[PHOTO] World Cup paraphrenalia for sale, Dufferin and Dupont, June 2014

[PHOTO] Roses in the Gardens of Hope, New Glasgow

Here are some of the roses I saw in New Glasgow's Gardens of Hope.

[URBAN NOTE] "Halifax looks forward to the opening of its very own library of the future"

I approve of cities getting wonderful new multi-purpose library complexes. This Globe and Mail article by Jane Taber gets at it.

It is being billed as the “city’s living room.” Its rooftop patio offers stunning views of Halifax harbour. There is a 300-seat theatre, two cafes, gaming stations, two music studios, dedicated space for adult literacy, a First Nations reading circle and boardrooms for local entrepreneurs.

Oh, and it will lend books, too.

Halifax’s new $57.6-million gleaming glass library of the future is to open later this fall – a 129,000-square-foot building in the city’s downtown with a unique cantilevered rectangular glass box on the top, suggesting a stack of books. Fully accessible, culturally sensitive, environmentally sustainable and architecturally stunning, with elegant angles and lines, it is the first piece of modern architecture to be built in Halifax in decades, and the first major central library to be built in Canada in several years.

[. . .]

In Canada, library use has increased slightly year after year, according to statistics from the Canadian Urban Libraries Council. From 2008 to 2013, the CULC tracked an 18-per-cent increase in library use, which includes the population served, attendance at programs and number of programs offered.

That is the story in Halifax, where so-called “in-person” visits have increased 2.9 per cent from 2012-13. Website visits were also up by 1.8 per cent. About 15,000 residents signed up for a library card this year and 8,340 library cardholders signed up for the library’s digital download service, according to Halifax Public Libraries’ performance report, released in June.

Libraries are also competing for taxpayers’ dollars – and making progress. New libraries are being built; some are being renovated. An architect was recently hired for Calgary’s Central Library, which is expected to open in 2018; the Toronto Public Library is completing a five-year, $34-million revitalization of its reference library.

[LINK] "Readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper, study finds"

Alison Flood's article in The Guardian about the apparent issues associated with reading ereaders resonated with me, as it did with people around the world. I generally prefer reading from books to reading online, having noticed the same comprehension and retention issues in my own reading.

I wonder what the consequences will be in the future, when so much more reading material is only going to be online. Will ereaders technology advance enough?

The study, presented in Italy at a conference last month and set to be published as a paper, gave 50 readers the same short story by Elizabeth George to read. Half read the 28-page story on a Kindle, and half in a paperback, with readers then tested on aspects of the story including objects, characters and settings.

Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University, a lead researcher on the study, thought academics might "find differences in the immersion facilitated by the device, in emotional responses" to the story. Her predictions were based on an earlier study comparing reading an upsetting short story on paper and on iPad. "In this study, we found that paper readers did report higher on measures having to do with empathy and transportation and immersion, and narrative coherence, than iPad readers," said Mangen.

But instead, the performance was largely similar, except when it came to the timing of events in the story. "The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, ie, when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order."

The researchers suggest that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does".

"When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right," said Mangen. "You have the tactile sense of progress, in addition to the visual ... [The differences for Kindle readers] might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story, is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading. Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story."

[LINK] "Atlantic Ocean slows global warming, but scientists believe hiatus will end around 2030"

The CBC/Reuters account is very worrisome.

The Atlantic Ocean has masked global warming this century by soaking up vast amounts of heat from the atmosphere in a shift likely to reverse from around 2030 and spur fast temperature rises, scientists said.

The theory is the latest explanation for a slowdown in the pace of warming at the Earth's surface since about 1998 that has puzzled experts because it conflicts with rising greenhouse gas emissions, especially from emerging economies led by China.

"We're pointing to the Atlantic as the driver of the hiatus," Ka-Kit Tung, of the University of Washington in Seattle and a co-author of Thursday's study in the journal Science, told Reuters.

The study said an Atlantic current carrying water north from the tropics sped up this century and sucked more warm surface waters down to 1,500 metres (5,000 feet), part of a natural shift for the ocean that typically lasts about three decades.

It said a return to a warmer period, releasing more heat stored in the ocean, was likely to start around 2030. When it does, "another episode of accelerated global warming should ensue", the authors wrote.

[URBAN NOTE] "Yubari: Withering into truth"

Spike Japan's Richard Hendy has returned with his own version of a recent visit to the Hokkaido coal-mining town of Yubari, recounting with abundant pictures the story of a Japanese community's managed decline as its population declines.

This is a positive picture, but I would note this is possible only in the context of a relatively buoyant economy that can manage such a planned draw-down. What happens when Japan runs out of money?

Few cities in the developed world can have been put as comprehensively through the wringer as Yubari, on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido and in its heyday known as the capital of coal: from a peak of just shy of 120,000 people in 1960, its population plummeted by four-fifths, to 21,000, in 1990, the year the last colliery closed and the last miners fled, and has since more than halved again, to below 10,000, as those who stayed on aged and died or drifted away in the wake of the city’s tumultuous 2007 bankruptcy.

Yubari now is a city of superlatives, mostly invidious ones: demographically, it is the oldest city in Japan, probably the world, and possibly ever to have existed, with a median age in 2010 of over 57 set to rise to 65 in 2020, when more people will be over 80 than under 40, making Yubari perhaps the world’s first pensioner-majority city. The population is still falling precipitously, down by a sixth in just five years, and there are fewer children, proportionately, than in any other city, with barely one in twenty of the population under 15—some dozen old-timers die in Yubari for every child born. Following the bankruptcy, Yubari has the most onerous debt burden and close to the weakest finances of any Japanese city, while its bureaucrats and mayor draw the lowest salaries—about £18,000 in the mayor’s case. For the city as a whole, per capita taxable income fell by nearly a third between 1998 and 2012.

After five years in the Tokyo hot-house since my last visit, I was eager to return, to ring the continuities and changes in such a rapidly shrinking place and to see if it would be possible to tease out a more guardedly optimistic narrative of managed senescence than the one customarily presented in the national—and international—media, for in the five years I’d been away much had changed, not all for the worse. Spurred by the rigors of bankruptcy, the schools, of which Yubari—like much of Japan—had far too many, have been consolidated, into a single elementary, junior high, and high school apiece, the wherewithal has somehow been found to build two tracts of considerately single-storey public housing, jobs have been created with the arrival of Chinese herbal medicine factory, and Japan’s oldest city in 2011 elected the country’s youngest mayor, the dashing and energetic Naomichi Suzuki, who had just turned 30 on election and who has come to relish his role as PR costermonger-in-chief for Yubari produce. Were there lessons in how to die with dignity in the Yubari experience for Detroit, which followed its now miniscule Japanese cousin into bankruptcy last year, and for the future Detroits waiting in the wings?

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO wonders, in the aftermath of companies confiscating bicycles parked on city property, if Toronto should clearly mark off public and private space on its streets.


• Centauri Dreams studies news that the Stardust probe may have captured bits of the interstellar medium.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports that sun-like Alpha Centauri A and B can both support planets in stable Earth-like orbits.


• The Dragon's Tales notes the impact of changing patterns of snowfall on Arctic ice.


• Eastern Approaches studies Balkan volunteers in wars abroad, both that of Albanians in the Middle East and of Serbs for Russia in Ukraine.


• Far Outliers looks at Japan's farmer-soldiers on the late 19th century Hokkaido frontier.


• Spacing Toronto favourably reviews the new psychogeography-themed book Unruly Places.


• Understanding Society points to the massive success of a comparative statistical analysis of historical Eurasian populations.


• Window on Eurasia links to a photo essay of an empty post-Olympics Sochi.


• Writing Through the Fog's Cheri Lucas Rowlands argues that modern social media hinders memoir writing, by making it too easy to publish quickly.


• Wonkman points out that the problem with subtle homoeroticism in modern popular culture is that, well, it doesn't need to be subtle any more. What needs to be hidden?

[BRIEF NOTE] On Paul Wells on Chantal Hébert on the 1995 Québec referendum

Paul Wells' review in MacLean's of Chantal Hébert's new book on the 1995 Québec referendum, The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was astonishes me. It seems, after Hébert's retelling, that hardly anyone involved in the question of national unity had any idea what they were doing, that every possibility was open. The idea of some sort of blundering towards catastrophe now does not seem implausible.

A team of Saskatchewan officials worked quietly to develop contingency plans in the event of a Yes vote in the 1995 Quebec referendum — options that included Saskatchewan following Quebec out of Canada, a new book reveals.

Roy Romanow, the premier of Saskatchewan at the time, never told his full cabinet about the secret committee’s work, Romanow told Chantal Hébert, author of The Morning After: The Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was, to be published by Knopf Canada on Sept. 2. Maclean’s has obtained a copy of the book.

“Filed under the boring title of Constitutional Contingencies — a choice intended to discourage curiosity — [the Saskatchewan committee's] work was funded off the books, outside the provincial Treasury Board process, the better to ensure its secrecy,” Hébert writes.

The committee considered a lot of possibilities for the chaotic period Romanow anticipated after a Yes vote — including Saskatchewan seceding from Canada; a Western union of Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia; abandoning the Canadian dollar to use the U.S. greenback; and even annexation of Saskatchewan, and perhaps other provinces, to the United States. “In the eventuality of a Yes vote, clearly you need to examine all your options,” Romanow says in the book.

The revelation that Romanow had set a contingency committee to work is one of several surprises in the book by Hébert, a columnist for the Toronto Star and Le Devoir L’actualité [you'd think I'd get that right on the first try - pw] and one of the country’s most prominent political commentators. She wrote The Morning After with assistance from Jean Lapierre, a former Liberal and Bloc Québécois MP and a leading Quebec pundit. The premise of the book is simple: they interviewed nearly 20 key or peripheral players in the 1995 referendum, from Jacques Parizeau to Jean Chrétien to Preston Manning and Frank McKenna, and asked them what they would have done if the Yes side had been declared the winner of the referendum. The resulting slim volume is the most complete account yet of the secret strategizing on both sides of that historic battle.

What the authors found was chaos. Neither the separatist Yes camp nor the federalist No coalition had any coherent plan for how to deal with a Yes, and at the highest echelons on both sides, leaders were working at cross purposes. Disarray in both the Yes and No camps would only have gotten worse after a numerical Yes victory.

I must read this book.