[PHOTO] Me and Yorkdale Fashion Santa (#yorkdalefashionsanta)

Sunday evening, I travelled north on the 29 Dufferin bus up to the Yorkdale Shopping Centre to have my photo taken with Yorkdale's Fashion Santa. If Justin Bieber did it, why not me?

NOW Toronto had a brief piece about this promotion.

Not even five minutes has passed after arriving at Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre and already, Paul Mason is approached by shoppers who want photographs.

It’s hard not to notice the 51-year-old model. Dressed in a burgundy, velvet blazer with a plaid scarf draped over top, his appearance is striking. Greeting onlookers with a warm smile and his bright blue eyes, the white bearded man bears a resemblance to one of this holiday season’s most popular characters.

Each week, Mason can be found at Yorkdale posing for selfies with mall-goers to raise money for the Sick Kids Foundation. The mall will donate one dollar (up to $10,000) for every photo taken with the stylish Santa and posted on social media with the hashtag #YorkdaleFashionSanta. The campaign was started last year, but it was only this year that it went viral.

“It’s gone really well. Better than expected,” Mason says with a laugh.

It has gone so well, the phenomenon has gone global. The Mirror>, a British publication, suggests that this year, the people involved took their time planning.

For this year's Fashion Santa push, Paul and Yorkdale had more time to work on the professional-looking shots, taken back in October, and attached a charitable cause to the campaign.

Lucia Connor, Marketing Director at Yorkdale Shopping Centre, said: "The response has been spectacular - we knew there was magic in this year's campaign.

"Adults are delighting in an interpretation of Santa that they can enjoy.

"Fashion Santa has given adults a way to reconnect with the magic of the holidays.

"Paul is a very talented model and his strong facial features appeal to both women and men with his striking beard, sparkling eyes and warm smile."

[LINK] "Coral Reefs Provide Crystal Ball for Future Change"

The Dragon's Tales linked to Brian Kahn's Scientific American article noting the negative effects of El Niño--and, climate change--on coral reefs.

Christmas Island sits about as close to the middle of the Pacific as you can get. The main island of Kiribati, a small island nation, is 3,300 miles from San Francisco, 3,800 miles from Brisbane and just 140 miles north of the equator. Its closest neighbor of note is Hawaii, which is still 1,250 miles away.

Some might say it’s as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get. But it’s at the center of one of the biggest climate events in decades. A super El Niño has raised water temperatures to unprecedented levels and it’s causing a massive coral die off.

Researchers are racing to track the impacts the warming is having on coral as well as what happens to the reefs when the waters cool. The work has implications well beyond an island in the middle of nowhere. How coral respond to this year’s El Niño offers a preview of what the rest of the world’s coral will face as the world continues to warm.

From the water’s surface, the coral reefs surrounding Christmas Island looked healthy. But as soon as Kim Cobb plunged below the azure waters that surround the world’s largest atoll, a new picture began to emerge on a November dive.

Once-vibrant reefs had lost their color. Ghostly white skeletons covered in a growing layer of green-brown algae created a desolate underwater landscape.

[LINK] "Great Lakes are warming more than twice as fast as the oceans, new study says"

Raveena Aulakh's Toronto Star article shares reasons to fear for the Great Lakes. One day will I be able to swim in Lake Ontario and find myself warmed?

An alarming new study says that freshwater lakes are warming at more than twice the pace of the oceans, and Lake Superior is the second-fastest warming lake studied, behind Sweden’s Lake Fracksjon.

The rest of the Great Lakes are also faring dismally, the study says, putting native fish in jeopardy, increasing the risk of invasive species and raising fears of widespread algae blooms.

The study, by a team of international scientists, analyzed data from hundreds of lakes around the world between 1985 and 2009. It found that summer surface temperatures rose by about 0.34 degrees C per decade on average.

That may not sound like a lot, acknowledged Sapna Sharma, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the faculty of science at York University. But put that in context with air temperatures and ocean temperature increase and “you see there is a big difference,” she said.

Average air temperatures over the same period warmed about 0.24 degrees C per decade, while oceans warmed about 0.11 degrees C per decade, she said.

[LINK] "Merkel Allies Betray Growing Alarm `Brexit' Prospect Is Real"

Bloomberg's Patrick Donahue and Arne Delfs report on growing concern in Germany that the United Kingdom might leave the European Union. This would not be in Germany's interests, of course.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party colleagues expressed growing dismay at the prospect of a British exit from the European Union, with one lawmaker portraying Prime Minister David Cameron’s planned referendum as an “existential risk” for Europe.

As European leaders prepare to discuss Britain’s call for EU reform in four main areas at a summit in Brussels Thursday, Cameron’s approach is raising concern in the Chancellery in Berlin that his demands go too far, according to a German government official. Another worry is that any agreement Cameron might extract from the rest of the 28-nation EU still wouldn’t be enough to sway EU-skeptical British voters, said the official, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

“The task of finding a solution is very demanding,” and EU principles such as the free movement of citizens and equal treatment among member countries “aren’t up for debate,” Merkel said in a speech to lower-house lawmakers in Berlin on Wednesday.

Cameron is seeking to win back powers from the EU and obtain greater protection for U.K. interests to present to British voters before the referendum he plans by the end of 2017. In doing so, he may be looking for a clash in Brussels to appeal to his domestic audience amid anti-Europe sentiment in his party and country.

“A head of government should never expose his country or Europe to an existential risk, whatever the threat,” Norbert Roettgen, the head of the German parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, said in an interview on Tuesday. Gunther Krichbaum, another senior lawmaker in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said Cameron shouldn’t count on changing the EU’s treaties.

[LINK] "Ukraine Defaults on $3 Billion Bond to Russia"

Bloomberg notes the continuing collapse of Russia-Ukraine relations.

Ukraine said it won’t repay $3 billion in bonds due to Russia, moving a step closer to a court battle amid a new wave of economic tension between the two ex-Soviet neighbors.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Kiev is imposing a moratorium on the note due Dec. 20, which Russian President Vladimir Putin bought two years ago as part of an abortive bail-out for Ukraine’s former leader just months before he was toppled. Russia said on Friday it will wait until a 10-day grace period on the bond expires on Dec. 30 before starting legal action.

Ukraine, its finances reeling from a two-year-old conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country, had pushed Russia to join a $18 billion restructuring with commercial creditors this year. But Russia argued the debt was sovereign, despite its unusual Eurobond form, and proposed its own repayment terms.

The default “is just confirmation of the unimproved relations between the countries," said Simon Quijano-Evans, the London-based chief emerging-market strategist at Commerzbank AG. “The hope is that backstage negotiations will succeed in finding a solution. Otherwise, a legal case would probably ensue, unnecessarily complicating the ongoing political discussions surrounding eastern Ukraine and the sanctions."

[LINK] "Japan's Married-Name Law Isn't Just About Names"

Bloomberg View's Noah Feldman writes about patriarchy in Japan.

Japan's Supreme Court has rejected an equality-based constitutional challenge to a law requiring couples to adopt either the husband’s or the wife’s last name. The decision is fascinating in its own right, reflecting the contemporary moment for feminism in Japan. It also raises a much broader question: How much should a constitution reflect the distinctive values of the society in which it operates, and how much should it express fundamental rights recognized almost universally?

The decision of Japan’s highest court exemplifies this question in a very concrete way. Japan’s Civil Code, enacted in 1896, during the Meiji era of Westernizing reforms, required that married women adopt their husbands’ last names. A 1947 revision created Article 750 of the code, which says the couple must adopt one family name, which can be that of the husband or the wife.

The provision had an intriguing history. Until 1870, commoners in Japan generally didn’t use last names. In 1876, the reformers initially decided that women should keep their own names upon marriage. The 1896 law reversed this rule, bringing Japan into closer conformity with Western practice of the time.

Today, 96 percent of couples choose the husband's name. This has led to challenges from Japanese feminists and pressure from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which considers the provision sexist.

The court’s decision relied in part on the formal equality of the provision, which it said was sufficient to satisfy the anti-discrimination provision of the constitution.

[LINK] "Ontario to lose equalization payments as Alberta's economic fortunes fall"

Karen Howlett and Jane Taber in The Globe and Mail report about the unpleasant way in which Ontario is no longer a have-not province.

Ontario will shed its status as a poor cousin of Confederation in the coming years, not because its economic fortunes are rebounding, but because resource-rich Alberta is falling on hard times.

The federal government is expected to announce how much each province will receive in the fiscal year 2016-17 from transfer payment programs, which include equalization, before Finance Minister Bill Morneau meets with his provincial and territorial colleagues in Ottawa on Sunday evening.

The equalization program redistributes national income to help poorer provinces provide services comparable to those of their richer counterparts. But equalization experts say the formula for calculating the payments is slow to respond to changes, including volatile commodity prices, which will leave Alberta carrying a disproportionate burden when the numbers are announced this weekend.

Ontario began receiving equalization for the first time in 2009, a dramatic reversal of fortune for the country’s one-time economic powerhouse. It is now set to reclaim its status as a “have” province because the disparity between its economy and that of Alberta is shrinking.

“What we’re talking about here is the bad way of coming out of equalization,” economist Don Drummond said.

[LINK] "The Donbass War. Assessing the Aftermath"

Meduza features Pavel Kanygin's assessment of the catastrophic situation in the Donbas separatist republics in eastern Ukraine. I'm left wondering about the viability of these territories absent the sort of substantial external support that is just not going to come from anyone.

In terms of prosperity and the quality of life, prewar Donbass was essentially on par with Kiev – significantly surpassing other Ukrainian and most Russian regions. Donetsk had one of the three biggest airports in all of Ukraine. Skyscrapers of glass and concrete housed the offices of international companies working directly in the region (rather than remotely through offices in the capital). The city was home to many expats. Local trams and buses offered wireless Internet, even beating the Moscow Metro by a few years.

In 2012, the city hosted the European Championship for football. Looking at Donetsk today, it seems impossible to believe that this was all in the recent past.

In the span of a few summer months in 2014, the financial and industrial capital of eastern Ukraine was transformed into a ghost town. The empty central streets conveyed only military trucks and desperate taxi-drivers with reporters in tow. To the north, to the west, and even in the center of the city, shells exploded every day. Several neighborhoods were destroyed entirely – down to their very foundations. Throughout the province, dozens of towns and villages were burned, annihilated.

Many Donetsk residents – service companies, bureaucrats, foreigners, local hipsters, and intelligentsia – were already leaving by the summer of 2014. And yet the overall population of the provincial center dropped very little; people from the devastated surrounding areas were drawn into Donetsk. Now they make up the new face of the city.

The war has come and gone, leaving behind poverty and pain. The buses and trams have been stripped of their wifi routers. High-voltage cables smashed in the shelling have been sold for scrap. Half-empty shelves in the stores have become customary. The city’s Petrovsky district still has many living in the bomb shelter of the local mine, fearing renewed artillery strikes. The nearby municipal psychiatric hospital has become home to fighters for the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Already last winter, I joined volunteers taking food and medicine to the neighborhood, where typhoid plagued people crowded in basements. What goes on now in Petrovsky and other areas around Donetsk is virtually unknown. This fall, DPR authorities banned volunteers from bringing in medicine and equated NGO activity with espionage.

[LINK] Joe O'Connor in the National Post on Syrians in Atlantic Canada

Joe O'Connor's National Post article "Atlantic Canada, stuck in demographic death spiral, sees huge opportunity in Syrian refugee influx" examines how some Atlantic Canadians look to Syrian refugees as a way to keep the population of the region afloat.

Mike Timani wanted to be an engineer. It was his life plan, and it changed, abruptly, in 1975, when civil war broke out in Lebanon. Timani’s village overlooked the Mediterranean. His parents owned two homes. One was shelled in the fighting, a direct hit that destroyed half of the house while the family was sitting in the other half. Fear and death became the Lebanese norm, and so Timani’s father urged his son to leave, which he did, in 1976, fleeing to Canada because he knew it was a “peaceful country.”

Timani got a job busing tables at a Toronto hotel. He didn’t really know anyone, or how to speak English, but he knew how to work hard and has gone on to employ 60 workers — half of whom are immigrants — at the Fancy Pokket Bakery in Moncton, N.B.

“I understand what civil war is like,” says Timani, who opened his bakery in 1989, specializing in pitas and bagels and the like. “I understand how hard it is to start over. But I was a hardworking guy, as many of us immigrants are.’’

Moncton was among 36 communities identified this week — as were nearby Fredericton and Saint John — by the federal immigration minister, John McCallum, as potential destinations for Syrian refugees. New Brunswick’s government has said the province can accommodate 1,500 Syrians. It will inspire a warm and fuzzy, kindhearted-Maritimers narrative, to be sure, but there is another more urgent storyline at play: the Syrians might desperately need a home, but New Brunswick desperately needs the Syrians.

It is the quid pro quo of the refugee crisis, at least in Atlantic Canada, where the provinces are stuck in a demographic death spiral, with rapidly greying populations, young people leaving for jobs someplace else and shrinking tax bases, lurching under the weight of the retired, the sick and the old.

[LINK] "Amazon Books: After a Month, Still Many Questions"

Shelf Awareness' feature on Amazon Books' new store looks at some interesting issues.

In recent weeks, some publishers have been receiving cheery notes from "the Amazon Books curators"--the buyers for Amazon's bricks-and-mortar store that opened a month ago in Seattle, Wash.--saying that they're looking forward to "building a relationship." The relationship will include the bookstore buyers attending list presentations "with our Amazon.com partners," and publishers providing review copies and other materials for the buyers.

Strikingly, for a store that stocks only 5,000-6,000 titles, many of which are determined by their popularity on Amazon.com, the buyers say that because "a big part of our selection is aimed at discovery, we are enthusiastic about putting great backlist and midlist titles in front of customers. So please let us know if you have any such books you think we should consider."

The letter about joint buyer meetings brings up an issue that many have wondered about, particularly considering that book prices are the same in the bookstore and online: Is Amazon Books getting its stock from Amazon.com, which gets extra terms unavailable to most bricks-and-mortar retailers? Are books being bought non-returnable by Amazon.com but being returned by Amazon Books to Amazon.com? How, if at all, is a distinction made between the two businesses--and how will that be handled at meetings in which the bookstore buyers participate?

[WRITING] "Can an App Really Cure Writer's Block?"

Last November, Bloomberg's Seth Porges wrote about some interesting-sounding writing apps.

Just about everybody has spent some time in the proverbial "zone," when time seems to melt away as you painlessly chug through challenges with a sense of satisfaction and purpose.

This “flow state,”as it was first named by social scientist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Ph.D., in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is familiar to anybody who has ever felt their fingers take control as they played piano, wrote a novel, or stacked Tetris blocks. It's the same otherworldly force that brings rhymes to rappers out of seemingly nothing and makes the work clock seem to move in fast-forward. This is, as the poet Marshall Mathers put it, when you “lose yourself.”

This is state is more than just an abstract concept. When people reach flow, they undergo physiological changes, including an increase in the part of the nervous system associated with relaxation, a recent study by a team of Swedish researchers found. Other studies that have looked at heart rate and breathing patterns back up the link between flow and calm. In other words, flow is real, and it really can help bring us that sought-after sense of happy productivity.

But can we switch flow on with simple software? I recently tried out a pair of new word processing programs that are designed to do just that, at least when it comes to writing. Both try to do the same thing: tune out distractions and stop you from overthinking what you write. To this end, the programs minimize your ability to edit—or even see—what you are writing, keeping you firmly in the present as you tap out words. Editing and polishing are for later—once you’ve fought the tyranny of the blank page and busted through your writer’s block.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly makes the case that people need rest.


• The Dragon's Gaze wonders if a lithium-rich giant star KIC 9821622 ate its exoplanets.


• The Dragon's Tales writes about the Russian war in Syria.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the sociology of holidays.


• A Geocurrents guest post looks at one mapping of ISIS.


• Joe. My. God. notes Donald Trump's defense of Vladimir Putin, discounting state-sponsored murder of journalists, and reports on the repeal of marriage equality in Slovenia.


• Language Hat looks at how a Chinese font was created.


• Language Log looks at how the Japanese language can be used to memorize pi.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money maps student debt in the United States.


• Marginal Revolution considers migration as a basic human right.


• Torontoist looks at how KFC got started in Mississauga.


• Window on Eurasia considers the reasons for Donbas residents to seek refugee status elsewhere, looks at Russia's problems with Circassians, examines Russian Muslim emigrants in Turkey, and reports on fears in Kazakhstan that the country might be attacked by Russian media.

[BRIEF NOTE] On PrEP, and TaSP, and the imminent end of HIV/AIDS

The Thursday before last, I was interviewed as a subject in an ongoing research project, led by the University of Toronto's Peter A. Newman and Carleton University's Adrian Guta, examining the PrEP front in the ongoing fight against HIV/AIDS.

The PrEP choice project: Exploring PrEP users, non-users, and provider perspectives

Are you a man who has sex with other men, living in Toronto, and over the age of 18? We would like to talk to you if you:

1. You are currently using Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and would like to share your experience and you are not currently enrolled in a clinical trial about PrEP.

2. You know about PrEP but you have decided it is not right for you at this time and you would like to share your experience.

As I explained in my enjoyable sixty-minute interview, I fall in the second category. My reasons for not taking PrEP have nothing to do with skepticism on my part about the science, or about taking medication. Rather, it relates directly to matters of cost: My drug plan at work does not cover PrEP, Truvada not yet having been approved by Health Canada as a drug that very effectively prevents HIV transmission, and I don't know how I could get the funds to do so. I have very recently heard that some people have been able to access the Trillium Drug Plan, and this is definitely something I'll be looking into in the New Year. For the time being, I feel as if I'm sitting in an uncomfortable place, looking at a medical revolution occurring outside Ontario--in the United States, in Québec, and most recently in France--and wondering how I'll last.

It isn't that I think I'm at especially high risk: I know what I do and who I do things with, I know what the actual risks are, and I think that if, one day, I ended up testing positive for HIV, I'd have legitimate reason to be surprised. The protocols of safer sex with condoms are protocols I have not had any problems following in my personal life. Were I to get PrEP, I don't think that my sexual practices would change substantially--I certainly would not, as described in the 2005 Los Angeles Times article where I first heard of what might be called proto-PrEP, embark on crystal meth-fueled lost weekends. That sort of sexual behaviour is frankly uninteresting to me, much more of a problem than a source of relief.

In part, it's a matter of my liking a belt-and-suspenders approach. Condoms work very well, used consistently. PrEP also works very well, used consistently. Why not combine the two to absolutely minimize HIV transmission? Truvada does have costs, financial and perhaps otherwise, but as noted by many even the costs of lifelong Truvada treatment are substantially less than the costs of lifelong HIV treatment. What's wrong with a simple pill that can ward off a disease that is still life-changing? Or, rather, what's not right with it? Not taking the drugs can be an issue, but that's always the case with any medical regimen.

It also relates to deeper shifts in the nature of the epidemic. It's starting to become a relative non-issue in ways I scarcely imagined when I first came out. At the same time that the PrEP revolution is ongoing, preventing HIV infections among HIV-negative people, the latest anti-retroviral treatments are not only keeping the HIV-positive in good health, they are radically reducing the chances of further infection. One thing widely reported in the media with varying levels of incredulity after Charlie Sheen's self-outing as HIV-positive, in
Vox and Gawker and MacLean's and New York Magazine, is that Sheen has undetectable levels of the virus in his system and cannot infect people. This was not just Sheen talking: This is the actual science. Multiple research projects, including the ongoing PARTNER study, have so far concluded that the chances someone HIV-undetectable could transmit HIV on to someone HIV-negative are trivial. The PARTNER study has not yet found a single instance of such a transmission happening, not with tens of thousands of sex acts in hundreds of couples in two years. TaSP, treatment as prevention, also works. The approach of systematic testing and universal treatment of HIV, pioneered in Canada in British Columbia by Dr. Julio Montaner, can break the back of the epidemic. Saving people's lives also slows down the epidemic.

Take the existence of PrEP, to start. Throw in alongside PrEP TaSP, equally effective in preventing infections. Throw in alongside these two the existence of condoms, a technology that is also quite effective. I do not think that I am wrong to say that, in my particular First World environment, HIV/AIDS is starting to become a trivial threat. It makes my head spin as I think this, so contrary it is to what I learned and what I practiced, but fearing HIV is something that might be falling out of style. This is wonderful, but this is a shock with profound ramifications for me and others. Once, when I read psychotherapist Walt Odets' In the Shadow of the Epidemic, I was struck by an exchange in which a gay speaker explained to a straight counterpart that, in the context of HIV/AIDS, every instance of sex, every moment of intimacy, was overshadowed by the possibility that something might go wrong, that someone might become infected with a lethal agent or (even worse) infect someone they loved with said. Not living under this fear would be such a relief, I can scarcely imagine what it would be like.

We need many things, here in Ontario at the end of 2015, here on this world, even. PrEP is one of them.