This is a spin-off of an essay I did for envirosci about urbanization. I came across it in a reading, ordered it through interlibrary loan, and it arrived like a month later - think they had to get it from another university. Really nice and readable book, with only one section that I found not [...]

Ever since I arrived in Toronto, I’ve been fascinated by the multi-culturality and the way different cultures integrate or do not integrate with each other. I’ve wanted to understand more about the process, and I was happy to come across Calculated Kindness : Global Restructuring, Immigration and Settlement in Canada published by OISE and edited [...]

The conference in Ottawa was all about the Millenium Development Goals - but what are those? According to statistics, less then 10% of Canadians have ever heard about them (and I can’t say I really knew, before I began my studies), so let’s do a little introduction. According to Stephen Lewis, special UN envoy for [...]

I’m coming to you live from the Ottawa Congress Center, where I am participating in the International Cooperation Days 2004, organized by CIDA. Today I’ve heard lectures about the UN Millenium Development Goals, which is the main focus of the conference, both in general, and focused on education and international health.
In education, WUSC presented [...]

In my endless search for internships, I spent a while last night looking at different UN sub-organizations, and read up a bit on the topic of how to get a job there. I thought others might be interested, so here are the major pathways into the UN system, as far as I can ascertain (this [...]

I am currently reading the Ingenuity Gap by Homer Dixon (who is teaching at the University of Toronto). So far, his book is entertaining, but hasn’t really given me that much new insights - however it did provide me with a few new stats that I found very interesting.
1) The biggest human structure in the [...]

Inspired by an article in Monthly Review. A common discussion when studying economics and development studies is the question of poverty - what is it? Can someone in Bramford who cannot afford to send their kids to summer camp really be compared to a struggling family in Ethiopia, barely surviving off subsistence farming? Of course [...]

While playing with the University of Toronto’s library pages, I did some random searches and came across an article about “Participation in the global knowledge commons” by Leslie Chan and Sely Costa. First of all, this is an example of how digitalizing academic publishing, and making it accessible for free-text searches makes knowledge more available [...]