An energy superpower or a super sales pitch? Building the case through an examination of Canadian newspapers coverage of oil sands

In 2006, Stephen Harper boldly pronounced Canada as an “emerging energy superpower” to a variety of international audiences, including at the G8 meeting in London. While this label is likely more representative of a marketing campaign than reality (Hester, 2007), it is important to understand the degree to which the Canadian media has embraced it. This paper determines the extent to which Canada’s national newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, and its largest paper, the Toronto Star, adopted the “energy superpower” frame in their reporting about Alberta’s oil sands over a 25-month period. The oil sands were selected as a case study because proponents of Canada as an “energy superpower” cite the development of Alberta’s oil sands as a key component of the country’s new-found status. To discover how this new label was intertwined into the broader discourse on oil sands development, I used content and discourse analysis to examine newspaper stories over 300 words in length that contain “oil sands” or “tar sands” in the lead paragraph and/or headline. While my study found few instances of news stories containing the term, it did find that these newspapers more closely adopted Harper’s underlying ideas about what an energy superpower is than the more activist government traditionally associated with the ter

Improving KantanMT training efficiency with fast align

In recent years, statistical machine translation (SMT) has been widely deployed in translators’ workflow with significant improvement of productivity. However, prior to invoking an SMT system to translate an unknown text, an SMT engine needs to be built. As such, building speed of the engine is essential for the translation workflow, i.e., the sooner an engine is built, the sooner it will be exploited. With the increase of the computational capabilities of recent technology the building time for an SMT engine has decreased substantially. For example, cloud-based SMT providers, such as KantanMT, can built high-quality, ready-to-use, custom SMT engines in less than a couple of days. To speed-up furthermore this process we look into optimizing the word alignment process that takes place during building the SMT engine. Namely, we substitute the word alignment tool used by KantanMT pipeline – Giza++ – with a more efficient one, i.e., fast_align. In this work we present the design and the implementation of the KantanMT pipeline that uses fast_align in place of Giza++. We also conduct a comparison between the two word alignment tools with industry data and report on our findings. Up to our knowledge, such extensive empirical evaluation of the two tools has not been done before

COVID-19 and Young Fathers: Negotiating ‘earning’ and ‘caring’ through the COVID-19 crisis: change and continuities in the parenting and employment trajectories of young fathers

In this briefing paper we explore the earning and caring experiences and trajectories of a cohort of seventeen young fathers. We examine continuities and change in their work and family arrangements, the impacts of these changes on their parenting trajectories and personal relationships, and the extent to which these experiences differ for young fathers who are resident and non-resident. The balance of earning and caring has always been negotiated and shared by parents to varying degrees (Neale and Davies, 2015), but never more rapidly than under the renewed socio-economic conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown. As a secondary effect of the lockdown as a major public health intervention, the pandemic has had significant gendered effects, forcing widespread change and renegotiations in the employment and caring circumstances of both men and women

From social isolation to local support: Relational change and continuities for young fathers in the context of the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic and state mandated policy of lockdown in March 2020, has had observable impacts on the organisation of family lives and personal relationships. Despite the recency of these major changes, emerging evidence suggests that the crisis has produced a multitude of disproportionate and uneven effects along traditional lines of inequality including gender, age, race and class (Power et al. 2020). Even before the crisis young fathers experienced a range of disadvantages and were stigmatised because of their young age and gender. While the relative paucity of research about young fathers is beginning to be addressed (Neale et al. 2015), the recency of the COVID-19 crisis means that we know little of the immediate and short-term impacts of the pandemic on these young men and their families or about how families have responded and adapted to the new social conditions that the crisis produced. A key, emergent finding was that young fathers were at heightened risk of loneliness and social isolation because of the lockdown. At the same time however, the crisis also engendered new forms of social solidarity and community support in the localities in which the young fathers live

“Oh sorry, I’ve muted you!”: Issues of connection and connectivity in qualitative (longitudinal) research with young fathers and family support professionals

The COVID-19 crisis has placed unique restrictions on social researchers in terms of how they conduct their research. It has also created opportunities for adaptation and critical reflection on methodological practice. This article considers how the unanticipated use of remote qualitative methods impacted processes of research connection and connectivity in qualitative (longitudinal) research. The reflections are based on fieldwork conducted for a qualitative longitudinal study about the parenting journeys and support needs of young fathers. We elaborate our key strategies and provide worked examples of how the research team modified their methods and responded in the crisis context. First, we consider questions of connection when seeking to (re)establish and retain connections with project stakeholders and marginalised participants through the pivot to remote methods. Second, we reflect on how processes of maintaining participation and interaction were impacted by practical and technological issues associated with the digitally mediated forms of connectivity available

Telephone Methods Toolkit

The pandemic has prompted many social scientists to rethink their research methods and adapt to researching in ways that accommodate social distancing rules. Telephone interviews offer a remote route to fieldwork but their value for researchers extends beyond the pandemic. This toolkit considers the role of telephone interviewing in qualitative research and the advantages and challenges of this method and attendant practical and ethical questions. We provide practical reflections around how to address the challenges associated with telephone interviews and draw on examples from current research

Telephone Methods Toolkit

The pandemic has prompted many social scientists to rethink their research methods and adapt to researching in ways that accommodate social distancing rules. Telephone interviews offer a remote route to fieldwork but their value for researchers extends beyond the pandemic. This toolkit considers the role of telephone interviewing in qualitative research and the advantages and challenges of this method and attendant practical and ethical questions. We provide practical reflections around how to address the challenges associated with telephone interviews and draw on examples from current research

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young fathers and the services that support them

In this chapter, we draw on insights from the first wave of semi- structured interviews for a qualitative longitudinal study called Following Young Fathers Further (hereafter FYFF). The substantive foci of the interviews were adapted to explore the diverse impacts of the COVID- 19 pandemic on young fathers and the services that engage them. Evidence suggests that even prior to the pandemic, these young men were already more likely to be experiencing family poverty and/ or social disadvantage (Hadley, 2017; Neale et al, 2015) and to be living in low- income families and contexts. They also negotiate stigma because of their young age and gender (Beggs Weber, 2012; Neale et al, 2015a) and therefore face a unique set of challenges in their transitions to parenthood and throughout their parenting journeys