[PHOTO] Pawnbrokers' row, Church above Queen, Toronto

The row of pawnshops extending north on Church Street above Queen Street has seen better days, but in the right light on a late autumn day it can still look interesting.

[URBAN NOTE] "On Brampton’s short-sighted Hurontario-Main LRT decision"

Spacing Toronto's Sean Marshall reposted there from his blog his responsible to the decision last week, undertaken by Brampton City Council, to not support the construction of light rail in the city. Why anyone would choose to disconnect their city--rather, keep their city separate--is beyond me.

On late Tuesday night (actually, early Wednesday morning) Brampton City Council made disappointing and harmful decision by voting against the Hurontario-Main LRT, a 23.2 kilometre, $1.6-billion light rail line, whose construction costs would be fully covered by the province. This followed another marathon meeting back in July in which a final decision was delayed to allow for further study and a possible compromise.

The mayor, Linda Jeffrey, and four councillors (Gurpreet Dhillon, Pat Fortini, Marco Medeiros, and Gael Miles) supported the project, but six councillors (Jeff Bowman, Grant Gibson, Elaine Moore, Michael Palleschi, John Sproveiri, and Doug Whillians) voted against. The final vote was 7-4 against the LRT, with Jeffrey mistakenly voting with the majority, but the 6-5 vote against a modified downtown routing in an last-minute attempt to sway opponents should be considered the true decision.

Light rail transit will still be coming to Brampton – construction will start in 2018 – but it will terminate at Shoppers World at Steeles Avenue, with only three stops completely within Brampton’s borders. Nearly four kilometres and four stops have now disappeared, including the crucial terminal at Brampton GO Station. The map below shows the Hurontario-Main LRT route, with the eliminated sections in red. (A short section of the LRT’s route in Port Credit was eliminated due to community opposition; it would have brought light rail transit closer to Port Credit’s bustling core. The Hurontario LRT will now terminate adjacent to the Port Credit GO Station, north of Lakeshore Road.)

The Hurontario-Main corridor was selected for LRT simply because it is one of the busiest transit corridors in the Greater Toronto Area outside the City of Toronto; it connects three GO lines and several major bus corridors, it would help urbanize south Brampton and several neighbourhoods in Mississauga. It’s part of a larger regional network, yet six city councillors in Brampton, looking out for narrow, local interests, sunk it.

Now transit advocates elsewhere are looking to capitalize on Brampton’s loss: at least $200 million of the province’s money won’t be spend. For example, advocates in Hamilton are looking for an opportunity to expand their funded LRT network with Brampton’s cash.

[LINK] "Sweden Risks Breaching Budget Ceiling to Pay for Refugees"

Bloomberg's Amanda Billner notes that the surge in refugee flows in Sweden is on track to cause havoc with public finance.

Magdalena Andersson risks becoming Sweden’s first finance minister to breach the budget ceiling since the current fiscal policy framework was put in place in 1997.

Her finances are buckling under a wave of refugees that could reach more than 350,000 people this year and next, equal to almost 4 percent of the population. The migration agency sees refugee costs reaching 60 billion kronor ($7.1 billion) next year, double its earlier forecast.

That spells trouble for the ruling Social Democrat-led coalition, which in its 2016 budget only has a buffer of 17 billion kronor before it hits the spending ceiling. While breaching that limit has no legal ramifications, it would be politically difficult for the minority government. It’s struggling in the polls and coping with a legacy of deficits left over from the financial crisis.

“If they breached the ceiling without saying so, that would go against tradition,” said Anna Breman, an economist at Swedbank AB. “It’s more likely that they’d try to ask for a raised ceiling and refer to the fact that it’s an extraordinary situation.”

The government already gave itself more room earlier this year, lifting the ceiling for next year by 4 percent. The former administration, ousted in 2014, kept increases within 1.2 percent a year this decade.

[LINK] "If We Want Humane AI, It Has to Understand All Humans"

The "all" in the title of Davey Alba's Wired article is italicized, for emphasis.

The first picture flashes on the screen. “A man is standing next to an elephant,” a robotic voice intones. Another picture appears. “A person sitting at a table with a cake.”

Those descriptions are obvious enough to a person. What makes them remarkable is that a human is not supplying the descriptions at all. Instead, the tech behind this system is cutting-edge artificial intelligence: a computer that can “see” pictures.

Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, is standing on a lit stage in a dark auditorium showing off the advanced object-recognition system she and her fellow researchers built. But as impressive as the system is, Li grows more critical as her presentation unfolds. She says that even if the computer is technically accurate, it could do more. The computer may be able to describe in simple, literal terms what it “sees” in the pictures. But it can’t describe the stories behind the pictures. The person sitting at the table, for instance, is actually a young boy—Li’s son, Leo. Li explains that he is wearing his favorite T-shirt. It’s Easter, and we non-computers can all see how happy he is.

“I think of Leo constantly and the future world he will live in,” Li tells the audience at TED in a video that’s been viewed more than 1.2 million times. In Li’s ideal future, where machines can see, they won’t just be built for maximum efficiency. They’ll be built for empathetic purposes. Artificial eyes, for instance, could help doctors diagnose and take care of patients. If robot cars had empathy, they could run smarter and safer on roads. (Imagine if the builders of self-driving cars used algorithms that didn’t account for the safety of pedestrians and passengers.) Robots, Li says, could brave disaster zones to save victims.

Li is one of the world’s foremost experts on computer vision. She was involved in building two seminal databases, Caltech 101 and ImageNet, that are still widely used by AI researchers to teach machines how to categorize different objects. Given her stature in the field, it’s hard to overstate the importance of her humanitarian take on artificial intelligence. That’s because AI is finally entering the mainstream.

[LINK] "ESPN Just Shuttered Grantland, and People Are Not Happy"

Wired's Julia Greenberg writes about the strongly negative reaction to the news that ESPN is going to shut down its well-regarded pop culture site, Grantland. I would venture that concern about the future of online journalism is also a factor in reactions.

“After careful consideration, we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise,” the company said in a statement posted on its site.

Grantland was launched by veteran sports writer Bill Simmons in 2011. It gained a loyal readership with a number of high profile journalists like Wesley Morris, Zach Lowe, Katie Baker, Andy Greenwald, and Alex Pappademas joining its ranks to become well-known for their distinctive points of view on sports and culture and the consistently high quality of their work.

[. . .]

“Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun,” the company said in its statement. “Thanks to all the other writers, editors and staff who worked very hard to create content with an identifiable sensibility and consistent intelligence and quality.”

The shuttering of Grantland will affect around 40 employees. ESPN will honor existing contracts, and it will have conversations with individual writers to see where they might fit in with other parts of ESPN.com. Some may choose to leave ESPN, following other writers and editors who have left since Simmons was pushed out in May. Departures in recent weeks may have contributed to the decision to shutter the site now. Grantland staffers who don’t have contracts but were full time employees will likely be laid off.

In addition to concerns over staff departures, ESPN appears to have wanted Grantland to move away from pop culture. Once that decision was made, it became less apparent why Grantland sports content should be separate from the rest of ESPN.com. ESPN offers longform sports journalism in its magazine as well as on ESPN.com. Grantland on its own was apparently never profitable.

[LINK] Michael Agar at Savage Minds on explaining what anthropology is

Michael Agar's guest post at Savage Minds is worth reading.

A couple of months ago I was having dinner with an old friend in Seattle. He stopped his fork in mid-flight and looked at me, astonished. “Microsoft hires anthropologists?” “Yes,” I answered, “They fire them too.” He’d just complained about the over-techification of his hometown, worried that the rumors of AliBaba adding to the existing digital mob were true. I had just said that “even anthropologists” were part of the new tech world. He still thought of us as collectors of quaint and curious customs of exotic people. Interesting and entertaining perhaps, but hardly relevant to the brave new digital world.

It made me wonder, again, how to explain what anthropology “is.” Why did my old friend still see it only in terms of the “savage slot,” Trouillot’s phrase that describes anthropology’s traditional academic assignment.

I do know that anthropology “is” something. It exists. It’s certainly the most self-conscious discipline that I know of, sometimes embarrassingly so at gatherings of diverse professions. It definitely tends to be more tied to the personal identity of its bearer than most professional labels that people use when you ask “what do you do?” Whatever it is, it has strong personal and social force. What is that force?

It’s been a half-century since I took the introductory cultural course at Stanford from Bernie Siegel. I signed up because a retired stockbroker and his wife, living in a restored house among the ruins of their abandoned former hometown in the California hills, asked me a lot of questions and then told me I should take it. I was there working for the State Department of Agriculture, looking for a moth whose eggs ate the leaves of grape vines. Cue Rod Serling for an episode of the old TV show Twilight Zone

A year later, I heard that Alan Beals was about to pack up his family and return for a second year of fieldwork in Gopalpur, a village in Mysore State, now Karnataka. He let me, a junior anthropology major, tag along because I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Much later I asked why he let me go and he said, “I don’t know. You kept showing up.” Just like Woody Allen wrote, that’s what 80% of life is, just showing up. The offer was, I’d work half the time as a research assistant and during the other half he would teach me what this mysterious “fieldwork” was all about.

[LINK] Kate Linthicum of the Los Angeles Times on Syrian refugees in California

Kate Linthicum's Los Angeles Times article looks at how some people in California are preparing for the arrival of Syrian refugees.

Long before two families fleeing Syria's civil war arrived in Los Angeles last week, Yvette Khani and her colleagues at the International Rescue Committee were busy making preparations.

They made sure the homes where the families would be staying were clean and stocked with familiar Middle Eastern foods. They offered to pick the refugees up at the airport.

The families are part of the first wave of Syrian war refugees who have arrived for resettlement in California, including 179 in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, according to the State Department. That number is expected to increase rapidly as the U.S. expands its commitment to offer asylum to Syrians, pledging to take in at least 10,000 in the next 12 months.

[. . .]

The two families coming to L.A. were placed with relatives living in Pomona and Cypress, and each member was given a stipend of just over $1,000. They declined to be interviewed.

In the coming months, Khani and the Glendale-based International Rescue Committee of Los Angeles, one of several agencies contracted by the government to resettle refugees, will help them find work, enroll in school and even drive them to job interviews and doctor appointments.

[LINK] "No, the Kids Aren’t Reading the Classics and Why Would They"

At Whatever, John Scalzi notes the very good reasons why the young of today aren't reading the classics of old science fiction. (They are young, and of today.)

The surprise to me is not that today’s kids have their own set of favorite authors, in genre and out of it; the surprise to me is honestly that anyone else is surprised by this. As a practical matter, classic science fiction isn’t selling where today’s kids are buying (or where they are being bought for), namely, in the YA section of the book store. See for yourself: Walk into your local bookstore, head to the YA racks and try to find a science fiction or fantasy-themed book that more than fifteen years old. It’ll be a rough assignment. YA has a high audience turnover rate — kids keep aging out of the demo, don’t you know — and the new kids want their own books. The older books you’ll see tend to be a) ones assigned by schools, b) ones that had movies made from them.

Mind you, generally speaking, book stores stock newer books anyway; book stores, like other entertainment venues, rely on novelty (which in our line of work is called “front list”) to get people through the doors. If you’re doing well as an author, some of your backlist is on the shelf, too. But the shelf in a physical bookstore is only so long. These days, being someone who has been in a lot of bookstores recently, I note the shelf in science fiction and fantasy is mostly skewed to living, working authors, most notably their last couple of books. Some classic (i.e., now dead) authors are there but usually represented by two or three books rather than an extensive backlist.

Which is as it should be. All love to Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, et al., but they’re dead now. They don’t need the money from readers; living authors do. Moreover, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, et al have been dead on average two to three decades and their best known work is half a century old. No matter how brilliant they were or how foundational they were to the genre, they’re going to be dated. None of the futures of Heinlein , as just one example, resemble a future that begins from today; they branch off from the 50s or 60s. Readers (in general) don’t want to have to go backwards a half century in order to move forward again.

Certainly you can’t expect new readers to the genre, including young readers, to backshift several decades — or, well, you can, but it would have the same effect as suggesting to a teenager today that if they want to see a movie about people their age, they should watch The Blackboard Jungle. Sure, it’s fine movie, and an important one. It’s just not especially relevant to the teenager of today. It wasn’t made for them, in any event. It was made for their grandparents.

[URBAN NOTE] "American Horror Story: The Cecil Hotel"

Via Reddit's Unresolved Mysteries forum I came across Josh Dean's article on Elisa Lam. The young British Columbian woman's death by misadventure in a seedy Los Angeles hotel has been mythologized. Carefully, with interviews and photos and fine attention to detail, Dean demythologizes this.

ithin hours, forums were open and buzzing at Reddit and Websleuths, two popular hangouts for the discussion of unsolved crimes, where amateur detectives congregate to pore over clues and trade sometimes reasonable but often ridiculous speculation.

In Elisa’s case, the early comments circled around two conclusions. Either this missing Canadian girl was under the influence of some illicit substance, or she was flirting with someone who’s not seen. Perhaps it was even both. These are not outlandish theories, having watched that footage with no sound. But the way in which theories spiral out of control was evident within the first 10 comments on Reddit, where one user suggests that Lam seems to be on “heavy psychedelics” and points out that the papers had reported the next stop on her tour was Santa Cruz — a city which, he notes, “is renowned for heavy drug use.” From here, the conversation rapidly spirals into the possibility (and feasibility) of covertly dosing someone with LSD via skin contact.

People imagined all kind of things in that footage: that Elisa Lam was hallucinating, that she was having a psychotic break, that she was playing hide and seek, that she was taken at gunpoint by someone who never appears in the frame. Follow the wrong thread and you can wind up through the looking glass, where theories get truly outrageous: Malicious poltergeists, demonic possession, an assailant using “cloaking technology,” even government mind control experiments.

Many users seized on what appears to be a third foot, connected to a body otherwise out of frame, at 2:27. This foot is often cited in arguments for a mystery murderer. If you look closely, it is probably a shadow of Lam’s foot. But many, many viewers are sure it’s proof of another person who was there, in the hall, calling for Lam, drawing her out. This is who Lam’s talking to when she’s waving her arms around. It’s the only possible conclusion. And the owner of this mysterious foot, they were sure, took Elisa, and had either killed her, or was still holding her, somewhere out there — possibly even inside one of the Cecil’s hundreds of rooms.

This is a longform must-read.

[LINK] "Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago"

Scientific American's Shannon Hall reports on how Exxon, to its decided benefit, hid its knowledge of global warming.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Alpha Sources, although Claus Vistesen is rightly gloomy about the prospects for the Italian economy, he thinks there may be a cyclical upturn coming.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the warping of the protoplanetary disk of AA Tauri.


• The Dragon's Tales notes exciting ancient archeological finds in Indonesia possibly belonging to Homo floresiensis.


• Geocurrents notes the controversy over an India-Africa summit.


• Language Log notes an instance of tardy students being forced to draw a Chinese character.


• Languages of the World examines the genetics of Napoleon Bonaparte.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the history wars of South Korea.


• Marginal Revolution notes an East German village whose inhabitants will soon be far outnumbered by Syrian refugees.


• Personal Reflections reacts to the Turkish election and Chinese demographics.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the vast data gathered from Ceres.


• Registan suggests Russia's elites are operating according to frightening theories of geopolitics.


• Cheri Lucas Rowlands shares photos of a trip to the Southwest.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at the demographics of the Donbas in 1926.


• Whatever's John Scalzi thinks the 50 dollar Amazon Fire tablet is worth it.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Russian nationalists will be a lasting threat to Ukraine and suggests non-Donbas Ukrainians will soon be deported from Russia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes a remarkable sort of organizational artifact.

[OBSCURA] On a beautiful Maria Hill monologue from Secret Avengers

Quite recently, a beautiful monologue by SHIELD agent Maria Hill appeared in issue 15 of Secret Avengers. Written by Ales Kot and drawn by a team including penciller/inker Michael Walsh and colourist Matt Wilson, what starts off as Hill talking about a childhood trip to the beach swerves into much more profound territory.



The entire sequence is here on Tumblr. If all comics were this good, there would be no question that they would be an art form deserving respect.