The biggest possible strike against red dwarf stars is that they are so dim that the odds a planet could exist in an orbit hospitable to an Earth-like biosphere may be very small, and that those worlds which did would be tidally locked–that is, they would not rotate relative to the star, leaving one side permanently exposed to its sun and the other side in permanent darkness. Secondary concerns include the question of whether or not the tendency of red dwarf stars to experience large stellar flares might make potentially Earth-like worlds un-Earth-like.

So far, theoretical studies suggest that tidal locking wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, an early model suggesting that so long as a planetary atmosphere was a tenth as dense as Earth’s (about twice that of Mars’) the atmosphere would carry enough heat from the side facing the sun to the side facing away from the sun, preventing catastrophe. Stellar flares, similarly, needn’t pose an existential threat to life on a world in a suitable orbit; at worst living organisms would be protected by a couple of metres’ water, atmospheres and oceans need not experience significant erosion, and as red dwarf stars age their tendency to flare dminishes.

Now, via Centauri Dreams’ post “M-Dwarfs: A New and Wider Habitable Zone”, I’ve learned that a recent paper may mean that broadly Earth-like worlds could orbit red dwarf stars at greater distances than previous thought. Why? The relative abundance of dim, warm light produced by red dwarf stars has an impact on climate.

It would be helpful, then, if we could find a way to back a planet off from its host star while still allowing it to be habitable. The flare problem would be partially mitigated, and tidal lock might not be a factor. [Manoj] Joshi, now studying planetary atmospheric models at the University of East Anglia, has recently published a new paper with [Robert] Haberle (University of Reading) arguing that the habitable zone around M-dwarfs may actually extend as much as 30 percent further out from the parent star than had been previously thought.

At issue is the reflectivity of ice and snow. M-dwarfs emit a much greater fraction of their radiation at wavelengths longer than 1 μm than the Sun does, a part of the spectrum where the reflectivity (albedo) of snow and ice is smaller than at visible light wavelengths. The upshot is that more of the long-wave radiation emitted by these stars will be absorbed by the planetary surface instead of being reflected from it, thus lowering the average albedo and keeping the planet warmer. Joshi and Haberle modeled the reflectivity of ice and snow on simulated planets around Gliese 436 and GJ 1214, finding both the snow and ice albedos to be significantly lower given these constraints.

The effect of this would be to make it possible for worlds with Earth-like climates to orbit red dwarf stars at distances 10 and 30 percent greater than previously thought. Further details, the authors note, remain to be determined by detailed atmospheric models.

Already, there are speculations that there could be as many Earth-like worlds orbiting red dwarf stars as brighter stars, on the grounds that though red dwarf stars’ habitable zones are substantially smaller than those of brighter stars, there are so many more red dwarfs that the two categories of stars host Earth-like planets in equal number. Could red dwarf stars host more Earth-like worlds than their brighter counterparts?

The paper is Joshi and Haberle, “Suppression of the water ice and snow albedo feedback on planets orbiting red dwarf stars and the subsequent widening of the habitable zone”

The riding of Sydney-Victoria is located on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, while South Shore—St. Margaret’s is located on the southern shore of mainland Nova Scotia, south of Halifax.

One of the ridings in question was Sydney-Victoria, where the Conservatives invested heavily in the hopes that Cecil Clarke would unseat Liberal incumbent Mark Eyking. Stephen Harper personally visited the riding twice during the campaign.

Eyking said Thursday his team knew something was wrong on election day when they started getting “disturbing” calls from supporters. Some voters were complaining about incessant phone calls, even though the Liberal communications team had only contacted them twice, as is routine.

Others said they were sent to polling stations that were incorrect or did not even exist.

“They were complaining to our office, saying why would you send me to the wrong place?” said Eyking.

“Our local offices new something was up. Somebody on the other side was playing a really nasty game here.”

Eyking ended up edging out Clarke by just 860 votes to hold onto the riding. His team never followed up on the suspicious calls.

[. . .]

NDP MP Pat Martin said the controversy raises doubts about whether the Conservatives fairly won the 2011 election or if they cheated their way to a majority.

“It’s outrageous, it’s disturbing, it’s as offensive as it can possibly be if you care a damn about the electoral system,” said Martin.

Martin accused the Conservatives of trying to steal eight ridings across the country wherein the NDP discovered suspicious activity tied to robo-calls. One of them was South Shore-St. Margaret’s, where NDP candidate Gordon Earle lost to Conservative Gerald Keddy.

NDP official agent Angus Fields said he remembers receiving “two or three calls” from supporters who were mysteriously directed to the wrong location to vote.

There was also an issue of some voters being deluged with pro-NDP robo-calls. Earle’s office was swamped with complaints for three days, but they were never able to rule out that it was an internal mix-up by NDP election headquarters. The party did not have a definitive answer by deadline Thursday.

NDP riding association president Wolfgang Ziemer conceded those issues would not have changed the final result. What was expected to be a tight race ended up being a comfortable win by almost 2,900 votes for Keddy.

A record number of card-carrying New Democrats are eligible to choose the federal party’s next leader, with British Columbia and Ontario holding the key to victory.

Final membership numbers released Tuesday by the party show membership has swelled to 128,351, an increase of just over 50 per cent since the start of the leadership contest last October.

All members are entitled to cast ballots, starting March 1 and culminating in a Toronto leadership convention on March 24.

British Columbia, with 38,735 members, and Ontario, with 36,760, will have the most influence over which of the seven contenders emerges victorious. The two provinces account for 30 per cent and 28.6 per cent of the membership respectively.

Ontario outstripped all other provinces in terms of membership growth, adding more than 14,000 members since October.

In Quebec, membership numbers have shot up to 12,266 from 1,695 last fall — a 600 per cent increase.

Still, Quebec accounts for only 9.5 per cent of the total membership, leaving the province with limited influence in choosing the party’s next leader even though it delivered more than half the 103 seats won by the NDP in the May 2 election.

[. . .]

Quebec’s clout is virtually identical to Manitoba’s 12,056 members (9.3 per cent), and only slightly better than Saskatchewan’s 11,264 (8.7 per cent), and Alberta’s 10,249 (7.9 per cent).

Nova Scotia is the most influential of the Atlantic provinces, with 3,844 members (2.9 per cent). The other three Atlantic provinces and the northern territories each account for less than 1 per cent of the national total.

By way of comparison, Québec’s population of eight million is ten times the size of Nova Scotia’s, eight times the populations of Saskatchewan’s and Manitoba’s, and a bit more than twice the size of Alberta’s. Québec is also the province that elected 59 NDP Members of Parliament out of a total of 75, providing a majority of the NDP’s caucus in Parliament.

Dan Arnold at the National Post‘s Full Comment blog is more skeptical of what this means.

First off, 45,000 new members isn’t “skyrocketing” when you consider both the Liberals and Conservatives exceeded that level in their most recent leadership contests. Heck, the B.C. Liberals and Alberta PCs posted similar or higher membership totals in their leadership races last year.

As for that “staggering” increase in Quebec – a little perspective people! Yes, that’s a big percentage increase, but it also means Quebec will have just a third the votes of B.C. Adding 12,000 Quebec members is well below Mulcair’s original target of 20,000, and it’s below the 14,000 who voted in the BQ leadership race. Keep in mind, those are actual BQ votes, not memberships, from a party most describe as “dead”. It’s also a total nearly every media outlet in Quebec ridiculed at the time.

In fairness, the NDP seems likely to surpass the 58,000 who voted in their 2003 leadership contest – though even that isn’t assured when you consider many of their current members are only members because of provincial leadership races last year. Still, we probably shouldn’t sneeze at 45,000 new members, especially when that includes the NDP’s first real Quebec membership base ever. There might very well be more votes in the NDP leadership race than the Liberal leadership race – especially if no one runs for Liberal leader.

Much depends on whether the NDP can deepen its base in Québec–increase its membership, especially–in time to keep its newly-acquired base and secure its position as a national party.

Elections Canada has traced fraudulent phone calls made during the federal election to an Edmonton voice-broadcast company that worked for the Conservative Party across the country.

While the agency investigates, aided by the RCMP, the Conservatives are conducting an internal probe. A party lawyer is interviewing campaign workers to find who was behind the deceptive “robocalls.”

Elections Canada launched its investigation after it was inundated with complaints about election day calls in Guelph, Ont., one of 18 ridings across the country where voters were targeted by harassing or deceptive phone messages in an apparent effort to discourage Liberal supporters from voting.

In Guelph, a riding the Conservatives hoped to take from the Liberals, voters received recorded calls pretending to be from Elections Canada, telling them their polling stations had been moved. The calls led to a chaotic scene at one polling station, and likely led some voters to give up on voting.

Postmedia News and the Ottawa Citizen have found that Elections Canada traced the calls to Racknine Inc., a small Edmonton call centre that worked for the party’s national campaign and those of at least nine Conservative candidates, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s own campaign in Calgary Southwest. There is no evidence that Harper’s campaign or any of the other candidates were involved in the calls.

[. . .]

The RCMP’s role in the investigation is unclear but it appears the force is assisting Elections Canada. RCMP officers have approached the Conservative Party, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The robocalls received in Guelph were recorded in female voices in both French and English. They told voters their polling stations had moved to a shopping mall in the city’s downtown, where parking was scarce.

A Citizen-Postmedia investigation has found calls misdirecting voters were also reported in ridings across the country: Kitchener-Waterloo, Kitchener-Conestaga, London-West, Parkdale-High Park, Winnipeg South Centre and Sydney-Victoria. It is possible that they were caused by robo-dialing errors.

Liberal supporters in a dozen ridings, mostly in Ontario, reported mysterious harassing calls, often late in the evening or early in the morning, where rude callers from a phone bank pretended to be working for the Liberals. The calls seem to have been an attempt to alienate Liberal voters in ridings where the Liberals and Conservatives seemed to be in close contests.

[I]t began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the “male” sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I’d yet lived. In the “female” sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

Given that during the time I was there the Japanese parliament was suggesting removing the social safety net (social security benefits, in American parlance) for women who chose not to have children, and the issue of young men who expected a stay at home wife and young women who wanted to have careers was quite a hot one, I could not then and still do not believe that divide was an accident. The simple fact is that domestic chores take a huge amount of time and energy, and if a woman is occupied doing them, and especially doing them without the machines that speed up the process considerably, means that she rarely has the time to pursue interests and a career. Though for cultural and financial reasons, Japanese houses often house more than one generation, the lack of technology creates so much unnecessary work that most of my neighborhood required both the young mother and grandmother in a household to devote their days to it.

I don’t think there’s some dastardly man in a high office making Mr. Burns fingers and saying: EXCELLENT. I have oppressed women for another day! Let us celebrate! (Except the PMs who wanted to take away benefits for childless women–but not childless men.) This kind of thing is always more subtle than that. People who have imbibed from their culture that men and business are important and women and the home are slightly distasteful and irrelevant spending their time on inventions applicable to one and not the other. Corporate managers approving projects along the same lines. Everyone performs their upbringing in their work in one way or another. Obviously, I don’t consider business a male bailiwick and the home the kingdom of woman, but a whole lot of people do, and a goodly number of them have a massive influence on the allocation of R & D funds and the political narrative than I do. Right this very second, here in the US, we are having an actual, serious, if incredibly stupid, conversation about whether or not women should have easy access to birth control. We are having this conversation because significant humans in our government believe women should not have access to it at all. I’m super excited about that, because it means it’s 1965 and we’re gonna go to the moon soon.

And Japan is HARDLY alone. C.f. that entire viciously moronic conversation about the care and feeding of my uterus. I merely noticed it for the first time over there. The article I linked to is fascinating because it is a very high tech response to a domestic issue, which is something I don’t come across very often. Most of us are cooking in kitchens quite recognizable from 40 years ago. The Roomba in the corner of my living room is about the only chore-class object in my house that that same grandmother would not have used in cleaning up after my parents.

One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets and exotic weaponry. Birth control seems non-existent and childbirth is still rocking the stirrups. And the home is at best not mentioned much. One of the things that “the future,” when we use that word as a metonymy for an idealized world in which machines solve all our problems, is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive or unpleasant and allow us the sheer, simple hours in the day to do more. And yet, by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play. Despite the fact that we here in the first world are supposed to have leveled up our gender equality stat, women still perform the majority of this labor, often in addition to a full shift outside the home. Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can’t even begin to contemplate.

I like her conclusion.

The future is not evenly distributed. Not along cultural lines, along language lines, along political, economic, class, or generational lines. And most certainly not along gender lines. A significant portion of the digital world proceeds on the quiet, probably subconscious meme that the future belongs to men and women are just along for the ride. Oh, sure, some women can play with the big boys. If they act right. But not the girly ones. They’re feminine, therefore: weak and frivolous and shallow and shrill.

They can do the laundry.

In the beginning was the word – yes, but where exactly? Last year, Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist at Auckland University in New Zealand, proposed that the cradle of language could be localized in the southwest of Africa. The report, which appeared in Science, one of the world’s leading scholarly journals, was seized upon by the media and caused something of a sensation. Now however, linguist Michael Cysouw from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has published a commentary in Science which argues that this neat “Out-of-Africa” hypothesis for the origin of language is not adequately supported by the data presented. The search for the site of origin of language remains very much alive.

Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units – consonants, vowels and tones – that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot. To interpret this finding Atkinson invoked a parallel from population genetics. Biologists have observed an analogous effect, insofar as human genetic diversity is found to decrease with distance from Africa, where our species originated. This is attributed to the so-called founder effect. As people migrated from the continent and small groups continued to disperse, each inevitably came to represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the total genetic diversity present in the African population as a whole.

So does such a founder effect play a similarly significant effect in the dispersal and differentiation of languages? Michael Cysouw regards Atkinson’s finding as “artefactual”. Cysouw, whose work is funded by one of the prestigious Starting Grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), heads a research group that studies quantitative comparative linguistics in LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literatures. He says he has no objection in principle to the use of methods borrowed from other disciplines to tackle questions in linguistics, but that problems arise from their inappropriate application. For example, he finds that if Atkinson’s method is employed to examine other aspects of language, such as the construction of subordinate clauses or the use of the passive mood, the results “do not point in the same direction”.

Indeed, in their article in Science, Cysouw and his coauthors Steven Moran (LMU) and Dan Dediu of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen show that, depending on the features considered, Atkinson’s method places the site of origin of language in eastern Africa or the Caucasus or somewhere else entirely. As Cysouw points out, linguists have long sought to throw light on the origin of language by analyzing patterns of language distribution. The problem is that such relationships can be reliably traced only as far back as about 10,000 years before the present.

It’s notoriously difficult to come up with hard data on languages in deep historical time, with the various efforts to construct ur-languages predating the earliest recorded languages (i.e. Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese) or plausible reconstructions (i.e. Indo-European) tending to be mutually contradictory. The data is too sparse and the time too deep, at least for the methods we’ve developed so far.

All that said, I wonder if the different results reported in the summary of Cysouw’s paper–language originated in southwest Africa as defined by this trait, in east Africa according to that, in the Caucasus as shown by a third–might actually constitute a point against the monogenesis of language, against the idea that language evolved in a single region or even a single community before being picked up by the remainder of the human species. If different widely separated populations developed language independently and then came into contact with each other, the resulting contact languages might retain each source language’s distinctive traits. (Might. I speculate at the limit of my knowledge.)

Thoughts?

[T]he visitors of today’s Detroit marvel at the industrial ruins and disaster porn, but at the time, people flocked to the city to see the massive technologies and industrial might at work, and mostly “they stood rapt as the twentieth century’s premier consumer object, the automobile, rolled off the assembly lines by the dozens an hour.” (p.19) It is hard to think of the spectacular model of modernity that Detroit once embodied, one that reshaped the city with a new form of ‘industrial geography’ which tied factories to suppliers and workers to homes with unprecedented efficiency.

The traces of grand boulevards from Woodward’s L’Enfant-inspired plan of 1807 remained – fanning out in a radial pattern of wide avenues from the city center, which added to the idea of speed and efficiency that has characterized Detroit, and the automobile industry for decades. Much like Los Angeles being the embodiment of the auto-centric city, Detroit is the perfect model of Fordist urbanism at work – not just in the factories – driven by mass-production along with high union wages, and the accessibility of the blue-collar worker to live in a single-family house of their own – with a dearth of any sort of apartment of multi-family housing to accommodate lower-income or those not wealthy enough, or white enough, to buy houses.

It’s race, Landscape+Urbanism argues (after its sources), that was the undoing of Detroit. Far from there being a civic identity common to all Detroiters, it seems like racial identity–white, black–was the more noteworthy factor. Inasmuch as this led to the reproduction and intensification of inequalities, of which shortages of decent and affordable housing were key, this triggered a downwards spiral.

The focus on single-family houses led to perpetual housing shortages – particularly when combined with a history of official and unofficial policies that prevented blacks from obtaining housing. Unlike many of the eastern cities where the geography was a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, Detroit was much more literally black and white, as Segrue mentions, “class and race became more important that ethnicity as a guide to the city’s residential geography.” (p.22) While it was understood as a “City of Homes” for most, the influx of black workers from the South, who came in the ‘Great Migration’, were met with a consistent range of discrimination and violence, as existing residents perceived in-migration as a threat to their community, starting in the 1920s and continuing all the way through the 1970s.

[. . .]

There were some inroads to employment in good jobs around WWII, driven by a tightening labor market, the coalitions of unions and civil rights groups, and some federal policies, which made sure that “blacks made significant gains in Detroit’s industrial economy during the war.” (p.27) There was still an undercurrent of racial tension, which played out in housing and employment, a continual topic that Segrue alludes to being a ‘structural’ racism that played out in Detroit, and were displayed in significant riots and other violence throughout the years, but that this didn’t stop the influx of blacks coming into the city, leaving the Jim Crow south for something better. It’s debatable if Detroit was much better.

The availability and quality of housing was poor for blacks – driven by a number of social and policy factors. While the New Deal had instilled a new ideology of opportunity for blacks – it had also instilled an ideology for current residents that the government would protect their property and the status quo. Thus the competing ideals of opportunity and protection played out in Detroit, and although, as seen previously, some gains were made – the majority of the wins came in maintenance of the status quo and protection from the new waves of poor, black residents.

[. . .]

The geography of race was perpetuated by the real estate community as well, who were actively involved in the exclusion of blacks from housing. Another aspect was construction, with new houses rarely being built for blacks or in a price range that was suitable. As Segrue mentions, in “1951, on 1.15 percent of the new homes constructed in the metropolitan Detroit area were available to blacks.” (p.43). Another major issue that shaped this geography in Detroit, and many other cities around the United States, was the concept of redlining. Maps were produced by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, informed by local real estate brokers and lenders, to rate the neighborhoods in cities according to a scale from A (green) to D (red). While ostensibly a methodology for determining investment risk, the process became a de facto method for exclusion, disenfranchisement, and continued disinvestment in the minority areas.

[. . .]

The promise of the New Deal, in post-WWII era, was predicated on government intervention to solve the problems of the city. One of those things was to provide adequate housing for the poor, whether this be true building of community and opportunity, or the more commonly wielded tool of ‘social engineering’ to make better citizens. Through a number of acts, the US developed policy and funding for many types of affordable housing, complementing the already robust subsidies of single family home construction and highway building.

[. . .]

The problem in Detroit, was that nobody seemed to want public housing, as it was fought almost everywhere by both whites, unions, real estate agents, developers and even some established black residents. The adjacency of even some black areas was problematic, and developers had to make deals with the FHA, such as the 1 foot thick, 6 foot high wall that separated the new development from the old – remnants of which still exist. This sort of approach reinforced the FHA’s official policy, not of true equality, but as mentioned by Segrue, even with some of the more enlightened bureaucrats, “a separate but equal philosophy.” (p.67)

I’ll be watching for the series as it’s completed. If it turns out Detroit’s only role now is as a negative role model, that may be enough.