[PHOTO] Neighbourhood mural, Dovercourt Park

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Alpha Sources, Claus Vistesen links to his podcast wherein he argues that too much blame is being placed on the IMF.


• blogTO notes a documentary on a CBC prop warehouse.


• City of Brass celebrates the Fourth of July and the end of Ramadan.


• Crooked Timber is scathing about the IMF, the European Union, and Syriza.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper that studies Gliese 229B, one of the nearest and first-found brown dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that half of the banded iron formations extant on Earth are products of microbes.


• Geocurrents notes how non-inevitable the Saudi state was within its current borders.


• Language Log looks at the use of Sinitic characters in modern Korea.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money tackles pea guacamole.


• Marginal Revolution shares photos of an abandoned Soviet space shuttle.


• Towleroad notes that Cuba has managed to halt mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphillis.


• Window on Eurasia notes the anti-Ukrainian slur Khokhol's unacceptability, looks at controversy over national textbooks in Tatarstan, and examines a dying Finnish-language magazine in Karelia.


• The Financial Times' The World warns of radical Islam among Albanians.

[LINK] "Syrians see the limits of an education in refuge"

Al Jazeera's Michael Pizzi reports on how Syrian refugees lack basic educational opportunities.

One morning last year, Alaa, 17, boarded a bus out of the Zaatari Syrian refugee camp to a nearby school to take the tawjihi, the grueling, end-of-high-school examination that is a rite of passage for teenagers in Jordan. Passing the test, which ostensibly opens the door to Jordanian universities, was the best way to keep her life on track while waiting out Syria’s war in the dusty tent city that is Zaatari — or so Alaa was told. Every day for several months, she studied — in her overcrowded classroom, at a tawjihi prep center and at night in her family’s trailer, until darkness fell and reading became impossible.

She aced the test, against steep odds; only 2 percent of her peers in camp passed. But Alaa wondered what success has done for her. “After the tawjihi, what’s next?” she asked. Paying the steep foreigner-rate tuition at a Jordanian university is out of the question for her parents, who, like many of the other 1 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, are depleted of savings, and scholarship opportunities are extremely rare. The United Nations typically tries to guarantee education through age 17. After that, refugees are on their own. “All the students who passed are still sitting in their tents, doing nothing,” she pointed out. “So what difference did my score make?”

As Syria’s war drags into its fifth year, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees are faced with the very real prospect of whiling away the prime of their lives in exile as their futures hang in the balance. In Jordan high dropout rates among Syrian teens, coupled with discouragingly low passing rates for those who make it to the tawjihi, raise fears that a generation of refugees could fail to earn the equivalent of a high school education. Moreover, the few who pass the test, like Alaa, don’t know what to do with their schooling. Except for a few dozen scholarship opportunities mostly in the Middle East and Europe, there is almost no avenue to higher education for even the most motivated youths.

Though poverty and the need to work are also factors, education advocates say the absence of a real incentive to finish high school urgently needs to be addressed. Failing to do so could have devastating consequences not just for these individuals but also for Syria’s future, said Naserddine Touaibia, a Zaatari camp official. “This generation is the one that will go back to Syria and rebuild,” he said. “If we don’t invest in [these refugees] right now, we risk having not only a lost generation but a lost Syria as well.”

[LINK] "Crimean Tatar TV back on air"

Open Democracy's Andrii Ianitskyi notes that the world's only Crimean Tatar television station is now broadcasting from Kyiv.

On 17 June, just before the beginning of Ramadan, ATR, the only Crimean Tatar television station in the world, resumed broadcasting after two months off air. The station is now based in Kyiv, however, not Simferopol.

Prior to the annexation of Crimea, ATR was an increasingly influential source of news and comment on the peninsula. As one blogger from Simferopol, the administrative capital of Crimea, says: 'Over the past few years, many people – not only Crimean Tatars – got so used to the channel that it's hard think about the information space without it.' Indeed, ATR became – and remains – a symbol of the Crimean Tatars' return to their ancestral home.

ATR started broadcasting from the Crimean peninsula in 2006. The station initially made only short programmes, broadcasting up to two-and-a-half hours a day. But in 2011, the television channel began a new phase in its development following the involvement of Lenur Islyamov, a Russian businessman.

[. . .]

This influx of capital allowed ATR to start broadcasting 24 hours a day. Professional newscasters and journalists joined the team, and the channel had correspondents in Kyiv, Moscow, and Istanbul. Original content was provided in three languages: Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar.

Over time, the TV station developed into a sizeable media holding, including a children's channel, a Crimean Tatar-language radio station, a Russian-language station, and a news site. In 2014, out of 57 channels operating on the peninsula, ATR was the fifth most popular TV channel, and was first among local stations.

[LINK] "Space Particles Are Helping Map the Inside of Fukushima"

Wired's Nick Stockton notes how muons from space are being used to map Fukushima's pipes.

In just about every industrial factory you’ll see them: huge lead pipes. These move fluid—often super hot, or even steamed water. Over time, the fluids wear the pipes down. Or maybe they get dinged by a passing forklift. Or maybe changes in temperature cause tiny cracks to appear. Then the pipe bursts, and people get hurt.

Inspecting pipes is a pain in the tochus. Usually these pipes are covered in insulation and pumping hot, high pressure steam. To inspect them, you have to shut down the pipe, take it out of service, remove the insulation, then apply X-rays or ultrasound—both of which require special certification to use because of the radiation involved.

But the days of butt-achey industrial inspection could be numbered, because a group of scientists at Los Alamos National Lab (you know, the atomic bomb place?) have figured out how to see through just about anything—including the radioactive disaster zone inside the Fukushima reactor core—using subatomic particles from outer space.

“Any industrial process is subject to flow-accelerated corrosion,” says Matt Durham, lead author of a new paper detailing the process, called muon tomography. Inside a pipe, whichever side that’s in contact with a fluid tends to get eaten up. The difficulty of disassembling a pipe for inspection means that comprehensive checks rarely happen. But using muons, “you don’t have to tear it apart,” says Durham. “You just have to zap it from the outside.”

[LINK] "U.S. now the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking nation"

Dylan Baddour blogging for the Houston Chronicle notes that the United States now has more speakers of Spanish than every other country save Mexico.

The United States boasts the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population, now that this country’s Hispanic population outnumbers the entire populace of Spain.

Only Mexico has more Spanish-speakers than the U.S., but even that is expected to change by 2050, when the United States will likely be the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country, according to a new report on the Spanish language by the Cervantes Institute in Spain.

The 77-page report dedicates one of seven chapters to U.S. Spanish language , tracking momentous growth in the scope and presence of Uncle Sam’s Hispanic population in recent decades.

“More than half of the growth of the U.S. population between 2000 and 2010 resulted from the growth of the Hispanic community,” the report said, citing numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau.

In the first decade of the second millennium the U.S. population grew by 27.3 million, and 15.2 million of those people are Spanish-speakers. The Hispanic population grew by 43 percent while the entire nation grew by 9.7 percent. The report attributes that discrepancy to both Hispanics’ higher reproductive rates and the steady influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States.

[URBAN NOTE] "New Queens Quay is lovely but potentially lethal"

Edward Keenan at the Toronto Star argues that Queens Quay has some serious design flaws.

The rebuilt Queens Quay Blvd., re-opened in June after extensive reconstruction, is a new kind of street in Toronto. Paved partly in coloured stone, featuring wide walks, a separated bike track and a streetcar right-of-way, it’s interesting and beautiful, as some of my colleagues have noted. Shawn Micallef even wondered in these pages, “Are we allowed to have something this nice?”

Unfortunately, right now, it seems to me it’s also kind of a death trap. People on it are constantly playing a dangerous game of “whose lane is it anyway?”

Out observing the road on Monday, I quickly became aware that a solid majority of people have no idea how to drive on it. It was almost comical to hum “Yakety Sax” in my head: drivers stopped suddenly, staring head-on into the eyes of other drivers; performed panicked, undercarriage-scraping, Dukes of Hazzard-style jumps off the streetcar right-of-way; did confused three-point turns through intersections and across bicycle and streetcar lanes in an effort to find their proper lane.

[. . .]

At Lower Spadina, car after car quickly and confidently turns left eastbound into the streetcar right-of-way before swerving back dramatically back toward the proper lane. There, they sometimes meet face-to-face with drivers going in the other direction — some of whom have turned wide out of a nearby driveway, others swerving out into oncoming traffic to go around taxis stopped for long periods blocking the only westbound lane.

At York St., things get even more confusing. There are two eastbound car lanes, one on each side of the streetcar tracks. The south one, meant to provide local access to buildings on that side, is paved in stone, and many car drivers correctly entering it suddenly think they are in the bike lane. Many stop in confusion, blocking lineups of cars following behind them in the intersection. I saw half a dozen cars reverse into the intersection and into the actual bike and pedestrian paths to turn around. Cyclists approaching from the east meanwhile, also tend to think it’s part of the bike lane, and pedal aggressively into oncoming car traffic. There are no markings or signs indicating what kind of vehicle should be in the lane or which direction vehicles in it should be travelling.

[URBAN NOTE] "Saving religious real estate from damnation"

The Toronto Star's Allan Woods looks at how the religious archtiecturee of Québec is being repurposed for secular purposes.

Quebec’s religious real estate is being sold off and transformed for secular purposes at an alarming rate, raising concerns about the protection of the rich religious heritage of a province once partially run by priests and nuns.

Nurtured in the Catholic faith, Quebec has largely left behind religion in the half-century since the Quiet Revolution which, among other things, ended the practice of priests and nuns administering the province’s education and health systems.

Now the province is faced with a glut of under-used and expensive churches that can no longer be maintained or upgraded on the meagre donations of congregants. The result: a record 92 churches were sold in 2014, according to Quebec’s Religious Heritage Council.

Former churches in Quebec are now home to concert halls, circus schools, climbing gyms, public libraries, palliative-care centres, condominiums, community centres and daycares. One downtown Montreal church serves as a nordic spa and gym. Another in the town of Coaticook, near Sherbrooke, Que., has been turned into a glow-in-the-dark mini-golf course.

While the idea of a putting green in a century-old place of prayer might displease purists, the alternative — leaving churches to rot and eventually face the wrecking ball — is worse, said the Université de Québec à Montréal’s Lyne Bernier, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage.

“If we don’t try to come up with plans to try to reuse these buildings . . . then we’re demolishing them to put up new buildings that are insignificant in comparison and I think a society would be poorer as a result,” Bernier said.