[PHOTO] Shearith Israel Cemetery, New York City

satyadasa did me the kindness of showing me around the Lower East Side and beyond during my recent trip in New York City. One of the many places he showed me was the First Shearith Israel Cemetery near West 21st Street at Sixth Avenue on 55-57 St. James Place. This cemetery is the oldest Jewish cemetery extant in New York City and, likely, North America.

Shearith Israel--the cemetery and its congregation--is associated with the Sephardi Jews, descendants of the Jews of Spain and Portugal deported from their homelands in 1492. Characterized by, among other things, use of the Ladino language--briefly, a Romance language derived from Old Spanish spoken by the descendants of the Iberian Jews--the Sephardim were the first Jewish group to be established in New York City, beating the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe by at least a century. The first Sephardim came to New York City in 1654, back when the tolerant Dutch granted Jews expelled from Dutch Brazil the right to live in the outpost of empire that was New Amsterdam. This cemetery, the second operated by the congregation, was founded in 1682.

The cemetery was a pleasantly green expanse when we saw it, a compact park-like territory hosting a hundred tombs and above-ground monuments, surrounded by buildings and full of life.

[PHOTO] Squirrel at Shearith Israel

It was almost as if this squirrel at Shearith Israel was posing for me.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Research in Motion not being in a death spiral, really it's not

There's something sad about news items like this, as as Research in Motion seems to undergo the same sort of slow-motion collapse that Nortel went through this time last decade. What happened to the high-tech Canadian economy that seemed to be developed at the end of the last millennium? Is Canada doomed to be a resource-exporting economy indefinitely?

(Mind, I remain as happy with my Huawei handset as I did the day that I got it. I've certainly got no grounds to claim that I'm actually, demonstrably, committed to the survival of Research in Motion. There just hasn't been any overwhelming moral imperative for me to do so.)

Research In Motion chief executive Thorsten Heins told CBC "there's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now" and says he is confident the company will be a "very strong player" in smartphones for years to come.

"This company is not ignoring the world out there, nor is it in a death spiral," Heins told CBC's Matt Galloway on the Metro Morning radio show on Tuesday.

Heins' appearance was part of a media blitz aimed at selling the company's turnaround story in the midst of mounting hurdles, which include layoffs of about 5,000 people, faltering sales of its BlackBerry smartphones, a delay in bringing out the new BlackBerry 10 technology and a tanking stock price.

Heins defended Canada's leading technology company as part of RIM's efforts to convince customers and investors that it can survive intense competition from Apple and other competitors.

Heins took criticism when he took the reins of the company in January for failing to acknowledge that the company needed major changes. "Now I'm six months [on the job] and I know a bit more, that's for sure," he said.

Last week, the company announced an operating loss in excess of $500 million last quarter. Heins says he expects similar challenging quarters to come until the company's BlackBerry 10 launch, now expected in the early part of 2013.

[. . .]

"We are still growing in Asia. There are still areas where we are No. 1," he said. "We are in the middle of a transition. We know what we are doing."

[. . .]

The new BlackBerry 10 operating system and phones have widely been considered a last-ditch effort to save the company, which has lost significant market share to the iPhone and Android phones.

[URBAN NOTE] Has Rob Ford disappeared?

The local edition of Metro featured an article asking "Is Rob Ford a part-time mayor?".

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, one of the administration’s most loyal allies, didn’t directly answer a question put to him today about whether Mayor Rob Ford is a part-time mayor.

Speaking at a news conference about the future of child care in Toronto, Mammoliti was asked about controversial comments made by councillor Adam Vaughan on The Jim Richards Showgram Wednesday.

“It’s quite apparent that we have a part-time mayor who talks a lot about making telephone calls to people and I’m sure he does… but the follow up on those telephone calls is non-existent,” Vaughan told the Newstalk 1010 host.

[. . .]

Mammoliti was asked about the reported Entertainment District sightings.

“I’m going to take a different opinion than most have taken. I think we need to hear criticism from everyone… if Councillor Vaughan wants to continue criticizing — and that’s his way of showing leadership in the city — than so be it.”

Mammoliti, who acts as the right-wing whip during council meetings, was then asked if he believes Ford is a part-time mayor.

“I think this mayor, I’ve said it right from the beginning, you know, let me explain it this way… with the previous mayor his criticism was he took everything on himself. To the point where things couldn’t get done because everything needed to be filtered by the mayor. In this mayor’s case, he has chosen to delegate,” said Mammoliti, adding that Ford returns every call and that that takes a lot of time.

There does seem to be an emergent consensus, on left and even on right, that Ford is a lame duck mayor. suitablyemoname's post in the toronto community linked to Edward Keenan's article in The Grid, which took Ford's lame-duck status as given and then asked "What kind of a mayor does this city need?"

The evidence suggests that Rob Ford’s current term as mayor is done. His control over the city’s agenda started unravelling as early as last July, when his foul-mouthed fear of CBC comedians coincided with an all-night outpouring of opposition to his proposed service cuts at City Hall. Since then, things have only gotten worse, and this year has been one of consistent defeat for Ford. It’s possible to imagine he could become relevant again, but that would be a tough road: He’s been thrown under the streetcar, run over, and left behind.

To fill the leadership vacuum, a rotating series of councillors, mostly from the centre and centre-right of the political spectrum, have seized the chain of office on an issue-by-issue basis—Jaye Robinson on the port lands, Ana Bailão on social housing, Josh Colle on the budget, Karen Stintz on transit. They’ve championed various resolutions and negotiated with council’s more unified left and centre-left members, led unofficially by Shelley Carroll, Adam Vaughan, and Gord Perks. It’s led to some surprising breakthroughs that couldn’t have happened otherwise, including the OneCity transit proposal brought forward last week by conservative midtowner Karen Stintz and left-leaning Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker. The map they put together represents a comprehensive plan to improve transit in virtually every part of the city, and suggests the beginnings of a plan to pay for it.

Keenan then went on to speculate who'd be Ford's successor. (Adam Vaughan is looking good, while I like Karen Stintz.)

[LINK] "How artificial intelligences will see us"

My post last month about the Google scientists who created a neural network capable of recognizing the content of images--the network was able to recognize cats from first principles--was, well, cat-biased. Annalee Newitz' io9 article is a much more thorough examination of the thought processes of what may be the most successful artificial intelligence-like entity yet created. How would it think?

[T]his network isn't like a human brain, though they share some characteristics. It's a new kind of (semi) intelligent entity. Let's call it XNet. Most of the news stories covering XNet have focused on how it learned to recognize humans and kitties after seeing them thousands of times, which is just the kind of thing a little kid would do. Very cuddly and relatable.

But XNet also recognized some other things, too. Over at Slate, Will Oremus reports:

Dean notes that the computers "learned" a slew of concepts that have little meaning to humans. For instance, they became intrigued by "tool-like objects oriented at 30 degrees," including spatulas and needle-nose pliers.

This is, to me, the most interesting part of the research. What are the patterns in human existence that jump out to non-human intelligences? Certainly 10 million videos from YouTube do not comprise the whole of human existence, but it is a pretty good start. They reveal a lot of things about us we might not have realized, like a propensity to orient tools at 30 degrees. Why does this matter, you ask? It doesn't matter to you, because you're human. But it matters to XNet.

What else will matter to XNet? Will it really discern a meaningful difference between cats and humans? What about the difference between a tool and a human body? This kind of question is a major concern for University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who has written about the need to program AIs so that they don't display a "lethal indifference" to humanity. In other words, he's not as worried about a Skynet scenario where the AIs want to crush humans — he's worried that AIs won't recognize humans as being any more interesting than, say, a spatula. This becomes a problem if, as MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal has speculated, human-equivalent machine minds won't emerge until we put them into robot bodies. What if XNet exists in a thousand robots, and they all decide for some weird reason that humans should stand completely still at 30 degree angles? That's some lethal indifference right there.

I'm not terribly concerned about future AIs turning humans into spatulas. But I am fascinated by the idea that XNet and its next iterations will start noticing patterns we never would. Already, XNet is showing signs of being a truly alien intelligence. If it's true that we cobble together our identities out of what we recognize in the world around us, what exactly would a future XNet come to think of as "itself"? Would it imagine itself as a cat, or as something oddly abstract, like an angle? We just don't know.

I'm reminded of philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous thought experiment: What is it like to be a bat?

[URBAN NOTE] "Push to stop Toronto operation of daycares criticized"

Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, at this point probably Rob Ford's most important ally and having gone on the record as wanting to create a red-light district on the Toronto Islands, trying to defund Pride Toronto for allowing the presence of even the individual members of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (not the group itself), warning of an extensive Communist presence on Toronto City Council, and favouring the creation of casinos in the city of Toronto so as to give single mothers employment (and childcare opportunities?), has just proposed transferring the few city-run daycares over to the province. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people who served with him on the relevant city government committee disagree with him on grounds both practical and ideological.

Councillors who sit on a committee that governs daycare are criticizing Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti's recommendation to pull the City of Toronto out of the business of running child-care centres altogether.

Mammoliti, who was appointed by the mayor to chair a special task force on child care in the city, recommended Thursday that the city ask the provincial ministry of education to take over the operation of the 53 Toronto-run child care centres.

"In turn, operations and system management will be operated by the school board system in partnership with all current operators, both not-for-profit and commercial," he said at a news conference on Thursday.

There are more than 920 child-care centres that the school board would have to manage under Mammoliti's recommendation.

[. . .]

Coun. Kristyn Wong-Tam, who who also sits on the committee, does not agree with Mammoliti's recommendation.

"We know that our daycare programs are oversubscribed. Everybody wants to get into a city funded, city-run daycare program," said Wong-Tam.

"And I think it will be very, very difficult for the province to deliver daycare services to all the individual municipalities and townships. It's just not possible."

[Coun. Janet] Davis was similarly dismissive.

"First of all, it won't fly," she said. "Secondly, the City of Toronto has a great child-care system. We are highly respected across the country. It is one of the best run, cost-effective systems that we have."

She believes the city should retain control of its child-care centres, but agrees funding from senior governments is inadequate.

"What we need are more resources from the provincial government to solve what is an ongoing and chronic underfunding of child care in Toronto."