[FORUM] How far back does your community's history go?

This afternoon, I went to Todmorden Mills with a friend. A City of Toronto heritage site was a small mill settlement founded in 1795 next to the Don River, that, in the centuries since, has become engulfed by expanding Toronto (the Don Valley Parkway is just to the west) and, since 1967, has been a pleasant little museum complex.

[T]he site consists of two historic millers' homes dating from the early 19th century, the Brewery building and the recently renovated Papermill Theatre and Gallery. Adjoining the site is a 9.2 hectare wildflower preserve with walking trails exploring a number of natural habitats, including upland and bottomland forests, dry and wet meadows, swamp lands and a pond.

(Pictures will come.)

Here in Toronto, Todmorden Mills is about as old as you can get, one of a class of historical remnants alongside Fort York and various older buildings scattered throughout Toronto. British settlement only dates back to the 1790s; the French presence was marginal and the First Nations' history in the area is essential discontinuous with modern Toronto.

What's things like in your community? How old is it? How young?

Discuss.

[PHOTO] The Joggers

We saw the pair of joggers running up the hill from the Don Valley to Broadview Avenue, but they turned back short of their goal.

[BRIEF NOTE] On not being homophobic by saying all homophobes are homosexual

The news that Cardinal O'Brien of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, he who has made a name for himself in the United Kingdom and the wider world for a variety of anti-gay statements, has himself resigned his position after being accusations he of undue sexual conduct with four different men became public, resdonates. The man seems to have been a hypocrite, condemning a class of behaviours and a certain identity that he himself indulged in--and, worse, may have engaged in a certain amount of coercion of subordinates.

O'Brien seems to have been a hypocrite. Generalizing from his case to all homophobes and all homophobia--assuming that it's all a matter of sexual repression--does not follow. That's the subjects post of "Homophobes Are All Secretly Gay". (Not.) Wonkman points out that claiming that a homophobe is secretly gay plays into traditional anti-gay stereotypes.

You just told us that a homophobe is secretly a broken, twisted piece of work: that his conduct and personality are defined by urges he’s working extremely hard to suppress; that he lashes out violently and publicly in order to help keep his broken sanity together; that he cannot possibly be a complete human being; that he is, fundamentally, an extremely sad and disturbed person; and that all of this is because he is secretly gay.

In short, he’s a wild-eyed freak.

You have no reason to think that he’s secretly gay. No study has ever concluded that a majority of homophobes (let alone all of them) are secretly gay. Sure, studies like this are constantly reported in the popular press, but the findings are always exaggerated and most of the studies reported in the popular press weren’t even looking into this phenomenon to begin with.

There is a weak scientific basis upon which to conclude that some homophobes experience some degree of latent homosexual attraction, but this degree is not necessarily higher than large numbers of people who live as perfectly contented, well-adjusted heterosexuals. (Having some small degree of same-sex attraction [that one time you kissed a guy in college; noticing that your personal trainer has nice abs which, in the back of your mind, you’d kind of like to rub; etc.] doesn’t make you gay.)

What we’re left with, then, is you digging up a particularly nasty and hoary stereotype in order to discredit someone who you dislike.

[. . .]

Can you avoid invoking homophobic stereotypes in order to make your case? Can you stop using “gay” as an insult, and can you rise above this sort of schoolyard namecalling (“OH YEAH? WELL YOU SECRETLY LIKE COCK!”) to make your points?

Coverage of the scientific research has frequently been nuanced, portrayed well last April in Scientific American.

Homophobes should consider a little self-reflection, suggests a new study finding those individuals who are most hostile toward gays and hold strong anti-gay views may themselves have same-sex desires, albeit undercover ones.

The prejudice of homophobia may also stem from authoritarian parents, particularly those with homophobic views as well, the researchers added.

"This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, 'Why?'" co-author Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, said in a statement. "Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection."

The research, published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reveals the nuances of prejudices like homophobia, which can ultimately have dire consequences.

"Sometimes people are threatened by gays and lesbians because they are fearing their own impulses, in a sense they 'doth protest too much,'" Ryan told LiveScience. "In addition, it appears that sometimes those who would oppress others have been oppressed themselves, and we can have some compassion for them too, they may be unaccepting of others because they cannot be accepting of themselves."

Ryan cautioned, however, that this link is only one source of anti-gay sentiments.

"May." "Sometimes." "Only one source." None of these adjectives refer to certainties. If you go to the paper in question, there you'll find those adjectives and others like "some."

One thing that the accusation that homophobes are closeted allows, incidentally, is a vindication of heterosexuals as not beign homophobic or implicated in homophobic norms. If homophobes is just a gay thing, what do heterosexuals have to do with it all? The accusation can be a convenient way to excuse heterosexuals from having to change anything about themselves.

[LINK] "Tweet, Screech, Hey: Animal Sounds Hint at Evolution of Language"

Lizzie Wade's ScienceNOW article, carried at Wired Science, reports on an ingenious comparative study of animal communications methods that has insights on the birth of human language.

One reason that human language is so unique is that it has two layers, says Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. First, there are the words we use, which Miyagawa calls the lexical structure. “Mango,” “Amanda,” and “eat” are all components of the lexical structure. The rules governing how we put those words together make up the second layer, which Miyagawa calls the expression structure. Take these three sentences: “Amanda eats the mango,” “Eat the mango, Amanda,” and “Did Amanda eat the mango?” Their lexical structure — the words they use — is essentially identical. What gives the sentences different meanings is the variation in their expression structure, or the different ways those words fit together.

The more Miyagawa studied the distinction between lexical structure and expression structure, “the more I started to think, ‘Gee, these two systems are really fundamentally different,’ ” he says. “They almost seem like two different systems that just happen to be put together,” perhaps through evolution.

One preliminary test of his hypothesis, Miyagawa knew, would be to show that the two systems exist separately in nature. So he started studying the many ways that animals communicate, looking for examples of lexical or expressive structures.

Vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), for example, use different alarm calls to refer to different types of predators, such as snakes and leopards. “That’s already headed in the direction of the way in which we use different words,” says co-author Robert Berwick, a computational linguist at MIT. Still, the monkeys always use the calls in the same context—to warn others about predators that currently pose a threat. They can’t arrange the calls in new patterns to talk about predators they saw yesterday, predators they expect to see tomorrow, or the abstract idea of “predator.” Vervet monkeys have a lexical structure but no expressive structure.

Songbirds, on the other hand, appear to communicate using only an expressive structure. Nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos), for example, can manipulate the patterns of their songs to form up to 200 different melodies. But no individual note has any particular meaning, the way the words in a sentence do. What’s more, an entire song always communicates the same message—the bird’s identity, location, and sexual availability. Birdsong is what Berwick calls a “holistic signal.” A song’s structure may vary, but it “means the same thing every time,” he says.

Because we see independent lexical and expressive structures in animals, it’s possible that human language could have evolved through the combination of similar preexisting systems, Miyagawa, Berwick, and University of Tokyo biopsychologist and co-author Kazuo Okanoya report online this month in Frontiers in Psychology.

[LINK] "US doctors cure child born with HIV"

This article by Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample made the rounds of Facebook as amazing, but in the light of day looks less like a miracle and more a reasonable extension upon the proven successes of post-exposure prophylaxis drug treatments in preventing HIV infection in people exposed to the virus. As the author points out, this treatment is likely to be most useful for children born to HIV-infected mothers who haven't already received treatment.

Doctors did not release the name or sex of the child to protect the patient's identity, but said the infant was born, and lived, in Mississippi state. Details of the case were unveiled on Sunday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

Dr Hannah Gay, who cared for the child at the University of Mississippi medical centre, told the Guardian the case amounted to the first "functional cure" of an HIV-infected child. A patient is functionally cured of HIV when standard tests are negative for the virus, but it is likely that a tiny amount remains in their body.

[. . .]

The number of babies born with HIV in developed countries has fallen dramatically with the advent of better drugs and prevention strategies. Typically, women with HIV are given antiretroviral drugs during pregnancy to minimise the amount of virus in their blood. Their newborns go on courses of drugs too, to reduce their risk of infection further. The strategy can stop around 98% of HIV transmission from mother to child.

[. . .]

The problem is far more serious in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, around 387,500 children aged 14 and under were receiving antiretroviral therapy in 2010. Many were born with the infection. Nearly 2 million more children of the same age in the region are in need of the drugs.

In the latest case, the mother was unaware she had HIV until after a standard test came back positive while she was in labour. "She was too near delivery to give even the dose of medicine that we routinely use in labour. So the baby's risk of infection was significantly higher than we usually see," said Gay.

Doctors began treating the baby 30 hours after birth. Unusually, they put the child on a course of three antiretroviral drugs, given as liquids through a syringe. The traditional treatment to try to prevent transmission after birth is a course of a single antiretroviral drug. The doctor opted for the more aggressive treatment because the mother had not received any during her pregnancy.

Several days later, blood drawn from the baby before treatment started showed the child was infected, probably shortly before birth. The doctors continued with the drugs and expected the child to take them for life.

However, within a month of starting therapy, the level of HIV in the baby's blood had fallen so low that routine lab tests failed to detect it.

[. . .]

When the mother and child arrived back at the clinic [two years later], Gay ordered several HIV tests, and expected the virus to have returned to high levels. But she was stunned by the results. "All of the tests came back negative, very much to my surprise," she said.