[PHOTO] "I see roses at night"

"I see roses at night"
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The photographer's flash is so useful.

[LINK] "Facebook violates Canadian privacy law: watchdog"

The Canadian Press' Jim Bronskill has the story.

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.

David T.S. Fraser goes into more detail at his Privacy Lawyer blog.

[MUSIC] Lo Fidelity Allstars, "Battle Flag"

Back in the late 1990s, I saw an arresting video for an electronica song, centered around a hated corporative executive who was killed in a limousine fire as a result of a conspiracy by everyone around him: mistress, employees, wife, the people he fired, even his children. The video was memorable, but I really loved the hard electronic music and the biting vocals. Alas, all I could remember of the song was the chorus of "C'mon baby tell me/Yes we aim to please." For years, the song has popped up, earworm-like, frustrating me because I didn't know its origins.

And then, one day last week, I realized that I should Google it. This revealed 6 610 hits and took me to this page, the first hit, which told me that the song was Lo Fidelity Allstars' 1998 "Battle Flag". I went to YouTube, and what do you know, the poster back there was right.

"New Order - Live in Concert - New York 81 - Min.46:16 - Remastered - HD [ 18.11.1981, New York ]" (Watch on YouTube)

It's an angry song, as the music and the lyrics reveal. The key to the song, I think, are the last two lines, "You want a revolution behind your eyes/We got together and organize." Whether it's a change of mind or a change of something larger, there needs to be a willingness to change.

It would have been impossible for me to find this song a decade ago, as I know all too well from personal experience. It would have been very unlikely for this video to have been played two decades ago. That I could find the lyrics so quickly and watch the video with such ease is one of the thing about our era that I love.

[BRIEF NOTE] On lunar Helium-3 mining (again)

Jean-Louis Santini's AFP article will make some people reading this post weep in frustration. That's right, the lunar Helium-3 meme is on the run again.

The moon still has a great deal of scientific information left to be discovered that relates directly to... our understanding of the history of the Earth and early history of other planets," geologist Harrison Schmitt told AFP.

Schmitt landed on the moon in 1972 aboard the Apollo 17, the last manned mission to ever touch down on the lunar surface. He is among an elite group of 12 Americans who are the only people to have walked on the moon.

[. . .]

Schmitt, a former astronaut, noted that the moon's soil is rich in helium-3, which comes from the outer layer of the sun and is blown around the solar system by solar winds.

The element is rarely found on Earth, unlike on the moon, where it is heavily accumulated because it is pushed away by the Earth's magnetic poles.

Helium-3 is highly sought for nuclear fusion, and though the technology is still in its infancy, the element "will ultimately be quite valuable on Earth," Schmitt said.

"It's not the only solution to the accelerating demand for energy that we are going to see on Earth, but it's certainly one of the major potential solutions to that demand."

Reserves of helium-3 on the moon are in the order of a million tons, according to some estimates, and just 25 tons could serve to power the European Union and United States for a year.

Helium-3, a light isotope of helium, is seen by proponents as an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, with collisions of helium-3 with the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium to produce abundant, radioactive waste-free power. Russia and China have stated their intentions to start mining helium-3 by the middle of the 2010s.

Three problems with this meme come to mind.

• We don't have fusion reactors: They've always been fifty years in the future. Collecting materials certain to be unusable for decades might not be economic.


• The MIT Technology Review makes the point that helium-3 fusion requires unrealistically extreme conditions in order to actually happen.


• Finally, as Depleted Cranium noted, besides the massive investments required for a lunar mining program and the pointlessness of collecting unusable fuel, there's already plenty of helium-3 on Earth, not least in the form of the decay of the unstable heavy hydrogen isotope tritium.

[DM] "Institutional Adaptations to Migrants and Transnationalism"

I've a post up examining how the Catholic Church in early 20th century French Canada and contemporary Mexico examining how the Roman Catholic Church first tried to prevent then tried to regulate emigrants and their behaviours, with suggestions that this sort of transnationalism might be present right now.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Turkey and the Uighurs

In Tuesday's Globe and Mail, Frank Ching observed ("Why the West is silent on rioting in Xinjiang") that Western countries were generally uninterested in taking a stand on the recent riots there.

Last year, Western countries put pressure on Beijing to hold a dialogue with representatives of the Dalai Lama, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy even threatening to boycott the Beijing Olympics if China refused. Beijing's protestations that Tibet was an internal Chinese affair were disregarded.

This time, however, the Western response is muted. The United States has adopted a mild tone, with President Barack Obama merely calling on all parties in Xinjiang “to exercise restraint.” The European Union has gone even further, taking the position that violence in Xinjiang “is a Chinese issue, not a European issue.” Serge Abou, the Eu's ambassador to China, said Europe also had its problems with minorities and “we would not like other governments to tell us what is to be done.”

While there are similarities between events last year in Tibet and those in Xinjiang this month, the world has changed: China is now seen as an indispensable partner of the United States and Europe, both of which are facing a financial crisis. Beijing's diplomatic assistance in resolving the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues is also seen as too important to put in jeopardy.

The countries that were interested in critizing China were Muslim, most especially Turkey.

What reaction there has been came mainly from Muslim countries. The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments, condemned what it called the excessive use of force against Uyghur civilians. At least 184 people, both Uyghurs and Han Chinese, have been killed.

The OIC statement declared: “The Islamic world is expecting from China, a major and responsible power in the world arena with historical friendly relations with the Muslim world, to deal with the problem of Muslim minority in China in broader perspective that tackles the root causes of the problem.”

The country that has taken the strongest position is Turkey, whose people share linguistic, religious and cultural links with the Uyghurs. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan actually went so far as to characterize what has happened as “a kind of genocide” and said his country would bring the matter up in the United Nations Security Council.

Calling a series of riots that reportedly killed two hundred people of various ethnicities "a kind of genocide" is a bit much, and is more than a bit funny given Turkey's own relationship to actual actsof genocide. Mind, the numbers don't seem especially significant, involving thousands of people in a country with tens of millions of inhabitants.

Thousands of Turks and Uyghur expatriates took to the streets across Turkey after Friday prayers, protesting the violence in Xinjiang and burning Chinese flags and products, AFP photographers and media reports said.

The biggest of the demonstrations was at Istanbul's Fatih Mosque, where an estimated 5,000 people gathered and said prayers for members of the Uyghur community who lost their lives in the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, the NTV news channel said.

"No to ethnic cleansing!" chanted the crowd, waving the Uyghur flag depicting a white crescent on a blue background, as some protestors set fire to Chinese flags and goods produced in China.

Some 200 people attended similar prayers at Istanbul's Beyazit mosque at the call of a Turkey-based Uyghur association and Turkish nationalist groups, after which they held a brief demonstration, shouting "Murderer China", an AFP photgrapher said.

That said, Turkey does have a strong interest in Xinjiang, inasmuch as Turks and Xinjiang's Uyghurs both speak Turkic languages. Early in the 20th century among the Turks of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Pan-Turkism was a popular ideology, serving to justify a reorientation of Turks away from Europe and towards areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia populated by peoples speaking related Turkic languages: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, perhaps even Tatarstan and the Uyghur lands in Xinjiang. This failed, as the consolidation of the Soviet state and the weakness of the Turkish state in the 1920s combined to make Pan-Turkism a dangerous ideology. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey promptly reopened relations, this time apparently hoping not to dominate but rather to cooperate, but with mixed results. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan switched scripts from Cyrillic to Latin, for instance, but Turkey just wasn't a powerful enough force in Central Asia relative to a dynamic China and a Russia with a long history and all manner of links with Central Asia. Even Turkey's historically close relationship with Azerbaijan has been threatened by the ongoing Turkish-Armenian rapprochement. Hugh Pope, author of Sons of the Conquerors, a book on the Turkic world, expects a consolidation of these countries to take place only slowly. Expecting Turkey to exert any influence in Xinjiang, now, is completely unrealistic. Turkey has aspirations, but not the means.