Topic: The evolution of retail business: Bloor Street between Spadina and Christie

For the past 30 years, Prof. Martin J. Osborne has conducted an annual survey of street-level businesses on Bloor Street between Spadina and Christie. For each business, he has recorded its name, the type of goods or services it offers, and any ethnic group it specifically targets (if applicable). Prof. Osborne will discuss the nature of this data, which is available at https://mjo.osborne.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/bloor/, and explore it with the audience. The discussion will include potential insights that can be derived from the data and the various applications it might have.

Speaker:

Martin J. Osborne is a retired academic economist who has long dabbled in web development. He was involved in the founding of EconJobMarket (https://econjobmarket.org), a platform that allows recruiters to advertise jobs and collect and process applications, and has been one of its two Chief Information Officers for several years. He was also one of the founders of the Open Access journal Theoretical Economics (https://econtheory.org), serving as its Editor for the first nine years of its existence and working extensively on its editorial software system. For the last 15 years he has developed software for text2bib.org (https://text2bib.org), a niche service that allows authors to convert files of references from plain text to BibTeX format. His academic work (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lx-4Hd8AAAAJ) is entirely theoretical, but ever since tracking the rise and fall of songs on the British Top 10 as a teenager, he has been interested in collecting, visualizing, and analyzing data. He has lived in the Bloor and Bathurst neighborhood for the last 40 years.

Agenda:

• 7:00-7:20 = Welcome and Introductions

• 7:20-7:50 = Presentation and Q&A/discussion

• 7:50-9:00 = Breakout groups

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