The Pulse: Aug. 2, 2023

An Edmonton analytics company has partnered with a Michigan university to produce a comparative visualized database to equip policymakers and service providers with actionable insights to improve public health.

Darkhorse Analytics built the Population Health Outcomes Information Exchange (PHOENIX) for a project based at Wayne State University. PHOENIX allows users to see the intersections of what we think of as standard health data (diagnosis, disability, dental visits) with information traditionally thought of as social (socioeconomic status, gun violence, education).

Although one might reasonably conclude that social disadvantage and disease have links, PHOENIX's purpose is to provide decision-makers and "interventionalists" with a lens to examine complex factors and find their correlations.

"The reality is that we don't know what causes the distribution and frequency of disease, and if we did, we'd be a lot better at preventing it," said epidemiologist Steven Korzeniewski, the lead researcher on the project. "We can talk about social vulnerability. We can talk about poverty. But the reality is, we don't know which aspects of social suffering are actually contributing to which types of diseases."

Korzeniewski reached out to Darkhorse after seeing its Opportunity Atlas, about 18 months ago. Opportunity Atlas is a project commissioned by Brown and Harvard universities. Using anonymized data from 20 million Americans that spanned their childhoods to mid-30s, it traced wealth and poverty levels back to the neighbourhoods where those surveyed grew up. It was a viral hit and just one example of Darkhorse's work examining complex social phenomena through visualized data.

Wayne State's needs were a good fit for Darkhorse's capabilities, vice-president Craig Hiltz told Taproot. "There's a lot of effort on the front end to get this kind of data put together," he said. "They came with the data."

Release 3 is online now, and Darkhorse is working on Release 4, with potentially more to come, Hiltz said. "It's an evolution, and that's how these data visualizations often work," he said.

Engaging Darkhorse was "probably the best decision I made professionally in the last few years," Korzeniewski said. "It was more of an interview than a request. They wanted to know about the social commitment, what the project was about, and whether it was something to get involved in. They would tell you what's not possible (and) what is possible, and they will give you a reasonable answer as to why you're in either camp. And that is very rare, from what I have found."

PHOENIX makes it possible to visualize a great deal of health information in the Great Lakes region of the United States. It's not quite so straightforward to do such a project in Canada, said Health Cities CEO Reg Joseph.

"We have ethics requests for data, and those ethics requests are very, very specific, in the sense that someone that's doing research will have to identify specifically what the hypothesis is," he said. "And then what they're predicting the data is going to do, and then you need to make a request for just that data."

That doesn't translate well to the kind of work Wayne State did, Joseph added. "To be really clear, it's the policies… not our technical capabilities or our analytics capabilities. We have that in spades."

• Mayor Amarjeet Sohi co-authored a letter with Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek and Jason Nixon, Alberta's minister of seniors, community, and social services, urging the federal government to increase funding for affordable housing projects in the two cities. Sohi said he was "deeply disappointed" that just 4% of the city's total ask under Phase 3 of the Rapid Housing Initiative was approved, and just six of 39 Alberta applications were funded. "It is essential that the federal government understand the specific context in the prairies, and ensure that Alberta's big cities receive equitable funding allocations," Sohi wrote.
• Racialized women in Edmonton are facing social exclusion, unfair pay, dismissals, and inequitable treatment in the workplace, CBC reports. Lawyer Crystal Lawrence believes the situation is slowly improving, but said there is still a lack of diversity in professional settings compared to cities like Toronto.
• In addition to the closure of Groat Road from Aug. 10 to 14 for construction work on the new Stony Plain Road bridge, the shared-use path will be closed from Aug. 8 to 19. The city said pedestrians and cyclists should "use 102 Avenue to Victoria Promenade and Ramsay Ravine near Government House Park as a detour." While the steel girders being installed were manufactured by the same company as the ones that buckled during the construction of 102 Avenue Bridge over Groat Road in 2015, Marigold Infrastructure Partners — the consortium building the 27-kilometre-long Valley Line West LRT — said it has learned from that and other recent bridge projects. "I can assure you that that has been taken into account," said construction manager Brad Baumle. Construction on the bridge is expected to finish by the fall of 2024.
• Flair is launching a direct flight from Edmonton to Cancun starting Oct. 29. The company is adding 13 new routes in total to its winter schedule.
• The Canadian Native Friendship Centre will receive more than $1.1 million in federal funding to help renovate its building at 11728 95 Street NW. Renovations will include upgraded meeting rooms, kitchens, and gathering spaces, and will reduce the building's energy consumption by an estimated 54.6%. The centre, which serves about 10,000 people each year, will contribute more than $560,000 to the project.
• The Edmonton Oilers have signed forward Ryan McLeod to a two-year contract worth $4.2 million, avoiding an arbitration hearing that had been scheduled for Aug. 4. McLeod had 11 goals and 23 points in 57 games last season.
• Ontario's Superior Court of Justice has awarded more than $142 million to the families of eight people who died on Flight PS752 in 2020, bringing the total awarded in damage judgments to nearly $250 million for the families of 14 victims. A total of 176 people, including 13 Edmontonians, were killed when Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot the plane down.

On this day in 1977, a newspaper ad encouraged people to "start a learning revolution" at NAIT.

The distinctly '70s-style piece promises to help students "capture a career," enticing them into NAIT's instrumentation engineering technology program.

The idea for the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology was born at the tail end of the 1950s during a push for more technical and applied education in Canada. The Alberta government was looking for such a school in Edmonton to complement the education offered by Calgary's Provincial Institute of Technology. (That school's name would change to SAIT when its northern sibling opened.)

The province announced the NAIT plan in 1959. Three years later, construction began on the institutes's $14-million campus. But classes would start before the building was finished. In October of 1962, NAIT's first 29 students began studying to become communication electricians.

Premier Ernest Manning officially opened the school in May 1963. A recently unearthed program from NAIT's first year shows that the courses were offered in three general areas — technology, business education/vocation, and apprenticeships. Under those categories, students could get instruction in everything from heavy-duty equipment to banking to commercial cooking.

Another prominent feature touted at the opening was the NAIT mural — or, as the program insists it is called, the "rustic mosaic picture." It was designed by Austria-born artist Alexander von Svoboda, whose mosaic work can be spotted in several other places in Edmonton, including at the Royal Alexandra Hospital. The mosaic, which was assembled in Toronto and then reconstructed in Edmonton, contains more than 600 pieces and represents some of the subjects and disciplines taught at the institute.

It would only be a couple of years before NAIT would construct the T-Building, the first of several expansions over the years. While the main campus would see new land purchased and new buildings put up over the decades, NAIT would also open satellite campuses: Patricia Campus in 1975, the Souch Campus in southern Edmonton (named for a former president of NAIT) in 1998, and a Spruce Grove campus in 2016.

For the first 20 years of its life, NAIT was directly administered by the Alberta government. A big shift came in 1982 when the province handed over control to a board of directors, which governs the institution to this day.

As technology has changed, so have the programs offered by NAIT. Students can now study topics ranging from IT to environmental science to media and communications. And the campus looks much different from how it was when it opened 60 years ago. However, some of the original elements remain, including von Svoboda's original rustic mosaic picture, which was recently restored following decades of exposure to Edmonton's demanding climate.

This is based on a clipping found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse — follow @VintageEdmonton for daily ephemera.