Summer Time Skyline, 1973

Summer Time Skyline, 1973

via Toronto Before by Aladone on 7/31/08

Supply and demand at the gas pump

 

 

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Supply and demand at the gas pump

via The Progressive Economics Forum by Marc Lee on 7/24/08

One of my favourite comics explains the economics of gas prices:

 

 

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Metrocide: A Tale Of Sixty Cities

 

 

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Metrocide: A Tale Of Sixty Cities

via Torontoist by David Topping on 7/24/08

Is Toronto a dangerous city? And is it getting worse? This week for Metrocide, Torontoist is examining a sea of homicide data and trying to come up with conclusions based not in fear or fantasy but fact.

Photo of Calgary by D'Arcy Norman.

Ever since Toronto earned its reputation as a safe city, safe has tended to be a relative term—safe compared to Detroit, safe compared to New York, safe compared to Chicago. Comparisons between individual cities' crime rates are at once useful and flawed; while they help contextualize a city by putting it into dialogue with others, they also "provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction" (so says the FBI). But insofar as they measure the effects of crime, rather than their causes, city-to-city comparisons are a good basis for determining relative safety, and—especially when it comes to homicide rates—play a large role in shaping public perception.

Today, we'll look at how Toronto's recent homicide rates stand up to thirty-four American cities and twenty-seven Canadian ones.

A Note on Statistics

Today, we're comparing Toronto to American and Canadian cities only. Not that we wouldn't like to toss worldwide cities into the mix, of course, but there are some problems with doing so. No over-arching body (say, the United Nations) seems to have homicide data for individual cities (rather than (whole countries) measured in any consistent way. Second, if we researched cities on an individual basis (say, picked twenty large European cities based on size), it is unlikely that each would measure homicides and homicide rates the same way as every other city or country did. (Would negligent manslaughter count in the numbers? Would non-negligent manslaughter? Infanticide? Will they provide rates, or just numbers? And if it's just numbers, will they provide a population that the rate can be determined from?) Geography is an issue, too: as we've shown in the past two days, homicide rates change for Toronto depending on what you define "Toronto" as. At this point, thus, accurately comparing worldwide cities is unfortunately beyond the scope of this week's project.

Fortunately, Statistics Canada and the FBI do make good statistical bedfellows; so far as we can see, their data measures cities in the same way for determining the same data. So: how does Toronto's homicide rate compare to American cities'?

Extraordinarily well; Toronto's numbers absolutely pale in comparison to American cities. Its metropolitan homicide rate in 2006 was lower than every American city with a population above 500,000 (charted above). And of the seventy-two American cities with populations over 250,000, Toronto's 2006 metropolitan homicide rate (1.8 per 100,000) was lower than every other city except for Plano, Texas—the wealthiest city in the United States—which had a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000.

In Canada, the picture is different. (Do note the change in scale from the American cities chart, and that this chart lists 2007 homicide rates.) Canadian cities, overall, do quite well in comparison to American ones in terms of homicide rate, regardless of geographical proximity; in 2006, Windsor's homicide rate (1.5) was thirty-one times smaller than Detroit's, and in the same year, Toronto's homicide rate (1.8) was fourteen times smaller than Buffalo's.

But, as we noted in March, and as was widely-reported last week, Toronto still holds its own against other Canadian cities. Of the twenty-six Canadian cities with a Central Metropolitan Area (CMA) population above 100,000 (charted above), Toronto's homicide rate in 2007 (2.0) ranked ninth highest, tied with Saint John. Of the nine cities in Canada with a CMA population above 500,000, Toronto's homicide rate in 2007 ranked fifth highest—with a lower rate than Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver—and is not far from Montreal, Hamilton, and Ottawa's rates (for all three, 1.6 homicides per 100,000). No large city in Canada had as good of a year for homicides as Quebec City had in 2007: of a population of about 750,000, it had no homicides whatsoever. Even if that was in part the result of good fortune—the last year it hadn't had a homicide before 2007 was 1962, its violent crime rate is similar to Toronto's, and it will unfortunately not be able to repeat the feat this year—the Québec capital consistently has a homicide rate that is on the low end of Canada's larger cities.

Sources

Canadian cities' 2007 metropolitan homicide rates are from the just-released Statistics Canada report. 2006's rates can be found in last year's report.

American cities' homicide rates are from the FBI, via Wikipedia.

 

 

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Heritage Toronto walking tours this weekend: Bâby Point, and in the Footste...

 

 

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Heritage Toronto walking tours this weekend: Bâby Point, and in the Footsteps of Black Victorians

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Matthew Hague on 7/24/08

This weekend's Heritage Toronto walking tours are a great way to get out and explore the city (free + no reservations required):

Bâby Point: 10 000 Years of History
Saturday, July 26 - 1:30 PM

Leaders: La Société d'histoire de Toronto
Start Point: SW corner of Jane St and Bâby Point Rd/Annette St
Finish Point: Near Old Mill Subway Station
Duration: Approx. 2 - 2.5 hours
Walk Difficulty: Long walk with slopes, many stairs and some rough ground

Explore some of Toronto's First Nations and French history with this tour of the area named after the estate of James Bâby, an early French settler. Hear about the Seneca village of Teiaiagon, the Carrying Place trail and the first French fort in what is now Toronto. Tours will be offered in English and French.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

In the Footsteps of Black Victorians
Sunday, July 27 - 1:00 PM

Leaders: Mackenzie House Museum
Start Point: South St. Lawrence Market, 95 Front St E at Jarvis
Finish Point: Mackenzie House, 82 Bond St, S of Dundas St
Duration: Approx. 2 hours
Walk Difficulty: Average walk on sidewalks

In the 19th century, Toronto was a centre of antislavery organizations and Black cultural and political activities. Hear about the men and women of the community as we visit some of the sites known to them.

Spacing is pleased to be the promoting sponsor of the Heritage Toronto walking tours.

Photo by Bobcatnorth

 

 

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The real reason for French immersion

Dan Gardner's column is intresting - especially seeing as my older brother went to French immersion for a bit and then I went to enrichment. My parents = social snobs? Hmm.

zooming in green

...and the neat thing is that I think it was taken right here...

zooming in green

via [daily dose of imagery] on 7/21/08

Biking on Don Valley track.

Sand Wars

Eons ago, I read a book on a related topic by a Cdn author with the quirky name of Silver Donald Cameron - which spoke of the issues of retaining beaches - which mostly comes down to 'stealing' the sand from where the ocean wants to take it - at great cost to all concerned - the beach, the taxpayers, and the next town down the shore...

Sand Wars

via Pruned by Alexander Trevi on 7/16/08

(Houses on stilts on Nags Head, North Carolina. Photo by Stephan Delfour-Given/AFP/Getty Images.)

In a familiar story that may yet become all too familiar to everybody in a climate-changed future, the Italian cities of "industrial Brindisi" and "elegant, baroque Lecce" are battling each other over sand.

Quoting The Guardian:

Faced with losing the pristine San Cataldo beach to creeping Adriatic sea currents, the town of Lecce in Puglia arranged to dig up 200,000 cubic metres of sand out at sea in front of neighbour - and rival - Brindisi. But with EU-funded work set to start proud locals in the port city of Brindisi rose up in protest, with 10,000 signing a petition to stop the digging, hundreds forming a human chain along their own, eroding, beach, and fans at a local football match unfurling a banner stating: "Don't touch the sand."

As interesting as this tale of mineral piracy is, it would be moreso if we were to hear that a landscape architecture firm has been commissioned to do some sort of project to be sited on this stretch of contested coastline.

Not only will they have to maneuver through a potentially explosive political landscape but the designers must simultaneously attend to the physical forces at work in this coastal landscape — such as beach erosion and surfzone currents — that, while much is now known about them relative to just a few decades ago, are still largely mysterious.

Maybe there is a competition for a new beachfront promenade or another Trump golf course or one of those so-called eco-towns or just a sprawling mansion for a chief executive and his family as a summer retreat from the city. The project site is no longer in Puglia but in a barrier island, such as North Carolina's Nags Head, pictured above. It's a mobile landscape, a fragile terrain always in danger of collapse, where everything is beyond the control of engineering. Entrants will have to navigate between programs of containment and resilience, between settlement and retreat, between conflicting ideas of permanence and impermanence.

And all entries will be the best projects ever. Obviously.

In any case, to return back to Italy, after Lecce was ordered to stop digging for sand, officials there were asked where they will now get their material from? The will import it from economically desperate Albania — which, of course, means that it will be another case of the rich exploiting the poor to maintain their quality of life and the exploited is left with a degraded landscape.

In the Archives:
Climate Ghettos

Related:
The Retreating Village

Tech and the Olympics

Cool article about R&D, Innovation and the Olympics.

Bad Ideas in Regulation: Food Safety

Ottawa washes hands of food safety: "A government plan to transfer key parts of food inspection to industry so companies can police themselves will put the health of Canadians at risk, according to leading food safety experts who have reviewed the confidential blueprint."

Oh. Because it's worked so well in other areas...

Visualizing. Me.

Clearly I need to write more, and/or input some of my own thinking here instead of just re-posting. On the other hand, I did create this site primarily as a data dump for stuff I thought was "neat." Oh well.

Urban bees in Toronto

Map of the Week: Urban bees

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 7/10/08

For most city dwellers, beekeeping is pretty much out as a hobby, at least pursued close to home. Ontario law forbids hives within 30 metres of a property line on the other side of which is a dwelling, park or place of public assembly, or within 10 metres of a highway. For most city dwellers, that pretty much crushes the idea of a back yard hive, as appealing as the idea might seem (or appalling, to the neighbours).

But two sites near the city's downtown (map link) are home a total of 22 working beehives: the roof of the Royal York Hotel (which Daphne Gordon wrote about in June) and the Brick Works near Bayview Ave. and Pottery Rd. The Brick Works site is much the largest, with 19 hives. At the seasonal peak, that means about 880,000 bees.

The area surrounding a beehive necessarily plays host to the bees. The distance bees fly to gather pollen varies, but a 1992 study found that they readily fly four kilometers in all directions, which means that gardens from Flemingdon Park to the CNE grounds are being visited by working bees.

So my place is almost in range!

After Beijing 08, the fight for human rights must go on

Provocative ads for Amnesty International.
Weight lifting
Archery
Swimming

Clever, but it's also interesting to think how the West's credibility on these matters (you know, torture and the like) by the US's actions in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

What T.O. should learn from Other Cdn Cities

We could be even better
I like the street food, the local museum concepts and the waterfront. Comparing Vancouver's waterfront with Toronto's is just depressing. The winter fest is tough - the weather doesn't consistently work as well as it does in Quebec.

Storm Clouds pix

via Torontoist by Miles Storey on 6/23/08

It's been a particularly tempestuous June this year, with storms rolling in under blue skies and dropping torrents of rain on the city before dissipating or meandering eastwards. There have even been reports of tornadoes touching down in southern Ontario.

The picture above, taken yesterday from the Harbourfront Centre, shows a storm system approaching the city from the east. The funnel shape in the centre is actually heavy rain and possibly hail falling on western suburbs.

Photo by Miles Storey

Reader-based review of Harper's Defence Policy

Harper's Secrecy-First Defence Policy: A reader writes

via inkless-wells « WordPress.com Tag Feed by Paul Wells on 6/22/08

If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper's instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)

So I was really grateful to get an email this morning from Inkless comment-board regular MikeG, who — puttering in his spare time on a sunny weekend — has produced the most detailed analysis of the Harper defence plan's spending projections that I have seen. He even made charts and graphs. And what they show is curious: while $490 billion sure looks like a heck of a number, it amounts to a gentle budgeted decline in Canada's defence effort, compared against major allies, over time.

I'll close by pointing out that a defence policy isn't only a policy for spending. It's a set of choices about what that money will buy. Since we're all planning to snooze on that set of choices in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, perhaps Inkless readers will care to read the policy themselves and discuss the choices the Harper government has made.

Democracy: not only can you do it yourself, I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to. Thanks once again to MikeG.

Cambridge Solar Collector Art Performance

Event Guide: Cambridge Solar Collector Performance

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Shawn Micallef on 6/20/08

WHAT: Solar Collector — A solar powered, web-connected, interactive sculpture

WHERE: 100 Maple Grove Road, Cambridge, Ontario (Google map)

WHEN: Saturday, June 21, 8:30PM

If you are in the mood for a summer solstice party with a technological twist on Saturday night, head to the lawn of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre in Cambridge and see the command performance launch of Solar Collector, a new public art sculpture that allows people to program light patterns through a web interface. The work is by Gorbet Design Inc., the folks behind P2P (or Power to the people), the interactive artwork installed on the front of the Drake Hotel back in 2004 (see Spacing's "History of our Future" issue in 2005, p. 41). It consisted of a large bank of light switches located on the south side of Queen Street that connected to lights fixed onto the Drake's facade, allowing people to write, or draw, whatever they wanted. If you can't make the performance on Saturday, you can experience Solar Collector on any other evening as well.

In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.

We invite you to celebrate the summer solstice at the launch of Solar Collector on June 21st. Bring an evening picnic out to the grassy lawn under the apple trees, and enjoy live music to accompany the sculpture's performance (More details here).–

Twelve aluminum shafts rise from the grassy hill in front of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre. Their graceful shape reflects the angles of the sun through the year. The tallest shaft is perpendicular to the sun at winter solstice, when the sun is low in the sky. The flattest shaft faces the high sun at summer solstice.

Each shaft has three sets of lights, along with three solar panels. During the day, the solar panels collect the sun's energy in a battery within each shaft. At the same time, the Solar Collector website collects light compositions — patterns in light that are created by the community through a simple web interface.

Each night at dusk, a performance begins of all the compositions collected that day. The flowing waves of light are a visual reflection of the sine waves that describe the sun's movement through the sky.

When the day's patterns are through, the performance moves on to a series composed collaboratively from all the patterns ever created. The length of the performance is a reflection of the weather and the seasons, as the shafts use up their energy and fade out late in the evening, one by one.

Photo by Gorbet Design Inc.

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

Ah, Lobbying - quite possibly the marketing activity with the highest ROI activity of all

How the U.S. Got Its Canadian Copyright Bill

via Michael Geist Blog by Michael Geist on 6/15/08

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) examines the role that U.S. pressure played leading up to the introduction of Bill C-61 last week. I argue that the bill is the result of an intense public and private campaign waged by the U.S. government to pressure Canada into following its much-criticized digital copyright model. The U.S. pressure has intensified in recent years, particularly since there is a growing international trend toward greater copyright flexibility with countries such as Japan, New Zealand, and Israel either implementing or considering more flexible copyright standards.

The public campaign was obvious. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins was outspoken on the copyright issue, characterizing Canadian copyright law as the weakest in the G7 (despite the World Economic Forum ranking it ahead of the U.S.). The U.S. Trade Representatives Office (USTR) made Canada a fixture on its Special 301 Watch list, an annual compilation of countries that the U.S. believes have sub-standard intellectual property laws. The full list contains nearly 50 countries accounting for 4.4 billion people or approximately 70 percent of the world's population. Most prominently, last year U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn, along with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, escalated the rhetoric on Canadian movie piracy, leading to legislative reform that took just three weeks to complete.

The private campaign was even more important.

Sources say that emboldened by the successful campaign for anti-camcording legislation, U.S. officials upped the ante at the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in Montebello, Quebec last summer. Canadian officials arrived ready to talk about a series of economic concerns but were quickly rebuffed by their U.S. counterparts, who indicated that progress on other issues would depend upon action on the copyright file. Those demands were echoed earlier by the USTR, which, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, made veiled threats about "thickening the border" between Canada and the U.S. if Canada refused to put copyright reform on the legislative agenda.

Faced with unrelenting U.S. pressure, the newly installed Industry Minister was presented with a mandate letter that required a copyright bill that would meet U.S. approval. The government promised copyright reform in the October 2007 Speech from the Throne and was set to follow through last December, only to pull back at the last hour in the face of mounting public concern.

In the months that followed, Prentice's next attempt to bring the copyright bill forward was stalled by internal cabinet concerns over how the bill would play out in public. The bill was then repackaged to include the new consumer-focused provisions such as the legalization of recording television shows and the new peer-to-peer download $500 damage award. The heart of the bill, however, remained largely unchanged since satisfying U.S. pressure remained priority number one. Just after 11:00 a.m. last Thursday, the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill.

The multi-tasking virus

So true.

The multi-tasking virus

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog by nick on 6/13/08

In an essay written for Tim Ferriss's blog, Josh Waitzkin, the former chess champion who was the subject of the book and subsequent film Waiting for Bobby Fisher, writes of his recent experience in returning to his alma mater, Columbia, and sitting in on a class taught by Dennis Dalton, "the most important college professor of my life." Dalton, writes Waitzkin,

was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world. Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.

But it was the audience's reaction that left an even greater impression on Waitzkin:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation's enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

That minds wander is not news - "wandering" may well be the default setting for our brains - but the scale of it today does seem to be something new and remarkable.

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

The anachronistic Brewers Retail

via Wellington Financial Blog - News, Views & Purviews by Mark McQueen on 6/13/08

As InBev launches a US$46 billion hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch, the iconic Bud may no longer be sporting an American flag. That's something we long became comfortable with here in Canada, as Labatt, Molson and Sleeman have all been acquired by foreign-based brewers. ...

But unlike the U.S., these foreign acquisitions have had a particular impact in Ontario. The former Brewers Retail (now The Beer Store), you see, is owned by the very foreign firms that also own the former Labatt, Molson and Sleeman franchises. What this means is quite straightforward: the owners of The Beer Store do what's best for their brands, and the rest of the world is at the back of the bus.

To whit, when it was discovered that "walk in cooler" beer stores (Yonge and Summerhill, for example) were increasing sales of small brands such as Brick, Mill Street and Moosehead, among others, the owners switched gears. Enough with that floormap. Most new stores are now "handy pickup" type outlets (Yonge and Lawrence, for example). Most of what you see now is a sea of beer produced by the same people that own the store. Conventiently inside the front door of the handy pickup outlets are the cases of the big three (Canadian, Coors Light, Blue, Bud and Sleeman). If you want to pick something else, feel free to ask a rep. But the delightful packaging of independent brewers is largely hidden from view, just like 20 years ago when the forbidden fruit rolled out from behind a wall on metal rollers. With this change in store setup, guess what happened to the sales of independent brewers? Right back down again. The oligarchy preserved their marketshare grip, all in the name of customer convenience. At least the convenience of the customers who buy the owner's particular brand of beer.

Which begs the question, why won't the Ontario government give local brewers the same opportunity to succeed as local vintners? The fact that our beer distribution system is owned by foreigners is not entirely different than the fact that Cognos or Dofasco have gone the same route.

What is different about this situation, however, is the impact the oligarchy has on the ability for the two dozen Ontario microbrewers to flourish. Lakeport, Creemore, Upper Canada and Sleeman all had varying degrees of success, and all started out extremely small. There is a chance that Mill Street or Wellington Brewery, for example, could replicate that success.

Let's give the next generation of Brew Masters a chance, and allow them to sell their beer at grocery stores. At least for a start.

Mapping Toronto's campers

Map of the week: Where the campers are

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 6/11/08

This week's map (link) is much simpler than last week's, and to a certain extent inspired by the weekend's heat wave: the percentage of the population in the GTA that received a provincial park camping permit last year, by postal area.

Durham Region is strongly represented.

Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and especially Oshawa are full of campers, it turns out, as is the Yonge St. corridor between Richmond Hill and Newmarket. There are also outdoorsy neighbourhoods downtown, where the Ontario park system is popular in High Park, the Beaches, the U of T area and the Islands.

The GTA's most enthusiastic campers can be found in M8X, in the Bloor St. W. and the Humber area of the former city of Etobicoke, where 4.4% of the population was issued a park permit last year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources issued almost 271,000 park permits last year, of which about 74,000 went to GTA residents. About 14,000 park users came from Quebec, and 4,500 from Manitoba. Over 16,000 came from the U.S., the largest groups from New York and Michigan.

Nerd box:

This week, we're displaying most of the suburban (but not rural) communities in the GTA. There are a total of 177 postal areas displayed, with just over 2,000 individual points. With this big a map, we're pushing the limits of how many polygons GoogleMaps can display. (The issue isn't the number of polygons so much as the points it takes to display them, which is why the maps are roughly drawn.). It may take 10-15 seconds to load