less from scratch. South Korea registered 10,260 US patents between 2005 and 2006, for example. The UAE registered 11.

“The problem is other regions are progressing even faster. … Gulf states are going to have to work very hard not to fall further behind,” says Kristin Lord, the author of a 2008 report that measured how far Middle East countries have come towards building knowledge-based societies in recent years. “Investments haven’t always paid off. So one of the questions the report raises is, will these be different?”

The good news is that Gulf companies and governments seem more than happy to buy and apply new technologies. Four of the GCC’s six members ranked in the top 40 countries worldwide on a recent information technology report by the World Economic Forum and INSEAD business school. But those rankings were based largely on the region’s ample technology investments, and its purchasing power as a wealthy technology consumer.

“You show them something new and they want to do it,” says Pooya Darugar, platform and technology evangelist at Microsoft Gulf. “There are no legacy systems [old computers and software] that they worry about. That’s one of the great things about working in this market.”

The US software behemoth moved to the Arabian peninsula way back in 1992, eons ago in terms of the region’s recent breakneck development. Like Huawei though, Microsoft’s operations here haven’t expanded much beyond sales, marketing and customer support. So the $8.2 billion it spent on R&D last year flowed mostly to the company’s corporate headquarters in California, or to development centers in China and India.

But Darugar sees no reason the Gulf states can’t produce the next great wired invention. “The Internet is a very equalizing technology,” he says. “These small startups like Twitter – they could be run out of Bahrain, or out of Oman.”

“If you look at the university students in this area, they have the skills, they have the hunger,” he adds. “We have to make sure they have the capability to go to the market, so they don’t necessarily have to become public-sector workers.”

New addition

One project that the UAE hopes will attract young technology firms is Dubiotech, a handful of buildings under construction near one of Dubai’s arterial roads, on a two-square-kilometer patch of desert that was bequeathed to the project by the emirate’s ruler. The first building – a four-storey laboratory facility – is expected to open by summer. And the science park’s director, Marwan Abdul Aziz, says a dozen firms, from pharmaceuticals to medical-device manufacturers, have signed on as tenants since January alone.

“Most of their activities are market-driven,” Abdul Aziz admits of Dubiotech’s growing list of host companies. “They want to make sure they have a strong base. Once that happens, they will be more comfortable, know the market better, invest more money and do more R&D work as well.”

“This is something that will take some time, and we knew that,” he adds. “For R&D to happen you need a good academic base, and that’s something the UAE is starting to have.”

Indeed, creating new Silicon Valleys takes legions of highly specialized workers, which emerging technology producers like China and India are churning out by the hundreds of thousands each year. But the Arabian peninsula – actually, the entire Middle East – lacks its own world-class technical institutes. So a growing number of the Gulf’s rich petrostates are courting tech-savvy Indian and North American universities to set up local branch campuses nearby.

One is the University of Waterloo (UW), a Canadian institution famous for spurring high-tech startups like Research In Motion, creator of the ubiquitous Blackberry. UW plans to set up two engineering programs in Dubai this fall, although a permanent home for its campus is being built in Abu Dhabi.

“There are a lot of entrepreneurial activities on campus,” says Leo Rothenburg, UW’s acting dean of engineering. “It’s not uncommon that our students graduate and already have businesses started. … We intend to bring that same spirit to the United Arab Emirates.”

Further up the coast, Qatar’s new 14-square-kilometer Education City development already hosts a handful of engineering programs from Texas A&M university, and a computer science program from Carnegie Mellon. The billion-dollar complex dispatched its first round of graduates last year, but many of the students that have enrolled so far have been foreigners. Even though university education is free for citizens of the tiny, petroleum-bathed country, tertiary enrollment for Qataris hovers around 20 percent – a third the rate of most high-income countries.

“They’re starting slowly, but with confidence and quality,” says Hady Amr, director of the Brookings Doha Center, the Qatar branch of a prominent, Washington-based think tank that was established last year, a few kilometers from Education City.

When asked how close the Gulf has come to cultivating its own technology-export industries, he says: “They’re preparing the ground, so that one day those seeds can be planted.”

“If you want to see the results of these things, call me in 10 years.”