Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 23, 2013, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A9 A S the provincial premiers gather for their meeting of the Council of the Federation in Ontario's Niagara- on- the- Lake, the topic of international trade is sure to emerge. In particular, the sputtering negotiations for a Canada- European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement will certainly be a source of some concern. These Canada- EU bargaining sessions have been going on now for years, and the final stages of the negotiations have proven to be especially difficult. Both sides have dug in their respective heels and thus seem unwilling to make the major compromises needed to push the deal across the finish line. Part of the blame should be rightly placed on the shoulders of the Europeans. They have strung the Canadians along - demanding significant concessions from Ottawa while offering precious little in return. Senior EU negotiators are quick to point the finger at the sometimes- unwieldy nature of the 28- country EU, but they are clearly seeking to minimize any economic costs to their membership. They have also sought to drag the negotiations out hoping to use both an impending deal with the Americans and the acknowledged political import attached to a Canada- EU deal by the Harper government to squeeze the Canadians for all they are worth. A good portion of the blame, however, rests with provincial governments in Canada, which have added a critical element of uncertainty into the negotiations. To be sure, their presence has not made it any easier to conclude a trade pact with the Europeans. The main problem with provincial involvement revolves around their input and behaviour at the actual Canada- EU bargaining table. Ever since the 1988 Canada- U. S. Free Trade pact, provincial governments have pressed for, and received, a larger voice in Ottawa's trade negotiations. While they were not in the actual negotiating room itself, they were next door at most of the bargaining sessions - constantly pressing to be informed, consulted and placated. The Canada- EU negotiations, with the acquiescence of the Harper Conservatives, have actually seen an enhancement in the role of the provinces in these discussions. Canadian negotiators, for instance, meet with them on the eve of every Canada- EU trade round and at the close of each negotiating session. Provincial representatives, for the first time, are actually present whenever Canadian negotiators discuss " provincial tables" ( areas involving provincial jurisdiction) with their EU counterparts. Simply put, provinces have been able to formalize their role in global trade talks and thereby carve out a larger presence for themselves in the negotiations. And as we have seen with previous sets of trade negotiations ( think the World Trade Organization trade rounds, NAFTA discussions around government procurement and softwoodlumber troubles with Washington), efforts by Ottawa to satisfy provincial demands ( or where there were sharp differences of opinion over how to proceed) can needlessly complicate things, drag out the negotiations and lead to poor trade outcomes for Canada. Provincial premiers, of course, do not want to make compromises for the good of cobbling together a larger trade deal, fearing it could have negative electoral implications for them. Atlantic provinces are worried about any increase in drug costs that would follow from any extension of pharmaceutical- patent protection for the Europeans; Quebec and Alberta are concerned about making concessions in the agricultural sector ( specifically in dairy imports and beef exports) in the face of insufficient gains from the EU; and Ontario is loath to weaken its ability to use provincial subsidies and protectionist measures to benefit local manufacturers. Additionally, the Europeans have been annoyed by the fact some provinces in Canada ( namely, Quebec and Alberta) have strenuously objected to a federally directed national- securities regulator. These provinces successfully won a Supreme Court of Canada challenge in 2012, effectively killing the idea of a national regulator, by pointing to how such a scheme would interfere with the constitutional prerogatives of the provinces. Ottawa policy- makers should also be cognizant of any provincial attempt to use the EU negotiations as a means of strengthening their constitutional competency in matters of international trade. Indeed, the last thing that the federal government needs is for the provinces to extract a de facto veto over any future trade deals. I'm not for a moment suggesting provinces should be completely outside the trade loop. That's just not on. But Ottawa trade negotiators, in the final analysis, would be in a stronger bargaining position if provinces and premiers would simply step back from the entire process. It would allow them to retain a common front, to speak authoritatively with a single, cohesive voice, to make the necessary compromises, and to better advance Canada's overall trade interests. Peter McKenna is chair and professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. Winnipeg Free Press Tuesday, July 23, 2013 A 9 POLL �� TODAY'S QUESTION Are you happy the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby boy Monday? �� Vote online at winnipegfreepress. com �� PREVIOUS QUESTION Would you go to see the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival play Hollywood Hen Pit ? I'll ketchup to it; I relish the theatre 14% I like the fringe, but hold the mayo 86% TOTAL VOTES 1,248 Winnipeg Free Press est 1872 / Winnipeg Tribune est 1890 VOL 141 NO 247 2013 Winnipeg Free Press, a division of FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. Published seven days a week at 1355 Mountain Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 3B6, PH: 204- 697- 7000 BOB COX / Publisher PAUL SAMYN / Editor JULIE CARL / Deputy editor Rein in meddling premiers PETER MCKENNA F OR years, the news about Alzheimer's and other dementia- related illness has been unrelentingly grim. We don't know many of the causes. We don't have a cure. Researchers warned the number of people with brain- robbing diseases would double in the next three decades as the baby boom generation aged. In other words, if you lived long enough, you'd likely suffer from it. Finally, however, good news: Dementia rates in England and Wales plunged by 25 per cent over the past two decades, according to a recent study in the Lancet . Another recent study, from Denmark, found people in their 90s now are mentally sharper than those who reached that age a decade ago. Tentative conclusion: That slide into dementia and Alzheimer's with age may not be inevitable. New theory: Eating right, exercising and cutting out smoking is not only good for your heart and lungs... it may also help forestall dementia. Dr. Marsel Mesulam, director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University, said these studies are " very exciting. The field had become pretty depressing with the news that the older you get, the more you lose cognition to the point where this could become almost inevitable if you live long enough." Here's what anyone bent on preserving his or her grey matter into advanced age needs to know: What you eat, how well you take care of your health and how much you exercise could well make a difference. Researchers say those who keep their blood pressure and cholesterol under control are likely to fare better, possibly because they avoid dementia that is caused by mini- strokes and other vascular damage. Education, too, is associated with lower dementia rates. Those with more education tend to fare better than those with less. ( Another good reason to finish high school and go to college.) You don't need a Ph. D, says Dr. Dallas Anderson of the National Institute on Aging. But being better educated may guide choices you make over a lifetime that help shield you from dementia. Make no mistake: Your lifestyle choices matter, and not just for dementia. Researchers reported last year in the New England Journal of Medicine on the impact of high cholesterol, blood pressure, smoking and diabetes on life expectancy. If you don't have any of those factors, your risk of dying of cardiovascular disease is amazingly low: 4.7 per cent for men and 6.4 per cent for women. But if you have at least two of those factors, you have a much higher risk of heart disease or stroke. Researchers have theorized that keeping the brain active - via crossword puzzles, for instance - would help prevent a mental slide. Some suggested brisk exercise or staying socially engaged helps. Diet? Vitamins? Drugs? So far, there's no strong evidence any of these prevent dementia. Many baby boomers are terrified that their memories are slipping. If you've ever walked into a room and forgotten why, you know. If you've ever encountered a colleague on the elevator and blanked on his name, you know. If you've ever forgotten the end of a sentence while you were writing it... A sobering story in the New York Times says some people can detect their slide into early memory loss and dementia before doctors see symptoms or medical tests can detect anything amiss. Before you panic, please remember our larger point: Following this health advice isn't a guarantee that you'll be sharp into your 90s. But those who shrug about these things and say, ' it's out of my hands,' are wrong. The choices you make add healthy weeks, months or years of life, or chip away at them. " Once the brain goes downhill, it is hard to bring it back," Anderson told us. Hard to forget that. L AST month I boarded a train with my wife, Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet and activist, to travel from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet, where her mother lives. Plainclothes police were waiting for us at the platform in Lhasa. They ushered us to a nearby police station, where they spent an hour going through our belongings. They were thrilled to find in my backpack a " probe hound," as we call it in Chinese - a little electronic device that can detect wireless eavesdropping. They asked me why I, a writer, was carrying it. I told them I needed to know whether my home in Lhasa was being monitored. They confiscated the device. At the time, U. S. Ambassador Gary Locke was visiting Lhasa. My wife and I had not planned our trip to coincide with Locke's, but domestic security officials, taking no chances, held us under house arrest. Woeser is a soft- spoken person with a gentle nature, but she does have a record of speaking truth to power on the topic of Tibet. In March, she was honoured with the U. S. secretary of state's International Women of Courage Award. Chinese authorities, it seemed, wanted to ensure Locke heard no voice that might spoil the perfect image of Tibet, they had arranged for his controlled itinerary. And that meant they needed to keep Woeser at a distance. We were released after Locke departed, but plainclothes police followed us. One of our friends, noticing them, tried to take a photo, and they, noticing him, smashed his camera. Anyone who dared to speak with us got a threatening " visit" from domestic security. And I was " invited" to the police station for more interrogation about that probe hound. So I told them the full story. In the 1960s, Woeser's father, now deceased, had taken a large number of photos in Lhasa. Woeser thought it would be an interesting project - artistically, if nothing else - to revisit the same spots and take photos, half a century later, from the same angles. To make the project as nearly perfect as possible, she found her father's camera and bought film for it. Within a few days, she had taken 19 rolls of photos. When a young friend who was headed back to coastal China came to say goodbye, Woeser asked her to carry the film and get it developed. The friend agreed. The next day at airport security, agents " discovered" in her luggage a knife she had never seen before. The " discovery" triggered an " enhanced examination" of her belongings, which the police took away and then returned to her just as she was boarding the plane. She checked on the film. The boxes were the same but not the contents. Woeser had given her 19 rolls of exposed Fuji 120 film; the boxes now contained 15 rolls of unexposed Kodak 135 film. That led Woeser to suspect that listening devices had been planted in our home. Her request to her friend had been made orally and to her alone. No one else had been involved; no telephone or Internet communications were used. That was why I was carrying the probe hound. We wanted to know whether our home was bugged. I told all this to the police and then asked them to return the probe hound. They refused. It was " counterespionage equipment," I was told. Citizens have no right to own such a device. These things happened as the Edward Snowden revelations were attracting the world's attention. The Chinese government seemed gratified, even pleased. Look! The United States is no better than China, so let's all just stop the mutual carping. But let's not jump to conclusions. How comparable are the cases? Is it conceivable that the United States would tell a citizen that he has no right to a probe hound? In China, the government can enter any space of any citizen anytime it wants. It is the " counterespionage" of citizens that is prohibited. Wang Lixiong is an author and political commentator. His novels include Yellow Peril. This op- ed was translated from Chinese by Perry Link, who teaches Chinese literature at the University of California at Riverside. - The Washington Post T HE recent revelation that J. K. Rowling is the author of the critically acclaimed and - until now - commercially unsuccessful crime novel The Cuckoo's Calling has electrified the book world and solidified Rowling's reputation as a genuine writing talent: After all, if she can impress the critics without the benefit of her towering reputation, then surely her success is deserved. And yet what this episode actually reveals is the opposite: that Rowling's spectacular career is likely more a fluke of history than a consequence of her unique genius. Whenever someone is phenomenally successful, whether it's Rowling as an author, Bob Dylan as a musician or Steve Jobs as an innovator, we can't help but conclude there is something uniquely qualifying about them, something akin to " genius," that makes their successes all but inevitable. Even when we learn about their early setbacks - Rowling's original manuscript for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was rejected by no fewer than 12 publishers; Columbia Records initially refused to release Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone; Jobs was booted from Apple in the mid- 1980s - we interpret them as embarrassing oversights that were subsequently corrected rather than evidence that their success may have somehow been a product of luck or happenstance. Several years ago, my colleagues Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds at Columbia University and I challenged this conventional wisdom with an unusual experiment. We set out to prove market success is driven less by intrinsic talent than by " cumulative advantage," a rich- get- richer process in which early, possibly even random events are amplified by social feedback and produce large differences in future outcomes. To test our cumulative- advantage hypothesis, we recruited almost 30,000 participants to listen, rate and download songs by bands they had never heard of. Unbeknownst to the participants, they were randomly assigned to one of two groups: an " independent" group, which saw only the names of the bands and the songs, and a " social influence" group, whose participants could see how many times songs had been downloaded by others in the group. In addition, those in the social- influence group were assigned to one of eight different " worlds" that were created concurrently, allowing us to effectively " run" history many times. If quality determined success, the same songs should have won every time by a margin that was independent of what people knew about the choices of others. By contrast, if success was driven disproportionately by a few early downloads, subsequently amplified by social influence, the outcomes would be largely random and would also become more unequal as the social feedback became stronger. What we found was highly consistent with the cumulative- advantage hypothesis. First, when people could see what other people liked, the inequality of success increased, meaning popular songs became more popular and unpopular songs become less so. Second and more surprisingly, each song's popularity was incredibly unpredictable: One song, for example, came in first out of 48 we sampled in one " world," but it came in 40th in another. In the real world, of course, it's impossible to travel back in time and start over, so it's much harder to argue that someone who is incredibly successful may owe their success to a combination of luck and cumulative advantage rather than superior talent. But by writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, an otherwise anonymous name, Rowling came pretty close to recreating our experiment, starting over again as an unknown author and publishing a book that would have to succeed or fail on its own merits, just as Harry Potter had to 16 years ago - before anyone knew who Rowling was. Rowling made a bold move and, no doubt, is feeling vindicated by the critical acclaim the book has received. But there's a catch: Until the news leaked about the author's real identity, this critically acclaimed book had sold only 500 to 1,500 copies, depending on which report you read. What's more, had the author actually been Robert Galbraith, the book would almost certainly have continued to languish in obscurity, probably forever. The Cuckoo's Calling will now have a happy ending, and its success will only perpetuate the myth that talent is ultimately rewarded with success. What Rowling's little experiment has actually demonstrated, however, is that quality and success are even more unrelated than we found in our experiment. It might be hard for a book to become a runaway bestseller if it's unreadably bad ( although one might argue that the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Grey challenge this constraint), but it is also clear that being good, or even excellent, isn't enough. As one of the hapless editors who turned down the Galbraith manuscript put it, " When the book came in, I thought it was perfectly good - it was certainly wellwritten - but it didn't stand out." Ironically, that's probably how those 12 editors felt about the original Harry Potter manuscript. Now, of course, they look like idiots, but what both our experiment and Rowling's suggest is they might have been right all along. Had things turned out only slightly different, the real Rowling might have met with the same success as the fake Robert Galbraith, not the other way around. As hard as it is to imagine in the Harry Potter - obsessed world that we now inhabit, it's entirely plausible that in this parallel universe, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone would just be a " perfectly good" book that never sold more than a handful of copies; Rowling would still be a struggling single mother in Manchester, England; and the rest of us would be none the wiser. Duncan J. Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Everything Is Obvious ( Once You Know the Answer): How Common Sense Fails Us. - Bloomberg News The easy pettiness of Tibetan authoritarianism OTHER OPINION The Chicago Tribune Preventing dementia is in your hands J. K. Rowling - chicken or egg? By Duncan J. Watts J. K. Rowling By Wang Lixiong A_ 09_ Jul- 23- 13_ FP_ 01. indd A9 7/ 22/ 13 7: 10: 19 PM ;