[PHOTO] Inside the atrium of the MaRS Discovery Centre

I explored inside the beautiful glass-walled atrium of the MaRS Discovery District's centrepiece tower, on the southeast corner of College and University next to the hospitals and academic institutions, on Doors Open this year. A planned centrepiece for academic-business science interactions, as The Globe and Mail's Kelly Grant notes the space has become a major election issue.

A few weeks before the tumult at Toronto’s MaRS centre exploded into public view, Ryerson University approached the Liberal government with a request: Was there anything the province could do about the lease rates at the MaRS tower, the gleaming monument to innovation sitting near-empty across from Queen’s Park?

Ryerson’s science department was searching for 25,000 square feet of specialized lab space near its Yonge and Dundas campus, making the tower, known as MaRS phase II, an ideal fit. But the school couldn’t afford to move there.

“The cost structure of MaRS was going to be very challenging,” Julia Hanigsberg, the vice-president of administration and finance at Ryerson, said. “If it was challenging for a university, it was obviously going to be very challenging for a start-up.”

Ms. Hanigsberg was told the government was working on the issue, but what she didn’t know at the time was the Liberals were quietly preparing a $317-million bailout of the MaRS tower, which, unable to lure enough tenants, was in danger of defaulting on the $235-million government loan that had made the innovation centre’s second phase possible.

Now, with another election looming, the Liberals are under fire for extending the loan in the first place, and for proposing in secret a plan to purchase the MaRS tower, buy out an American developer’s remaining interest in the project, and convert at least 10 floors of the tower to office space for bureaucrats.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait notes 2MASS J05233822-1403022, 40 light years away, a very low-mass star that's just barely massive enough to be an actual star, not a brown dwarf. (The lowest-mass, in fact.)


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the peculiarities of giant planets orbiting giant stars.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper analyzing archeological remnants (shell middens) of the earliest Maori settlers in New Zealand.


• Joe. My. God. notes Roman Catholic cleric Robert Carlson, testifying about sexual abuse cases during his tenure as a bishop in Minnesota, stating he wasn't sure if priests having sex with children was criminal.


• Language Log's Victor Mair takes another look at the situation with the Arabic-language translation of Frozen, noting similarities and differences between the sociolinguistics of Arabic and Chinese.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the use of slave labour--often immigrant--in the fisheries of Thailand.


• Marginal Revolution comments on the exceptional difficulty of reforming Pemex, the Mexican state oil company.


• The Search looks at the results of a conference on community digital archiving, noting that the actual software is only a small portion of the overall effort.


• Savage Minds' Simone notes the importance of text and tourism, looking at guide books to the Nordic Faroe Islands.


• Strange Maps' Frank Jacobs describes a proposed urban development in Scandinavia, uniting Norway's Oslo, Denmark's Copenhagen, and the west coast of Sweden.


• Towleroad notes that Hong Kong is not allowing Britons the right to marry--including same-sex marry--at the British consulate in that city-state.


• Window on Eurasia notes potential problems with new Russian legislation on dual citizenship.

[LINK] "South Ossetia’s unwanted independence"

Open Democracy's Stephen Jones takes a look at South Ossetia. Nominally independent since the 2008 Russo-Georgian war like Abkhazia, South Ossetians seem inclined to favour unification with their co-ethnics in North Ossetia, in the Russian Federation. There's little prospect of that, though.

‘[I]ndependence’ will bring little to most South Ossetians – they will be condemned to isolation, marginality, and dependence. The prospects for cooperation with Georgia, its natural economic partner, and contacts with the rest of the South Caucasus through traditional seasonal work and cross border trade, are closed. In the 2012 South Ossetian presidential elections, all four candidates declared they would not engage with the Georgian government. Local migration to North Ossetia and Russia has accelerated, particularly among youth, adding to the SOAO’s demographic decline (villages are disproportionately made up of older women).

the 2012 elections, Alla Dzhioyeva, an anti-corruption crusader against Eduard Kokoity, the outgoing president (unrecognised by Georgia and the rest of the international community), had victory snatched from her by the South Ossetian Supreme Court. Dzhioyeva’s challenge had been unexpected, and she was not Russia’s preferred candidate. Although Dzhioyeva was later given a cabinet post, it illustrated the region’s limited political autonomy, underlined by the intimidating and unchallengeable presence of the Russian military. That court decision supported the Georgian contention that South Ossetia is a not a real state, but a Russian vassal, subject to Russia’s strategic goals. South Ossetia’s borders remain under Russian control, and South Ossetian foreign policy simply does not exist.

South Ossetia does not have the autonomous functions of a state able to provide for its citizens, 80% of whom hold Russian passports. There is constant talk (which goes back to irredentist demands made in the early 1990s) by Putin and local South Ossetian parties for a simple solution – union with North Ossetia. This means annexation by Russia because North Ossetia is part of the Russian Federation. United Ossetia, one of the nine parties running in the June 2014 South Ossetian parliamentary elections, has made union with North Ossetia central to its platform. It would be a popular decision. In a rare independent survey of South Ossetians in 2010 by Gerard Toal and John O’Loughlin, over 80% expressed the desire for union with the Russian Federation, and 82% wanted Russian troops to remain in South Ossetia permanently. Unlike Abkhazia, there is, paradoxically, little support for independence.

[. . .]

There are, in addition, potential repercussions in the North Caucasus if annexation takes place. The North Caucasus, which consists of six non-Russian autonomous republics (which contain significant ethnic Russian populations) and over 40 national groups, is crisscrossed with conflict between clans, regions, religions and republics; there are multiple border disputes – between Ingushetia and Chechnya, North Ossetia and Ingushetia, between Kabardins and Balkars, and between Kumyks and Chechens in Daghestan, to mention just a few. Changing borders in the Caucasus is rarely accomplished peacefully, and right now Russia does not want to endanger its precarious control over the North Caucasian Federal District.

[LINK] "Portugal indebted to Angola after economic reversal of fortune"

The Guardian Weekly's Claire Gatinois reports on the controversies surrounding Angolan investment in former colonizer Portugal. Portugal, in a pronounced economic slump even before the global economic slowdown in 2008, is increasingly dependent on oil-rich Angola, whether as a destination for Portuguese migrants or as a source of investment. Many Portuguese seem skeptical of this, whether because of skepticism about the good sense in cozying up to the Angolan kleptocracy or because of resentments dating from the colonial era.

There was no doubt about the firm handshake, but the smile looked a bit forced. The date was 17 November 2011, the place Luanda. Pedro Passos Coelho, the Portuguese premier, had just completed talks with the president of Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos, sealing an agreement that was both a boon for Portugal and deeply humiliating.

Six months earlier, Portugal, verging on bankruptcy, received a €78bn ($100bn) bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. In exchange Lisbon agreed to radical austerity measures, leaving the population poorer and sapping the welfare state. In a curious reversal of fortunes, the former colonial power was in poor shape, but its ex-colony, finally at peace, was awash with oil dollars.

Angola was a Portuguese colony for more than 400 years. It gained its independence in 1975 after a long struggle, but a devastating civil war ensued, only ending in 2002. Dos Santos has been in power since 1979 and the country now enjoys growth rates of between 5% and 15%. Portugal, heavily in debt and struggling to climb out of recession, finally exited its bailout last month.

[. . .] "Angola is looking for recognition and makes it very clear where the money is, sometimes to the point of humiliation," says French historian Yves Léonard. In February, when the cash-strapped government in Lisbon raised the possibility of selling 85 Miró paintings, an Angolan millionaire, Rui Costa Reis, offered to buy them. Well-off Angolan families are now the only people who can afford to shop on the capital's upmarket Avenida da Liberdade. They are investing in luxury apartments at Cascais, a fashionable seaside resort, and buying up companies hastily privatised by the authorities. They – and the Chinese – are the prime beneficiaries of the "golden visas" that the government has promised to anyone investing €500,000 ($650,000) in the country.

In a detailed survey, O Poder Angolano em Portugal (Angolan power in Portugal), Ceslo Filipe, the deputy head of business magazine Jornal de Negócios, has charted the extent of Angolan assets in Portugal. According to his calculations Angola has invested between €10bn and €15bn, with a wide range of interests: in the media (Impresa), energy (Galp), banking (Banco Comercial Português, Banco Português de Investimento), building and agrifood. Dos Santos and his entourage have played a leading role in these investments, according to Filipe. Meanwhile, the president's son, José Filomeno de Sousa dos Santos, now heads Fundo Soberano de Angola, controlling assets worth about $15bn.

[LINK] "Endangered Bonobos Reveal Evolution of Human Kindness"

At National Geographic, James Owen observes that studies of the critically endangered bonobo reveal much about human evolutionary origins, particularly human societies and empathy.

The bonobos, orphaned by illegal hunters in central Africa, are the study subjects of evolutionary anthropologists Brian Hare and Jingzhi Tan, both of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Working with the rescued apes at the Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Hare and Tan have revealed a social side to bonobos that was previously thought to be uniquely human.

Unlike other nonhuman primate—including our other closest living relatives, chimpanzees—peace-loving bonobos seem to tolerate strangers, share resources with random bonobos, and exhibit a form of empathy called contagious yawning. (Related: "'Contagious' Yawning Occurs More Among Loved Ones.")

These findings may help to solve the long-standing evolutionary puzzle of why humans show kind or helpful behavior to other humans beyond their immediate family or group: It could have a biological basis.

"Certainly culture and education play an important role in the development of human altruism, but the bonobo finding tells us that even the most extreme form of human tolerance and altruism is in part driven by our genes," Tan said.

[LINK] What it actually means for Eugene to have passed the Turing test

News that a computer passed the Turing test was quickly undermined once people began looking into the claim in detail. CBC's John Bowman collected a sample of the criticisms on Twitter.

News media, including the CBC, carried the story and the skepticism surrounding it. But on Twitter, programmers and tech journalists almost immediately began to question the claim on a number of fronts.

Eugene Goostman isn't a "supercomputer," but a computer program called a "chatbot," meant to emulate a person typing into an instant messaging service, they pointed out.

As for the claim that it "passed" the "Turing Test" "for the very first time," well, they found each part of that claim questionable.

The Turing test is based on a question and answer game, proposed by renowned British mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing, to distinguish humans from computers.

Turing predicted in a 1950 paper that within 50 years, computers would play the game so well that an "average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning."

[. . .] There's even dispute over whether the test as the researchers set it up was really the "iconic Turing Test." The judges were told that "Eugene" was a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine, and that English wasn't his first language.

So, right away, the bar was lowered.

Wired's Adam Mann takes it apart at leisure.

There’s nothing in this example to be impressed by,” wrote computational cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum of MIT in an email. He added that “it’s not clear that to meet that criterion you have to produce something better than a good chatbot, and have a little luck or other incidental factors on your side.”

Screenshots on the BBC’s article about the win show a transcript that doesn’t read like much more than a random sentence generator. When WIRED chatted with Goostman through his programmers’ Princeton website, the results felt something like an AIM chatbot circa 1999.

WIRED: Where are you from?
Goostman: A big Ukrainian city called Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea

WIRED: Oh, I’m from the Ukraine. Have you ever been there?
Goostman: ukraine? I’ve never there. But I do suspect that these crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal will try to defeat this nice place too.

The version on the website could of course be a different version than was used during the competition.

This particular chatbox almost passed a version of the Turing test two years ago, fooling judges approximately 29 percent of the time.

Fooling around 30 percent of the judges also doesn’t seem like a particularly high bar. While the group claims that no previous computer program has been able to reach this level, there have been numerous chatbots, some as far back as the 1960s, which were able to fool people for at least a short while. In a 1991 competition, a bot called PC Therapist was able to get five out of 10 judges to believe it was human. More recently, there have been fears that online chatbots could trick people into falling in love with them, stealing their personal information in the process. And a 2011 demonstration had a program named Cleverbot manage a Turing Test pass rate of nearly 60 percent.

Anders Sandberg, meanwhile, links to a blog post of his, "Eugene the Turing test-beating teenbot reveals more about humans than computers". He suggests that the appeal of the Turing test lies in human incapacity to discern actual intelligence.

Why do we fall for it so easily? It might simply be that we have evolved with an inbuilt folk psychology that makes us believe that agents think, are conscious, make moral decisions and have free will. Philosophers will happily argue that these things do not necessarily imply each other, but experiments show that people tend to think that if something is conscious it will be morally responsible (even if it is a deterministic robot).

It is hard to conceive of a human-like agent without consciousness but with moral agency, so we tend to ascribe agency and free will to anything that looks conscious. It might just be the presence of eyes, or an ability to talk back, or any other tricks of human-likeness.

So Eugene’s success in the Turing test may tell us more about how weak we humans are when it comes to detecting intelligence and agency in conversation than about how smart our machines are.

[LINK] "Defying Russian warnings, Moldova and Georgia head for EU pact"

Margarita Antidze and Alexander Tanas' Reuters article suggests that Georgia and Moldova, two post-Soviet states with problematic relationships with Russia, are heading towards the European Union. This will certainly worsen relations with Russia, and are themselves controversial within Georgia and Moldova. Still, the European Union's attractive force seems to be combining with Russia's repulsive force to produce decided shifts in Russia's post-imperial periphery.

Undeterred by the conflict triggered by Ukraine's swing towards Europe, the former Soviet republics of Moldova and Georgia will sign a trade and political pact with the European Union this month with Russia warning both countries against the move.

The two small countries - Moldova has a population of just over 3.5 million and Georgia 4.5 million - see the signing of an association agreement as the crucial step towards mainstream Europe, leading to eventual membership of the powerful EU trading bloc.

But, as has been shown by their regional neighbor Ukraine, Russia sees their westward move further away from Moscow's sphere of influence as a geo-political setback that could threaten its markets too.

Last November, Russia persuaded a now-ousted Ukrainian leader to pull out of an identical pact with the EU. When protests then chased him from office, Russia, in a backlash, annexed Crimea, and armed pro-Russian separatist groups sprang up in Ukraine's east and the battle there is still raging.

How Russia - which went to war with Georgia in 2008 - will react now remains the big unknown but officials have warned of "possible consequences".

With Moldova and Georgia harboring pro-Russian breakaway enclaves themselves within their borders - all of which are hankering after union with Russia and look askance on EU association - both states have valid grounds for concern from a Russian response to the June 27 signature.

[DM] On the demographic background behind the Ontario election tomorrow

I've a brief post up at Demography Matters noting that the economic growth that all three parties count on for Ontario may not happen as the population ages and the workforce declines.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Globe Editorial Board endorsed Wynne Liberals, was overruled"

This news item reported by Canadaland's Jesse Brown certainly caught my attention.

The Globe and Mail Editorial Board unanimously agreed to endorse a minority Liberal government for the Ontario provincial election but was overruled at deadline by Editor-in-Chief David Walmsley. Walmsley held the section up at noon last Friday for over two hours, costing the budget-strapped and job-slashing Globe tens of thousands of dollars as Editorial Board editor Tony Keller gnashed his teeth and squeezed out a forced endorsement for Tim Hudak's Conservatives.

The Globe newsroom was in miserable spirits today as Walmsley's honeymoon came to an end. It is widely felt that Walmsley was carrying water for publisher Philip Crawley, who in turn was carrying out the orders of the Globe-controlling Thomson family, whose interests would be best served by a Conservative government.

[. . .] The Globe's Ed Board put weeks of work and thought into arriving at the Wynne endorsement, and they are now baffled as to why they even bothered. This sentiment is shared throughout the newsroom. It was more than one staffer could take, to stand by passively as Walmsley piously held forth about the "certain values" that "the Globe and Mail stands for" while seemingly speaking on behalf of journalists he second-guessed and overruled at the behest of his masters.