[URBAN NOTE] Photos of Three Chinese Associations

Kensington Market is located just east of downtown Toronto's main Chinatown, and accordingly the district has a large Chinese presence. I remember when once, walking with bitterlawngnome, I spotted these two community institutions and was excited: as I had learned while studying for my anthropology bachelor's degree, chain migration did visibly exist! (On PEI, not so much.) bitterlawngnome didn't understand why I was so excited. The Fu-Kien Society of Ontario Canada and the Hainan Association of Ontario Canada and the Lao Chinese Association of Toronto were my three proofs at the time.

Fu-Kien Society Of Ontario Canada, 171 Augusta Avenue
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Hainan Association of Ontario Canada, 217 Augusta Avenue and Lao Chinese Association of Toronto, 215 Avenue Street
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] Some Friday links

• 3 Quarks Daily's Robin Varghese wonders if Google is killing individuals' ability to recognize even basic things.


• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason photographs the busiest highway in Canada, the 401, at its busiest.


• 'Aqoul notes that Algeria's latest economic policies look very bad and that there were recently riots between Chinese migrants and Algerians.


• blogTO's Derek identifies the most unsafe roads for cyclists in Toronto, with the commenters throwing in their own suggestions.


• Daniel Drezner writes about the current system of international relations as if it was The Birthday Club.


• Demography Matters' Aslak Berg writes about the very difficult situation faced by an arguably already overpopulated Yemen still seeing high population growth, and Claus links to a video on human evolution and wonders how sub-replacement fertility is evolutionarily adaptive.


• Far Outliers links to an article arguing that where Indonesia is a successful emerging pluralistic democracy and economic power Burma is doing nearly the exact opposite.


• A Fistful of Euros' Douglas Muir reports that the aftermath of the sale of Serbia's oil company to Gazprom is going as well as one could expect.


• Hunting Monsters reports on the phantom country of Nagorno-Karabakh.


• Inkless Wells' Paul Wells reports on the latest in a series of polls demonstrating that contrary to mythology, Québécois--especially Francophones--are more likely to support strict jail sentences for criminals that many English Canadians elsewhere.


• Language Hat reports that an Indonesian tribe is adopting Korea's hangul script for their language, the first time ever, apparently, that hangul has been used for a language other than Korean.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Dave Brockington memorializes the late filmmaker John Hughes of 1980s fame.


• Open the Future's Jamais Cascio discusses his participation in a Slate series examining how the United States could collapse.


• Slap Upside the Head celebrates the fact that a woman who said that British Columbia's school system discriminated against non-heterosexual children by not providing so-called "reparative therapy" had her complaint dismissed.


• Strange Maps hosts an unusual early modern map that shows Europe upside down. Literally.


• Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales wonders (1, 2) if the Russian elite has decided to adopt Huntington's clash of civilization theory and make Russia into the central state of Orthodox civilization.


• Noel Maurer reports on a Brazilian plan for a high-speed rail link that actually makes sense economically.


• The Vanity Press reports on the fact that a faked birth certificate actually belonging to Obama was actually an editing version of South Australian David Jeffrey Bomford.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that many of the small peoples of Russia's Middle Volga region are upset with Moscow's centralizing and potentially even assimilatory policies, and argues that the Abkhazian/South Ossetian precedent might encourage the peoples of the Russian North Caucasus to break away.

[LINK] "The life and death of Donald Marshall"

Mi'kmaq activist Donald Marshall is dead.

Like many teenagers, Donald Marshall drank, smoked and hung around the local park with rowdy friends. He might have grown up to become a stalwart citizen, a native leader, an entrepreneur.

We will never know because he lost the chance to realize his ambitions when he was convicted of murder, at 17, and imprisoned for 11 years for a crime he didn't commit. By the time he was finally released on parole in 1982, he was forever damaged by a miscarriage of justice and years of detention.

And yet, despite the tragedies of his later life, his name is synonymous with the fight for justice for the wrongfully convicted. He broke the trail for others, including David Milgaard and Guy Paul Morin, in challenging the legal system. The 1990 royal commission into his case produced 82 recommendations that fundamentally changed the criminal justice system in Nova Scotia. “He had a huge potential for leadership, which was never crushed by his imprisonment and which enabled him to contribute to the native community in Canada,” said lawyer Clayton Ruby, a member of Mr. Marshall's legal team before the royal commission.

A proud Mi'kmaq, Mr. Marshall is also a hero in the battle against racism toward aboriginals in this country. He spent six years fighting discrimination in the courts to challenge the federal government's denial of the historic treaty rights granted to his people by the British Crown in 1760, a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

“He was a really shy person, but he was brave enough to go through the limelight a couple of times to change both the provincial systems and the federal ones and to make very significant changes,” said Terry Paul, Chief of the Membertou Nation. “It is a tragic loss not only for me, being a personal friend, but for the aboriginal people across the country.

Go, read the entire article.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the intelligent crow

The crow turns out to be scarily intelligent.

In a series of tests, the four rooks named Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe were offered a tempting treat - a juicy worm floating on the surface of water in a vertical tube.

To start with, the worm was out of reach. Videos of the experiments show the birds examining the tube from different angles, appearing to think the problem through.

Then the researchers provide a solution in the form of a handful of pebbles. The rooks can be seen picking up the stones and dropping them into the tube to raise the water level and bring the worm within reach.

Cook and Fry succeeded straight away, while Connelly and Monroe took two attempts.

The birds appeared to estimate how many pebbles were needed from the outset. Rather than try for the worm after each stone was dropped, they waited until the time seemed right.

They also selected larger stones over smaller ones, for greater effect.

In other experiments, the rooks quickly understood that sawdust cannot be displaced in the same way as water.

There's this news item, too.

Experiments by researchers at Oxford University show that New Caledonian crows in captivity spontaneously used up to three tools in the correct sequence to achieve a goal - a feat never before seen in non-human animals without explicit training.

Five out of seven birds tested figured out how to extract different lengths of sticks from tubes so they could ultimately get one long enough to fish out a morsel of food at the bottom of the deepest tube.

In all, the crows needed three sticks of different lengths to achieve their objective of reaching the food - and four of the five successful birds came up with the sequence needed on the first try.

[. . . U]sing tools to make or retrieve other tools has long been considered a hallmark of human intelligence, and has often been interpreted as evidence of advanced cognitive abilities, such as planning and analogical reasoning.

While the researchers concluded that the crows did not probe for sticks merely at random, they could find no evidence that their sequential tool use was a mark of reasoning or human-like planning.

"It seems that there might be something about this family of birds that is a little bit more similar to our own problem-solving abilities," acknowledged Wimpenny. "But obviously much more needs to be done in terms of experiments."

"So it's hard to make truly comparative conclusions on this now."

Oh, and there's at least one anecdotal report claiming that whole communities can pick up grudges against individuals. And apparently crows have the equivalents of neocortexes and exhibit encephalization quotients just behind those of primates. And also, apparently crows (and parrots) are as smart relative to other birds as great apes are to other primates (for the record) besides having brain structures comparable to those of bright mammals.

Are those black cawing birds we see picking through our garbage some kind of individual?

[BRIEF NOTE] On a city of villages

At his blog, Andrew Barton recently raised an interesting question: why are so many Toronto neighbourhoods branding (or being branded) villages? The major role played by Toronto's Business Improvement Areas is probably central to this.

I don't understand is why so many BIAs now have to identify themselves as a village. Beyond Emery Village, we've got Davisville Village and Liberty Village and Mirvish Village and practically anything else you care to name and stick "village" at the end of. Of the sixty-seven BIAs presently listed on the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas website, twenty-three are "villages." While a few of them, such as Forest Hill Village and Parkdale Village, are legitimate in that Forest Hill and Parkdale actually were independent villages before becoming part of Toronto, we've also got names like, say, Yonge-Lawrence Village that have no basis in history.

Maybe it's the idea of a stronger, more interconnected city, the prospect of reconnecting with the people next door, or simply the security of uncomplicated peace that you'd find in a country village where everyone stands up for each other. Villages have practically been fetishized since the beginning of the Industrial Age as reminders of a less complicated, more pure lifestyle, and the rural impulse that villages represent keeps cropping up again and again.

[. . .]

To me, it's something different. Villages don't suggest security and bucolic happiness to me. They suggest isolation, provincialism and parochialism. The traditional concept of a village hardly even exists anymore.

I agree with him to a certain extent in that an overreliance or overuse of the term "village" is parochializing, but I don't agree with him to the extent that most people do circulate only in certain specific areas and tend to identify themselves with Toronto through these neighbourhoods. Going out of one's way to create villages where none existed, just reappropriating already urbanized territory without a prior history of settlement, does strike me as a studied violation of history.

Thoughts?

[BRIEF NOTE] Thoughts on Toronto and soccer

Now that Ronaldo is here in Toronto and making the city that hosts Toronto FC feel like a real soccer city, people wonder how far the team would go. Wouldn't you know, this Simon Kuper essay in the Financial Times makes some interesting suggestions about the past, at least.

Let’s take the archetypal provincial city with giant club, Manchester, because what happened there prefigured later events in towns such as Barcelona and Milan. In 1878 a football club for workers of a railway company started up in Manchester. Newton Heath played in work clogs against other works teams. Newton Heath, of course, became Manchester United. What matters here are its origins. The workers were “sucked in from all over the country to service the growing need for locomotives and carriages,” writes Jim White in Manchester United: The Biography.

Almost all of Europe’s best football cities were once new industrial centres. Clubs grew bigger here than in capitals or towns with entrenched hierarchies. That’s why no team from Paris, London or Berlin has won the Champions League.

In most leading European football cities, the industrial migrants arrived in a whoosh in the late nineteenth century. Munich had 100,000 inhabitants in 1852, and five times as many in 1901. Barcelona’s population trebled in the same period to 533,000.

[. . .]

In all these cities the industrial revolution ended, often painfully. But besides the empty docks and factory buildings, the other legacy of the era was beloved football clubs.

These were the cities with the fewest long-standing hierarchies, the weakest ties between people and place. Here, there were emotional gaps to fill. Contrast these cities with traditionally upper-class towns. In England, Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Canterbury and York have more than 100,000 inhabitants each. Yet between them they have just one team in the Football League. In places with settled hierarchies, people did not need football to root themselves.

It may be possible to draw some useful analogies. Toronto is a very quickly growing, increasingly post-industrial city with weak hierarchies. And, despite double-digit unemployment and relative decline, it's still a wealthy city. Torontonians may have good reason to hope for a flourishing team in the near future.