Uninhabited Spaces

Our dear friends Patrick and Raymond relocated to Toronto at the end of 2010 and they have now relaunched their wonderful art gallery. Located in the heart of the entertainment district, the Wellington Street Art Gallery focuses on Canadian contemporary painting and sculpture. Patrick has been an art collector for many years and he has amassed a worthy collection of established and emerging artists. Perhaps Patrick's greatest discovery is painter/sculptor Nicholas Crombach , whose distinctive marine-influenced works are both engaging and beguiling. You can browse the current collection here .

Canadian banks dominated the recent bank ranking released by Bloomberg. National Bank of Canada led the Canadian pack at #3, followed by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (#4), Toronto-Dominion Bank (#12), Royal Bank of Canada (#17) and Bank of Montreal (#19). The Bloomberg ranking includes banks with at least $100 billion in assets, taking into account factors such as Tier 1 capital, non-performing assets compared with total assets, efficiency and a comparison of costs against revenues. Only three U.S. banks — Fifth Third Bancorp (#7), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (#14) and Citigroup (#16) — made the top 20. Read the full results at Bloomberg .

The brains at Queen's Human Media Lab will be presenting the PaperPhone at the upcoming ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver. The head of the project, Dr. Vertegaal believes this technology will result in paperless offices as well as being a truly portable device. “This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years. This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.” Check out the PaperPhone preview here .

On the heels of the stunning news that the U.S. had captured its infamous public enemy, Canadian voters have delivered a startling and history-making federal election. Conservative leader Stephen Harper will once again be eligible to form the federal government, this time with a comfortable majority of 165 seats (won or leading at time of writing). After two back-to-back minority governments, Harper is no doubt pleased with what appears to be a decisive mandate from the Canadian electorate. A closer look at the percentage of vote reveals that just shy of 40% of voters chose a Conservative candidate for Parliament. Or, put another way, 60% of electors did not vote for the Conservatives. The lion's share of the progressive/centrist vote was split between the NDP (31%) and the Liberal (19%) candidates. The Conservatives gained an additional 22 seats within the 40% of votes. The majority win for Harper was partly a result of the design of the federal electoral process and partly...

A dear friend of ours Karen Peperkorn, founder of the Creative Arts focus program in the Limestone District School Board, has hatched a wonderful plan to create the Kingston Centre for Arts & Design (KCAD). The goals of KCAD are: provide support and promotion of cultural activities Provide a community based centre of excellence for the Arts and Design. Unify dance, drama, visual art, craft, design, literary art Feature Arts resource space providing books, materials, Arts listings Karen has applied to be featured as part of PepsiCo's "Refresh Project" and is in competition to receive $100,000 to launch KCAD.  Learn more about KCAD and vote for this arts-based community education project at KCAD .