[PHOTO] Bank of China (Canada), 396 Dundas Street West

Bank of China (Canada), 396 Dundas Street West
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

Located on the other side of Beverly Street from the Art Gallery of Ontario and just west of the Italian consulate, the downtown Toronto outpost of this Chinese commercial bank can lay claim to some interesting architecture, full of curves and skylights if unduly weather-stained.

[LINK] "How the Stuxnet Worm Formed Its Attacks—and Who Might Have It Now"

80 Beats writes about the apparent Stuxnet computer virus attack against Iranian nuclear installations (covered here: 1, 2, 3). The evidence does seem to suggest a targeted attack.

The security group Symantec has been trying to analyze and understand the waves of Stuxnet attacks against Iran, and now its researchers have found the base of the attacks, according to Symantec’s Orla Cox.

The new research, which analysed 12,000 infections collected by various anti-virus firms, shows that the worm targeted five “industrial processing” organisations in Iran. “These were the seeds of all other infections,” said Ms Cox. The firm was able to identify the targets because Stuxnet collected information about each computer it infected, including its name, location and a time stamp of when it was compromised.

Though Symantec isn’t naming the five targets in Iran, another security expert studying Stuxnet’s code, Ralph Langner, told CNET the likely target of the whole attack was the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.

“My bet is that one of the infected sites is Kalaye Electric,” he wrote… “Again, we don’t have evidence for this, but this is how we would launch the attack – infecting a handful of key contractors with access to Natanz.”

The question. as the Financial Times article this Saturday on Stuxnet and the wider campaign against the Iranian nuclear program (assassinations and the like) concluded, is what happens next. How will this be escalated?

Go, read.

[LINK] "Who rules the waves?"

The Economist notes the inaguruation of a new Chinese government research program aimed at exploring the environment of the South China Sea.

IMPERIALISM and oceanography often go hand in hand. The British Admiralty’s surveys of the world’s coastlines and shallow seas during the 18th and 19th centuries brought a wealth of scientific knowledge. They also did no harm to the ability of British merchantmen to navigate the world—and of British warships to dominate it.

Viewed from that perspective, China’s southern neighbours might be slightly nervous about a meeting held in Shanghai on January 26th and 27th, which gathered the country’s oceanographers (including several who work abroad) to discuss a project called South China Sea-Deep. As its name suggests, this project is intended to explore the South China Sea, a patch of water with an area of 3.5m square kilometres and a maximum depth of 5.5km that China’s government regards (despite competing claims from every other country with littoral waters there) in much the same way that ancient Romans regarded the Mediterranean: mare nostrum.
[. . .]

South China Sea-Deep is led by Wang Pinxian, of Tongji University in Shanghai, a doyen of the field. To assist him, he will be able to call on the services of Jiaolong, China’s latest deep-submersible vehicle (pictured, planting a flag), which is designed to dive to a depth of 7km. Last July Jiaolong managed 3.8km. The craft’s handlers aim to push that to 5km this summer and to the full amount next year.

The project is partly inspired by a study carried out aboard a vessel called Dayang Yihao in 2007, of the then little-known Southwest Indian Ridge. This is part of the system of mid-ocean ridges that form as the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust move apart—a process known as sea floor spreading. Among other things, the researchers on board Dayang Yihao located rich deposits of copper, lead and zinc, associated with hot springs called hydrothermal vents that are often found near mid-ocean ridges. And when the International Seabed Authority, which looks after such matters, promulgated regulations last May for the exploration of these sorts of deposits, China quickly made an application to do so in the Southwest Indian Ridge.

The South China Sea, too, is thought to be a product of sea floor spreading—though the spreading in question happened between 32m and 16m years ago. And Lin Jian of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, one of the leaders of the expedition to the Southwest Indian Ridge, is also running a sub-project intended to study the tectonic evolution of the area. This should help settle the questions of how the South China Sea came into existence, how much of its floor is basaltic ocean seabed, of the sort spewed out of mid-ocean ridges, and how much is continental rock that simply happens to be below sea level.

The second part of the project, a study of sedimentation and the ancient climate, will follow up Dr Wang’s original examination of the area, in 1999, which was part of an international effort called the Ocean Drilling Programme. Despite all the disclaimers, this will be the bit of most interest to the oil and gas industry.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Signs of bad arguments"

Anders Sandberg's post deserves to be quoted in its entirety.

Signs that you might be looking at a weak moral argument:

"It was for their own good!"
"We must be strong!"
"Think of the children!"
"For the greater good!"
"But we are here to help you!"
"Otherwise the terrorists will win!"
"Denying this means you agree with Hitler!"

[LINK] "Stories from the Big Apple: New York City’s bike lane backlash"

At Spacing Toronto, Jake Schabas writes about the ways in which New York City's issues with cycling do and do not resemble Toronto's.

It's worth pointing out that the contexts are strikingly different between Toronto and New York City. After all, we're not talking about the odd painted line or loss of a single car lane on Jarvis Street. Installing 250 miles of lanes in five years, as has been done in New York City, should cause a stir. With million-dollar-a-block treatments radically redesigning streets to make them more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists often at the expense of car lanes and parking, there's a good argument that such drastic changes should go through greater public consultation processes.

Local community boards meetings — New York’s hyper-local arm of municipal government established as a way for communities to proactively participate in city issues — are fast becoming the forums for startled residents and local businesses to vent about the changes. And politicians are noticing.

Last November, Staten Island city councillors successfully fought for the removal of a 2.35 mile bike lane on a main street in their borough. Street protests have broken out over a single bike lane along Prospect Park West — a street bordering Brooklyn’s version of Central Park now surrounded by gentrified brownstones. Fights between bike-riding hipsters and Hasidic Jews over bike lanes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn are all too real. Just last week, the idea of licensing cyclists was raised by a Republican councillor in Queens.

Indeed, Republican city councillors are showing their increasing sophistication by arguing that bike lanes should have to go through a lengthy environmental review process that other traffic changes must endure. Such a move would essentially kill the currently expedited process allowing for lanes to be built all over the city at such a furious pace.

Luckily for New York City, anti-bike activists are still playing catch-up. For years now, the City's Transportation Commissioner Janet Sadik-Kahn has openly questioned the place of the car on the city’s streets with the full backing of Mayor Bloomberg. Combine this with a strong mayoral system and Transportation Alternatives, the city's sustainable transportation advocacy group that organizes large pro-bike rallies, fills community board meetings with vocal supporters and overwhelms unfriendly politicians' office inboxes with floods of e-faxes seemingly at will, and those Staten Island politicians still have a long way to go.

Iamskyscraper's comment does more interesting contrast-and-compare between Torontonian and New Yorker approaches to public cycling.

The difference between Toronto and New York is that the government here is very sophisticated and tends to win out with smart, reasoned thinking. In Toronto, situations like the above spin out of control, with lots of finger pointing and weak politicians bending to the squeakiest voice, policy be damned. In New York, Bloomberg has been around long enough to have trained every department to deal in data. You say the new bike lane is slowing traffic? Ok, we'll put GPS in the entire taxi fleet and monitor traffic speeds for a year and see if you are right or not. Not enough parking spaces? Ok, we'll do a turn-signal study and see if we can take some turning lanes out and turn them back into parking. Outer-borough whining about a suburban bike lane? Ok, we'll replace it with a bus lane to see how that works and preserve the idea of giving street space to other modes than private cars. It's quite something to see the NYC govt manage such a hot item in such a chaotic city so effectively. The venting in the articles Jake links to are just part of the march of process.

Jake may be right that at the moment Toronto is still more hospitable to cyclists, ironically, because of the lack of infrastructure that forces cars and bikes to share space and get used to each other. It is indeed still a death wish to ride in mixed traffic on a major NYC street due to the lack of lane use in this town (the paint on the ground is meaningless - traffic "flows" down those big avenues in a way that cannot be described as following lanes). But for recreational biking New York cannot be beat -- just look at the bike map (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikemaps.shtml). You can plan trips hours-long and never have to deal with cars - the connectivity is amazing. As as for parking, NYC is catching up fast. Anyone can request a rack (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikerack.shtml) and laws here now require parking inside office buildings (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikesinbuildings.shtml). Keep your eye on the Big Apple...