[PHOTO] Conifers in the dark, High Park Village

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily writes about the ways in which Cuba, and Havana, have been seen in the American imagination.


• Antipope Charlie Stross solicits suggestions as to what he should print with a 3-D printer.


• Crooked Timber is alarmist about the United States, making comparisons to Pakistan and to Weimar Germany.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining the simulated atmospheres of warm Neptunes.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Russians are leaving France without their Mistral carriers and that Russia is talking about building its own space station.


• Joe. My. God. notes that an Argentine court has given an orangutan limited rights.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that transgendered workers now have legal protection in the United States.


• Marginal Revolution reflects on the new Nicaragua Canal and is skeptical about Cuba's economic potential.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw links to an essay examining how New Zealand set the global 2% inflation target.


• The Search looks at one effort in digitizing and making searchable centuries of book images.


• Towleroad looks at Taiwan's progress towards marriage equality and notes the refusal of the archbishop of Canterbury to explain the reasons for his opposition to equal marriage.


• Window on Eurasia notes the different effects of the collapse in oil prices on Russia's different reasons, looks at language conflicts in the Russian republics, and observes the revival of Belarusian nationalism.

[LINK] "Cuba Property Claims, Yielding Pennies, May Spur Talks"

Bloomberg's David Glovin and Toluse Olorunnipa note how the imminent restoration of Cuban-American diplomatic relations is making the question of American property seized during the Cuban Revolution relevant again.

With the U.S. and Cuba moving to normalize relations and perhaps end a half-century trade embargo, the impoverished Caribbean nation can afford to pay Americans whose assets it nationalized after the 1959 revolution maybe 2 percent of the value of the seized property.

That’s why Cuban and U.S. negotiators are likely to search for other ways to compensate companies including Coca-Cola Co. (KO), which lost $27 million in machinery and real estate, and individuals such as Carolyn Chester, whose family lost an 80-acre farm on what was then known as the Isle of Pines.

“I’d rather be paid a fair settlement over a period of time than pennies on the dollar in one lump sum,” Chester said. “I know the Cuban people are poor, so maybe we can work something out intelligently.”

President Barack Obama’s surprise announcement last week that the U.S. will seek to establish diplomatic ties with Cuba and ease economic barriers resurrected an issue that had largely faded from public view in the decades since Fidel Castro grabbed power and nationalized foreign-owned assets.

The U.S. recognizes more than 5,900 claims against Cuba stemming from the expropriation of property owned by Americans in the aftermath of the revolution, according to the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, an arm of the Justice Department. The claims were worth about $1.8 billion at the time; today, they total about $7 billion with interest.

[LINK] On the fragility of the Internet in North Korea

Bloomberg's Jordan Robertson and Chris Strohm observe how the North Korean internet may have been downed by private hackers, revealing its vulnerability.

North Korea’s limited access to the Internet was restored after being cut off for hours, days after the U.S. government accused the country of hacking into Sony Corp.’s files.

The connection, which can be patchy, was restored after a nearly 10-hour outage, Dyn Research said on Twitter today. Two state-run news websites were working as of 11:30 a.m. local time, including that of the Workers’ Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, which showed leader Kim Jong Un touring a catfish farm.

North Korea, which has four official networks connecting the country to the Internet -- all of which route through China -- began experiencing intermittent problems yesterday and today went completely dark, according to Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research in Hanover, New Hampshire.

[. . .]

North Korea appears to be suffering from a relatively simple distributed denial-of-service attack that is causing temporary Internet outages, said Dan Holden, director of security research for Arbor Networks Inc., based in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Such attacks flood Internet servers with traffic to knock infrastructure offline. In North Korea’s case, the attack appears to be aimed at the country’s domain-name service system, preventing websites from being able to resolve Internet addresses, Holden said.

It’s unlikely the attack is being carried out by the U.S., as any hacker could probably spend $200 to do it, Holden said.

[LINK] "Russia Adds to Decade of Grain-Price Flux With Intervention"

Rudy Ruitenberg of Bloomberg observes how Russia is trying to limit exports of its wheat in order to avert economic issues. Argentina, as I recall, has imposed similar export taxes on its agriculture in the recent past.

Russia plans to introduce grain export duties, reinforcing a willingness by the fourth-biggest wheat supplier to protect domestic interests that helped bring about a decade of food-cost turmoil.

The government said today it would develop duty proposals within 24 hours as it tries to rein in domestic prices inflated by a rout in the ruble. That follows export duties in 2004 to limit shipments, a jump in the rates in 2008 to brake inflation and an outright ban in 2010, when drought caused crop failure. Chicago wheat prices soared 47 percent that year.

Russia, which accounted for about 1 percent of world wheat exports at the start of the 1990s, was projected to make up 14 percent this season, before export curbs were announced, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. The country’s share fell to 3 percent after the 2010 ban, from 14 percent a year earlier.

“For some years we were under the impression that they were as reliable as the traditional suppliers,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization, said by phone from Rome today. “A good crop is no guarantee that Russia will export either.”

[. . .]

The country’s grain exporters asked the government to withhold export duties until after March 1, Interfax reported today, citing a letter from the National Association of Exporters of Agriculture Products.

“Russia would be losing face as an unreliable supplier,” said Natalya Volchkova, an assistant professor at Moscow’s New Economic School. “It’s one thing to restrict exports because of bad harvest, and another to do it on the account of politics, which is worse.”

[URBAN NOTE] "The Building Blocks of Bike Culture: Social Engagement and Promotional Strategies"

At Spacing, George Poulos writes about ways other cities have built up strong cycling cultures.

When it comes to building a bike culture, we here in Canada often look upon the “live-work velodromes” of Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and the like with considerable envy. So well ingrained are the quirky intangibles that make up a vibrant bike culture that not even a Københavnere (resident of Copenhagen) would be able to tell you what makes it so – it just is.

While we may not be so fortunate as to have ultra flat cities laid out on quaint medieval templates, many dedicated individuals, professionals, and interest groups have succeeded at defying the common refrain that cycling “just won’t work here”. Indeed, cycling is on the rise in Canada’s cities.

And yet, rather than taking on board and supporting the multitude of social changes which have lead to this growth, the larger narrative surrounding the prospect of more urban cycling has largely been pigeonholed into a debate over “bike lanes” and other grudge matches over rights to public space.

That growing cities with the means to accommodate active mode shares should be exploring strategies to tap into latent demand for cycling is an idea that is gaining more and more traction in Canada. Undoubtedly, the business case for investing in active transportation is very compelling.

And, while many municipalities (such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, etc.) have succeeded in implementing designs to respond to growing cycling demands, they have largely done so through infrastructure based strategies alone (with a few exceptions). Certainly, no municipality could ever hope to sustain a growth in cycle mode shares without providing an attractive, safe, and convenient means of travel for cyclists. However, limiting efforts to strictly infrastructure build-outs is to leave some very powerful tools on the shelf.

Go, read.

[LINK] "141: For Tsepey Who Self-Immolated in Tibet Six Hours From Now"

Savage Minds' Carole McGranahan has a terribly sad essay, with photos of victims and maps of their distribution, about Tibetans who have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule in Tibet. Tsepey, mentioned in the title of her essay, is the 141st to do so.

141 Tibetans have chosen to self-immolate, to set themselves on fire with the intention of dying. The first was Thubten Ngodup in 1998, who self-immolated on the 49th day of a Tibetan hunger strike in Delhi, India. The next was eight years later in 2006 when Lhakpa Tsering immolated in Mumbai. Then in 2009, the first self-immolation inside Tibet: a young monk named Tapey from Kirti Monastery who self-immolated the year after a brutal attack on the local community by Chinese security forces, and ensuing crackdowns on religion. After Tapey, another 133 have self-immolated. Offered themselves through fire as Tibetans often phrase it. One-third of these were religious figures, monks, nuns, and even reincarnate lamas. The rest were ordinary people—students, farmers, nomads, workers. They were sons and daughters, husbands and wives. They were parents. They were ages 16-64, but were overwhelmingly young men in their late teens and early twenties. Seven Tibetans have self-immolated in India or Nepal, one woman self-immolated in Beijing, but the rest have done so in Tibet itself: 133 Tibetans have self-immolated in Tibet under the People’s Republic of China.

Why are Tibetans self-immolating? Answering this question requires a brief history lesson: in 1949 Mao Zedong’s communist army defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army. One of the first things Mao said he would do was liberate Tibet. He was true to his word, invading Tibet and forcing a political agreement with the Dalai Lama’s government in 1951 that made Tibet a part of the People’s Republic of China. Tibetans initially tried to cooperate with the Chinese, but the situation grew increasingly bad with drastic reforms, abuses of political and religious leaders, and the destruction of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, scriptures, statues. A grassroots army formed in eastern Tibet to fight against the Chinese. Thousands of Tibetans fled to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. The situation continued to deteriorate. Finally, in 1959, under suspicions of a Chinese plot to assassinate the Dalai Lama, he escaped in disguise to India. Thousands of Tibetans followed. They thought they would be in exile for a short while then return to Tibet, that the world would come to their aid, that in this global moment of decolonization a new case of colonization would not be allowed. It was.

Tibetans have now been in exile for over 55 years. Two generations, now three, of Tibetan refugees have been born in exile. And millions of Tibetans are still in Tibet. A Tibet partitioned into different Chinese provinces—Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, Xizang, Yunnan—as “Tibetan autonomous” counties, prefectures, and regions. This political history and this separation of community are key to the self-immolations.

Why self-immolate? My best answer comes from the self-immolators themselves. I can’t do ethnographic fieldwork with self-immolators. Neither anthropologists nor journalists are allowed to Tibet to do research on self-immolation, nor are any foreign journalists posted to Tibet at all (that’s right, none. There are more foreign journalists in North Korea than in Tibet). Nor do historians have historical materials on which to draw: there is no history of self-immolation in Tibet save an 11th century monk named Dolchung Korpon who self-immolated in front of the sacred Jowo statue in the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. Instead, this is a contemporary global practice associated with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. His now-iconic 1963 protest in Saigon against the Diem government is considered to have established self-immolation as a 20th century—and now 21st century—form of political protest.

A commenter reports that the 142nd has just occurred.

[LINK] "An Orangutan Has (Some) Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules"

Wired's Brandon Keim reports on the story of Sandra, an orangutan in a Buenos Aires zoo, who has been deemed to possess some human rights. This sort of story is inevitable, I think, especially given the speed with which human beings have come to realize the existence of high intelligence elsewhere in the animal world. Should this intelligence, this sapience, not be protected in ways analogous to the ways in which dependent humans are protected?

The Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights, an animal advocacy group, had asked Argentine courts recognize the 28-year-old great ape’s right to freedom from unjust imprisonment.

On Friday, an appeals court declared that Sandra, who is owned by the Buenos Aires Zoo, is a “non-human person” who has been wrongfully deprived of her freedom.

Sandra, who was born in German zoo and sent to Argentina two decades ago, at an age when wild orangutans are still living at their mother’s side, won’t be given complete freedom.

Having lived her entire life in captivity, Sandra likely could not survive in the wild. Instead, if the zoo does not challenge the decision within 10 working days, Sandra will be sent to a sanctuary in Brazil.

“This opens the way not only for other Great Apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories,” said lawyer Paul Buompadre, one of the activists who filed the suit, to the La Nacion newspaper.

[LINK] "Sony's Got Bigger Problems Than North Korea"

Bloomberg View's William Pesek makes the case that Sony has huge problems with drift and fecklessness only revealed by the North Korean hack.

"Why pick on Sony? They haven't had a hit since the Walkman." In a three-minute skit on "Saturday Night Live" over the weekend, comedian Mike Myers nailed one of the less-discussed problems to be exposed by North Korea's hack of Sony Pictures: the apparent cluelessness of top Sony brass in Tokyo.

Like the Japanese media, Sony's corporate headquarters thus far seems to view the hacking drama as mostly an American problem. When local newspapers have covered the story, they've focused on Hollywood's poor taste in lampooning North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sony executives, including CEO Kazuo Hirai, have barely commented.

In fact, the attack has exposed a disturbing lack of cyber-preparedness on Sony's part. Hirai early on recognized the sensitivity of "The Interview" -- the Seth Rogen comedy that appears to have provoked the Pyongyang regime -- even going so far as to ask for revisions to the climactic assassination scene. But since the hacking, public coordination between Los Angeles and Tokyo has been poor if not nonexistent. The controversial decision to pull the movie from theaters before release was reportedly made by the studio alone.

This internal dysfunction points to a much wider problem at Sony. No corporate name better embodies Japan's rise from the devastation of World War II. Japanese view Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita with the same awe and affection Americans do Henry Ford or Steve Jobs. The Walkman, about which Myers's alter ego Dr. Evil joked on Saturday, changed the world and fueled a cottage industry of books heralding the coming domination of Japan Inc.

But as the company expanded -- in part with the high-profile purchase of Columbia Pictures Entertainment in 1989 -- it lost focus. Over the last two decades, executives have repeatedly put off painful restructuring and refused to shed underperforming assets. Sony's operations now sprawl from film and music studios to videogame consoles to life insurance. Tokyo's hands-off attitude toward its Hollywood studio may reflect a laudable concern for artistic freedom. It's also an acknowledgment that the company has grown too big and too disparate for any meaningful oversight from the top.