[PHOTO] Waiting for Santa at the Galleria, Toronto

The light actually looked like this, I swear.

[URBAN NOTE] "South Caucasus Minorities Within Minorities"

Language Hat highlighted a Far Outliers note about the demographics of the capital cities of the independent South Caucasus, after Thomas de Waal.

The three main capital cities of the region have their own distinct histories. A century ago, neither Tbilisi (Tiflis), Baku, nor Yerevan had a majority population of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, or Armenians, respectively. Tbilisi can lay claim to being the capital of the Caucasus, but its Georgian character has been much more intermittent. For five hundred years it was an Arab town, while the older city of Mtskheta was the old Georgian capital. Then, in the medieval period, the city was taken over by the Armenian merchant class. They were the biggest community in the nineteenth century and finally left en masse only in the 1960s. Famous Tbilisi Armenians have included the world chess champion Tigran Petrosian and the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. Baku became a cosmopolitan city with many different ethnic groups from the late nineteenth century. Russian became its lingua franca. Garry Kasparov, the Jewish Armenian world chess champion, who was born in Baku but is unable to return there because of his Armenian roots, describes his nationality as “Bakuvian” (Bakinets in Russian). Baku only turned into a strongly Azerbaijani city with the end of the Soviet Union, the Nagorny Karabakh war, and the mass emigration of other national groups.

By contrast, up until the First World War, Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, had a Persian flavor and a Muslim majority population. Its major landmark was a blue-tiled mosque, and there was no big church. Von Haxthausen wrote, “In Tiflis, Europe and Asia may be said to meet, and the town has a divided aspect; but Erivan is a purely Asiatic city: everything is Oriental, except a few newly-built Russian houses, and occasionally Russian uniforms in the streets.” More Armenians lived in Tiflis, Baku, Shusha, and Van. Yerevan became an Armenian city only after the mass flight of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and of Azerbaijanis from eastern Armenia in 1915–18.

[URBAN NOTE] "TTC Surface Route Statistics 2011-2014"

Fans of big data and the TTC will love Steve Munro's latest post, including statistics on ridership on surface routes for the past several years. His annotations:

The total number of riders by type of service can be subject to error if a considerable proportion of the routes do not have new riding counts (e.g. streetcars in 2012). Note that some of the 2011 counts are also from previous years.

The ratio of riders to service provided is expressed relative to AM Peak vehicles, to Vehicle Hours operated, and to Vehicle Kilometres operated.

The vehicle speeds are based on the reported hours and kilometres operated. To the extent that the hours include layovers (which on some routes can be a considerable proportion of the scheduled time), the speeds could be understated although this would be more likely to show up on a route-by-route calculation. This particularly affects night routes where running times are extended to be a multiple of the 30 minute headways.

Note that despite the importance placed on “express” buses (the 14x and 19x series), the vast majority (95%) of bus trips is carried on local services. Productivity of the downtown express routes is particularly poor.

Streetcar routes operate in more congested areas with higher passenger loads and more frequent stops. Their boarding ratios per peak vehicle and per vehicle hour are about 50% higher than for the bus routes reflecting the higher capacity of streetcars.

[LINK] "The Japanese Barely Eat Whale. So Why Do They Keep Whaling?"

Wired's Sarah Zhang notes why the Japanese continue to hunt whales, in the face of international criticism and their own disinterest in actually eating the meat.

When Japan this week resumed hunting minke whales in defiance of an international moratorium, the country found itself now on the other side of the Americans—and Australians, and New Zealanders, and most of the world, really. The International Whaling Commission has banned commercial whale hunting since 1986, making an exception for scientific research. Japan obeys the letter, if not exactly spirit, of the ban by saying the 333 whales it plans to kill each year are purely for research.

(Iceland and Norway, on the other hand, object to the moratorium and continue to hunt whales commercially without using science as an excuse.)

Given how Japan has twisted itself into knots to justify its whaling and how much international flack it’s getting, you might conclude whale meat is a hugely important part of Japanese cuisine. Nope. Small-scale whaling is traditional in some parts of Japan, but whale meat was only ever popular in the postwar period. So for older Japanese, “this is like nostalgia food,” says Katarzyna Cwiertka, a Japanese studies professor and author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity.

For everyone else, though, whale meat is more of a curiosity. “I am among the kids who benefited from the cheap meat from the whales. My children have, however, no such experiences at all,” says Kazuhiko Kobayashi, an agronomy professor and the co-author of Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts. “This means that whale has lost its position among the animal meats, and will belong more to the category of curious foods for the predominant majority of Japanese.”

Good numbers are hard to come by but A 2006 poll commissioned by Greenpeace and conducted by the independent Nippon Research Centre found that 95 percent of Japanese people very rarely or never eat whale meat. And the amount of uneaten frozen whale meat stockpiled in Japan has doubled to 4,600 tons between 2002 and 2012.

Even Japan’s former top whaling negotiator, Komatsu Masayuki, told me he had never tried whale meat before the whaling job. “I was kind of forcing myself to eat whales because I don’t know the taste,” he says. “And it was delicious. But I’m not crazy about eating whales.” Masayuki, who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries until 2007, still condemns members of the International Whaling Commission for “imposing their wrong emotional view upon Japanese conduct.”

[LINK] "Vertical Farming – Agriculture of the Future"

Emilio Godoy at the Inter Press Service suggests the future of agriculture may be vertical.

Infrared thermometer in hand, Nelson Pérez checks the water temperature in the trays where dozens of small lettuce plants are growing in a nutrient-rich liquid in this vertical farm in Panama.

The water, which contains calcium, phosphorus, magnesium and vitamins, must be kept at a steady 21 degrees Celsius, to obtain the best growth.

Pérez is the watchful carekeeper of the lettuce growing in trays in the controlled environment created by the Urban Farms company in the town of Río Hato, population 15,700, in the province of Coclé, some 125 km north of Panama City.

The vertical farm, the only one of its kind in Latin America, is an example of controlled-environment agriculture, a technology-based approach toward food production which often uses hydroponic methods. This kind of farming helps combat the effects of climate change on agriculture.

“Climate change has affected agricultural production,” said David Proenza, founder of Urban Farms. “So we saw a need to see what changes we could bring about, using technology.”

[LINK] "Antigua: Surrounded by Sea but Catchments are Empty"

The Inter Press Service's Kenton X. Chance describes how the Caribbean island of Antigua is coping, or not, with an increasingly intense drought.

Antiguan Veronica Yearwood no longer panics when she hears that the rainfall forecast for the tiny Caribbean island is again lower than average rainfall.

Not because she is a hydrologist in the water department of the Antigua Public Utilities Authority. “We went passed that stage. We did panic, but we have now settled down to the reality that the drought is really going to be a very bad one; it’s not going to end tomorrow,” she told IPS.

“So we’ve decided to look at ways to mitigate, use what we have sufficiently,” Yearwood said.

Antigua, a 108.5-square mile island of 80,000 people in the northern Caribbean, has been experiencing severe drought conditions for the past two years.

“All of our surface water catchments are bone dry. Our aquifers have shown a decline in the level of the water, and we’ve moved from 60 per cent desalination to 90 per cent desalination,” Yearwood told IPS, adding that citizens are coping “as best as they can.”

[LINK] "The Jungle: Migrant camp’s growth a symptom of refugee crisis"

Marco Chown Oved's Toronto Star article looking at "The Jungle", the migrant shantydown outside the French port of Calais where thousands hope to escape to the United Kingdom, is sad. That they are mistaken about their chances if they got there makes it tragic.

Cold November rains have flooded the muddy encampment and left everyone in a dour mood.

Between tarp-covered tents and vast puddles, men wearing shalwar kameez tread carefully in shoes with the backs flattened so they can be kicked on and off like slippers.

They stop at a ramshackle shelter that serves as a shisha bar and step onto carpet-covered pallets that make up the floor. Only after they are seated cross-legged and have sweet-smelling smoke billowing out of their noses will they speak.

“France is s---,” said Shakir, a 24-year-old Pakistani medical student who volunteers in a makeshift clinic. “All we want to do is get out of here.”

After travelling thousands of kilometres, fleeing violence, persecution or poverty, the estimated 5,000 people living in the sprawling migrant encampment known as The Jungle are now achingly close to their goal. On a clear night, you can see British lights twinkling across the English Channel.

[LINK] "Smartphone Growth Is Slowing. That’s Great News for Apple"

Wired's Davey Alba looks at the economics of the global smartphone market, and Apple's resilience in said.

Since smartphones have been around, people have been buying them. Lots of them—the market has grown exponentially over the past decade. But now, for the first time, market research firm IDC is predicting that 2015 will be the first year that the rate at which the worldwide smartphone market expands will sink into single digits. Turns out, most people who want smartphones probably already have ’em. Counterintuitively, this is to Apple’s benefit.

IDC’s new report today predicts total smartphone shipments in 2015 will amount to a 9.8 percent increase compared to last year, or 1.43 billion units. According to the firm, growth has slowed in the Asia Pacific region, Latin America, and Western Europe.

Not surprisingly, IDC expects that Windows Phones and other phones running on operating systems other than Android or iOS will ship in significantly less quantities in the future.

But a much more pointed reason for slowing growth is the changing market dynamics in China. As the world’s largest smartphone market, representing about one-third of total smartphone sales globally, China has the scale to shift global trends. And in China, the smartphone market is saturated, which means growth has stagnated. First-time buyers have vanished, meaning the growth potential in the country is now in the upgrade market.

“In past years, feature phone users were converting to first-time smartphone buyers,” Anthony Scarsella, a research manager with IDC’s mobile phones team, tells WIRED. “That’s shifting out of China right now.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Taking the ambiguity out of police carding"

Spacing Toronto's Idil Burale writes about carding in Toronto, and where it stands now.

On October 28th, Community Safety Minister Yasir Naqvi released a draft regulation to standardize police street checks in order “to ensure that those interactions are conducted without bias or discrimination, and done in a manner that promotes public confidence and keeps our communities safe.” This regulation seeks to establish a rights-based framework for policing and set out clear rules to govern that notoriously gray area in the Police Services Act: voluntary engagement between the public and police.

Since then, as if on cue, police chiefs and union heads from Hamilton to Toronto have engaged in a campaign of fear-mongering meant to alert us to the perils to public safety (i.e. that criminals would roam free) if the regulation passed. But what is it about the regulation that is causing such distress for the men and women we pay to protect our communities?

I, for one, am very happy to see the police engaging in this very important discussion (the draft regulation consultation period concludes next week). I think it’s valuable to hear their perspectives, given that, for quite a long time, the debate around street checks has been completely one-sided, with police only denying or downplaying any claim of wrongdoing. But I’m also most disappointed by the lack of substance that these senior officers and union leaders have added to the debate.

Now, let’s be honest: the main issue that police chiefs and association heads have with this draft regulation is the fact that it tells them that they will now have to give “rights notifications” to people they stop. While Section 9 of the Charter on Rights and Freedoms is pretty clear about our right not to be arbitrarily detained, the onus has always been on individuals to know their rights and when to assert them. It has too often seemed that police services resist the duty to inform people of their rights.

That dispute led to the stand-off between then-Chief Bil Blair and board chair Alok Mukherjee in 2014 during the negotiations of the Toronto Police Service Board’s policy on carding. The Province, it seems, followed lawyer Frank Addario’s recommendations to the board by emphasizing rights and placing the onus on police officers to inform those they stop for “voluntary” interactions that they have the right to walk away. The province contends that this is a balanced approach (which I can attest to, given the other glaring gaps in the draft) that allows police officers to continue proactive policing while also ensuring that basic rights are respected.

[URBAN NOTE] "Challenging Times at Brockton Town Hall"

In Torontoist's regular Historicist feature, David Wencer looks at the troubled history of the late 19th century village of Brockton, southwest of Bloor and Dufferin.

In the 1870s, Toronto’s western boundary was marked by Dufferin Street. The area to the west of Dufferin, along Dundas, featured a growing community known as Brockton, taking its name from early landowner James Brock, a cousin of Isaac Brock, hero of the War of 1812.

As the population of Brockton grew, so did the apparent need for amenities such as local law enforcement, sidewalks, water, sewer systems, streetcar connections, and fire service. Taxes were needed to pay for such amenities, and these taxes could only be implemented if Brockton legally incorporated itself as a village. Although rumours of Brockton incorporating had begun some time earlier, it appears that serious discussion of the issue began in the autumn of 1880.

In September 1880, a reported “large majority” of residents agreed to petition the York County Council to have Brockton legally incorporated as a village. A census was taken in November, in which Brockton was found to have slightly more than the minimum 750 residents required for incorporation. John Winchester led a delegation at the Council, securing their support in petitioning the Ontario Legislature to have the incorporation made official.


Detail of Hart & Rawlinson’s 1878 Map of the City of Toronto, with Suburbs of Yorkville, Parkdale, Seaton Village, Brockton, and Ben-Lamond. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

While awaiting provincial assent, Brockton held an election in January 1881, with John Winchester elected as reeve, to preside over a village council of four elected councillors. Over the winter, this anxious council met regularly in George Rosbach’s Hall over the Brockton Club House at Dundas and Sheridan, forming committees in an effort to prioritize civic improvements. At one meeting on January 31, councillors announced intentions to propose several by-laws on matters such as postal service, licensing hotels, and the regulation of local street names. At this meeting “the Reeve stated that the Council had no power to do anything towards stopping horseracing on the street till their [incorporation] Bill was passed by the [Ontario] legislature,” wrote the Globe, “but he had spoken to the authorities in Toronto to stop it in the city, and as the greater part of the racing complained of was inside the city limit he had no doubt that it would be stopped altogether.”

Ontario declared Brockton an incorporated village in March, defining its boundaries as the area south of Bloor between Indian Road and Dufferin, with its southern boundary being the northern boundary of Parkdale, running east along an area near to today’s Wright Avenue, and then southeast along the Grand Trunk Railway tracks.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Anthropology.net notes the ancient Bronze Age trade routes between Iran and Mesopotamia.


• blogTO notes the impending facelift of Osgoode subway station.


• James Bow overhears a conversation at the DMV started by a guy who wanted special vanity plates.


• Centauri Dreams notes a proposed satellite that would be dedicated to the search for planets around Alpha Centauri.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that stellar metallicity has nothing to do with planet formation.


• Far Outliers notes religious warfare in the Central African Republic.


• Geocurrents notes the superb Middle Eastern maps of the Institute for the Study of War.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the terrible effects of gentrification.


• Marginal Revolution notes Finland's introduction of a guaranteed minimum income.


• pollotenchegg maps the distribution of Russian and Ukrainian populations in Ukraine.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes senior poverty around the world.


• Transit Toronto notes that the last of the Orion V buses have left the service of the TTC.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russia's redirection of traffic from ports in the Baltic States, observes the need for a modern Ukrainian military, and suggests Russia will annex South Ossetia.

[LINK] "Science-fictional shibboleths"

Science fiction writer Charlie Stross wrote about the problems with written science-fiction, particularly the science-related ones.

There is a term of art that developed early on in the field of SF criticism: willing suspension of disbelief. When we read a work of fiction we are taking, as a given, statements that build upon one another to construct a cunningly plausible lie. We suspend our natural disbelief in things we know to be untrue, for dramatic effect cannot withstand the scorn reserved for falsehood. However, there is a limit (different for everyone) to the number of lies we can stack Jenga-style atop one another before our disbelief can no longer be held in abeyance: on reaching this point, the willing suspension of disbelief fails and the tower of implausibility totters and collapses in our minds.

Disbelief can be shattered easily by authorial mistakes—one of the commonest is to have a protagonist positioned as a sympathetic viewpoint character for the reader behave in a manner that is not only unsympathetic but inconsistent with the protagonist's parameters. But there are plenty of other ways to do it.

Certain patterns are guaranteed to make me throw a book at the wall these days (or they would, if I wasn't doing almost all my reading these days on an iPad), or at least stop reading on the spot. One such pattern is sometimes described as "the seven deadly words"; when you can say of a story "I am not interested in these people," the author has failed to hook you on the human content of their drama, and unless they're compellingly brilliant on another, inhuman, level—for example, the works of Olaf Stapledon or (some of) the works of Greg Egan—then that's it, game over. Another pattern is "this is pointless and tedious" (although it's even harder to define than "lack's human engagement"), and a third might be "this makes no sense" (on any level, including deliberate surrealism).

But then we get to more specific matters: specific shibboleths of the science fictional or fantastic literary toolbox that give my book-holding hand that impossible-to-ignore twitch reflex.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Interview: Richard Florida and the Future of Toronto"

Thanks to Facebook's Alex for linking to Urban Toronto's interview with Toronto-based urbanist Richard Florida, looking at the problems of an increasingly class- and neighbourhood-fragmented Toronto.

31 years after Jane Jacobs wrote Cities and the Wealth of Nations, it is still surprising to discuss macroeconomics and urban design in the same breath. Discussions of GDP, productivity, and innovation, are virtually never linked—in a structurally meaningful way, at least—to the health and vibrancy of urban environments. What's more, as the rate of technological development accelerates, particularly in terms of internet connectivity and communications, some theorists believe that the importance of geographic location as an economic factor is destined to diminish.

In The World is Flat, for example, Tom Friedman argues that globalization and technological development have made many geographic boundaries obsolete, diminishing the importance of place in the global economy. With many corporations asserting a global presence and technology allowing meetings, transactions, and the exchange of knowledge to be conducted from practically any location. A corollary of this line of reasoning is that the clustering of wealth and talent would give way to a globally 'level playing field' of commerce and innovation.

Richard Florida at the Martin Prosperity Institute, image by Lorne Bridgman, cou
Richard Florida at the Martin Prosperity Institute, image by Lorne Bridgman, courtesy of creative class.com

By contrast, Richard Florida argues that "cities form the fundamental economic container of 21st century economies, and the world is becoming 'spikier' than ever before." Indeed, as economic inequality increases throughout the world, "prosperity and innovation are also becoming more geographically clustered." Even in the supposedly 'flattening' age of social media and instant communication, the very companies that produce today's most disruptive and groundbreaking technologies jockey for prime position in tech innovation hubs like California's Silicon Valley, as "quality of place becomes increasingly important."

Meanwhile, here in Toronto—as in many cities throughout the world—the "geography of urban landscapes is also becoming increasingly stratified," Florida notes. Citing David Hulchanski's landmark 'Three Cities Report,' Florida notes that the recent intensification of "a long-term trend towards a prosperous urban core, surrounded by an eroding middle-class, which is itself bordered by increasingly impoverished outer areas."

As Toronto's—and, indeed, the world's—wealth becomes increasingly polarized, "the geographic boundaries of prosperity are also becoming more starkly defined, with increasingly concentrated clusters of affluence surrounded by the comparatively financially depleted areas that make up most of the world." To better understand this phenomenon—and, more broadly, the relationship between geography and prosperity—Florida proposes a radical new economic paradigm in which the the cultural geography of cities is not merely considered an aesthetic consequence of a society's economic system, but rather a critical socio-economic determinant in its own right.

[LINK] The Yorkshire Ranter on how computer models nuclear started a nuclear war in 1983

In his post "That time I was nearly burned alive by a machine-learning model and didn’t even notice for 33 years", Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell writes about how subtle issue with Soviet computer models of Western behaviour nearly started a nuclear war in the early 1980s. Starting principles, it seems, must be carefully examined.

We already knew about Operation RYAN, the Yuri Andropov-inspired maximum effort search for intelligence offering strategic warning of a putative Western preventive war against the Soviet Union, and that it intersected dangerously with the war scare of 1983. We also knew that part of it was something to do with an effort to assess the intelligence take using some sort of computer system, but not in any detail. A lot more documents have just been declassified, and it turns out that the computer element was not just a detail, but absolutely central to RYAN.

At the end of the 1970s the USSR was at the zenith of its power, but the KGB leadership especially were anxious about the state of the economy and about the so-called scientific-technological revolution, the equivalent of the Revolution in Military Affairs concept in the US. As a result, they feared that once the US regained a substantial advantage it would attack. The answer was to develop an automated system to predict when this might happen and what the key indicators were.

Model the whole problem as a system of interconnected linear programming problems. They said. Load up the data. They said. Comrades, let’s optimise. They said.

In all, the RYAN model used some 40,000 data points, most of which were collected by greatly increased KGB and Joint GRU field activity. It generated a numerical score between 0 and 100. Higher was better – above 70 peace was probable, whereas below 60 it was time to worry. The problem was the weighting applied to each of those parameters. Clearly, they had to train the model against some existing data set, and the one they chose was Nazi Germany in the run-up to Operation BARBAROSSA.

Who needs theory? They said. We’ve got the data. They said. A simple matter of programming. They said.