[PHOTO] Late night at Eglinton Station as the train comes in

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes underground constructions, from subways to roads, which never took off.


• Centauri Dreams suggests that an analysis of KIC 8462852 which claimed the star had dimmed sharply over the previous century is incorrect.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the greenhouse effect of water vapour in exoplanets and wonders if carbon monoxide detection precludes life.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the economic radicalism of early Marvel.


• Marginal Revolution argues China's financial system should remain disconnected from the wider world's so as to avoid capital flight.


• The Numerati reacts to the recent snowstorm.


• Personal Reflections examines Australia Day.


• The Planetary Society Blog depicts an astronomer tracking a comet.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes that Ukraine now hosts one million refugees.


• Towleroad notes that gay refugees are now getting separate housing in Germany.


• Window on Eurasia talks about the worrying popularity of Chechnya's Kadyrov and suggests that when the money runs out Russia's regions will go their separate ways.

[LINK] "With a little pill, could one city’s AIDS epidemic be ending?"

Ariana Eunjung Cha's Washington Post article suggests--plausibly--that the mass uptake of PrEP in San Francisco may mean that future HIV transmissions will stop in that city. There's something fitting to this, inasmuch as AIDS was first identified in this centre.

On online dating sites, Matthew Sachs identifies himself as a 5-foot-8, 130-pound grad student who likes hiking, performance art and community service. He says he’s interested in meeting a broad range of guys, from jocks to geeks, and notes that — oh, by the way — he’s “On PrEP.”

Those four letters stand for a daily medical regimen in which healthy individuals take a blue oval pill to lower their risk of becoming infected with HIV. The treatment, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, has become so common in the Bay Area’s gay community that it’s frequently mentioned in social media profiles from Facebook to Scruff.

Since the first breakthrough research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010, the once-a-day dose of Truvada has consistently been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection by as much as 90 percent. The results of the most recent study, which was published in September, were even more encouraging: Not one of the 600 people taking the drug became infected over two years.

As many as 10,000 San Franciscans could now be on PrEP, according to one city official’s estimate. The treatment has been transformative here, not just in medical terms but in how it has changed the nature of dating, love and relationships between those who are HIV-positive and those who aren’t. And it has prompted some AIDS experts to consider something that would have been unfathomable during the dark days of the 1980s: Could the nation’s onetime epicenter of HIV/AIDS be the place where the epidemic that has so haunted Americans begins to come to an end?

Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is one of the believers. It’s “very realistic,” he said, that San Francisco might see new HIV infections cease in several years. But the rest of the country will be more challenging, he said.

[LINK] "Japan Won’t Give Up Sharp Without a Fight"

Bloomberg's multi-authored article on the prospects for ailing Japanese corporation Sharp can be best read as another data point reflecting the decline of Japan's economy.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came into office on a pledge of resuscitating the economy with market reforms and stimulus programs. Now his government’s commitment to shareholder rights faces scrutiny in the case of troubled electronics giant Sharp.

Although the Osaka-based company is a household name because of its TVs, it’s long operated in the red. For the year ending in March, analysts estimate a loss of 82 billion yen ($694 million). Sharp is in talks with two possible saviors: Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group and a government-backed fund called Innovation Network Corp. of Japan (INCJ). Foxconn is offering $5.1 billion; INCJ plans to bid $2.6 billion.

It sounds like a win for Foxconn. But in Japan, floundering companies have long relied on the state. Sharp’s management is leaning toward the lower offer, according to two people familiar with the talks. Shareholders haven’t griped publicly, and Sharp’s banks seem to be onboard.

Critics see Sharp as proof that Abe doesn’t have the stomach for tough reforms. After vowing to liberalize labor markets and deregulate parts of industry, he has delivered few substantive changes. The economy has contracted three times since he took office. “This is a test case for Abe, and he and his government will fail,” says Michael Cucek, a political science professor at Temple University’s Japan campus. Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou has met with Sharp’s major lenders as well as government officials to press his case, according to a person familiar with the talks.

[LINK] "Webcam search engine raises privacy concerns for connected devices"

CTV reports on the astonishing lack of security for Internet-networked devices. The search engine in question, Shodan, might be appalled for what it enables, but the manufacturters bear much more responsibility.

A young child asleep on a couch in Israel. Mourners huddled together at a small funeral in Brazil. An elderly woman stretching in a fitness centre in Poland. All available for anyone to watch via the unsecured webcams overhead.

This isn't "1984," it's the world in 2016. Shodan, a search engine that indexes computers and devices rather than information, now allows users to pull screenshots from nanny cams, security cameras and other connected devices around the world that don't ask for a username or password.

Those screenshots are connected to an IP address, a unique identifier for each Internet connection or device that can be traced back to a general geographic area.

Anne Cavoukian, former Ontario privacy commissioner and now the executive director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University, said she was appalled when she saw the Shodan webcam search in action.

Yet, she said, it's only a symptom of the wider problem with the so-called Internet of Things, where many webcams and other connected devices such as wearables, TVs and thermostats ship with a low level of security -- and some with none at all.

[LINK] "Your paper brain and your Kindle brain aren't the same thing"

Public Radio International hosts an article noting that people read online and printed materials differently. E-books and books are not perfectly interchangeable after all.

Manoush Zomorodi, managing editor and host of WNYC's New Tech City, recalls a conversation with the Washington Post's Mike Rosenwald, who's researched the effects of reading on a screen. “He found, like I did, that when he sat down to read a book his brain was jumping around on the page. He was skimming and he couldn’t just settle down. He was treating a book like he was treating his Twitter feed," she says.

Neuroscience, in fact, has revealed that humans use different parts of the brain when reading from a piece of paper or from a screen. So the more you read on screens, the more your mind shifts towards "non-linear" reading — a practice that involves things like skimming a screen or having your eyes dart around a web page.

“They call it a ‘bi-literate’ brain,” Zoromodi says. “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain.”

So what's deep reading? It's the concentrated kind we do when we want to "immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document,” Zoromodi says. And that uses the kind of long-established linear reading you don't typically do on a computer. “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet we don’t do that.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Condo buying frenzy in Waterloo as Google moves in"

The Toronto Star hosts Katia Dmitrieva's Bloomberg article noting how Waterloo's tech sector is making its real estate attractive to investors.

In a banquet hall in north Toronto, a condominium-sales event is generating the kind of frenzy more often seen on a trading-room floor.

Michael Wekerle, former Bay Street trader, technology investor, Dragons’ Den judge and now real-estate mogul, steps up to a podium in front of about 1,600 people to make his pitch. Waterloo, with its two universities and a burgeoning technology sector that’s attracted companies such as Google Inc. and dozens of startups, is booming, he says.

“It’s a land grab,” Wekerle, 52, dressed in a light grey three-piece suit and trademark sunglasses, tells the rapt crowd last weekend. “There were zero cranes when I first showed up there and there are 15 cranes in the sky now.”

He finishes his speech. Then all hell breaks loose. Prospective real-estate investors surge to the back of the room, submitting paperwork for offers on one or more units as agents in suits shout and gesture to clients, who anxiously pace the aisles. Three hours later, the 250-unit, $85 million District Condos project is sold out and 170 people are added to a waiting list.

The fervent demand for property in Waterloo highlights the city’s coming-of-age as an investment destination: first by technology companies and now real estate firms looking to gain from the city’s metamorphosis. Real estate investors at the event, including families, seasoned individuals and couples, were looking for higher returns than in Toronto, where homes are sold for almost double what they are in Waterloo.

[URBAN NOTE] "Two Cheers for the One Stop Subway Extension"

Torontoist hosts John Parker's argument that the subway confusion in Scarborough, with multiple overlapping and changing plans over the years condensing towards a future of underservicing in east-end Toronto, will work out for the best.

It clearly uses six kilometres of subway tunnel solely to link Scarborough Town Centre to the end of the existing TTC line. This exceeds the length of any single stretch on the current system. It will be costly, and it will require some serious reworking of how the TTC deploys its trains at the eastern end of Line 2. But to expect the politicians to give up on that symbolic length of subway tunnel appears beyond hope at this point.

On the happy side, it will no doubt get a lot of use—as advocates for a Scarborough subway have argued all along. A lot of people live or work within a short walk of the proposed destination. Of all the proposals that were seriously advanced in the long and tortured path to a final plan, this one has the benefit of not being completely crazy.

It then becomes a matter of fare differential to determine how many riders heading for downtown Toronto stay on the line to Bloor-Yonge (or—God willing—to a future downtown relief line), and how many hop off and pick up the GO train at Kennedy for a quick trip to Union Station.

As to the presumed role of a local SmartTrack line, the matter becomes largely irrelevant. The fallacy of the original Smart Track promise becomes increasingly evident with each announcement that emerges from the City’s detailed review process—just look at the utter fantasy of the proposed western spur to the airport. Who knows when—if ever—anything resembling the election-time proposal will be implemented and, if it is, what it will look like and who will operate it. At the moment, it appears for all the world that it will be absorbed into the detail of an eventual regional GO line, and it will be implemented when Queen’s Park decides to get around to it.

[URBAN NOTE] "How Trump Bungled the Deal of a Lifetime"

Bloomberg View's Timothy L. O'Brien notes that, for all of his reputation as a deal-maker, Trump is actually bad. For proof, O'Brien offers Trump's mishandling of a major deal in Manhattan.

Through Trump’s rise, fall and rebirth, there was one major real estate project that he tried to keep. The tale of what happened to that property should be of interest to anyone looking for insight into how Trump might perform as president. It was a deal of genuine magnitude and would have put him atop the New York real estate market. And he screwed it up.

The deal involved Manhattan’s West Side Yards, a sprawling, 77-acre tract abutting the Hudson River between 59th and 72nd Streets and at the time the largest privately owned undeveloped stretch of land in New York City. The Yards were a vestige of the Penn Central Transportation Company, a failed railroad enterprise that, in 1970, filed what was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. In the wake of that collapse, Trump leveraged his father’s ties to New York’s Democratic machine and local bankers to acquire pieces of Penn Central’s holdings, including the Yards, in the mid-1970s.

Unable to reach agreements with the city and community groups on how to develop the site, Trump let his option lapse in 1979. His Yards saga began in earnest in 1985, when he bought back the property from another developer for $115 million.

Trump’s plans for the property included office and residential space; a new broadcasting headquarters for NBC; a rocket-ship-shaped skyscraper that would have been the world’s tallest building and cast shadows across the Hudson River into New Jersey; and a $700 million property tax abatement from the city as an incentive to build it. The $4.5 billion project -- which Trump called Television City -- would have been New York’s biggest development since Rockefeller Center.

Like London’s Canary Wharf, begun a few years later, Television City promised to reshape a significant portion of a major urban center. “It’s an opportunity to build a city within the greatest city, and I don’t think anybody’s ever had that opportunity,” Trump said in an interview at the time.

What happened? Go read.

[URBAN NOTE] "How to Experience David Bowie’s New York"

The New York Times hosts Justin Sablich's wonderful article looking at the points in New York City--lower Manhattan, mainly--around which Bowie maintained his life.

David Bowie was a New Yorker for over 20 years. In Bowie years, that is practically an eternity considering the multitude of lives he lived — musically, geographically and otherwise — since he set out to become a star in the late 1960s.

“I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” said Mr. Bowie, who was born in Brixton in South London and had stints in Berlin; Lausanne, Switzerland; and several other cities, in a 2003 interview. “I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing. I am a New Yorker.”

He somehow managed to settle into a domesticated life that resembled that of many others living in and around SoHo (though most do it without the supermodel wife and penthouse apartment): browsing the books at McNally Jackson and shopping for groceries at Dean & DeLuca, among other low-key adventures that he undertook in what the playwright John Guare called “this cloak of invisibility.”

Soon after news spread of Mr. Bowie’s death on Jan. 10, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his album “Blackstar,” fans started a makeshift memorial outside the SoHo apartment where he had lived with his wife, Iman, since 1999, joined the following year by their daughter, Lexi. Mr. Bowie and Iman purchased their first city home in 1992, a ninth-floor apartment at the Essex House Hotel on Central Park South, which they sold in 2002.

“Just as each and every one of us found something unique in David’s music, we welcome everyone’s celebration of his life as they see fit,” Mr. Bowie’s family wrote in a statement.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster

Today, as I've been reminded for this week, marks the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster in 1986.

"Challenger Disaster Live on CNN" (Watch on YouTube)

I do not remember where I was when the explosion occurred. I was only six, at at school in a country uninvolved in the launch of the Challenger. I learned of the disaster and its causes at a somewhat more mature age, perhaps in the context of the scandal erupting when it turned out the space shuttle was launched prematurely in very adverse weather conditions for no good reasons.

Is it because of Challenger that my generation learned not to indulge in the dreams of regular and inexpensive space travel, in the Challenger as a functioning space bus? Did Challenger underline the extent to which bureaucracies invested in the public's trust are willing to compromise basic elements of safety in order to look good? Maybe. Richard Feynman's famous O-Ring demonstration remains as damning of the actions of everyone involved as ever.

"Richard Feynman: Challenger Crash O-Ring" (Watch on YouTube)

I would have to say that, when I think of the Challenger disaster now, I think of it less as a specific proof or disproof of anything, and more as a background element of disaster. Reading Carole Maso</>'s The Art Lover, where the protagonist sees the explosion live on television even as she learns that her best friend is hospitalized with AIDS, that televised scene of disaster was an effective punctum. Much more recently, as I noted in January 2014, the use of a vocal sample from that broadcast in Beyonce's "XO" was effective in underlining the potential for catastrophe that can lie underneath everything, ready to bring us to ruin if we do not take care.

"Beyoncé - XO" (Watch on YouTube)