[PHOTO] A for Anarchy, June 2012

Photographed in the area of The New School, this particular bold graffiti strikes me as almost retro. (Anarchy as an ideological contender?)

[LINK] "The Tyranny of Memory"

Clifford at Love and Fiction has a nice essay up on how human memory doesn't necessarily accurately represent actual lived experiences, informed by Daniel Kahneman's writings on bias in memory. He starts his essay by noting how, even though he was reluctant to make a particular trip to Morocco, his memories of it--aided, guided, defined by photos--are more solidly positive than his actual lived experiences were.

[Y]ou could say that the decision to go to Morocco was the correct one, in the long term, and I think you’d be partially correct. But you have to be careful about putting memory on a pedestal. Because you’re basically saying that because I remember the experience of being in Morocco as a pleasant one, so it was. But it wasn’t. Right? Remember? It wasn’t.

Maybe what happened with the trip to Morocco was a case of “no pain no gain.” But it could also be a process called by Daniel Kahneman “the tyranny of memory.” He described an experiment when test subjects were made to chose between two procedures, both of which they had already experienced. In the first one, they had to keep their hands in cold water for 60 second. In the second, they had to keep their hands in cold water for ninety seconds, but the water started to warm up towards the end. The test subjects overwhelmingly (80%) chose the second experience, even though (and this is important) it was objectively worse than the first, because the happy ending colored their memory.

[. . .]

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion – and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decision. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience.

[. . . T]he tyranny of memory is very real. It is quite possible to live your life misguided by your own memory, like the students leaving their hands in the cold water for longer than they need to, because you do not remember what exactly happened. I’m glad I went to Morocco – but can I trust that gladness?

Ultimately the present moment is all we have. The past is gone, and the future may never come. Funny that the people who most stridently talk about the need to travel are urging you to live for the moment! But they might actually be doing the exact opposite. Because once the moment is gone, memory is all we have.

[LINK] "Whodunit? Crows Ask That Question, Too"

Virginia Morell's ScienceNOW article, hosted at Wired, reports on the latest findings on the New Caledonian crow. It's been known that corvids are smart, but new research suggests that this crow species is capable of understanding cause-and-effect.

Imagine hearing a distant roll of thunder and wondering what caused it. Even asking that question is a sign that you, like all humans, can perform a type of sophisticated thinking known as “causal reasoning”—inferring that mechanisms you can’t see may be responsible for something. But humans aren’t alone in this ability: New Caledonian crows can also reason about hidden mechanisms, or “causal agents,” a team of scientists report Sept. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s the first time that this cognitive ability has been experimentally demonstrated in a species other than humans, and the method may help scientists understand how this type of reasoning evolved, the researchers say.

Causal reasoning is “one of the most powerful human abilities,” says Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. “It’s at the root of our understanding of the world and one another.” Indeed, it is the key mental ability for many things humans do, including inventing, making, and using tools. We develop this ability early in life: A 2007 study in Developmental Psychology reported that human infants as young as 7 months old understand that when a beanbag is tossed from behind a screen, something or someone must have thrown it. The infants infer that a “causal agent” must be involved in the motion of the flying beanbag.

But why should this ability be limited to humans? “It seems like it would make good sense for crows and many other animals to be able to distinguish between the wind rustling tree limbs and an unseen animal crashing through the canopy,” says Alex Taylor, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the lead author of the new study. Because New Caledonian crows are also inventive and skillful tool-users, Taylor and his colleagues thought the birds might have causal reasoning skills similar to those of humans.

Working on Mare Island in New Caledonia, the scientists captured eight wild crows (five adults and three juveniles) and housed them inside a large outdoor aviary. Over the next few days, the birds used a slender stick to extract food from a small box placed on a table in the aviary. Then the plot thickened: The scientists placed the food box close to a blue tarp large enough for a person to hide behind. The researchers also set up a large stick that could be poked through the tarp and waved around by a human outside the aviary pulling on a string; the moving stick posed a danger to the birds if they tried to extract the food.

The crows in the aviary then observed two different situations. In one, the “hidden causal agent” scenario, the crows saw a human enter the blind. Then, a few moments later, the stick poked through the tarp and moved back and forth 15 times. The human then exited the blind. In the “unknown causal agent” scenario, the crows saw only the stick as it emerged from the tarp and moved back and forth 15 times.

In both situations, a human also stood next to the table in the aviary, so the crows never tried to get the food. And in both cases, when the visible human left, the crows began to remove their food from the box. Yet the crows’ behavior differed depending on whether they had seen a human come and go from the blind. If the birds had seen a human stepping out of the blind, they seldom gave the stick so much as a glance as they dug out their food. But the crows that saw the stick move but no one emerge from the blind were nervous: They often stopped probing for food and studied the blue tarp and stick—apparently suspecting that someone or something unknown had caused the stick to move and that it might move again. Some even flew away from the setup.

Together, the tests show that the crows are “capable of causal reasoning,” Taylor says. “We expected the crows to initially be scared of the moving stick. Instead, they only became scared when they could not attribute the movement to a hidden human—which suggests the crows were reasoning that the stick’s movement was caused by that human.” The crows, he says, apparently don’t expect an inanimate object to move on its own, just as infants don’t expect beanbags to be tossed through the air by a toy block.

80 Beats has more.

[CAT] "One way to skin a cat – same genes behind blotches of tabbies and king cheetahs"

Not Exactly Rocket Science's Ed Yong writes about the latest discoveries regarding the genetics of the patterns of cats' coats. It turns out that the same genes define coat patterns across the felid family.

Two teams of scientists, led by Greg Barsh from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and Stanford University, and Stephen O’Brien from the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research have discovered the gene behind the king cheetah’s ink-stains. And it’s the same gene that turns a mackerel-striped tabby cat into a blotched “classic” one.

Back in 2010, Eduardo Eizirik, one of O’Brien’s team, found a small region of DNA that seemed to control the different markings in mackerel and blotched tabbies. But, we only have a rough draft of the cat genome, they couldn’t identify any specific genes within the area. The study caught the attention of Barsh, who had long been interested in understanding how cats get their patterns, from tiger stripes to leopard rosettes. The two teams started working together.

Christopher Kaelin and Xing Xu focused on the region that Eizirik had identified, using DNA samples taken from Californian feral cats that had been captured for sterilisation. By comparing mackerel and blotched individuals, the team found one gene that was responsible for the different markings. They dubbed it Taqpep. All blotched tabbies have one of two critical mutations in both their copies of Taqpep, while all mackerel cats have one or two unblemished versions.

Taqpep is also responsible for the king cheetah’s unmistakeable coat. Kaelin and Xu sequenced the gene in Kgosi, a captive king cheetah, and found another mutation in Taqpep, one that greatly enlarges the protein encoded by the gene.

Kaelin got in touch with Ann van Dyk, the woman who first identified that king cheetahs were a mutant version of the regular ones. She runs a cheetah conservation centre in South Africa that’s Kgosi, and all other captive kings, came from. By analysing all of her cheetahs, van Dyk confirmed that Kgosi’s Taqpep mutation is found in all the kings, and none of the 217 wild spotted cheetahs do.

Yong writes at length. Most interestingly to me, the research suggests that a theory of Alan Turing on animal coat patterns might be accurate.

[D]iffusing molecules are central to a longstanding explanation for animal patterns. Back in 1952, Alan Turing, the legendary computer scientist and code-breaker, suggested that animal skins could produce beautiful complex patterns through a lively tango between two molecules – an activator and an inhibitor. Both diffuse throughout the skin, and react with each other. Over short distances, the activator reinforces itself, but over longer distances, the inhibitor blocks it. Depending on how quickly they spread and how strongly they interact, they can produce everything from spots to blotches.

Scientists have tested Turing’s “reaction-diffusion” ideas in many different animals, but it has been next to impossible to find the actual activators or inhibitors. Barsh thinks that Taqpep (or rather, Tabulin) may be one of them, and the team is now looking into it further.

Wired Science's Brandom Keim has more.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Eritrean government's determination to tax its exiles

The well-nigh totalitarian nature of the Eritrean government--militarized, hostile to civil society, prone to subjecting its citizens to forced labour--is a matter of common knowledge. It has triggered substantial emigration--I've written at Demography Matters about the presence of Eritreans in large numbers in Libya (with the goal of reaching Europe) and Israel (travelling via Sudan and Egypt). There's also a large Eritrean community in Canada, concentrated in Toronto.

The Eritrean state has been forcing Eritrean citizens to pay a 2% tax on their income earned in Canada to the Eritrean government. Eritrean-Canadian journalist Aaron Berhane wrote about this in May in a guest column in the Toronto Star.

Some 20,000 Eritreans now live in the Greater Toronto Area. Harassment and fear have followed many of them here. The Eritrean consulate in Canada asks them to provide T4 slips and other Canada Revenue Agency documents as proof of their Canadian income. The government of Eritrea then uses this information to impose an additional 2-per-cent tax on their incomes. Refusal to pay results in the withholding of basic documents such as educational records and birth and marriage certificates. Family members in Eritrea find their applications for business licence renewals declined. Even those who need nothing from the Eritrean government are approached and intimidated by agents of the regime to pay the tax.

The UN has sanctioned Eritrea for its support of Al Shabaab, the insurgent group in neighbouring Somalia with alleged links to Al Qaeda. Last December, a UN Security Council resolution condemned “Eritrea’s use of the ‘diaspora tax’ . . . to destabilize the Horn of Africa region . . . and decided that Eritrea shall cease those practices. It further decided that Eritrea shall stop using extortion, threats of violence, fraud and other illicit means to collect taxes outside of Eritrea from its nationals or other individuals of Eritrean descent.”

The tax continues to be collected, however, and Eritrean Canadians could be forgiven for wondering who governs them here in Canada.

A later Toronto Star article investigated the matter further. Stewart Bell's National Post article on the matter, "‘It is our right’: Eritrea vows to continue taxing citizens in Canada despite warning from Ottawa", communicates that despite being warned by the Canadian government to stop this tax, the Eritrean government plans to continue.

Will this lead to a break in diplomatic relations? I have to wonder whether there's anything that the Canadian government can do, really; if the Eritrean government is willing to threaten the relatives of emigrants, emotionally if not legally it might be impossible for the emigrants not to respond.

The diplomat who represents one of Africa’s most authoritarian regimes said Friday his government would continue collecting what some call an “extortion tax” in Canada even though the Department of Foreign Affairs has demanded that it stop.

“We have to tax our people, it is our right,” Semere O. Micael, the Eritrean consul in Toronto, said after the National Post reported that Ottawa had sent a diplomatic note to his government making it clear he would be sent home if he continued to run the tax scheme.

Asked to respond to the consul’s comments, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s press secretary Rick Roth said: “We have made our position on this matter to the Eritreans clear, and we expect that to be respected. The government of Eritrea should not test our resolve on this matter.”

The one-party state, which lacks a formal economy, has been demanding that Eritreans living in Canada hand over 2% of their incomes and pay a national defence levy. The RCMP and United Nations have reported that those who refuse to pay suffer threats and harassment.

Thousands of Eritreans have sought refuge in Canada. But even in cities like Winnipeg and Toronto, they complain, the cash-strapped government they fled has tried to tap them for money. Refusal can mean reprisals against family members still in Eritrea and stonewalling by the consulate.

[. . .]

Canada took action last week, sending a diplomatic note to Eritrea advising that Mr. O. Micael’s accreditation would only be renewed once Ottawa had received written assurance he had stopped the tax scheme.

Eritrea responded in a letter on Tuesday that it would comply, but Mr. O. Micael said in a telephone interview that while he would no longer take in taxes at the consulate, Eritreans in Canada would still have to pay up.

“I am not going to collect the tax in my office. That’s all. That’s what the Canadian government was asking and they got the response,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we stop collecting.… Now instead of paying to my office they will pay it through the bank.”

[. . .]

Aaron Berhane, a journalist who fled Eritrea after the government shut down his newspaper in 2001, said the consul was dodging. “What he is saying is, ‘I will not intimidate them to pay inside my office, but it is okay with Canada if I intimidate them to pay outside of my office.’ Of course, it can’t be okay and the Canadian government has to watch his activities closely.”

[BRIEF NOTE] On Chinese democratization

I've posted in the past about signs that the People's Republic of China might be on the verge of democratizing. An economically successfully middle-income country with high rates of literacy and media penetration and growing levels of urbanization, China has reached and surpassed many of the benchmarks of socioeconomic development seen by some political scientists as necessary for a stable democratic system.

Anne Applebaum's Slate column touches upon something more critical still to China's political future than levels of GDP per capita. Is the Chinese political system actually as capable as expected? If there's a breakdown, perhaps associated with an economic shock or another, China could change quickly.

In Beijing last week, every conversation ended the same way. You could start off talking about art, or the stock market, or food. You could be sitting at a formal banquet or in somebody's house. You could be chatting with a businesswoman in a chic dress or a bureaucrat in a gray suit—but sooner or later she or he would lean over and ask: Have you heard anything?

And no one had. Or, at least, no one had heard anything remotely credible about the disappearance of Xi Jinping, the man designated to be the next leader of China. Days before my arrival, Xi had abruptly canceled meetings with Hillary Clinton, the Danish prime minister, and others. No public explanation was given, so the rumor mill produced dozens: back trouble, a heart attack, an assassination attempt, a Politburo dispute, a corruption scandal. Even after he was photographed at a Beijing university last Saturday after two weeks of unexplained invisibility (and, indeed, met with Leon Panetta on Wednesday), the rumors didn't stop. "Ah," said a skeptical acquaintance, only half joking, "But was it really him?"

The absence of information about the health and welfare of the soon-to-be most important man in the country comes as no surprise to anyone in China, where many aspects of public life remain mysterious. Xi is expected to assume leadership at the next Communist Party congress, for example, but while hotels in Beijing are booked up for mid-October, there's no official word on when that congress will begin. Once it does, other senior officials might also change jobs, but nobody knows exactly which ones or what the selection of one person over another would mean. When several Chinese central bankers—among the most important and influential economists in the world—switched jobs this summer, nobody knew if that meant policy changes, either. "Those who know, don't speak," one Beijing resident told me. "And those who speak, don't know."

Everybody keeps talking anyway: Although the strict taboos on public discussion of high politics are carefully observed by the print and broadcast media, they are broken constantly on the Chinese equivalents of Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, outside of politics, information about everything else flows remarkably freely. "We don't worry about high politics," one Chinese journalist told me. "We can't write about our leaders anyway, so why bother? There are so many other subjects." Investigative journalists working for newspapers and magazines do indeed produce stories about corruption, about buildings with dubious ownership, about shabby infrastructure. Of course when such stories lead back to senior party members, as they invariably do, journalists tread cautiously. There is a method: They write, then wait for a reaction. If no reaction comes, they write some more. If a party official calls up to complain, they switch subjects.

The result is an endless conversation about what can and cannot be said and who can and cannot say it. One also spends a lot of time in Beijing arguing over basic facts. Is the economy really growing at 7.5 percent annually, as officials say? Or has the rate of growth secretly sunk to 4 percent, as some perfectly legitimate economists claim? Without reliable information from the government, it's impossible to discuss critical problems—the supposedly deep indebtedness of Chinese banks, say, or the allegedly large budget deficits of provincial governments—let alone find ways to solve them. Conspiracy theories breed in the vacuum, sometimes inspiring not just gossip but also riots like the one that damaged the U.S. ambassador's car on Tuesday.

It's not what one expects: Since at least 2009, many in—and outside—China have touted their system as stable and predictable; an alternative to the United States, where squabbling politicians might lead the country over a fiscal cliff; and an alternative to Europe, where elected officials postpone tough decisions and bureaucrats resist reform.

But close up, China's system looks less stable than it seems from far away. The combination of silence and rumor must create real uncertainty for investors. Economic forecasting is a lot harder if no one knows the leadership's plans. Meanwhile, there is no lack of squabbling, indolence, corruption, and bureaucratic obstructionism in China. It's just that, unlike us, the Chinese don't openly berate themselves about it. China's opacity keeps critics guessing. But does it mean the world's second-largest economy is better-run?

[URBAN NOTE] "Big, Obnoxious Toronto Mayor Visits Chicago, Blends In Too Well"

The NBC Chicago blog post by Edward McClelland seems to be the most noteworthy coverage given to Chicago media to Rob Ford's visit to our North American Midwest sister city. Chicagolanders I asked on Facebook noted that they hadn't heard of it, or that they had heard of it only through their Canadian friends' feeds.

It is not flattering.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford spent two days in Chicago, and nobody noticed. The controversial Canadian mayor’s trade visit, which coincided with the end of our city’s first teacher strike in 25 years, was huge news in Canada.

Here, it didn’t make the Tribune or the Sun-Times. Maybe that’s because, as I found out when I wrote a Great Lakes travelogue, Americans don’t want to read about Canada. Or maybe it’s because Ford didn’t look at all like a foreigner in Chicago. Although the Toronto Sun portrayed him as Jake Blues, he actually looks more like Jim Belushi’s brother-in-law on According to Jim than John Belushi. And he has the personality of Saturday Night Live motivational speaker Matt Foley. Ford is so loud and obese it wouldn’t have been surprising if he’d applied for asylum in the United States.

More on that in a moment. After taking a boat tour of downtown Chicago, Ford had a private half-hour meeting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. They talked about the two cities’ business relationships, as well as garbage pickup, an unglamorous housekeeping task of mayors everywhere. They also discussed labor issues, or labour issues, if you're reading this in Canada. Ford recently signed a four-year deal with his city’s workers.

“I’ve been up to Toronto a great deal, and I’m proud that we are going to renew our sister city relationship,” Emanuel said at a press conference after the meeting. “The similarities are not just in the business community or in our geography. Chicago is the most American of American cities.”

And Toronto is the most American of Canadian cities. It has franchises in the NBA, Major League Baseball and MLS, and now hosts a Buffalo Bills game each year. It’s ethnically diverse, with large immigrant populations from the Caribbean and Asia. And if you’re a Canadian who wants to make it big in business or see your name in lights -- two American traits -- you go to Toronto. Emanuel acknowledged that Toronto is in Chicago’s league as an international city.

“Today, the economies that are being driven are being driven by the 100 most dynamic cities that have the energy, the culture, the business and the dynamism that people want to be a part of, and Toronto and Chicago are two of those cities in the top tier of the world,” he said.

McClelland then went on to recount an incident when a drunken Rob Ford began screaming insults and obscenities at a couple watching a Toronto Maple Leafs game. Chicago's mayor Rahm Emanuel, McClelland concludes, at least uses that kind of language in private.

Here in Canada, Steve Kupferman's Torontoist overview and Rosie DiManno's article in the Toronto Star are not-unrepresentative samplings of the contemptuous coverage of Ford's actions that's become normative.