Canadians consuming smartphone data at rapid rate

A recent U.S. study found that for the first time, smartphones have surpassed landlines as most Americans' primary means of communication.

In Canada, about one in five Canadians rely solely on their cellphone. While the shift to wireless isn't new, the speed of the transition is growing rapidly, with data consumption increasing at five per cent every week in Canada.

Between now and 2016, Canada will need 30 times more bandwidth than what is currently available on the networks.

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Google executive to visit North Korea

Google's executive chairman is preparing to travel to one of the last frontiers of cyberspace: North Korea.

Eric Schmidt will be travelling to North Korea on a private, humanitarian mission led by former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson that could take place as early as this month, according to two people familiar with the group's plans who asked not to be named because the visit had not been made public.

The trip would be the first by a top executive from U.S.-based Google, the world's largest internet search provider, to a country considered to have the most restrictive internet policies on the planet.

North Korea is in the midst of what leader Kim Jong Un called a modern-day "industrial revolution" in a New Year's Day speech to the nation Monday. He is pushing science and technology as a path to economic development for the impoverished country, aiming for computers in every school and digitized machinery in every factory.

Limited access to internet

However, giving citizens open access to the internet has not been part of the North's strategy. While some North Koreans can access a domestic intranet service, very few have clearance to freely surf the World Wide Web.

It's highly unlikely Google will push to launch a business venture in North Korea, said Victor Cha, a Korea expert who was a senior Asia specialist in the administration of former president George W. Bush.

"Perhaps the most intriguing part of this trip is simply the idea of it," said Cha, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington. Kim Jong Un "clearly has a penchant for the modern accoutrements of life. If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development."

It was not immediately clear who Schmidt and Richardson expect to meet in North Korea, a country that does not have diplomatic relations with the United States. North Korea has almost no business with companies in the U.S., which has banned the import of North Korean-made goods.

North Korea likely is more interested in Google products such as email, maps and other content, said Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University in South Korea.

"North Korea has made a lot of investment in science and technology, not just for military purpose but also for the industry and practical reasons," Lim said, predicting that Pyongyang may ask Google to let their experts learn from the U.S. company about upgrading its software and content.

Vocal advocate

Schmidt has been a vocal advocate of providing people around the world with internet access and technology.

As Google's chief executive for a decade until 2011, Schmidt oversaw Google's ascent from a small California startup focused on helping computer users search the internet to a global technology giant making inroads into mobile phone markets as well as mapping.

Google now has offices in more than 40 countries, including all three of North Korea's neighbours: Russia, South Korea and China, another country criticized for systematic internet censorship.

After being accused of complying with China's strict internet regulations, known as "the Great Firewall of China," Google pulled its search business from the world's largest internet market in 2010 by redirecting traffic from mainland China to Hong Kong. The company maintains other businesses in China, but a recent transparency report shows Google's services there sporadically are blocked.

Since stepping aside as CEO, Schmidt has served as Google's executive chairman, largely responsible for the company's external relationships with policymakers, business partners and governments around the world.

And in recent months, Schmidt had been working with Jared Cohen, a former U.S. State Department policy and planning adviser who heads Google's New York-based think-tank , on a book about the internet's role in shaping society. "The New Digital Age" is due to be published in April.

Schmidt's message: The internet and mobile technology have the power to lift people out of poverty and political oppression.

"The spread of mobile phones and new forms of connectivity offer us the prospect of connecting everybody," he said in commencement speech at Boston University in May. "When that happens, connectivity can revolutionize every aspect of society: politically, socially, economically."

The Richardson-Schmidt trip comes at a delicate time politically. In December, North Korea defiantly shot a satellite into space on the back of a three-stage rocket last month, a launch Pyongyang has hailed as a major step in its quest for peaceful exploration of space.

Washington and others, however, decry it as a covert test of long-range ballistic missile technology designed to send a nuclear-tipped warhead as far as California. The UN Security Council quickly condemned the launch, and is deliberating whether to further punish Pyongyang for violating bans on developing its nuclear and missile programs.

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A 'phenomenal' year for Canada's young tech companies

Overall, Canada's tech sector has just finished an excellent year and the prospects for 2013 look at least as good.

That's the picture that emerges from conversations with the CEOs of four young Canadian tech companies that were identified earlier this year as potential "tech darlings" in a CBCNews.ca story.

Given the changing calendar, we asked for their take on the year that was and the year to come, both for Canadian tech and for their own companies.

Mike McDerment, the CEO of FreshBooks, an online accounting company based in Toronto, told CBC News that 2012 was "the best year ever, absolutely phenomenal" for Canadian tech companies.

McDerment and the other three CEOs credited some of the success to an improved financing situation, something that had been a significant problem for Canadian tech start-ups in the past.

"Tech start-ups now have access to capital that they weren't seeing before," said Ryan Holmes, the CEO of HootSuite, a Vancouver based company best known for its social media dashboard.

In the past, some good ideas died on the vine because financing couldn't be raised, but now there is often competition among investors to get involved in a tech start-up, he explained.

"There's more angel investments, more people getting comfortable investing in tech, even if that's not where they made their money," added Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.

And Judy Sims, CEO of Shopcaster, noted that 2012 was "a big year for growth," with over a hundred start-up incubators in Canada.

"A lot of people are getting trained in early-stage start-ups, in moving really quickly, in testing, in methodology."

Shopify in Ottawa and Shopcaster in Toronto are both e-commerce companies, with Shopfiy selling a platform to operate an online business and Shopcaster providing a platform for brick and mortar stores to sell their products online.

Worried about RIM

Thorsten Heins, president and CEO of Research In Motion, talks about the new BlackBerry 10 operating system at the BlackBerry Jam Americas conference in San Jose, Calif., on Sept. 25. (Eric Risberg/Associated Press)

The CEOs did identify one big issue of concern going into 2013, the fate of Research In Motion, arguably still Canada's true tech giant, although in the doldrums for almost two years now.

For Canada to have a company of RIM's size and significance means "there are literally thousands of people who know how to do stuff in a technology world and for the tech community, having that to draw on as you build your teams... and build new companies altogether, is just exceptional," McDerment said.

McDerment, for one, has been saddened by the lack of faith and support for RIM in Canada. As RIM shows, "tech companies build up quickly and they can encounter massive problems quickly as well," he says.

"It takes a lot of support and a lot of excitement to build one of these companies and to get through bad times, it takes that as well."

RIM's future should become clearer after it launches Blackberry 10, its new operating system, on Jan. 30.

Promising year ahead

The coming year for Canadian tech should build on the successes of 2012, according to the CEOs, especially if the corner has been truly turned on the financing problems of the previous few years.

Sims said that for start-ups, it's all about the talent, "where the talent's going and where the talent's getting trained." And she says that today's talented young graduates and recent graduates prefer to work in start-ups more than older companies.

Local universities also play a big role in whether a city will become a successful tech hub.

Holmes hopes to see an increase in the number of graduates this year because of an emerging "shortage of talented engineers." He's also concerned about a tech talent drain from Canada to the U.S., especially to Silicon Valley.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke founded the e-commerce platform company in 2006 in Ottawa. (Ben Courtice/Shopify)

For his part, Lütke is concerned about what are called "exits," in industry jargon, after 2012 saw a number of successful Canadian entrepreneurs sell their companies.

The latest takeover – announced two weeks ago – saw California-based Oracle willing to pay $871 million US for Eloqua, a Canadian cloud software company that went public last year.

His concern is that too often the exits take place too early, while the company still has major growth potential.

However, McDerment views the large number of successful exits in 2012 as a proof that Canadians "can build very successful and attractive companies."

Small business approach

Looking at the broader e-commerce sector, McDerment expects to see more innovative products available for small businesses.

Noting that the internet "has made the network of small business owners cost-effective to reach," especially now that many tasks are better done over network-based cloud-computing, "small businesses are going to benefit enormously in terms of productivity, efficiency and what not."

"We've seen an amazing paradigm shift in how the world communicates and does business," adds HootSuite's Holmes.

He argues that the shift has been consumer-led, with business following along. "Because there are so many people on social media right now, businesses need to be there."

He expects the trend to the social business will be huge in 2013.

For Holmes, that means increasing corporate demand for social media management systems, more use of social media tools inside companies and big things for companies that cater to social media on the mobile internet.

'Canada's smartest company'?

The CEO's of these four potential tech darlings were clearly upbeat about their own company's prospects.

Shopify has just finished a year in which the December issue of Profit magazine called it "Canada's smartest company." It was also ranked the number three online retail website, after Amazon and eBay, in a recent study. Lütke said he was a bit surprised by the finding, noting, "it's slightly disingenuous to take Shopify as a whole and then compare us to Amazon," since Shopify offers a platform that has allowed others to create something like 40,000 separate online stores.

Shopify doubled its revenue last year and Lütke expects it will do that again in 2013. Staff numbers have also doubled, from 70 to 140.

Ryan Holmes, front centre, poses with HootSuite employees at a party at Hootsuite's Vancouver headquarters in 2012. HootSuite will soon move to new offices with space for up to 500 workers. (Courtesy HootSuite)

HootSuite also had a year of rapid growth. The company beat its financial projections, took over Seesmic, a smaller competitor, and opened offices in London, U.K.

HootSuite staff numbers went from 100 to 235 and its new Vancouver headquarters will be able to house 500 employees.

Holmes said HootSuite will be pushing more international expansion out of North America in 2013 and hinted at new products that could change the market.

Shopcaster, the youngest of the four companies and not yet two years old, also hopes to go international this year.

Sims told CBC News that 2012 "was a big growth year and also we had major pivot in the late summer, from a product browsing and sharing application to an e-commerce site."

Shopcaster also added the 'e' to their name, Sims replaced fellow founder Matt O'Leary as CEO, and the company Shopcaster was one of three winners of the Canadian Technology Accelerator award from the Canadian Innovation Exchange.

Shopcaster works with stores in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal and has just begun launching in New York City.

Cross-border shipping will be in place by the end of January. San Francisco is next and then Sims says the company will open up the site to stores anywhere, as long as they have a bricks and mortar existence.

For its part, FreshBooks made the move to cloud accounting in 2012 and McDerment says it has been "extremely well-received," with November, the latest month with complete data, their best month ever.

Pointing to the mobile apps that FreshBooks rolled out in 2012, he said that their focus next year will be "about reminding small business owners that there's choice in the products that they use."

TOMORROW: The four CEOs tell us about some of the other Canadian tech companies that impress them.

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Internet culture: Has the GIF grown up?

The GIF — or Graphics Interchange Format — has long been defined by silly and lighthearted contributions to online culture, but it has also gained steam as a serious and increasingly accessible storytelling tool.

In a milestone year, the compressed file format celebrated its 25th birthday and enjoyed recognition as the Oxford dictionary's U.S. word of the year for 2012.

'The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism.' —Katherine Martin

The most popular GIFs shared online are typically animated, colourful, and intentionally entertaining. They feature animals doing funny things, accidental happenings and snippets from popular culture.

It's "catnip for the internet," says popular tech site Gizmodo.

But GIFs also played a role in major news stories in 2012, a large part of the reason the Oxford University Press defined the word this way:

GIF: verb. To create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event): "He GIFed the highlights of the debate."

"Like so many other relics of the '80s, [the GIF] has never been trendier," Katherine Martin, head of the U.S. Dictionaries Program at OUP, said in a statement.

"The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace."

Oxford University Press highlighted the amount of GIFing done during the 2012 Olympics in London, exemplified by The Atlantic's coverage of the vault event.

The magazine wove a series botched landings between paragraphs that referenced them, an approach that was more telling than stills and also easier on the internet connection than videos because compressed images load more quickly. Other mainstream media outlets, like the New York Times, Business Insider and CBC News have experimented with the format in ways that would have raised eyebrows in previous years.

During the U.S. presidential election, for instance, many media outlets live-GIFed key moments and catchphrases — such as Mitt Romney's much repeated "binders full or women."

The GIFs of the people

But journalists are not the only ones who have been working GIFs into their routines.

Last year saw the creation of apps like WeGIF and Motiongraph that put the tools of GIF-making in the hands of the masses. Many such apps are competing to become the GIFing equivalent of the wildly popular (if recently criticized) picture sharing platform Instagram.

One of the top contenders is Cinemagram, a small startup with roots in Montreal, which has attracted millions of active users since launching as a free app in March.

The number of people signing up each day is in the tens of thousands, says community manager Katie Sehl.

"We don't think it's just a flash in the pan," she said, adding that GIFing will increasingly become one of the ways people are communicating. Many users, she noted, have used the app to tell news stories from their point of view.

"The news aspect is something we had not anticipated initially, but are really excited about," Sehl said. "Every news story is huge for our users: Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 election, even Black Friday."

Devin Feldman, a 19-year-old U.S. college student who runs the popular Twitter account @GIF_Master, says the use of GIFs in news coverage could make stories more appealing to his generation.

"Honestly, I think about Harry Potter," he said, referencing newspapers shown in the boy wizard movies where the photographs move. The politician on the front page, he said, would seem more alive.

"You don't just see some bad angle, but the reaction on their face."

Many sites that feature GIFs prominently, like blog hosting platform Tumblr, still focus on lighthearted fare and cheeky ways of expressing emotion. However, several now include newsworthy GIFs. The GIF Hound's Tumblr blog, for instance, is dedicated to capturing key moments from current events.

"The Obama campaign released video today of the president thanking his staff post-re-election victory," notes the curator in one entry. The GIF featured the moment U.S. President Barack Obama wiped a tear from his eye. "He got a little emotional."

If GIFs of a serious nature become more commonplace, and if higher resolution GIFs become easier to make and share, the usage of the 25-year-old format could gain new life and become more widespread.

Sehl said pigeonholing the format as frivolous ignores its expressive potential. She has seen users create GIFs about issues from the headlines as well as the emotionally charged stories from their own lives.

"One user used Cinemagram to track his brother's progression in coming out of a coma," she said. "GIFs can be whatever you want them to be."

[View the story "GIFing the news of the day" on Storify]

Storified by CBC News Community· Fri, Dec 21 2012 16:15:29

Some have called 2012 the year of the GIF, especially as its usage continues to expand into the realms of journalism, research and art. Will this 25-year-old format shed its reputation for exaggerated facial expressions and psychedelic scenes?

Here are some news GIFs that illustrate the image file format's serious side.

November: Barack Obama gives an emotional thank you speech to a group of campaign volunteers in Chicago a day after his re-election as U.S. president.

Tumblr

October: NASA reveals images of Hurricane Sandy as seen from space.

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September: Egyptian police and protesters clash in Cairo following protests over an American-produced low-budget video that mocks the Prophet Muhammad.

Tumblr

September: U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Pentagon on the anniversary of 9/11.

Tumblr

August: The long-anticipated landing of NASA's Mars rover is a success. Curiosity, a moving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target. Here's a glimpse at its descent.

Tumblr

August: A wind-battered sign is captured on camera as tropical storm Isaac is officially upgraded to a hurricane.

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July: Movie theatre shooting suspect James Holmes appears dazed during a court appearance in Aurora, Colo. In all,  Holmes faced 142 charges in connection with the shooting rampage at a midnight showing of the Batman movie.

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July: Seven promising young British athletes lit the Olympic cauldron during the 2012 London games. Several rings of fire came together to form one blazing torch.

Bleacherreport

June: As in the iconic image, a lone activist blocks the advance of a column of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Chinese police aggressively deterred dissent on the 20th anniversary of the crackdown in June.

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What do you think of this usage of GIFs? Would you like to see more of them in daily news stories? 

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Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain

The same primitive impulses that helped early man survive against the evolutionary odds are drawing shopper Denam Drew to a pair of tan suede shoes. At least that's the theory behind neuromarketing, an emerging field that uses the tools of neuroscience to understand the secrets of the consumer brain.

Drew is holding the shoe in his hand while researcher Adam Spadaro stands behind him watching his brain waves light up a computer screen in colourful flares of red, yellow and green. All of this is possible because Drew is wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap with electrodes placed all over his head, recording the electrical impulses on the surface of his brain. He's also wearing eye tracking goggles to reveal exactly what he's looking at when the computer records a flash of emotion.

"The goggles use the pupils as a reference point to track where your eyes are looking and wherever the eyes go, that's a measure of the attention of the brain and that's key information for marketers," Spadaro says. He's completing a PhD in cognitive psychology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, but at the same time he's using his scientific knowledge to help get one of Canada's first neuromarketing companies off the ground.

"It would be really useful for a brand to know if this product is or is not capturing a consumer's attention," Spadaro says, struggling to balance his laptop computer in the middle of the shoe store and, at the same time, monitor the flashing images of Drew's brain on the screen.

"It's really giving you a lot of insight into his emotional response, much more so than if you were just to ask him how he's feeling. Sometimes you can get a truer response to his emotion. That offers a lot of insight that neuroscience has been taking advantage of for several decades now and marketers are now beginning to take advantage of it."

What if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level?

Diana Lucaci is also here at this Toronto shopping centre to supervise the research. She is the founder of True Impact Marketing, which she says is the first and only neuromarketing research company in Canada that uses both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to try to read consumers' minds. Her company owns the EEG cap and eye tracking goggles, but when she wants to use an fMRI machine, she has to buy time from hospitals and universities.

"The three key metrics we measure are engagement, attention, and memory," she says. "We're able to measure levels of positive and negative emotion as well. A company would want to know if its brand elicits a particular emotional response, if it's positive or negative at a particular point in time," she says. "That is invaluable information for marketers because it takes a lot of guess-work out. You're not launching a campaign and crossing your fingers hoping you know what your customers feel and what they want."

"My formal education is in neuroscience from the University of Toronto," she says, "following that, I've worked progressively in roles in marketing and communications."

"As a marketer, I always wanted better tools before we went to market with a campaign. When you know that a campaign requires millions of dollars and putting it together takes months and months, and the only data you have is a survey, and often you don't even have that, so you just cross your fingers and hope that people pay attention."

Traditional market research has always tried to analyze how consumers think and feel about a product or a brand, using focus groups and surveys. The problem is, sometimes consumers don't tell the truth. "In focus groups, what often happens is that you get people skewing their answer to what they think the marketer wants to hear or what will make them sound better in front of the other participants," Lucaci says.

But what if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level? The theory is that consumer motivation starts there, with a series of brain chemical triggers rooted in primal neural circuits that evolved to help humans make decisions that would help or hinder survival. Assuming consumer choice is not purely rational, but rather is strongly biased by emotion, neuromarketers believe that if they can read pleasure or disinterest at this unconscious level, they can better predict what consumers will buy or avoid.

How the brain makes consumer choices

One of the few studies to examine the brain activity of consumer choice attempted to answer an old marketing question: why do some people say they like Coke better than Pepsi?

Dr. Reid Montague, at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, scanned the brains of test subjects while they tasted Coke and Pepsi. During the blind taste test, the brain imaging showed that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was active. "This area of the brain is strongly implicated in signaling basic appetitive aspects of reward," Montague wrote. So when the test subjects didn't know the brand name of the particular sweet, black liquid they were tasting, their brains processed the choice based on taste.

People need to be aware of neuromarketing and its ethical implications, said Ruth Lanius. (CBC)

When Montague asked the subjects which one they liked better, they were equally split between Coke and Pepsi. But when Montague repeated the taste test, this time showing the test subjects a Coke can and telling them they were tasting Coke, suddenly new brain areas got involved: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the midbrain, areas that have been associated with memory and based on emotion.

"There is a dramatic effect of the Coke label on subjects' behavioural preference," Montague wrote in his paper. Once they knew they were drinking coke, the test subjects said they preferred Coke in the labelled cups significantly more than unlabelled Coke and more than Pepsi.

"We hypothesize that cultural information biases preference decisions," he concluded.

Lucaci cites this study as proof that consumer choice is not based on a rational judgment of which product is superior. "So what that tells us is that people regardless of their brain telling them, 'this tastes better,' people have a positive brand association with a product that overpowers the emotion of taste," Lucaci says.

Neuromarketing raises ethical questions

What does Montague think about the emerging field of neuromarketing, after this research?

"Neuromarketing could be a legitimate pursuit especially in areas where one wants to determine how much someone values a product," he said in an email. "In neuroimaging, this is a rapidly developing area — the study of valuation (not neuromarketing per se) — and there are many possible uses. For example, it may be possible to produce neural focus-group approaches to certain aspects of branding, desirability, and so on. Such approaches could in principle be cheaper and more reliable than other focus group methods."

"However, I do not see this kind of approach supplanting anything. A person's purchase behaviour will always be paramount and the brain science will continue to develop."

But are there any ethical issues that should be considered? Could neuromarketing data be used to manipulate consumer behaviour?

Shopper Denam Drew wears eye tracking goggles to reveal exactly what he's looking at as a computer records a measure of the attention in his brain. (CBC)

"Of course you can influence the brain," said Ruth Lanius, a neuroscientist at Western University in London, Ontario, in an interview. "I think it's interesting, how can we influence the brain at an implicit level, to get you more interested in something."

"It's something that definitely has ethical implications that need to be reviewed and discussed, and that people need to be made aware of," she told me.

In an interview, Queen's University behavioural neuroscientist Richard Beninger was asked if he believed the developments in neuroscience could be used to unconsciously influence human behaviour.

"I'm interested to understand how the brain works, that's what's driven me for decades," he told me. "I find it difficult to say well I'm going to stop doing neuroscience because what we're going to find is going to be so powerful, we're going to be able to change the course of mankind. As one small scientist with one small lab, it's hard to think that I'm going to have some big impact like you're talking about. But perhaps I have to start thinking about these things."

"We're learning more all the time and with knowledge, comes power, and with knowledge comes the potential to abuse the knowledge," he said.

Back in the shoe store, watching Drew scanning the shelves wearing eye tracking goggles, Lucaci dismisses these concerns.

"It's not any more dangerous than running a survey and asking people what they think and pressing a button to pick what product they like," she said. "This time, though, we're seeing the reaction without having to ask them anything. It's a lot cleaner in that regard."

"It's literally impossible to design a super ad that will make people want to buy something they don't want to buy. The brain simply doesn't work like that," she says.

How did Drew feel about people watching his brain while he looked at shoes?

"It's a little weird but it's not too invasive. I don't have too crazy reactions to shoes," he said, walking through the mall with his head wired up in an EEG cap and still wearing the eye tracking goggles.

All of this is just the beginning of neuromarketing in Canada. So far Lucaci's company has only one client, and she won't reveal the name until later next year when she intends to publish a case study. But the industry is growing. The first Neuromarketing World Forum was held last April in Amsterdam. And the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association says there are now more than 75 companies doing neuromarketing research all over the world.

This is the first in a four part series called Inside Your Brain on CBC's The National, World at Six, and CBC.ca exploring how modern neuroscience is changing the way we think about the way we think. In part two, Kelly Crowe discovers how an ancient system in our living brains can explain our cravings for food, sex and relationships.

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Fructose may spur overeating, brain scans suggest

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the North American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

Try to control the size of your drink sugar-sweetened beverages, as well as how often you drink them, an endocrinologist suggests. (Andrew Burton/Reuters)

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 per cent fructose and 45 per cent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded U.S. study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Thin and sick?

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 per cent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement.

"However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

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Kyoto climate change treaty sputters to a sorry end

The controversial and ineffective Kyoto Protocol's first stage comes to an end today, leaving the world with 58 per cent more greenhouse gases than in 1990, as opposed to the five per cent reduction its signatories sought.

From the beginning, the treaty that was adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, was problematic. Opponents denied the science of climate change and claimed the treaty was a socialist plot. Environmentalists decried the lack of ambition in Kyoto and warned of dire consequences for future generations.

But the goal of the treaty was simple.

"We hoped that we would be able to reduce greenhouse gases substantially, but that it was a first step," explained Christine Stewart, the Liberal environment minister who negotiated in Kyoto on Canada's behalf.

The Kyoto Protocol was an initiative that came out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It recognized that climate change was a result of greenhouse gases created by human industrial activity. The idea was that rich nations, which had already benefited from industrialization, would reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the first part of the treaty and developing nations would join in later.

Although the protocol was adopted in 1997, it didn't to come into force until 2005. In the intervening eight years, countries set reduction targets for themselves and ratified the agreement.

"At the time we didn't realize how complicated it would be to get the Kyoto Protocol ratified and for it to enter into force internationally," said Steven Guilbeault, co-founder of Equiterre, a Montreal-based environmental charity.

Problems from the beginning

Right off the bat, there were problems. The U.S., the world's biggest emitter at the time, signed up but never ratified.

And Canada ratified the treaty but with targets that were unachievable in the opinion of many.

'If we ratify this thing, we'll never hit our targets.'—Bob Mills, former Reform and Conservative MP

Bob Mills was a Reform Party MP from Alberta who went to Kyoto with the government. He was in Johannesburg five years later when the country agreed to reduce emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels.

"If we ratify this thing we'll never hit our targets," Mills warned Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien at the time, because he was worried Canada's international reputation would take a hit.

To his disappointment, Mills was right. As 2005 rolled around, Canada was nowhere near to having a plan and our emissions were rising. When he entered government a year later, the Conservatives started to lay the groundwork for much less ambitious greenhouse gas reductions.

"In 2006, it was a pretty tough situation because nothing really had been accomplished. We had these targets in front of us, they were impossible to hit," he said.

Taking a pass on Kyoto targets

And so, Canada's new government decided not to bother. They worried about the harm it would cause Canada's economy and the fact that only developed nations had to cut back while economic up-and-comers like China, India and Brazil could pollute as much as they wanted.

"We would have to pull every truck and car off the street, shut down every train and ground every plane to reach the Kyoto target the Liberals negotiated for Canada," argued Conservative Environment Minister Rona Ambrose in 2006.

Instead, the Conservative government opted to begin a long process of overhauling all of Canada's environmental legislation. That meant scaling back on Kyoto commitments that couldn't be met.

Canada announced to the world that we wouldn't be able to meet our Kyoto targets in 2007. Three years later we set new, easier-to-hit targets — 17 per cent below 2005 levels — that keep us in line with the Americans.

'Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past'

The final nail in the coffin for Canada's involvement in Kyoto went in on Dec. 13, 2011.

"Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past," announced Environment Minister Peter Kent at a news conference in Ottawa soon after he got off the plane from a climate change conference in Durban, South Africa. Kent gave one year's notice and, as of Dec. 15 this year, Canada was no longer a party to the Kyoto Protocol.

Environment Minister Peter Kent announces that Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto accord, outside the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Dec. 12, 2011. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

While there is plenty of blame to be shared between the Liberals and Conservatives for Canada's failure to meet its targets and remain in Kyoto, the problem of climate change remains a growing threat.

"There is building evidence that, in fact, climate change is accelerating. It's closer than we had thought earlier … are running out of time," worries John Stone, a Canadian climate scientist and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore.

If there is anything good that came out of the Kyoto experience, it is that the issue it tried and failed to tackle is now top of mind, says Guilbeault.

"That's probably one of the biggest accomplishments of the Kyoto Protocol, is making climate change something that's part of our everyday life."

Some countries have signed on to a second round of Kyoto commitments beginning Jan. 1, 2013, and stretching through to 2020, but they only represent 15 per cent of current world emissions.

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Tweeting the news as it happened in 2012

[View the story "Tweeting the news as it happened in 2012" on Storify]

Storified by CBC News Community· Fri, Dec 21 2012 11:22:05

In 2012, when something happens that will end up on the news, often the first place people write about it is on Twitter.

Ordinary people turn to social media to tell the world - and show the world - what is happening while it is happening right in front of them.

These are some of the most compelling tweets and photos from the year's biggest news stories in Canada and the U.S.

The Eaton Centre Shooting

On June 2, gunfire broke out in the food court of Toronto's Eaton Centre shopping mall. One person died on the scene, and another man died of his injuries a few days later. The shooting took place in daylight hours, in a crowded food court in one of the busiest public places in the city.

The Toronto Blue Jays' Brett Lawrie broke the news to many on Twitter with this series of tweets:

Pretty sure someone just let off a round bullets in eaton center mall .. Wow just sprinted out of the mall ... Through traffic ...Brett Lawrie

People sprinting up the stairs right from where we just were ... Wow wow wowBrett Lawrie

This is serious .. Oh my god http://pic.twitter.com/J5KaU9qjBrett Lawrie

Rattled right nowBrett Lawrie

In the Eaton Center. Cops everywhere. Ambulance everywhere. Being told someone started shooting in the food court.Jessica Redfield

Just saw a young boy, maybe young teen, rushed out on a stretcher. Face covered. Shirt off. How could someone do thisJessica Redfield

She wrote about what she saw in her blog.

Late Night Thoughts on the Eaton Center ShootingI can't get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won't go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in th...

The Aurora, Colo., shootings

Of course we're seeing Dark Knight. Redheaded Texan spitfire, people should never argue with me.Maybe I should get in on those NHL talks...Jessica Redfield

@jessespector MOVIE DOESN'T START FOR 20 MINUTESJessica Redfield

Shots fired in the theater. #batman #aurora #coloradoCaitlin

Oh God, I don't know what to do.Caitlin

Everybody please pray for my friend Alex.Caitlin

Have just evacuated our theater in Aurora. There was a shooting in our auditorium. I am safeZach Eastman

I know I saw one man with blood running down his hands being carried into a cop carZach Eastman

Movie theater just got shot up while we were watching Batman. I'm ok a little freaked out. Walking to Isaac's house with a group of friends.Jaime Marshall

Saw three different people who had been shot but hear there are a lot more.Jaime Marshall

We did see bullet holes n the left side wall of our Theater 8. Sounded like someone setting off fire crackers n our theater. #aurorashootingJaime Marshall

Alex didn't make it.Caitlin

Alex Teves was a Arizona basketball fan, loved Spider-Man, was an amazing therapist, and died a hero.Caitlin

He could make us all laugh with his Gollum impression. I'll never forget that.Caitlin

Elliot Lake mall collapse

Canadians were horrified to learn that people were trapped in the Algo Centre Mall in Elliot Lake, Ont., after a section of the roof collapsed on June 23.

At first, as many as 30 people were thought to be trapped, but the list was quickly narrowed down to just two people: Lucie Alwyn and Doloris Perizzolo. Both women died in the roof collapse. An inquiry into the cause of the disaster is currently delayed.

Kevin McSheffrey, the editor of the Elliot Lake Standard, was nearby at the time, and captured audio of the roof collapsing.

Collapsing mall roof captured on audio recording: The sounds of the collapsing roof at the Algo Centre Mall were... http://bit.ly/PRVcGMElliot Lake Standard

Trevor Tymchuk, whose Twitter profile indicates he lives in Elliot Lake, tweeted about the effects of the mall collapse on his town.

Several hearses seen in Elliot Lake (there's normally only one in town).Trevor Tymchuk

Collins Hall being used as an information centre for those looking for missing people in mall collapse.Trevor Tymchuk

People are reporting dead relatives, but no official word from police.Trevor Tymchuk

#ElliotLake It's hard listening to the interviews on the radio, especially when the host starts crying.Trevor Tymchuk

#ElliotLake Also when they describe that the crowded lottery kiosk was there one second, then gone the next.Trevor Tymchuk

@StartingPtCNN Thank you for your amazing coverage Soledad! Here we are marooned in Red Hook, Brooklyn!! #Sandy http://pic.twitter.com/VAHFiLXXNick Cope

Partial building collapse from #Sandy winds http://pic.twitter.com/MuXrjFGLDavid Common

80 feet of boardwalk floating free at Atlantic and New Hampshire Ave. #sandy #acpress http://pic.twitter.com/chDrRSVrJitney Guy

Haida Gwaii earthquake 

@IainMcKechnie major shaking, glasses broken, power out but no major structural damage. SCARY AS HELL THOUGHJen B

Some damage at the #portclements museum #haidagwaiiJen B

Little aftershocks,cleaning up broken bits & scared to go upstairs.Could hardly stand up during the quake, thought the house was coming downJen B

@CoastalFrances thanks we're usually 30 mins behind wiah point in Masset. Heard they are evacuating parts of MassetJen B

The only thing I had to get info was twitter via wifi -who wants to be on a landline while the floor ripples under you #Idontreccomend #rantJen B

Too dark for pics but can hear waves coming in, much like when big boat passes, extremely thankful for low tideJen B

Another strong aftershock just now - rattling glasses #haidagwaii #earthquakeJen B

On way up to evacuation zone in Masset. #haidagwaii #tsunami http://instagr.am/p/RUSJdxKYd0/Simon Corkum

evacuating wave about to hit in 4 min in cumshaw inlet in Haida Gwaii. Our Lodge is about to take a direct hit. #earthquake #TsunamiFrontier Farwest

@epicflyfishing did you see the tsunami wave? Is everyone okay?Wil Fundal

@wilfundal im not there but our friends in Sandspit are at highest elevation watching. Our lodge there is on the beach but its emptyFrontier Farwest

Folks in Sandspit are bracing for the big wave. Nothing yet, Tide is at 4 feet right now so that is in our favour #earthquake #TsunamiFrontier Farwest

everyone in sandpit, Haida Gwaii has gone to the highest point called Hydro Hill, still no sign of any wave #earthquake #TsunamiFrontier Farwest

Some bigger waves hit the shore a few minutes ago but we're on the lee side of the spit and its low tide. We may be OK #earthquake #TsunamiFrontier Farwest

Everything seems OK, everyone is starting to leave the evacuation area #earthquake #Tsunami Thanks for all the good wishesFrontier Farwest

North Beach today amid the rumbling #haidagwaii http://instagr.am/p/RWB44Bt-Hf/Jen B

8 miles away from my home. I am in disbelief...Ben

Lots of camera crews over here http://pic.twitter.com/PxyBFMDKAdam Bartlett

Some of the relatives of those who were in the school tweeted about the attack.

my little brother is fine...just really shaken up as soon as he heard gun shots he was told to hid face down in he corners and as soon asGary Braun

the oe gunman died out of two the all made a ran for the firehouseGary Braun

My nieces and nephew at Sandy Hook school are fine. But horrible situationRep. John Frey

Sister, driving to Sandy Hook, came upon some 1st graders running from school. She took them to Police Dept. Kids were shaken. HeartbreakingRep. John Frey

@johnfrey There were reports 5 kids escaped school very early,seen running across field,true or false? if true,safe home yet? is cold outeditchick

@editchick My sister actually took 5 first graders to police station. If they are the same kids, they're okRep. John Frey

24 hrs ago, I was at Sandy Hook Elementary School Holiday Concert. Pure innocence, now shattered. Impact of today setting in... So, so sadRep. John Frey

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Check your junk mail? Ottawa's anti-spam rules still missing

If you're wondering what happened to the Conservative government's much-publicized anti-spam law, you're not alone.

Many consumers and opposition MPs want to know why the legislation, passed two years ago, still is not in force.

"I think that this demonstrates that the Conservative government doesn't take privacy issues seriously," said NDP MP Charmaine Borg, who notes that another piece of legislation, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act that also governs the Privacy Commissioner's Office, is overdue for a review by Parliament.

"So we're seeing this constant lateness and meanwhile technology continues to evolve and there's new threats that are posed and citizens are more and more concerned about their privacy online."

The federal government has been studying how to fight unsolicited email since 2004.

Canada's Anti-Spam Act, passed in December 2010, aims to regulate all forms of commercial electronic communication including tweets and text messages.

Among other measures, it would prohibit businesses from sending messages to customers without their consent, require them to have an easy mechanism to allow people to unsubscribe and gives the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission the power to enforce the law and impose penalties of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million for organizations.

"This law will allow the CRTC in particular to take action against unsolicited spam, malware and botnets," said the CRTC's chief compliance and enforcement officer Andrea Rosen. She adds the commission's powers would also extend beyond Canada's borders.

"If the spammer is offshore, we have the ability under the law to co-operate with foreign governments, to share information and to bring proceedings together against individuals that are offshore," Rosen said.

Rosen said the CRTC finalized its regulations in March 2012 and has set up a Spam Reporting Centre where consumers will be able to lodge complaints. She said the commission is ready to enforce the law, once it comes into force.

The holdup is with Industry Canada.

Consultation on regulations continues

No one at the department agreed to be interviewed, but in an emailed response to questions from CBC News, a spokesperson explained that Industry Canada received "significant input" to its first set of draft regulations in August 2011 and is "currently finalizing a new set of draft regulations for pre-publication, which will include a second round of public consultation."

Tricia Kuhl, a corporate, commercial and technology lawyer at Blakes in Montreal, says the legislation is shaping up to be the world's toughest anti-spam law.

"My clients are saying the government has gone too far because it's onerous, it's burdensome, it might actually end up crippling their business because they're unable now to reach certain clients they want to reach," she said.

Kuhl points to one of the proposed rules that would prevent organizations from sending email to clients after two years, unless there was new business. She says a five-year time frame would be more reasonable.

"Businesses are grappling with the difficulty of how they're going to actually get consent from people who actually want to receive their emails or prospective clients they need to reach."

At the rate things are going now, Kuhl says she doesn't expect the law to come into force until late 2013 at the earliest.

That doesn't sit well with Joanna Blink, a Toronto woman who says she gets a lot of unsolicited email. "Pass a law, make it so and get on with it. Do something about it."

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Nobel-winning Italian biologist dies at 103

Rita Levi-Montalcini, an Italian biologist who conducted underground research in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, died at her home in Rome on Sunday. She was 103 and had worked well into her final years.

Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, announcing her death in a statement, called it a great loss "for all of humanity." He praised her as someone who represented "civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time."

Italy's so-called "Lady of the Cells," a Jew who lived through anti-Semitic discrimination and the Nazi invasion, became one of her country's leading scientists and shared the Nobel medicine prize in 1986 with American biochemist Stanley Cohen for their groundbreaking research carried out in the United States. Her research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia.

Neurologist and senator for life Rita Levi Montalcini was a Nobel Prize winner for Medicine in 1986. (Riccardo De Luca/Associated Press)

Italy honoured Levi-Montalcini in 2001 by making her a senator-for-life.

A petite woman with upswept white hair, she kept an intensive work schedule well into old age. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she said in 2009.

Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, to a Jewish family in the northern city of Turin. At age 20 she overcame her father's objections that women should not study and obtained a degree in medicine and surgery from Turin University in 1936.

She studied under top anatomist Giuseppe Levi, whom she often credited for her own success and for that of two fellow students and close friends, Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, who also became separate Nobel Prize winners. Levi and Levi-Montalcini were not related.

After graduating, Levi-Montalcini began working as a research assistant in neurobiology but lost her job in 1938 when Italy's Fascist regime passed laws barring Jews from universities and major professions. As Second World War neared, Levi-Montalcini created a makeshift lab in her bedroom where she began studying the development of chicken embryos, which would later lead to her major discovery of mechanisms that regulate growth of cells and organs.

With eggs becoming a rarity due to the war, the young scientist biked around the countryside to buy them from farmers. She was soon joined in her secret research by Levi, her university mentor, who was also Jewish and who became her assistant.

"She worked in primitive conditions," Italian astrophysicist Margherita Hack told Sky TG24 TV in a tribute to her fellow scientist. "She is really someone to be admired."

Worked as a doctor for refugees

Another Italian scientist, who worked for some 40 years with Levi-Montalcini, including in the United States, said the work the Nobel laureate did on nerve growth factor was continuing. "Over the years, this field of investigation has become ever more important in the world of neuroscience," said Pietro Calissano, who began studying under Levi-Montalcini in 1965.

The 1943 German invasion of Italy forced the Levi-Montalcini family to flee to Florence and live underground. After the Allies liberated the city, she worked as a doctor at a centre for refugees.

'My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely.'—Rita Levi-Montalcini on never having married or having children

In 1947 Levi-Montalcini was invited to the United States, where she remained for more than 20 years, which she called "the happiest and most productive" of her life. She held dual Italian-U.S. citizenship.

During her research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she discovered nerve growth factor, the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells.

The research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia. It also led to the discovery by Stanley Cohen of another substance, epidermal growth factor, which stimulates the proliferation of epithelial cells.

The two shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986. After retiring in the late 1970s, she continued to work as a guest professor and wrote several books to popularize science.

She created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation to grant scholarships and promote educational programs worldwide, particularly for women in Africa. She then became active in Parliament, especially between 2006 and 2008, when she and other life senators would cast their votes to back the thin majority of centre-left Premier Romano Prodi.

Levi-Montalcini had no children and never married, fearing such ties would undercut her independence.

"I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense," she said in a 2006 interview. "My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."

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