[PHOTO] Looking south at Aura, on Yonge Street at Wellesley

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO notes that the supersonic Concorde actually paid visits to Toronto.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining planetary migration in stellar binaries.


• Eastern Approaches is critical of the referenda in eastern Ukraine.


• The Financial Times's World blog notes a French dilemma: does it sell warships to Russia now in this time of economic austerty? Does it dare not to?


• Joe. My. God. notes the victory of Conchita Wurst in Eurovision, and Towleroad comments on Russian displeasure.


• The Language Log's Geoffrey Pullum links to, and comments upon the recent Economist map showing how ludicrous it is to establish language areas as countries.


• The New APPS Blog notes how problematic it is to suggest that genetic differences explain everything.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer warns that, at the current rate, Ukraine's violence will reach a level of civil war in December.


• Savage Minds investigates the branding of anthropology.


• Speed River Journal's Van Waffle describes the rose-breasted grosbeak.


• Towleroad notes that religious freedom is reserved only for conservative Christians.


• Torontoist provides a biography of John Bayne Maclean, a man who in the late 19th century lay the foundation for a publishing empire including MacLean's.


• Window on Eurasia links to an argument that federalization in eastern Ukraine would lead to disintegration.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell discusses Colorado River water politics on the US-Mexico border.

[LINK] "The pdf graveyards can only expect an increase in their undead populations"

Steven Poole's opinion piece in The Guardian about the rather large number of PDF-format documents which never get read somewhat misses the point. Open document standards are nice, sure, but could it be that many of these documents aren't expected to be read by many people, or read off the Internet (as opposed to as an E-mail attachment)?

What does the kind of email attachment you choose to send say about you? Are you an apologetic corporate slave, a hippie freedom fighter, or a paranoid hacker? We don't often give much thought to the various kinds of electronic file types that zip around the internet, except when they annoyingly fail to open on our computers. But embedded in them are all sorts of political and economic choices.

File types are not generally thought of, for instance, as making much difference to global progress and the smooth accumulation of human knowledge. But could it be that the humble pdf is hurting democracy? That is the question posed by Alex Hern, after a World Bank report noted sadly that few of its research papers (offered as pdfs on its site) are downloaded much, and nearly a third have never been downloaded at all.

The pdf, or portable document format, was invented by Adobe to solve a real problem – how to make an electronic document incorporating text and images that looked the same on any operating system. But the problem is that it's hard to get the data back out of a pdf and use it. Text is usually searchable – the World Bank report itself notes that Google indexes pdfs to count citations of articles – but there's no chance of scraping the underlying data from embedded charts and graphs. Condemn public research to that format and you end up with what White House open data project fellow Nathaniel Manning mournfully calls "PDF graveyards".

Poor pdfs. On this argument, electronic file types are an ecosystem freed from the pressures of natural selection, in which unfit species don't die out but keep shambling around like data-hoarding zombies. But I'm not sure we should all abandon the pdf just yet. It's true that it is a lovably clunky relic of the days when everyone thought "desktop publishing" was the future. (I for one have never felt less athletic than when struggling to make Adobe "Acrobat" fill in a simple pdf form.) But what is the alternative?

[LINK] "The Antarctic Ice Sheet Has Started to Collapse and Nothing Can Stop It"

Perhaps we can think of this as re-terraforming? Via Gizmodo:

For years, scientists have feared the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet—a vast swath of ice that could unleash a slow but unstoppable 10-foot rise in sea levels if it melted. So here is today's terrible news: we now know the ice sheet is melting. And there's pretty much nothing we can do to about it.

The accelerating collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is reported by two different teams of scientists, in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters. Its collapse has been predicted for decades, most prominently by glaciologist John Mercer, but this is the first tangible evidence that it's actually now happening. Warmer waters are most likely responsible for the melting.

The New York Times explains why the position of the ice sheet makes it especially vulnerable to runway melting:


The basic problem is that much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits below sea level in a kind of bowl-shaped depression [in] the earth. As Dr. Mercer outlined in 1978, once the part of the ice sheet sitting on the rim of the bowl melts and the ice retreats into deeper water, it becomes unstable and highly vulnerable to further melting

This is no longer just speculation or the plot of a blockbuster film. "This is really happening," NASA's Thomas P. Wagner emphasized to the New York Times. "There's nothing to stop it now."

[LINK] "Fish Learn To Use Tools, So Let's Rethink the Definition of Tool Use"

io9's Jason Goldman argues that the ability of Atlantic cod to use ersatz tools requires us to really think about definitions of what a tool is and how they are used.

In a recent study, a group of researchers led by Sandie Millot designed a feeding machine that could be operated with a pull string. If a fish was hungry, it would swim up, pull the string, and the food would be dispensed. Since fish – like all other animals – are capable of associative learning through basic classical and operant conditioning, the fact that fish could learn to operate this sort of basic feeder is not surprising. Indeed, 48 of 56 fish figured out how to get the food. Each of the fish was marked with a small tag with a colored bead on it just in front of the dorsal fin. The tags helped the researchers to identify each individual fish.

The surprising part is what happened next. Three of the fish figured out that they could use the artificial tags, rather than their mouths, to operate the feeder. They learned to swim past the string and hook it onto their tags so that the food would be released that way. Since the researchers caught everything on video, they could carefully analyze the surprising behavior.

For each of the fish, the moment of insight began by accident. The fish appeared to accidentally catch their tags on the feeder's pull-string. As soon as they felt the pull of the string, they showed what's called a startle reaction: they immediately responded with a fast burst of swimming until the tag became unhooked. Eventually, after a bit of trial and error and fine-tuning, all three fish were performing the action with apparent intention, using their dorsal tags alone rather than their mouths to operate the feeder.

The argument:

[T]he researchers argue that whether the action qualifies as tool use should hinge on cognition rather than behavior. "The question is not how an animal uses a tool or an extension of the body but why." The why, in this case, is to obtain a desired goal.

"If we accept that the cod were aware of the morphological extension (the tag) on the back," they reason – and how could we not, given how their behavior become more fine-tuned over time? – then "using this to activate a feeder could be regarded as a form of tool use." The researchers even go so far as to suggest that the tag could be thought of as a sort of artificial limb!

The surprisingly sophisticated development in fish of this goal-directed behavior suggests that the usual definition may be insufficient to capture the full range of tool use in all animals. Instead, Millot and colleagues offer a more nuanced characterization of tool use, which relies upon understanding the mental machinery that underlies the innovative behavior, rather than simply describing the innovation itself.

[LINK] "Why Wal-Mart Hasn't Conquered Brazil"

Renee Dudley, Christiana Sciaudone, and Jessica Brice argue that WalMart is doing worse than expected in Brazil because its lowest-price model doesn't fit Brazilian shopping patterns. This after the chain has ended its ventures in Germany, South Korea, and India, and even faces serious problems in China on top of a slowing American market.

When asked where she does her shopping, Ivanira de Pontes Duarte, a 51-year-old maid in São Paulo, says it depends on what she’s looking for. If she needs olive oil, a small shop in the middle of her two-hour commute is her go-to spot. Hypermarket chain Extra, a unit of France’s Casino Guichard-Perrachon (CO:FP), has the best deals on cleaning supplies, but only on Wednesdays, when they’re on sale. And a local street fair is where she finds the cheapest produce. One place the store-hopper hasn’t tried is Walmart. “I’ve seen their ads on TV, and their prices don’t seem that much better than everyone else’s,” she says. “It’s a question of savings. Most Brazilians don’t make very much and we need to save where we can.”

[. . .]

Wal-Mart executives have said the company needs to more clearly explain its pricing to Brazilian shoppers eager to stretch paychecks that average about $900 a month. Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon, who ran the international division for five years, acknowledged at an October analysts’ meeting that “we’re not making the most” of Brazil, where the company has had four local CEOs in a decade.

Better communication is probably beside the point, says Thales Teixeira, a Harvard Business School professor, because Brazilians will shop at several stores if that’s what it takes to get the lowest prices. “They’re cherry-picking the promotions. They care more about that and less about Wal-Mart’s one-stop shopping convenience,” says Teixeira, who grew up in Brasilia. “At Wal-Mart, they’re finding a fair price for their basket, but it’s not necessarily the lowest price for all the items in it.”

Sticking with the everyday low price strategy is hurting the company, says Richard Cathcart, a retail analyst at Banco Espirito Santo de Investimento in São Paulo. The hyperinflation of the 1980s that once drove Brazilians to stock up at large stores such as Wal-Mart’s no longer exists. “People would get paid, and then they would go to the hypermarket and buy as much as they could for the whole month—that is not the situation anymore,” Cathcart says. “You either have to bring people in by changing their culture and the way they like to shop or you’re stuck.”