[PHOTO] "Gamble safely"

"When it comes to gambling,
taking precautions just makes sense."

safeorsorry.ca

I saw this amusing safe-gambling ad on a subway headed downtown. I like the cheekiness.

[VIDEO] "Riding the 512 St. Clair streetcar, from St. Clair Station to Oakwood Avenue"

On the evening of the 2nd of October, 2012, I rode the 512 St. Clair streetcar west from its start at St. Clair Station, via St. Clair West Station, to my stop at Oakwood Avenue. The trip of 3.7 kilometres took just over 18 minutes. Looking north out of my window by my seat at the front, this is more-or-less what I saw.

[URBAN NOTE] "Council kills off Jarvis bike lanes"

NOW Magazine's Ben Spurr reports on Toronto city council's decision to remove the bike lines on downtown Toronto's Jarvis Street that had been installed at great expense just a couple of years ago.

Council rejected a last-ditch attempt to save the controversial bikeways Tuesday, voting 24-19 against a motion from Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam that would have kept the street in its current configuration.

Instead, the city will now proceed with council's original direction, made last July, to remove the bikeways and reinstall a reversible fifth car lane on Jarvis. The work will begin after the completion sometime next month of the separated bike lane on nearby Sherbourne.

Going into Tuesday’s meeting, the vote on Jarvis was expected to be close. But despite a flurry of lobbying on the council floor, left wing councillors couldn’t convince enough of their colleagues to come onside.

In the end council members like Josh Colle, Ana Bailao, and Michelle Berardinetti, whose votes some thought could be swayed, sided with Mayor Rob Ford, who led the push to take out the lanes last summer.

[. . .]

Supporters of the Jarvis lanes argue that they’re a model of how drivers and riders can safely coexist. City data indicate bike ridership on the street has tripled since the bikeways were installed in September 2010, and rates of accidents involving cars, pedestrians, and cyclists have all declined. Meanwhile, car travel times have only increased by two minutes.

They also argue that, at an estimated $280,000, reinstalling the fifth car lane is a waste of money.

[LINK] "Ron Banerjee’s army of none"

Writing for The Grid, David Topping presents his thorough research into Ron Banerjee and his organization Canadian Hindu Advocacy, known for its very loudly anti-Muslim presentations. It turns out that, contrary to Banerjee's claims, CHA isn't; in fact, as Topping documents, it looks like Banerjee is his own group's only active member.

To say that Canadian Hindu Advocacy lends Ron Banerjee credibility is an understatement—its reach, or rather the reach he claims it has, is the sole basis for it. Mere months after its founding, Banerjee called CHA “the largest and most prominent Hindu advocacy [group] here in Canada” at a rally, and he hasn’t stopped saying as much since. ”We are a national organization of professionals,” reads the homepage of CHA’s website, “most of whom have left other groups to join together and form an entity that really stands up for traditional Canadian and mainstream Hindu values.” In a letter to Maclean’s on behalf of CHA, Banerjee wrote, again, that “we are a large national group.”

Never mind, for now, that Canada’s Hindu population numbered 297,200 people as of 2001 [PDF], and that even in Toronto Life’s feature about the Valley Park Middle School protests against school prayer that Banerjee helped orchestrate, he claimed a paying membership of only 930, which is 0.31% of that. Never mind, for now, that Banerjee, who is alternately referred to in the press as a director of CHA and its spokesperson, is apparently the only member of the organization who’s ever referred to in the press at all. (Combined, the Toronto Sun and National Post have published dozens of news articles quoting Banerjee, and he’s also a recurring talking head on Sun News Network’s The Arena with Michael Coren, and has been a guest on AM640′s John Oakley Show and Jim Richards’ Newstalk1010 Showgram.)

[. . .]

I tell Banerjee that I’m trying to find any evidence of the hundreds of paying members he claims the group has, and I ask if I can talk to any of them. He says, “I wouldn’t know how to do that without disclosing the names of the people and stuff like that.” He sends me this video, which he says shows other members (“senior directors” and a few of their “more active members”). It doesn’t look like a large national group; I count only about ten people standing with Banerjee in it. He promises to send me the names of other members and supporters, some of whom I say I’m willing to keep anonymous. I tell him that, either way, the more he can send me, the better, and that it’s my job to not take him on his word. I give him a day. He sends me five.

I was asking Banerjee for members of Canadian Hindu Advocacy because I’d spent a week looking myself, and hadn’t been able to find any.

When I spoke to Pandit Roopnauth Sharma, the president of the Canadian Hindu Federation, which represents temples across the country, he wasn’t surprised. “Other than knowing Mr. Banerjee by name, I know of no one who’s in the group,” Sharma said. “I don’t know of anyone that I’ve come into contact with who’s said to me, ‘By the way, I’m the president,’ or ‘I’m the secretary,’ or ‘I’m the treasurer.’” Half-serious, he asked for a favour: “When you find somebody, please, I would be interested to know who they are. And if you find members of his executive and things like that, it would be nice to know who they are.”

Dr. Budhendra Doobay, the chairman of Richmond Hill’s Vishnu Mandir and the founder of the Canadian Hindu Federation, says he doesn’t “know of any Hindu [Banerjee] represents,” either. “As far as I’m concerned, his views do not represent the views of Hindus in the GTA.”

CHA’s Facebook group is little help. As of September 28, it has a mere 111 members, only 18 of whom, including Banerjee, were active in any way between June 1 and September 18, 2012 (whether posting anything to the group’s wall themselves, posting a comment alongside something anyone else posted, or Liking anything). Of those 18 members, 7 don’t appear to live in Canada—their home cities are listed as places like Delhi, India. Or Kyoto, Japan. Or Chicago. Of the group’s five administrators other than Banerjee, two appear to be living in India. Still, I sent private messages to all of the administrators and all of the active members whose privacy settings allowed it, asking each one i) whether they were Hindu, ii) whether they were Canadian, iii) whether they were a member of CHA, and iv) what they thought of the decision to screen Innocence of Muslims. After a week, none had replied to me except for one woman, Cutler Hill. She says she’s Canadian, but not Hindu; she described herself as an “evangelical Zionist.” She continued: “I am not part of the decision commity [sic], but if I was I would vote in favour of it.” It was beginning to look an awful lot like Canadian Hindu Advocacy had an abundance of neither Canadians nor Hindus.

[LINK] "Sociology and the Technopolitical Two-Step: The Case of the Regnerus Study"

I quite like Dan Hirschman's take at his blog on the problems with Mark Regnerus' infamous study about the GLB families. How can Regnerus produce research which makes specific claims about a topic that's somewhat different from what his research addressed? Hirchman identifies a sort of creep.

In July of this year, Mark Regnerus, a family demographer and Associate Professor of Sociology at UT-Austin, published a study comparing various outcomes for “young-adult children of parents who have had a same-sex relationship,” also referred to as children of “gay fathers” and “lesbian mothers.” This study, in contrast with most prior research, found that these children had worse outcomes on a variety of measures (educational attainment, current employment, etc.). The study elicited immediate interest from conservative political groups, the media, and a wide range of scholars. Virtually every aspect of the study has since been criticized, from the representativeness of the survey sample to the seemingly sloppy shorthand that transformed “young-adult children of parents who have had a same-sex relationship” into children of gay fathers and lesbian mothers to the publication process (especially the shockingly fast timeline, and the conflicts of interest of reviewers and commenters). The already available November issue of Social Science Research (SSR, the journal in which the original study was published) explores these criticisms and perceived irregularities in extensive detail. Sherkat, an editorial board member at SSR, reviewed the internal records and reports thoroughly on the review process. The issue also includes two open letters commenting on the paper, a summary by SSR’s editor, and commentary by several other authors, as well as a response from Regnerus himself.

I’m not going to comment much on the substance of the dispute here, as it’s not especially my area of expertise, and the critics in SSR and elsewhere have done an admirable job on that score already (I especially recommend this early criticism by Andrew Perrin aptly summarized by its title “Bad Science Not About Same-Sex Parenting.”) I do want to comment on the role of politics in the research process and especially the quote with which I opened this post. Regnerus’s study, flawed as it may be, attempts to address a politically salient question: do the children of same-sex parents experience worse outcomes than children from various other family structures? Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to debates over the legalization of same-sex marriage (or, perhaps, the end of the prohibition on same-sex marriage), and especially the debates over adoption by same-sex parents, knows that this question is politically salient. We also can tell that this issue is politically salient because of the coverage afforded to the prior research on the topic (the same research Regnerus critiques). For example, one study found that children raised by lesbian couples experience better outcomes than their peers. Finally, Regnerus’s study was funded by the politically active, and very conservative, Witherspoon Institute, which suggests that someone somewhere thought it was going to be politically relevant. Were it not politically relevant, odds are that Regnerus would never have been able to conduct the study.*

So, how is it that Regnerus can open his response in the November issue of SSR with the blanket statement that his study “cannot answer political or legal questions”? Here, I’m going to argue that Regnerus engages in a beautiful example of what I am going to call the “technopolitical two-step.” Technopolitics is a wonderful term that comes from the field of science, technology, and society (STS), especially the work of Gabrielle Hecht and Timothy Mitchell (although their own uses of the term differ), both of whose work is rooted in the tradition of Bruno Latour. This tradition argues that technical and scientific projects have incredibly important political consequences and that technical and scientific decisions are often made with political projects (broadly conceived) in mind. In other words, the technical and political are deeply intermingled. One goal of this tradition in STS is to expose this intermingling and thus refute, in some sense, deep claims about impartiality often put forward by scientists and engineers.

[. . .]

The “technopolitical two-step” then is a dance commonly performed by researchers engaged in policy-relevant work. Step one, claim privileged knowledge or skills for answering questions of deep political significance. Step two, reject the implication that the knowledge you produced can actually answer any political question. This dance is, I think, especially pervasive among social scientists. On the one hand, claiming relevance is absolutely essential to securing funding and attention. And, most social scientists, I think, actively want to influence political outcomes (at a minimum in some sort of generic “making the world a better place” fashion). But if the connection between a finding and a particular political debate is too transparent, the objectivity of the research is more likely to be called into question, threatening to transform the findings from “facts of the matter” into mere political rhetoric.

[. . .]

It’s quite possible that advocates for GLB families would not draw the boundaries of the category in the same fashion of Regnerus. And, significantly, advocates of same-sex marriage (who Regnerus references elsewhere in the conclusion, noting that courts are increasingly legalizing same-sex marriage) may explicitly have in mind stable, intact, two-parent units who plan their families, not Regnerus’s definitions, which count as a GLB family any case where either parent had any same-sex relationship. Neither definition is wrong – definitions, in some sense, are incapable of being wrong in their own context. But findings do not stay within the confines of a single paper or study. Facts “travel”, in Mary Morgan’s delightful phrase. And when social scientists subtly redefine a category (and in some sense, they are incapable of doing otherwise, as the socially recognized category rarely maps perfectly onto the categories available in a dataset, and is likely too fuzzy and contested for any single definition to accurately characterize everyone’s understanding), and then make claims about that category, they are engaging in an important kind of politics.