[BLOG] Some Friday links

• At A BCer in Toronto, Jeff Jedras enumerates the many failings of the Liberal campaign and wonders if the NDP has what it takes to be Official Opposition.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling reproduces a Brazilian diplomat's description of that country's recent foreign policy successes.


• Charlie Stross points out a recent study suggesting that the Fukushima nuclear incident was generally well-managed, with the shortage of coolant after the tsunami being the main thing.


• At Centauri Dreams, Larry Klaes argues in favour of Earth actively sending out transmissions to try to attract alien civilizations. Um, no.


• Geocurrents points out that political divisions in Nigeria don't map only on religious lines, with ethnicity also playing a role.


• Joe. My. God. reports on al-Qaeda's recognition of Osama bin Laden's death. Not that it will quiet deathers, but still.


• Personal Reflection's Paul Belshaw observes that UN population projections suggest Australia and New Zealand will see migration from burgeoning Pacific island populations, and that they will have advantages in attracting migrants over more closed countries.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh makes the point that whatever its failings in terms of egalitarian modern law, female inheritance rules under Islam were actually better than in Christian and Jewish terms.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble reports on a doubtful claim that ethnic Russians will become a minority in Russia by the late 21st century, between immigration and a low birth rate.

[LINK] "Salmond hails 'historic' victory as SNP secures Holyrood's first ever majority"

I feel somewhat sorry for my British readers and acquaintances, since the Scottish National Party's majority government has promised a referendum on independence. Judging by Québec's various referendums and their effect on Québec and Canada as a whole, this will not be fun for anyone.

The Scottish National party has won a majority in the Holyrood elections – a dramatic result that will allow its leader, Alex Salmond, to hold a historic referendum on independence for Scotland.

After a series of astonishing victories over Labour and a collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote, the SNP leader saw a landslide for his party take it beyond the 65-seat mark. Holyrood has 129 seats.

After a night of defeats for some of Labour's best-known figures and a near defeat for the Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray, Salmond declared he would stage an independence referendum within five years.

Jubilant at the "historic" scale of the SNP's victories, he added that he would first demand much greater economic freedom for the Scottish parliament, including the right to set its own corporation tax and increase borrowing powers to £5bn. Then he would hold his referendum.

"Just as the Scottish people have restored trust in us, we must trust the people as well," he declared. "Which is why, in this term of the parliament, we will bring forward a referendum and trust the people on Scotland's own constitutional future."

David Cameron congratulated Salmond, but warned him that he would oppose any move towards independence for Scotland.

"I passionately believe in our United Kingdom, and of course I congratulate Alex Salmond on his emphatic win," Cameron said.

"I will do everything, obviously, as British prime minister, to work with the first minister of Scotland as I will always do to treat the Scottish people and the Scottish government with the respect they deserve.

"But on the issue of the United Kingdom, if they want to hold a referendum I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have."

[LINK] "Greece Considers Exit from Euro Zone"

This news, reported by the English-language version of Der Spiegel's Christian Reiermann, is very important.

Greece's economic problems are massive, with protests against the government being held almost daily. Now Prime Minister George Papandreou apparently feels he has no other option: SPIEGEL ONLINE has obtained information from German government sources knowledgeable of the situation in Athens indicating that Papandreou's government is considering abandoning the euro and reintroducing its own currency.

Alarmed by Athens' intentions, the European Commission has called a crisis meeting in Luxembourg on Friday night. The meeting is taking place at Château de Senningen, a site used by the Luxembourg government for official meetings. In addition to Greece's possible exit from the currency union, a speedy restructuring of the country's debt also features on the agenda. One year after the Greek crisis broke out, the development represents a potentially existential turning point for the European monetary union -- regardless which variant is ultimately decided upon for dealing with Greece's massive troubles.

Given the tense situation, the meeting in Luxembourg has been declared highly confidential, with only the euro-zone finance ministers and senior staff members permitted to attend. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Jörg Asmussen, an influential state secretary in the Finance Ministry, are attending on Germany's behalf.

Sources told SPIEGEL ONLINE that Schäuble intends to seek to prevent Greece from leaving the euro zone if at all possible. He will take with him to the meeting in Luxembourg an internal paper prepared by the experts at his ministry warning of the possible dire consequences if Athens were to drop the euro.

"It would lead to a considerable devaluation of the new (Greek) domestic currency against the euro," the paper states. According to German Finance Ministry estimates, the currency could lose as much as 50 percent of its value, leading to a drastic increase in Greek national debt. Schäuble's staff have calculated that Greece's national deficit would rise to 200 percent of gross domestic product after such a devaluation. "A debt restructuring would be inevitable," his experts warn in the paper. In other words: Greece would go bankrupt.

It remains unclear whether it would even be legally possible for Greece to depart from the euro zone. Legal experts believe it would also be necessary for the country to split from the European Union entirely in order to abandon the common currency. At the same time, it is questionable whether other members of the currency union would actually refuse to accept a unilateral exit from the euro zone by the government in Athens.

Wow.

Go, read.

[LINK] Quebec and Winnipeg getting NHL teams and Toronto stealing a NFL team from New Orleans?

The prospect of Québec City and Winnipeg getting NHL teams almost two decades after they lost them, something I blogged about at History and Futility, seems somewhat stronger.

It’s by no means a slam dunk, a home run or even a wrist shot to the back of the net, but two self-confessed “jock economists” at the Conference Board of Canada appear to be cautiously making the business argument for bringing the National Hockey League back to Winnipeg and Quebec City.

A report released Wednesday argues clearly that the necessary factors — defined as market size; income levels; a strong corporate presence; and a level playing field — are not only present in the two cities, but are comparable to other Canadian cities with NHL franchises, and even better in some cases.

The caveat, of course, is that Winnipeg, which lost its beloved Jets in 1996 to Phoenix, and Quebec City, which saw its Nordiques head southwest to Colorado in 1995, remain small markets with a shallow corporate pool to draw from for season tickets and the big-revenue boxes.

“It’s a tough call,” admits Mario Lefebvre, director of the board’s centre for municipal studies and co-author of the report.

“This will take some fine planning; it will take some people working really hard behind the scenes, making sure that corporations are in for the long run.”

He says people in Quebec City have boasted to him about being able to sell corporate boxes before they even attract a team, let alone build the new arena that will be necessary to support an NHL franchise.

“That’s called frenzy of a new adventure,” Lefebvre says. “You are going to sell it for the first year, first two years, and who knows maybe even the first three years, but it’s the long-term dedication that you will need.”

According to Lefebvre and Glen Hodgson, a senior vice-president and chief economist at the Conference Board, populations in Quebec City and Winnipeg are large enough to support another professional sports franchise, and those people have the disposable income to pay for tickets.

The “level playing field” argument is perhaps the most compelling — part of what drove the Nordiques and the Jets out of Canada in the first place was the extremely low Canadian dollar, and rising salaries paid to players in U.S. dollars.

But with a salary cap taking care of one of those factors, and the loonie expected to stay at par with the U.S. dollar for the foreseeable future, “under these conditions, Quebec City and Winnipeg could compete with larger markets on an ongoing basis,” the report concludes.

Toronto city councillor Doug Ford's speculation about stealing the New Orleans Saints NFL team--the sort of thing that his brother, Mayor Rob Ford, wanted to get for Toronto somehow--is something that I apologize for to all Louisianans.

A Toronto city councillor has outraged NFL fans in New Orleans with comments about the team possibly moving to his city.

Doug Ford, brother of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, told a sports journalist this week that he was excited about the possibility of an NFL franchise relocating to north of the border. The brothers are known as big football fans — and big fans of the NFL.

Doug Ford told sports network The Score that he believed Toronto is in line for a franchise. But then he said, "Two teams are kind of in play here: Jacksonville’s number one; New Orleans is the other."

There was no reaction from Jacksonville, but fans of the 2010 Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints were outraged at the suggestion their team would pack up and move.

"Reports about the Saints as a potential team moving to Toronto are completely false," said Saints vice-president of communications Greg Bensel in an email. "The New Orleans Saints are committed to the city of New Orleans."

Ford was quick to apologize and say he was sorry. He said he had heard a rumour the Saints might be in difficulty and he should have been more careful.

"I apologize to all of the folks in New Orleans and Louisiana," he told the Times-Picayune. "After all the struggles they've been through, the last thing in the world we would want to do is take away the Saints."

Ford said he didn't appreciate the devotion Louisiana fans felt for their beloved Saints.

"Have they put me on the most-wanted list down there?" he was quoted as saying.

Gack.

[LINK] "Robots Evolve Altruism, Just as Biology Predicts"

This is the sort of thing that makes me hopeful about the future. Non-zerosumness really is a feature of the universe. From Wired Science's Brandon Keim.

Robots in a Swiss laboratory have evolved to help each other, just as predicted by a classic analysis of how self-sacrifice might emerge in the biological world.

“Over hundreds of generations … we show that Hamilton’s rule always accurately predicts the minimum relatedness necessary for altruism to evolve,” wrote researchers led by evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller of Switzerland’s University of Lausanne in Public Library of Science Biology. The findings were published May 3.

Hamilton’s rule is named after biologist W.D. Hamilton who in 1964 attempted to explain how ostensibly selfish organisms could evolve to share their time and resources, even sacrificing themselves for the good of others. His rule codified the dynamics — degrees of genetic relatedness between organisms, costs and benefits of sharing — by which altruism made evolutionary sense. According to Hamilton, relatedness was key: Altruism’s cost to an individual would be outweighed by its benefit to a shared set of genes.

[. . .]

Simulations of evolution in robots, which can “reproduce” in mere minutes or hours, have thus become a potentially useful system for studying evolutionary dynamics. And though simple in comparison to animals, Keller’s group says robot models are not too different from the insects that originally inspired Hamilton.

In the new study, inch-long wheeled robots equipped with infrared sensors were programmed to search for discs representing food, then push those discs into a designated area. At the end of each foraging round, the computerized “genes” of successful individuals were mixed up and copied into a fresh generation of robots, while less-successful robots disappeared from the gene pool.

Each robot was also given a choice between sharing points awarded for finding food, thus giving other robots’ genes a chance of surviving, or hoarding. In different iterations of the experiment, the researchers altered the costs and benefits of sharing; they found that, again and again, the robots evolved to share at the levels predicted by Hamilton’s equations.

“A fundamental principle of natural selection also applies to synthetic organisms,” wrote the researchers. “These experiments demonstrate the wide applicability of kin selection theory.”

[LINK] "The making of a chimpanzee dictionary"

More proof of the intelligence of chimpanzees can be found via Esther Inglis-Arkell's io9 article.

Researchers recently discovered that chimps have over twice the number of sign language-like gestures than previously thought. Through painstaking effort, the researchers learned to decode which gestures meant, "I like your face," versus "I'm going to claw your face off."

The first step to compiling a comprehensive database of ape language is full immersion - the same way you would study any other language. Past researchers, it seems, would miss out on a lot of important gestures. They'd have to stay behind during chimp raiding parties, when groups of males went off to patrol the border of their territory or encroach on the group nearby. They'd also get kicked out of chimpanzee alone time, when males and females courted. There have to be some important gestures going on then.

Catherine Hobaiter, the lead researcher, spent two years with a single group of chimpanzees. They say familiarity breeds contempt, and Hobaiter spent enough time with them to get them thoroughly contemptuous of her and not caring a bit what she thought of any of them. Once they were used to her, they went about their daily life without caring what she did. What she did was film 120 hours of examples of their repeated gestures. Some were easy to guess at, since they bore a striking resemblance to human gestures. The chimps would wave their hands around to get their young to become playful or beckon other chimps over.

Finally, it came time to analyze what each gesture meant. This caused confusion in the past, because not all gestures result in the desired action. (In humans, an innocent middle finger, intended only to convey that the recipient is a massive jerk when it comes to using turn signals, can result in rolled eyes or a severe beating - the latter of which is surely not the gesturer's intended outcome.) So researchers paid attention to the gesture itself, whether or not the gesture was repeated more urgently as time when on and the desired response did not come, and the final attitude of the gesturer. If the chimps displayed contentment after the last gesture, it indicated that the other chimp had responded the way the first chimpanzee had hoped. If the first chimp seemed frustrated, what they had was a failure to communicate. The team identified sixty-six gestures in all. Hopefully, they will be compiled and given out to people who fear getting ripped apart by chimpanzees for making a faux pas.

More can be found about these gestures here and especially this 2004 paper. These gestures seem to indicate that the chimpanzees have a theory of mind, that is, that they imagine someone else is in their other.

We should too, I think.

[LINK] "West of Eden"

Boyko Vassilev's Transitions Online essay made me think about the sorts of relative rankings of countries described here.

Being somebody’s West means that you lead – and the other follows. The essence of “leading” is concentrated in the standard of living, freedom of movement, and the quality of public administration. The perception of being behind or out in front is often all about mass culture. You consume your neighbor’s soft power; therefore you acknowledge he is “ahead” of you.

Before 1989 Romanians watched Bulgarian television. Some Romanians above the age of 40 still remember the opening chords of the youth shows and domestic (but also imported) crime series on Bulgarian TV. Ceausescu’s state lacked such programming.

If you think, however, that Bulgarians watched only their own TV channels, you would be gravely mistaken. While Romanians learned some Bulgarian to watch Bulgarian TV, the Bulgarians in the west of the country learned Serbo-Croat. People pushed their technical skills to the maximum in order to receive broadcasts from Belgrade and if possible, the other radio and TV stations of the former Yugoslavia. Entire villages spoke the neighboring country’s language, even using the right cases (Bulgarian does not have them). The source of this education was TV, radio, and Serbian turbo-folk, with beautiful singer Lepa Brena at the top of the list.

In this way, Bulgarian viewers got what they lacked: a vibrant rock, pop, and folk culture; news from the world; American movies; and sometimes even some erotic scenes on TV. That was their way to acknowledge that Yugoslav citizens enjoyed a higher standard of living. Additionally Bulgarians noticed that their neighbors had easy access to jeans and sneakers – and could travel freely with their passports, while they needed to undergo painful procedures to acquire an exit visa. If you had asked who the West was for Romanians or Russians, they could say “Bulgaria.” But if you had asked Bulgarians themselves, they would point to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and first and foremost to Yugoslavia.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the later prosperity of Bulgaria and Romania and European Union membership, made this all whole. Albania as Bosnia-Herzegovina's west, Romania and Bulgaria disputing their relative statuses or using them as clubs to condemn countrymen for backwardsness--the comparisons go on.

Go, read the essay.