[URBAN NOTE] "Hamilton video extols the virtues of going Toronto-free"

Via the Burgh Diaspora comes a pop-cultural artifact associated with Hamilton's push to take off as a satellite city of Toronto, a YouTube cartoon. CBC Hamilton's Kate Adach reports.

Trying to appeal to the tired commuter, Hamilton’s Economic Development office has commissioned a short animated video as a marketing tool to encourage businesses to invest in Hamilton.

The “Wake Up From Your Commuting Nightmare” video, which runs about two minutes, was designed to promote living and working in Hamilton as a viable alternative to Toronto and neighbouring cities

It shows a 1950s style businessman on his daily grind — scrambling to get ready for work, being stuck in traffic, and then stuck again on the way back home. He appears to have an epiphany at the end when the sky clears around him and he walks merrily into Hamilton’s Lister Block.

“We’re trying to show [commuters] the price is right here,” said Mike Marini, the marketing coordinator for the economic development office.

About 30,000 Hamilton residents leave the city every day and less than 10,000 come in, he said. “There’s definitely a deficit.” The animated video is part of an “aggressive” marketing campaign designed by the office with a mandate to encourage people to “invest in Hamilton.”

The video’s secondary goal was to highlight the local talent that exists in Hamilton, said Jacqueline Norton, the economic development office’s consultant in charge of creative industries. “Hamilton does have these creative folks right here in the city.”

The score was written by Nathan Fleet, a Hamilton filmmaker and composer, who directs the Hamilton Film Festival. His music company, Blue Pick Media, started this year.

“They’re actually walking the walk,” Marini said. “We didn’t shop this out to Toronto to make this video, it’s a local guy in Hamilton.”

[. . .]

Creative industries are the fastest growing business sector in Hamilton’s downtown, according to the economic development office. The video is just one way of trying to highlight that.

“We’ve got a great story to tell,” Marini said. “We’re proud of the investments here and I think Toronto’s starting to see that.”

As of this posting, the video has so far gotten 1 834 views.

[PHOTO] Greeters by the escalator

These two pretty women were standing by the foot of the escalator leading to the bottom-most floor of 10 Dundas East, the multi-story shopping and entertainment complex on the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas, handing out flyers advertising a month's free use of the complex's gym. The people descending weren't interested, alas.

[LINK] "Brazil Gains Business and Influence as It Offers Aid and Loans in Africa"

Simon Romero's New York Times article describing how growing Brazil is building up a growing presence in Africa, via trade and aid and cultural projection and the like, is worth reading in full. Brazil is the most populous and, in aggregate, the biggest economic power on the shores of the South Atlantic; it makes sense that as soon as it was able, its influence would be felt in Africa as well as in Latin America.

Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The array of aid projects and loans recently extended to African countries points both to Brazil’s ambitions of projecting greater influence in the developing world and to the expanding business allure of Africa, where some economies are rapidly growing even as parts of the continent still grapple with wars and famine. The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

“There’s the growing sense that Africa is Brazil’s frontier,” said Jerry Dávila, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about Brazil’s inroads across the South Atlantic Ocean. “Brazil is in the privileged position of finally reaching the institutional capacity to do this.”

[. . .]

Africa now accounts for about 55 percent of the disbursements by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, which oversees aid projects abroad, according to Marco Farani, the agency’s director. Altogether, including educational exchanges and an expanding loan portfolio, Brazil’s foreign aid exceeds $1 billion, he said. Big portions of Brazilian aid also go to countries in Latin America, and there is a smaller focus on East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia.

“We still have a smaller foreign aid profile than other some countries, but we’re learning how to do cooperation,” Mr. Farani said.

[. . .]
Other projects are intended to lure Africans to study in Brazil. A new university began offering classes last year for students from Portuguese-speaking countries, including Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe.

Since Brazil does not need to import large amounts of oil or food, its plans in Africa differ somewhat from other countries seeking greater influence there. Outreach projects tie largely into efforts to increase opportunities for Brazilian companies, which sometimes work with Brazil’s government in offering aid.

Some of Brazil’s biggest inroads, predictably, are in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, where the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ranks among the largest employers, and Mozambique, where the mining giant Vale has begun a $6 billion coal expansion project.

But Brazilian companies are also scouring other parts of Africa for opportunities, putting down stakes in Guinea and Nigeria. A leading Brazilian investment bank, BTG Pactual, started a $1 billion fund in May focused on investing in Africa. New links are also emerging, including Brazilian farming ventures in Sudan; a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to São Paulo; and a fiber optic cable connecting northeast Brazil to West Africa.

[LINK] "Grey parrots shown to have the reasoning skills of toddlers"

Whatever else may have happened to the other hominin species of the Earth--assimilation into the Homo sapiens sapiens gene pool, extermination, both, other--high intelligence is still present elsewhere on the Earth. io9 George Dvorsky summarizes a recent study of the African Grey Parrot as proof.

One of the reasons why birds haven't been given the respect they deserve is by virtue of the fact that their intelligence evolved along a different track from ours and those of other mammals. This has led to a certain kind of negative bias against birds — but it's one that's starting to fade. Studies into the African Grey parrot in particular are showing a high degree of intelligence, including their counting abilities and vocalization skills.

And now, a study conducted by Christian Schloegl and Kurt Kotrschal in Germany is showing that parrots have very sophisticated inferencing skills as well. The researchers were able to demonstrate this by administering a test that had, up until this point, never been tried on birds.

As Stephanie Pappas reports in LiveScience, scientists already know that parrots can make inferences; after being shown two opaque boxes, one full of food and one empty, Grey parrots intuitively know which one has food inside it after the boxes have been closed. Easy peasy.

But Schloegl and Kotrschal wanted to make the task a bit more challenging. Pappas writes:

In their new study, six African Grey parrots were presented with two opaque boxes, one containing walnuts and one empty. Instead of showing the parrots the empty box, however, the researchers shook the boxes so the parrots could hear the walnuts inside.

In some cases, the researchers shook either both of the boxes or neither box. In others, they shook just the empty box or just the full one. They found that the parrots could correctly determine that a noisy box was a full box. Even more impressively, when presented with a box that made no sound when shaken, the birds consistently picked the other box, seemingly reasoning that it must be full.

Now this might not sound impressive — but it's important to note that humans are incapable of making this kind of inference until the age of three. Moreover, aside from apes, no other species has been shown to be able to do this — not even monkeys or dogs.

[LINK] On Earth-like worlds orbiting white dwarf stars

I posted posted here last year about the possibility that Earth-sized planets with habitable environments could orbit white dwarf stars--briefly, stars that have reached their end of their fusion-burning lifespan, shedding their outer layers into space and evolving into a compact ball of superdense cooling matter. The very idea seems to be one of those ideas that came as an initial surprise--"Could such a thing be possible?"--but then, after some consideration of the possibilities, became bemused acceptance--"Well, why not?"

A recent Supernova Condensate post fetchingly titled "Undead Suns" amplifies on the theme of a recent Centauri Dreams post that examines the idea in greater detail.

First, Centauri Dreams on the detectability and potential for habitability for such hypothetical--and as yet undiscovered--worlds.

The conditions on planets orbiting close to a cool white dwarf might be relatively benign. What Fossati and team show is that the cooling process in these stars slows down as their effective temperature approaches 6000 K, producing a habitable zone that can endure up to eight billion years. And it turns out that white dwarfs offer advantages M-dwarfs do not, providing a stable luminosity source without the flare activity we associate with younger M-class stars. As you would expect, a cool white dwarf has a habitable zone close to the star, ten times closer than for M-dwarfs. One recent study has used this to argue that a Mars-sized planet in the white dwarf CHZ would be detectable with today’s ground-based observatories even for faint stars.

But there are other options including polarized light that may be used to detect a planet with an atmosphere around a white dwarf. Normally, starlight is unpolarized, but when light reflects off a planetary atmosphere, the interactions between the light waves and the molecules in the atmosphere cause the light to become polarized. The paper notes that the polarization due to a terrestrial planet in the CHZ of a cool white dwarf would be larger than the polarization signal of a comparable planet in the habitable zone of any other type of star except brown dwarfs. Analyzing polarization is thus a viable way to detect close-in rocky planets around white dwarfs.

Next, Supernova Condensate on the possibility of yet another type of Earth-like planet, this one the exposed core of a former gas (Jupiter-type) or ice (Neptune-type) giant. The two planets found so far which most closely resemble the type of world being speculated about may be the cores of massive planets, not having started as predominantly rocky worlds. Is this such a problem for life?

Certainly, they may well be the cores of former gas giants, and surviving the common envelope evolution is a given. But I’m not convinced the final assertion holds. Being the cores of former jovian planets, all that’s left may well be a big ball of iron and silicate, not all that dissimilar to an Earth-like planet. When it first formed, Earth wasn’t all that Earth-like either, and it’s entirely possible that some amount of material may have been captured gravitationally by these planetary cores as the red giant lost its mass. Carbon and oxygen rich material may well have been accreted. If anything, these planets would likely be enriched in heavier elements. They would likely contain more carbon and oxygen than Earth does. But then, this is merely my own speculation on the matter.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s Diner en Blanc pops up at Fort York"

Even though Toronto can be a frustrating city at times, with its yawning divisions and its inhabitants' structural insecurities and the rest, sometimes it can pull off really cool things on a grand scale. The most recent example of this is the apparent success of the city's inaugural Diner en Blanc yesterday at Toronto's Fort York The description of the event by Noor Javed in the Toronto Star makes me smile.

Dressed in all white, food and umbrellas in tow, hundreds of guests braved the wet weather to attend Dîner en Blanc, the city’s inaugural impromptu dinner party hosted on the grounds of historic Fort York.

The location for the party had been kept a secret from attendees until the very last minute, and many who came by chartered buses found out only when they had arrived.

“We didn’t know until we were literally here,” said Sana Ansari, who brought her friend Hena Awan — and two ponchos — along. She had come because it was “one of those unique Toronto events you just can’t miss.” And even the rain hadn’t deterred her from making the trek from Mississauga.

Others said the weather added to the ambience.

“It’s beautiful here, even with the rain,” said Dave Winter from Toronto, who had set up his table with flowers, champagne flutes and silverware.

“How often do you get to do something like this?” he said.

While diners sat under the cloudy skies, holding umbrellas with one hand and eating with the other, live bands played in the background, adding to the ambience of the night.

This was Toronto’s first attempt at Dîner en Blanc, an event that began in 1988 in Paris. The idea caught on, and similar dinners take place around the world including in Singapore and New York.

At a Toronto test run last year, some 400 guests dined in the Distillery District. This year, 1,400 people registered to be part of the real thing. More than 3,000 were on a waiting list, said organizer Jordan Fogle.