Results tagged “universityoftoronto”

Enduring bouts of rain and hail, about a thousand students, workers, and community members marched through downtown Toronto yesterday as part of the Drop Fees for a Poverty Free Ontario campaign. At 4 p.m., they arrived at Queen’s Park to demand that the provincial government start "investing in the people, 'cause we are the solution," as the chant went.

On Monday, Torontoist spent the day at the Toronto Innovation Showcase at City Hall, learning about data sets, queues, and civic engagement. At the top of the agenda was the unveiling of toronto.ca/open, Toronto’s new open catalogue of city data, ranging from—as Mayor Miller explained in a press release on Monday morning—"apartment inspection data to child care availability to dozens of GIS mapping data that will enable a broad range of location-based applications. And yes," he added, "our initial data offering also includes the TTC’s scheduling data."

University College has long been one of Toronto's most admired buildings. Its Gothic Revival style, inspired in part by the Romantic poets, impressed such distinguished nineteenth-century visitors as Anthony Trollope, Governor General Lord Dufferin, and Oscar Wilde. In Landmarks of Toronto (1893), John Ross Robertson called the University of Toronto building "the crowning architectural glory of Toronto." Perhaps befitting its moody architecture, University College is also home to one of the city's best-known ghost stories. Versions of the story differ, but each follows the same basic plot.

It's hard to deny that Robin Williams can be a funny fellow, and he even earned an Oscar for Good Will Hunting, which, of course, was shot here.

The great August Mars hoax is an annual tradition. Come summer, inboxes around the world start to fill with the same old messages claiming that on August 27, Mars will come so close to the Earth that it will appear as large as the full moon in the night sky. This year, the hoax itself has received a lot more attention than usual, which makes the University of Toronto Libraries Department's celebration of the "closest approach of Mars in recorded history" even more embarrassing (the error was fixed this afternoon).

Though film shoots in our city have really taken off in the last fifteen or twenty years, they did make movies up here before we gained any kind of rep as “Hollywood North.” It’s fun to watch some of them old movies at least partially because they’re better, on average, than a lot of what’s made nowadays. On the other hand, they present more of a challenge for us here at Reel Toronto.

U of T's flat fee proposal for Arts and Science students—the one that would force new students to pay for 5.0 courses, regardless of how many courses, from 3.0–6.0, they actually took—has barreled over the final administrative hurdle at the University of Toronto, and was passed this evening by the university's Governing Council at a meeting held at the school's Mississauga campus.

This Norm MacDonald vehicle is not by any stretch of the imagination a good movie, but that doesn't mean it isn't funny. There's no real acting (Norm is Norm, which is just fine), it features some interesting cameos (Don Rickles, Chevy Chase, and a brilliant-but-on-death's-door Chris Farley), and (all together, now!), it was filmed on the streets of our fair city!

Two weeks after the University of Toronto got one step closer to passing a contentious proposal that would force many new students to pay a flat fee regardless of the number of courses they were actually enrolled in, the University of Toronto Students' Union (UTSU) and the Arts and Sciences Students' Union (ASSU) have—according to a press release sent out by them this morning—"filed an urgent application asking the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to stop a flat fee proposal from moving ahead."

"That room looks like a student art show," says one, pointing way up to the second- or third-floor windows of Connaught House, lit up in an electric whirl of colour.

U of T's Faculty of Arts & Sciences has passed the flat-fee proposal that we slammed last week as being disastrous for student life. Whether or not the proposal—which would force all students taking anywhere from 3.0 to 6.0 courses, regardless of how many courses they actually took, to pay for 5.0 courses—is implemented for all incoming students as of next school year is now in the hands of the school's Governing Council, where, after passing through the council's boards, it will be decided on at a meeting on May 20 [PDF]. University of Toronto Students' Union President Sandy Hudson confirmed the ruling to Torontoist over the phone tonight, and she told us she is "less optimistic" for the proposal's death "the higher up we go," but told us that, with the Arts & Science Student Union and students on campus, "we're gonna keep fighting it."

Ryan Bigge—Toronto's least ironically named freelancer and, according to the first issue of Spacing, a former "magaging editor" of Adbusters—last year estimated that Richard Florida pulled in $170 000 a year from U of T. When the 2008 Public Sector Salary Disclosure (Sunshine) list was released, Bigge took the figure of $169,999.98 to mean that his guess was only two cents off. What Bigge failed to take into account, however, was that the 2008 list was actually the disclosure of salaries for 2007, and only included money paid out for that period. In other words, because Florida was only hired away from George Mason University in July '07, the money on the list covered just the half-year he was at U of T.

The University of Toronto—apparently anxious to catch up with York in how alienated, poor, and frustrated students have been made there—is weighing a proposal disastrous for the bulk of its future students, all in the name of a fast buck.

The New York Times broke a story on Sunday that has since stirred up some local interest (and some national interest as well): Toronto researchers Greg Walton and Nart Villeneuve of the U of T Munk Centre for International Studies' Citizen Lab were, along with Ottawa-based consultancy SecDev, instrumental in ferreting out some very shady spy activity happening on at least 1,295 computers around the world, approximately 30% of which were owned and operated by so-called "high-value" targets, including journalists, embassies—even the Dalai Lama. A lot of the data necessary for the investigation was gathered abroad, but the brunt of the analysis happened right here, in Toronto, under the aegis of U of T.

Attention drivers intending to head out of the city for a relaxing weekend drive: if a bill before the Ontario legislature is passed, you may have to keep your brand new Model T off country roads on Saturdays and Sundays. According to The Star, "the two days selected were picked on as Saturday is market day, when the country roads are very busy with farmers' conveyances, and Sunday was chosen as the 'day of rest.'" Fear not drivers, as the proposed law does not apply to urban areas and "the bill is so drastic that it is hardly probable it will pass the House."

Dateline: February 12, 1954. An evening of one-act plays was presented at Hart House Theatre by students from three of the University of Toronto's colleges. Victoria was represented by a treatment of T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes, Trinity by Ferenc Molnar's Still Life, and St. Michael's by William Butler Yeats's Land of Heart's Desire. Once the performances were finished, the actors received feedback from an academic jury, led by a future Canadian literary icon.

The University of Toronto has purchased the McLaughlin Planetarium from the Royal Ontario Museum for $22 million, with plans for "academic use." The Planetarium, which we profiled in detail last March, was, since its closure, transformed into temporary offices for ROM employees and a temporary warehouse—one of the most amazing ones imaginable—for ROM artifacts. But the more time that passed after its closure, the less it seemed possible for the museum to be able to develop the land that it was on: the ROM was met with widespread opposition to a proposed condo project in 2005, and though they were still planning a tentative new development last year, we wrote then that "as impractical as it is now, the Planetarium still stands on hallowed ground, and it is hard to imagine that another fight over its future is not on the horizon." U of T and the ROM, regularly at odds over the Planetarium's fate, have seemed able to agree on that point: U of T President David Naylor described the purchase in a press release as a "win-win-win for the U of T, the ROM, and the public," and the Globe summarized the situation nicely: "The museum gets $22-million to help pay off the $84-million left owing to the provincial government after its $270-million expansion, the university gets badly needed room to grow and the public gets relief from a persistent threat to despoil a treasured landscape."

The future of the historic David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill could be decided in a hearing that wraps up today. The University of Toronto sold the 190-acre property to a developer last summer, who told a Conservation Review Board hearing yesterday that their plans for the site preserve the three historic buildings but don't include a public park. At the other extreme, the Richmond Hill Naturalists want to see the entire site preserved as a park, research facility, and operating museum. Coming up the middle is the town of Richmond Hill, which wants to set aside the forested western half of the property that includes the buildings while allowing development on the eastern half. The Observatory's rich history and importance to the town as a large greenspace in the middle of suburbia should all but cinch the case for preservation of a significant portion of the site.

Riding the rocket is a routine event for most of us, a mundane part of our daily schedules that doesn't get a whole lot of attention. But at least for the next month, some imaginative physicists want to take the edge off our collective tedium and sprinkle a bit of cosmic wonder through our otherwise boring commutes. This year is the International Year of Astronomy; to celebrate, a series of posters is going up on the TTC which aims to engage our curiosity about the very nature of the universe itself. The campaign is part of an initiative called CoolCosmos, and consists of five posters that offer whimsical tidbits of information about astronomy, couched in terms that those of us who never ventured past grade 11 physics can still understand. It’s an endearingly nerdy campaign, and the most compelling use of TTC ad space we’ve seen since Poetry on the Way got us pondering the merits of blank verse while stalled on Bathurst.

Some movies are good, some movies are bad, and some movies are so bad they are good. There are even movies that are so bad they’re not good but they at least have some sort of kitsch factor. Cocktail falls into none of these categories. It’s just plain bad. So bad that even if one ranks the Great Bar Movies of the 1980s, it takes a distant second place to Road House. So bad that the tagline was “When he pours, he reigns.” We’re not making this stuff up.

FILM: Spiritual dreams, full-blown hallucinations, and alpha-wave highs, all without drugs? Sign us up! Award-winning documentary FLicKeR tells the story of Canadian artist and visionary Brion Gysin's dream machine: a bright light placed inside a rotating cylinder that matches with the alpha waves in our brains (the results are pretty incredible). Check out the premier tonight, and please don't try to make your own machine—we don't want you locked up at home staring at a lightbulb shoved into a toilet paper roll. The Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West), 9:15 p.m., $8 for members, $11 for non-members.

Toronto's extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn't always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

      

A field of crosses on the University of Toronto campus—set up by engineering students—commemorates the 628 students, faculty, staff, and alumni who were killed fighting in World War I, a war that ended ninety years ago yesterday. Each cross is marked with the name of one of the fallen.

Every Saturday morning Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

It's like a bunch of ad executives got together in a boardroom and decided "You know what gets the kids' attention these days? Community alerts about sexual predators!" It's like that old joke "SEX—Now that I have your attention..." except replace SEX with RAPIST or PROWLER or some other such thing.

MUSIC: The Mahones, The Warped 45's, and Eugine Ripper are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Fast Folk Underground concert series tonight at the legendary Dakota Tavern. The Mahones are getting ready to tour the US with Irish-American punk-rockers the Dropkick Murphys, so bail out on that financial planning appointment you had with your accountant, grab yourself a Jameson's, and get ready to wake up tomorrow feeling like a character from a Bukowski novel. The Dakota Tavern (249 Ossington Avenue), 10 p.m., $10.

Reel Asian is a festival that, we must admit, we've never made it out to before. Along with a couple of the other fall festivals (imagineNATIVE, Planet in Focus), we make a point of browsing the lineup for something worth making an appointment to see and then, whether we find something or not, inevitably forget about it. Hopefully, this time will be different. It has to be. Reel Asian, entering its twelfth year, has now reached the level of institutional maturity at which it possesses the resources to branch out and appeal to people outside of its traditional constituency.

FILM: For the ninth year in a row, the imagineNATIVE film festival will feature videos and films by indigenous artists, alongside exhibitions and workshops voicing stories of survival and identity. You may have noticed their Indian Jane posters around—the festival's annual marketing campaigns cleverly deconstruct Hollywood stereotypes of natives (we've been informed that the awesome scene in Temple of Doom where the guy gets his heart ripped out didn't actually happen...sigh). Various locations, runs October 15–19. Tickets start at $7.

Do you use Skype? Are you...in China right now? Oh, good. Because researchers at University of Toronto's Citizen Lab revealed yesterday in a report [PDF] that chat messages sent over Skype's Chinese service, TOM-Skype, were being actively monitored, censored (for keywords like "democracy," hah), and stored on publicly-accessible servers, where the Citizen Lab researchers got their hands on them. Skype said today that they were "extremely concerned" about the practice, and had no knowledge it was going on. Stay classy, China! [via Boing Boing]