[PHOTO] Old vitrolite tiles of College Station, Toronto

I caught a glimpse of the old green tiles of College Station, thanks to Chris Bateman's recent Spacing article "How the TTC lost and found its subway style".

Not many people could have known that behind the advertising billboards on the platform of College station was something no-one had seen for more than three decades. Last week, workers upgrading the metal hardware that covers large portions of the station walls revealed a little bit of Toronto history that was long presumed destroyed.

There, covered in a thick layer of dust and grime, was the station’s original glossy blue-green vitrolite tile. A little cracked and worse for wear, but still firmly affixed to the walls.

For almost half the stations existence, this stuff covered the entire station, including the ticket hall. And then, in the 1980s, the TTC covered it up during an aesthetically misguided modernization effort that also drove its famous subway font to the brink of extinction.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Crooked Timber is skeptical of the idea that technology has a relationship with secular stagnation.


• D-Brief notes research suggesting that human brains cannot be sorted into distinct categories of male and female.


• The Dragon's Tales links to speculation on embedding American marines in Filipino units, the better to deter China.


• Far Outliers notes the complexities of ethnic identity in Azerbaijan.


• Marginal Revolution starts a--alas!--not enlightening discussion on Muslim integration in Christian-majority societies.


• Steve Munro notes unimpressive ridership statistics for the Union-Pearson Express.


• Towleroad links to a profile of ex-SEAL MTF Kristin Beck.
  
• Transit Toronto notes that, finally, the repairs to the bus area of Ossington station are complete.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the legal complexities of the Iranian-American nuclear deal.


• Window on Eurasia warns of consequences for Ukraine of Belarusian support for Russia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell is critical of British arguments for war, generally.

[URBAN NOTE] "Aging TTC streetcars rattle into winter"

Chris So's Toronto Star article describes how the TTC is prepping its streetcars for winter, a task made all the more urgent by the age of the current stock and by the non-arrival of its Bombardier replacements.

Gerry Ferreira, senior technical adviser for the transit commission, took reporters through the myriad fixes and part replacements being done in the streetcar garage at Queen St. W. and Roncesvalles Ave.

[. . .]

Over the past two winters, Toronto thoroughfares were frequently beset by streetcars that broke down due to the strain of operating in the cold. TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said that one of the worst days—a frigid one in January 2014—saw 48 streetcars fail to run for the morning rush hour. Ross said the repair push is being done while the arrival of more new streetcars from Bombardier continues to be delayed.

“These vehicles … systems that are prone to failure: they corrode, they have lines and seals that age and shrink in the extreme cold,” said Ross. “These machines are showing their age.”

As Ferreira explained, the streetcars operate primarily with an extensive system of pressurized air that travels through tubes and valves to control everything from suspension and braking to operating the windshield wipers and opening the doors. There’s also an air controlled valve that can shoot sand—which is stored underneath seats in the cab of the car—through a tube aimed at the front wheels to improve traction if it’s icy.

Problems come up when the mercury dips below -20C, Ferreira said. Condensation can freeze and block the air tubes, leading to all sorts of malfunctions. And over time, salt can erode the air tanks and while the tubing gets brittle and leaks, which leads to less efficient air flow and can cause the compressor beneath the tail of the car to overheat and break down.

[URBAN NOTE] "Subway fetish does injustice to Scarborough"

As is usual, Edward Keenan makes sense--here, in the Toronto Star--when he argues that the desire of the people of Scarborough for a subway line as opposed to light rail is an insult, as opposed to a rational choice.

Here comes Margaret Kohn, no less a luminary than the acting director for the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus, to demonstrate the unrelenting Fordian transit illiteracy that persists in this city when it comes to the subject of Scarborough. Writing Dec. 1 on the Opinion page of the Star, she scoffed at the contempt of the “downtown cognoscenti” for the three-stop Bloor-Danforth extension, summing it up as a matter of greedhead urban robber barons hoarding an ever greater share of civic spoils for themselves at the expense of the inner-suburban poor — especially in their lust for new subway lines like personal trophies, in the form of the downtown relief line (a subway line whose primary purpose, if it were ever built, would be to provide more space on trains and more routes for suburban riders to travel into downtown).

Eventually she slows the parade of insults long enough to make what she seems to think is a novel argument: that Scarborough is home to many of the city’s poorest and most disadvantaged residents, and has really terrible transit. Invoking the philosopher John Rawls’ famous “veil of ignorance” test, she asks if most people wouldn’t prefer the subway option if they thought there might be a good chance they’d have to live in Scarborough.

Now it must be noted that her core observation — “that a major investment in public transit in the periphery is a matter of justice” — is not a new contribution to this debate. It is in fact pretty much the agreed premise of all parties on which the debate is based.

What LRT network advocates — those who oppose the subway extension — have argued all along is that pouring billions of dollars into a limited extension of the existing Bloor-Danforth line to Scarborough Town Centre robs Scarborough residents of fair access to transit. Because of the immense cost of tunnelling for little benefit over the alternative, the subway means we tie up our transit resources for a generation to build three new stops that will lose money serving a relatively limited ridership. The LRT alternatives are not only far cheaper to build and operate, but they would serve far more riders, bringing rapid transit closer to more neighbourhoods in Scarborough.

[LINK] "Anti-abortion groups target IUD use"

Al Jazeera America notes that anti-abortion groups will not be satisfied with limiting abortion, but that they rather want to go after birth control generally. I, for one, see no reason to try to compromise with the uncompromising.

A rapid increase in the number of U.S. women turning to intrauterine devices to prevent pregnancy has prompted escalating attacks on the birth control method from groups that oppose abortion.

The next battle will be at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has agreed to consider a new religious challenge to contraceptives coverage under President Obama's healthcare law. Although the case deals broadly with whether religiously affiliated groups should be exempt from providing birth control coverage to their employees, some parties in the case have focused specifically on IUDs.

IUDs work primarily by preventing sperm from reaching an egg. But they have come under fire from anti-abortion groups because, in rare instances, they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. Those who believe that life begins at conception consider blocking implantation to be terminating a pregnancy rather than preventing pregnancy.

“IUDs are a life-ending device,” said Mailee Smith, staff counsel for the Americans United for Life, which filed an amicus brief in support of the challenge before the high court. “The focus of these cases is that requiring any life-ending drug is in violation of the Religious Freedom Act.”

IUD use among U.S. women using contraceptives grew to 10.3 percent in 2012 from 2 percent in 2002, according to the Guttmacher Institute, making them the fastest growing birth-control method. Their popularity has grown as women recognized that newer versions of the device don't carry the same safety risks as a 1970s-era IUD known as the Dalkon Shield.

[LINK] "Euro to Bear Brunt of Yuan's Inclusion in Reserve-Currency Club"

Bloomberg's Netty Idayu and Lillian Chen note that the Euro is set to face a challenge from the rising prominence of the Chinese yuan.

The euro’s worst year in a decade is looking even grimmer after the Chinese yuan’s inclusion in the International Monetary Fund’s basket of reserve currencies.

The 19-nation currency’s weighting in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket will drop to 30.93 percent, from 37.4 percent, the organization said Monday. The yuan will join the dollar, euro, pound and yen in the SDR allocation from Oct. 1, 2016, at a 10.92 percent weighting.

The euro has tumbled 13 percent against the dollar this year, the most in a decade, and central banks have reduced the proportion of the currency in their reserves to the lowest since 2002. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi signaled on Oct. 22 that policy makers are open to boosting stimulus, after embarking on a 1.1 trillion-euro ($1.2 trillion) asset-purchase program in March.

“The euro will get the most impact from this weight adjustment,” said Douglas Borthwick, head of foreign exchange at New York-based brokerage Chapdelaine & Co. “The IMF is taking from euro to give to China; the other rebalancing amounts are largely negligible.”

China’s currency will exceed yen and sterling in the new basket. The levels will be 41.73 percent for the dollar, 8.33 percent for the yen and 8.09 percent for the pound, the IMF said. The dollar currently accounts for 41.9 percent of the basket, while the pound accounts for 11.3 percent and the yen 9.4 percent.

[LINK] "Wikipedia Deploys AI to Expand Its Ranks of Human Editors"

Wikipedia's development of AI editors, noted by Wired's Cade Metz, worries me. If AIs will work there, what role will humans have?

Aaron Halfaker just built an artificial intelligence engine designed to automatically analyze changes to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia anyone can edit. In crowdsourcing the creation of an encyclopedia, the not-for-profit website forever changed the way we get information. It’s among the ten most-visited sites on the Internet, and it has swept tomes like World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica into the dustbin of history. But it’s not without flaws. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, anyone can mistakenly add bogus information. And anyone can vandalize the site, purposefully adding bogus information. Halfaker, a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees Wikipedia, built his AI engine as a way of identifying such vandalism.

In one sense, this means less work for the volunteer editors who police Wikipedia’s articles. And it might seem like a step toward phasing these editors out, another example of AI replacing humans. But Halfaker’s project is actually an effort to increase human participation in Wikipedia. Although some predict that AI and robotics will replace as much as 47 percent of our jobs over the next 20 years, others believe that AI will also create a significant number of new jobs. This project is at least a small example of that dynamic at work.

“This project is one attempt to bring back the human element,” says Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia’s head of research, “to allocate human attention where it’s most needed.”

[LINK] Luke Coffey at Al Jazeera on Russia and Turkey

Luke Coffey's opinion piece at Al Jazeera places the current breakdown in Russia-Turkey relations in the context of generally intense competition between the two post-imperial (?) countries.

The West might view recent events between Russia and Turkey as a new phenomenon, but this fails to take into account the complex and fraught relationship between the countries.

The downing of the Russian jet is simply the latest drama in a saga that has been playing out since the middle of the 16th century.

In one form or another, Russia has driven Turkish foreign and defence policy for centuries. Since 1568, Turkey and Russia have been to war 12 times. At least nine of the occasions have been over Crimea - which Russia illegally annexed last year.

Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire have contested regions in the Black Sea, the South Caucasus and the Balkans for centuries.

In 1772, Russian troops raided and briefly occupied Ottoman territory in the Levant. Even during World War I, Russian troops got within 160 kilometres of Ottoman-controlled Baghdad. The ensuing friction led to much bloodshed.

After World War II, Joseph Stalin's designs on Turkey's Eastern Anatolia Region and Soviet Russia's wish to control the Turkish Straits were what originally drove Turkey into NATO's arms.

[LINK] "Target Canada creditors unsatisfied with recovery plan’s details"

The Globe and Mail's Marina Strauss notes the continuing aftermath of Target Canada's collapse.

Some creditors of the failed Target Canada, including landlords and pharmacists, are uncertain about what its proposed recovery plan will mean for them, raising questions about whether it will win quick creditor approval.

The plan, filed in court late last week, proposes that many creditors receive 75 to 85 per cent of their “proven” claims. But the complex proposal also says U.S. parent Target Corp. will drop its $1.4-billion intercompany claim (originally valued at $1.9-billion) only if it secures a release from landlords from its lease guarantee obligations that could potentially be worth even more. Instead, the landlords would have to agree to a formula of payments, plus an enhanced “top-up” amount from Target, which is unsatisfactory to some of the landlords.

“Landlords are reviewing the documents and reviewing all of their options,” said Linda Galessiere, a lawyer at McLean & Kerr LLP who represents a number of key landlords.

In developing its plan, Target aimed to avoid costly and protracted litigation with creditors while gaining a speedy green light from them. To help reach its goals, Target came to a $132-million settlement with its largest landlord, RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, in which RioCan released Target from those lease guarantees. The agreement possibly paves the way for Target to win enough votes for the plan to get the nod, but landlord and pharmacist concerns still threaten to derail a fast resolution.

Five landlords will be in court in the next week or so to try to force Target to pay them about $4-million of the guarantees under their leases, underlining a key contentious issue that could thwart plan approval by early next year.

[LINK] The Dragon's Tales on the United States and asteroid mining

Will Baird at The Dragon's Tales links to a couple of articles noting controversy over the United States' new Commercial Space Launch Act, which creates a legal framework for asteroid mining.

[WRITING] "Modern Textual Criticism"

Livejournaler jsburbidge writes about the complexities of modern textual criticism in our 21st century technological era.

A few days ago, I became aware of Jerome McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, which I had previously been unaware of. I used to be interested in the field, and in fact did a graduate course in the theory of mediaeval textual criticism with a teacher with whom McGann had been discussing these issues at the time (Lee Paterson, credited at the beginning of the book). I gather that it has had some considerable impact.

Regardless of the fact that the only two reviews on LibraryThing are dismissive (neither of which seems to have been written by someone with prior knowledge of post-18th century bLivejournaler ibliography - one is at least written by someone with an exposure to classical stemmatics - and who are not aware of the context into which it fits) it is a well-written and cogent piece of work. The problem it addresses - how one conceives of the task of the editor as conditioned by how one views authorial composition - is refracted through various scholarly disagreements on editions of specific texts. At the time, considerable debate centred around the Kane and Donaldson Piers Plowman (referenced by McGann, despite the fact that it's not in the period he is mainly dealing with) and the Hans Gabler Ulysses (not referenced, but very relevant, and about which McGann has written elsewhere). The question of whether one is trying to recover a text reflecting "authorial intention" or something different, conditioned by either/both of a socially mediated agreement regarding a standard text (some versions become iconic, as with Auden's September 1 1939), or by a model of composition as collaborative, will not go away with modern texts. In addition, the issues are closely related to the perspective shifts associated with the New Historicism and other forms of theory which stress the social context of and contraints on the author at a different level.

I have seen it suggested that all of this is becoming less relevant now that we have entered a world in which composition, in the old sense, is dead, having been replaced by reformatting an author's electronic text so that at no time is there a process of transcription.

If anything, this is diametrically wrong. Consider the following, not entirely atypical, life of a novel by a modern author (with each stage preserved in complete texts for the future critic)[.]

[PHOTO] On the decision of Anton Corbijn to stop his commercial photography

The author of The Economist's Prospero blog notes that Anton Corbijn has apparently decided to abandon the practice of photography as an art form. Why? Technology.

Photography as a slow, analogue art-form is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute—that’s six billion each month—and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital products anyone can be a Photoshop hack, selfie whore or filter junkie. We see with our smartphones, not our eyes. What need do we have for old-fashioned specialists using toxic chemicals to make a physical print that can be neither insta-shared nor “liked”?

A case is point in Anton Corbijn, the Dutch artist who in a 40-year career has shot thousands of celebrities, everyone from the Rolling Stones to Björk, and whose iconic album-cover shots include U2’s “Joshua Tree” and Morrissey’s “Viva Hate”. A retrospective of his work at the C/O Berlin gallery feels like a fond farewell to his big-buck career: from now on photography will only be Mr Corbijn's hobby.

The two-floor exhibition features 600 prints from 1972 to 2012, including his famed music photography from the 1990s. A travelling show from The Hague Museum of Photography, Mr Corbijn’s work represents a bygone era of analogue masterworks. Each of the prints on the wall was first seen by Mr Corbijn only as he dipped them into chemical baths in a dark room—as different as possible from the modern digital shoot, where hundreds of shots can be compared and even retouched on the spot with the band and creative director peering over the photographer's shoulder.

Known for melancholic, black-and-white photos with a raw, anti-glamour aesthetic, Mr Corbijn’s work feels timeless. Some images intentionally include motion-blur, like his portrait (above) of Luciano Pavarotti, growling like a death metal star in Turin back in 1996. Even though Mr Corbijn has steady hands, something he credits to his non-coffee, non-smoking lifestyle, he believes sharpness is overrated. It remains the photographer’s technical preference to shoot slow shutter speeds, which allows movement in the frame.

This took me aback, not least since I liked his work. His collaborations with Depeche Mode, for instance, have been uniformly enjoyable, particularly his direction of the video for their "Enjoy the Silence".

"Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

I really do not see his point in abstaining from his production of images for an audience. That there is so much photography online does not mean that his will be less wanted--my Instagram feed, I do not flatter myself, is not a direct competitor with his. Not many are: He has a particular name and reputation that can consistently draw him attention. Digital photography, darkroom photography--different people can develop different voices. Commercial sustainability, I grant, is an altogether different issue.

What do you all think of this?