[CAT] Shakespeare, striking a pose

[PHOTO] Me by the CN Tower, Toronto

I spent yesterday afternoon exploring Toronto with a visiting friend. The CN Tower was an inevitable destination.





This new photo of me is much appreciated. I needed a new profile picture for the new year, something nice to replaced my pose with Yorkdale Fashion Santa.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes the TTC's commitment to imrprove the 501 Queen streetcar.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes one white dwarf that has the debris of a planetary system about it and looks at a brown dwarf with detectable clouds.


• Far Outliers notes how, in 1988, Armenia-Azerbaijani disputes over Karabakh started destabilizing the entire Soviet Union.


• Language Hat considers what a language is.


• Language Log considers the linguistic effect of Reddit.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money mocks George Lucas' statement comparing his sale of Star Wars to Disney to white slavery.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Ontario is a very highly indebted subnational jurisdiction indeed, though much of this has to do with the fiscal elements of Canadian federalism.


• The Planetary Society Blog examines the findings from Ceres.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the hardening of Europe's borders.


• Transit Toronto notes that TTC has its thirteenth new streetcar and reports on the rollout of PRESTO.


• Towleroad reports on a legal challenge in Hong Kong to that jurisdiction's ban on same-sex marriage.


• Window on Eurasia notes the winddown of many of Russia's business dealings with Central Asia.

[URBAN NOTE] "Beach grooming could face city budget axe"

The Toronto Star's Betsy Powell reports on one of the many, many functions of Toronto's civic government which might get cut this fiscal year.

During warmer months, Marawan El-Asfahani and his children love swimming in Lake Ontario and hanging out at Kew-Balmy Beach near the family’s east-end home.

“We have a phenomenal set of beaches in the city, and not only that, they’re Blue Flag certified too,” he says of the international eco-award given to beaches meeting stringent water quality, environmental and safety standards.

But the Toronto branding specialist also says it’s not uncommon to stumble across debris in the coarse sand. It’s one of the reasons he would like the city to start grooming all swimming beaches daily, treating them as a valued public asset and “core destination” for residents and tourists alike.

[. . .]

Next week, Toronto’s 2016 budget season kicks into gear when councillors begin debating and prioritizing the coming year’s spending and revenue plans and priorities.

The city is facing severe fiscal challenges. Staff has presented an operating budget that comes up $57.4 million short, along with another $67 million in previously identified priorities including repairs to social housing and new spending for a council-endorsed poverty reduction plan.

For months, budget committee chair Gary Crawford has been meeting with representatives of 35 agencies, departments and divisions “to talk about their priorities.” He has also been setting the stage publicly for the annual financial showdown over the $11 billion budget.

[ISL] "Charlottetown company aims to rekindle interest in Maritime cheeses"

Jim Day, writing for The Guardian of Charlottetown, reports on a Toronto acquaintance of mine who has set up an interesting cheese business on the Island. Well done, Victoria!

Victoria Goddard is eager to slice into the cheese business.

The 33-year-old author established a small farm in Grandview earlier this year with plans to grow mixed fruit and flowers.

[. . .]

In addition to old favourites, her company will focus on regional and specialty cheeses not readily available on P.E.I.

Goddard will sell cheeses made in the Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario as well as cheeses imported from Belgium, Italy, England and France.

"The Maritimes and Quebec produce some of the world's best cheeses,'' she says.

"We'll be stocking local favourites, and will gradually increase our selection each week as we grow.''

[LINK] On the potential decline of Wikipedia

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen linked to the preprint of an upcoming paper, by Halfaker et al., "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System:
How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline".

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.

[LINK] "More African Elephants May Be Sold to China This Year"

National Geographic's Adam Cruise reports on Zimbabwe's continued export of elephants to China. This may be better that killing surplus elephants wholesale, but there are still obvious ethical issues afoot.

In October 2014, tens of young elephants were taken from their family groups in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, where they were held in a capture unit for eight months until July 2015. That’s when 24 were flown to the Qingyuan quarantine facility in Guangdong Province before being transferred to Chimelong Safari Park, also in Guangdong.

Oppah Muchinguri, Zimbabwe’s minister of environment, water and climate, said that more of the country’s wildlife will be captured and sent to China to give them a better and safer environment, according to the China Daily. Muchinguri spoke during a visit to the Qingyuan animals and plants preservation center, Guangdong, on New Year's Eve.

"We are happy that young African animals have been well accommodated here in China,” she said. “We are willing to export more in the years to come as it would help in the preservation of wild animals."

In September 2015, National Geographic reported that the elephants in China were being mistreated and were slipping into poor health.

Previously, in 2012, Zimbabwe exported eight elephants to China, according to a database produced by the Convention on International Trade in Wild Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), the international body that sets wildlife trade policy. Only four survived the journey. Another three died shortly after arriving in China, leaving only one surviving elephant.

[LINK] "Can Social Insects Have a Civilization?"

In the past, I've blogged about the idea of swarm intelligence, the sort that might emerge from social insects or other highly social if individually simple-minded creatures. Centauri Dreams features a guest post from one Michael Chorost in which he imagines a trajectory for a social insect species to evolve to high civilization, even sentience.

[H]ere’s the idea I want to test on you all. I asked myself, “Would it be possible for social insect colonies on some other planet to evolve to have language and technology – in other words, a civilization?”

Of course, the idea of swarm intelligence, or hive-mind intelligence, has been around forever in science fiction. To give but one example, Frank Schatzing’s The Swarm posits an undersea alien made of single-celled, physically unconnected organisms that collectively have considerable intelligence. But I need to examine the idea with much more rigor than can be done in fiction.

I refined the question by deciding that, as on earth, the individual insects would have brains too small for serious cognition. The unit of analysis would not be individual bugs but colonies of bugs. The intelligence would have to emerge from their interaction.

After much thought, my answer to the question is “No – but…”

Let me explain both the No and the but. It is these explanations on which I want your feedback.

[LINK] On the origins of high-tech New England in whaling

The Dragon's Tales linked to an article in the Economist, "Fin-tech", suggesting that the structure of whaling companies was uniquely influential.

Most historians trace the origins of the modern company back to outfits like the Dutch East India Company and its British equivalent. These were given national monopolies on trade in certain goods or with certain places. This legally buttressed status allowed them to fund themselves by selling shares to the public, helping to get stockmarkets off the ground. The managers of these multinational enterprises were professionals with only small ownership stakes. Lower-level employees generally had no shareholding at all.

By eliminating dependence on individual owners or managers, these entities became self-perpetuating. But their monopolies also embroiled them in politics and led inevitably to corruption. Both the British and Dutch versions ended up requiring government bail-outs—a habit giant firms have not yet kicked.

The whaling industry involved a radically different approach. It was one of the first to grapple with the difficulty of aligning incentives among owners, managers and employees, according to Tom Nicholas and Jonas Peter Akins of Harvard Business School. In this model, there was no state backing. Managers held big stakes in the business, giving them every reason to attend to the interests of the handful of outside investors. Their stakes were held through carefully constructed syndicates and rarely traded; everyone was, financially at least, on board for the entire voyage. Payment for the crew came from a cut of the profits, giving them a pressing interest in the success of the voyage as well. As a consequence, decision-making could be delegated down to the point where it really mattered, to the captain and crew in the throes of the hunt, when risk and return were palpable.

[LINK] "Outside the box: a Sunni endgame in Syria, Iraq?"

Fernando Betancourt at Open Democracy speculates about one scenario for the end of ISIS, pregnant with risk for everyone involved, which just so happens to be everyone now.

There are signs of previously unknown levels of cooperation and alignment between the United States and the key Sunni states in the region, which could lead to a power-sharing agreement that satisfies their strategic interests. The principal events are as follows:

In October, a group of 53 Saudi imams unaffiliated with the government called for a jihad against the Russian, Iranian and Syrian governments. The group went even further than official condemnation and likened the Russian intervention to the 1980 war in Afghanistan—which led to the birth of Al Qaeda, in case anyone has forgotten. It is significant that the Saudi government allowed or was not able to stop the communication; the former would indicate approval of the intensified message while the latter would imply weakness and the desire of the Saudis to avoid internal dissension from the more radical clergy.

On 5 November, the USAF announced the deployment of six F-15C Eagles to Incirlik AFB in Turkey. That is interesting, because unlike the F-15E Strike Eagle the F-15C is a pure air superiority fighter that has no ground attack role, yet ISIS has no air force. The mission is to protect Turkish airspace; but from what? The only planes flying over Syria belong to the Combined Joint Task Force, to Russia or to the Syrian government.

On 24 November, a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24 that had momentarily violated Turkish airspace. This act goes far beyond Turkish aspirations in Syria and involves a much wider Russo-Turkish competition encompassing the Black Sea and the Caucasus; but the fact that military action was taken in this particular theatre is significant and may indicate that Turkey is prepared to act more aggressively than previous indicated.

On 5 December, the Iraqi government officially accused the Turkish government of an “illegal incursion” of troops into northern Iraq. This was in response to the rotation of about 150 trainers to an Iraqi camp north of Mosul, which has been a largely routine occurrence until now. Yet, freakish as this protest might seem, it was serious enough for the Turkish ambassador to be summoned to Baghdad and the Turkish government to issue a warning to all of its nationals to leave Iraq.

[LINK] "Recruiting Mercenaries for Middle East Fuels Rancor in Colombia"

Bloomberg's Matthew Bristow and Nafeesa Syeed report on how the habit of Middle Eastern countries of recruiting Colombian mercenaries to fight in regional wars is not playing well at all in Colombia itself.

Colombia’s government is frustrated at having its top soldiers lured to the Middle East as mercenaries for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates when they are still needed to fight insurgents and drug traffickers, Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas said.

A Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen has deployed Colombian contractors, according to a former army officer who has been involved in recruiting contractors and a senior government official, who asked not to be named because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Soldiers are persuaded to quit the army when their terms of enlistment end by the prospect of earning about seven times as much in the Middle East, the former officer said.

Colombia’s efforts to negotiate with Middle East governments over the hiring of mercenaries have so far failed, Villegas said in a Dec. 22 interview in Bogota. While Colombia has reached a tentative peace accord with the country’s biggest rebel group, its special forces are targeting new mafia groups seeking to fill a void left by a planned demobilization.

“My complaint is why, for instance, the U.A.E. or Saudi Arabia have not been able to negotiate a treaty with Colombia to regulate that relationship,” Villegas said. “Every time we approach those governments, the answer is no, we’re not interested in a treaty.”

[DM] "Edward Hugh, Economist Who Foresaw Eurozone’s Struggles, Dies at 67"

The last Demography Matters post of 2015 noted the sad death of co-blogger Edward Hugh, and the first post of this year shall note Landon Thomas Jr.'s obituary for Edward in The New York Times. A sampling:

“For those of us pessimists who believed that the eurozone structure was leading to an unsustainable bubble in the periphery countries, Edward Hugh was a must-read,” said Albert Edwards, a strategist based in London for the French bank Société Générale. “His prescience in explaining the mechanics of the crisis went almost unnoticed until it actually hit.”

As the eurozone’s economic problems grew, so did Mr. Hugh’s popularity, and by 2011 he had moved the base of his operations to Facebook. There he attracted many thousands of additional followers from all over the world.

If Santa Claus and John Maynard Keynes could combine as one, he might well be Edward Hugh. He was roly-poly and merry, and he always had a twinkle in his eye, not least when he came across a data point or the hint of an economic or social trend that would support one of his many theories.

His intellect was too restless to be pigeonholed, but when pressed he would say that he saw himself as a Keynesian in spirit, but not letter. And in tune with his view that economists in general had become too wedded to static economic models and failed their obligation to predict and explain, he frequently cited this quotation from Keynes:

“Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.”

[FORUM] What do you think will happen in 2016?

Over at Personal Reflections, Jim Belshaw shared a collection of his predictions about the future of the world in the coming year. Oil exporters will continue to be affected by low prices, the European Union will grind towards dealing with the refugee crisis and incidentally with its own disunity, Russia and China will be searching, and so on.

What do you think will happen? Will there be any noteworthy trends you see occurring this year, whether on the scale of the globe or at a more local level? Myself, I half-expect a certain amount of disenchantment with the new Trudeau government as the scale of the work needed becomes apparent.

What say you all?