[PHOTO] At the Hot Box Cafe, marijuana trumps beer and equals love

Marijuana is better than beer; marijuana is love.

That's the message on this eye-catching sandwich board sitting outside 204 Augusta Avenue in the middle of Kensington Market, the new home of the Hot Box Cafe since its relocation last year from Baldwin Street, The place, signs are careful to note, do not sell marijuana; they just sell pot culture paraphernalia, bongs and the like, and offer a nice patio where people can bring their weed and light up. (The Toronto police apparently haven't gone after the Hot Box Cafe for providing a venue for smokers, but almost certainly would if it was actually selling a drug that's still illegal.)

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bag News Notes takes a look at the images of the Turkish lady in red, she who has become an icon of the protests.


• James Bow thinks that Conservative protests that a Canadian MP who left his party should run for a by-election are disingenuous considering the numbers of times the Conservatives benefitted from defections themselves.


• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the awesome potential of the new WFIRST telescope, an infrared telescope, to detect planets. (It could pick up rogue planets, and analyze atmospheres.)


• Daniel Drezner has some things to say about the revelations of the NSA's surveillance of communications.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis notes that, for a country set on building dams, Ethiopia is still so rural and non-electrified as to not gain much immediate benefit from hydroelectricity save as exported power.


• Noel Maurer kind of approves of the Colombian Senate. (I suspect he'd still prefer to get rid of that country's upper house, too.)


• Registan is unimpressed by a cliché-sounding profile of the Pashtuns.


• Transit Toronto's Robert Mackenzie notes that tunnelling has begun for the Eglinton LRT.


• Window on Eurasia notes that some Russians have called for extending the draft to women.

[LINK] "Ontario to overhaul teachers' college, halve admissions"

The CBC report touches upon the advantages and disadvantages of Ontario's planned reform of its education programs.

Aspiring teachers in Ontario will soon face a drastically different landscape than their predecessors.

They will be competing for half the number of spaces in teachers’ college, taking twice as long to earn their degree, and spending double the number of days in classroom placements — all before joining the glut of teachers looking for a job in Ontario.

The changes, spearheaded by the governing Liberals, are meant to curb the oversupply of new instructors — all of whom must have earned a post-secondary degree before applying to teachers' college. According to the Ministry of Education, roughly 9,000 new teachers graduate in Ontario each year, but only about 6,000 teachers are needed.

[. . .]

[S]ome aspiring teachers, like Ryerson graduate Colin McKay, fear that the changes may impede those who want to be educated but not necessarily employed in Ontario.

"We may be producing too many teachers for the domestic market, but a lot of the excess is being exported to the rest of the world," he said, adding that Canadian credentials are prized in other countries.

McKay, who is heading to teach English in Japan this summer, said restricting admissions with the aim of raising quality may only "hurt production, and hurt aspiring teachers."

[LINK] "Canadian job gains in May best since 2002"

Good economic news from Canada, eh?

Job vacancies fall to lowest point on recordCanada's economy had its best month for job creation in more than a decade last month, adding 95,000 new jobs, according to Statistics Canada.

A consensus of economists had been expecting Canada to create only about 15,000 jobs during the month.

The gain reported Friday was more than three times as much as the most optimistic expectation among closely watched economists.

"All of the employment gains in May were among private-sector employees, offsetting losses over the previous two months for this group," the data agency said.

The large gain pushed unemployment down a tenth of a percentage point to 7.1 per cent. The strong showing was one of the best headline numbers on record. The last time more jobs were created in any given month was August 2002, when the economy cranked out 95,100 new positions.

[LINK] "Timbuktu’s slaves liberated as Islamists flee"

Sudarsan Raghavan's article in The Washington Post from Timbuktu is the first article I've seen taking a look at the aftermath of Tuareg slavery in the Sahel, especially in the aftermath of the fighting in Mali.

Across this sand-swept city, hundreds of modern-day slaves are experiencing a sense of liberation, many for the first time. Nearly all the lighter-skinned Tuaregs and Arab Moors who for generations exploited them have fled the city, fearing reprisal attacks for supporting supporting the Islamists or the Tuareg separatists whose rebellion helped ignite the Islamist takeover of Mali’s north last year.

“Under the Islamists, blacks were exploited even more by the pink-skinned people,” said Roukiatou Cisse, a social worker with Temedt, a human rights group, referring to the Tuaregs and Arab Moors. “They told them, ‘We are with the Islamists. We are in power. We are the masters and you are our slaves. We will do what we want.’ ”

“Now, the slaves have profited by the pink-skinned people leaving.”

The jubilation underscores how deeply divided Mali’s northern communities became during the 10-month rule of the Islamists, who included homegrown jihadists, such as the Tuaregs and Arab Moors, as well as foreigners with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the terror network’s West and North Africa branch. A French-led military intervention that began in January ousted the Islamists from towns in the north, though a guerrilla war continues.

Under the Islamists, many Tuaregs and Arab Moors took advantage of their shared ethnic backgrounds with the jihadists and asserted themselves over their black neighbors. The widened rift between the communities could take years, if not decades, to close, residents say.

“It’s a very deep wound that could prove difficult to heal. It could fester for 10, 20, even 30 years,” said Salem Ould Elhadje, 73, a local historian, who has written four books about Timbuktu. “One side no longer trusts the other side.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Mayor Rob Ford crack video scandal: Ford Nation stands by its man"

Gerry Nicholls' Toronto Star opinion piece makes the sad but plausible argument that the ongoing polarization of Toronto into downtown and suburban camps explains why Rob Ford's popularity hasn't budged.

It’s telling, for instance, that we talk about a “Ford Nation” but never a “Harper Nation” or a “Hudak Nation.”

And “nation” is actually a good word to describe Ford’s support base because in politics tribal instincts run strong.

Stripped to its basic element, politics is really nothing more than a never-ending battle between two warring tribes: “Us” and “Them.”

We vote for a party or for a politician to defend “Us,” the good guys, from “Them,” the bad guys, the outsiders, the people who oppose our interests.

From the Ford Nation’s perspective, “Us” are hard-working, middle class, suburbanites, while “Them” are downtown elites, special interest groups, the media and public sector union bosses.

So what happens when “Them” launches a ferocious attack on Ford Nation’s top man?

The same thing that happens when outsiders attack any nation: its members close ranks and rally around their leader. That’s what Ford Nation is doing now.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Real Reason Cities Are Centers of Innovation"

Emily Badger's article at The Atlantic Cities has gotten wide coverage.

"We think there’s an underlying completely different way of thinking here, which is very different from the economist’s way of thinking," says [Wei] Pan, a doctoral candidate in computational social science in the MIT Media Laboratory's Human Dynamics Lab. Previous work by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute has proven the math behind the power of cities: As they grow in population, all kinds of positive outcomes like patents and GDP and innovation (and negative ones like STDs and crime) grow at an exponential factor of 1.1 to 1.3.

This means that all the benefits (and downsides) that come from cities don’t just grow linearly; they grow super-linearly [. . .]

As for why this happens, though, Pan pushes aside theories about the location of manufacturing or the specialty of trade. "It’s more fundamental than that," he says. "Cities are about people. It’s just that simple."

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Pan and several colleagues argue that the underlying force that drives super-linear productivity in cities is the density with which we're able to form social ties. The larger your city, in other words, the more people (using this same super-linear scale) you’re likely to come into contact with.

"If you think about productivity, it’s all about ideas, information flows, how easily you can access ideas and opportunities," Pan says. "We believe that the interaction mechanism is what drives the productivity of the city."

It’s not possible for scientists to measure your social ties in the same way they can measure GPD or crime incidents or STD infections (despite their best wishes, they can’t put sensors on all of us). But this study examined a proxy for the same idea: The researchers looked at phone logs between anonymized telephone numbers all over the country, in search of the number of people who we communicate with inside our own metropolitan statistical area.

"If you look at the interaction patterns of cities," Pan says, "You will see that they grow super-linearly with population with the same growth rate as productivity, as innovation, as crime, as HIV, as STDs."

All of those facets of urban life have appeared until now to share a somewhat mysterious mathematical relationship. But this research suggests that this particular super-linear growth rate is directly tied to how dense cities enable us to connect to each other. As cities grow, our connections to each other grow by an exponential factor. And those connections are the root of productivity.

Of note is the fact that they suspect the productivity gains trail off when cities reach the 40 million mark, but since there are no cities that size as of yet it remains hypothetical.