[amor de cosmos]

What is this all about? I thought we had an R&D problem in Canada You'd think UofT, Waterloo, Guelph, UWO, Ryerson, York, UOIT, McMaster & other places in or around the Golden Horseshoe area could come up with something like this with Bell, Globalive, RIM & everything else:

UNIVERSITY ISSUES
U of T contributes to New York's push for academic excellence
john lorinc
From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011 7:28PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011 10:28PM EDT

The University of Toronto has joined a team of international schools to make a bid to build a $450-million urban sciences campus in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The deal includes a promise of city-owned land and $100-million in seed capital. It is part of an ambitious plan by New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg to develop a world-class engineering and research commercialization facility.

The deadline for bidding is Friday, with Stanford and Cornell universities in the United States considered front-runners.

U of T’s engineering faculty has teamed up with New York University, the City University of New York, Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, Bombay’s Indian Institute of Technology and the University of Warwick in Britain. U of T vice-president and provost Cheryl Misak said the proposal calls for 50 permanent and rotating faculty, new housing on the site, and corporate partnership agreements with IBM, Cisco and Siemens. The Brooklyn site the group is proposing for the school was once used by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “It’s a hugely exciting proposal.”



The radical economic development scheme, considered by many to be the mayor’s legacy project, is expected to generate $6-billion in spin-off investment and create 30,000 creative-class jobs in coming decades.

Mr. Pinsky describes the strategy as “an Erie Canal moment,” a reference to a controversial 1820s decision by a state governor to build an upstate shipping channel. The investment that drove vast wealth into the port of New York.

Rather than offering the usual economic development tools such as tax breaks or land deals to entice office or condo developers, or shopping malls, Mr. Bloomberg wants to create what will essentially be a Silicon Valley East.

“It may be the single most transformative investment of the Bloomberg administration,” said Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Initiative at the University of Toronto. “I only wish more cities would think that way.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle2216539/