[PHOTO] Looking south at Yonge and Bloor, May 2012

[URBAN NOTE] "Audit: Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s campaign overspent legal limit by 44%"

Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, who has 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, favouring the creation of casinos in the city of Toronto so as to give single mothers employment (and childcare opportunities?), and supporting the transfer of the few city-run daycares over to the province, in addition to being until recently one of mayor Rob Ford's few strong allies on city council, may be in serious trouble.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s 2010 campaign exceeded the legal spending limit by 44 per cent in apparent violation of provincial election law, says a city-commissioned audit.

The 43-page probe released Friday found “additional apparent contraventions in relation to contributions, campaign expenses, and financial reporting,” by the campaign of the veteran Ward 7, York West, councillor.

At its Feb. 4 meeting, the compliance audit committee of three experts can choose to do nothing or refer the audit to a prosecutor for possible legal action. If a court found that the $12,065 in overspending, or other actions, breached the act, Mammoliti could face ejection from office.

Neither Mammoliti, who has previously said he believes his campaign followed all the rules, nor his lawyer, Jack Siegel, returned calls for comment.

An audit by the same firm into Mayor Rob Ford’s 2010 campaign financing will be released later this month, the auditor has said.

[. . .]

DePoe said he was first tipped by an anonymous caller — a “weird guy” who said he was a lawyer. DePoe went to city hall and spent three days looking through Mammoliti’s filing before deciding to make a complaint.

“It appears to be a pretty serious breach,” he said of the audit findings. “I believe elections need to be fair and everyone has to follow the rules.”

The question of what will happen to Mammoliti's political career remains open. For that matter, the question (here mentioned in passing) of what an audit of Ford's successful mayoral campaign is yet another potential career-ender for the current mayor.

[URBAN NOTE] "Hamilton’s identity crisis"

The Ontarian city of Hamilton, the slowly recovering post-industrial city anchoring the western end of the Greater Toronto Area, has been getting some good press of late, and for good reason. As transport links with the City of Toronto proper improve, Hamilton's low cost of living combine with a developed urban core to make an interesting destination for Torontonians looking for an affordable interesting new place to live. That's why, as documented by the National Post's Katrina Clarke, the gaffes by a PR firm hired to promote the city are so embarrassing.

(Seriously. Why didn't these people think of checking hashtags, or getting editors?)

Hamilton has been pegged as the go-to destination for hip, young creative types who get priced out of nearby Toronto — people like Michael Pett, a shaggy-haired 24-year-old educator and indie film-producer.

“One of my friends has described it as, it’s kind of like before the West was won. This kind of open frontier where if you want a piece of it, it’s yours,” he said.

But this week, Mr. Pett was aghast when an Ottawa-based company, hired by the city to consult residents on spending priorities, made a series of mistakes that revealed how little it knew knew about Canada’s ninth-largest city.

During its Monday launch of the $376,000 Our Voice, Our Hamilton campaign, the consulting company, Dialogue Partners, tweeted “what is ‘HSR’” in response to a comment posted on Twitter. HSR is the Hamilton Street Railway, the city’s transit system.

Then news broke Tuesday that the company had posted pictures on their Pinterest page of a courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio, and of a t-shirt saying “Hamilton pop. 354,” likely representing the small town of Hamilton, Washington.

Hamilton — long southern Ontario’s underdog, it has basked in its evolution from Steeltown into something akin to Toronto’s Brooklyn — is a place where identity is a constant topic. The apparent mistakes did not go unnoticed among the more than 500,000 souls who live there, or at least those who are on Twitter.

“The fact that this PR firm from Ottawa didn’t have the decency to learn anything about Hamilton is obviously insulting,” said Mr. Pett.

[LINK] "Ikea monkey: Sanctuary claims owners abused Darwin"

By now, I'm surely not the only person here to have heard of the claims that the former owner of Darwin, the Japanese macaque that gained global game after he ran loose in a Toronto IKEA, abused the monkey in order to make it behave properly. (The Toronto Star's Niamh Scallan was one of the first to report on the filing in court.)

The former owner, Yasmin Nakhuda, denies this through her lawyer. I will say that the sorts of abuse described are, sadly, very common among primates held as pets. If the Story Book Farm primate shelter can document these claims, it goes without saying Darwin should be kept from her.

The statement asserts that Nakhuda, introduced to an illegal exotic animal dealer in Montreal last summer, said she was interested in obtaining a Japanese macaque such as Darwin, because of a YouTube video she saw, in which a tavern owner in Japan trained the monkeys to be servers.

Balking at the $10,000 price, the document claims, she allegedly took possession for a few days to see what it would be like to own a monkey — with the option to return Darwin. It also gave her time to secure the large sum of cash to complete the purchase.

The statement of defence alleges Nakhuda’s first few days of ownership didn’t go well, and Nakhuda wanted to return Darwin to the dealer. It’s further claimed that the dealer came to Nakhuda’s home to teach her how to “physically abuse Darwin to ensure that he compiled with her wishes.”

Once she learned this, the document alleges she decided to keep the monkey and paid the Montreal-based dealer, whose identity has not been revealed by Nakhuda, according to the sanctuary.

The statement of defence suggests that in the months after the purchase leading up to his December escape from a dog crate in a vehicle in the parking lot of the North York Ikea, Nakhuda, her husband and two kids abused the pint-sized primate. The alleged abuse includes strangulation, striking Darwin in the face and head and hitting him with a wooden spoon; forcing Darwin to live in a small dog crate; not changing his diaper for up to three days; failing to provide veterinary care and proper food; and permitting other family members to physically abuse Darwin.

[LINK] "Crows Really Are Mind-Readers"

Wired Science features an article by ScienceNOW's Michael Balter reporting on corvid intelligence. It seems that the Western Scrub Jay--and by extension, its relatives--may prove their awareness of other creatures' minds through their hiding of food.

One member of a research team from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands spent 7 months in bird cognition expert Nicola Clayton’s University of Cambridge lab in the United Kingdom studying Western scrub jays, a member of the crow family that is often used for these studies. The Groningen team then developed a computer model in which “virtual jays” cached food under various conditions.

In PLOS ONE, they argued that the model showed the jays’ might be moving their food—or recaching it—not because they were reading the minds of their competitors, but simply because of the stress of having another bird present (especially a more dominant one) and of losing food to thieves. The result contradicted previous work by Clayton’s group suggesting that crows might have a humanlike awareness of other creatures’ mental states—a cognitive ability known as theory of mind that has been claimed in dogs, chimps, and even rats.

In the new study, Clayton and her Cambridge graduate student James Thom decided to test the stress hypothesis. First, they replicated earlier work on scrub jays by letting the birds hide peanuts in trays of ground corn cobs—either unobserved or with another bird watching—and later giving them a chance to rebury them. As in previous studies, the jays recached a much higher proportion of the peanuts if another bird could see them: nearly twice as much as in private, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE.

Then came the stress test. First, Thom and Clayton gave the jays trays with the ground cobs but no food to hide in them—a so-called “sham” session. Then, in a second session, they gave the birds new hiding trays and bowls of peanuts to hide. When the jays were done, the experimenters removed the trays and stole all of the peanuts. Finally, after a short break, the researchers gave each bird yet another round of food, a new tray to hide it in, and one of the trays it had seen earlier: either the sham tray or the ransacked “pilfer” tray. The jays had 10 minutes for recaching.

If the Groningen model was correct, Thom and Clayton argue, the stress of discovering that food was missing from the pilfer tray ought to drive jays to cache more peanuts than those presented with the sham tray. In fact, there was no difference, even though corvids have excellent memories for hidden food and remarkable abilities to find it again. The hypothesis that jays have theory of mind remains on the table, Thom says.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Brian Burke Was Good for the Toronto Maple Leafs"

The extent to which the Toronto Maple Leafs have coasted on their reputation for the past forty-odd years, run by a management that has opted to make a much profit as possible with as little investment as necessary, has been something I've come back to time and again for the past three years. Corbin Smith's Torontoist opinion piece makes the case that the recent firing of Brian Burke, head coach, was unjustified in that the team was making progress. Commenters disagree, loudly.

The 2008 Maple Leafs [. . .] could only manage a single second-round pick by trading away what was arguably their most valuable asset at that time: Nik Antropov. But it’s worth noting that the same day Burke traded Antropov for a second-rounder, he also managed to get another second-round pick for Dominic Moore, which is excellent value when you consider that Moore has never achieved stats to the level that he did for the Leafs in 08-09.

The rebuild had begun. Burke was selling off what assets the Leafs had as best as he could. The team was still terrible, and there was a long, long way to go. But at least it was getting better. In 2008, the Leafs had worse than nothing. By the end of 2009, they’d managed to bring themselves back to plain-old “nothing.”

In Burke’s first full season with the Leafs, his roster moves got bigger and bolder. Over the summer he wisely got rid of failed goaltending prospect Justin Pogge. He also acquired yet another second-round pick in exchange for two non-impact players.

[. . .]

Toronto is still some distance from Stanley Cup contention, but the Leafs are a hell of a lot better than they were when Brian Burke first inherited the team. Had Burke not been so unceremoniously canned, it seems rather likely that Leafs fans would have started to see consecutive trips to the post-season for Toronto.

[. . .]

We’ll miss Burke’s truculence in press conferences almost as much as we’ll miss his excellent advocacy and charity work in Toronto over the past several years. (I mean, hell, we even selected Burke as a 2012 Hero for his efforts in promoting LGBTQ rights.) As for the Toronto Maple Leafs, we’re hoping that Burke’s vision for the team will come to fruition, even though Burke himself will have moved on.

[LINK] The Kepler-47 Planetary System

I found this NASA graphic illustrating Jason Major's Universe Today article "A Moon With Two Suns", this graphic illustrates the known worlds of the Kepler-47 planetary system. Kepler-47 is of note as it is the first planetary system discovered with multiple planets orbiting two stars. (Last September I noted the discovery of the Kepler-16 planetary system, which has only one planet orbiting two stars.)

Kepler-47c is of note for orbiting in the habitable zone of the system. While it is likely some kind of superterrestrial world or ice giant, Kepler-47c may possess relatively Earth-like moons. NASA is excited.

While the inner planet, Kepler-47b, orbits in less than 50 days and must be a sweltering world, the outer planet, Kepler-47c, orbits every 303 days, putting it in the "habitable zone," where liquid water might exist. But Kepler-47c is slightly larger than Neptune, and hence in the realm of gaseous giant planets, difficult to imagine as suitable for life. That does not preclude the chance that it has large a moon with a solid surface and liquid water lakes or seas. Kepler-16b was likened to Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet in the movie Star Wars—a world with a double sunset. Kepler-47c suggests a different possible scene: our hero standing on a moon, gazing at a double sunset, with a Neptune-class planet rising behind her.

The research team used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Using ground-based telescopes at the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin, they made crucial spectroscopic observations to determine characteristics of the stars in the binary system which is 4,900 light-years from Earth. They are orbiting each other very fast, eclipsing each other every 7.5 days. One star is similar to the Sun in size, but only 84 percent as bright. The second star is a red dwarf star only one-third the size of the Sun and less than one percent as bright.

At a first glance, Kepler-47c seems to have a very eccentric orbit. This would create serious seasonal effects on any moons orbiting Kepler-47c, and on the planet itself.

[DM] "More on France versus Germany"

I've a post up at Demography Matter noting the differences between French and German patterns of demographic changes, noting that these differences could have serious consequences for the economic and monetary union uniting the two (and most of the European continent).

Go, read.