[META] Blogroll Addition

Lately, I've been thinking about my post from the first of this month about how the lack of dialogue between different factions contributes to the collapse of the public sphere. There are three major newspapers in Toronto--the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the National Post--but because of the right-leaning nature of that last paper I've not linked to it on my blogroll, subscribed to it on my RSS reader, or even read it or cited its articles consistently.

Well, that's changed now. Welcome, <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com><i>National Post</i></a>, to my blogroll.

[PHOTO] Bole bench

Bole bench
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I've seen this chair carved so well out of a bole or some other piece of wood propped outside a store on Bloor Street West near Bathurst--no, frustratingly, I don't remember which one--propped outside the entryway in clement weather for years now.

[LINK] "Nightmare in Dubai for Toronto gay couple"

I was surprised to find out, via Slap Upside the Head, about the horror story experienced by a Canadian gay couple in Dubai. Xtra has it.

A gay Toronto couple was detained for 28 days in Dubai for carrying the prescription arthritis drug Celebrex, which is banned in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Rocky Sharma and Stephen Macleod, who have been together for 10 years, were stopped upon arrival in Dubai on Aug 2, where they planned to spend the day before returning to Toronto from a vacation in India.

Macleod had a bottle of the prescription arthritis medication Celebrex in his suitcase. They were told Celebrex is a controlled substance in UAE and, even though they did not present themselves to border officials as a couple, both partners were detained.

“I think they thought we were gay and we would have some party drugs with us,” says Sharma, who is now safely back at home with his partner. “They were definitely targeting people who are young, from the western world and nicely dressed, like they are going to party.”

The UAE has very tough drug laws. Even over-the-counter medications that include traces of codeine are restricted. Possession can result in lengthy jail sentences, heavy fines or the death penalty, according to an advisory issued by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

[. . .]

They were not given an opportunity to contact a lawyer or consular officials but Sharma managed to contact friends at home on his Blackberry, which he had on him at the time of his arrest. Those friends gave him the emergency contact number of the Canadian embassy in Abu Dhabi, which Sharma called before his Blackberry was confiscated. Sharma’s family also contacted DFAIT in Canada but their efforts were stymied by the long weekend.

[. . .]

For the next 18 days, Sharma and Macleod could only communicate with each other via the case worker provided by the Canadian consulate.

“That was one of the worst parts, because I had no idea how he was doing, he had no idea how I was doing,” says Sharma. “We were told by the embassy not to even hint that we were a couple, to act like we were only friends, and that’s what we did.”

Homosexuality is punishable by death in UAE.

Even when the couple was formally declared innocent by the Dubai prosecution on Aug 18, they were kept another 11 days while their paperwork was processed.

[LINK] "Reviving Manchu"

Language Hat links to an interesting Wall Street Journal article describing how some Manchu in northeastern China are trying to revive the moribund Manchu language.

Manchus originated from China's northeast, which under the country's last dynasty, the Qing, was off-limits to Han Chinese immigration. As the dynasty collapsed toward the end of the 19th century, Chinese migrants flooded in. When Japan occupied Manchuria in the 1930s, Manchu language education was replaced by Japanese. Once China retook the region at the war's end, Japanese classes were replaced by Chinese. The Manchu language was never again taught on a wide scale.

As a result, virtually no Manchus today have heard Manchu spoken by their parents. For many, it was taboo. Gebu Algika, a 30-year-old sports promoter who helps run one of the Manchu classes in Beijing, said his grandfather, a prominent Manchu, was executed by the Communists shortly after the 1949 takeover for being a "reactionary." His family fearfully changed its ethnic registration from Manchu to Han. "People born after 1950 don't speak it," he says. "It was politically dangerous."

As rulers of China's last dynasty, Manchus suffered especially under communist rule. Members of the court underwent ideological indoctrination: Most famously the last emperor, Puyi, whose life story was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci, became a gardener. His relatives were forbidden to speak Manchu, and Manchu schools in Beijing closed down.

Today, only one elementary school in the country teaches Manchu, and that only as an elective. In universities and a handful of private schools, written Manchu is still taught but purely as a means to reading the Qing dynasty's archives.

From two million registered Manchus in China's 1980 census, the country now has nine million -- a reflection of people's willingness to ignore stigmas and embrace their true heritage. For Hasutai, the desire to reconnect to his roots flared up when he was 11 and realized that his people's language was all but dead. He decided to teach himself written Manchu, using textbooks and old ethnographic recordings of Manchus.

Over time, he came into contact with other Manchus who shared the same goals. The group launched two Web sites, reprinted old textbooks, made up flashcards and collected recordings of Manchu speakers. Hasutai began holding classes in downtown Beijing. "We want it to be part of our life, a language we speak with our spouses and children," says Ridaikin, who also uses the Chinese name Hu Aibo. The 24-year-old graduate student in mathematics teaches one of the Manchu classes in Beijing.

The discussion at Language Hat segues into an examination of imperial langauges which never managed to replace the languages of conquered peoples.

[BRIEF NOTE] I'd like everything on the Internet to last forever

At The Globe and Mail, Ivor Tossell considers in his article "On the Web, forever has a due date" the ephemeral nature of the Internet's sites, even the most popular ones. GeoCities, you may or may not have heard, is about to close down.

At the end of October, Yahoo will pull the plug on GeoCities, the service that more than 1 million people used to set up web pages. On Oct. 27, the whole thing will simply cease to exist. It will, as we say in the industry, go poof.

This poofing business does not bode well. Lately, there's been so much discussion about the permanence of information – especially the embarrassing kind – that we have overlooked the fact that it can also disappear. At a time when we're throwing all kinds of data and memories onto free websites, it's a blunt reminder that the future can bring unwelcome surprises.

Ten years ago, you could have called GeoCities the garish, beating heart of the Web. It was one of the first sites that threw its doors open to users and invited them to populate its pages according to their own creativity. At a time when the Web was still daunting, it encouraged laypeople to set up their own homepages free of charge.

And that's exactly what laypeople did. GeoCities exploded, turning into a gaudy carnival of websites devoted to everything from Civil War history to ichthyology, from quilting to Quaaludes. The place was designed around an urban metaphor, divided into cutely named “neighbourhoods” according to content. Nobody seemed to police what went where, which meant you could explore without knowing what you were looking for, or what you might stumble over next.

[. . .]

Alas, the site never excelled at the money-making thing and its ham-fisted attempts to turn a buck drove users away. In 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities for $3.57-billion in stock, which turned out to be $3.57-billion too much. The world moved on, and GeoCities faded into a ghost town.

And now, it's curtains. GeoCities won't disappear entirely. The Internet Archive – a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco dedicated to backing up the Web for posterity's sake – is trying to salvage as much as it can before the deadline hits. At least one other independent group is trying to do the same. But this complicates things, because it puts GeoCities users' data into the hands of an unaccountable third party.

This disturbs me: I'm the sort of person who has archived computer files dating back to the mid-1990s, and was terribly concerned when it looked like my first few years of university notes were inaccessible. My online past really matters to me, was crucial in forming my personality and determining, well, everything about me. (That's another story.) The idea that all sorts of information can be lost as sites become more complex and more full of information--Tossell uses the example of photo captions and comments--really upsets me.

[LINK] "To Ban a Mockingbird"

Am I supposed to like school censorship of thought-provoking and critically acclaimed books?

The Toronto District School Board has been asked to review To Kill a Mockingbird after receiving a complaint from a parent of a student at Malvern Collegiate.

It’s important to note that the book has not been banned. The school board, which is ultimately responsible to the parents, has received a complaint and has an obligation to respond. There is no indication that the book will be banned, and earlier Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale survived a similar challenge. Unfortunately, other school boards in the GTA have also considered bans against To Kill a Mockingbird, and some, like a school in Brampton, has scrapped the book from its grade 10 English course.

What, Bow goes on to ask, is the good in excluding a book that confronts racism in all of its nastiness head on from a school curriculum?

[LINK] "Desperate moms want boys"

This story disturbs me, not only because of the bias against females that--if correct--is prevalent among at least some South Asians, but frankly, because it's happening in Canada. I had a [FORUM] last December about the consequences of human genetic engineering on the size of disfavoured populations: queer people, say, or left-handers. I don't want this to happen in Canada already.

On a windswept street in a bustling industrial area on the outskirts of town, a stocky man in a white shirt and dark jeans pulls out three Ziploc bags containing red, brown and silver pills.

Take two red and brown pills each day for a week, he tells the woman who says she is nine weeks pregnant, and your baby has an 85 per cent chance of being a boy. Then he demands $750 in cash.

In the Indian state of Punjab, the culture is obsessed with boys. Desperate to avoid giving birth to girls, women for decades have taken extreme measures. They swallow herbs, drink pregnant cow's milk, pray in marathon sessions, and since the widespread use of ultrasound technology, abort female fetuses.

It's a huge topic of debate in India, with an alarmingly skewed birth ratio of boys to girls.

But this scene on an industrial strip was not played out in Punjab, but just west of Toronto, in an area a large number of Punjabis now call home – and where the latest Canadian census figures reveal significantly fewer girls than boys in the South Asian community.

Posing as a pregnant Punjabi woman, a Star reporter met the man after answering an ad in the Ajit Weekly, a Punjabi-language newspaper printed in Mississauga. "A guaranteed and satisfactory medicine for having a son is available," the ad says.

The man turned out to be Kanwar Bains, the newspaper's news editor and the meeting took place outside the paper's office. He said a woman cannot be more than 12 weeks pregnant for the pills to work.

[. . .]

IN 2006, a study published in the British medical journal Lancet found the boy-girl ratio changed markedly after ultrasound technology – that diagnoses fetal abnormalities and illnesses but can also identify sex – became popular in India 20 years ago. The most dramatic decline of female births came between 1991 and 2001, from 945 girls for every 1,000 boys to 927, despite a ban in 1994 on sex-selective abortions.

According to India's 2001 census, the northern state of Punjab has one of the worst gender ratios at 793 girls to 1,000 boys.

Canada does not collect statistics based on ethnicity at birth. But statistics here, now home to more than a million Indo-Canadians, many from Punjab, also show a somewhat skewed gender ratio. According to 2006 census figures, nationally there are 932 girls to 1,000 boys under age 15 in the South Asian community, compared to 953 girls to 1,000 boys in the general population.

The numbers in the South Asian community in the Toronto area become much more skewed: 917 girls to 1,000 boys in the Toronto Central Metropolitan Area. Broken down further, it shows 904 girls to 1,000 boys in Mississauga, and 864 girls to 1,000 boys in Brampton.

"That means the sex-ratio is 50 per cent higher for under-15 South Asians as compared to the general population (in the Toronto CMA)," said David Foot, professor of economics at the University of Toronto and a demographics expert. "I would say that is concerning."

[LINK] "Planetary Habitability Quantified"

My thanks to james_nicoll for linking to an interesting Centauri Dreams post reporting on a new method that can be used to calculate the volume on a world habitable by microorganisms.

“QH Theory is based on two new biophysical parameters: the habitability H, as a relative measure of the potential for life of an environment, or habitat quality, and the habitation M, as a relative measure of biodensity, or occupancy. Both parameters are related to other physiological and environmental variables and can be used to make predictions about the distribution, abundance, and productivity of primary producers, such as plants and phytoplankton, and microbial life in general. Initially, habitability was modeled from the environment’s temperature and humidity because they are easier to measure at planetary scales with ground or orbital instruments. Global habitability and habitations maps were constructed of terrestrial land and ocean areas with data gridded at various spatial and temporal resolutions. Preliminary work shows that the QH Theory is comparable to existing models in predicting terrestrial primary productivity.”

The results, as applied to our planetary system?

Using finely tuned planetary models, Mendez found that among Mars, Venus, Europa, Titan and Enceladus, the latter has the highest subsurface habitability. That makes the Saturnian moon a tempting but difficult target, the inaccessibility of its habitable region rendering Mars and Europa better compromises for near-term missions to places where habitability is still unresolved.

On Earth, the biosphere includes parts of the atmosphere, oceans, and subsurface. The potential global habitats of the other planetary bodies are deep below their surface. Enceladus has the smallest volume but the highest habitat-planet size ratio followed by Europa. Surprisingly, it also has the highest mean habitability H, in the Solar System, although too deep for direct exploration. Mars and Europa are the best compromise between potential for life and accessibility.

[. . .]

Mendez has established a quantity called Standard Primary Habitability that uses a variety of criteria for establishing the surface habitability on a given world. Interestingly, while the current SPH of Earth is close to 0.7, the figure has been as high as 0.9 in earlier periods, including the late Cretaceous, the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction. Earth achieved, in other words, a higher level of habitability in that era than today, at least as quantified by Mendez, until the events that led to the K/T extinction occurred.