[DM] "On how a lack of fluency in German is hurting Europe's single market"

I have a post up at Demography Matters commenting on this Economist article suggesting that a lack of fluency in German is preventing southern Europeans hit by the economic crisis from moving to Germany. I note, via illustrations, that German has a long way to go to catch up with English, especially in the countries hardest-hit by the Eurozone crisis.

[PHOTO] Looking down the aisle

I snapped this picture looking down the very long length of one of the new Toronto Rocket trains running the length of the Yonge-University-Spadina line. For more, see the Wikipedia article on the Toronto Rocket, James Bow's extensive overview at Transit Toronto, and/or the TTC's own page.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling points to a Tumblr-sponsored symposium of Tumblr art.


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin wonders if the American right's influence is now ebbing.


• Eastern Approaches documents the latest, disappointing round of cross-border Hungarian-Romanian competition over Transylvania and its peoples.


• Far Outliers' Joel points to an interesting essay by Andrei Lankov suggesting that, irrespective of foreign sponsorship or not, the Communist revolution in North Korea genuinely was popular.


• A Fistful of Euros' Brent Whelan hopes for a victory by the left in Italy's elections tomorrow.


• Maximos blogs about kayaking and sharks in the harbour of Sydney, Australia.


• Patrick Cain has a fun infographic charting the components of birth rates in Ontario from 1990 on.


• At Towleroad, Ari Ezra Waldman discusses coming out as HIV-positive and its political import.


• Eugene Volokh notes the arrest of some Christian missionaries in Libya.


• Window on Eurasia notes a Russian commentator, Vladislav Inozemtsev, who argues that the Russian government is fine with allowing immigration from the near abroad and is uninterested in making investments to improve productivity.

[LINK] "Are there going to be any women at this party?"

Dwayne Day's article in The Space Review has gotten a fair amount of publicity on my Facebook friends list. By and large, the comments have been pretty productive.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of The Space Review. These days barely a week goes by without somebody launching yet another space blog. There are now so many of them, with so much overlapping coverage, that it’s impossible to keep track. That has been one of the benefits of The Space Review: it is not a blog, it is a weekly journal, with longer-form opinion and commentary and even historical essays (sometimes with footnotes!) Although sometimes the essays stray into goofy territory, they are rarely partisan or uncivil, which cannot be said for many space blogs.

But if you go back over ten years of The Space Review, or even over the past year, you may notice something missing: women. There are almost no women who have written for The Space Review. We have the white, middle-aged male demographic pretty well covered, but that’s pretty much true of the space blogosphere too. Why are there no women writing for The Space Review?

Alas, I don’t have a good answer why. There are a few women who are prominent in the space field, such as the current NASA Deputy Administrator and the CEO of SpaceX, among others, although female representation in space leadership positions is undoubtedly lower than it is for many other fields. Women are better represented in the space sciences, particularly astronomy and planetary sciences. The group Women in Aerospace has done a great job over the years supporting women in the field with recognition and scholarships. There are some women bloggers in the space field, and the best space policy website is run by a woman. But most female space bloggers tend to be located more in the sciences than other areas. It is certainly true that women are not well-represented in space enthusiast and activist communities, where a simple head count at space-related conferences reveals that their numbers are often less than twenty-five percent and sometimes under ten percent.

[LINK] "Study: Why Straight Women Are Often Close With Gay Men"

Thoughts, anyone, on the study described in Lindsay Abrams' article in The Atlantic?

[W]hen it avoids teetering into decorative accessory territory, the "unique and important bond shared between straight women and gay men" is both observable and understudied. So researchers at the University of Texas at Austin designed an experiment aimed at empirically evaluating how, exactly, both parties benefit from being soul mate friends.

To do so the researchers designed a fake internet persona -- "Jordan" -- and evaluated participants' ability to form a relationship with him based solely on his Facebook profile.

[. . .]

The results, published in Evolutionary Psychology, showed that straight women are more trusting of mating advice (the authors' preferred term) when it comes from a gay man, although they don't put any more faith in gay men's ability to help them find a mate than they do in straight men or women.

Gay men, too, were more likely to trust advice from straight women than from straight men or lesbians. They thought that straight women were more likely than gay men, but not significantly more likely than lesbians, to help them find a mate.

In all this, the researchers see support for their hypothesis that "close friendships between straight women and gay men may be characterized by a unique exchange of unbiased mating-relevant information that may not be available in their other relationships." This works, they propose, on two levels: first, the two aren't competing for mates; and second, they otherwise have a lot in common -- namely, being attracted to men. As the study's title puts it, they're "Friends with benefits, but without the sex."

[URBAN NOTE] "Doug Ford says integrity commissioner should resign over call for sanction against may

Via the National Post's Natalie Alcoba comes the latest installment in the Ford family saga that has become Toronto's.

Councillor Doug Ford thinks the city’s integrity commissioner should apologize and resign after recommending a sanction that became the centre of a legal battle over Mayor Rob Ford’s job.

Janet Leiper’s proposed punishment for breaking the code of conduct — that Mr. Ford reimburse donations that lobbyists and one company had made to his charitable football foundation — was deemed by a court to have been outside the city’s authority to impose. The mayor voted to overturn the sanction, leading Toronto resident Paul Magder to take him to court for a conflict of interest violation. Last month, a Divisional Court panel of three judges unanimously ruled the city overstepped its bounds and overturned a lower court’s decision that he should be removed from office.

“I think it’s time the apology commissioner apologize,” said Doug Ford, an attack on previous instances in which Ms. Leiper has asked both him and the mayor to say sorry for their behaviour. “If it was up to me, I’d ask her to step down,” he said. “Through her lack of due diligence she has almost destroyed a family.”

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday first asked Ms. Leiper to apologize on the floor of council Thursday as city council discussed a report she wrote explaining the court’s decision.

He said Ms. Leiper should have sought legal advice before interpreting a “grey area.”

Councillor Gord Perks was “appalled” the deputy mayor didn’t understand the importance of testing a new area of law in court. He pointed out that courts rendered two different decisions on the matter, “indicating that the areas were complex and difficult enough.”

Ms. Leiper would not respond to the deputy mayor’s apology request when asked by reporters later. She explained the rationale behind her suggested sanction, however, to council, saying she examined the penalties that were at her disposal and deemed that a member could improperly direct a benefit somewhere else that could attract a “corrective action.” So, her recommendation sought to “correct the people who were compromised, correct those lobbyists who gave donations who should not have been asked in the first place.”

[LINK] "NDP MP rejects conflict allegation over CBC royalty cheque"

The NDP MP for my riding of Davenport, Andrew Cash, was a musician and a journalist before he was a parliamentarian. It's the first role that was alleged to cause a conflict of interest on his part, as reported by Postmedia News' Andrea Hill (see also MacLean's Andrew Coyne. It turns out that accepting royalty cheques from the CBC for music work on Dragon's Den doesn't bar him from voting on most matters relating to the CBC, apparently.

An NDP MP who receives thousands of dollars a year in royalties from the CBC says he will continue to sit on the committee that determines funding for the public broadcaster and that he is not violating conflict of interest rules.

Toronto-area MP Andrew Cash has been composing, producing and performing music for CBC’s reality-TV show Dragon’s Den since the show debuted seven years ago. He reportedly receives more than $2,000 for every episode aired.

“The ethics commissioner has said that I’ve done nothing wrong,” Cash told Postmedia News on Thursday. “I have been in constant touch with the ethics commissioner and her office since I first got to the Hill.”

When Cash joined the Canadian heritage standing committee in September 2011, he said the first thing he did was submit a letter to the clerk of the House to disclose the fact that he had a composer contract with the CBC and to state he would not participate in debates or votes related to the broadcaster.

Later that month, Mary Dawson, parliament’s conflict of interest and ethics commissioner, sent Cash a letter to clarify what his obligations were under the government’s conflict of interest code. In the letter, she said that the code prohibits you from participating in debate or from voting on matters specifically related to CBC’s funding or planning priorities that may affect your private interest. She added that Cash was able to participate in debates and votes that are of general application or that affect the CBC as one of a broad class.

[DM] "On North Korea becoming a place where people are from"

I've a post up at Demography Matters wherein I argue that while South Korea is becoming a place people are moving to, North Korea's fate in the 21st century is to be the place (country, region, whatever) where people around the world will be from.