[PHOTO] Looking north, Rustico

Standing on the grounds of Doucet House, I was looking north, towards Rustico harbour, the sand dunes of the Prince Edward Island National Par, and ultimately the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Dragon's Tales links to a private proposal for the ESA to launch
• The Everyday Sociology Blog's Peter Kaufman finds sociology and mindfulness meditation quite compatible.


• Far Outliers takes a look at the instability of the post-Ottoman Arab kingdoms of the Middle East.


• Joe. My. God. notes that AIDS denialists are trying to shut down YouTube commentary on their ideas by claiming copyright on videos referenced in these commentaries.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Spain is now partaking in the European Union-wide market for health care services.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw observes that, perhaps contrary stereotypes, his Australian region of New England had a very large Chinese population.
  
• J. Otto Pohl notes how the social geography of Accra, Ghana's capital, has changed and not changed over time.


• The Planetary Society Blog features a guest post from Bill Dunford talking of various missions sent to our sun.


• The Volokh Conspiracy announces a week of posts on the position of sharia law in the United States.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Ukrainian Orthodox (Kyiv Patriarchate) as well as Ukrainian Catholics are opposed to Russia, and quotes statistics (the high number of .ru-registered websites outside of Russia, the high Kazakh birth rate, conspiracy theories about Ukraine) which suggest things might be problematic for Russia.

[URBAN NOTE] Five blogTO links on Toronto, its restaurants, and its history

What the subject line says.

• Derek Flack observes, with photographs, the time in 1972 historic Campbell House was saved from construction by being moved through the streets of Toronto to its current location at University and Queen.


• Erinn Beth Langille compiles a list of the top 10 coffee shops that also serve alcoholic beverages.


• Darren "DKLo" Susilo lists six restaurants in the greater Toronto area that do a particularly good job of serving Canadian Chinese food.


• Derek Flack has a nice photo essay about small hidden streets in Toronto.


• Flack also shares pictures dating back a century of Roncesvalles Avenue and its neighbourhood.

[NEWS] Some Tuesday links

• Here on Livejournal, Elf Sternberg notes that the sort of homophobia that reduces same-sex partners to sex acts and anatomical parts is also really unflattering to heterosexuals, too.


• The New Scientist notes a recent paleogenetic study suggesting that among the legacies left to Homo sapiens by Neanderthals may be lighter skin and straighter hair.


• Bloomberg notes that growing official homophobia is making lives for GLBT people across Africa more difficult than ever before.


• The Guardian suggests suggests that the growing crackdown on student visas in the United Kingdom may be alienating future professionals from Britain, and notes that migrants from Mali are going to Africa much more than Europe nowadays.


• Al Jazeera provides background to the ethnic conflict ongoing in the Central African Republic and notes the popularity of Korean popular culture in northeastern India based--among other things--on shared race.


• New York magazine notes the absurdity of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas claiming that Georgia in the 1960s was race-neutral.


• In the Caucasus, Eurasianet notes that Georgia wants to join NATO to get its lost territories back (another reason not to let it in) and that Abkhazia has not benefitted from the Olympics as some had hoped.


• Radio Free Europe notes that Serbian and Bosnian Serb migrant workers at Sochi seem to have gotten screwed over.


• The New York Post traces the genesis of Suzanne Vega's songs in different places around New York City.

[LINK] "Legendary Montreal-born writer Mavis Gallant dead at age 91"

I've already shared on Facebook Victoria Ahearn's Canadian Press article announcing the sad news that Mavis Gallant, Canadian expat and great writer, has died.

Montreal-born short story great Mavis Gallant lived in Paris for much of her lauded career and brought a European flair to her writing, but she made a big impact on the literary community in her native country, Canadian authors said Tuesday after word of her death.

"Mavis Gallant was a marvellous short story writer and a constant hopeful influence on my life," Nobel Prize-winning short story master Alice Munro said in a telephone interview from Victoria.

"I didn't know her well. I met her at a few conferences, I think here in B.C. But the important thing was that long before that, I knew about her work and the fact that she was a Canadian and she wrote mainly short stories, which you were not really encouraged to do as your main writing.

"So she was important to me in that way."

Gallant died Tuesday morning in her Paris apartment, said publisher McClelland & Stewart. She was 91.

The article goes on to talk at length about Gallant, her life, and her writing.

[ISL] "The Past Rise and Current Fall of Russian Cyprus"

Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble linked to and summarized a Russian-language article on the position and history of Cyprus' large Russophone community.

In an article on Rosbalt.ru, Tatyana Khrulyeva surveys the rise and what she sees as the potential fall of this community. According to the 2011 Cyprus census, there were only 8164 Russian citizens living on the island, but in reality, there are far more Russians there and they play a variety of roles (rosbalt.ru/main/2014/02/15/1233278.html).

“Not all Russians allowed themselves to be counted,” she says, given that many of them are involved in activities they do not want to call attention to. Moreover, not all of the members of Russian Cyprus are ethnic Russians or citizens of the Russian Federation. Many have other backgrounds and it is thus more appropriate to speak of the Russian-speaking community.”

Using that measure, unofficial calculations suggest that there are some 50,000 Russian speakers on Cyprus, approximately six percent of the island’s total population. Most are in the major cities, and there are so many in Limassol that some there jokingly refer to it as “Limassolograd.”

[. . .]

According to Khrulyeva, there are four basic sub-groups of the Russian-language community of Cyprus. First, there are the Pontic Greeks who in Soviet times lived on the shore of the Black Sea. Most of this community left Russia in the early 1990s, many went to Greece proper, but 10,000 settled in Cyprus, mostly around Pafos.

[. . .]

Second are the group Khrulyeva calls “the Russian wives.” According to Cyprus media, “almost 50 percent of the marriages” on the island involve Russian women. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cypriots often went to the USSR for higher educations and returned “not just with diplomas but also with spouses.” Many of these women, despite their degrees, now work as domestics.

The third group consists of “Russians who are able to live in Cyprus for an extended time during the course of the year.” Most of these people have good incomes and are from Russia or Ukraine. They came to Cyprus not only because of the good weather and good schools but because until the island joined the EU, it was just about the best place in the world for Russian companies to register and operate as offshores.

And the fourth, Khrulyeva continues, are those who came to find work. Getting a visa to Cyprus is easy but getting work permits is much less so. Consequently, those who came in pursuit of jobs have often found that while they like the weather and the schools, they are forced to work in service jobs far beneath those they were trained to do.

A recent New York Times article suggests that Cyprus after the bailout--which targeted disproportionately non-EU, especially Russian, bank account holders--is starting to regain its attractiveness. Cyprus has problems, but apparently it's still better off than Russia.

[LINK] On termites as models for construction robots

Wired's Nadia Blake pointed towards the latest development in applied swarm intelligence.

Termites normally inspire thoughts of insect invasions, obnoxiously colored house-tents, or the Orkin man. But for a group of scientists at Harvard University, the cooperative insects inspired a whole new army of robots, described in Science.

These robots, each about the size of your head, follow a minimal set of rules when building a structure. Instead of detailed plans, they rely on environmental cues to accomplish their task — a minimalist strategy that’s based on a principle called “stigmergy.” Conceived in 1959 by a French biologist, the term describes how termite colonies cooperate and self-organize to build massive, intricate mounds. In some places, these mounds can be 8 feet tall; they’re also air-conditioned by a network of internal tunnels, and are often oriented along the Earth’s north-south magnetic axis.

But unlike humans, termites don’t follow blueprints or plans while constructing their homes. All they know is what the finished product is supposed to be, and what to pay attention to along the way. As each termite scoops up mudballs and deposits them in various places, it leaves a trail of chemical cues for other builders. Based on these cues, the other termites modify their building behaviors and deposit their own mudballs where the stuff is needed. Boom. Termite mound.

The fleet of Harvard robots follows this strategy, too. Their minimal programming includes the ability to move forward, backward, and rotate; they can also climb, sense, pick up and deposit bricks. Where they lay those bricks depends on what the other bots are doing and what the final structure is supposed to be.

Meeri Kim's Washington Post article goes into much more detail.

“Around here, you hear about termites destroying buildings,” said Justin Werfel, a Harvard University computer scientist and author of a study in the current issue of the journal Science. “But in Africa and Australia, they are known for building enormous, complicated mounds of soil.”

[. . .]

Each termite is an organism of fairly low complexity, but, using stigmergy, a colony can build a highly complex structure. So the team started with this simple framework: Each robot must have its own basic brain and sensors, and be programmed with certain “traffic rules” it must obey.

The sensors enable them to see bricks and robots next to them, and the traffic rules depend on the final structure. They prevent robots from placing bricks in places where they might easily collapse, or constructing a scenario in which a brick would have to be squished in between two others.

Each robot, about eight inches long, consists of internal metal gears and hardware as well as 3-D printed parts. The bricks themselves are also made in a way that helps the robots climb and align them better.

“In our system, each robot doesn’t know what others are doing or how many others there are — and it doesn’t matter,” Werfel said.

The main difference from the real-life insect is that termites don’t have a desired end product. Rather, there is a random component involved; given the same starting place, a colony will build a slightly different structure every time. But for constructing a house, for instance, the robots would need to follow a specific blueprint. So Werfel created the option for a user to input a picture of a predefined structure, and the robots will go to town on building it.

The paper in question is here.