Canada's privacy watchdog says Internet phenomenon Facebook breaches the law by keeping users' personal information indefinitely - even after members close their accounts.

Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says the popular social networking site should hang on to the data only for as long as truly necessary.

In a report Thursday, Stoddart urged Facebook to remedy the problem, one of several serious privacy shortfalls she discovered.

Facebook, which has nearly 12 million Canadian users, allows people to keep in touch with friends and family by updating their personal pages with fresh messages and photos.

Stoddart said although Facebook provides information about its privacy practices, it is often confusing or incomplete.

"It's clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates," Stoddart said in a statement.

For example, the "account settings" page describes how to deactivate accounts but not how to delete them, which actually removes personal data from Facebook's computer servers.

[. . .]

The privacy commissioner will review Facebook's actions after 30 days to gauge progress. She can take the case to the Federal Court of Canada to have her recommendations enforced.

She launched a probe of Facebook in response to a complaint last year from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

The clinic, based at the University of Ottawa's law faculty, alleged numerous violations by the high-profile site.

By now, almost everyone agrees that California government is seriously dysfunctional. The state suffers from a grave fiscal crisis, extraordinarily high taxation (which, however, is still not enough to finance the state's exorbitant spending), overregulation, and numerous other problems. "Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger has been no more able to curb these tendencies than his much-reviled Democratic predecessor, Gray Davis. Steven Greenhut suggests that California's problems are structural, not merely the result of bad decisions by individual politicians. He argues that the Golden State's people would be better off if it was broken up into three or four separate smaller states. The idea of partitioning California is not a new one; but it has never been more timely. While I don't necessarily endorse Greenhut's specific proposal, I do agree with the general argument that California's problems stem partly from its excessive size. With some 38 million people, California has about one-eighth of the nation's population.

Normally, the ability to "vote with your feet" is one of the strongest checks on dysfunctional state policies, a point John McGinnis and I discussed in this article. If a state government has poor economic policies, excessive taxes, or bad public services, taxpayers will tend to migrate elsewhere, putting pressure on the state to clean up its act. That, for example, is what happened with my own home state of Massachusetts when it lost population to southern and western states in the 1970s and early 80s. Even if the poorly performing state government doesn't shape up, at least migration will reduce the number of people who have to put up with it.

California has been largely insulated from foot-voting pressure because of its huge size, and the way in which it monopolizes most of the desirable parts of the US West Coast. Because of these geographic advantages, the cost of leaving California is often much higher than that of leaving most other states. As a result, Californians have had to put up with more abuse than most other state governments could get away with.

If California were divided into three or four smaller states, the cost of exit would be lower, and the new states would have strong incentives to compete with each other for people and businesses. Foot-voting would be a far more viable option. Of course we wouldn't want states that are too small to exploit economies of scale. However, each of the new states would probably have some 8 to 14 million people, more than such medium-size states as Virginia, Washington, Indiana, and Massachusetts, which few if any believe to be too small.

Once humans go into space to stay, the Gregorian calendar isn't something they'll necessarily take with them. A timekeeping system based around equinox and solstice and organized for the needs of an agricultural society may not have much more than nostalgic value to the pioneers of Sol, considering that the environments they inhabit will be purely artificial. Depending on the tempo with which space is settled, humanity's new worlds may well ditch Earth's dating system in favor of one which is relevant to them, and not just an apron string binding them across the light-hours to a land that's no longer home.

[. . .]

Ceres' orbital period is a little over four and a half Earth years - 1680.5 days, and the Cererean calendar divides this out into 1,680 twenty-four hour days with a bit left over at the end. The days are grouped into twenty-one months, each eighty days long, and owing to my vision of Ceres as being run along technocratic lines, they are for the most part named after scientists, astronomers, and people relevant to the discovery of Ceres.

As Poncy did, I’ll use outer planet specialist Mike Brown’s illustrations of what has happened to our Solar System in the last few decades. The first illustration shows the Solar System most of us grew up with, a system with nine planets that were more or less clearly defined, with what was assumed to be a certain amount of debris and cometary material further out.

Now, of course, we see a new Solar System. Depending on how we define planets, we can declare that we have numerous such objects in the outer system — call them ‘dwarf planets’ — along with, much further out, the enormous, spherical system known as the Oort Cloud. Think about this: The number of objects with a diameter beyond 500 kilometers has doubled in just ten years from thirty-five to more than seventy as we’ve continued our investigation of trans-Neptunian objects. It is fully assumed that within another decade or two, we’ll know of hundreds more of these objects.

Let me quote [space proponent Joel] Poncy on this:

If we now recap all sizable Solar System planetary objects larger than 500 km, we get 19 objects closer than the orbit of Uranus, orbit-able after a decade or so of cruise with current technologies. Uranus itself can be flown by but not orbited for a decent travel time. We have already more than 40 objects at Uranus and beyond and this number will grow considerably by 2020. This is even starting to change the appellation ‘Outer System,’ which was previously used to name the part beyond the frost line at 4 AU, and is now sometimes used to designate the part beyond 30 AU.

Consider, too, that we once thought of the the Solar System as being enclosed in a well defined heliosphere that separated it from true interstellar space. Now we have objects like Sedna, with an aphelion (942 AU) that is well beyond the heliosphere. In moving to its perihelion at 76 AU, Sedna moves from interstellar space into the heliosphere and then gradually works its way back out again. The new Solar System is packed with objects that defy all the definitions we once brought to the term.

The Roma Community Center in Toronto has criticised the Canadian government for today's reintroduction of visa requirements for Czechs, which the Center says harms the persecuted minority of Czech Romanies.

The situation in the Czech Republic and other countries is similar to the situation in Germany in the 1930. Like at the time, Canada now prevents a persecuted minority from finding a safe refuge, Paul St.Clair, an activist from the centre, told CTK.

"We are disappointed that Canada has decided to shut the door to Czech Roma who are genuine refugees even if they come from a highly developed central European country," the Center said in a press release.

St.Clair recently faced accusations that he personally profits from the Romany immigration to Canada, being one of its organisers. He has sharply dismissed the accusations.

St. Clair said Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), which decides on granting asylum, has complied with 85 percent of Czech Romany asylum claims in the past one-and-a-half year.

However, in a press release concerning the visa reimposition on Monday, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said that more than a half of the claims have been rejected or withdrawn before the IRB makes the final decision.

The statistics are therefore distorted, Kenney said, indicating that a number of Czech claimants only abuse Canada's asylum system.

On Tuesday, August 5 (not Aug. 6 as widely reported), the private television station Nova, by far the most-watched in the country, broadcast a documentary portraying the life of Czech Roma who'd emigrated to Canada as carefree and comfortable. The 15-minute report, by reporter Josef Klima on the Na vlastni oci (With Your Own Eyes) program, showed Czech Roma families living comfortably on state support as they waited to be granted asylum by the Canadian government.

Within days, there were reports of large numbers of Roma, reportedly 5,000 in the large east Moravian city of Ostrava alone, selling their property and possessions in preparation for emigrating to Canada. By the following week, the Canadian Embassy in Prague was receiving hundreds of calls a day, 90% from Roma, and flights to Canada from Prague were booked into October. The situation was also fuelled by offers by the mayors of some towns to contribute funds to buying airline tickets for the Roma who wanted to leave. The mayor of Ostrava-Marianske Hory, Liana Janackova, told Mlada fronta dnes, "we have two groups of people -- Gypsies and whites -- that live together, but can't and don't want to. So why can't one group take the first step toward finding a solution? I don't think it's racist. We just want to help the Gypsies."

[. . .]

Lucie Cermakova, spokeswoman for the Canadian Embassy in Prague, denounced the program as one-sided. "The program presented only one side of the matter and picked out only nonsensical ideas," she said. A similar opinion was voiced by a spokeswoman for the Czech Embassy in Ottawa, Marie Jurkovicova: "According to our information, the program was full of half-truths, which strongly distorted reality and practically invited the exodus of large groups of Czech Roma. It concealed a number of facts." (Mlada fronta dnes, August 13, 1997)

[. . .]

Canadian officals in the Czech Republic are attempting to convince Czech Roma that emigrating to Canada is no easy or safe path to follow, Terry Mooney, charge d'affaires at the Canadian Embassy in Prague told the Canadian Press. "We're trying to stop them by indicating that they're taking an enormous risk in going," he said. "They may not be accepted. And if they are returned, they will return, generally speaking, to impoverished circumstances...We're trying to tell them that life in Canada is not a bed of roses, even if they are accepted. They need to think very soberly about whether all of this is worth it." (CP, Aug. 26, 1997)

There were also reports in Canada that the Canadian immigration officials were delaying the processing of asylum claims by Roma to make checks for criminal records. During this delay, the Roma applicants are left without any legal status in Canada and they cannot apply for working permits or social aid. And the hostels in Toronto, for instance, are already beginning to run out of space to house them.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the Rom began to migrate to other parts of Europe and, after the 1880s, to both North and South America. Today, most Gypsies in Canada are Rom. Although no systematic research has been conducted on their arrival in this country, on the basis of available data, it is reasonable to estimate their first appearance as having been around the turn of the century. Passenger lists record Rom arriving at New York in 1899, 1900, and 1901 who claimed either to have been in Canada or to be headed here. Border-crossing records show Rom entering the United States from Winnipeg and Montreal in 1903, and a photograph exists from the following year of a band of Rom camping at Innisfail, Alberta.

The Canadian Rom are divided into two main tribes – the Machwaya (from the Mačcva region of northern Serbia) and the Kalderash – of which there are numerous branches. According to the Rom themselves, most belong to the Mineshti clan of the Kalderash tribe, a group of related families claiming descent from a common ancestor, Mina, who is variously identified as a man or a woman. If the latter, she is described as a large, strong woman who travelled across Russia with her seven sons and a pig. The majority of Canadian Rom trace their ancestry to four brothers, Zlatcho, Grofia, Wasso, and Bochi, the sons of Zurka, a descendant of Mina. According to oral tradition, they first came to the United States in the 1880s or 1890s and thence to Canada. Other clans arrived at about the same time and were probably associated with one another through marriage ties. They include the Papineshti (geese clan), the Supeshti, a clan of Russian Kalderash, and the Goneshti, who claim to be members of the Churara tribe, a group distinct from both the Machwaya and the Kalderash. Since 1970 there has been a steady influx of Lowara Rom from Europe, and if police reports are any guide, they now constitute the largest Gypsy group in Canada. The Lowara are closely related to the American Rom but have diverged from them to some extent in dialect and customs as a result of their longer stay in Europe.

Regardless of nomenclature, all these groups are Rom with almost identical speech and customs. They apparently interact and intermarry freely; for all practical purposes they should be considered variants of a single ethnic entity. In addition, several other Gypsy groups have arrived in North America and subsequently sojourned or taken up residence in Canada. The Rom were preceded in this country by the Romnichals from the British Isles (1870s) and the Ludar from Bosnia (1890s). Hungarian musician Gypsies, or Romungros, are found in the bigger Canadian cities, but their history in Canada is largely unknown. As well, several Irish and Scottish traveller groups, who are not of Gypsy origin though they are commonly so regarded by non-Gypsies, have immigrated to this country.

The sad, but perhaps inevitable, news came today that Pages, one of Toronto's most-loved bookstores, will indeed be closing its doors on August 31st. Efforts by owner Marc Glassman to maintain the viability of his business amid "skyrocketing rents" on Queen West have ultimately hit a brick wall in the form of lease-cycle that's finally run its course.

As previously reported, a six month extension worked out with Pinedale Properties in February was occasion for cautious hope, but the discrepancy between what Glassman can afford to pay and what Pinedale believes it can charge is simply too wide. A fixture for artists, intellectuals and book lovers coming on 30 years, the store will be sorely missed.

[. . .]

Hesitant to give me a drop-dead date on a search [for a new location], Marc instead explained that beyond just finding a new location, it's become both necessary and desirable to rethink the store from the ground up. In the age of the Kindle and eBooks, it's his belief that the independent bookstore will have a better chance to thrive if it's operated as something of a split between a retail venture and an event-space. (Perhaps something like powerHouse Books?)

[. . .]

While the importance of the materiality of books will certainly continue to fade, it's unlikely to completely disappear. There's plenty out there who'll continue to treasure the beauty of the book as an object. Indeed, I'd count myself one of these people. But to rely solely on this form of business is, given the current situation at Pages, hardly prudent.

The Czech Republic's ambassador to Canada will fly out of the country this afternoon partly in protest and partly to plot his country's reaction to new visa restrictions on Czech visitors to Canada, the embassy in Ottawa says.

Ambassador Karel Zebrakovsky will be leaving less than 24 hours after Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced the federal government will attempt to stop what it sees as an unacceptable number of refugee claimants from both the Czech Republic and Mexico, with new visa requirements that go into effect at midnight tomorrow.

In Prague, where Canada thinks thousands of the Roma minority have been launching fraudulent refugee claims, the reaction was fierce.

Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer branded the restrictions a "unilateral and unfriendly step." He was speaking after an emergency government meeting to discuss the new visa requirements, Reuters reported.

[. . .]

In retaliation, the Czech government will require Canadian diplomats and civil servants to obtain visas before entering the country on official business, he said. But Prague is powerless to place visa requirements on all Canadian visitors to the country because it is a member of the European Union and must harmonize immigration policies with all of the 27 member countries.

Czech diplomats will also begin raising the Canadian visa problems with the European Commission in a bid to reach a mutually agreeable resolution.

[. . .]

The restrictions on Mexican visitors to Canada could have even greater economic ramifications.

Mexican asylum claims make up one quarter of all applications that Canada receives, the government says. But tourism and business trips from that country to Canada have also been on the rise.

The tourism industry is urging the federal government to delay the visa requirement for Mexican visitors until Nov. 15.

A group of hotels, restaurants and tour operators from Ontario and Quebec that rely on business with Mexico said the government's move came without advance warning and in the middle of a recession.

"This has blindsided our industry," Hume Rogers, general manager of Capital Hill Hotel and Suites, told reporters in Ottawa.

Carlo Dade, executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, said the government's decision didn't offer any exceptions for the growing number of Mexican business travellers, or the possibility of a program to pre-clear frequent visitors such as that which Canada has with the U.S.

A cat's purr normally says, "I'm happy." But a new study suggests some purrs send cat owners a different message: "Feed me!"

Researchers found that purrs of hungry cats included a higher-pitched sound, somewhat like a cry or meow. They played recordings of these purrs from 10 cats to 50 human volunteers. Even people who'd never owned a cat found them more urgent and less pleasant than contented purrs from the same animals.

These food-seeking purrs may exploit the way humans naturally respond to a baby's cry. Some cats apparently learn it's effective in getting a human to feed them. Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in England and co-authors present their work in today's issue of Current Biology.

As the Emperor and Empress of Japan emerged from the Japanese Hall on Alexander Street in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Cy Saimoto was at their side, smiling and waving to the people packed six deep along the street to witness the couple's visit to a building and a neighbourhood that were once the heart and soul of Japantown.

A few minutes after helping the royal couple into a waiting limousine yesterday, Mr. Saimoto was still smiling, basking in the afterglow of escorting them around the hall and in the symbolism of the event.

“It meant a lot to the people, to the Japanese community. And the Downtown Eastside. Because the first Japanese settlement was here,” said Mr. Saimoto, who is 81 and an honorary chairman of the Vancouver Japanese Language School & Japanese Hall.

[. . .]

Hundreds of people lined the block in front of the school to catch a glimpse of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, who are on a 12-day visit to Canada that began in Ottawa on July 3 and ends this week in Vancouver.

School directors and others in Vancouver's Japanese-Canadian community lobbied to get the school on the royal couple's itinerary, arguing that the building's historical significance should outweigh any worries about the royal couple seeing rundown areas of the city.

The school and hall opened in 1906 and have operated since, except between 1942 and 1952, when the property was confiscated and used first by the Canadian military and then by local businesses.

In 1953, after a lengthy campaign, half of the property was turned over to the Japanese-Canadian community. Of all the boats, stores, homes, businesses and other assets seized from Japanese-Canadians during the war, the school is the only property to have been returned.

During World War II when Japanese Canadians had their property confiscated and were interned (see Japanese Canadian internment), Japantown ceased to be a distinct Japanese ethnic area. Although some Japanese returned after the war, the community never revived. The area is now part of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Along Powell Street, a few remnants of the former Japanese neighbourhood still exist. The Vancouver Buddhist Church, formerly the Japanese Methodist Church, still exists at 220 Jackson Street (at Powell).[3] So does the Vancouver Japanese Language School and Japanese Hall at 475 and 487 Alexander Street (at Jackson), which was established in 1906.

Until the boom in Japanese restaurants in the 1980s, two restaurants on Powell Street were among the only Japanese dining in the city.

It was Nihonmachi, at least until 1942. That's when rabid, racist paranoia caught up with the events of Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, and the thriving Vancouver community of Nihonmachi, or Japantown, was torn apart to satisfy Canada's hatred of its latest enemy in the Second World War.

It's no secret Japantown never recovered from the deportations, seizure of property and sheer viciousness of Canada's hysterical over-reaction. Today, the many problems of the Downtown Eastside are much in evidence around Oppenheimer Park, which was once the heart of Nihonmachi.

Miko Hoffman is general manager and program director for this weekend's Powell Street Festival, held at and around Oppenheimer Park. She isn't optimisitc that the vibrancy of Japantown will ever return.

"I would love to see it happen, love to," she says. "It's just that the community is so dispersed, it would take a lot to get people to come back here."

The haunting German film The Lives of Others, which tells the story of how an East Berlin writer and his girlfriend are kept under round-the-clock surveillance by the infamous Stasi secret police, provides an inkling of what Prenzlauer Berg was like 20 years ago. The district, which used to sit close against the Wall, was not massively damaged by Allied bombing during the Second World War, but it still looked as if the war had ended yesterday. The borough, which incidentally used to be twinned with London's Hackney during the latter's socialist heyday, contains street after street of late-19th-century apartment blocks. Two decades ago, the facades of all of them were either falling off or pockmarked with the holes of millions of bullets sprayed on them by the invading Red Army (the tactic was designed to deter snipers) as they took the city in May 1945. The district stank of a soft brown coal called lignite, which was used to heat people's homes, and two-stroke-engine car exhaust fumes. It was home to academics, dissidents and intellectuals but also to Communism's failures and rejects, those without enough friends in the ruling Socialist Unity Party to warrant a decent apartment.

Prenzlauer Berg is no longer twinned with Hackney. Perhaps that is just as well: in the interim it has transformed itself into the Berlin equivalent of Islington – a yuppie enclave in a city which has been affectionately dubbed "poor but sexy" by Klaus Wowereit, its gay Social Democrat mayor. There is not much poor about Prenzlauer Berg, however: once the city's punk borough, it has come of age and is now home to a baby-boomer population of trendy, young, middle-class and educated Germans. Its streets, which once had the odd Trabant or Russian Lada parked in them, are now full of Audis and BMWs. Children cavort in the well-organised playgrounds that have been set up on what seems like every inch of green space. They, like their parents, are dressed in designer clothes, while babies are wheeled about in pristine prams costing 1,000 euros apiece.

[. . . ]

Eisenhüttenstadt is the opposite of Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, but its predicament is shared by hundreds of similar towns and communities in the former Communist East. The town is literally dying on its feet. Before the fall of the Wall, Eisenhüttenstadt was home to a population of close on 60,000. Today, the number has fallen to nearly half that figure and is still falling year by year. An unemployment rate of around 20 per cent has meant that the town's young people have simply upped sticks and gone west in search of work.

Steffi Schultz now survives on a state pension. Under Communism she had a job in a waste-recycling factory which she says she enjoyed, but she was made redundant not long after unification. Fields of flattened weed-choked rubble have taken the place of the Communist-era flats that surrounded her tower block a few years ago. A few concrete table-tennis tables stand in a deserted playground – but the children that used to play on them have long since disappeared. Like many of the other remaining residents in her street, Steffi Schulz is not convinced that Germany's reunification has amounted to much. "In the old days there was a real community round here," she said. "But if it goes on like this there will be nothing but pensioners left in the east," she added.

• Chantal Hébert describes, from her own experience as a mother and a Canadian Francophone, the conscious planning that it take to keep the French language in good stead, whether among children or within cities.


• Rob Ferguson reports that Premier Dalton McGuinty, with a Francophone mother and French-language schooling, is the only leader of Ontario's three major political parties to speak French. The other leaders--Tim Hudak of the Progressive Conservatives and Andrea Horvath of the New Democratic Party--are trying to catch up.

Windsor continued to have the highest unemployment rate in Canada in June with the latest labour market figures released by Statistics Canada Friday showing that 14.4 per cent of the local population was jobless.

That represented a jump of 0.6 per cent over 13.8 per cent in May, meaning that there were more than 25,000 people out of work in the metropolitan area at the beginning of summer.

However, Rick Laporte, president of CAW Local 444 representing Chrysler workers, suggested the reopening of the Windsor Assembly Plant June 30, and the announced addition of a third shift Friday may mean that the local economy hit its lowest point in June and may now begin to recover.

“I’m hopeful,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve hit bottom, but with the plant back back up, the numbers should improve. Certainly I expect a softer (unemployment) rate next month, no question.”

He said the 3,500 Chrysler workers who returned to the job at the end of June should also have a positive impact on area feeder plants, with some of them possibly being in the position to hire.

“The third shift is wonderful news,” He said. “That 14.4 per cent number seems ridiculously high.”

Carole Wilbourn, a New York-based cat therapist, has been working on feline problems since the 1970s. The issues have remained basically the same, she says: aggression, timidity, destructive tendencies and not using the litter box are top complaints. What has changed are owners' attitudes. They're more likely to seek her out pro-actively - getting advice before moving with a cat, or introducing another pet into the household. And they're less embarrassed about seeing a cat shrink.

"People still have a hard time calling me, but it used to be harder before," Ms. Wilbourn says.

Cats can be more challenging therapy patients than dogs, she says. "Because a dog wants so much to please. A cat is, like, 'Maybe. If I'm happy, then you're happy.' "

From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. Humans have shaped the evolution of dogs more than any other species. Even when they misbehave, dogs are hardwired to please people. Cats, not so much.

But it's a mistake to think that cats don't care, says Pearl Kam, founder of Gentlecare Natural Pet Products in Port Coquitlam, B.C.

As part of her holistic treatment of cats, dogs and horses, she often uncovers emotional issues beneath the physical problems, she says: especially in felines.

"Most people think dogs are the social animals; but cats, when they live with you, they want to be with you," Ms. Kam says. "They do need that bond."

Difficulties often start when the owner takes a vacation or starts working longer hours, she says. "When they get ignored, and they don't get their hugs and kisses, yeah, they get pissed off."

And cats are quick to anger, Ms. Kam says. "Cats won't take as much crap before they get behaviour issues. Dogs can have a lot of damage before they show you anything. Cats will show you early on."

But frustrated owners looking to lay blame should take a long, hard look in the mirror, says cat behaviourist Mieshelle Nagelschneider of Seattle. "The majority of feline behaviour issues are not true 'behaviour problems,' " says the author of Through the Eyes of a Cat, due out in 2011. "They're part of a cat's natural behaviour repertoire. It's the owners who have issues with how their cat is naturally reacting to the environment the owner has set up."

Passing the mirror test?
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The mirror test is a measure of self-awareness developed by Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970, that was based in part on observations made by Charles Darwin. While visiting a zoo, Darwin held a mirror up to an orangutan and recorded the animal's reaction, which included making a series of facial expressions. Darwin noted that the significance of these expressions was ambiguous, and could either signify that the primate was making expressions at what it perceived to be another animal, or it could be playing a sort of game with a new toy. There are 9 species that pass the mirror test, including magpies and elephants but mostly primates. Most human babies do not pass the mirror test until several months of age.

Gordon Gallup built on these observations by devising a test that attempts to gauge self-awareness by determining whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in a mirror as an image of itself. This is accomplished by surreptitiously marking the animal with two odourless dye spots. The test spot is on a part of the animal that would be visible in front of a mirror, while the control spot is in an accessible but hidden part of the animal's body. Scientists observe if the animal reacts in a manner consistent with it being aware that the test dye is located on its own body while ignoring the control dye. Such behaviour might include turning and adjusting of the body in order to better view the marking in the mirror, or poking at the marking on its own body with a limb while viewing the mirror.

At first, even animals that are capable of passing the mirror test respond as the orangutan described by Darwin. In fact, young children and people who have been blind from birth but have their sight restored initially react as if their reflection in the mirror was another person.

Davenport Road is one of the oldest streets in Toronto. Some 12,000 years ago it was a meandering trail along the shore of Lake Iroquois first used by native hunters and traders. After the shoreline receded it continued to be an important overland link between the Don and Humber rivers. It is one of the few major streets in the city that is off the grid as it follows the original pathway.

On the way to Casa Loma
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The back of George Brown College's Casa Loma campus
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Looking up Bathurst
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Houses clinging to the hill (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Houses clinging to the hill (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Houses clinging to the hill (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Houses clinging to the hill (4)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Houses clinging to the hill (5)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Houses clinging to the hill (6)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The hot media are those, which have a large influence on humans and its sensous perception. According to McLuhan these media even possess a "destructive strength" (for example "stone axes" see the point "the medium is the message"). The pioneer of the media ranks the writing, the phonetic alphabet, the book, the photography and also the radio among this kind of medium. These objects of communication place much data and detailed informations at the users disposal, which are mainly concentrate on one sense of the recipient.

It is affected by this, but remains rather passive in the behavior. The cold media have a small influence strength on humans. The reason for this is, that they offer little details and information, and are not optically delightful for humans. To use and understand these media humans must actively deal with these media. McLuhan calls the televi-sion, the telephone or the caricature as example for it. Finally we mention the fact that a medium is not only hot or cold, but must be regarded always standing in a relationship to another medium.