[PHOTO] Looking up at the CN Tower from Harbourfront

Looking northwest from the grounds of the Harbourfront Centre yesterday, where Toronto's Word on the Street literary festival was being hosted, this is what I saw.

[LINK] On the waters of Mars

Chelsea Leu's Wired article was the first to appear in my RSS feed, describing the discovery of water on that world.

We’re not talking gushing rivers or oceans here. These scientists have been investigating “recurring slope lineae,” patches of precipitated salt that appear to dribble down Mars’ steep slopes like tears rolling gently down a cheek. Planetary scientists hypothesized that the streaky formations were products of the flow of water, but they didn’t have concrete, mineralogical evidence for that idea until now, says Lujendra Ojha, a scientist at Georgia Tech who first spotted the lineae back in 2010. In a new Nature Geoscience paper, published online today, Ojha and his colleagues present “smoking gun validation” that it was liquid water flowing on Mars’ surface that formed these tear stains.

Ojha and his team have watched these lineae form every Martian summer, growing wider week after week until they slowly fade come winter—exactly the times and places where conditions are right for liquid water to exist on Mars. Plus, the surface is crusted with salt, which could help stabilize liquid water so it doesn’t boil or freeze.

Ojha notes that they haven’t actually observed water flowing on Mars. The team took their data from the CRISM instrument on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, which, frustratingly, only observes the surface every day at 3 pm. That’s when Mars is at its hottest and driest, so any liquid water oozing on the surface would have long since evaporated by the time MRO laid eyes on it.

CBC went into more detail about the potential implications of this water for life and its sources.

[The team] added that on Earth, similar brines offer "the only known refuge for active microbial communities" in the driest parts of Chile's Atacama Desert.

On Mars, such brines could provide "transiently wet conditions near surface," the researchers said. However, they cautioned that the amount of water may be too low to support known organisms that exist on Earth.

The researchers said they still don't know where the water might be coming from – it's probably not from melting ice, since the streaks are found near Mars's equator, where it's unlikely there could be any ice near the surface.

It could be coming directly from the atmosphere, but researchers aren't sure if there's enough water vapour in Mars's atmosphere for that to happen. They might also come from a local aquifer, but since aquifers tend to be low-lying, that doesn't explain why some of the streaks extend all the way up to the tops of local peaks. They suggested that the water source might be different for different slope lineae.

Even this discovery still means that Mars is a profoundly inhospitable world. The recent discovery of perchlorates underlines this issue. It does make it a bit less inhospitable, a less sere world.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO looks at Queen and Bay in the 1960s and examines the PATH in the 1970s.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that beamed power might be detectable by SETI.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at ancient salmon fishing in Alaska and notes the state of the Ukrainian war.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the extent to which crime can warp societies.
  
• Far Outliers notes the heckling women protesters of Kyrgyzstan.


• Language Log shares a bad translation of into English from Chinese.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how Indonesian drilling triggered a mud volcano.


• Marginal Revolution looks at cap and trade in China and wonders why deflation has returned to Japan.


• The Russian Demographics Blog maps abortion in Europe.


• Savage Minds shares a list that is also an ethnography.


• Towleroad notes the appearance of PrEP on American television.


• Window on Eurasia criticizes Putin's diplomatic strategies, notes that there are three million Muslims in Moscow, looks at the controversy surrounding Syrian Circassian refugees, notes some Russian tourists are now saying they are Belarusian, and notes the challenges of Belarus.

[LINK] "India’s Historic 1st Mission to Mars Celebrates 1 Year in Orbit at Red Planet"

Universe Today's Ken Kremer reports on the success of India's mission to Mars.

India’s historic first mission to Mars is now celebrating one year orbiting the Red Planet and may continue working for years to come. During year one the spacecraft was highly productive, achieving its goals of taking hordes of breathtaking images and gathering scientific measurements to study Mars atmosphere, surface environments, morphology, and mineralogy.

The Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM, is India’s first deep space voyager to explore beyond the confines of her home planets influence and successfully arrived at the Red Planet after the “history creating” orbital insertion maneuver on Sept. 23/24, 2014 following a ten month interplanetary journey from Earth.

The MOM orbiter was designed and developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), India’s space agency, which is the equivalent of NASA.

“Mars Orbiter spacecraft marks one year of its life around the Red Planet today [Sept. 24, IST],” said ISRO. It was primarily designed as a technology demonstrator but is also outfitted with significant science instruments.

[URBAN NOTE] "Affordable housing shortage hurts Toronto: Mayor Tory"

The Toronto Star's David Rider reports about how many Canadian mayors are concerned with housing.

Toronto’s affordable housing shortage is threatening employers’ ability to attract workers, Mayor John Tory said Thursday, demanding that federal parties offer solutions before the Oct. 19 election.

Tory’s comments came after strategizing with counterparts from Vancouver, Edmonton, Halifax, London and Kitchener on how to get affordable and social housing on the campaign radar.

Almost every day, Tory said, businesspeople warn that the costs of shelter — the average detached Toronto house was priced at more than $1 million last month — along with transit challenges are making it harder to recruit and keep staff.

“Businesses are figuring out that this is not sustainable,” Tory told reporters after the mayors’ meeting. “This will become more and more of a competitive disadvantage and a problem for jobs, if it’s allowed to continue.”

[URBAN NOTE] "What neighbourhood and gentrification mean for Berlin immigrants"

Defne Kadıoğlu Polat writes for Open Democracy about how immigrants in Berlin are being priced out by gentrification.

Berlin has some of the fastest rising rents in Europe and a rapidly changing consumption infrastructure. Despite continuing regulations, such as a new rent cap law enforced in June this year and prohibition of luxury restorations in the relevant quarters, gentrification is taking its toll on the local population. Particularly low-income immigrants are adversely affected.

Generally speaking, in countries with strong welfare traditions such as Germany, the negative effects of gentrification are not easily detected. Often immediate displacement can be avoided through strict rent control. This year, in fact, Berlin was the first city in Germany to issue a rent cap law that forbids landlords from charging more than ten percent over the average local rent for new tenants. However, Berlin-based reporter Michael Scaturro in The Guardian has already noted that the law remains ambiguous, giving landlords the opportunity to make use of legal loopholes.

From my own field work in Berlin’s up-and-coming Reuterkiez neighborhood, located in the historical working-class and immigrant-heavy Neukölln borough, I can tell that landlords are eager to push low-income residents out of apartments and rent out to middle class newcomers and students who pay more due to flat sharing. Particularly immigrants are disadvantaged when it comes to defending themselves since they frequently lack language skills and know-how of the German legal system.

Moreover landlords and housing administrations often intentionally fall short of fulfilling their responsibilities in order to get old-established immigrant tenants to leave voluntarily. Given Neukölln’s historic roots as a working-class location, apartments are relatively basic. One major problem is moist, which can only be avoided through proper renovation. In one instance, Fatima[i], a woman with Arabic roots and broken German, told me her housing administration blamed her for the moist and refused to take care of it. In this and similar cases it seems that low-income and often welfare-dependent immigrants are more easily intimidated because they are not aware of their legal privileges. Murat Yıldırım, a lawyer active in the neighborhood, notes that many of his immigrant clients get themselves into legal difficulties by signing contracts they do not fully understand. After they have signed, it is often too late.

Meanwhile, many immigrant residents in Reuterkiez are willing to do whatever it takes to stay put in their neighbourhood. Spatial proximity is crucial for low-income inhabitants with limited social capital, but it is even more crucial for residents with a migratory background, female migrants in particular, who have often arrived after their husbands, do not work outside their homes and are less mobile. Accordingly, having everything nearby - such as doctors who speak their mother tongue, ethnic food shops or homework-assistance for their children - becomes a vital issue.

In my experience, immigrants in Neukölln’s Reuterkiez neighborhood are therefore willing to reduce their quality of life in order to stay in or close to their familiar environment. So, a female immigrant from Turkey, Emine, told me she had moved into a one-and-a-half room apartment with her husband and three children offered to her by her landlord after the pipes burst in her old apartment. Since she did not know when the damage would be fixed she signed up for a new - way too small - apartment in the same building, fearing she would have to leave the neighborhood if she did not take what she was offered. Emine’s landlord then proceeded to sell the building, and the new owner fixed the damage and rented the space out to students.

But it does not always have to be a landlord on the make who leaves tenants in distress. A typical scenario for Reuterkiez is that a family with new offspring wants to move into a bigger place but is simply unable to find a new apartment in the same area for a rent they can afford. So they stay in the same apartment despite its becoming too small for their growing family.

The German welfare agencies are not helping to alleviate the situation either: several long-term immigrant residents told me that the local unemployment agency advises them to move to Marzahn-Hellersdorf in East Berlin where rents are still low. Marzahn-Hellersdorf, however, is infamous for neo-Nazi activity. Understandably, most families would rather live in a badly-maintained and overcrowded apartment than move to that area. And even without the threat of racism, many immigrants are unhappy about changing their neighbourhood. Emine sums up the problem for her and other immigrants in her quarter:

[ISL] "Bell Island collapse not an if, but a when, engineer says"

CBC News reports about what may be an impending disaster on Newfoundland's Bell Island.

A retired mining engineer is worried about what could happen when — not if — the roof of the Bell Island mine collapses.

Peter Young's house in Portugal Cove-St. Philip's, just west of St. John's, offers spectacular views of Bell Island, but he's concerned about what lurks beneath the bottom of Conception Bay.

Young told CBC Radio's On the Go this week that tunnels under the abandoned mines, going down as far as two kilometres, hold the potential for a large-scale disaster.

[. . .]

The method of mining that was used saw large pillars of rock installed to keep the roof of the mine up. About 35 per cent of the rock is left in its place while the rest was mined and taken out.

"But the problem really is that originally, the roof in the mine was quite safe. We're beginning to see failures occurring, and the failures are that the water level in the mine is now appearing to follow the tidal movements in Conception Bay," Young said.

"The effect of that is that clearly there's some failure occurring between the mine roof and the ocean floor. The question is how big is it? Is it going to grow, is it going to remain? We just don't know."

[URBAN NOTE] On the Union-Pearson Express and mass transit in Toronto

The Union-Pearson Express is doing poorly, with ridership dropping strongly and cars being 90% empty. blogTO's Amy Grief suggests that, at $C 27.50 a ticket, the price is just too high.

Many believe that the $27.50 one-way fare (or $19 with a Presto Card) is just too expensive, especially when Torontonians can take an alternative route to the airport, via the TTC, $3. Yet, according to the Globe and Mail, the provincial government doesn't want to lower the UPX fare prices any time soon.

Provincial Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca expects the UPX's currently lacklustre numbers to increase and he hopes to see more than 5,000 daily riders by June of next year.

However, at Queen's Park yesterday, PC MPP Michael Harris said the UPX is "becoming a white elephant on the rails," reports the CBC.

Transportation advocacy groups, such as TTCriders, are also vocal about their disdain for the UPX, which cost $456 million to build and $68 million annually to operate. They want to integrate the express train with the TTC. Others, say this money should go towards more essential projects such as a downtown relief line.

Toronto needs to do mass transit better.

[LINK] "Small business can’t afford stronger worker protections, says lobby group"

The Toronto Star's Cole Burston notes the resistance of an Ontario small-business lobby to the idea of fighting precarious work. This is not good.

The tide of precarious work may be advancing, but luxuries like giving employees their schedules ahead of time are too costly and cumbersome for small businesses, the Ontario Chamber of Commerce says.

Making it easier for workers to get overtime pay and removing legal loopholes that exclude some 45 professions from basic workplace rights could also harm the economy, according to the group’s written submission to the provincial government.

The submission was made on behalf of around 60,000 mainly small businesses in Ontario, as the government considers changing its employment and labour laws to respond to the rise of precarious work. It urges the government to consider how those changes could undermine competitiveness.

But its recommendations fly in the face of changes proposed by workers rights’ advocates, who argue that Ontario’s patchy and outdated legislation needs better protections — including two weeks scheduling notice and a universal floor that would ensure that every employee in the province has the right to things like minimum wage, overtime pay, and emergency leave.

[. . .]

The submissions suggests that advanced scheduling notice is too difficult for businesses who must response to fluctuating production requirements — despite the fact that major retail players Loblaws and Metro have recently taken steps to improve scheduling rights for their employees.

[LINK] Rosemary Counter on surviving the Twitter mob

In MacLean's, journalist Rosemary Counter describes how she survived a fierce global Twitter reaction to one of her articles.

At 1:54 a.m., the first tweet came. “Please help, very racist article!” it read, with a sudden sense of urgency and a link to my most recent piece in a city newspaper. The headline, at the time, read, “A feast of local delicacies not for the faint-hearted,” and the body was a short travel piece about challenging myself to eat strange (to me) local delicacies while in the Philippines.

A few months earlier, and with the help of a Filipino guide who kindly escorted me around Palawan ordering foods for me to try, I’d eaten woodworm and “chicken ass” (his words) and crocodile. With what was supposed to be a Buzzfeed-esque quick-hit tone, I described each with a personal “ick factor,” then ate them anyhow. I enjoyed all but one, a boiled duck embryo called balut, which, because I’d eaten all the other foods and topped it off with a malaria pill in sweltering heat, I took one look at before vomiting over a wall. (Once upon a time, this was a funny story.) I returned to Canada with fabulous memories and experiences, psyched to write about my trip.

The first piece published was about my afternoon at the Selfie Museum at Manila, the world’s first and only selfie museum. Nobody noticed it.

Similarly, the food piece, for five glorious days, received only a handful of the usual “great job!” comments and a casual few Facebook likes, mostly for the photo of me with my tongue out and about to eat a woodworm, which we’d added at the last minute just for fun. Otherwise, the piece’s tone was amped up to be “edgy,” then turned up another notch online, where its title changed to “PETA-offending treats on the menu in the Philippines.”

The click bait didn’t work; the piece failed to gain steam and I had mostly already forgotten about it. I was getting married out of town that weekend, had been frantic and distracted for months. In fact, at first, I wasn’t even sure which piece the tweet referred to. In six years as a freelance writer, I’ve only dabbled in travel writing, but a handful of pieces came to mind as maybe-offenders. In those same six years, I’ve become used to the occasional negative tweet. Usually, I immediately and sheepishly apologize.

[LINK] Languages of the World on the Basques and their history

In her post "On the Basques, Their Genes, Their Language, and What They Mean for the Indo-European Debate", Asya Perelstvaig looks at what the latest in linguistics and genetics mean about the history of the Basques and wider Europe.

With those clarifications in mind, let’s now turn to the Günther et al. article. According to the authors, they conducted the first ever “genome-wide sequence data from eight individuals associated with archaeological remains from farming cultures in the El Portalón cave (Atapuerca, Spain)”. These pre‑historic individuals “emerged from the same group of people as other Early European farmers”. The advancing agriculturalists mixed with—and eventually acculturated—local hunter-gatherers. Besides showing how agriculture must have spread through southwestern Europe, which Günther et al. argue was mostly through migration rather than cultural transmission, the genome data from the El Portalón skeletons sheds new light on the origins of the Basque people: because “the El Portalón individuals showed the greatest genetic affinity to Basques”, Günther et al. conclude “that Basques and their language may be linked with the spread of agriculture across Europe”.

In other words, three population waves can be distinguished in the pre-historic peopling of Europe: Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, Near-Eastern agriculturalists, and Steppe pastoralists. (Some scholars deny the existence/importance of the third wave, but recent genetic evidence, discussed in my earlier post, strongly supports migration from the steppes.) Each new wave mixed with, acculturated, and in some cases subsumed the pre-existing population. While this broad-strokes picture is largely agreed on, the issue of which contemporary groups show how much genetic and/or linguistic connection to which pre‑historic population is a more controversial one. Thus, Basques have been commonly assumed to be descendants of the first population wave, the hunter-gatherers. Gradually pushed into the mountainous “refuge zone” in the Pyrenees, they maintained their genetic uniqueness (for instance, earlier genetic studies found them to have “a higher-than-normal frequency of Rh‑negative blood types”, as pointed out by Balter), as well as their language. Or so the story went. If Günther et al. are correct, Basques are descendants not of the hunter-gatherers but rather of the agriculturalists who spread through southern Europe and into Iberia, ultimately from the Near East.

This conclusion has important consequences for the Indo-European debate. If the distinctiveness of the Basques is a result of them being descendants of an earlier wave, surrounded by a sea of advancing Indo-European-speaking groups (primarily, Celtic- and later Latin-speaking), and that earlier wave was the farming population, it follows that the advancing Indo-Europeans must be the third population wave, the steppe pastoralists (who eventually adopt agriculture, as more suitable to the geographical conditions of their new habitat). In other words, the finding that links Basques to agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers provides a strong argument in favor of the Steppe theory of Indo-European origins (as schematized on the left). According to the Anatolian alternative, the original Indo-Europeans were the Near Eastern agriculturalists, who later spread into Europe. For this to be possible, we need to assume that the Basques and the Indo-Europeans were two very different waves of agriculturalists that presumably came from different places and did not mix much. There is little evidence, as far as I am aware, to support such a scenario.

But as mentioned above, we should be careful about distinguishing “peoples” and their languages. As Balter points out, we “cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Basque still has its origins in a hunter-gatherer language that was retained and carried along as farming spread throughout Iberia”. Is this possibility, however remote, a way out for the advocates of the Anatolian theory? I remain skeptical about this scenario, however, as it would involve hunter-gatherers contributing the Basque (or more broadly Vasconic) language, the agriculturalists contributing the distinctive Basque genetic make-up and the Indo-European language, with the steppe pastoralists bringing in the characteristic “Indo-European” DNA signature but making no major impact on the language. This scenario seems quite outlandish to me.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the problems of a valid Iroquois passport

Sarah Moses' Syracuse.com article "Team England arrives on Onondaga Nation to get passports stamped" caught some attention on Facebook earlier this month.

Members of Team England arrived on the Onondaga Nation this morning to get their passports stamped and practice for the 2015 World Indoor Lacrosse Championship, which starts Friday.

Team England is the first team to arrive on the nation and to have their passports stamped, said Jeanne Shenandoah, of the Onondaga Nation. Shenandoah and Awhenjiosta Myers stamped the passport this morning.

The Onondaga Nation and Syracuse will be the site of the world indoor championship. This is the first international sporting event held on indigenous lands.

Thirteen teams will be competing in the tournament. The other teams will be arriving this week for the games and each team will have their passports stamped with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy stamp.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy has issued its own passports for more than 30 years. In 2010, England would not allow the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team to enter the country to compete in the world championships because the players were traveling on their Haudenosaunee passports.

North Country Public Radio's coverage of the tournament, incidentally, is good reading.

The question of the Iroquois passport has been an active one, with the travel document apparently being only intermittantly recognized by different governments, Canada and the United States included. For the Iroquois, the passport is a badge of identity and sovereignty. I get that. Does this gesture still work when it's not accompanied by much sovereignty on the ground?

What say you?