[PHOTO] Filming an anti-bullying ad for RioCan, Yonge and Eglinton Centre

Passing by Friday evening, I saw a film crew taping some kind of anti-bullying ad for RioCan, the owners of the Yonge-Eglinton Centre.

[LINK] "Islamophobic Bus Ads In San Francisco Are Being Defaced With Kamala Khan"

This is genius. From io9 comes the latest appearance of Kamala Khan, Marvel's latest superhero.

Well, this is just brilliant. Racist adverts promoting hatred against Muslims are currently being run on buses in San Francisco - but someone has started covering them up with anti-hatred messages from Marvel's première Muslim superhero, Ms. Marvel.

The adverts were purchased by the American branch of the Freedom Defence Initiative - who, here in the UK, are actually classified as a known Hate Group - and equate Muslims with Nazis. Because, ya know, playing the Nazi card straight away is the perfect method of displaying your point of view as something reasonable. Well done guys. Well done on point two, too - running Islamophobic adverts on buses in San Francisco, an exceedingly liberal city. That's bound to go well!

In a way, it did, because some kind soul chose to deface improve the FDI's hate-ads by plastering over their ridiculous garbage with pictures of Kamala Khan, who became Marvel's first book-headlining Muslim superhero when she took on the mantle of Ms. Marvel in 2013. Here's the ads, as spotted by Street Cred on Facebook:

[LINK] "Watch Jumbo Squid Speak by 'Flashing' Each Other"

National Geographic's Jane J. Lee describes what we are learning about the communications methods of Humboldt squid. (Video is at the site.)

Giant Humboldt squid, which can grow as big as a man, speak to each other in flashes of color, their whole bodies quickly changing from red to white and back again. But just what they’re communicating has long been a mystery to scientists.

[. . .]

The new research is the first to track communications between free-swimming Humboldt squid, partly because the animals show no fear of human divers. They’ve been known to rip off a diver’s mask and to attack lighting and camera equipment. The predators sport suckers lined with sharp teeth, have a two-inch-long beak used to sever the spines of fish, and have no qualms about ripping apart and eating injured comrades.

Scientists mounted cameras on three of the animals—a first for squid research—and are using the footage to begin deciphering the chatter of flashes and flickers used by these five- to six-foot-long (1.5- to 1.8-meter) “red devils.” The new study is published Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

One of the Humboldt squid’s more “attention-grabbing behaviors” is rapidly flashing nearly its entire body from red to white to red again, says Hannah Rosen, a doctoral student at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California. Actual light, like bioluminescence, isn’t involved.

It’s probably an attempt to communicate, she says, based on National Geographic Crittercam video first taken in 2009 that shows most squid flash only in the presence of other squid.

The animals can speed up or slow down their flashes to send different messages. But researchers have no idea what the squid are trying to say—maybe they’re broadcasting come-ons to prospective mates, or throwing down with potential rivals. “That is the question of the hour,” says Rosen, the lead study author.

[LINK] "X-Rays Reveal Snippets From Papyrus Scrolls That Survived Mount Vesuvius"

National Geographic's Dan Vergano describes how the lava-charred scrolls of ancient Roman Herculaneum are starting to be read through careful use of X-rays.

The volcanic Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., destroying the wealthy Roman resort town of Herculaneum along with the better-known Pompeii. Only some 260 years ago did explorers at Herculaneum first uncover the roughly 800 charred scrolls from a library in a building dubbed the "Villa de Papyri," buried beneath more than 50 feet (15 meters) of ash.

While hundreds of the scrolls have been painstakingly unwrapped since then, with some destroyed in the process, most remain too fragile to unroll and read. But a new x-ray technique reads the text right through the rolled-up papyrus, reports a team led by Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems of the National Council of Research, in Naples, Italy, by discerning charcoal ink from charred papyrus.

"This pioneering research opens up new prospects not only for the many papyri still unopened, but also for others that have not yet been discovered," the team reports in the journal Nature Communications.

The x-ray technique, called phase-contrast tomography, can read the letters on a rolled-up fragment of a scroll that suffered the 608°F (320°C) heat of the ash avalanche that buried the town. The deciphered letters most likely were written in the century before the destruction of the resort.

The scrolls undergo the equivalent of a chest x-ray, which doesn't do much damage, says computer imaging expert Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, who is on the larger team that for years has sought to peer inside the Herculaneum scrolls. "The real worry comes from handling them; they are very delicate," he says.

[LINK] "Off-Target: How a U.S. retail giant misread the Canadian market"

Chris Sorenson of MacLean's argues that Canada's underlying economic problems are another reason for Target's withdrawal from the Canadian market.

What’s surprising about Target’s Canadian misadventure isn’t that it ran into unforeseen problems. It’s that it didn’t think there was any point in trying to fix them. To be sure, the company was being pressured by investors to improve performance following an infamous data breach in 2013. But one could hardly imagine Target abandoning the state of California, with roughly the same population as Canada, just because it experienced a few teething problems.

Although it wasn’t cited as a reason in Target Canada’s bankruptcy filing, Canada’s rapidly deteriorating economic climate almost certainly hastened Target’s decision to snap a leash on its bull-terrier mascot and head home. Target’s announcement came the same day that Sony Canada closed all 14 of its stores, and federal Finance Minister Joe Oliver announced he was delaying the federal budget because of collapsing oil prices, which threaten to erase surpluses and plunge parts of the country in recession. “They’re looking at a lot of different metrics, and consumer spending would be one of them,” says Peter Chapman, a former Loblaw executive and retail consultant in Halifax. “What we’re seeing in the oil industry and the ripple effect on the economy is huge.”

A saturation of the Canadian retail market may have also factored into Target’s decision. Twenty years ago, Wal-Mart, a discount chain whose arrival was more likely to generate protests than the fawning newspaper coverage enjoyed by Target, managed to successfully colonize Canada with a similarly rapid expansion after it bought 122 Woolco stores. But much has changed since. A long line of U.S. retailers, from J-Crew to Lowe’s, have followed Wal-Mart northward in recent years, each laying a claim to a piece of Canadians’ wallets. Target, in other words, may have simply come too late to the party (to the extent there ever was one)—a realization that should have other U.S. retailers thinking twice about tapping Canada for easy growth.

The outlook for the Canadian economy in early 2015 is far worse today than it was six months ago—around the time Target Canada president and company veteran Mark Schindele was readying a turnaround plan for the struggling Canadian operation. Citing the plunge in oil prices, U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley, for example, recently downgraded its GDP growth forecast to 1.8 per cent this year and 1.5 per cent in 2016—a full percentage point lower than its previous estimates. By contrast, most economists expect the U.S. economy to grow at three per cent over the same period, with falling energy prices acting as a stiff tailwind. In the Prairies, where the collapse in oil prices is wreaking the most havoc, there is even talk about Alberta being thrown into recession, a marked turnaround from previous years when the province led the country in employment growth. Suncor Energy has already laid off 1,000 workers and there’s likely more pain to come with oil now below US$50 a barrel.

What’s more, the oil-induced hangover could be exported elsewhere, with Ontario having become more reliant on manufacturing specialized equipment for the oil sands in recent years. It all adds up to a rather alarming picture, given that Canadian households now owe a record $1.63 for every dollar they earn. Economists have frequently warned that elevated debt levels make Canada vulnerable to economic shocks—such as wild swings in energy prices.

[LINK] "The Crimean ‘question’"

At Open Democracy, Sergei Markedonov argues that even if--as seems plausible--Crimea will remain Russian, the question of integrating Crimean populations with Russia will remain pressing. If this fails, then Crimea's future could become open again, with worrying consequences.

After more than two decades belonging to an independent Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula has become part of Russia, which has thereby gained an extra 27,000 km2 of territory and over two million new citizens. Ukraine and the West see this unprecedented event as annexation and a sign of the Kremlin’s neo-imperial ambitions. To countries not directly involved in the Ukrainian crisis, it is a dangerous violation of the Eurasian status quo that could cause widespread destabilisation in the area, while in Moscow’s eyes it is ‘the return of Crimea and Sevastopol to their homeland’, the reunification of the peninsula with Russia, and re-establishment of disrupted historical justice.

The change in Crimea’s status has triggered the most serious stand-off between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War, at a point when all post-Soviet Russia’s efforts to integrate with the West while preserving its ‘special position’ on security and other issues have collapsed, and American and European governments and commentators are united in accusing Moscow of flouting international law and the global order. Russia meanwhile counters with reminders of Western intervention in former Yugoslavia and the Middle East, and points to the results of the referendum in the peninsula as proof of the ‘legitimacy’ of its actions.

One thing has, however, become clear: the ‘Crimean question’ has at least two dimensions – the international and the internal. The ‘return to its home haven’ has not solved any of Crimea’s many problems; on the contrary, Russia’s leadership now faces an urgent need to find an adequate solution to them.

Until 2014, Crimea was nowhere near the top of the list of geopolitical problems in the post-Soviet space. The peninsula, unlike the Caucasus, was free from armed conflict involving refugees and displaced persons, not to mention dead bodies. Its status as an autonomous republic within Ukraine was also respected. Occasionally, voices could be heard in Kyiv calling for an end to Crimean autonomy, but such bizarre ideas never got very far. Ukraine’s territorial integrity (with Crimea included) was recognised by a bilateral treaty signed by Moscow and Kyiv in 1997 and ratified by Russian Federal law in 1999. It was even renewed for 10 years in 2008, despite Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s support for his Georgian counterpart Mikhail Saakashvili in the Five Day War in the Caucasus.

Before 2014, there was also no question of a de facto state with a separate, non-Ukrainian infrastructure. It was a mere five days before the 16 March referendum on the peninsula’s status that the Supreme Council and Sevastopol City Council together passed a Declaration of Independence. This independence was however extremely short-lived: the process of absorbing Crimea into the Russian Federation effectively began on 18 March.

[LINK] Two articles on the obsolescence of the stand-alone telephone

Wired's Mat Honan argues in his "Never Buy a Phone Again" that the rapid progress of tablet computers makes the classic phone pointless.

Think about what a phone is. It’s a device that lets people talk to each other remotely by converting sound waves into transmissible signals. For more than 100 years, phones changed very little. As cell phones took off, our conversations broke free of fixed positions, but we were still using gadgets made to move voices, not files. Then touchscreen smartphones changed everything. According to US government data, 16 percent of American homes didn’t have a landline in 2006. That was just before the iPhone came out. Today it’s more than 40 percent. More and more, when we talk, it’s on our smartphones.

Yet what we really use these devices for, according to network operations powerhouse Ericsson, is to move data—increasingly over the 4G wireless tech called LTE. You might think LTE just means a faster Instagram feed. It does. But LTE is also the main reason our smartphones are getting so large. Power-hungry LTE devices want bigger batteries. Bigger batteries mean bigger phones. It’s no coincidence that Apple, Samsung, LG, and Google have all rolled out 6-inch phonelike flagships since the end of 2013.

I say phonelike because, come on, these are tablets. They barely fit into a front pocket. They won’t fit into a back pocket—or at least not most back pockets. The average Levi’s have a back-stash that’s just 5.25 inches deep.

So is that a tablet in your pocket? Yes. LTE didn’t just change our phones into things that look like tablets; it also changed them into things that act like tablets. Older cell networks, even 3G, used dedicated connections to move your voice, just like a landline. But LTE turns your voice into data packets like the rest of Internet traffic. Until last year, carriers were mostly using older networks and technologies to carry voice calls, but now everything’s moving to voice over LTE, or VoLTE. It’s basically VoIP—like Skype.

So why do we still need voice plans? Dunno. You can get LTE on any decent tablet. And with LTE, you can send and receive calls with Skype and its ilk even, say, on the bus. You can send text messages with services like WhatsApp. You can port your existing mobile number over to Google Voice and continue calling and texting, from the exact number you have right now, on your iPad.

Meanwhile, at NPR's All Tech Considered blog, Aarti Shahani goes to a tech show, looks at good low-cost Asian phones, and asks a question: "When It Comes To Smartphones, Are Americans Dumb?".

The vendors at the Asia wing make a good sales pitch, but they've also got money at stake. So I wander through the convention in search of experts who don't — and find Greg Harper.

He's the kind of rigorous (or obsessive) expert you wish were whispering into your ear while you're phone shopping. "In terms of smartphones, I have 28 active [phone] numbers," Harper says. "And I have no idea how many actual phones I own. It's in the hundreds."

Harper swears by his Asian phones.

"The [Xiaomi] Mi5 is a very, very good phone, and the OnePlus. Those are the two phones I'm using right now," he says.

His favorites cost $300 to $400 — about half the price of a top-end, unsubsidized Apple or Samsung, and he says they're just as good. They run on Android, so you can use all the same Google apps.

Korea-based Samsung is, in fact, taking a beating on its home turf. Because it was so focused on Americans who'll spend a lot of money, it lost the huge market in Asia. One company called Xiaomi has risen so fast it's now the third-largest smartphone-maker in the world.

I'll note that I've consistently used Huawei phones for the past several years, with no complaints.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO lists the five oldest restaurants in Toronto, finding out that the oldest date from the 1920s.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about how tourism helps revive her sense that people are good.


• Centauri Dreams considers how an Encyclopedia Galactica could possibly work.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to papers speculating that hot massive O-class stars HD
  60848 and IRAS 16547−4247 appear to have protoplanetary disks, and notes the discovery of a very low-mass brown dwarf.


• The Dragon's Tales links to an article suggesting that China will deploy military forces to Africa.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the sociology of music.


• A Fistful of Euros' Sigrún Davíðsdóttir comes out against strongly against FX lending, like the franc-denominated mortgages of central Europe.


• Language Hat links to poetry from neglected languages and notes that in medieval Europe, Germanic areas had much better Latin than Romance areas where people thought they already spoke the language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the Roman Catholic Church's uncomfortable relationship to colonizers.


• Marginal Revolution looks at who in the United States is moving out of the labour force.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers what might happen to Venezuelan assets in the case of a default, noting British law which might be relevant and looking at the question of whether or not Venezuela's creditors could seize Citgo.


• Savage Minds features a blog post from Ritu Gairola Khanduri, talking about the importance of cartoons in India.


• Towleroad argues that trans actor Janet Mock should be considered an icon.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes why bakers can't be forced to take orders for anti-gay cakes.


• Window on Eurasia notes regressive Russian attitudes towards Ukraine, and looks at how Russia is rejecting European legal norms.

[DM] "On why demographics mean a near-term recovery in Greece is unlikely"

I've a post up at Demography Matters arguing that, whatever the government, the scale of mass migration from Greece is such that economic recovery is not very likely.