[PHOTO] A bonny swan

The swan may be a fierce bird, but it's also a beautiful one. I photographed this one swimming and diving serenely near the southern end of High Park's Grenadier Pond.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bag News Notes features photographs of the aftermath of the Bangladeshi factory collapse.


• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the electric sail, propulsion method for spaceships currently being tested.


• At The Dragon's Tales, Will Baird links to a study suggesting that China's Yangtze river is at least 23 million years old.


• Daniel Drezner doesn't think that an age of cheap energy globally will necessarily destabilize the world, at least outside of oil exporters, since globalization binds in other ways.


• Eastern Approaches notes the continuing sensitivity of the post-Second World War deportation of the Sudeten Germans from the Czech Republic, as recently emphasized by the Czech president's defense.


• Geocurrents examines the reasons for the sharp shift in most of India towards below-replacement fertility rates, suggesting that television shows featuring women with small families may be as important a factor as anything else.


• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis notes that one of the first victories of organized labour in the United States occurred in 1882 with the implementation of a ban on Chinese immigration. (Canada followed in 1885.)


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Sasha Volokh examines the implications of prisons being reviewed on Yelp.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Ukrainians and Moldovans, not Central Asians, are more likely to be undocumented migrants in Russia. (They're less visually and culturally distinctive, apparently, and harder to catch.)

[URBAN NOTE] "It’s ‘about time’ Toronto Maple Leafs fans had something to cheer for"

Metro Toronto's Jessica Smith has an interesting interview up with CBC hockey journalist Elliotte Friedman. Briefly, the Maple Leafs' ongoing success may have saved the team's morale and popularity.

Hockey Night in Canada host Elliotte Friedman is a man without a team — he’s an unbiased observer — but he does know a little about “fandemonium.”

“Your city is just a little bit more enjoyable when your hockey team is good. It’s about time Toronto fans had this,” he says at the CBC’s downtown Toronto office, a couple of hours before he’s scheduled go on air for the HNIC pre-game show and the Leafs-Bruins game.

He grew up a Blackhawks fan, not a Leafs fan, but in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when the Leafs were good, he was caught up in the excitement, he says.

“They needed this badly because I think they’re in danger of losing a generation of fans,” he says. “If you lose a generation they’ll become Sidney Crosby fans or something else.”

[. . .]

Friedman predicts Boston will take the series in six — because of the Bruins’ experience, depth and Zdeno Chara — but says just having the Leafs in the playoffs has changed things.

“If they lose this series, will they be disappointed? Yes. But they’ll look at this season and say, ‘We’re back.’”

[URBAN NOTE] "Immigrant underclass in GTA fuels simmering frustrations"

One of the tags I'll be giving Debra Black's Toronto Star article will be "Three Torontos" since this article speaks about the ongoing ethnic--and, consequently, geographic--polarization of Toronto between a well-off largely white population and a less-well-off population of immigrant origin. This Is Not Good.

[S]ome experts worry the increasing creation of an immigrant underclass will brew trouble — sadly ironic in a region that for decades has taken pride in and built a reputation on its multiculturalism and acceptance of immigrants from around the world. By 2017, the GTA is forecast to become home to a predominantly non-European population.

A recent backlash over the Royal Bank of Canada’s move to replace Canadian workers with foreign workers, and a battle in Brampton over a townhouse development that erupted along cultural lines with accusations of shady “Indian politics,” reveal simmering tensions. And the Conservative Party’s recent attempt to crack down on abuses to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program has done little to appease critics.

“While immigrants and immigration is the heart and soul of the country, if you look at the main basis of inequality in Canada, along with gender, it’s based on race and immigrant status,” said Yogendra Shakya, senior research scientist at Access Alliance.

“Racialized immigrants are facing two to three times the rate of unemployment, higher representation in precarious, contract, on-call or temporary jobs. They are two to four times more likely to be underemployed and have more than double the rates of education level in terms of having post-secondary education.”

Shakya has witnessed the widening inequality and growing frustration at his agency’s clinics. New immigrants often can’t find work in their field and end up in temporary low-paying jobs, often through temp agencies. This precarious work has led to higher rates of poverty among immigrants across the GTA.

Further complicating the picture are temporary workers — often brought in under the temporary workers’ program or under international student visas — who choose to stay here after their visas expire and become part of the undocumented in the city. What’s more, new emerging communities, with perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 people in them, of immigrants from Nepal, Bhutan, Central Asia and parts of Africa such as Cameroon, are also beginning to emerge across the GTA.

[LINK] "Amateur Astronomer Catches Record Setting Gamma-Ray Burst"

GRB 130427

gamma-ray burst

Universe Today's David Dickinson writes about how an amateur astronomer managed to photograph one of the brightest gamma-ray bursts so far discovered, GRB 130427 some three billion light-years away.

On April 27th, 2013 a long lasting gamma-ray burst was recorded in the northeastern section of the constellation Leo. As reported here on Universe Today, the burst was the most energetic ever seen, peaking at about 94 billion electron volts as seen by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope. In addition to Fermi’s Gamma Ray Burst Monitor, the Swift satellite and a battery of ground based instruments also managed to quickly swing into action and record the burst as it was underway.

But professionals weren’t the only ones to capture the event. Amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins was awake at the time, doing routine observations from his observatory based near Toole, Utah when the alert message arrived. He quickly swung his C-14 telescope into action at the coordinates of the burst at 11 Hours 32’ and 33” Right Ascension and +27° 41’ 56” declination.

Wiggins then began taking a series of 60-second exposures with his SBIG ST-10XME imager and immediately found something amiss. A 13th magnitude star had appeared in the field. At first, Wiggins believed this was simply too bright to be a gamma-ray burst transient, but he continued to image the field into the morning of April 27th.

Wiggins had indeed caught his optical prey, the very first gamma-ray burst he’d captured. And what a burst it was. At only 3.6 billion light years distant, GRB 130427A (gamma-ray bursts are named after the year-month-day of discovery) was one for the record books, and in the top five percent of the closest bursts ever observed.

[. . .]

Amazingly, the RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response) array recorded a peak brightness in optical wavelengths of magnitude +7.4 just less than a minute before the Swift spacecraft swung into action. This is just below the dark sky limiting naked-eye magnitude of +6. This is also just below the record optical brightness set by GRB 080319B, which briefly reached magnitude +5.3 back in 2008.

[. . .]

Mr. Wiggins’ observation also raises an intriguing possibility. Did anyone catch a surreptitious image of the burst? Anyone wide-field imaging right around the three-way junction of the constellations Ursa Major, Leo & Leo Minor at the correct time might just have caught GRB 130427A in the act. Make sure to review those images!