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Mar. 18th, 2016
The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski notes that, unsurprisingly, ridership of the Union-Pearson Express has risen sharply following cuts to the fare.
Half the price has bought the Union Pearson Express train twice the riders, according to Metrolinx.
A week after the provincial agency cut fares by more than half, early estimates show that ridership is holding steady at about 5,000 a day.
Before the price drop, the UPX was only drawing about 2,000 to 2,200 riders.
Last Wednesday, the first day of the new prices, 83 per cent of UPX riders were air travellers. The other 17 per cent were commuters, said Metrolinx spokeswoman Anne Marie Aikins.
Staff counted about 5,300 boardings that day and that’s held steady since, she said. Forty per cent of Wednesday’s riders were first-time UPX users.
Nicholas Keung of the Toronto Star notes that racism is present on the Toronto job market.
It’s a disturbing practice called “resumé whitening” and involves deleting telltale signs of race or ethnicity from a CV in the hopes of landing a job.
And it happens more often than you’d think.
According to a two-year study led by University of Toronto researchers, as many as 40 per cent of minority jobseekers “whiten” their resumés by adopting Anglicized names and downplaying experience with racial groups to bypass biased screeners and just get their foot in the door.
It’s when “Lamar J. Smith” becomes “L. James Smith” or “Lei Zhang” morphs to “Luke Zhang” — and the callback rates soar.
“It’s really a wake-up call for organizations to do something to address this problem. Discrimination is still a reality,” said Sonia Kang, lead author of “Whitened Resumés, Race and Self-Presentation in the Labour Market,” to be released in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal Thursday.
“It shows us that racial minorities aren’t just passively receiving this discrimination. They are trying to do something about it.”
Universe Today's Ken Kremer reports about the joint ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars mission.
The cooperative Euro-Russian ExoMars 2016 expedition is now en route to the Red Planet after successfully firing its upper stage booster one final time on Monday evening, March 15, to blast free of the Earth’s gravitational tug and begin a 500 million kilometer interplanetary journey in a bold search of indications of life emanating from potential Martian microbes.
The vehicle is in “good health” with the solar panels unfurled, generating power and on course for the 500 Million kilometer (300 million mile) journey to Mars.
“Acquisition of signal confirmed. We have a mission to Mars!” announced Mission Control from the European Space Agency.
The joint European/Russian ExoMars spacecraft successfully blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Russian Proton-M rocket at 5:31:42 a.m. EDT (0931:42 GMT), Monday, March 14, with the goal of searching for possible signatures of life in the form of trace amounts of atmospheric methane on the Red Planet.
The first three stages of the 191-foot-tall (58-meter) Russian-built rocket fired as scheduled over the first ten minutes and lofted the 9,550-pound (4,332-kilogram) ExoMars to orbit.
Wired's Natalie Wolchover reports about the search for life on other planets, through detecting the gases emitted by life into planetary atmospheres. One problem: What should be looked for?
After millennia of wondering whether we’re alone in the universe—one of “mankind’s most profound and probably earliest questions beyond, ‘What are you going to have for dinner?’” as the NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild put it—the hunt for life on other planets is now ramping up in a serious way. Thousands of exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than the sun, have been discovered in the past decade. Among them are potential super-Earths, sub-Neptunes, hot Jupiters and worlds such as Kepler-452b, a possibly rocky, watery “Earth cousin” located 1,400 light-years from here. Starting in 2018 with the expected launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers will be able to peer across the light-years and scope out the atmospheres of the most promising exoplanets. They will look for the presence of “biosignature gases,” vapors that could only be produced by alien life.
They’ll do this by observing the thin ring of starlight around an exoplanet while it is positioned in front of its parent star. Gases in the exoplanet’s atmosphere will absorb certain frequencies of the starlight, leaving telltale dips in the spectrum.
As Domagal-Goldman, then a researcher at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), well knew, the gold standard in biosignature gases is oxygen. Not only is oxygen produced in abundance by Earth’s flora—and thus, possibly, other planets’—but 50 years of conventional wisdom held that it could not be produced at detectable levels by geology or photochemistry alone, making it a forgery-proof signature of life. Oxygen filled the sky on Domagal-Goldman’s simulated world, however, not as a result of biological activity there, but because extreme solar radiation was stripping oxygen atoms off carbon dioxide molecules in the air faster than they could recombine. This biosignature could be forged after all.
The search for biosignature gases around faraway exoplanets “is an inherently messy problem,” said Victoria Meadows, an Australian powerhouse who heads VPL. In the years since Domagal-Goldman’s discovery, Meadows has charged her team of 75 with identifying the major “oxygen false positives” that can arise on exoplanets, as well as ways to distinguish these false alarms from true oxygenic signs of biological activity. Meadows still thinks oxygen is the best biosignature gas. But, she said, “if I’m going to look for this, I want to make sure that when I see it, I know what I’m seeing.”
Meanwhile, Sara Seager, a dogged hunter of “twin Earths” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is widely credited with inventing the spectral technique for analyzing exoplanet atmospheres, is pushing research on biosignature gases in a different direction. Seager acknowledges that oxygen is promising, but she urges the astrobiology community to be less terra-centric in its view of how alien life might operate—to think beyond Earth’s geochemistry and the particular air we breathe. “My view is that we do not want to leave a single stone unturned; we need to consider everything,” she said.
Wired's Margaret Rhodes reports how computers capable of detailed image analysis can transform botany.
My dad is a wildlife biologist, and during road trips we took when I was growing up he spent a lot of time talking about the grasses and trees along the highway. It was a game he played, trying to correctly identify the passing greenery from the driver’s seat of a moving car. As a carsick-prone kid wedged into the back seat of a Ford F150, I found this supremely lame. As an adult—specifically, one who just spoke with a paleobotanist—I now know something about my father’s roadtripping habit: Identifying leaves isn’t easy.
“I’ve looked at tens of thousands of living and fossil leaves,” says that paleobotanist, Peter Wilf of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. “No one can remember what they all look like. It’s impossible—there’s tens of thousands of vein intersections.” There’s also patterns in vein spacing, different tooth shapes, and a whole host of other features that distinguish one leaf from the next. Unable to commit all these details to memory, botanists rely instead on a manual method of identification developed in the 1800s. That method—called leaf architecture—hasn’t changed much since. It relies on a fat reference book filled with “an unambiguous and standard set of terms for describing leaf form and venation,” and it’s a painstaking process; Wilf says correctly identifying a single leaf’s taxonomy can take two hours.
That’s why, for the past nine years, Wilf has worked with a computational neuroscientist from Brown University to program computer software to do what the human eye cannot: identify families of leaves, in mere milliseconds. The software, which Wilf and his colleagues describe in detail in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines computer vision and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns in leaves, linking them to families of leaves they potentially evolved from with 72 percent accuracy. In doing so, Wilf has designed a user-friendly solution to a once-laborious aspect of paleobotany. The program, he says, “is going to really change how we understand plant evolution.”
Damn. From Universe Today's Bob King, a report about a massive fast-rotating black hole at the centre of a quasar.
Way up in the constellation Cancer there’s a 14th magnitude speck of light you can claim in a 10-inch or larger telescope. If you saw it, you might sniff at something so insignificant, yet it represents the final farewell of chewed up stars as their remains whirl down the throat of an 18 billion solar mass black hole, one of the most massive known in the universe.
Astronomers know the object as OJ 287, a quasar that lies 3.5 billion light years from Earth. Quasars or quasi-stellar objects light up the centers of many remote galaxies. If we could pull up for a closer look, we’d see a brilliant, flattened accretion disk composed of heated star-stuff spinning about the central black hole at extreme speeds.
As matter gets sucked down the hole, jets of hot plasma and energetic light shoot out perpendicular to the disk. And if we’re so privileged that one of those jet happens to point directly at us, we call the quasar a “blazar”. Variability of the light streaming from the heart of a blazar is so constant, the object practically flickers.
CBC's Nicole Ireland reports about CBC's abandonment of pseudonyms, requiring real names for commenters in the hope of elevating dialogue. I suspect, alas, that some people will not be deterred by this.
CBC will ban the use of pseudonyms for readers commenting on stories on the CBC.ca website, the corporation announced Thursday.
All commenters will be required to use their real names, Emma Bedard, spokeswoman for CBC English Services, told CBC News.
The move is a "request for transparency on the part of [online] users," Bedard said.
The decision was a result of a review of CBC's commenting policy that began in January, she said, after audience members expressed concerns about the content of comments appearing online.
Thursday's announcement was spurred by a complaint from a group of prominent New Brunswick francophones over what they considered hateful attacks on the province's French-speaking community.
"CBC has heard from a number of Canadians concerned about our commenting space, the use of pseudonyms, and some audience submissions that violated our guidelines around hate speech, particularly with respect to the francophone community in New Brunswick," said Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor in chief of CBC News, in an Editor's Blog published on the website Thursday afternoon.
[LINK] "Cuba’s Cold Shoulder"
Mar. 18th, 2016 03:46 pmBloomberg carries Patrick Symmes' article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek noting the disinterest of official Cuba in moving to overcome the economic legacies of the US trade embargo. Could it be that this opposition was all rhetorical?
The U.S. president’s mission to Cuba, which has spun itself into a hurricane of diplomatic and cultural expectations, is due ashore on March 21. Barack and Michelle Obama will tour Old Havana’s cobblestone alleys, meet with revolutionaries and anti-revolutionaries, and possibly go as far as shaking the hand of an ancient, trembling, and all-powerful king.
That would be Mick Jagger, who is scheduled to perform at an outdoor concert with the band known as Los Rolling in the official Cuban media. Half a million fans are expected. The first American presidential visit to Cuba in 80 years will also include nine innings of baseball diplomacy, as the Tampa Bay Rays play the Cuban national team in the first exhibition game in 16 years.
For the U.S., the trade and economic benefits of Obama’s attempt to normalize relations with the island are obvious: Cuba was once a major importer of American farm and industrial products, linked to the economies of New Orleans and Tampa by ferry, and flooded with state-of-the-art Buick Straight Eights, circa 1952. Obama has carved out exceptions to the 55-year embargo—including, on March 15, allowing U.S. citizens to visit Cuba individually, instead of in groups, and giving Cuba access to the international banking system. But only Congress can lift the whole thing.
Raúl Castro, 84, now the island’s president and more pragmatic than his retired brother Fidél, 89, recognizes that Cuba must create millions of jobs for its restive young people and can’t afford to pay for that itself. He’ll probably ask Obama for billions of dollars in investment and an end to the embargo.
Despite the hoopla, little has happened to expand commerce since Dec. 17, 2014, when Obama announced that the U.S. was reestablishing ties with Cuba. The road ahead will test how intransigent Cuba’s monopoly state enterprises are in the face of change. (The Ministry of Labor still keeps an official list of who’s allowed to work as a birthday clown.) Inertia and socialist doctrine continue to support a closed economy. The entire point of the Cuban Revolution was to keep America out. Pivoting the island from central planning and state monopolies to an open economy engaged with the U.S. won’t be easy.
Peter Watts, in his post "Dumb Adult", takes issue with the category of Young Adult fiction as something that keeps teenagers from reading more complex books.
We didn’t have “Young Adult” when I was your age, much less this newfangled “New Adult” thing they coddle you with. We had to jump right from Peter the Sea Trout and Freddy and the Ignormus straight into Stand on Zanzibar and Solaris, no water wings or training wheels or anything.
Amazingly, I managed to read anyway. I discovered Asimov and Bradbury and Bester at eleven, read Zanzibar at twelve, Solaris at thirteen. I may have been smarter than most of my age class (I hope I was— if not, I sure got picked on a lot for no good reason), but I was by no means unique; I only discovered The Sheep Look Up when a classmate recommended it to me in the tenth grade. And judging by the wear and tear on the paperbacks in the school library, everyone was into Asimov and Bradbury back then. Delany too, judging by the way the covers kept falling off The Einstein Intersection. Back in those days we didn’t need no steenking Young Adult.
Now get off my lawn.
I’ll admit my attitude could be a bit more nuanced. After all, my wife has recently been marketed as a YA author, and her writing is gorgeous (although I would argue it’s also not YA). Friends and peers swim in young-adult waters. Well-intentioned advisers, ever mindful of the nichiness of my own market share, have suggested that I try writing YA because that’s where the money is, because that’s the one part of the fiction market that didn’t implode with the rest of the economy a few years back.
But I can’t help myself. It’s not that I don’t think we should encourage young adults to read (in fact, if we can’t get them to read more than the last generation, we’re pretty much fucked). It’s that I’m starting to think YA doesn’t do that.
I’m starting to think it may do the opposite.
[BLOG] Some Friday links
Mar. 18th, 2016 06:35 pm- Centauri Dreams notes that the early Earth's magnetic field could protect it from a violent young sun.
- D-Brief notes some British storks have abandoned seasonal migration in order to stay year-round at landfills.
- The Dragon's Gaze looks at the WASP 94AB binary, a system with two stars each with a hot Jupiter.
- The Dragon's Tales reports Russia has slashed its space program's budget by 30%.
- Marginal Revolution suggests poor Americans could benefit from being more open to moving around.
- The NYR Daily is not optimistic about the 2016 American presidential election.
- Strange Maps divides the world into zones defined by income.
- Torontoist looks at Ireland Park, built to commemorate the Famine refugees.
- Transit Toronto notes that today, the 18th of March, is Transit Driver Appreciation Day.
- The Financial Times' The World wonders what would happen if Russia cut natural gas supplies to the European Union.
- Arnold Zwicky shares an amusing St. Patrick's Day cartoon.