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Jan. 23rd, 2016
The National Post hosts Tom Spears' Ottawa Citizen article noting a downside to typing too quickly. (For the record, I can breach 100 WPM.)
Typing fast doesn’t just cause typos, the University of Waterloo found. It also allows students to write before they formulate their ideas fully.
In other words, fast typing undermines the content of their writing.
The study comes from a team under Prof. Evan Risko, who holds a Canada Research Chair in embodied and embedded cognition.
His team asked students to write essay-style answers to questions — typing some answers normally, and others using only one hand.
Using one hand slowed them to about the speed of handwriting, the study found. It also made their answers much better.
“Typing can be too fluent or too fast, and can actually impair the writing process,” said Srdan Medimorec, a PhD candidate at Waterloo and main author of the study.
The descendants of abandoned goldfish, CBC's Samantha Craggs notes, are populating Hamilton's harbor.
Researchers at the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG) have counted as many as two million large and small goldfish this year, fish that are likely descendants of people dropping unwanted pets in the water.
Now there are so many that they're throwing another wrench into attempts to rehabilitate the bay.
This year, the RBG team has counted as many as 2,500 large goldfish and two million young, said Tys Theysmeyer, head of natural lands with the Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG). They seem to be thriving thanks to climate change, and poor water conditions that have discouraged native species from flourishing.
RBG spotted handfuls of them dating back to the 1990s, Theysmeyer said. But lately, the problem has worsened.
"People used to actively release goldfish into the bay a lot," he said. "In the last five years, their numbers have been rising and rising."
[. . .]
In Hamilton, the numbers are rising from a perfect storm of water conditions. Warmer water temperatures mean that new fish species such as the goldfish can survive, where decades ago it might not have. Theysmeyer says pressures on water quality in the bay, such as contaminated overflow from the city, have also caused a decline in native fish species, leaving more room for goldfish.
Native fish such as northern pike, freshwater drum and several sunfish and minnow species are in short supply, Theysmeyer said. He estimates that only two species — namely yellow perch and blue gill — are showing up in greater numbers.
The Globe and Mail's Kerry Gold notes the concern of many Vancouverites that condo development in that city's Chinatown could undermine that neighbourhood's existence. This sounds familiar, honestly.
King-mong Chan, who was born in Hong Kong and came to Canada at the age of 1, says he has been discovering his roots through Vancouver’s historic Chinatown. But as encroaching new midrise condo developments threaten the culture and charm of the tiny neighbourhood – with a history that goes back to the 1880s – he’s wondering if there will be anything left of Chinese tradition once the condo developers are finished with it.
“There shouldn’t be any more condos,” says Mr. King-mong. “We’ve seen enough development. It’s like a train unleashed.”
Mr. Chan is part of a coalition of young Chinese-Canadians that has formed in the last couple of years in reaction to the sweeping changes in Chinatown. Many see them as the voice of a movement to save Chinatown before it’s too late.
For some, Chinatown’s sudden infusion of condos is a case of, “Be careful what you wish for.” For others, it’s exactly what they feared would happen after new zoning allowed for taller buildings.
For more than a decade, Chinatown and the area around it had been suffering from a lack of vitality. The demographic had aged, businesses were hurting and, at night, the sidewalks were dead. Members of Chinatown’s business community wanted a solution, so the city held a series of public consultations and eventually rezoned the area to make way for buildings as high as 17 storeys along Main Street. The idea was that density, by way of condos, would revitalize the area and get shoppers into stores.
CBC's Susan Bradley notes that Ikea, after three decades, is finally returning to Nova Scotia with a shop in Halifax. Some linked articles note that Moncton, Halifax's only rival as a shopping centre, is envious. I wonder what this says about the Maritime economy.
The buzz about Ikea opening a store in the Halifax area hit a fever pitch on Friday as the Swedish furniture giant announced a much-anticipated return to the Maritimes, after leaving the area nearly three decades ago.
"The rumours are true. We are going to open a full-size store," Ikea Canada president Stefan Sjostrand said at a news conference, ending days of speculation among locals about whether a new store would be a full-size operation or a showroom location.
Ikea Canada operated a store in Dartmouth from 1975 to 1988 and was widely mourned among loyal shoppers when it shut down. Rumours of the store's return have popped up periodically over the past three decades.
"I think this is very exciting for Halifax. I think it is a sign of confidence in the Halifax economy," said Halifax Mayor Mike Savage.
He said the chain has a big following in the Maritimes.
The Toronto Star's Janice Bradbeer tells the story of how, from humble beginning, the Art Gallery of Ontario got its start.
Much more at the website.
The Ontario Society of Artists, led by president George Reid, drew a stroke of colour across winter’s white canvas in January 1900 to create the Art Museum of Toronto – later to become the Art Gallery of Ontario.
For decades the group of local citizens, who formed the Society in 1872, wanted a permanent venue to exhibit their art, rather than in venues along industrious King St.
Toronto at the beginning of the 20th century was booming with a population of 208,000 recorded in 1901 – second only in size to Montreal in the Dominion of Canada.
And what a city Toronto was. Why, there was a sewage system in place, flushable toilets, electric lights and navigable streets paved with asphalt. Horse-drawn streetcars had been replaced by electric ones. Majestic buildings, such as the Old City Hall and at the University of Toronto, dotted the landscape.
But the cultural side went unseeded.
Much more at the website.
Wired's Tim Moynihan wrote this enlightening article about smartphone camera technology.
Smartphone cameras are great, or at least close enough to great that you don’t notice the difference. We’ve reached the point where you’ve got to work pretty hard to find a phone with a mediocre camera, and when you do, it is an anachronism to be mocked and derided—and passed over for a phone with a better one.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time, not too long ago, when smartphone cameras sucked. They took genuinely bad photos that were underexposed or overexposed or grainy or … well, you remember. And if you don’t, consider yourself lucky. It’s taken a few years, but nowadays people take a great camera for granted. Thank companies like Nokia, which started pushing that envelope in 2007, and Apple, which gave the iPhone 4 the first camera that made people go, “Daaaaaaaamn.”
How did this happen? When you consider things like sensor size, pixel density, controls, and optics, smartphone cameras should be pretty lousy. Compared to a DSLR, they still are. But the camera in your pocket is crazy good considering the limitations manufacturers work under. And the advancements keep coming. As we look to the future, the cameras in our phones are only going to get better.
No matter what kind of camera you’re talking about, there’s a universal truth: the bigger the image sensor, the better the image. A bigger sensor will capture more detail with wider dynamic range (the detail in dark and light areas), offer superior low-light performance, and focus more sharply on moving objects. However, with few exceptions, smartphone cameras have tiny sensors.
The vast majority of top-tier smartphones use Sony sensors for their main cameras and Samsung sensors for their front-facing selfie cameras. And every phone on DxOMark’s list of the 10 smartphones with the best image quality has a sensor size between 1/2.3 and 1/3 inches. In terms of surface area, the one-inch sensor in a nice point-and-shoot like Sony’s RX100 is more than six times bigger than any of the top smartphone camera sensors, while the sensor in a consumer DSLR is around 19 times bigger. Drop the cash for a pro-grade DSLR and the sensor is 50 times the size of that puny thing in your iPhone 6S.
Wired's Cade Metz notes Wikipedia's evolution in recent years, for good and for ill.
Today, Wikipedia celebrates its fifteenth birthday. In Internet years, that’s pretty old. But “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is different from services like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Though Wikipedia has long been one of the Internet’s most popular sites—a force that decimated institutions like the Encyclopedia Britannica—it’s only just reaching maturity.
The site’s defining moment, it turns out, came about a decade ago, when Stephen Colbert coined the term “Wikiality.” In a 2006 episode The Colbert Report, the comedian spotlighted Wikipedia’s most obvious weakness: With a crowdsourced encyclopedia, we run the risk of a small group of people—or even a single person—bending reality to suit their particular opinions or attitudes or motivations.
“Any user can change any entry, and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true,” Colbert said, before ironically praising Wikipedia in a way that exposed one of its biggest flaws. “Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn’t, that’s my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it’s also a fact. We should apply these principles to all information. All we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true.”
Fifteen years on, Wikipedia is approaching an equilibrium.
To prove his point, Colbert invited viewers to add incorrect information to Wikipedia’s article on elephants. And they did. In the end, this wonderfully clever piece of participatory social commentary sparked a response from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder and figurehead-in-chief. At the 2006 Wikimania—an annual gathering of Wikipedia’s core editors and administrators—Wales signaled a shift in the site’s priorities, saying the community would put a greater emphasis on the quality of its articles, as opposed to the quantity. “We’re going from the era of growth to the era of quality,” Wales told the The New York Times.
And that’s just what happened. The site’s administrators redoubled efforts to stop site vandalism, to prevent the kind of “truthiness” Colbert had satirized. In many ways, it worked. “There was a major switch,” says Aaron Halfaker, a researcher with the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-profit that oversees Wikipedia. Volunteers policed pages with a greater vigor and, generally speaking, became more wary of anyone who wasn’t already a part of the community. The article on elephants is still “protected” from unknown editors.
Chantal Hébert's analysis of the NDP's central problem, published in the Toronto Star, is compelling. Why is Mulcair still leading the party, again?
Even as NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair launches a bid for a mandate to lead the party for another four years and a second election campaign, his Quebec base is slipping from under him.
If Mulcair relinquished his Outremont seat tomorrow, the NDP would be hard-pressed to hold the Montreal riding against a born-again Liberal party.
The same is true of many of the other NDP seats in Quebec.
It is no accident that most of the New Democrats who survived the last election had higher profiles than the rest of the Quebec pack. That and a four-way split in the vote rather than the party label earned 16 of them a ticket to the new Parliament.
To be fair, none of Mulcair’s 2012 leadership challengers would have done as well in Quebec last fall. But are those 16 seats reason enough to believe Mulcair remains the best choice to lead the NDP to a stronger outcome in Quebec and across Canada in four years’ time?
As things stand today the evidence is, at best, inconclusive.
[BLOG] Some Saturday links
Jan. 23rd, 2016 03:07 pm- blogTO looks back to see when Yonge and Dundas was cool.
- James Bow is decidedly unimpressed about Toronto's ever-shifting plans for mass transit.
- Joe. My. God. notes the opposition of Pope Francis to Italy's civil unions bill.
- Language Log notes Hong Kong's mixture of Cantonese and English, and shares a bit of pop music.
- Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw wonders if Australia has peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, if its originality ended then.
- Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Science Blog shares XKCD's charting of the spaces for undiscovered but possible planets in our solar system.
- The Russian Demographics Blog notes that the Ukrainian population is continuing to decline.
- Spacing Toronto examines the history of the Toronto Coach Terminal.
- Transit Toronto suggests that current mass transit plans evoke Transit City, the difference being that Transit City would be substantially done by now.
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Over the past two weeks, I've been haunting YouTube extensively, watching and listening to the artifacts of David Bowie. Tonight I've been enjoying the brilliant imagery and the sound of the video of Bowie's 1993 "Jump They Say", so dense with meaning for Bowie and his fans.
There's so much there.
Bowie's not alone. I've been binging on sketches from classic Canadian comedy show The Kids in the Hall, enjoying clips of things like the monologues and sketches of Scott Thompson's Buddy Cole.
In their own ways, different yet congruent, the works of Bowie and The Kids in the Hall have lasted well. They still feel fresh, new, enjoyable.
What non-contemporary pop cultural artifacts have you been engaging with? What shows, what music, what books?
Discuss.
There's so much there.
Bowie's not alone. I've been binging on sketches from classic Canadian comedy show The Kids in the Hall, enjoying clips of things like the monologues and sketches of Scott Thompson's Buddy Cole.
In their own ways, different yet congruent, the works of Bowie and The Kids in the Hall have lasted well. They still feel fresh, new, enjoyable.
What non-contemporary pop cultural artifacts have you been engaging with? What shows, what music, what books?
Discuss.