[PHOTO] The HAL Maasdam, docked in Charlottetown (August 2013)

The Holland America Line's Maasdam was in Charlottetown harbour in late August, docked at the cruise ship dock at 1 Weymouth Street.

The city, and the wider province, have become popular destinations for cruise ship visitors in recent decades, despite criticism from some that the visitors are concentrated in Charlottetown and the arguments of others that cruise-ship tourism prioritizes daytrips over more in-depth visits.



I took this picture of the Maasdam a couple hundred metres to the west of the point where I took my first picture. (Children were posing for their parents, unseen to my left.)

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• BlogTO highlights a new photography exhibition at Ryerson University that I really should see.


• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the idea of subsurface biospheres on exoplanets.


• Crooked Timber's Belle Waring shares pictures from the ongoing protests in Ukraine and starts a debate.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a new model of the evolutions of the Sun and the Earth's atmosphere that suggests Earth will face a runaway greenhouse in 1.5 billion years, rather later than previously expected.


• Far Outliers highlights the ongoing Berber awakening in north Africa.


• Language Log tackles the Jamaican-sounding remarks of Rob Ford and finds them credible.


• The Map Room's Jonathan Crowe links to a wonderful New Yorker article on maps in literature.


• Marginal Revolution notes a new paper arguing that coal power was essential for urban growth.


• Supernova Condensate quotes Karl Popper about inductive reasoning.


• Torontoist notes the plans for a new proposed park to be built at Ontario Place.


• Towleroad remarks on the recent suicide of an Azerbaijani gay rights activist and notes the doubling of a bounty offered by Hong Kong billionaire to any man who would marry his lesbian--and coupled--daughter.


• Window on Eurasia notes the new reading list for Kremlin officials.

[LINK] "Chris Alexander scolds Ontario over health care to refugees"

CBC's Susana Mas reports on an interesting conflict in federalism in Canada: Ontario is taking care of the health needs that the Canadian federal government has abandoned.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander publicly scolded the Ontario government today for defying the federal government's decision to reduce the level of health care available to refugee claimants.

Ontario introduced a new program, effective Jan. 1, that will provide refugee claimants with access to primary care and urgent hospital services as well as medication coverage regardless of their refugee status, following cuts to a federal program that administers temporary health-care benefits to refugee claimants.

"I've expressed our government's disappointment with the Ontario government's recent decision to reinstate health-care benefits to all asylum seekers and even rejected refugee claimants," Alexander said.

[. . .]

The federal government's reforms for the asylum system introduced in December 2012 include, among other things, a list of 37 countries that "do not normally produce refugees, but do respect human rights and offer state protection."

Claimants from this Designated Country of Origin (DCO) list, which includes the U.S. and most countries from the European Union, now have their refugee claims heard faster.

The goal of the policy, the minister said, is to ensure that people who are in real need of asylum get the protection they are seeking fast, while those with unfounded claims are sent home more quickly.

Alexander said the number of asylum claims from countries that are generally considered safe but used to produce a high number of unfounded claims has dropped 87 per cent.

"I want to make this point very clear, because it seems some people still don't understand the great benefit to genuine refugees that flow from our reforms. The beneficiaries of these reforms are yes, Canadian taxpayers, but mostly and overwhelmingly genuine refugees."

The immigration minister said Ontario was compromising the integrity of the system by putting "bogus" asylum seekers and "failed" refugee claimants ahead of Canadians who are seeking health-care services and refugees who are in need of real protection.

It's worth noting that the changes would, for instance, not cover Roma fleeing central Europe. For starters.

[LINK] "How the U.S. Maps the World’s Most Disputed Territories"

Wired's Greg Miller has a great interview with Leo Dillon. Head of the United States' State Department's Geographical Information Unit, which ensures that the frontiers on official maps reflect American policy, in so doing Dillon sometimes even has an effect in defining the actual territories of the maps. It's full of fun anecdotes.

WIRED: What’s an example of an interesting border dispute you’ve worked on?

Leo Dillon: One case I worked on that was kind of fun involves a tiny island off the coast of Morocco. It’s very close to shore and very, very small. But about 11 years ago Morocco sent a few troops there and Spain swooped in with helicopters and expelled them and it became a big deal.

[Then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell was asked to mediate the conflict. [In Powell's plan] everyone was going to leave the island, with no prejudice as to who it belonged to. They drew up an agreement but the problem was the name. The Spanish wouldn’t use the Moroccan name and the Moroccans wouldn’t use the Spanish name.

I was at a dinner party that Saturday night and I got a call from the Secretary’s staff saying that instead of a name they wanted to use the coordinates for that island. So I showed them how to get on a database and do that. I could hear the Secretary in the background saying, “Ask him how accurate those coordinates are.” They’re not totally accurate, but there’s no island nearby with which it could possibly be confused. So the documents he drew up for the mediations referred to “the island and such and such coordinates” and those documents had to be signed by the prime minister of Spain and the king of Morocco by midnight that same day.

The prime minister of Spain signed, no problem. But they had to send a high speed car looking for the king of Morocco. This was in the days before cellphones were prevalent. So they caught up to him and he basically had to pull over at some house and say, “Excuse me, I’m your king, could I use your phone?” He called up Powell and asked him to read the document, which he immediately agreed to. So that was a big deal, and my small part in it was to provide those coordinates. It’s a great example of how geographic names matter.

[LINK] "The Myspace Fallacy"

Slate's Will Oremus posted a very strong critique of the paper I mentioned a couple of days ago claiming that Facebook is set to peak and decline. After noting a major weakness in the theory--do all online social networks necessarily follow epidemiological models, with their peaks and dips?--Oremus is very critical about their data sources.

[T]hey pull their data exclusively from Google Trends, which measures the number of Google searches for a given keyword over time. In other words, the researchers’ claim that Facebook is faltering is based entirely on an apparent dip in the number of people typing “Facebook” into Google in 2013.

They justify this bizarre choice of proxy data by arguing that it’s “advantageous compared to using registration or membership data,” which can include inactive members. OK, then why not use daily or monthly active users, as industry analysts do? Seemingly unaware that Facebook is a public company, the researchers claim that user activity data on social networks is “typically proprietary and difficult to obtain.” They back up this assertion with a rather amusing citation: a study published in 2009 about—you guessed it—Myspace.

The Google Trends data on searches for Facebook, unfortunately, do not appear particularly reliable: There’s a huge spike in October 2012 that the researchers can’t really explain and end up simply throwing out. Yet they have no such qualms about an apparent dip in 2013. In fact, that dip is the key to their paper. If Facebook isn’t actually declining in popularity, then the Myspace model doesn’t fit.

The authors never entertain the possibility of an alternative explanation for a dip in the Google Trends data. Facebook’s numbers show that its users migrated en masse from using the site on a desktop computer to accessing it via their phones and tablets in 2013, often via the mobile app. The paper makes no mention of this trend—nor the even simpler possibility that people aren’t searching for “Facebook” as much on Google because they already know what it is and where to find it. By the authors’ logic, I guess a Google Trends search for “broadband” would suggest that high-speed Internet began to wane in popularity sometime around 2005.

[LINK] "Kristen Stewart Is Right: 1984 Is Kind of an Epic Love Story"

The Atlantic's Noah Berlatsky has convinced me that Kirsten Stewart was right to claim that George Orwell's 1984 was a love story. (She'd be wrong to say that it was only a love story, but I don't think she said that.)

Orwell is, of course, famous for linking totalitarianism to the denial of history and objective reality: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four." But, as Stewart suggests, the bulk of the novel, and the main content of Winston's betrayal, is not an exercise in mathematics, but rather the romance plot.

It is when Julia first passes Winston a note saying, "I love you" that his half-formed rebellion takes concrete shape and form. The couple's first sexual encounter is specifically described as "a blow struck against the Party … a political act." It isn't math or history that strikes that blow, but love. "If they could make me stop loving you, that would be the real betrayal," Winston says. To which Julia replies, "They can't do that … It's the one thing they can't do." Even if you read that as doomed, it's still a fairly romantic bit of dialogue, insisting as it does on the existence of love "in a world where," as Stewart says, "love really doesn't exist anymore."

It turns out, alas, that Julia is wrong; "they" can get inside you.

[. . .]

Orwell is able to imagine Big Brother with great power, but when he comes to portraying Julia, he flails. She's just a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

[. . .]

Orwell is able to imagine newspeak and Big Brother and the chief torturer O'Brien with great power, but when he comes to portraying Julia, he flails. She's thoughtless, primitive, interested only in things of the body rather than the mind — "only a rebel from the waist downwards," as Winston calls her. We never really learn why, or feel why, she loves the older, not particularly attractive Winston. We merely know she does because she says so and because, as soon as they meet in private, she starts calling him "dear.” She's just a stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl who's part of Winston's story, not the other way around. So it's not exactly a surprise that she betrays Winston immediately, or that, as O'Brien says, just about licking his lips, "All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her." None of it was ever really there to begin with.

[. . .]

I prefer to think, though, that whatever Eric Blair's limitations as a writer of female characters, he did, in fact, believe in love. Winston, at the end, abandons Julia for big Brother. But does that mean that the relationship with Julia never existed? O'Brien would say it didn't. Memory, history, love; for the Party, none of them are real. It seems to me that Kristen Stewart is on the side of the resistance, and of Orwell, when she says that O'Brien is wrong, and that 1984 is a romance.

The Eurythmics' song "Julia", written for a movie version of 1984, could be taken as a sort of secondary proof. If nothing else, it's an elegant song.

"Eurythmics - Julia (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

[URBAN NOTE] "Book City memoir"

NOW Toronto's Sarah Greene has a nice piece talking about how The Annex's Book City was a hub for Torontonian writers for quite a while.

Book City alumna Alana Wilcox, now editorial director at nearby Coach House Books, worked at various locations including the Annex store for seven years, and still drops off boxes of Coach House books by bike.

“It was a real community space,” she says of working there in the mid- to late 90s. “People would go to the bar, have a drink and on the way home stop at Book City and have long neighbourhood conversations. They’d stay for hours just chatting with their friends.”

Nathalie Atkinson, now a culture columnist and editor at the National Post, concurs. “I loved working the Friday-night shift because it was festive,” she says. “You could tell who was on a date.”

[. . .]

“I was there 74 years,” jokes author Derek McCormack, who was at Book City for about a dozen years and whose first book, Dark Rides, was published in that period, during what he calls the “CanLit boom.” (He now works at Type Books.)

“There was a moment there with Ondaatje and Atwood and Rohinton Mistry when Canadians seemed really proud that we were suddenly stepping onto the world stage, and there was also a boom in young writers and in presses starting up.”

As a young writer/bookseller, he knew he was brushing shoulders with publishers, editors and journalists as well as writers like Margaret Atwood, Graham Gibson and Barbara Gowdy.

“Half of literary Toronto has worked at Book City,” says Wilcox. And I’m not sure that’s much of an exaggeration: André Alexis, John Lorinc, Howard Akler, Chris Chambers, Paul Vermeersch and Jason McBride all did.