[PHOTO] Condo site under construction, lower Bathurst Street, April 2012

[LINK] "The Uncanny Valley"

The Volokh Conspiracy's Kenneth Anderson linked to a translation of Masahiro Mori's seminal 1970 article presenting this thesis of the uncanny valley.

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people's reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention. More recently, however, the concept of the uncanny valley has rapidly attracted interest in robotics and other scientific circles as well as in popular culture. Some researchers have explored its implications for human-robot interaction and computer-graphics animation, while others have investigated its biological and social roots. Now interest in the uncanny valley should only intensify, as technology evolves and researchers build robots that look increasingly human. Though copies of Mori's essay have circulated among researchers, a complete version hasn't been widely available. This is the first publication of an English translation that has been authorized and reviewed by Mori.

[LINK] Andrew Coyne on Sun TV's requesting government aid

There's an irony in Sun TV, a privately-run and vociferously right-wing television network noted for very low viewership, demanding government support (to wit, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's making the channel mandatory for cable packages, so getting them the funds they otherwise lack). The National Post's Andrew Coyne writes at length about this irony, from a right-wing perspective no less.

I don't think Sun TV will last much longer.

The network, never shy about self-promotion, seems almost an infomercial for itself these days. Network personalities have been drafted to explain the urgent public necessity of making Sun mandatory carriage, that is of taxing everyone with cable or satellite service. Viewers are directed to a website, where they can send an email to the CRTC in support of its application.

As with every other corporate special pleader since Confederation, the campaign lays on the nationalism with a trowel. Sun promotional materials note the network is “100% Canadian” and produces “96 hours a week of Canadian content.” Its submission quotes everyone from Pierre Juneau, the CRTC’s first chairman, to Jack Layton, not forgetting to butter up the commission itself: “Strong Role For The CRTC,” runs one section heading.

There just aren’t words for this kind of gall. Even by the standards of the cultural sector, it’s breathtaking: proof, yet again, that the only thing you need to succeed in Canadian business is utter shamelessness, coupled with an invincible sense of entitlement to the public’s money. Leave aside its general positioning of itself as the voice for conservative, free-market types, or its constant lectures to others on the need for self-reliance. This is the network that, when it is not talking about itself (sole opposition to the “non-Sun media”) is more or less obsessed with the CBC and its “billion-dollar subsidy.” All forgotten, apparently.

Well, not quite. The network argues it is only asking for the same deal as its competitors in the all-news business, including the CBC. And, in fairness, it is. CBC Newsworld (now CBC News Network) and CTV News Channel were both given mandatory carriage when they first launched, and for many years afterward. Nor is Sun the only supplicant before the CRTC asking to be blessed in this way. Others include Starlight (“the Canadian Movie Channel”), Natural Resources Television, and EqualiTV, a channel for disabled Canadians.

But if fairness is what we’re after, there’s another way to go about it. Rather than give every channel an equal chance to stick their hands in the public’s pockets — to force viewers to pay for channels they would not pay for willingly — it is to grant that privilege to no one: to leave viewers free to decide whether or not to subscribe to each channel, on its own merits.

[LINK] "China calls for talks after North Korean threat"

The Los Angeles Times' article describing the reaction of China to the latest North Korean threats hints at the possibility that China might take concrete action against its neighbour, if only to try to prevent the destabilization of China's Korean frontier.

With North Korea openly threatening the United States with nuclear weapons, China called Thursday for a new round of diplomacy and appears to be growing increasingly frustrated with its longtime ally.

Beijing’s calls for intervention come amid a torrent of belligerent language from Pyongyang, angered by a United Nations resolution earlier in the week expanding sanctions over its missile and nuclear program.

The latest escalation came Thursday when Pyongyang lashed out at the United States, which it called the “archenemy of the Korean people.’’

“We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States,” North Korea's National Defense Commission said in a statement released by the official news service.

“Settling accounts with the U.S. needs to be done with force, not with words,” it said.

[. . .]

Frustrated with its longtime ally, China took a surprising step against North Korea on Tuesday by voting in favor of the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the rocket launch.

For years, Beijing has been encouraging North Korea to follow Chinese-style economic reforms, loosening the controls on its tightly controlled economy.

From 2003 to 2007, China led the six-nation talks -- which included the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia as well as North Korea -- on the nuclear program. Analysts believe, however, it is unlikely that North Korea will return to negotiations, even under strong pressure from Beijing.

For the Chinese, Snyder said, calls for multiparty talks are seen more as a "crisis management mechanism, so they can rest easy there will not be any escalation."

[LINK] "NIH Told to Retire Most Research Chimps"

This news reported by Scientific American is good news, contingent of course on the chimpanzees being properly housed and cared for after the experiments are done.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should dismantle a decades-old colony of 360 chimpanzees, retiring all but roughly 50 of the animals to a national sanctuary, the biomedical agency was told on 22 January in a long-awaited report.

The report, from a working group of external agency advisors, also counsels the NIH to end about half of 21 existing biomedical and behavioral experiments, saying they do not meet criteria established in a December, 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report.

“Clearly there is going to be a reduction in the use of chimpanzees in research,” says working group co-chair Kent Lloyd, the associate dean for research at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis.

The report says that the NIH should begin planning sanctuary housing for the retiring animals “immediately”, and that a colony of about 50 animals would be sufficient for future research. The report also sets high hurdles for new chimpanzee experiments in the future, calling for the establishment of an independent committee that would vet individual study proposals after they first pass routine NIH scientific review. In cases where the burden on the animals is high, the benefit to humanity should have to be “very high” to pass muster with the committee, says Daniel Geschwind, the other co-chair of the working group and a geneticist at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The report suggests that three of nine ongoing invasive experiments, involving immunology and infectious diseases, could continue, because they meet the IOM criteria. These require that a study be needed for public health; that no alternative animal model exists; that performing the study in humans would be unethical; and that the animals be maintained in socially and physically appropriate habitats. The report also says that eight of 13 behavioral or comparative genomics studies could be allowed to continue, but in some cases only conditionally — meaning that funding for these experiments could not be renewed without passing the independent committee review.

The working group — a subgroup of NIH’s Council of Councils, a trans-agency advisory body — was chartered by NIH director Francis Collins one year ago to advise the agency on how to implement the recommendations of the IOM report, which found that most chimpanzee research was not necessary. Its recommendations are not binding; Collins is expected to respond to them in late March, after a 60-day period of public comment. But they signal yet another significant step in an ongoing retrenchment. Last month, the agency announced that it will retire 110 chimpanzees to the national Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville, Louisiana, after they had been first slated to move to an active NIH-supported research centre in San Antonio, Texas.

[URBAN NOTE] "Competition Seeks Ideas for Turning a Downtown Hydro Corridor Into an Urban Oasis"

Terri Coles' Torontoist post describes an exciting possibility. I loved New York City's High Line--it's the subject of two extended photo essays of mine (1, 2). A Toronto equivalent would be superb.

In New York City, an elevated freight rail lane in west Manhattan became the High Line, a celebrated linear park running through a busy part of the borough. Design firm Workshop Architecture hopes that one of Toronto’s hydro corridors can be similarly transformed into a continuous recreation area for Toronto’s pedestrians and cyclists, and that an international contest soliciting ideas for the space will help hasten the process.

The corridor in question is a strip of grass, more than five kilometres long and filled with massive hydro towers (like the one in the picture at the top of this post). It connects several neighbourhoods in the city, from the Annex to Davenport. These, according to Helena Grdadolnik, Workshop Architecture’s associate director, are areas that lack the park space that other parts of Toronto enjoy.

Right now, the City licenses space from Hydro One for eight separate small, unconnected parks along the corridor. Last year, Toronto’s parks department invited area residents to give input on an upgrade for one of those parks. This led Grdadolnik to think that it may be time for a larger vision for the entire corridor.

An electricity corridor may not seem like the ideal spot for a park, but Grdadolnik thinks that with the right plan, it could happen. “I thought it would be great for the communities along this route to be galvanized to input into a full vision for this area, as one linear park,” she said. “I also thought it was important to extend beyond the green strip of the electricity infrastructure and include the sidewalks and streets adjacent to this corridor in any future planning. My office and home are nearby, and I see many people using this corridor as a shortcut to the grocery store, but it is broken up by streets that are hard to cross, and by fences and steep grade changes.”