[PHOTO] Gardens, Toronto City Hall

Gardens, Toronto City Hall
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

While I'm sure that the gardens in front of the UFOid City Council Chambers are lush in summer, as late as November they still had a sere beauty to them, neatly maintained and still with some colour set against the snowless pavement.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO wonders whether, with Starbucks coming, Gerrard Street west of Little India is finally being gentrified.


• Border Thinking's Laura Agustin remarks on the exclusion of illegal immigrants from the German public health system.


• Daniel Drezner suggests that, based on current evidence, Europeans are responding to the Eurozone crisis not be falling apart but
  rather by intensifying integration.


• At Everyday Sociology, Janis Prince Inniss doesn't think much of calls to institutionalize more, possibly violent, mentally ill when mental health systems generally are so badly constructed.


• The Global Sociology Blog comes up with one more example why (I think) small communities shouldn't be self-governing, in the form of a teenage girl murdered in Bangladesh by a village court.


• Palun at Itching for Eestimaa reflects on holidays and foreigners in Estonia.


• Language Hat started an interesting discussion on the legitimation and diversity of Australian English.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Eric Kaufman describes how Doctor Who made the Weeping Angels--basically, statues which stalk you--so terrifying.


• Spike Japan continues its commentary on Huis ten Bosch, a Dutch-themed amusement park in Japan, additionally reflecting on the Dutch image over time.


• Towleroad links to some eye-catching Russian public service announcements aimed at HIV/AIDS among queer men.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little takes on Bourdieu, examining the density of interpretations and criticisms relating to any social fact.


• The Yorkshire Ranter argues that the Egyptian revolution has gone from a stage of mass protest to one of quiet, but radical, actual changes.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Church of the Nativity and Palestinian state-building

The Palestinian Authority has chosen an interesting method of trying to promote Palestinian statehood.

The Palestinians on Monday made a formal bid to have the no-longer-so-little town of Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus Christ, added to UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.

"We are very proud to announce that we have submitted the nomination file of Bethlehem: birthplace of Jesus -- Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route ... to the World Heritage Centre," tourism minister Khulud Daibes told reporters.

The addition of the West Bank town to the UNESCO list should have been almost automatic and accomplished a long time ago, but like most issues in the Holy Land, it has become entangled in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And the Palestinians are hoping that getting the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to recognise Bethlehem as a part of Palestinian cultural heritage will give impetus to their struggle to establish a state.

"This timing is crucial for us, it is part and parcel of our plan to end the (Israeli) occupation and build the institutions of the state of Palestine," Daibes said.

In the absence of constructive peace talks with Israel, Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad has been leading an effort to build institutions for a de-facto state.

They feel they have a strong case for Bethlehem's recognition when the UN committee meets to decide on the nominations in July 2012.

And UNESCO officials agree.

"Who can question that the Nativity Church is a world heritage site?" said Louise Haxthausen, head of UNESCO's Ramallah office, who has worked with the Palestinian tourism ministry in preparing the bid.

But in the end, UNESCO may not even be able to consider the bid for the same reason that it has not been added to the list to date: Palestine is not yet a recognised state.

At the same time as filing the nomination, the Palestinians have also applied for membership of the World Heritage Committee.

The tourism minister said she was hopeful the application would be accepted, though she conceded there was "no plan B."

The efforts by the Palestinian Authority--its authority limited to the West Bank, granted--to build its competence, going for more and better governance, have been getting results, with a slew of Latin American countries recognizing a Palestinian state and many western European countries upgrading their representation.

I'm quite for this. Apart from protecting a critical space for world culture, anything that brings the Palestinian Authority deeper into the international system, requiring it to fulfill legal obligations, is a good thing. Who knows? Maybe the explicit protection of a Christian site might help in a revival of the old tradition of Palestinian secular nationalism.

Besides, one thing that WikiLeaks has proven is that the Israeli government has proven decidedly unwilling to make any concessions to the Authority, notwithstanding the concessions that the Authority has offered to Israel. Israel--like Palestine, true--needs to be pressured into being an honest partner. Broader recognition of Palestinian statehood will hopefully do that.

[LINK] "Grindr app goes straight – but there are different rules for women"

This, described in The Guardian, has the potential to be quite interesting.

Grindr is going straight. The mobile app that helps gay men track their nearest potential date is launching a new service that will allow women to turn their mobiles into GPS-powered dating tools.

Joel Simkhai, Grindr's 33-year-old founder, said he had received tens of thousands of requests from women asking for a straighter, female-friendly version of Grindr. Project X, which will be named in the next few weeks, will be very different to the gay version. "Proximity is less of a turn-on for women than it is for men," said Simkhai.

But Simkhai said location would still be the service's key selling point. "This desire to meet is not just a gay thing. We are all social creatures. But men and women are different. Grindr was made for a man. If we are going to bring women in to this we have to do things differently." He said he hoped to launch the new app in "the very near future".

Simkhai said Grindr would work for straight men as it is, if it were populated by straight women. "The way their minds work is pretty much the same," he said. "For gay men just the fact that there is someone 400ft away and gay is interesting." But the new app will incorporate specific features to appeal to women. "For a straight woman, a guy who is 400ft away from her? So what. It happens all the time. We have got to provide more," he said. "Grindr is very photo-centric. Women obviously want to see someone that they might find attractive, but they need to know more than that."

[. . .]

Grindr now has more than 1.5 million gay members and is available on smartphones including iPhone, BlackBerry and Android mobiles. London has the most Grindr users in the world, ahead of New York and Los Angeles. Users sign up with a photo and the barest of stats – age, height, weight. No graphic nudity is allowed. Once you sign on, the app presents a grid of pictures of potential dates sorted by proximity using GPS technology accurate to a couple of hundred feet. People interested in meeting can text each other or send more photos using the app.

The app has become a gay phenomenon. Blog The New Gay called Grindr the "biggest change in gay hookups since the 'hanky code'".

"I don't know about that," said Simkhai. "It certainly has allowed new possibilities," he said, adding that the service had removed the guesswork from spotting fellow gay men. "You walk into a new room and you can find out who is gay. I was in London recently, and when I landed at Heathrow I was on Grindr. I didn't have to figure out who was gay. Every time you go somewhere new, you have a new set of guys."

I'll not be getting the app anytime soon because I'm not interested in its premise and I've a personal dislike for Apple, but it certainly has a lot of interesting potential for meeting new people, and not necessarily for hookups. Will this work in the same way for straight women, though?

A further refinement of Grindr might be to let people know if others of similar interests are walking about. Certainly being able to strike up a conversation with someone you've a potential interest in would help quite a lot.

[BRIEF NOTE] Could Facebook dominate Japan?

The head of the Zynga Game Network, maker of Farmville and others, thinks that Mixi is bound to predominate.

Japan “is one place where Facebook may not end up being dominant,” Robert Goldberg, head of Zynga Game Network Inc.’s operations in the country, said in an interview in Tokyo. “Despite the unique cultural challenges that Japan presents, we fully expect Facebook to be successful in this market as they have across the world.”

Facebook, boasting more than 500 million users and a valuation above $80 billion, is focusing on expanding in Japan and Russia, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in July. Mixi, which began social network operations in 2004, has about 22 million customers in the country, 10 times the number of Japanese Facebook users.

Concerns over privacy issues and early problems with site design and translation have also set back Facebook’s popularity in the country, Goldberg said.

[. . .]

Facebook, available in more than 70 languages, almost doubled its subscriber base in Japan in the past six months to about 2.2 million, according to market researcher Socialbakers. The country ranked 49th in terms of total users registered for the service, with the U.S. topping the list at 148.9 million.

[. . .]

Zynga chose Mixi for the Japan release of its “FarmVille” hit title in December. The game is Facebook’s second most popular title with 53 million users, after Zynga’s “CityVille” with 98.6 million, according to researcher AppData.com.

Goldberg declined to disclose the user numbers for FarmVille in Japan.

Mixi is better suited for Japanese users because it gives subscribers more control over who sees their content and personal data is more secure, President Kenji Kasahara said in an interview on Dec. 15. Users can also send Twitter-like messages limited to 150 characters, a service that began in September 2009 and isn’t available on Facebook, Kasahara said at the time.

[. . .]

Mixi’s monthly active users, subscribers who log in at least once a month, have reached 14.5 million as of Dec. 31, the Tokyo-based company said earlier this month. That compares with Facebook’s more than 500 million users worldwide and 24.5 million for DeNA Co., Japan’s biggest developer of social games for mobile phones.

Back in September I blogged about the different countries where non-Facebook social networking systems still predominate. While Orkut has been or soon will be surpassed by Facebook in Brazil and India, there are still some countries where local social networking systems predominate: Russia (and the rest of the Russophone world) with VKontakte), South Korea with CyWorld, and Japan. The fact that none of these three countries don't use the Latin alphabet might have something to do with it.

Ultimately, people will use Facebook--or any other social networking platform--because it's useful. In the case of the above three countries, perhaps especially Japan, Facebook may be most likely to become competitive with local networks if user interest grows in establishing contact with social networking platforms like Facebook which outside the three countries' domestic markets, i.e. for Russians to be in regular contact with Poles, or South Koreans and Japanese with each other. The proprietary nature of Facebook makes it likely (I think) that there won't be anything like VKontakte/Facebook interoperability. The question then becomes one of whether or not sufficient pressure to push these countries towards Facebook use.

Thoughts?

[LINK] Two spaceflight links

First, via io9, Space.com's Alasdair Wilkins suggests that there could have been a Soviet lunar mission if not for the repeated failures of the N-1 rocket.

Between February 1969 and November 1972, Soviet space engineers repeatedly saw any dream of landing a cosmonaut on the moon literally go up in flames.

A succession of four failures of the Soviet-built N-1 mega-booster led to the project’s cancellation by decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

A fifth launch of the super-booster was slated in the fourth quarter of 1974, one that gleaned lessons learned from the earlier unsuccessful flights.

Up in smoke and millions of rubles spent, the terminated N-1-L3 space project was to be topped by a lunar system to support a two-cosmonaut crew on a maximum flight time of 13 days to the moon and back to Earth, with one crew member setting foot upon the lunar surface.

Trying to gain access to relevant American intelligence information remains extraordinarily difficult.

Meanwhile, 80 Beats reports that a US-European team is interested in salvaging the cancelled Ares I booster.

The partners are Alliant Techsystems of Minneapolis (ATK) and the European company Astrium, which builds Ariane 5 rockets to carry satellites into space. Today they are announcing their collaboration on the new 300-foot rocket.

The new rocket, named Liberty, would be much cheaper than the Ares I, because the unfinished NASA-designed upper stage of the Ares I would be replaced with the first stage of the Ariane 5, which has been launched successfully 41 consecutive times. The lower stage of the Liberty, a longer version of the shuttle booster built by ATK, would be almost unchanged from the Ares I.

To truly go ahead with the project, the two companies will need to snag at least some of the $200 million in funding NASA is set to give next month to private companies developing space taxi technology. Giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as newer private space companies like SpaceX, are all competing for these dollars and contracts.

There has been deep concern in the US Congress about the length of time it might take to provide commercial alternatives, leaving America reliant on Russian Soyuz vehicles until perhaps the latter part of this decade. But ATK and Astrium believe their experience means they could have the 90m-high (300ft) Liberty rocket ready to fly by 2013, and operational with astronauts on board by 2015.

The two companies are targeting a price of $180 million per launch as a way to undercut the price of the Atlas V rocket launches by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin collaboration called United Launch Alliance, which currently dominates the market. And launching astronauts may not be the only ambition of ATK and Astrium.

Go, read.

[DM] "On Zimbabwe's declining HIV infection rate"

I've a post up at Demography Matters commenting on a recent study confirming a sharp fall in HIV seroprevalence in Zimbabwe, linked to the pervasiveness of the epidemic and changes in sexual practices.

Go, read.