[PHOTO] Renovations outside the Bay

Renovations outside the Bay
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

As part of the ambitious Bloor Street Improvement plan, this part of the sidewalk on the corner of Yonge and Bloor,outside the Bay has been torn up. New handsome-looking tiles now populate this area.

[URBAN NOTE] Great, a garbage strike

The Toronto garbage strike is not pleasing many Torontonians.

As garbage continued to pile up in Toronto's streets amid widespread illegal dumping, the city's top politicians said Tuesday they were still optimistic they could soon reach an agreement with striking municipal workers.

Garbage bins across the city have been stuffed with trash. Most are now filled to overflowing.

Tuesday is usually the first day of regular garbage pickup in Toronto — and the city has asked residents to keep trash in their homes for at least a week before trying to dispose of it.

But some people wouldn't wait.

Garbage bins have been crammed full, and green garbage bags filled with trash are starting to pile up on the streets.

Mayor David Miller pleaded with the city's residents not to make the situation worse.

"It is becoming clear that there is a small group of people that are taking advantage of this strike to use Toronto as their personal dumping ground," he told reporters at a Tuesday news conference.

"This is not and should not be acceptable to any of us. I would ask people to be patient."

That the striking workers and the city are negotiating is "a good sign," said Miller.

But Mark Ferguson, president of CUPE Local 416, which represents outdoor workers, said Monday the two sides were still "miles apart" from a deal.

A garbage bin wrapped in plastic
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

A girl next to a Christie Pits pile
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I took these photos on the first day of the strike. I also remember the stench in Toronto in that summer's garbage strike. I am not looking forward to that stench this summer at all.

[LINK] "SETI: A detectable neutrino signal?"

Centauri Dreams reports on the latest way to search for technological extraterrestrial life: use the neutrino.

Somehow I never thought of the IceCube neutrino telescope as a SETI instrument. Deployed in a series of 1,450 to 2,450 meters-deep holes in Antarctica and taking up over a cubic kilometer of ice, IceCube is fine-tuned to detect neutrinos. That makes it a useful tool for studying violent events like galactic collisions and the formation of quasars, providing insights into the early universe. But SETI?

[. . .]

[I]f we can get around formidable practical challenges, we’ll eventually want to develop a muon collider. So, presumably, would an extraterrestrial civilization. And indeed, Silagadze discusses the practical uses of a high-energy neutrino beam in, for example, the study of the inner structure of a planet, or the use of collimated neutrino beams for communications. A 1979 paper by Mieczyslaw Subotowicz went so far as to argue that advanced cultures might deliberately choose neutrino channels for interstellar communications to shut out immature emergent civilizations from the ongoing conversation.

[. . .]

IceCube, anyone? The beauty of neutrino SETI is that it can readily run in the background of concurrent neutrino-based astrophysical studies. Thus keeping an eye out for possibly artificial high-energy neutrino signals produced in muon colliders light years away makes a certain degree of sense. Will it succeed? Silagadze quotes Cocconi and Morrison’s classic paper: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate: but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”

[LINK] "Dupont Narrowed: a Cyclist and Driver's First Impression"

Over at blogTO, Jerrold reports on the effects of the city's changes to the street, and doesn't like them.

While I'm all for bike lanes, I'm not all for a bike lane on Annette and Dupont - at least not how they've been implemented on the stretch of Dupont & Annette between Keele and Lansdowne (I haven't yet tested the stretch on Annette between Keele and Jane to the west).

What the city has done:
- eliminated a full car lane in each direction
- added a super-wide curbside bike lane in each direction
- added some dedicated curbside car parking areas (that the bike lanes pass on the left)
- whatever road was left over sits unused in the middle, bounded by yellow strips

What the effect has been:
- increased vehicular traffic congestion at all times of the day, and well into the evening
- major increases in vehicular congestion during peak time (because what used to be a four lane road during peak times is now a two lane road during peak times).

They also didn't do much to cover up or de-emphasize the old road markings, making the road look complicated and not easily understood.

[LINK] "L'Ontario compte 50 000 francophones de plus"

Dominique LaHaye in the Ottawa Francophone newspaper Le Droit points out that new changes to Ontarian statistical methods has boosted the number of Ontarians considered Francophone.

La province de l'Ontario compte officiellement 50 000 résidants francophones de plus, depuis hier, dont 5000 à Ottawa.

Cette nouvelle vague de francophones a été rendue possible grâce à l'adoption par le gouvernement ontarien d'une nouvelle définition de la population francophone plus inclusive et censée refléter davantage la diversité des communautés francophones de l'Ontario.

À des fins statistiques, les francophones étaient auparavant définis comme ceux dont la langue maternelle était le français. Cette nouvelle définition inclusive englobera ceux dont la langue maternelle n'est ni le français ni l'anglais, mais qui ont une bonne connaissance du français comme langue officielle. Ce sont aussi des personnes qui utilisent le français à la maison, ce qui comprend un grand nombre de nouveaux arrivants en Ontario.

Ainsi, la définition précédente ne considérait pas comme francophones environ 50 000 Ontariens qui parlent le français tous les jours. Avec la nouvelle définition, les francophones représentent maintenant 4,8 % de la population de l'Ontario. Il s'agit d'une hausse de 0,4 % portant le nombre total de Franco-ontariens à 580 000.

La population francophone de Toronto augmente ainsi de 42 % et celle d'Ottawa connaît une hausse de 10 %.

Here's my English translation.

As of yesterday, the province of Ontario officially has 50 000 more Francophone residents, including 5000 in Ottawa.

This new wave of French was made possible through the adoption by the Ontario government for a new and more inclusive definition of the Francophone population expected to better reflect the diversity of Francophone communities in Ontario.

For statistical purposes, Francophones were previously defined as those whose first language was French. This inclusive definition will include those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English, but have a good knowledge of French as official language. These are also people who use French at home, including a large number of newcomers to Ontario.

Thus, the previous definition did not consider 50 000 French-speaking Ontarians who speak French every day. With the new definition, Francophones now represent 4.8% of the population of Ontario. This is an increase of 0.4%, bringing the total number of Franco-Ontarians to 580 000.

The Francophone population of Toronto increased by 42% and Ottawa grew by 10%.

It's worth noting, parenthetically, that there is a program to encourage Francophone immigrants to settle outside of Québec, although as I blogged at Demography Matters I doubt that this statistical boosting of Francophone numbers in Ontario will do much, if anything, to reverse the assimilation of most Ontarian Francophones and the limitation of French Canada to Québec and adjacent parts of Ontario and New Brunswick.