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Highly logical: Microsoft and Paramount Pictures team up to promote new ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ film

By Guest PostMay 15, 2013Technologyaka scotty, australia, bad robot production, beam me up, bing, bing translator, canada, darkness, Facebook, film, imax, j j abrams, james doohan, jen buckmaster, klingon, leeanne stables, logical pairing, los angeles, Microsoft, movie adventure, msn, paramount pictures, rick rashid, san francisco, seattle, star trek, starfleet academy, toronto, trekker, Twitter, windows 8, windows phone, xbox, xbox live, xbox smartglass, xbox video awards

A new Star Trek app for Windows 8 and Windows Phone kicked off an unprecedented cross-company partnership to promote “Star Trek Into Darkness,” the new film from Paramount Pictures. Star Trek movie-themed content will materialize across Microsoft’s consumer products and services leading up the May 16 release of the highly anticipated new movie.

REDMOND, Wash. – May 15, 2013 – Star Trek and Microsoft — a logical pairing, Spock might say.

Paramount Pictures thought so. (more…)

Television: Chronicle of a Death Foretold?

By Guest PostNovember 24, 2012Mediaandre h caron, balance of time, bell media, calgary, canadian productions, canadian programming, children, creation, cross canada study, cyms, endangered, Environment, made in canada, media platform, montreal, nuclear family, publication, quality, quebec, social impact, st john, television, television programs, toronto, tv, université de montréal, vancouver, young canadians

Not only is TV not endangered, but it also has a unifying social impact on the nuclear family across the country. This is the main conclusion of a cross-Canada study—Are the Kids All Right?—on the television viewing habits of families with at least one child aged between 9 and 12 years. The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by André H. Caron, professor of communications at the Université de Montréal and Director of the Centre for Youth and Media Studies (CYMS).

“Young Canadians today live in a different world than that experienced by previous generations. In this context, many well-placed observers have predicted the impending death of television,” says Dr. Caron. “We wanted to test the veracity of this statement, so we set out to meet 80 different families (over 200 participants) to determine the current place of the small screen that has shaped so many childhoods since its creation.” (more…)

Want Better Employees? Get Somebody Else To Rate Their Personalities, Suggests New Study.

By Guest PostNovember 16, 2012Economyassessment, business, co worker, current employees, evaluation tool, job, maastricht university, michael scott, performance, personality test, phenomenon, potential, predictive, self rated, the office, toronto, university, ute huelsheger

TORONTO, ON – Businesses will get more accurate assessments of potential and current employees if they do away with self-rated personality tests and ask those being assessed to find someone else to rate them, suggest results from a new study.

Previous job performance studies have shown that outsiders are best at rating an individual’s personality in terms of how they work on the job. But observers in these studies have always been co-workers. (more…)

University of Toronto Study Demonstrates Impact of Adversity on Early Life Development

By Guest PostOctober 28, 2012Sciencebehavioural geneticist, biology, british columbia, childhood adversity, chris reaume, cifar, dna sequence, drosophila melanogaster, ebbd, Environment, enzyme, evidence, evolutionary biology, food, for, foraging gene, fruit fly, gene, gene robinson, human development, illinois, interaction, james burns, kindergartener, larvae, marla sokolowski, molecular genetics, Nature, neuroscience, pkg, pnas, pre programmed, protein, reproductive fitness, rna, rovers, sitters, tom boyce, toronto, transgenic manipulation, university

Study part of growing body of knowledge surrounding gene-environment interplay

TORONTO, ON – It is time to put the nature versus nurture debate to rest and embrace growing evidence that it is the interaction between biology and environment in early life that influences human development, according to a series of studies recently published in a special edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Biologists used to think that our differences are pre-programmed in our genes, while psychologists argued that babies are born with a blank slate and their experience writes on it to shape them into the adults they become. Instead, the important question to be asking is, ‘How is our experience in early life getting embedded in our biology?’” says University of Toronto behavioural geneticist Marla Sokolowski. She is co-editor of the PNAS special edition titled “Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergarteners” along with professors Tom Boyce (University of British Columbia) and Gene Robinson (University of Illinois). (more…)

Second-generation Immigrants Outperform Mainstream Populations in the US, Canada, and Australia

By Guest PostOctober 6, 2012Culture, Economy, Education, Politicsafro caribbean, australia, canada, canadian integration, canadian perspective, census data, chinese, cross national, difference, employment success, heather zhang, higher education, higher generation, immigrant, immigrant success, jeffrey reitz, labour market, mainstream population, mcgill university, multiculturalism, naoko hawkins, offspring, professional occupation, reflective, research journal, second generation, social science, south asian, survey, toronto, united states, university, US, white

TORONTO, ON – A new study published by the Social Science Research journal reveals that second-generation Chinese and South Asian immigrants in the US, Canada, and Australia are more successful than the respective mainstream populations (third- and higher-generation whites).

Jeffrey G. Reitz and Naoko Hawkins from the University of Toronto and Heather Zhang from McGill University examined survey and census data from these countries to compare the achievements of immigrants and their offspring. (more…)

U of T Research Demonstrates How Children Learn About Prejudice

By Guest PostMarch 24, 2012Generalanjum nayyar, children, elementary school, external instruction, kang and inzlicht, kids, michael inzlicht, negative experience, prejudice, red group, sonia kang, toronto, university of toronto

How do children come to realize that they themselves might be targets of prejudice? It may depend on their age. New research conducted at the University of Toronto shows that a six-year-old may be influenced most by direct instruction about prejudice, but once that child gets closer to 10, she begins to rely more on her own experiences.

“Young children are information hungry – they are eagerly searching for general rules to help in mapping out their social worlds,” write researchers Sonia Kang, an assistant professor in the Department of Management at U of T Mississauga and the Rotman School of Management, and Professor Michael Inzlicht of the Department of Psychology in this month’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. (more…)

Canadian Police Agencies Suppressing Data on Race, Says Criminology Study

By Guest PostFebruary 2, 2012Culture, General, Politicsaboriginal origin, aboriginals, akwasi owusu bempah, blacks, canada, centre for criminology, data on race, diana tyszko, halifax, jurisdiction, law, nipissing, over representation, paul millar, perpetrators, police force, police services, policy, public knowledge, race of victims, race statistics, racial background, racial discrimination, toronto, transparency, ucr, university of toronto, victims

*Data essential for creating fair policies*

While only 20 per cent of Canada’s police forces have an explicit policy against reporting the race of victims and accused persons, criminologists from the University of Toronto and Nipissing show that the majority of police departments do not report race in practice.

The study, by Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology, and Paul Millar, an associate professor at Nipissing University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, is entitled Whitewashing Criminal Justice in Canada: Preventing Research through Data Suppression and appears in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society. (more…)

IBM Closes on Acquisition of Platform Computing

By Guest PostJanuary 9, 2012Technologyacquisition, canada, cloud management, cluster, digital media, enterprise clients, grid, helene armitage, high-performance computing, hpc applications, ibm, key initiative, life sciences, oil and gas, ontario, platform computing, smarter planet strategy, technical computing, toronto

ARMONK, N.Y. – 09 Jan 2012: IBM today announced it has completed the acquisition of Platform Computing, a privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Financial terms were not disclosed.

On October 11, 2011, IBM announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Platform Computing, a global leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software for distributed computing environments. (more…)

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