Canada Post is planning to cancel home delivery to nearly half of its customers along some rural routes in Quebec’s Eastern Townships because of road safety concerns. The postal agency is evaluating the safety of mail routes across Canada, after three carriers died and 37 were injured while making deliveries since 2005. Nearly 40 per cent of the routes examined in the Eastern Townships have failed the safety evaluation, because they present a hazard to carriers forced to stop on winding...

NEW YORK: Even elite U.S. universities do not provide the technical training needed for the kind of computing Google is famous for, computer scientists say.

So Google and International Business Machines are announcing Monday a major research initiative to address that shortcoming. The two companies are investing to build large data centers that students can tap into over the Internet to program and research remotely, which is called “cloud computing.”

Both companies have a deep business interest in this new model in which computing chores increasingly move off individual desktops and out of corporate computer centers to be delivered as services over the Internet.

Google, the Internet search giant, is the leader in this technology. But companies like Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Microsoft have built Internet consumer services like search, social networking, Web e-mail and online commerce that use cloud computing. In the corporate market, IBM and others have built Internet services to predict market trends, tailor pricing and optimize procurement and manufacturing.

Behind these services are data centers that typically use thousands of processors, store libraries of data and engage specialized software to tackle what scientists call Internet-scale computing challenges. This new kind of data-intensive supercomputing often involves scouring the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights. This round of innovation has been led by corporations, but industry executives and computer scientists say a shortage of skills and talent could limit future growth.

“We in academia and the government labs have not kept up with the times,” said Randal Bryant, dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon University. “Universities really need to get on board.”

Six universities will be involved in the initiative. They are Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Maryland and the University of Washington. Google is building a data center, at an undisclosed location, that will contain more than 1,600 processors by the end of the year. IBM is also dedicating data center resources to the project.

The data centers being built have a small fraction of the computing firepower behind Googles Internet search service. But they will be big enough, scientists say, to do ambitious Internet research. Setting up and running such centers, including providing the electricity and technical staff, is difficult and expensive. The two companies, a person who was told of their plans said, have committed a total of $30 million over two years for the project.

“This is a huge contribution because it allows for a type of education and research that we cant do today,” said Edward Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington.

The companies and academics long-term goal is to expand the data-center clusters so students from many schools can participate and to enlist the support of other companies and the U.S. government. The collaboration began after a meeting in December between Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Samuel Palmisano, chief executive of IBM, at Googles headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The Canadian dollar briefly slipped below par with the U.S. dollar Friday for the second timein three days asGDP growth slowed and oil prices fell. The loonie traded as low as 99.88 cents US in morning trading, downtwo-fifths of a cent from Thursday’s close. The looniehad also slipped below parity with the U.S. greenback on Tuesday before regaining strength. GDP figures for Canada showed growth in the third quarter slowed to 2.9 per cent from 3.8 per cent in Q2. But that was still...