[PHOTO] The flags of Brazil and Portugal on Ossington Avenue

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO lists ten signs that you grew up in the Toronto neighbourhood of The Annex.


• The Dragon's Tales links to Alva Noe's essay arguing that artificial intelligences are so far less capable than amoebas.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog looks at the sociology of being a houseguest.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis notes that, while Scandinavian-Americans don't seem to vote as a cohesive bloc, Dutch-Americans do.


• Joe. My. God. notes a ridiculous British noble who makes ridiculous claims about GLBT people.


• Livejournaler mindstalk reflects on The Siberian Curse with its thesis that Russia's northwards orientation hurts its economy.


• Spacing calls for a comprehensive study of urban transportation costs in Canada.


• Torontoist notes Spacing's new store in Toronto.


• Transit Toronto notes that tunneling for the Eglinton line has reached the area of Bathurst Street.


• Writing Through the Fog shares beautiful street photos of Valetta, capital of Malta.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mayor-elect [Tory] supports narrower city streets"

The Toronto Star's Betsy Powell reports on a pleasant news item: the mayor-elect of Toronto talking rationally and calmly about counterintuitive measures which might improve traffic.

Mayor-elect John Tory says he’s open to a city staff proposal to narrow Toronto streets to reduce speeds and increase safety as long as it does not add or worsen traffic congestion.

“Mr. (Stephen) Buckley, (general manager of the city’s transportation services department) says, and his experts, that this is in fact will help traffic to move more smoothly and some of these lanes are already in place on streets like Danforth and University Ave.,” Tory told reporters Tuesday at city hall.

“But I just want to make sure that is in fact what is achieved because if as we move to implement this in different places it actually has the effect of making the traffic congestion worse than I think it’s something we’re going to have to take another look at.”

[. . .]

Tory noted other cities, such as New York and Chicago, have narrowed lane size to improve traffic flow and safety.

“It is on that basis that I would say let’s take a look at doing it at other places (in Toronto.)”

[URBAN NOTE] On the second city of Ukraine, Kharkiv

Transition Online posted an essay by a young Ukrainian, Viktoria Grivina, about what is now Ukraine's city, Kharkiv. Her description of a city still profound marked by the late Soviet era was evocative to me.

Showing where I live to foreigners was awkward. First, the name – Kharkiv, Kharkov, Xarjkov – is bizarre to pronounce and impossible to remember. Second, the webcam missed the 19th-century downtown and focused on the unfortunate Lenin, who hours earlier had literally been torn from the main square. Close to the plinth that had supported our former revolutionary leader stood four green portable toilets and a janitor. In a gray and orange coat, the janitor posed for the webcam with a look of melancholy. Nearby was the empty Freedom Square.

The two Europeans, Marco and Blas, were bemused by our unwillingness to build anything in this ridiculously huge area. “So this is the agora where people gather in Kharkiv?” Marco asked. I answered, "No." Marco required an explanation, “Where do they go to express their opinions then?” "”If they want to do that, they go home,” I said.

The surrounding streets were eerily empty. “Are you sure it’s not Chernobyl?” Blas asked. “I’m sure. See this is my school. No wait, it's not my school – it's on the other side of the city – but my school is an identical twin of this. We also have three basic types of apartment houses: five-, nine- and 16-stories. I live in a nine-story block. Any nine-story tower you see on the webcam you can consider my house,” I told them.

Marco wondered how the city planners came up with this cloning approach. As my history teacher once said, everything started in good faith and with good intentions. Besides, as the great Russian painter and thinker Kazimir Malevich wrote in his 1915 manifesto, the ideal form is rectangular: you can’t spoil a right rectangular prism, the most tasteful basis for architecture.

Blas looked again at the gray concrete nine-stories of the Saltovka neighborhood and asked whether people still thought that Malevich was right. I answered that it was something to dispute about. But not on the square; if you see someone protesting on Freedom Square, consider them aliens.

[LINK] "As Espresso Rises, Will 'Greek Coffee' Be Left To The Turks?"

Alastair Bland's post at NPR's The Salt about the decline of traditional Greek coffee-drinking patterns caught my attention.

Greeks have loved coffee for centuries. Today, they drink more per capita than even the French and Italians, and almost as much as Americans, and they may spend hours each week in cafes. They're proud of their coffee too, and if you call their rich, gritty signature brew "Turkish coffee" instead of Greek, you're practically asking for a fight in the Greek islands.

But while coffee can be a matter of national pride, increasingly, the Greeks are sipping on a decidedly non-Greek brew: espresso. Chalk it up as one more sign of globalization.

From hipster-thick city centers to the remote hinterlands, espresso is booming in Greece. Mikel Coffee Co., a cafe chain focused on espresso-based drinks, has spread through the country. New restaurants in Athens are specializing in serving espresso — and training baristas to prepare it. Coffee-roasting companies have appeared, and in the midst of the trend, gritty Greek coffee has been put on the back burner.

And the tourism industry has also latched firmly onto espresso: Today, new hotels often install industrial-sized espresso machines in their kitchens, something they weren't doing five years ago, says Athens architect Yiannis Giannopoulos, who oversees construction and remodeling of hotels.

Chrysa Gerolymatou, the general director of the 6-year-old Mikel Coffee Co., believes Greek coffee lovers increasingly see espresso as a more cosmopolitan, modern choice. Whatever the reasons, she says, espresso is undeniably catching on in Greece. "Consider that until the early '90s, there were only two coffee choices — Greek traditional coffee and instant coffee," she tells The Salt in an email.

[LINK] "AIDS Is No. 1 Killer of African Teenagers"

Sam Olukoya's Inter Press Service article is a much-needed reminder that, whatever the emergent state of the epidemic in developed countries, elsewhere in the world HIV/AIDS is still terribly deadly.

Two years ago, Shola* was kicked out of the family house in Abeokuta, in southwestern Nigeria, after testing HIV-positive at age 13. He was living with his father, his stepmother and their seven children.

[. . .]

“Shola felt as an outcast,” says Akinpelu. Eventually, Shola’s grandparents took him in.

HIV among teenagers is devastating families in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, where AIDS has become the leading cause of death among adolescents.

“This is absolutely unacceptable,” says Craig McClure, chief of HIV programmes with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in New York. “What’s more, AIDS-related deaths are decreasing for all age groups except adolescents.”

The global AIDS death toll fell by 30 percent between 2005 and 2012 but increased by 50 percent among adolescents, says a UNICEF report.

[LINK] "The last Arab"

Maged Mandour's Open Democracy essay arguing that pan-Arab identities are declining in importance as national and sectarian identities surpass it in relevance looks convincing, at least.

The signs of the erosion of Arab identity are visible across the region. In Iraq, sectarianism is on the rise. The Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish communities are divided, with fault lines drawn in blood. The idea of being Iraqi is outdated, and the idea of being part of the Arab nation is even more distant.

Ever since the American invasion of Iraq, political divisions have been aggravated, and this has been deepened by political elites who have been using systematic state violence to stoke up sectarianism in order to cling to power. There has been a systemic elimination of Sunni community leaders from power by an overtly sectarian Iraqi government. The deliberate policy of "sectarianising" the security apparatus of the state has not only stoked sectarianism, it has caused the Sunni community as well as the Kurdish community to identify themselves in terms of their sect, rather than as Iraqi or Arab.

In Egypt, the inward-looking policy of de-Arabizing that started with President Sadat has reached its apex. The clearest symptom of this is the national sentiment towards Palestinians as well as Syrians. Egypt’s stance has dramatically shifted against Gaza, especially Hamas, who are now being blamed for the terrorist attacks in Sinai, with the military regime using these attacks to tighten the blockade of the strip and increase domestic support.

In terms of attitudes towards Syria, the majority have dramatically shifted their support to Assad, as the mania of “fighting terrorism” sweeps the nation. There is very little sympathy for the Syrian people’s suffering even though Assad has been on a rampage for the better part of three years.

[. . .]

Domestically, there is a large segment of Egyptian society that is not seen as Egyptian, but they are seen instead as agents of external powers, and most importantly, as foreign elements who identify themselves with a sect, namely the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of the Brotherhood are seen as placing their identity of belonging to the Brotherhood above their identity as Egyptians. In essence, Egypt is developing its own version of sectarianism. In this context, the divide is not religious or linguistic, it is secular/Islamist.

In Syria, the game of sectarianism has reached its apex. The revolt can now easily be characterised as a revolt by the Sunni majority against an openly sectarian regime. This, of course, ignores the more complex dynamic in Syria, with the critical role played by the Sunni urban middle class in their support for the regime. However, it is very difficult to ignore the fact that the Assad regime has mastered the sectarian game; gaining the support of the minorities as their protector against the Sunni onslaught, which threatens the very existence of some of these minorities, especially the Alawites. In effect, the struggle is turning into an existential struggle for these sects as they are no longer being identified as Syrian or Arab.

[LINK] "New Gene Studies Suggest There Are Hundreds of Kinds of Autism"

Wired shared Sarah DeWeerdt's fascinating article which uses the latest researches in genetics to argue that "autism" is not a single condition but rather a vast and diverse clade of superficially similar genetic conditions. This understood diversity has obvious implications for treatment.

Rather than recruiting people with autism based on outward characteristics, some researchers are turning this flood of genetic information into an advantage: They are classifying children with autism based on their genetics, and thoroughly characterizing each subgroup to map autism’s landscape as a whole. These ‘genetics-first’ studies, including the one in which Waylon and Geoffrey participate, may help researchers to construct a meaningful taxonomy of autism and understand the source of its diversity. Eventually, such studies may even lead to treatments that address the root cause of a child’s autism, rather than just the symptoms.

Researchers have known for a couple of decades from genetic disorders closely related to autism, such as Rett syndrome and fragile X syndrome, that people with a disruption in the same gene often have similar symptoms. In the past ten years or so, advances in technologies for sequencing and analyzing DNA have provided hints that the same is often true for people with so-called idiopathic autism, or autism of unknown cause.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, microarray technology revealed that people with autism tend to carry many copy number variations, deletions or duplications of large stretches of DNA that encompass multiple genes. Researchers soon saw that people who harbor the same copy number variants often share other characteristics and symptoms as well.

To investigate these commonalities, some teams began to look into subgroups of people with a common chromosomal alteration. The most comprehensive of these projects so far is the Simons Variation in Individuals Project (Simons VIP), which is characterizing about 200 people with variations of a chromosomal region called 16p11.2. (The Simons VIP is funded by the Simons Foundation, SFARI.org’s parent organization.) About 20 percent of individuals with deletions in this region and 10 percent with duplications have autism.

In the past couple of years, it has become feasible to look more closely at the DNA of people with autism by analyzing all of the protein-coding sequences in their genomes — about 1 percent of the roughly 3 billion base pairs that make up each genome. This approach has revealed that many people with autism have mutations that aren’t found in people without the disorder, but few people with autism share the same mutation. Despite analyzing genetic material from more than 2,500 people with autism, “We almost never saw the same gene hit twice,” says Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington and a leader of one of the first of these studies.

[LINK] "NASA Aims To Slash Space Shipping Costs With Shiny 3-D Printer"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell notes the advent of 3-D printing in space.

Need a part on the International Space Station? You’re going to have to wait for that. That is, wait for the next spaceship to arrive with the critical tool to make a repair, or replace something that broke. You can imagine how that slows down NASA’s desire for science on the orbiting laboratory.

Enter the first orbiting “machine shop”: a 3-D printer that was just installed in the station’s Columbus laboratory this week. If the printer works as planned, astronauts will be able to make simple things based on instructions from the ground. Over time, the agency hopes this will save time and money, and reduce the need to rely on shipments from Earth. And keep an eye out in 2015: two other 3-D printers are scheduled to join it.

As NASA aims to send astronauts to an asteroid and perhaps to Mars, the need to manufacture parts on site is critical. Sending a valve to Phobos isn’t an easy proposition. Much better that future crews will make stuff on the spot, and NASA says the space station will be a good spot to test this kind of stuff out. Adding motivation is a National Research Council report from this summer urging NASA to start 3-D printing testing as soon as possible, since the station (as of yet) is only funded by all partners through 2020. Negotiations are ongoing to extend that to 2024.