[PHOTO] Hello Kitty by the falls, Allan Gardens

The two Hello Kitty dolls I saw poised at the top of this waterfall in the Allan Gardens yesterday afternoon amused me.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO considers if the Union-Pearson Express might work as a rapid transit line.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that Earth-like worlds which rapidly lose most of their water can extend their habitable lifetimes.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog talks about the sociological lessons of party crashers.


• Geocurrents notes the complexities of Valencian identity and its relationship to Catalonia.


• Joe. My. God. notes the introduction of a civil unions bill into the Italian parliament.


• Language Hat links to a contemporary survey of spoken Irish in the Aran Islands.


• Language Log looks at the Hakka and their distinctive Chinese language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the impacts of structural racism on the lives of people living in unincorporated communities in California.


• Marginal Revolution notes some young Argentines are throwing wedding parties without an actual married couple.


• Steve Munro looks at waterfront transit plans.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla notes a 3-d model of Charon.
  
• The Russian Demographics Blog shows the 1897 Russian Imperial census' data on speakers of the Ukrainian language.


• Window on Eurasia notes the extension of the Chinese transport net to the Russian Far East, argues Ukrainians are losing interest in Russia, and notes potential Russian border issues with the Baltic States.

[LINK] "Elections Canada says 3.6 million votes cast during advance polls"

I was quite pleased by CBC's report, and reminded of the marked increase in turnout in last year's municipal elections in Toronto.

Elections Canada says an estimated 3.6 million people voted during four days of advance polls running from Friday to Thanksgiving Monday, representing a 71 per cent increase over three days of advance polling in 2011.

The agency estimated that 1.2 million people voted on Thanksgiving Monday, 767,000 on Sunday, 780,000 on Sat

Voters complained of some irregularities with voter information cards, as well as insufficient staff and long lineups.

Some voters who were upset with the niqab debate wore face masks, and in at least one instance a potato sack to vote.

Under Elections Canada rules, electors are allowed to vote while wearing a face covering as long as they take an oath attesting they are eligible and provide two pieces of ID, including one with a current address.

The polls suggest that if an election were held today, it would likely be a toss-up between the Liberals and Conservatives. But with a week to go until election day, there is plenty of time for voting intentions to shift significantly.

[LINK] The Volokh Conspiracy on Canadian expatriates and the right to vote

At American libertarian blog The Volokh Conspiracy, ILya Somin considers the arguments for and against expatriates having voting rights. On balance, he comes out for.

In defense of the Canadian law, one can argue that expats should not get to vote for a government many of whose laws they do not have to obey so long as they live abroad. In addition, Canada and many other countries do not tax expats who establish long-term residency abroad (though taxes are much harder to escape for many American expats). If you believe that voting rights should be limited to “stakeholders” who are subject to a government’s laws and required to pay for its support, many expats don’t qualify, or at least do not do so nearly as much as other citizens do. Furthermore, long-term expats may have weaker ties to their home countries. It is also possible they don’t follow politics there as closely, and might make worse choices at the ballot box as a result.

On the other hand, many expatriates plan to return to their countries of origin eventually. The fact that they continue to identify with the home country retain their citizenship suggests a measure of emotional attachment. Even while abroad, they may still be heavily affected by their home governments’ policies on many issues, most notably taxation and trade.

To these traditional arguments, I would add that expats from advanced democracies are often relatively highly educated professionals. While the two are not identical, virtually all studies show that there is a strong correlation between education and political knowledge. This may be particularly true of those expats who are interested enough politics back home to take the trouble to vote by absentee ballot. At the margin, letting expats vote probably helps diminish one of the most serious flaws of modern democracy: the problem of widespread political ignorance.

Even if expats have less of an immediate self-interested stake in government policy than those who stay at home, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will make worse decisions. Most of the time, there is relatively little correlation between narrow self-interest and political opinions. A person who truly cares only about his narrow self-interest probably would not choose to vote in the first place.

[LINK] "Evidence of earliest modern humans outside Africa found in China"

CBC carries the Thomson-Reuters article describing the discovery, in a southern Chinese cave, of evidence of an early migration by Homo sapiens into China long before the species made it to Europe.

A trove of 47 fossil human teeth from a cave in southern China is rewriting the history of the early migration of our species out of Africa, indicating Homo sapiens trekked into Asia far earlier than previously known and much earlier than into Europe.

Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of teeth between 80,000 and 120,000 years old that they say provide the earliest evidence of fully modern humans outside Africa.

The teeth from the Fuyan Cave site in Hunan Province's Daoxian County place our species in southern China 30,000 to 70,000 years earlier than in the eastern Mediterranean or Europe.

"Until now, the majority of the scientific community thought that Homo sapiens was not present in Asia before 50,000 years ago," said paleoanthropologist Wu Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Our species first appeared in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, then spread to other parts of the world, but the timing and location of these migrations has been unclear.

[URBAN NOTE] "The tragic tale of Toronto’s first big baseball star"

Spacing Toronto's Adam Bunch shares the sad story of Toronto's first big baseball star, Ned "Cannonbale" Crane.

The bases were loaded. It was the bottom of the eight. This was it: first place was on the line. Toronto and Newark headed into that Saturday afternoon battling for the lead in the International League — along with the team in Jersey City. With only a couple of weeks left in the 1887 season, every win was vitally important. And with only an inning left in their second game of the day, Toronto was losing to Newark by three runs.

That’s when Ned “Cannonball” Crane came to the plate. He was the ace of the Toronto pitching staff; a giant of a man: big and tall and impossibly strong. He once threw a ball more than 400 feet — a world record; impressive even by today’s standards — and he could throw a ball faster than anybody else could, either. He was one of the game’s first big power pitchers. He combined the blistering speed of his fastball with a “deceptive drop ball” that baffled opposing hitters. It was a deadly combination. He won 33 games for Toronto that year — more than any other pitcher has ever won on any Toronto team.

And he could hit, too. Crane was one of the best hitters in the whole league that year. His .428 average is still considered to be the best batting average by a pitcher in professional baseball history. (If he’d hit that in the Majors, it would put him sixth on the all-time list for any position.) On the days when Crane wasn’t pitching, he was in the outfield or at second base so they could keep his bat in the line-up.

[LINK] "Impacts of and responses to the dense smoke haze from #Indonesia"

Maximos' Blog features a post looking at the devastating Indonesian forest fires which periodically sweep Southeast Asia with smoke, their origins, and their possible solutions.

Through the night of 8 October, 2015, Singapore had some drenching rain bringing some respite from the dense smoke haze that had hung over Singapore for the last few weeks. Rains over parts of Sumatra in particular, and a shift in local winds have brought clear skies and sunshine, yet the problem is by no means at an end. Fires still burned across Sumatra and Kalimantan.

On my way out to enjoy the respite and do a little shopping at Tekka Market, I struck up a conversation with one of the security personnel who work in my 30 story condominium. We often chat. She came from Pulau Bintan in Indonesia, around 40 kilometres away, and it’s another opportunity to speak Indonesian.

“When the it reaches 300 in Singapore people worry and many wear masks. In Kalimantan and Sumatra it’s often much higher. It was about 1900 in Kalimantan last week,” she reminded me.

“Yes and over 500 in Palembang,” I added. “It’s climbing again here.”

“The smoke has blown north to Thailand and Vietnam, I heard it on the radio.”

“For the moment but it’s on the way up again here,” I said.

“It’s only moderate,” she replied.

“No it’s more than that already,” I said, reaching for my iPhone with the AQI app installed. “Here, look, PM2.5 is 148.”

That was two hours ago, now PM 2.5 is at an unhealthy 155. Comparing this with the inner Sydney station of Rozelle, close to my Australian home I see that by contrast the Sydney station is at an AQI of 32.

Much more there. Go, read.

[LINK] Paul Tapsell on being a Maori anthropologist

Savage Minds features a guest post by one Paul Tapsell reflecting on his personal life and his professional career, as someone of Maori background in a rapidly changing New Zealand.

The greatest challenge of being an anthropologist is being me. From one decade to the next I have been a cross-cultural island of self-consciousness, framed by the cross generational memories of wider kin. Wisdom comes in many forms, but as I tell my students, at least those who turn up to class, it cannot be found on the Internet. Somewhere between my father’s Maori generation of desperately trying to be English and my children’s reality of being overtly Maori you find… me.

Raised in the tribally alienated rural heartlands of Waikato naivety (built on 19th century confiscations at gunpoint), my view of the world was one of barefoot summers by the ocean, while the rest of the year was underpinned by frosts, fog, rugby and ducking for cover in a rurally serviced school surrounded by affluent dairy farms and horse studs. Right from the start teachers placed me neither at the front or the back of the classroom. Kids in the front were mostly fourth generation descendants of English settlers, while at the back were the ever sniffling Maori who had no shoes and walked five miles to school across farmlands, one steaming cow pat to the next. And there I was, from age five, placed right in the middle, on the boundary between a white-is-right future and an uncivilised dark skinned past.

Weekends provided respite, often spent with my grandmother while dad mowed an acre of lawn on our tribal property back in Rotorua. She used taonga (ancestral treasures) to instil in me a deeper understanding of the proud history to which Maori belonged, decades before these stories found their way into mainstream classrooms. Taonga either at her museum or off the mantelpiece made history all the more real to me, especially when performed during death rituals on my ancestral marae (community villages) of Maketu and Ohinemutu.

Life in the 1960s-70s seemed so simple, so straightforward. You were either Maori (dark like dad) or English (lily white like mum). If you were Maori, society deemed you dirty, lazy and only good for fixing roads or driving buses. Whereas if you chose to be English, no matter your skin colour, you could participate in a national ideology of being “one people”, but only so long as you played by the rules. I did not play by the rules. My very left wing Irish grandmother filled my head with a whole different way of seeing the world. For her, colonial New Zealand was extremely unjust and Maori had been royally screwed by the English. She kept the home fires alight, becoming the most feared” Maori” in our village. In 1915 her husband and twenty-five other kinsmen had fought for God and Empire on foreign soil, killing indigenous people of another land in the name of an English King, but for what? To return home as second rate citizens, shot to pieces, and dig ditches on lands now owned by wealthy farmers? No, her world was now here.

This changes.

More, at the site.

[LINK] "Crowdfunding a revolution in Montenegro"

Fedja Pavlovic at Open Democracy writes about the state of affairs in Montenegro, which includes a crowdfunding campaign against the incumbent.

On 27 September, thousands of Montenegrin citizens, led by the main opposition group (the Democratic Front), gathered in front of their parliament to demand an end to the 26 year rule of Milo Djukanovic’s regime. The resignation of Djukanovic’s government would be followed, it was hoped, by the formation of a transitional, national unity government, whose mandate would be limited to organising the first free and fair elections in the country’s history.

Since then, the protesters have put up tents on a boulevard which has become known as ‘liberated territory’; across the barricades, a thousand policemen in full armor stand guard outside an empty parliament building, on top of which snipers are dispersed. Last Sunday, the Ministry of Interior attempted to disband the assembled crowd, but the protests’ leaders refused to leave the occupied ground until their demands were met.

Anti-Government rallies have also taken place in three other cities – the organisers’ plan is to spread this wave of popular revolt to every municipality in which Djukanovic’s party holds power, thus making the movement nation-wide.

Meanwhile, from our press tent, I have been involved in running an international crowdfunding campaign to support the Montenegrin protests. Without the funds, the logistics or the manpower to mount a credible challenge to Djukanovic, the protests’ organisers have been forced to think outside of the box. Indeed, the prospect of the protests being the first political event of their kind to be sustained by small individual donations (‘citizen-driven and citizen-funded’, as they point out) is as out-of-the-box as it gets.

As partial as I am to this fundraising novelty it appears as though, even at this early stage of development, the protests have brought to the fore a far more pertinent point – one that may contribute to the understanding of the role of elections in authoritarian regimes.

[LINK] Bloomberg View on Truvada and PrEP

In the editorial piece "What It Takes to Prevent HIV", Bloomberg View's editorial board comes out in favour of the mass deployment of Truvada to prevent HIV infections.

Years of debate over Obamacare have left too many people with the impression that health-care problems can usually be solved by changing federal government policy. The mystifying story of an effective but too-little-used drug to prevent HIV infection is a reminder that's not always the case.

It's been more than three years since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada as an HIV preventive. In September, the World Health Organization recommended it for anyone at risk of contracting the disease. Yet data from Gilead, the drug's manufacturer, suggest that only a fraction of the people at risk of contracting HIV are taking it. That's a missed opportunity, because the HIV epidemic in the U.S. is nowhere close to an end.

There's strong evidence that the drug, if used more widely, could significantly lower the number of new diagnoses -- still almost 50,000 a year. In a recent study of gay men in Kaiser Permanente's San Francisco health-care system, none of those who took Truvada over a period of 32 months contracted HIV.

What's keeping it from being used more widely? The American medical community broadly has been slow on the uptake. AIDS specialists and clinics are excellent at treating people with HIV; today, a 20-year-old with the infection can expect to live to 71 (up from 56 in 2000-2002) -- almost on par with the population as a whole.

[LINK] Two links on the appeal of the Shafia honour killings

CBC carried the news that three people convicted of carrying out an honour killing directed towards four female family members have lodged an appeal.

A Montreal couple and their son who were convicted of first-degree murder in the so-called honour killings of four female family members are appealing for a new trial.

Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed, filed a 110-page factum with the Ontario Court of Appeal, arguing Justice Robert Maranger failed to intervene when the Crown presented arguments that they believe improperly swayed jurors in their decision-making.

The document also questions the testimony of University of Toronto Prof. Shahrzad Mojab, an "honour killing" expert who testified on behalf of the Crown.

The three accused were each given an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years for their roles in the deaths.

The bodies of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Mohammad Shafia's first wife, Rona Mohammad Amir, 50, were found in the family's Nissan, submerged in a lock on the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009. The prosecutors at their trial said the three accused felt the sisters and Amir had been acting dishonorably by not following family rules.

Michael Friscolanti of MacLean's goes into more detail.

In a lengthy factum filed at Ontario’s Court of Appeal, the Shafias take specific aim at the “overwhelmingly prejudicial” testimony of a key Crown witness: Shahrzad Mojab, a University of Toronto professor who researches honour-based violence. A leading expert in her field, Mojab told the original Kingston jury that in some Middle Eastern cultures, a family’s reputation is measured by the obedience and chastity of its women—and that even the mere perception of inappropriate conduct can be a death sentence. “The shedding of blood is the way of purifying the name of the family in the community,” she told a packed courtroom on Dec. 5, 2011. “It is an expected act. It is expected that the honour of the family be restored and controlled.”

Lawyers representing the Shafia trio (father Mohammad, mother Tooba Yahya, and eldest son, Hamed) say the trial judge, Justice Robert Maranger, never should have allowed Mojab to take the stand. Her evidence “created enormous prejudice,” they argue, because it implied the accused “had a disposition to commit family homicide as a result of their cultural background.” Originally from Afghanistan, the family immigrated to Canada in 2007.

“Allowing cultural disposition evidence tempts jurors to follow their worst impulses and creates the risk that defendants will be judged by their background rather than their proven actions,” reads their joint factum, obtained by Maclean’s.

“By reinforcing pre-existing stereotypes of violent and primitive Muslims, [Mojab’s testimony] created the risk that the jury’s verdict would be tainted by cultural prejudice.”

The factum points out that Ontario’s high court has described Muslims as “a minority that many believe is unfairly maligned and stereotyped in contemporary Canada,” and that “cultural caricatures of ‘dangerous Muslim men’ and ‘imperilled Muslim women’ ” are “well-entrenched in popular culture and mainstream media.” “By placing the deaths of the deceased in a context of culturally inspired violence against women,” the factum continues, “Dr. Mojab’s evidence risked engaging racial and cultural animus.”

Friscolanti notes that there was, in fact, much evidence suggesting that the three held the four dead in great contempt.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the unknown extraordinaries of KIC 8462852

Yesterday I shared Ross Anderson's article at The Atlantic, "The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy", because of its potential import. KIC 8462852, a star somewhat larger and brighter than the Sun 1500 light years away, hosts something in orbit.

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.

One speculation is that this could possibly--just possibly--be the signature of an artificial construction in orbit of the star, something like a Dyson sphere. Centauri Dreams notes that some kind of close exocomet encounter could provide a more reasonable explanation than that of an extraterrestrial civilization at work.

We’re fortunate to have four full years of Kepler data on this target, allowing the authors to explore a range of possibilities. A large-scale impact within the system is the first thing that comes to my mind. On that score, think of something on the scale of the event that caused our own Moon to form. The problem here is the time frame. The collision would have had to occur between observations from the WISE observatory and a large dip in flux (nearly 15%) seen in later Kepler observations, because we would expect such an event to trigger a strong infrared excess that was not seen by WISE. Such an excess could be there now, but this would also mean that we chanced upon an impact that occurred within a window of just a few years.

Coincidences happen, so we can’t rule that out. The paper also considers catastrophic collisions in this star’s analogue to our asteroid belt, as well as the possibility that we are seeing the passage of a disintegrating comet through the system. In this scenario, the comet would have passed well within one AU. [. . .]

But can the comet scenario explain details in the light curves of KIC 8462852? The paper notes how much remains to be explored, but concludes that a cometary explanation is the most consistent with the data. Conceivably a field star might have made its way through this system, triggering instabilities in KIC 8462852’s analogue to the Oort Cloud. There is in fact a small nearby star that whether bound to the system or not could be implicated in cometary infall.

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait seems to represent the scientific consensus, in that an alien civilization is not impossible. Regardless, something interesting is definitely around.

I actually kinda like it. I’m not saying it’s right, mind you, just that it’s interesting. Wright isn’t some wild-eyed crackpot; he’s a professional astronomer with a solid background. As he told me when I talked to him over the phone, there’s “a need to hypothesize, but we should also approach it skeptically” (paraphrasing a tweet by another astronomer, David Grinspoon), with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Look, I think it’s pretty obvious this scenario is, um, unlikely. But hey, why not? It’s easy enough to get follow-up observations of the star to check the idea out. It’s low probability but high stakes, so probably worth a shot. And it’s not exactly science fiction; Wright and a few other astronomers have submitted a paper (pending publication) to the prestigious Astrophysical Journal examining the physics of these structures and detailing how they could be detected around other stars.

As reported in the Atlantic (which is what started all the social media interest in the first place), Wright and Boyajian are indeed proposing to use a radio telescope to look for signals from the star. An alien civilization building such a structure might leak (or broadcast!) radio waves that could be detectable from 1,500 light-years away. That’s the whole basis of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see the movie Contact, or better yet read the book, for more on this). Telescope time is controlled by a committee, and it’s not clear if the proposal will pass or not. I hope so; it shouldn’t take too much telescope time, and under modest assumptions it shouldn’t be too hard to detect a signal.

If one exists. This is still a very, very long shot. But again, this isn’t a huge effort costing zillions of dollars. The effort is minimal, but the payoff could be pretty big. Also, radio observations of the star might prove useful in solving the mystery, even if it’s not aliens. Which, I’ll reiterate, it really likely isn’t.

I would also support follow-up observations (as indicated in the Boyajian paper) looking for signals from comets. Some molecules in comets glow quite brightly when comets get near a star, and that signal may not be too difficult to detect either. Also, there could simply be natural possibilities no one has thought of yet. More observations means stirring the pot a little more and could inspire new thinking.

The important thing is that, although Kepler had a huge sample size, the number of stars studied are only a very small percentage of the total number of stars in the galaxy. What wonders remain to be found around those?

[DM] "Some links on the Syrian refugee crisis"

I've a post up at Demography Matters gathering together links on the Syrian refugee crisis, looking at everything from Thomas Piketty's approval of Germany's intake, to South America's probable failure to take in substantial numbers, to the first Syrians arriving on Prince Edward Island.