[PHOTO] Hidden under the escalator at Eglinton

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Joe. My. God. notes Mike Huckabee's statement that he would have pretended to be transgendered to see naked teenage girls.


• Language Hat reports on a Syriac manuscript of Galen.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports that the 35-hour work week in France was not as effective as it could have been.


• Marginal Revolution opines on ways to deal with mental ilness.


• Steve Munro reports that two-way streetcar traffic has begun on Queens Quay.


• Savage Minds has a fascinating interview up with indigenous scholar Jenny Davis.


• Torontoist checks in on the delayed bike lanes in the Annex.


• Towleroad reports that, unsurprisingly, a majority of LGBT Americans say mainstrean religions are hostile to them.


• Window on Eurasia notes the controversial place of the Tuvan language in the republic's education system and argues that the West is approaching the Ukrainian conflict tactically, not strategically.

[LINK] "Why Are Nigerians Flocking to Work in Texas Prisons?"

Maurice Chammah at Vice describes the processes which have led so many Nigerian immigrants to the United States to move to Texas, where they work in local prisons.

John Okperuvwe flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Boston in September 2008 after winning a visa through a lottery run by the US State Department. He spent three days in Boston with a friend, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he knew a pastor from back home. He worked as a security guard at the Staples Center and the city's main train depot, and took a second job transporting blood between doctors and laboratories. His wife and children—they now have two boys and two girls—eventually joined him, and they squeezed into a single room in the pastor's house. In terms of job opportunities, Okperuvwe says, "California was as dry as Africa."

In early 2010, Okperuvwe found a friend from his college days in Lagos on Facebook. He sent a message, and they started chatting. The friend was working in a Texas prison and making good money.

Okperuvwe prayed. He felt he had little to lose, and that March, he found a cheap apartment in Houston and took the entrance exam for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (known locally as TDCJ). He passed easily. In September, TDCJ offered him a job in Huntsville, a town of 30,000, about an hour from Houston, which houses many of the state's prisons and the agency's headquarters.

As soon as he arrived, Okperuvwe discovered that there were lots of Nigerians and other West Africans already living in Huntsville, all working for TDCJ. Some, like him, had brought their families and others were single men living in department dorms. Many, like him, already had college degrees from back home that wouldn't transfer so they were studying at Sam Houston State University, the local college, during the day and working at night.

Okperuvwe had discovered a phenomenon that had already become apparent to prisoners, their family members, and correctional officers: since around 2008, a wave of African immigrants have taken jobs as prison guards in Texas. The exact numbers are unknown—the Texas prison agency does not keep track of the birthplaces of its employees—but prisoners and correctional officers anecdotally ballpark it in the hundreds. Many come from Nigeria, but others hail from Cameroon, Liberia, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. In 2009, the newsletter Prison Legal News reported that at the Ramsey Unit, near Houston, entire shifts were "largely composed of Nigerians."

[LINK] "Why Dinosaurs Would Have Never Built Spaceships"

Forbes' Bruce Dorminey argues, after paleontologists, that dinosaurs were never particularly likely to evolve into intelligent tool-users akin to human beings. Even if the asteroid never hit, they seem to have been locked on their own, evolutionarily lucrative, path.

Anyone’s who’s ever stared into the eyes of a snake can attest to their cold-blooded instinctual ire. But the gray matter needed to create thinkers like Einstein and Edison requires more than steely instinct. That’s one reason most researchers scoff at the notion that dinosaurs — whether cold-blooded or not — would have ever evolved into a technological spacefaring civilization.

“Physiologically, ‘classic’ [non-avian] dinosaurs, like Brontosaurus, Triceratops or Tyrannosaurus rex are most akin to reptiles like snakes, alligators, and lizards,” Bruce Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, told me. “In modern ‘reptiles’ there is always a very small brain size ratio relative to body size, [which] is why you can’t really ‘train’ a pet snake to do complex tricks.”

Dinosaurs may have been cunning and very efficient in adapting to their environment, but they also had no reason to evolve into Mesozoic philosophers, Peter Ward, a University of Washington paleontologist and most recently the co-author of “A New History of Life,” told me.

Yet, for argument’s sake, even if the dinosaurs had survived the climatic ravages triggered by the comet that struck the Yucatan coast some 66 million years ago, could they have vectored into anything like human intelligence?

“The notion that some subset of dinosaurs would have evolved into human-like creatures is absurd,” Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist and executive director at the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy in Kanab, Utah, told me. “We [haven’t] any data to suggest that complex technology has survival value along evolutionary timescales.”

[LINK] "The future of the Icelandic language may lie in its past"

PRI's Patrick Fox took a look at the language policy of Iceland, which aims to produce or at least promote indigenous alternatives to foreign loanwords. He argues that this kind of language management works because of the high degree of linguistic consciousness and national identity among Icelanders.

There’s probably a perfectly good old word that’s maybe fallen out of use. Combine it with another word, make sure it follows Icelandic grammar rules.

And then, try to talk the public into using it.

Here’s an example from knitting: The word "ribbing" — which is often used as edging on sweaters.

"We had a lot of words for this, and some confusion about what to call it," says knitware store owner Guðrún Hannele Henttinen, who’s also on the knitting language committee. “So we found an old word, stuðlar, and we thought maybe that would be good to use that again.”

[LINK] "A tranquil U.S. Muslim hamlet in the Catskills – until the attack plot"

Reuters reports on a community in upstate New York, founded in the 1980s by African-American Muslims and thriving, in the aftermath of a recently-revealed plot to attack it.

Just beyond the gated entrance to the tiny Catskills community of Holy Islamberg, population 200, cows graze and ducks glide on a tranquil pond. Modest houses of wood and cinder block sit along the hamlet’s single thoroughfare, a rutted dirt road without traffic signs.

Islamberg sits about 150 miles northwest of New York City, but the small enclave of Muslim families living on shared land feels a world away from city life, which is what its founders intended 30 years ago, when they established the hamlet on 70 acres of pasture land and dense woods in upstate New York.

Last month, however, the community’s serenity was disrupted by news that a Tennessee man had pleaded guilty to charges of plotting an attack on Islamberg and its residents.

Formed by a group of African-American Muslims from New York City, the community follows the teachings of Pakistani Sufi cleric Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, who during the 1980s urged his American acolytes to leave metropolitan areas and establish rural communities centered on religious life.

Today, Islamberg is one of about a dozen Muslim enclaves formed in accordance with the cleric’s ideas. It also serves as home to Muslims of America, a Gilani-founded organization.

[LINK] "Autistic Coders Get Jobs as Microsoft, SAP Woo Software Sleuths"

Bloomberg's Olga Kharif reports on one occupational niche where people with certain kinds of autism thrive.

David McNabb graduated from college with a computer science degree in 2001 yet never found a job in his field or any field, failing at interview after interview.

Those meetings with prospective employers “were definitely a large stumbling block,” said McNabb, 36, who was diagnosed with autism last year. “I wasn’t on the same page as far as what they were looking for in a person, or maybe the type of person they’d wanted to work with.”

He finally embarked on his professional life about five months ago, when he began working from home for Ultra Testing, a 2 1/2-year-old startup that tests software for companies. Eighty percent of Ultra’s workforce has an autism spectrum disorder.

Many people with autism, which impedes social and communication skills, are unemployed, and those who work often have low-paying jobs. Interviews are hard because many have trouble making eye contact and are sensitive to noise or light. Yet, like McNabb, some are high-functioning and exceptional at repetitive tasks, recognizing data patterns and finding bugs in software -- a good fit for the technology industry. Microsoft Corp., SAP SE, Freddie Mac and HP Australia have initiated programs to hire people on the autism spectrum.

“It’s definitely been a very good break for me, just getting traction, being able to show that I can be working and contribute to a team,” said McNabb, who lives with his father and stepmother in Flossmoor, Illinois. He spent all those years helping family members with computer issues, volunteering and tinkering at home with operating systems and software to see what makes them tick.

[LINK] "Younger workers more likely to see less income in retirement, CIBC says"

CBC's Paul Evans reports on the grimdark future facing the average young Canadian worker facing retirement.

Urgent attention needs to be given to what Canadians can expect to get in retirement income — something that's become a real divide along generational lines, a prominent Canadian economist says.

In a note to clients this week, Benjamin Tal at CIBC waded into the ongoing debate over Canada's looming pension and retirement crisis.

While falling well short of endorsing any of the myriad proposals out there to fix the problem, including beefing up the Canada Pension Plan, encouraging more individual savings by expanding RRSPs and TFSAs or something else, Tal is unequivocal in his view that declining retirement income is a problem needing a solution — and soon.

After running a simulation of pension income across a wide variety of age ranges, Tal found a clear deliniation between those in retirement now or approaching it, and those who won't get there for several years or decades.

In today's economy, few people rely on any one source of retirement income, with most people drawing on a combination of their own investments such as RRSPs, TFSAs and real estate, government programs such as CPP and things like pension plans that they may have accrued from employers over a lifetime of work.

In general, Tal says, "the typical 70-year-old today has enough income to maintain his or her pre-retirement standard of living, taking into account the typical drop in expenses in one's post-working years."

[LINK] "3-way federal race would have unpredictable outcome"

Éric Grenier of Three Hundred Eight had a fascinating analysis of Canadian federal politics, noting how close things are between the three major parties.

EKOS Research, in a poll for iPolitics, put the Conservatives at 30 per cent, the NDP at 29 per cent, and the Liberals at 27 per cent.

A Global News poll by Ipsos Reid, meanwhile, showed the Conservatives and Liberals in a tie at 31 per cent, with the NDP narrowly behind at 30 per cent.

And a poll by Abacus Data placed the Conservatives alone in first at 31 per cent, with the NDP and Liberals tied for second place at 28 per cent.

These are remarkable numbers, and would be unprecedented in Canadian election history if they carried through a campaign. Polls have recorded three-way contests between elections before, but there has never been an election that finished that close.

In fact, the closest three-way race in federal election history was in 2006 — when the gap between the first-place Conservatives and third-place New Democrats was just under 19 points.

There has been a handful of legitimate three-way races at the provincial level. In none of these cases, where the margin between first and third was less than six points, did the winning party secure a majority of seats.

Moreover, finishing third in a three-way race can be very penalizing. In terms of who comes out with the most seats, it is a virtual toss-up between the first and second place finishers. The party finishing in third position, despite being only marginally behind in the vote count, often takes little more than half as many seats as the other two parties.

The Liberals, Grenier argues, are the weakest of the three. The Conservatives have their stronghold in MP-rich western Canada, as the NDP does in Québec, but Atlantic Canada where the Liberals are particularly strong does not have that as many seats. Then again, as he noted at his blog, the NDP has been less resilient in Ontario than the Liberals have been. Such thin margins mean that many seats could be decided by slim margins. We might well see the NDP be the political party best-placed to form a minority government federally, for instance.

[DM] "Some assorted blog links"

I've a post up at Demography Matters linking to some interesting demographics-related blog posts I've come across, covering everything from HIV/AIDS in Russia to changing rates of childbearing among American women.

Go, read.