Laila’s, my favourite Lebanese food in the city, got shut down this week.

The full list of violations is pretty egregious.

I ate there at least a few times a month. Not only did the food taste exactly like my Lebanese grandmother’s cooking, they always kept a chess set around. Andrey and I used to play all the time when he still lived in Toronto.

Here’s a picture of a typical plate.

Sigh

Update (Oct 29): And it’s open again? I’m so torn.

Posted via email from hyfen’s posterous

HealthCampTO

A real unconference

On any given day in Toronto, there are a handful of loosely-organized events tech available to attend. They’re free or cheap, unstructured and often have the ‘-camp’ suffix. This means they’re “unconferences” right?

Well, not necessarily.

“Unconference” isn’t a catch-all term for any event that’s free and unstructured. Instead, it’s a gathering where the rules are agreed upon by all participants. (Consult the Wikipedia entry for details.)

Apparently this distinction trips up even publications like NOW. In a piece titled “‘Un’ too many”, Josh Errett asks: “has Toronto reached a tipping point with unconferences?” The article’s message: there are way too many unconferences in Toronto and perhaps some consolidation is in order.

But people immediately jumped on his lack of evidence. Ryan Coleman comments:

Wow. Stunning research at work here as approximately NONE of the events you list would be considered, nor advertise themselves, as “unconferences”.

Again, from another comment on the post by Mark Kuznicki:

I will add that you do your readers a disservice by failing to clearly explain what an unconference is. “The idea is that there is no format” is completely wrong. There is a format. An unconference is a self-organizing format where the participants create the content.

So the bottom line: there are lots of casual events in Toronto but not all of them are real unconferences.

Last month, I found myself at one of the real ones: HealthCampTO.

We will use the “unconference” format to create a safe place for contrarians, free thinkers, change agents and idea entrepreneurs. It is the first healthcamp in Canada, modeled after the globally renowned healthcamp movement begun in San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia.

The invite came courtesy of my friend Rob Fraser. I first met him while working on an article for The Varsity about online communities. After an earlier interview with Daniel Patricio, he introduced me to Rob and his blog, nursingideas.ca, citing it as an example of someone who was using technology to reach out to a broader community beyond the boundaries of a particular school.

Half a year later, Rob is still extremely active in the healthcare community. One of his latest projects was helping organize HealthCamp.

Here’s Rob introducing himself at the start of HealthCamp:

Fellow organizer Carlos Rizo kicked off the day with a tale about Umberto Eco. The scholar has a collection of 30,000 books and when visitors enter his library, most comment on the sheer size of his collection. However, 1% of the time, someone will tell him: “Amazing! All this knowledge — there’s so much more that we have to learn.”

Likewise with healthcare.

Unconference facilitator, Mark Kuznicki laid down some rules:

• Law of two feet: if you don’t like a session, you can leave
• The 1/n rule: don’t try to talk more than 1/n percentage of the time, where n is the number of people in a session

After the introductions, people wrote down issues and questions which they felt should be discussed. The grid below represents the room and time for each topic (also available online):

A full day later, here’s Jen McCabe sharing some her thoughts at the end of the day.

If you want to go through the digital artifacts from the day, you can replay the CoverItLive Feed or check out the various topic pages.

A few photos from Refresh Summer Social

Another summer night, another patio.

What’s the occasion?

This event is a special one – we’d like to thank each of you that has supported Refresh Events over the past year. Come on out to The London Tap House on August 24th at 7pm to meet fellow designers, developers, social media experts and others working in Toronto’s vibrant interactive community.

Here’s the view from the roof:

This DJ sure gets around:

This DJ, not so much. Here’s Saul “wiki wiki”-ing.

There was cake:

(Sprouter has a better photo.)

Some more pictures

(Alternately, you can look at Elaine’s set - she has way more.)

#hoHOTo

(The summer edition)

Update: Hohoto happened again. Read about version 3.

If you suspect you’ve seen a post with this title on my blog before, you’re absolutely right!

But eagle-eyed readers will spot a slight variation in the casing of the letters. This one is pronounced “ho-HOT-o.”

Get it? “Hot.” As in the awful muggy weather we’re having right now.

Yesterday was the summer followup of the charity event that raised $25k for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

Join us at the #hoHOTo summer camp. Do you really think that we geeks could resist the chance to run a summer camp?

Due to the lack of lakes — I said “lakes” not cesspools — in Toronto, it was held at the multi-storied Wetbar & Suite 106 in the heart of Clubland.

Mmm. Summer breezes.

Actually, it was much cooler inside. Here’s the view:

A whirlwind summary of the night

Prizes were drawn:

And cotton-candy was handed out:

Certain Microsoft employees were there. Like this guy:

Or this guy (the accordion-playing variety).

As usual, the tunes were brought to you by these fellows:

And the photos were taken by this birthday boy (taking a drinking break):

Final tally: $10,500 to the Daily Bread Food Bank.

The full set of photos

Doing it in the open: Michael Nielsen at Science 2.0

How is the Internet changing the way scientists do science? The Science 2.0 conference attempted to give some answers to that question yesterday.

Greg Wilson (that’s him at the front) has been running a Software Carpentry course for the last few weeks and yesterday’s conference pulled in a bunch of guest lecturers to give some closing thoughts.

Doing it in the open

For most people in the audience, the fact that Michael Nielsen experienced projector troubles and had to be rescheduled to the end of the afternoon was a minor nuisance. For me, it meant that even though I showed up near the end of the conference, I still got to hear him. Fortuitous — it was one of the most interesting talks I’ve heard in a while. In fact, it was so interesting that I even forgot to take photos.

Here’s the title:

Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery

Michael Nielsen is writer who’s been spending a lot of time thinking about open science and mass online collaboration. He began by highlighting a post on mathematician Terence Tao’s blog that outlined the Navier-Stokes problem and sketched a few techniques that might be used to solve it. “This is not your typical BoingBoing post,” said Michael. It’s a heavy, sprawling post but most interestingly, it sparked a conversation that at the latest count has 129 comments including contributions from some of the heaviest heavyweights in the math world. And the debate is still raging two years later, both in the comments and the other blog posts that have linked to it. The kicker: “This guy is pumping these posts out, over and over again.”

But it’s not just Tao. About 10% of living Fields medallists have blogs. Many others are pushing the boundaries of blog and wiki software with great success.

(Ironically, the LaTeX encoding that has allowed mathematicians to use math formulas in blog posts on wordpress.com was added almost as an afterthought. A developer announced that he was installing the plugin but joked that it’s a “niche feature that maybe 17 people would use regularly”. Little did he know…)

So what’s actually going on? Nielsen argues that we’re seeing a restructuring of where experts focus their attention — and attention is the ultimate scare resource in science.
These online tools facilitate small insights that couldn’t be published in a conventional way but contain the seeds to later progress. In this sense, it’s a way of scaling up scientific conversation, both across space (geographically over the Internet), and time (remember the comments on the Terrence Tao post have been going strong for two years).

As someone in the audience asked, with this massively collaborative way of doing science, who gets the credit for achievements? Michael asked a related question: “Who sequenced the human genome?” It definitely wasn’t the result of a few people. In the future, the concept of authorship might be trumped by a culture of recommendations. Besides, if science is done in the open, you could lie about your contribution but all claims would be trivial to verify.

He ended his talk with a great anecdote — probably not quite historically accurate — about how Michael Faraday was asked by Queen Victoria “what the point of electricity is” after he explained the concept. His reply: “of what use is a newborn baby?” None of us know quite how the Internet will change science but Science 2.0 values the process of sense-making rather than simply pumping out theorems. Online tools enable these conversations to happen.

Needless to say, I’m excited to read his upcoming book which will be an expansion of what he’s been talking about now.

So, what else?

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear all the talks but some other people did. Steve Easterbrook was liveblogging it and has good notes from everything. Milan Davidovic also has some notes. And of course, there’s the twitter stream. Here are all the blurbs

And a few more photos:

Jon Udell gave the closing talk on “Collaborative Curation of Public Events,” another great talk that I might write about at some point…

One of my favourite examples from his talk. A high school that said “We posted weekly.pdf to our website. Isn’t that good enough?”

David Rich talking about “Using ‘Desktop’ Languages for Big Problems.”

And the attendees at the end of long day.