Nov. 25th, 2009

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Imagine that.

Canadians aren't buying the Harper government's assertion that there's no credible evidence Afghan detainees were tortured, a new poll suggests.

Indeed, The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey indicates Canadians are twice as likely to believe whistleblower Richard Colvin's claim that all prisoners handed over by Canadian soldiers to Afghan authorities were likely abused and that government officials were well aware of the problem.

The poll findings come just as the government is mounting a major counter-offensive to rebut the explosive testimony of Colvin, the former No. 2 at the Canadian embassy in Kabul and now an intelligence officer at the embassy in Washington.

Rick Hillier, the former chief of defence staff, and several other top military officials are scheduled to testify later today at a Commons committee that is investigating the torture claims.

Hillier has already said there was always concern about the treatment of prisoners transferred to Afghan prisons but that he doesn't remember the kind of "smoking gun" warnings Colvin says he repeatedly issued.

Hillier has his work cut out for him to convince Canadians, the poll suggests.

Fifty-one per cent of respondents said they believe Colvin's testimony to the committee last week.

In stark contrast, only 25 per cent said they believe the government's contention that the diplomat's claims are flimsy and not credible.

A majority in all regions - except Alberta where 41 per cent believed Colvin and 35 per cent the government - sided with the whistleblower.

Those who identified themselves as supporters of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives were most inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt. But even they were almost evenly split.
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I've two posts of interest up at Demography Matters.


  • First up is a post speculating as to whether the apparent predominance of Somalis and Eritreans as illegal migrants in Libya has anything to do with these countries' shared Italian colonial past.

  • Next comes a post linking to two interesting New York Times articles examining migration as it relates to Korean identities, the first exploring Korean children adopted in the United States, the next taking a look at South Korea's own adaptation to being a multicultural and multiracial society.



Go, read.
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Over at Understanding Society, Daniel Little examines the interesting question of whether or not the idea of social networks play a fundamentally important role in group behaviour or not, with spontaneous group formation being the main alternative to this, it seems.

Is the concept of a social network one of a very small number of concepts that must be invoked in virtually every kind of social explanation? As such, is the concept of a social network, and the associated concepts of concrete social relationships it brings with it, a fundamental component of any satisfactory social ontology? And does the concept of a social network define a crucial space between the micro and the macro? (A good recent effort to link social networks theory to an important area of social science research is Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action.)

A couple of points are pretty obvious. One is that social networks do in fact constitute a key causal mechanism underlying many social processes. We can explain important features of social and political life by identifying the concrete social networks that exist within the population: the transmission of ideas, knowledge, and styles through a population; the selection of important leaders in government and industry; the effective reach of the state; the course of mobilization within a community around an important issue; and the effectiveness of a terrorist group, to name a few examples. A second point is that networks have specific features of topology and functioning that have causal consequences that are largely independent from the personal characteristics of the people who constitute it. For example, information may travel more quickly through a network of people containing many midsized nodes than one containing just a few mega-hubs. And this structural fact may suffice to explain some social outcomes: for example, this rebellion succeeded (because of rapid transmission of information) whereas that one petered out (because of ineffective communications).


Little comes out in favour of organized social networks' important.

The reason is straightforward: almost all social outcomes require a degree of coordination, communication, and mobilization. A social network is not the only way of bringing these factors about -- cheerleaders and television stations can do it too. But the causal importance of social networks is likely to be great in many cases. And for this reason it seems justified to conclude that social networks are in fact fundamental to social explanation. Likewise, it appears correct to say that they function as bridging mechanisms from micro to macro, in that they help to convey the actions of local agents onto larger social outcomes (and back!).


Go, read his post.
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Thanks to Will Baird for pointing me in the direction of this news story.

Karen Marie Fernets is a serial embezzler who bilked thousands of dollars from several employers in Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Yukon. Last month, Fernets was sentenced for theft and fraud charges dating back to 2005. Compared with other recent economic crimes, her tactics were unsophisticated -- she made a series of cheques payable to her own bank account.

This has been the year of white-collar scandals and schemes in Canada, ranging from disgraced Montreal financial advisor Earl Jones, charged with having spent at least $12-million of his clients’ money, to Ponzi schemes run by Toronto fund manager Weizhen Tang, who allegedly ran a $60-million fraud, and the duo from Alberta -- Milowe Allen Brost and accomplice Gary Allen Sorenson -- who have been charged with embezelling roughly $100-million from unwitting investors.

Now a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests Canadian companies make great targets for fraud. In their latest global economic crime survey, Canada was the fourth most fraudulent nation in the world -- behind Russia, South Africa and Kenya.

In its survey of more than 3,000 companies in 54 countries, 56% Canadian companies reported economic crimes over the past year. That’s a 10% increase since 2003, the highest level in six years.

So does Canada have more thieves in our midst, or are we just better at ferreting out perpetrators?


Good news, bad news.

Tipoffs from internal or external sources are higher in Canada than in other countries, as is our ability to detect fraud through electronic means. Automated systems used to detect inconsistencies or suspicious transactions accounted for more than 10% of frauds detected by companies in Canada. Thanks to rats and routers, more crimes are being reported in Canada then elsewhere.

[. . .]

The most common type of fraud encountered in Canada is asset misappropriation, although accounting fraud and money laundering are also prevalent. Canada has a better track record when it comes to other types of economic crime. Whereas 27% of global respondents reported be a victim of bribery and corruption, only 7% of Canadian respondents experienced such crimes. In addition, while intellectual property infringement made up 15% of global complaints, only 7% of Canadian firms claimed such incidents.

“We’re not as bad as many [developing] countries, but if you look around the OECD, the really developed economies with strong democratic governments, I think we are pretty high on the list for having a high incidence of commercial fraud,” says Mr. Grout. He says the reason for that is the lack of deterrents. “We don’t put anyone in jail,” he said.
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Barring convincing contradictory research, it looks like the species Homo floresiensis does, in fact, exist.

Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York confirmed that the Hobbits, or Homo floresiensis, are indeed a separate “human” species instead of a population of diseases Homo sapiens.

According to the press release, researchers William Jungers and Karen Baab used statistical analysis on the skeletal remains of LB1 (nicknamed Flo) to determine that Homo floresiensis are indeed a distinct species. A few characteristics of LB1 that makes her and her kind a separate species than modern humans.

  • LB1’s cranial capacity is about 400cc, about the same size as a chimpanzee.

  • The skull and jawbone of LB1 is more primitive looking than any normal modern humans.

  • The thigh bone and shin bone of LB1are much shorter compared to modern humans including Central African pygmies, South African KhoeSan (formerly known as ‘bushmen”) and “negrito” pygmies from the Andaman Islands and the Philippines. Jungers and Baab believe that these are primitive retentions as opposed to island dwarfing.

  • Using a regression equation developed by Jungers, LB1 was about 3 feet, 6 inches (106cm) tall, far smaller than modern human pygmies whose adults grow to less than 4 feet, 11 inches (150cm) tall.


  • With Homo neanderthalensis--Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?--that makes two other hominin species co-existing with us once upon a time.
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    Thanks to Scott Peterson at Wasatch Economics pointed me to this rather "wow" news item.

    Dubai World, with $59 billion of liabilities, is seeking to delay debt payments, sending contracts to protect the emirate against default surging by the most since they began trading in January.

    The state-controlled company will ask creditors for a “standstill” agreement as it negotiates to extend maturities, including $3.52 billion of Islamic bonds due Dec. 14 from its property unit Nakheel PJSC, Dubai’s Department of Finance said in an e-mailed statement. Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s cut the ratings on several state companies, saying they may consider the plan a default.

    “Extending the maturity of Nakheel debt is feeding the market’s uncertainty on which debt Dubai will honor in full,” said Rachel Ziemba, a senior analyst covering sovereign wealth funds at New York-based Roubini Global Economics. “They look desperate and the market is concerned that in the long term Dubai’s indebtedness is rising not falling.”

    Dubai accumulated $80 billion of debt by expanding in banking, real estate and transportation before credit markets seized up last year. Contracts protecting against default rose 116 basis points to 434 basis points yesterday, the most since they began trading in January, ranking it the sixth highest-risk government borrower, according to credit-default swap prices from CMA Datavision in London. The contracts, which increase as perceptions of credit quality deteriorate, are higher than Iceland’s after climbing 131 basis points in November, the biggest monthly increase since January.


    Thoughts? If Dubai did go under, I suspect that its collapse might well be iconic insofar as the 2008-and-after economic crash is perceived by future generations.
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