[PHOTO] A Lovebot here, a Lovebot there: robotic love in Toronto

On the 29th of September, I posted this photo of cheery loving robot graffiti on Bloor Street West in the Annex.



On the night of Nuit Blanche, I found two more.

The first was in front of Boutique Bar, on Church Street.



The second was on postres in Kensington Market.



Doing a bit of research, I found out that these concrete statues and posters were of the Lovebot, part of a public art campaign described in August 2013 by the Toronto Star's Alyshah Hasham. They are here to make us happy.

The child-sized robots with their protruding red hearts and hug-ready arms are street art with a simple mission, says artist Matthew Del Degan.

“To illuminate the love and wonder that exists in the concrete jungle and inspire more.”

Though Torontonians may sometimes seem like faceless robots working in the city, he says, they’re not.

“We have hearts.”

Nearly 100 Lovebots are now gathered on a tennis court at his family home in Vaughan — the cheery result of two years of work and the help of a dedicated team of about 20 volunteers.

They will be deployed in the coming weeks to locations around Toronto, where they will each represent an act of love or kindness.

[URBAN NOTE] "In Little Liberia, expats nervously eye those returning from Africa to NYC"

Amel Ahmed's Al Jazeera America feature about how Little Liberia, an immigrant enclave on New York City's Staten Island, is coping with the Ebola epidemic makes for disturbing reading. Fear is everywhere.

In Little Liberia, some 4,500 miles from where Ebola has ravaged parts of West Africa, the disease is still taking a toll. As fear and rumors spread around this enclave in New York’s Staten Island — home to the largest concentration of Liberians outside Africa — so, too, have stories of lost relatives and fracturing communities.

“I told my mom to stay away from that lady,” said Assie Jalloh, gesturing toward an apartment building near where she was picking up groceries on Targee Street in the Clifton area of the borough.

The object of her concern was a woman who recently returned from West Africa, said Jalloh, a nurse and a Sierra Leonean expat. She favors a mandatory 21-day isolation period for all travelers arriving from the affected countries.

In Little Liberia, Jalloh is not alone in her concern. Many Liberian-Americans share her fears. Momo Fully, a father of four, lost his cousin to Ebola in August. He worries the disease, which has killed more than 3,000 people in West Africa, could take hold in the United States.

“People go back and forth all the time. There’s always the possibly of Ebola coming to America and spreading,” he said.

[. . .]

“This is the sad reality. If my own brother came from Africa, I wouldn’t be comfortable meeting him," Fully said.

He faces another burden. Since the death of his cousin, he and his wife have been providing financial help for the man’s wife and children. “We are all they have now. We have to support them,” he said.

[URBAN NOTE] On anti-Semitic language and Rob and Doug Ford in Toronto

Hayden Kenez' National Post article "Doug Ford booed at debate as he tries to distance himself from anti-Semitic slur allegedly uttered by mayor" begins with the latest scandal facing the Ford brothers.

Doug Ford caused an uproar at a mayoral debate at a north-end Jewish school Sunday evening while trying to distance himself from an anti-Semitic slur allegedly uttered by his brother on an audio recording.

Mr. Ford was responding to allegations from fringe mayoral candidate Ari Goldkind, who said that Rob Ford had called Jews the “’K’ word” in a recorded outburst.

Seizing on the topic of anti-Semitism and hate speech, Mr. Goldkind said that Rob Ford’s record of making racial slurs boded poorly for his brother’s campaign.

“That is where [discrimination] starts,” Mr. Goldkind said, pointing to where Rob was seated in the audience.

“I’m not going to address that comment,” Mr. Ford said, before invoking a stereotype that upset the crowd. “But you know something? My doctor — my Jewish doctor, my Jewish lawyer…,” he said, trailing off as the comment sent the crowd into pandemonium.

The audience shrieked, yelled and booed at Mr. Ford, who seemed flustered. “I’ll leave it at that,” he said, once the audience had quieted down.

“Mayor Ford, who has shown a tremendous amount of chutzpah for coming into this room tonight, may get a free pass from everybody else on this stage … but the fact that he insulted my religion, whether it was under the influence or not; we cannot have a mayor like that,” Mr. Goldkind said. “Because that is where it starts.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Stollerys to close after 114 years at Yonge & Bloor"

blogTO's Derek Flack reported yesterday that Toronto menswear store Stollerys, on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor, will close.

Longstanding menswear retailer Stollerys will close its doors in the new year after a run of over a century at the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor streets. Speculation that the store was in trouble has been tossed around for a while now, reaching a fever pitch a couple years ago when reports surfaced that Apple was planning to open a flagship store in the space. You can cue up the rumour mill once again now that the store has confirmed that it's set to close.

The Globe and Mail's Marina Strauss had more.

David McKenzie, sales manager at the store, said it hasn’t set an exact date for the shutdown, but it could be in January or February, after the busy holiday shopping period. He said a developer has bought the building, but didn’t provide further details.

“We still will be here for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We still have a lot of stock.”

The store, which industry observers have said is tired and in need of an update, has struggled with savvy nearby rivals such as Harry Rosen Inc., the country’s dominant men’s clothier which is rapidly expanding and upgrading its space, and Holt Renfrew & Co. Holt’s upped the ante this week when it opened its first men’s-only standalone store after having put a big push on bolstering its men’s fashion business over the past couple of years.

[. . .]

Stollerys also grapples with heightened online competition from Harry Rosen and an array of independents which are investing heavily in their e-commerce businesses. Stollerys launched its own online selling site about a year ago, Mr. McKenzie said.

In an April post I noted after another that the store had missed opportunities. Why did it launch an online selling site only a year ago? Comments at blogTO and reviews at Yelp!, meanwhile, seem divided between people who like the style and people who dislike the often standoffish nature of the store towards novices.

[URBAN NOTE] "Kayaking the Rouge River and Toronto’s harbour and islands: A photo essay"

Technology journalist Mathew Ingram has a lovely photo post describing a recent kayak trip he took down the Rouge River, in Scarborough, to Toronto harbour.

I got a kayak for my 50th birthday a couple of years ago — a red, 14-foot Perception Carolina, in case you’re interested in the specifics, with two dry wells — and I’ve been paddling a lot around our cottage north of Toronto, but I hadn’t brought it down to the city before until this fall. I thought I would bring it and see if there was enough to do with it to make it worthwhile, especially since we live near where the Rouge River feeds into Lake Ontario.

I’ve biked down the lake-front trail near our house to the mouth of the Rouge many times, and across the bridge into Pickering and along the bluffs out to Frenchman’s Bay, and I would often see kayaks and canoes coming down the river, and wonder where they had been. So one day I strapped the kayak to our old car and headed over to the Rouge.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and I paddled around the marshes at the mouth of the river for a bit and saw some swans and Canada geese, some blue herons and some white egrets, and then I headed up-river. Unfortunately, I had chosen to go just a couple of days after a big rainstorm, and the river was running quite hard — I was fighting the current the whole way, and after about 45 minutes of hard paddling I could go no further. The ride back to the mouth of the river took me about 15 minutes.

Go, enjoy.

[LINK] "Seeds of Doubt"

Michael Specter's article in The New Yorker deserves to be widely shared, indeed. Anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva seems, to put it charitably, more concerned with the impact of her rhetoric than the accuracy of her facts. Even her biography has issues: she is not world-famous as a physicist.

Hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat transgenic products every day, and if any of Shiva’s assertions were true the implications would be catastrophic. But no relationship between glyphosate and the diseases that Shiva mentioned has been discovered. Her claims were based on a single research paper, released last year, in a journal called Entropy, which charges scientists to publish their findings. The paper contains no new research. Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)

Shiva refers to her scientific credentials in almost every appearance, yet she often dispenses with the conventions of scientific inquiry. She is usually described in interviews and on television as a nuclear physicist, a quantum physicist, or a world-renowned physicist. Most of her book jackets include the following biographical note: “Before becoming an activist, Vandana Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists.” When I asked if she had ever worked as a physicist, she suggested that I search for the answer on Google. I found nothing, and she doesn’t list any such position in her biography.

Shiva argues that because many varieties of corn, soybeans, and canola have been engineered to resist glyphosate, there has been an increase in the use of herbicides. That is certainly true, and in high enough amounts glyphosate, like other herbicides, is toxic. Moreover, whenever farmers rely too heavily on one chemical, whether it occurs naturally or is made in a factory, weeds develop resistance. In some regions, that has already happened with glyphosate—and the results can be disastrous. But farmers face the problem whether or not they plant genetically modified crops. Scores of weed species have become resistant to the herbicide atrazine, for example, even though no crops have been modified to tolerate it. In fact, glyphosate has become the most popular herbicide in the world, largely because it’s not nearly so toxic as those which it generally replaces. The E.P.A. has labelled water unsafe to drink if it contains three parts per billion of atrazine; the comparable limit for glyphosate is seven hundred parts per billion. By this measure, glyphosate is two hundred and thirty times less toxic than atrazine.

For years, people have been afraid that eating genetically modified foods would make them sick, and Shiva’s speeches are filled with terrifying anecdotes that play to that fear. But since 1996, when the crops were first planted, humans have consumed trillions of servings of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients, and have draped themselves in thousands of tons of clothing made from genetically engineered cotton, yet there has not been a single documented case of any person becoming ill as a result. That is one reason that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, the U.K.’s Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the European Commission, and dozens of other scientific organizations have all concluded that foods derived from genetically modified crops are as safe to eat as any other food.

Spectre goes on to demonstrate much more.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO notes that the TTC hopes to improve rush hour service by, among other things, shortening wait times on station platforms and adding new cars.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the complexities of an emergent planetary system, L1551 NE.


• The Dragon's Tales links to an article arguing North American integration should push forward.


• Eastern Approaches observes continuing political instability in Bulgaria.


• Joe. My. God. notes a large demonstration in Taiwan in support of same-sex marriage.


• Marginal Revolution notes that democratic progress has been made in Hong Kong under Chinese rule.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw writes about problems related to the niqab and its receiption in Australia.


• The Planetary Society Blog reports on the Messenger probe's continued exploration of Mercury.


• Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc argues that Doug Ford should prove that he has donated his salary to charity, as he has claimed.


• Towleroad observes the continued progress of same-sex marriage before the courts, as the United States Supreme Court's decision not to review cases on same-sex marriage in multiple states legalizes it there.


• The Volokh Conspiracy observes an American court's opening of two parents' proceeding to cancel the adoption of Russian children.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russian perspectives on the recent Latvian election and suggests that fascism is a real outcome in Russia if Russians feel threatened.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Postmedia purchase of Sun Media, and the future of Canadian journalism

Torontoist's Graeme Bayliss noted this morning the surprise news that the Postmedia Network bought Quebecor's English-language papers for $C 316 million.

The Postmedia Network announced today that it will acquire Sun Media’s English-language newspapers and speciality publications—175 in all—including its flagship daily, the Toronto Sun.

The $316-million deal, which also includes the rest of the Sun chain of papers, as well as the London Free Press and the free Toronto and Vancouver dailies 24 Hours, still needs regulatory approval, including the approval of the Competition Bureau. The process is expected to take several months.

Paul Godfrey, president and CEO of Postmedia, which owns the National Post, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, and Vancouver papers the Province and the Sun, said in a statement that his company will “continue to operate the Sun Media major market dailies and their digital properties side by side with our existing properties in markets with multiple brands.”

The National Post, flagship paper of Postmedia, had an article with a complete listing of the titles involved. The Globe and Mail, meanwhile, noted that this is part of a strategy to try to compete with online and foreign digital media.

The deal, financed by a mixture of debt and equity, comes with a dose of risk. Postmedia already owns competitor papers in many markets across the country, which raises warning flags around competition. In Edmonton, the company would own the Sun and Journal; in Ottawa, the Sun and Citizen; and in Calgary, the Sun and Herald. In Vancouver, it already owns the Province and Sun, which is not part of the Sun chain.

But executives at the debt-saddled publisher say the deal is a necessary move to scale up its digital might so it can compete with foreign digital giants like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which draw massive audiences that are pressuring traditional media.

“I think the world is different now,” said Paul Godfrey, president and CEO of Postmedia and a former head of Sun Media. “I don’t consider the other newspapers competitors at all.”

The sale is subject to regulatory approvals, including from the Competition Bureau, and could test Canadian rules around competition in media markets. It will create a newspaper behemoth with more than 190 mass market and community newspapers, and more than 12 million unique monthly visitors online.

Quebecor president and CEO Pierre Dion said in a statement that newspaper revenues have fallen “year by year,” and that “the Canadian newspaper business absolutely needs consolidation to remain viable and to compete with digital media.” Quebecor keeps its French-language titles, including Le Journal de Montréal.

It's quite open to question whether this strategy will work out. Even this new behemoth, if its existence is approved by the Competition Bureau, will be but a minnow next to Google and Yahoo. I and others see no sign that this company will be any more financially self-sustaining than its predecessors.

[VIDEO] On the need to get Just Passing Through on CBC

The web show Just Passing Through is competing at CBC's Comedy Coup for a half-million dollars to fund a prime-time CBC show. What is it about?

Moonshine, the Maritime Mafia, strippers and hot yoga for dogs.You'll find them all--and a whole lot friggin' more--in the East Coast comedy series Just Passing Through. The hit webseries blends the spirit of old-school sitcoms like Three's Company with the edge of today's hits like The Trailer Park Boys. Terry and Parnell Gallant, rough-and-tumble "cousints" from Prince Edward Island, are heading to the Alberta oil patch to get loaded rich. When the shitbox car Grammie gave them breaks down in Toronto, they show up unannounced on their uptight cousin Owen's doorstep and swear they're "just passing through". But the family reunion Owen never asked for is the family reunion that never ends.

"Just Passing Through - Episode 1 - Alberta Bound" (Watch on YouTube)

The episodes to date are hosted at YouTube account of showrunner and writer Jeremy Larter. I quite enjoy Just Passing Through, as a show that plays nicely, smartly, and--yes--crudely--with various stereotypes (the Island, Toronto, et cetera).

Go to Comedy Coup and support Just Passing Through. You won't regret it!