Charles Bourget/Trans. Rachel Tunnicliffe
March 24/2005
Quebec Religious Heritage Foundation
A new tendency has appeared over the last few years to the detriment of the garden-cemeteries. Large cemetery parks have been set up outside towns in rural areas.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
March 19, 2005
Don’t like fossil fuels? Nuclear power? Hydro dams? Go fly a kite. Really. The next great energy technology may well involve implausible-sounding machines called Flying Electric Generators, windmills 30,000 feet high and tethered to the ground by power lines. These windmills would capture the plentiful power in the strong, steady winds that blow in the jet stream.
No pollution. No greenhouse gases. No hazard to birds. Enough energy to meet the world’s needs many times over. And costs that are projected at one to two cents a kilowatt hour, far less than that of existing fuels.
The visionaries floating these ideas are no crackpots. Inventor Bryan Roberts, an Australian engineer with a PhD from Cambridge who teaches at the University of Western Sydney, has a long history of getting inventions off the ground, including a tethered four-rotor helicopter built under a collaborative agreement with Bell Helicopters’ Australian agents. David Shepard, co-CEO with Roberts of Sky WindPower Corporation, the machine’s corporate developer, patented the optical scanner in the 1950s and then formed a company that sold the world’s first commercial OCR (optical character recognition) scanners, now at the Smithsonian Institute. Others at Sky WindPower, a San Diego-based corporation, also have impressive practical accomplishments in the corporate and military spheres to complement their flights of fancy.
The flying wind generator, drawing power from the local electric company through its tether, uses helicopter-like rotors to climb skyward and GPS technology to keep its bearings. Once at its desired altitude, the generator drifts in the wind while the rotors generate electricity and send power down the same tether that had powered its ascent. When it needs to come down to Earth, the flying machine can either come down on its own power, as helicopters do, or be winched in.
Sky WindPower plans to raise clusters of these aircraft – perhaps 600 at a time – above lands not far from metropolitan centres. Each cluster would have a capacity of 12,000 megawatts – equivalent to roughly 24 Pickering-sized nuclear reactors – and produce 90 million megawatt-hours a year – 25% more than those 20 Pickering plants would produce. Two of these clusters could more than meet Ontario’s entire power needs; seven Canada’s, not that it would ever be necessary or desirable to eliminate all other electricity technologies.
On land, the flying wind generator’s requirement is negligible. Floating above forests or farmers’ fields, the tethers would cost next to nothing in land or agricultural production while providing farmers with a bit of revenue for the use of their land. If a flying generator ever fell from the sky, as would be inevitable, it would crash in an unpopulated area and so represent minimal threat to human safety.
Above land, there is a cost – airplanes would need to be excluded from these areas, to avoid collisions with the flying generators or their tethers. But there is nothing new here. At 15 sites along the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.S. government for decades has tethered balloons carrying radar equipment to detect illegal flights by drug smugglers. These sites, which occur at altitudes up to 15,000 feet, appear on aeronautical charts and are well known to pilots, who in any case routinely deal with restricted air space. Sky WindPower calculates that less than one-quarter of 1% of U.S. airspace would need to be reserved, all away from populated areas, to meet all U.S. energy needs. That is far less than the amount of air space now restricted to civilian aviation.
Flying windmills have many advantages over their land-based counterparts which, because of factors such as contours of the land and daily heating and cooling patterns, often face either inadequate wind or turbulent winds, necessitating expensive designs. No such impediments occur in the jet stream, where air moves near-constantly and at several times the speed that it does at 100 feet off the ground, allowing much more energy to be captured from each square meter of wind.
While the wind blows well almost everywhere in the world, Canada is especially suited to flying turbines. The very best winds, 30,000 feet up, happen to blow along the Canada-U.S. border, where most of our population resides. At Montreal, Toronto, Windsor, Winnipeg or Regina, or Vancouver, a flying windmill will typically operate at 85% to 90% of its full capacity, about 50% higher than at many lower latitudes – and also higher than at more northerly latitudes. The skies above Gagetown, N.B., where a windmill would operate at 92% of its capacity, has one of the world’s best-recorded wind readings.
Roberts first began working on his concept in 1979. He has successfully flown prototypes in wind tunnels and in the sky. Sky WindPower now wants to scale up – its next prototype is designed and has the government permissions necessary for it to be tested in the California desert. It awaits only the $3-million needed to proceed.
Will investors take a flyer on this technology? So far, the big boys have stayed away, and for understandable reason. The smart money is moving to Arctic pipelines, nuclear plants, tar sands, LNG facilities and other government-subsidized energy systems that are with us in a big way only because government decrees it. The world’s energy entrepreneurs have all vanished, aside from a small band tilting at windmills in the sky.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.Urban-Renaissance.org.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
March 5, 2005
It doesn’t add up. A private school in Toronto where whites feel lucky to have their children accepted in classes dominated by Asians and Indians. Where girls are the equal of boys in math. Where five and six-year-olds, as a matter of course, solve problems that befuddle kids many grades higher in conventional schools, public or private.
Welcome to Spirit of Math, a 600-student for-profit evening school that – with one 90-minute class per week – outperforms anything Canada produces. Until three years ago, Spirit of Math operated only in the outskirts of Toronto. Then, it licensed a school in Winnipeg. Two years ago it opened two more Toronto campuses. This fall, it expects to award its first franchise to a Toronto-area “Campus Developer” and, if the franchise-school concept proves successful, in coming years a new franchisee could be coming to a location near you.
Spirit of Math wasn’t always a for-profit school. Charles Ledger, the junior high school teacher who first developed the Spirit of Math program, began by teaching it (or “Ledger Math,” as his Grade 7, 8 and 9 students dubbed it) in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale in the 1980s. Spirit of Math proved so successful that the school soon dominated Canada’s math competitions, winning more Canadian Junior High School Championships than all other schools combined. His students also won most of the Canadian championships in the Pascal Contest, a national mathematics contest sponsored by the University of Waterloo, and more than 80% of the Ontario Team Championships.
This was more than Canada’s hide-bound public school system could fathom. The educational establishment decided it had nothing to learn from Ledger’s methods – his approach was peculiar to himself, could not be duplicated, and thus had no wider applicability, it decided. Not only were Ledger’s methods dismissed, after Spirit of Math was set up as a private school, the provincial Ministry of Education refused to give high school students credits for the math courses they took at Spirit of Math unless they also sat through day-school courses. The ministry won’t license Spirit of Math unless it operates on a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. basis, and when an accredited Toronto-area day school that did operate on a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. basis agreed to provide credits to Spirit of Math students that met its criteria, the ministry forced it to stop.
Despite the views of education bureaucrats, the Spirit of Math approach is highly reproducible, as Ledger’s daughter and business partner, Kim Langen, now proves year after year. Langen trains teachers in her dad’s methods with extraordinary results – Spirit of Math students continue to take top honours in math competitions across North America. Little wonder that parents line up early to register their kids for Spirit of Math each May – the classes rapidly fill up – and that the school has had requests to work its magic in communities across the continent. Spirit of Math attracts mostly good math students, disproportionately from ethnic communities that place high value in their children’s education and are willing to spend the $35 per class required to make a difference. By making their students adept at numbers and teaching them how to think through problems, Spirit of Math soon has them going to the head of their day-school class.
To its own surprise, Spirit of Math has realized that it, too, underestimated how much kids can learn at an early age. It now raises the bar each year and introduces more concepts to their students at earlier ages. Sometimes, Spirit of Math discovers that learning is actually easier at young ages, as when it found that Grade 1 children more readily accepted the concept of negative numbers than children in Grade 4 or 5, the year that most schools introduce them.
To deliver its results, Spirit of Math also expects more of its teachers. Rather than lecturing to passive kids, teaching by rote, and prescribing set ways to solve problems, Spirit of Math finds ways of getting kids to discover solutions on their own, building their confidence and seizing on students’ insights to draw lessons for them at the precise moment they’re most receptive.
Spirit of Math succeeds partly because of its novel teaching methods and partly because it doesn’t put up with pretense. It won’t graduate students that haven’t mastered their material, or re-admit even bright students who don’t do its assignments. It thinks nothing of placing a less-able student in a lower grade with younger students, and it will even send such a child to a lower grade during the school year, if the child would otherwise slow down a class’s progress.
Is this heartless? “You don’t fool kids by pretending they have accomplished something they haven’t,” Langen states matter-of-factly. “They know when they’ve been given something that they haven’t had to work for.” She’s seen her kids thrive after they’ve been held back a year. Don’t these kids get teased, and lose self-esteem? “Kids don’t care [if their classmates are of different ages],” she says. “We often have kids from three to four different grades in the same year. Some kids skip a grade or two, some are held back.”
And some school systems imbue their students with the spirit of learning while others only dispirit them. If government-regulated school systems weren’t so rigid, and were able to adopt successful innovations in learning, parents wouldn’t be seeking outside schooling in large numbers. Until then, alternate schools will be filling the void, and doing the math.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.urban.probeinternational.org
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
February 16, 2005
Ontario universities and colleges like the provincial government’s Rae Report on education. They’re even planning a media campaign to make sure the provincial government in its spring budget begins to spend the $1.3-billion in additional funding that former NDP premier Bob Rae recommends they get by 2007.
The unions like the Rae Report, too, because it “validates what front-line faculty and support staff have been arguing for years,” says the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), namely that Ontario needs more unionized full-time faculty members.
And the essay-writing industry likes it, because the schools will soon step up their marketing to process ever-more students – Ontario will double its number of graduates, if Rae’s hopes are realized. Because these new recruits for what Ontario touts as “higher education” will overwhelmingly be mediocre students, even less able to write their own essays than the current class, and because they’ll be well funded through the student assistance programs Rae touts, tomorrow’s students will be ever-more receptive to outsourcing their school work to Internet services that charge as much as $100 per hour for essay writing.
A good many students, of course, are honest, hard-working, and competent. The research foundation that I work for has hired dozens with talent over the years. But for every good application we have received, perhaps 10 or 20 more have come from students or university graduates who can’t spell, punctuate or reason from sentence to sentence. Little wonder that university professors report the majority of their first-year students cannot string a few paragraphs together without error.
The appalling state of university grammar is ubiquitous, present not only in university basket-weaving courses but also in the province’s elite schools.
“At Elizabeth and I’s next meeting . . .” read one note from a University of Toronto law student who was working with us. The school system’s failure to graduate high school students with minimum levels of proficiency, and the universities’ willingness to then accept them, reflects one problem above all: an emphasis of quantity over quality, stemming largely from the conventional wisdom that everyone benefits from a formal higher education. In Rae’s words, “Learning is a value in itself. The capacity to be curious and reflective is what allows us to grow as individuals. To be moved by an eloquent passage or poem, to be relentlessly inventive in solving the riddles of natural science, to be learned and practised in a body of knowledge or a skill, to understand the time and discipline it takes to do something well: these are indispensable cultural values that need to be championed.”
His views betray an unthinking bias to credentialism. Formal education can stifle as well as stimulate the human capacity to be curious and reflective. An unschooled farmer or factory worker is no less capable of growing as an individual than the schooled professional. Most people, even with university degrees, will not prefer soliloquies over the Super Bowl, no matter how much do-gooders try to force-feed them an academic diet.
Worse, such thinking implicitly ranks a mediocre middle manager or stock broker above an extraordinary gardener or mechanic, devaluing manual workers’ social status and their sense of worth. Knowing this, our youth shun manual occupations in which they might shine, and instead consign themselves to the book learning that society expects of them.
All society then suffers. Schools are dumbed down to accommodate the unmotivated – a B.A. or B.Sc. no longer conveys any academic standing, having been cheapened to the value of a high school diploma of a generation ago. Only now students must spend an additional three or four years in school to end up with the same social status. As for those who are motivated by book learning, they become warehoused at university, sharing teachers with dozens if not hundreds of others, largely on their own in an unstimulated sea of students.
The solution should be self-evident. Raise the bar to admission in academic institutions, to ensure that only those with drive or talent can qualify. Ensure that loans and scholarships are available for those without financial means. Value people for their character and their abilities, whether or not they have initials after their name. Loosen the grip of the unions and the government over the school system. And shut down many of our so-called institutions of higher learning, so that those remaining can restore the dignity and loft that was once the hallmark of academia.
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
February 5, 2005
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the breathtaking artists whose cloth projects have graced many miles of countryside and, in cities, wrapped entire buildings will next week add to their trademark feats with another monumental work, this one in New York City’s Central Park. Some 500,000 people will come to cast off their February blues by taking a walk in a park like no other – Central Park’s 23 miles of pathways will be framed by 7,500 free-hanging, saffron-coloured “Gates,” each 12 feet apart, each seven feet off the ground and 16 feet high.
No one could fault the city of New York for financing this mammoth undertaking, the largest outdoor sculpture in the city’s history, involving more than one million square feet of woven nylon fabric, 60 miles of vinyl tube, and 5,290 tons of steel. Not only is The Gates expected to bring New York US$100-million in economic activity, the entire world will be viewing the installation on television and reading about it in their newspapers and magazines, giving New York City perhaps another US$100-million in free publicity.
Except the city didn’t pay Christo and Jeanne-Claude to erect this art. Just the opposite. Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid New York City US$3-million for the use of Central Park. They also paid for personal and property liability insurance, holding harmless the city and its Department of Parks and Recreation. They also paid for a restoration bond to guarantee that they would take down their installation, and leave no garbage or damage behind. They took pains to ensure that their installation didn’t impede the public’s normal use of Central Park, or the activities of park personnel for maintenance and cleanup. Because the park needed to supervise the work being done on their property, the artists compensated the park for these costs. Their contract with the city, in fact, committed them to leave no vegetation or rock formation disturbed.
The coffers of the city and its merchants will swell through the 16 days this cloth-work flies its colours in Central Park. Hotels and tourist operators are offering “Christo” packages while others sell luxury Christo watches, Christo books, Christo films, Christo souvenirs of all kinds. Christo and Jeanne-Claude want not a penny of this; they have donated all merchandising rights from The Gates to The Central Park Conservancy and Nurture New York’s Nature, organizations they hold dear. Neither will they take a penny of the individually signed posters that Nurture New York’s Nature is selling.
The Gates requires an army of 600 merely to install the work, and hundreds more to manufacture the structures, maintain them, provide them with round the clock protection, and disassemble them. The many Christo and Jeanne-Claude devotees who would volunteer their labour are directed to Central Park administrators to help out elsewhere – Christo and Jeanne Claude accept no unpaid labour. They also accept no donations of cash, no corporate sponsorships, no grants from either public or private arts foundations. They want no diversions of time from their art and no compromises of their art satisfying funders who, by paying the piper, would invariably influence the tune.
As with all Christo and Jeanne-Claude creations, the artists will fund The Gates entirely themselves, through the sale of studies, scale models, preparatory drawings and collages of the exhibit, as well as earlier art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s obsession with artistic independence has a price – The Gates will cost them US$20-million – but it produces art that is priceless, figuratively and literally. No tickets may be sold to view The Gates – this art for the public from these celebrated artists is free – and there is no aftermarket for The Gates – every last foot of fabric and pound of steel will be recycled, to ensure The Gates live on only in the imagination of the multitudes who have beheld it, and only in the entirety of its conception.
In only one way can governments be said to have played a role in the art of Christo and Jean-Claude – in squelching it. The artists have sought permission to do The Gates since 1979 but only after Michael Bloomberg, a Central Park Conservancy member, became mayor, did they receive a favourable decision. Until then, the city bureaucracy had dug in its heels, preferring to fund the uncontroversial and the mediocre. Similarly, because of the French bureaucracy, it took the artists 10 years to clothe Pont Neuf in Paris. More often, the artists fail altogether. Of the 57 ideas that they have proposed, 18 were accepted and 37 denied, sometimes despite years of trying. Two-thirds of the works of these masters – two of the world’s greatest living artists – have thus been denied us by the power of governments to dictate the public taste.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.urban.probeinternational.org.
