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Jan. 16th, 2016
Spacing Toronto's Dave Meslin argues that Toronto should not oppose street murals.
More, including beautiful photos of the street art, is at the link.
It’s been seven months since I wrote about the Regal Heights street mural, a community-driven art project painted by neighbours of all ages on Springmount Avenue.
Despite half a year of rain, traffic and salt, the mural is still looking pretty good, although the brightness of the colours has already begun to slowly fade. That’s the nature of street murals. Daily abuse ensures that they don’t last as long as their vertical cousins painted on walls. That’s part of the fun: re-painting the mural, with a new design, every few years! Luckily, this particular community art project has been immortalised on Street View. But while Google has given the Regal Heights street mural eternal digital life, it looks like City staff are trying to ensure that the project itself has no future at all.
In response to a supportive motion from Councillor Cesar Palacio, Transportation Services has written a stunning staff report, recommending that no street murals be allowed anywhere in Toronto. The same report acknowledges that painted street murals are currently allowed in Vancouver, Ottawa, Halifax and Kitchener.
More, including beautiful photos of the street art, is at the link.
[LINK] "A Tempest in a Digital Teapot"
Jan. 16th, 2016 05:23 pmSavage Minds hosts Colleen Morgan's essay about the role of digital images in modern-day anthropology.
It was hot, but that was not unusual. We woke up at the first call to prayer to be on site at sunrise. I would trudge through the dimly-lit streets of the village, up to the ancient tell, and sit next to my trench until I had enough light to see my paperwork. The cut limestone went from dull gray, to a rosy pink, then that brief and magical moment called the golden hour, when the archaeology would become clear and beautifully lit and I would rush around trying to take the important photos of the day. Then the light would become hard, white-hot, and often over 100F. By lunchtime all of the crisp angles of the limestone would disappear into a smeary haze, hardly worth bothering with a camera. Photographs of people were impossible too—everyone was dusty, hot, irritable, half in shadow under hats, scarves.
I picked up my camera and climbed out of the Mamluk building I was excavating, on my way down the ancient tell of Dhiban and back up the neighboring tell of the modern town of Dhiban. As I walked between the Byzantine, Roman, Nabatean and Islamic piles of cut stone, a faint trace of smoke made me hesitate, then come off the winding goat path. Two of the Bani Hamida bedouin who worked with us on site were stoking a small fire on the tell. While making fires on the archaeology was certainly not encouraged, the local community had been using the tell to socialize for a long time. I greeted the men and they invited me to sit and have qahwa, a strong, hot, sweet, green coffee served in many of the local hospitality rituals and customs. I refused once, then twice, then looked over my shoulder at the vanishing backs of my fellow archaeologists, on their way to breakfast. Then I accepted a cup. But first, I pulled out my camera and snapped a photo.
When I’m feeling ornery, I tell people that I wrote a whole chapter of my PhD thesis about a photograph of a teapot. Even worse, a digital photograph of a teapot. And it’s not really a teapot, it is a coffeepot, perched on a small twig fire on top of a tell heaving with archaeology, and tended by these two men, Atif and Zaid, who did not want to be in the frame. They are represented by two slightly blurry sticks, hovering in the foreground, a present absence. The photo isn’t even all that good.
See, in my thesis (Emancipatory Digital Archaeology) I was working through what digital artifacts do in archaeology. What does it mean to take a digital photograph of a pot sherd, a woman swinging a mattock, a teapot coffeepot in the desert sun? How is the analog-turned-digital moment mobilized to create archaeological understanding? Can a virtual reality model of a Neolithic house change the way we understand the past, and, can we start making these things, these digital ephemera, in a better way, to create a more participatory, multivocal, craft-based archaeology?
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald's Tom Ayers writes about the enormous success of Cape Breton University's online course in the Mi'kmaq language.
The course homepage is here.
Registration for a new online and in-class course on Mi’kmaq history and culture at Cape Breton University has already surpassed 2,200 students and the number keeps growing.
And that’s just fine with instructor Stephen Augustine and co-facilitator Ashlee Cunsolo Willox.
The free 12-week course launches Monday evening, covering a range of topics that include the Mi’kmaq creation story, oral history and traditions, indigenous governance, the legacies of residential schools and the impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“As of two hours ago, we were at 2,238, which is 400 more people than Friday night,” Cunsolo Willox, the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Health at the Sydney university, said Sunday afternoon.
“We have no upper limit, because we are running it as the open online access for free. We are asking people to register just so we will get a sense of who actually will show up on campus … but really, we can take as many people as have access to Internet and interest in the course.”
The course, called Learning From Knowledge Keepers of Mi’kma’ki, will stream live and sessions will be archived each week and available any time to the public. It will also be broadcast by Bell TV1.
The course homepage is here.
CBC reports on the warming of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The Gulf of St. Lawrence reached its highest recorded average temperature in a century in 2015, scientists say.
The temperature 150 metres below the surface reached 6 C last year, the warmest in 100 years of observation.
Peter Galbraith, a research scientist with Department of Fisheries and Oceans, led the study and said he's not surprised by the finding.
"We've been seeing this coming, and it's not stopping," he said.
The record temperature may be related to climate change, he said.
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CBC notes that, in British Columbia, ocean acidification caused by increased carbon dioxide levels is already starting to harm shellfish.
Scallops and oysters have long been among B.C.'s signature seafood stocks, but there is now concern that with oceans becoming more acidic, shellfish are struggling to survive
"It means the product will become more expensive with time," said Roberta Stevenson who speaks for the BC Shellfish Grower's Association. "Always when you have more demand than supply we are able to raise our prices."
According to Statistics Canada, the price of seafood in Canada rose close to three per cent over the past year.
Stevenson says as waters grow more acidic, farmers are seeing a direct impact on the health of their shellfish, specifically their ability to procreate.
"The concern is in the hatcheries when we try to get our animals to reproduce in a hatchery setting at day eight they have a difficulty creating their shell because of the acidity in the water," she said.
Wired's Chelsea Leu writes about the potential for climate change to disrupt the écologies of the oceans in any number of ways, some of which are--plausibly--wholly unknown.
For a whole month this year, the world’s atmosphere contained more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide, on average. That’s more CO2 than the atmosphere has seen for hundreds of thousands of years, and those levels just keep going up.
All that carbon in the atmosphere means hotter global temperatures and more severe weather, of course. But scientists have less of an idea of what climate change will do to the ocean—a complex, difficult-to-study realm that’s due for huge chemical and ecological shifts. And that’s worrying, because the oceans are also a big carbon sink and the source of sustenance for most life on Earth.
Some changes are pretty certain, says Charlie Stock, a climate modeler at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. The ocean of the future will be warmer than it is today. And its structure will also be different—less-dense warm water will stack on top of a layer of cold water, with less mixing between the two. “Ocean productivity is basically bringing together nutrients and light,” Stock says. Deeper water has more nutrients; the surface gets more light. If less often the twain shall meet, overall productivity could go down.
And a warming ocean jumbles up where animals can survive. Fish tend to follow the water that’s just the right temperature for them, so eventually, Stock says, tropical fish could end up in normally temperate waters. Some species’ habitats will get squeezed—especially animals adapted to very specific conditions at the poles. And critters at the equator have to deal with ocean temperatures that are warmer than they’re used to.
The ocean’s chemical changes are especially wrenching for denizens of deep water, says Lisa Levin, a biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a paper published in Science today. They’ve adapted to living conditions that don’t change very often, and they tend to live longer and grow more slowly than their shallow water counterparts. So they’re sensitive: An uptick of one degree temperature-wise can push deep-water corals to the edge of their tolerance, and more acidic waters (from more carbon dioxide) make it much harder for them to build their chalky skeletons. That’s bad news, because those corals form the foundation (literally and figuratively) of entire ecosystems. “We could cross thresholds we don’t even know about,” she says.
Science Alert carried Julia Calderone's Business Insider article looking at the science behind the cat's eye.
Cats have some of the most unique eyes in the animal world: Instead of having circular pupils like humans, the black parts in the centres of their eyes are vertical - which can adapt quickly and can open and close like the aperture of a camera. Why are cat eyes so special? It all comes down to how they use their vision, new research says.
By analysing 214 different species of land animals, researchers at UC Berkeley found that the way animals spend their day determines the shape of their pupils. The team published their study on 7 August 2015 in the journal Science Advances.
Pupil shape and size determines how much light gets to the eyes - and is then translated by the brain into a picture of the world around us. When it's dark out our pupils expand to let in more light and enhance our vision, but when it's bright out, our pupils get smaller to prevent overstimulation. Cat eyes do the same thing, but with much more finesse than humans.
Previous research has suggested that the thin-slitted pupils of domesticated house cats and other predatory animals allow for a wider range of muscle movements and for more light to enter the eye.
Thin slits in cats - as opposed to circular pupils - allow for a huge change between the constricted and dilated states, and are capable of undergoing a 135-to-300-fold change in area. Human pupils, for comparison, can only change their pupil area 15-fold, according to a press release from UC Berkeley.
[CAT] "Cheetahs Are Hard"
Jan. 16th, 2016 09:04 pmVice's Motherboard carried Kaleigh Rogers' article looking at the problems faced by a cheetah breeding centre in Virginia. Apparently cheetahs behave quite differently from other cats, making an already difficult task of breeding captive populations to compensate for the decline of wild ones even more difficult.
Cheetahs don’t roar, like other big cats. They purr.
It’s a deep, rumbling vibration that is simultaneously tranquil and terrifying. You can sense their calm, but you can also sense their power. I was transfixed as I listened to Nick, a five-year-old male cheetah, purring happily inches from my face on the other side of a chain-link fence.
It was a cold, grey day in the hills of Virginia, more than 7,000 miles away from the cheetah’s natural habitat in the dry grasslands of sub-Saharan Africa. Nick paced the fence line, my view of him obscured by some plastic slats woven through the links.
“He’s really hard to get pictures of because he’s always right on the fence,” explained Adrienne Crosier, a biologist and the head of the cheetah breeding program at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal. She told me Nick, hand-reared for a few weeks as a newborn, is particularly fond of people.
“He always wants to come see you,” she said, Nick’s purr thrumming continuously.
Nick has spent his entire life in these hills at SCBI, where 21 endangered species are bred and researched. The cheetah program is considered one of the facility’s biggest success stories. Over the last five years, SCBI has been responsible for bringing 34 healthy cheetah cubs into the world and contributing a wealth of scientific research to our understanding of the species. The goal is to gain knowledge that will help conserve cheetahs in the wild. Because of their nomadic nature and vast territories, studying cheetahs in situ has always been a difficult task, and a large portion of what we now know about the species—their health, fertility, endocrinology, genetics—came from research done on captive cats.
But there are conservationists who question whether this strategy does much to help the wild population. With just an estimated 10,000 cheetahs remaining in the wild and everything from habitat destruction, to conflicts with farmers and the exotic pet trade threatening the species’s survival, is this strategy the most effective way to protect these cats? What good is a friendly cheetah in Virginia to the ones facing extinction in the wild?
Lawyers, Guns and Money was one blog that linked to Richard Yeselson's recent article in The Atlantic, "The Return of the 1920s". In this article, Yeselson suggests that the United States is set to replay the 1920s, with all of its crises and accomplishments, now in the 2010s.
Yeselson's arguments are interesting, so much so that I suspect he might be right. What do you think?
In the wake of the terrorist mass murders in Paris and then San Bernardino, many Republicans and conservatives, already concerned about unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central America, have responded by conflating opposition to immigration, anxieties about the porousness of America’s borders, and fear of radical, Muslim-identified terrorists. Most Republican governors (and Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire) announced that they would refuse to accept refugees from Syria. Republican members of Congress, with the support of 25 percent of the Democratic caucus, passed a bill to “pause” the program. First, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would “consider” closing Muslim mosques in the United States “because some of the ideas and some of the hatred—the absolute hatred—is coming from these areas.” Trump then further suggested that Muslims should be required to have a special ID and promising to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. And now he has proposed that Muslims be temporarily banned from entering the United States, a position that, according to several national polls, enjoys majority support among Republicans and white evangelicals. Liberals, including President Obama, have argued that this reaction is not only nonresponsive and practically absurd, but also, as the president put it, “shameful” and, pointedly, “not American.”
But when Obama speaks of what is “not American,” countless citizens wonder: Who is he to judge what is “not American”? The United States is wracked by a spasm of anti-cosmopolitanism and fear of radical subversion. It is exemplified, for many Americans by the election and presidency of Obama himself: black, yet biracially cosmopolitan, urban, intellectual, raised partly in a Muslim country, and the abandoned son of a Kenyan activist and academic. Millions of conservatives still suspect him of being un-Christian and, literally, not a native-born American qualified to serve as president. That Obama’s election occurred simultaneously with the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression exacerbated these cultural tensions. The current conflict is a continuation of one over the past century in the United States between what the historian Gary Gerstle has called the racial nationalism of blood and ethnic supremacy and a more expansive civic nationalism which promises a common political project of equal rights and respect for all. America has seen expressions of both racial and civic nationalism in its history—both are quintessentially American articulations of political power and hierarchy. Yet these different national projects—one culturally and ethnically homogeneous, the other inclusive of differences, yet seeking to subsume them into a “Party of America”, in political theorist Rogers Smith’s words—both risk canceling out a third strain of American nationalism. They contend with a paradoxically de-nationalized pluralism of countless hyphenated Americans whose sub-communities do not cohere into a generous polity larger than the sum of its parts.
There is no period of American history that so pervasively demonstrated the power of ethno-nationalism to suppress pluralist differences as that following the Russian Revolution, the end of the First World War, and then continuing through much of the 1920s. There are many broad parallels between this era and our own. In both historical moments, there is a rising racial nationalism that takes hold of a significant (and demographically similar) portion of the country. Following the 1920s, Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership during the Depression and a massive labor movement—which, at least, in its ideals (if often not its practice) extolled the social solidarity of Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions—renewed civic nationalism. So, too, did the total mobilization on behalf of prosecuting the Second World War. But civic nationalism, too, was still flawed by institutional racism, and dependent upon extra-national enemies—first German and Japanese totalitarianism and then Soviet communism—to somewhat unify the American political culture. What might we expect to, first, culminate, and, then, follow, the moment of Trump?
Yeselson's arguments are interesting, so much so that I suspect he might be right. What do you think?