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http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/an-australian-famous-for-documenting-toilets-has-come-to-montreal An Australian famous for documenting toilets has come to Montreal ROBERTO ROCHA, MONTREAL GAZETTE More from Roberto Rocha, Montreal Gazette Published on: February 20, 2015Last Updated: February 20, 2015 5:23 PM EST Mozza restaurant washroom is known for its party ambiance, with disco lights, music and a TV screen. Australian blogger Dan Schaumann searches for the world's best toilets, and this one was suggested to him by the Montreal community on Reddit. Mozza restaurant washroom is known for its party ambiance, with disco lights, music and a TV screen. Australian blogger Dan Schaumann searches for the world's best toilets, and this one was suggested to him by the Montreal community on Reddit. Marie-France Coallier / Montreal Gazette A mantra of making it big on the Internet is to find a niche and run with it. Dan Schaumann, an Australian transplant to Montreal, has found his niche in snapping eccentric toilets. When he’s not making music or working in a supply chain for a multinational, Schaumann scours the cities he visits for its oddest loos, often crowdsourcing tips on Reddit.com. A recent discussion in the Montreal section of the website turned up no fewer than 100 comments. The washroom at L’Avenue restaurant on Mont-Royal Ave., with black light, fluorescent paint, and a TV embedded in the floor was a big favourite. The chaotic graffiti that adorns the urinals at Les Foufounes Électriques on Ste-Catherine St. E. was also a top suggestion, as was Mozza restaurant in the Gay Village, described as “a dance party, complete with disco ball, lights and blaring music.” Montrealers, it seems, are as proud of their washrooms as Schaumann is passionate about them. So far he has documented 10 toilets in the city. “I’m going to make a point of visiting one or two of the suggestions per week until I get through them all,” Schaumann told the Montreal Gazette. He has already documented hundreds of toilets in 30 cities. His efforts have won him close to 1,000 followers on Instagram and extensive news coverage in Boston and Chicago. His passion for flushers started three years ago, as a joke. “I noticed that people could take a photo of just about anything — a leaf on the ground, for example — and they would almost always receive ‘likes’ no matter how common the subject matter was. I wondered if anyone would ever like a photo of a toilet, and indeed, it didn’t take long for someone to show their appreciation,” he wrote. As to why his requests for toilet tips are often fruitful wherever he goes, he has a theory. “The toilet is a day-to-day necessity that doesn’t have a reputation as being particularly captivating, so I think when you encounter a washroom that strikes you as being out-of-the-ordinary, it becomes quite a memorable occasion,” Schaumann said. As a lavatory connoisseur, Schaumann has distilled the common traits of memorable commodes. “Graffiti is the one I love the most, whether it’s a simple witty remark someone has scrawled upon the wall or a punk-style plastering of graffiti across the whole bathroom. I love it when there is an interesting tiling pattern, artwork or decor in the room,” he said. “The whole experience has left me with a new-found respect for the restroom. I can pretty much find something unique in every bathroom I enter now, such as an interesting colour scheme, feature, or sign on the wall.” Map: Dan Schaumann’s top 10 toilets Navigate via the map or click on List to see the full list. If using a computer, swipe to the next item by dragging the mouse across the grey area above the photos. If on mobile, swipe with your finger. For a full-screen map, click here. rrocha@montrealgazette.com twitter.com/robroc sent via Tapatalk

1000 de la Commune E. Architectes: Fin de la construction:2007 Utilisation: Résidentiel Emplacement: Vieux-Port, Montréal ? mètres - 11 / 12 étages (Courtesy of Trams Property Management) If I remember correctly it took 6 years to do this project.

by Tabia Lau (facebook) on Saturday, September 8, 2012 at 6:51pm · My Dear Montreal, I miss you like nothing else. Montreal, your walls of concrete and collapsing bridges, your tardy buses and delayed metros. Your incidents that causent un ralentissement for a duree indeterminee sur la ligne orange in my direction. Oh Montreal, your potholes and signs of ARRET and odd hilltop slopes. Your grey skies and hesitant Autumns with children rattling off numbers in a playground in broken Quebecois and your speedy Springs and torrential snowfalls in February and April. Your french baguettes and hipsters on Ste-Catherine on bixis and plaid hats with red squares. Montreal I miss your Tam tams. I'm homesick for your noise, Montreal. I miss the buses driving by, I miss the pitter-patter of jaywalkers, the french chatter on St-Denis and the gusts of winds up on Mont-Royal. Oh I miss Mont Royal, your blue skies and green lawn, the music of your LARPers and Tam-tams. I miss the Tam-Tams, the self-forming circle and slight haze of 420, the city, the earth, the blades of grass breathing with us as we beat, as a city, as one. I miss your cracking Old Montreal, your warm creperies and bus tours. I miss your dying newspapers and your bill 101. I miss your easy film rating system, the way bus drivers wave to one another. I miss your voice in the metro, the parade of scarves in October, Americans already in puffy coats, girls in UGGS in Westmount. I miss your jewish bakeries and italian pasta, your chinese noodles and greek wraps, your hidden Tibetan cuisine and Indian buffets, Your fresh fruits by Cote-Des-Neiges and buses upon buses at Vendome. I miss this ridiculous bagel feud (St-Viateur ftw), and this slightly less ridiculous language barrier. I miss your music festivals, Montreal. No one loves music the way you do. I miss your Quebecois accent, and your ridiculously small street signs. Your rude old ladies and creepy old men. The violinists on the metros and free hugs in the Old Port. I miss your habs riots and your policemen on horses, I miss your street construction and lights. I'm going to miss your Christmas lights, Montreal. That'll be when this hits hardest, won't it? Christmas. I miss your Christmas lights, Montreal. Rene Levesque and Penfield with large wreaths. I miss your Autumn already, Montreal. It isn't fair I may never live through the entirety of another Montreal autumn, another Halloween night. I love your leaves and gusts and the parks, at night. I miss your chilly raindrops. You know, I will try to collect some of your sunscent, your gorgeous bilingual humid night moisture bring it with me wherever I go whoever I become you will always be home.

Traffic management APPlied logic Sep 13th 2011, 16:10 by The Economist online TRAFFIC lights are crucial tools for regulating traffic flow. They are not, however, perfect. Drivers exchange the gridlock that would happen at unmanaged junctions for a pattern of stop-go movement that can still be frustrating, and which burns more fuel than a smooth passage would. Creating such a smooth passage means adjusting a vehicle’s speed so that it always arrives at the lights when they are green. That is theoretically possible, but practically hard. Roadside signs wired to traffic lights can help get the message across a couple hundred metres from a junction, but such signs are expensive, and have not been widely deployed. Margaret Martonosi and Emmanouil Koukoumidis at Princeton University, and Li-Shiuan Peh at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, however, have an idea that could make the process cheaper and more effective. Instead of a hardwired network of signs, they propose to use mobile-phone apps. For a driver to benefit, he must load the team’s software, dubbed SignalGuru, into his phone and then mount it on a special bracket attached to the inside of his car’s windscreen, with the camera lens pointing forwards. SignalGuru is designed to detect traffic lights and track their status as red, amber or green. It broadcasts this information to other phones in the area that are fitted with the same software, and—if there are enough of them—the phones thus each know the status of most of the lights around town. Using this information, SignalGuru is able to calculate the traffic-light schedule for the region and suggest the speed at which a driver should travel in order to avoid running into red lights. Tests in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where five drivers were asked to follow the same route for three hours, and in Singapore, where eight drivers were asked to follow one of two routes for 30 minutes, revealed that SignalGuru was capable of predicting traffic-light activity with an accuracy of 98.2% and 96.3% respectively, in the two cities. This was particularly impressive because in Cambridge the lights shifted, roughly half-way through the test, from their off-peak schedule to their afternoon-traffic schedule, while in Singapore lights are adaptive, using detectors embedded under the road to determine how much traffic is around and thus when a signal should change. In neither case was SignalGuru fooled. Fuel consumption fell, too—by about 20%. SignalGuru thus reduces both frustration and fuel use, and makes commuting a slightly less horrible experience.

Anyone who's sat at a red light for minutes on end in the middle of the night when there's no cross traffic can cheer on science for proving what we already knew: lights that adapt to the flow of traffic, instead of dictating the flow of traffic, can improve the flow of traffic. A team of researchers discovered that if you let lights locally decide how to time their signals based on how much traffic they're dealing with, and then communicate that with nearby lights, you get closer to the "green wave" of lights that keeps thing moving smoothly. The issue with the centralized, top-down system of control is that it is geared to address an average traffic situation that rarely occurs as planned. The variations in rush hour traffic mean that lights are trying to apply one solution to a vast number of situations. In their trial in Dresden, Germany the team found that traffic congestion was eased by nine percent, pedestrian congestion by 36 percent, and bus and tram traffic by 56 percent. With rush hours spreading in time and distance, the proof and implementation of this can't come soon enough. Blog: http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/23/study-traffic-lights-should-respond-to-cars-not-other-way-arou/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+weblogsinc/autoblog+(Autoblog) To tame traffic, go with the flow Lights should respond to cars, a study concludes, not the other way around By Rachel Ehrenberg Web edition : Friday, September 17th, 2010 Traffic lights that act locally can improve traffic globally, new research suggests. By minimizing congestion, the approach could save money, reduce emissions and perhaps even quash the road rage of frustrated drivers. The new approach makes traffic lights go with the flow, rather than enslaving drivers to the tyranny of timed signals. By measuring vehicle inflow and outflow through each intersection as it occurs and coordinating lights with only their nearest neighbors, a systemwide smoothness emerges, scientists report in a September Santa Fe Institute working paper. “It’s very interesting — the approach is adaptive and the system can react,” says mechanical engineer Gábor Orosz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “That’s how it should be — that’s how we can get the most out of our current system.” An ultimate goal in traffic regulation is “the green wave,” the bam, bam, bam of greens that allows platoons of vehicles to move smoothly through intersection after intersection. When that happens, no drivers have to wait very long and sections of road don’t become so filled with cars that there’s no room for entering vehicles when the light does go green. To achieve this rare bliss, traffic lights usually are controlled from the top down, operating on an “optimal” cycle that maximizes the flow of traffic expected for particular times of day, such as rush hour. But even for a typical time on a typical day, there’s so much variability in the number of cars at each light and the direction each car takes leaving an intersection that roads can fill up. Combine this condition with overzealous drivers, and intersections easily become gridlocked. Equally frustrating is the opposite extreme, where a driver sits at a red light for minutes even though there’s no car in sight to take advantage of the intersecting green. “It is actually not optimal control, because that average situation never occurs,” says complex-systems scientist Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, a coauthor of the new study. “Because of the large variability in the number of cars behind each red light, it means that although we have an optimal scheme, it’s optimal for a situation that does not occur.” Helbing and his colleague Stefan Lämmer from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany decided to scrap the top-down approach and start at the bottom. They noted that when crowds of people are trying to move through a narrow space, such as through a door connecting two hallways, there’s a natural oscillation: A mass of people from one side will move through the door while the other people wait, then suddenly the flow switches direction. “It looks like maybe there’s a traffic light, but there’s not. It’s actually the buildup of pressure on the side where people have to wait that eventually turns the flow direction,” says Helbing. “We thought we could maybe apply the same principle to intersections, that is, the traffic flow controls the traffic light rather than the other way around.” Their arrangement puts two sensors at each intersection: One measures incoming flow and one measures outgoing flow. Lights are coordinated with every neighboring light, such that one light alerts the next, “Hey, heavy load coming through.” That short-term anticipation gives lights at the next intersection enough time to prepare for the incoming platoon of vehicles, says Helbing. The whole point is to avoid stopping an incoming platoon. “It works surprisingly well,” he says. Gaps between platoons are opportunities to serve flows in other directions, and this local coordination naturally spreads throughout the system. “It’s a paradoxical effect that occurs in complex systems,” says Helbing. “Surprisingly, delay processes can improve the system altogether. It is a slower-is-faster effect. You can increase the throughput — speed up the whole system — if you delay single processes within the system at the right time, for the right amount of time.” The researchers ran a simulation of their approach in the city center of Dresden. The area has 13 traffic light–controlled intersections, 68 pedestrian crossings, a train station that serves more than 13,000 passengers on an average day and seven bus and tram lines that cross the network every 10 minutes in opposite directions. The flexible self-control approach reduced time stuck waiting in traffic by 56 percent for trams and buses, 9 percent for cars and trucks, and 36 percent for pedestrians crossing intersections. Dresden is now close to implementing the new system, says Helbing, and Zurich is also considering the approach. Traffic jams aren’t just infuriating, they cost time and money, says Orosz. Estimates suggest that in one year, the U.S. driving population spends a cumulative 500,000 years in traffic at a cost of about $100 billion. And the roads are just going to get more congested. The optimal way of dealing with such congestion is to take an approach like Helbing’s and combine it with technologies that deal with driver behavior, Orosz says. Car sensors that detect the distance between your bumper and the car in front of you can prevent a sweep of brake-slamming that can tie up traffic, for example. “In general these algorithms improve traffic, but maybe not as much as they do on paper because we are still human,” he says. “It is still humans driving the cars.” http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63481/title/To_tame_traffic,_go_with_the_flow

About time. I really like those "test" street signs. They look great! I think I prefer the Green ones though. Green ones (from http://www.flickr.com/photos/montrealstreetsigns/460880559/)

Icon of city's night sky going high-tech The Gazette Published: 6 hours ago The iconic clock atop the Molson Canada brewery tower facing downtown Montreal has gone high-tech. Over the past several weeks, the neon tubing in the clock and company logo were replaced with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, providing an energy-saving source of light that is more direct as well as higher in output and lower in wattage. The switch will allow Molson to save 72 per cent of its energy consumption to operate the largest functioning timepiece in the province at 13.8 metres in diameter. "Our hexagonal clock in the shape of the original label for Molson Export has been an iconic figure on the Montreal landscape helping keep the tempo for neighbours for more than 50 years," said Serge Chevrier, who is responsible for its upkeep. "Every year, in case of a break or during maintenance, many residents of the Ville Marie borough call us to say the Molson clock isn't working and asking when it will be functioning again," Chevrier said. "It seems the clock is essential to their daily lives." Molson spokesperson Marie-Hélène Lagacé said the beermaker is swamped with calls twice a year when the time changes and the clock isn't immediately adjusted. She said it takes up to 48 hours to make the necessary changes to the clock, which was built in 1950. Lagacé said Molson made the change to reduce its environmental footprint. LED lights last six times longer than neon lights, yet consume only 28 per cent as much energy.