[PHOTO] Before sunset at Dovercourt Park

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly comes out in favour of not trying to lead the life of an overachiever.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper noting the extent to which circumstellar habitable zones are influenced by the evolution of their stars.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the sociology of summer vacations. Who gets to take one?


• Language Hat notes the complexities of Unicode.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the sweatshops of Argentina.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla shares the latest pictures of Pluto while Jason Davis shares the first photos taken from the interior of the Society's solar sail.


• Towleroad notes Caitlyn Jenner's outpouring of support on Twitter.


• Window on Eurasia notes the practical collapse of federalism in Russia.

[LINK] "Charity offers hope to Mexico's Mixtec elderly"

Al Jazeera's John Holman reports about the fate facing the elderly among the Mixtec, an indigenous people of Mexico whose demographic pyramid has been hollowed out by migration to the United States.

Cameraman Gustavo Huerta and I were heading to meet an elderly population which has been frequently forgotten by their own society let alone the wider world.

The Mixtec is beautiful in a hardy, spiky kind of way. But the arid soil doesn't give much to live on and the majority of the young and able stream out of the region to Mexican cities or the US rather than trying to scratch a living in the fields here.

It's been that way for decades. And while the young leave, the children and the elderly are often left behind. The children are waiting their turn- for the old there is no such hope.

Many are left to eke out their lives in increasing poverty. That’s the recurring story in the village of Atenango where from a one room shack we picked up Guadalupe, an indefatigable 80-year-old who was to be our translator with the elders in the village who only spoke Mixtec.

She cheerfully interjected every utterance with colorful profanities, often offered up her own colourful interpretation in the midst of a translation, and probably wouldn’t make it as a UN translator - but it worked for us.

[LINK] "Latin America Already Has the Trade Deal It Needs"

Bloomberg View's Mac Margolis writes about poor Mercosur. Is the Common Market of the South, founded on a deal between Brazil and Argentina, salvageable at this stage?

When it kicked off in 1991, Mercosur, the abbreviated name for the Mercado Comun del Sur, or the "South American Common Market," looked like a winner. Latin America had cashiered its dictators and begun to open its borders. Free trade winds were blowing, and the region's emerging democracies wanted to join forces to cash in on the global bonanza.

[. . .]

A renewed Mercosur would lead the way. On paper, the trade bloc is a juggernaut. If it were a country, it would have the world's fifth-largest economy and a population of 295 million.

Solidarity made a good bumper sticker, but it didn't translate easily into good trade policy. As the raw materials boom subsided, markets retracted and protectionism returned. Governments raised non-tariff barriers and imposed import quotas against their neighbors.

The customs union announced in 1994 ought to have been completed by 2006. With luck, said Lia Valls, trade expert at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, "the agreement will be in place by 2018 or 2019."

Meantime, just about anything goes. Some trade analysts estimate that up to half of the goods traded between Mercosur partners do not benefit from the reduced common tariff. "Uruguay does what it wants. Argentina doesn't want free trade, and Brazil doesn't lead," Mauro LaViola, head of Brazil's Export Association, told me.

[LINK] "Germany's Bad Idea to Legalize Pot"

To the extent that Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky thinks that the specific proposal in Germany to legalize marijuana is a bad idea, I may agree with him. I don't necessarily agree with him in his implication that keeping the drug's de facto legal status is sufficient, inasmuch as this vagueness can be a problem.

Save for Dutch cities and the Christiania commune in Copenhagen, Berlin is one of the easiest European metropolis for buying marijuana. In Kreuzberg, the nightlife district, dealers approach people outside subway stations. Goerlitzer Park, also in Kreuzberg, is a major marijuana market despite a "zero tolerance policy" in effect since March 31. Locals responded to the announcement with a mass "smoke-in" attended by about 3,000 people, and to anyone visiting the park, it will seem the protest didn't end.

This defiance is a curious turn of events for Germany, where an overwhelming majority of people will wait for a traffic light to change to cross an empty street: Marijuana is illegal, except for medical use (fewer than 300 people qualify, most of them cancer patients), but it's widespread practice to flout the ban. Last year, Green Party leader Cem Oezdemir took the Ice Bucket Challenge next to a cannabis plant. He was stripped of his parliamentary immunity afterward, but has suffered no further consequences.

[. . .]

When laws are so broadly ignored, liberalization is akin to accepting reality. This, however, is Germany, and the only detailed legislative proposal -- from the Greens -- could make things worse. At 70 pages, it contains exotic proposals such as training marijuana sellers in "responsible sales" so they are only able to operate shops if they have a government certificate. The law would raise the amount for personal use to 30 grams, but it would so tightly regulate growing and sales -- and probably raise prices so steeply -- that the goal of liquidating the black market wouldn't be achieved. Medical cannabis costs about twice the black market price.

Though it's inevitable for prices to go up after legalization because of taxes, the government needs to compete effectively with the black market dealers to replace them. Germany's current policy is already so liberal that further liberalization only makes sense as a cost-saving measure and perhaps as a way to get some extra revenue. Trying to impose stricter controls on marijuana sales just won't work because Germans have already pretty much made their own laws.

[URBAN NOTE] "New data finds Scarborough subway routes run through ‘extremely low density’ areas"

The Toronto Star's Marcus Oleniuk notes that, on parts of the proposed Scarborough subway route, densities in the neighbourhoods passed through are even lower than on the famously underperformed Sheppard line. Is this just astonishingly ill-thought electoral politicking?

Of the three options, the new analysis for the Star by University of Toronto human geography professor Andre Sorensen shows the Bellamy Rd. corridor would have the most people within walking distance of a station.

But by comparison, provincial data shows both Don Mills and Yonge-Sheppard stations on the Sheppard subway line — what has been called a “white elephant” for the riders it failed to draw — have more people living nearby than that of the entire Bellamy Rd. corridor.

[. . .]

Sorensen’s analysis found the proposed routes are “basically equal” in that they are all low-density options.

The analysis uses 2011 census and jobs data to analyze the density of people and employment along the three routes. These are not ridership numbers, but show how many people are currently within an 800-metre walking distance of potential station stops.

When it comes to moving people around and getting people to jobs — objectives Tory has repeated as the main motivations for many of his recent transit initiatives — Sorensen’s numbers show little current or future potential to accomplish those goals.

[LINK] On how David Broockman undercovered the sociological fraud of Michael LaCour

New York's Jesse Fingal has an excellent long read describing how, through diligent work and despite problems internal to the discipline, political science graduate student David Broockman proved that a much-mooted theory was based on fraud. The academy can work better, clearly, but Fingal demonstrates how it can be made to work regardless.

The exposure of one of the biggest scientific frauds in recent memory didn’t start with concerns about normally distributed data, or the test-retest reliability of feelings thermometers, or anonymous Stata output on shady message boards, or any of the other statistically complex details that would make it such a bizarre and explosive scandal. Rather, it started in the most unremarkable way possible: with a graduate student trying to figure out a money issue.

It was September of 2013, and David Broockman (pronounced “brock-man”), then a third-year political-science doctoral student at UC Berkeley, was blown away by some early results published by Michael LaCour, a political-science grad student at UCLA. On the first of the month, LaCour had invited Broockman, who is originally from Austin, Texas, to breakfast during the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. The pair met in a café called Freshii at the Palmer House Hilton, where the conference was taking place, and LaCour showed Broockman some early results on an iPad.

The iPad thing was LaCour’s trademark. “He was sort of famous for taking his results from different studies he was working on, putting them on an iPad, and buttonholing people at the conferences and going over all of the research that he was doing, the different findings he had, and basically not letting the people go until they had an idea of what he was working on,” says Tim Groeling, a communications professor at UCLA, who is listed as one of LaCour’s references on his curriculum vitae. “It was infectious,” continues Groeling. “Really cool stuff was on that iPad.”

The results LaCour showed Broockman were, in fact, very cool, and like everyone else who had come across them, Broockman instantly knew they would be a hit. LaCour’s research involved dispatching canvassers to speak with California voters at their homes. He reported that a brief conversation about marriage equality with a canvasser who revealed that he or she was gay had a big, lasting effect on the voters’ views, as measured by separate online surveys administered before and after the conversation. [. . .]

[. . . B]ack in 2013, the now-26-year-old Broockman, a self-identifying “political science nerd,” was so impressed by LaCour’s study that he wanted to run his own version of it with his own canvassers and his own survey sample. First, the budget-conscious Broockman had to figure out how much such an enterprise might cost. He did some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what he’d seen on LaCour’s iPad — specifically, that the survey involved about 10,000 respondents who were paid about $100 apiece — and out popped an imposing number: $1 million. That can’t be right, he thought to himself. There’s no way LaCour — no way any grad student, save one who’s independently wealthy and self-funded — could possibly run a study that cost so much. He sent out a Request for Proposal to a bunch of polling firms, describing the survey he wanted to run and asking how much it would cost. Most of them said that they couldn’t pull off that sort of study at all, and definitely not for a cost that fell within a graduate researcher’s budget. It didn’t make sense. What was LaCour’s secret?

[LINK] "Write back (not) in anger (#SFWApro)", or, a badly-informed Sad Puppy writer at work

I've been particularly fond of David Mack, a novelist most known for his works in the Star Trek extended universe, since his excellent Destiny trilogy from 2008. (Making the Borg not only compelling antagonists, but dealing with them in a manner suiting the Trek ethos, can be a challenge.) Last August, when a reader of his complained about a lesbian relationship he introduced in the Vanguard novel series, between the Vulcan T'Prynn and the Klingon spy Lurqal, his wholehearted defense of diversity made it to io9.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, that Mack was criticized in this--in introducing the relationship, in defensing the relationship--by one Amanda S. Green, a fan writer on the Puppies slate at the Hugos. Mack looks at her attempted critique over at his blog, and reveals much that is lacking. She literally did not know what she was talking about, even choosing not to actually read the books wherein the backstory Green claimed that did not exist was developed at length. This, Mack concludes at the end, has obvious implications.

My novel provides exactly that great backstory she claims is necessary to sell such a story arc. But she doesn’t know that, because she didn’t read the book she was in such a hurry to write off as a violation of canon — all so she could score some cheap rhetorical points against an “SJW” author.

I wish to reiterate that a perusal of her rather limited bibliography suggests she has never written or edited professional media tie-in fiction. Consequently, she might be unaware that not only must tie-in story outlines and manuscripts be vetted and approved by their editors, they must also pass muster with the licensor who controls the copyright on the intellectual property. If my work for Star Trek had been deemed by its licensor to be in conflict with canon, it would not have been approved for publication.

Now, all this might seem to some folks like a lot of noise for very little signal. But I think it’s important to remember that as a nominee in the Best Fan Writer category, Ms. Green was offered the opportunity to submit self-selected examples of her work for the Hugo Voter Packet, to demonstrate which of her writings from 2014 show her to be worthy of taking home a Hugo award. That she chose to include the post I dissected above — an unresearched, factually deficient essay in which she lacks the basic courtesy even to name me as the author of the piece she tries (and fails) to deconstruct, never mind link to it so that readers can review the original materials and arrive at informed conclusions with regard to her arguments — speaks volumes.

Should anyone be surprised at this stage by the Puppies' unwitting foolishness?