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The Citizen, 2017-10-12, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2017. PAGE 5. Other Views Discrimination wastes potential Jn the movie Hidden Figures, based on the contribution of real-life mathematician Katherine Johnson to the early space program in the U.S., her co-workers keep wondering why she disappears for long periods during each work day. Johnson is eventually questioned about her prolonged absences from her desk, with supervisors even suspecting she may be a spy, selling secrets of the U.S. space program to the Soviet Union. Johnson, who besides being a rare woman among the team trying to send men safely into space is also black, finally explains that as a woman of colour in a facility located in Virginia, she's not allowed to use a bathroom in a building that only has "white" bathrooms. She must walk a quarter mile to find a bathroom she's allowed to use as a black woman. Generally when we hear stories about discrimination we think of the price paid by the victims, but what struck me in watching this story was the cost to society by silly rules made purposely to keep people down instead of harnessing their full potential. In this case, Johnson, who eventually played a pivotal role in putting Americans in space and getting them to the moon, was not able to give her best work because segregation forced her to waste time walking to a bathroom far away. Think of the added costs in segregation -era southern U.S. or South Africa under apartheid of building twice the infrastructure of washrooms and water fountains, etc. because white people felt insulted if they had to be too close to black people. In Johnson's case, she even had to have a separate coffee pot because she wasn't allowed to use the same coffee urn as her white co-workers. But the real waste is the lost potential of people who are kept down by a dominant Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk culture. In a way, Johnson (and the U.S. space program) were fortunate that she came along as segregation was already winding down or her brilliant mind might never had the chance to be fully employed in the first place. Wasteful barriers have hamstrung many societies for centuries. Britain's class system wasted the potential of bright people born into the lower classes until relatively recently. There's an argument to be made that Britain would have been more successful if children from poor and lower class families had been able to rise according to their abilities, not been hemmed in by their class. Canada became a dynamic society when student assistance allowed bright young people to attend university no matter what the financial situation of their families. On the other hand, here in Canada, discrimination kept successive waves of immigrants from Irish to Chinese to Jews from being free to apply their best skills. How many Chinese men, who perhaps were qualified to accomplish much more, ended up running restaurants or laundries in the early 20th century? And then there's the case of our country's chronic underestimation of the female half of the population for most of our history. If you read the pathetic arguments made by the men in power in the early 1900s as to why women shouldn't have the vote, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Even after women were allowed to vote in 1919, it still took decades for women to be able to begin to show their true potential to make the country a better place. Sadly, in many places in the world, the western liberation of women to express their potential is seen as a spread of corruption. Men in power want to keep women in the kitchen and the bedroom. Conservative Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia persuaded the government to make it against the law for women to drive cars. But there's hope that the practical gains of ending discrimination may eventually overcome close-minded prejudice. Recently, young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman declared that as of next June, women will be allowed to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. He braved the ire of conservative clerics because he saw the economic gain if women were freed to drive to work or to shop. The door to women gaining equality in Saudi Arabia has only opened a crack but with this recognition of the value of giving women more freedom, perhaps the crack can be forced open wider. Here in Canada, we're still not realizing the potential of people in too many areas. We still have immigrant doctors and other professionals driving taxis when they could be doing so much more. The tragedy that is the plight of many First Nations reserves is also a huge waste of human potential. Recently I watched an interview on TVO with a woman who had become the first Indigenous female surgeon less than 20 years ago. If we devote the resources to solving the issues that plague native communities we could be paid back many times over by unleashing the potential of Canadians like her. Keep an eye on that credit report Like many other people in this world I have been a victim of identity theft — back when I was just entering into adulthood I noticed some odd charges on my credit card. After some research and a few phone calls, they sent me a new card and the charges were reversed and all was good in the world of my finances, however, the experience had a lasting impact on my life. Since then, I've been a little more careful about which links I click, where I buy from and making sure that nothing hinky is going on with my credit. Unfortunately for me, the privately -owned companies that handle credit aren't quite as careful or concerned as I am. In part, I'm talking about the recent data breach the credit bureau Equifax suffered. Tens of millions of people had their credit information, including names, addresses and social insurance/social security numbers illegally accessed through an easily fixable vulnerability. Unfortunately, Equifax didn't feel the vulnerability was important enough to fix. In part, I'm also talking about my own experience with the company which has proven to be problematic at best. To fully explain the situation, we need to go back a few years. My wife had just started working at one of Canada's large financial institutions and she suggested that I switch my accounts over to keep all our banking information together. Things went fine at first — switching most of my accounts was simple enough but one account (which I won't reveal here because, once bitten twice shy as they say) couldn't be transferred due to a problem with my credit report. It turns out that another financial institution I Denny Scott riaikii Denny's Den had dealings with had neglected to update my information, leaving huge holes in my credit history. I found this out because I couldn't do everything I wanted to do with my new bank. It took me months of dealing with Equifax to finally get them to understand the problem and, to this day, years after Ashleigh has left the financial institute, I'm not sure it's completely cleared up. The problem is that Equifax doesn't really answer to anyone — they can have serious mistakes on file that can affect everything from getting a cell phone to a house and the only thing you can do is work through their system to get it fixed. Unfortunately, their system seems to be about as antiquated as the security they had protecting their files. On one hand, we have a company not taking the necessary precautions to make sure our files, which we didn't choose to have with them but have to have with them because that's the way credit bureaus work, are protected. On the other, we have a government that is woefully behind the times in making sure that organizations like this have to report these kinds of breaches. Currently, Canada has no regulations that force companies to report breaches of customer privacy, just some paltry fines if it comes to light that a company did have such a breach. Right now, some individual or group of hackers has access to 143 million Americans' social security numbers, 44 million files from the United Kingdom and an unknown number of Canadians facing possible identity theft. The number is unknown because, on top of not having to report the breach, Equifax doesn't have to provide those numbers. The company may provide the numbers at a later date but currently, the only people in Canada who know to check their credit reports are approximately 10,000 Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) subscribers. This isn't just a list of e-mails — this is literally everything a person with ill intent needs to go out and get a credit card on some poor person's dime. They could answer every question necessary to buy a house or a car or a boat on your credit and live under your name for months before it's figured out. The government is at fault here because they have let these credit -monitoring services regulate themselves which, in the digital age, has resulted in a lawless environment. I urge everyone to routinely keep an eye on their credit information. It may be a good time to check it now if you haven't in awhile. Unfortunately, that means getting in touch with the same people who let your information out in the first place. It's kind of like asking the farm hand who left the barn door open what the status is on all the missing horses, but, like I said, the companies are the only game in town. The real kick -in -the -pants here is that you could never have had dealings with Equifax directly. You may have bought your home and cars in cash and never needed a credit check. You may have a pay-as-you-go cell phone. You may keep your money in your mattress because it feels safer there than in the bank. You could have lived your entire life never leaving a single digital -financial footprint and you may still have your name on a file with one of these companies. Shawn Loughlin ALAIION Shawn's Sense Justine comes to Bylth Alittle joke has been running through the village of Bylth over the last few weeks and if you caught my typo in the village's name, you already know what I'm talking about. Yes, when called upon to replace one of the stolen street signs from a few weeks ago, the historic village and its esteemed residents were graced with a sign that somehow took the five letters that make up the name of the village and jumbled them about — kind of like when you put all those dice with letters in the Boggle game and shake them around. Ah-ight, it wasn't that bad, but a mistake had been made along the county road just on the edge of Blyth. The error has since been fixed, however, and all is right in the universe. Trust me, I understand typos. There are few on this planet who realize the importance of proper grammar, spelling and punctuation more than a journalist. A typo can make people chuckle because of how silly it looks, or it can straight -up cause problems for you or someone else, depending on what you happened to type, as opposed to what you actually typed. Heck, just this month in The Rural Voice, a sister publication of The Citizen, the nation's Prime Minister was labelled as Justine Trudeau in the magazine's coverage of the International Plowing Match in Walton. Funny? Yes. Embarrassing? Yes. Accurate? No. But, the reality of the situation is that it happens. I will always have one typo that sticks in my craw when I was in my final semester at Humber College. We were in the very final stages of producing our semester -long project: an entire magazine designed, edited and written by students. The magazine was called Convergence and it examined the work of the media. In a story about the disappearance of iconic Canadian news anchors, we created an effect with a pair of anchors fading away (kind of like Marty McFly's family photograph in Back To The Future) and the headline referred to fading away. Our teachers didn't like the headline. They didn't feel it represented the story properly, so they took it upon themselves to change it at the 11th hour to say "Criticial Shortage". No, that's not how you spell critical and no criticial is not a word. It was too late and thousands of copies of the magazine had been printed by the time anyone caught it. We, the students, could take solace in the fact that it was our teachers who made the mistake and not us, but try telling that to a potential boss in a job interview. A quick Google search produces all kinds of hilarious results when it comes to unfortunate and potentially costly typos. A number of them are a little on crude side, as you might imagine, but they are good for a chuckle. In fact, while I was sitting in the waiting room of my chiropractor's office a few weeks back, I noticed that a diploma featured the crest of the country's Chiropractic Association and it was spelled wrong. I joked with him that, similar to a Rolux watch or Guccci shoes, perhaps it wasn't so much a typo, but rather that he isn't actually certified as a chiropractor. I think I thought it was funnier than he did. So, whether you produce diplomas for a chiropractic association or print road signs, no one is immune to the dreaded typo. So, if you're printing something expensive, double- check. Be like a carpenter who measures twice, but cuts once. Check twice, print once.