[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bag News Notes’ Michael Shaw takes a look at NSA Edward Snowden, as good as look as can be taken.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster reflects on Iain M. Banks as a designer of megascale structures.
• The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird reports on Chinese interest in paying for the reconstruction of a Nicaragua canal.
• Eastern Approaches notes that the iconic Gdansk shipyards, which fostered the growth of solidarity, are at risk of closing.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Perelstvaig writes about the coverage of the news of the last speaker of the Baltic Finnic language of Livonian, in all of its flaws.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen likes a book describing why some East Asian economies hit the First World and others didn’t, while Alex Tabarrok advocates for a new regime in the United States for the approval of medications.
• New Apps Blog’s Lisa Guenther uses a documentary on the fate of the long-term incarcerated to start a discussion on what we grow to tolerate.
• Normblog’s Norman Geras interviews Daniel Libeskind.
• The Signal’s Bill LeFurgy writes about word processing, the killer app that jumpstarted the computer revolution.
• Window on Eurasia argues that Ukrainians generally haven’t assimilated the Crimean Tatar history of deportation into their own and quotes from a Kazakhstani writer who argues that real, broad-based Russian influence is much more threatening to Kazakh identity than anything the Chinese have done or are likely to do.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Charlie Stross mourns fellow and recently passed Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks.
• Crooked Timber, Lawyers, Guns and Money, and New APPS all take a look at the disgusting self-justifying behaviour of philosopher Colin McGinn towards a female grad student of his.
• Daniel Drezner wonders about the extent to which ideology will become important in upcoming seasons of Game of Thrones.
• Language Hat wonders if Dutch spelling reforms have cut off contemporary speakers of Dutch from easy access to Dutch literature predating the mid-19th century.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if European Union Internet privacy and security regulations will make things worse for American firms.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw writes about the continuing mystique of the monarchy in Australia.
• Registan’s Reid Standish talks about the marginal improvements in law and order in Kyrgyzstan.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs talks about the recent map reimagining the countries of the world on a reunified Pangaea as a rhetorical ploy.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little charts the ways in which life for Chinese has improved over the past four decades, asnd the ways in which things are still lacking.
• Window on Eurasia quotes from alarmists worrying about the “de-Russification” of Tatarstan, demographically and otherwise.

[LINK] “Film Crew Tries to Unearth Atari’s ‘E.T.’ Game Graveyard”

Mashable’s Chelsea Stark is one of the many journalists covering the news that a Canadian film company is planning to excavate a New Mexican landfill where–reputedly–millions of copies of the 1982 Atari 2600 game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial were buried.

Atari released a video game in 1982 that was such a commercial flop that the company buried the evidence in a New Mexican desert. But, since the past can never remain buried, a film crew now wants to dig up a stash of those ET The Extra-Terrestrial games, in an attempt to uncover gaming history.

According to Albuquerque, N.M., television station KRQE, film production company Fuel Industries has been granted six months of access to the Alamogordo, N.M., landfill where Atari dumped nine semi trucks worth of E.T. game cartridges and other merchandise in 1983.

[. . .]

The E.T. game was considered by many to be the final straw in a series of poorly manufactured games, which contributed to the United States’ video game industry crash of 1983. At that time, the market was saturated with low-quality games, created by just about anyone, for the variety of consoles trying to hold market share. That included the Atari 2600, for which E.T. was created.

The game was apparently a five-week rush job meant to catch holiday sales and tie in with the release of the Steven Spielberg classic. That rush is apparent, however, as E.T. was full of weirdly-colored characters and backgrounds, nonsensical gameplay and a host of glitches that made it practically unplayable. After poor reviews by critics and consumers, Atari was left sitting on 3.5 million copies.

PC Magazine‘s Damon Poeter debunks the myth that the landfill is filled with the game; see also Wikipedia’s article.

Marty Goldberg, co-author of Atari Inc.: Business is Fun, thinks the treasure hunt being conducted by Fuel Industries is a “non-issue publicity stunt.” In a comment on PCMag’s original article about the film company’s mission to uncover the legendary E.T. cartridges, Goldberg said he and co-author Curt Vendel debunked the myth of the buried games based on interviews with former Atari employees they conducted and internal company documents they pored over to research their book.

“There were never thousands of E.T. games buried in Alamogordo, that’s a myth that sprung up later and was also never once mentioned by the actual press articles of the time. The dump there was simply a clearing out of Atari’s Texas manufacturing plant as it transitioned to automated production methods and a focus on personal computer manufacturing. It had previously been one of the main plants for manufacturing of game cartridges and other hardware, and game manufacturing was being moved overseas to China,” Goldberg said.

“As part of the transition, the unused cartridge stock of a group of titles (not just E.T.), console parts, and computer parts were all dumped there in New Mexico. It was covered in detail by the Alamogordo press at the time, and is just such a non-mystery that I’m surprised by all this.”

[PHOTO] Against the war in Central Africa, on College Street

I was walking last month off of College Street west of Bathurst when I saw this poster pasted on a utilities pole. This was the first poster I’ve ever seen in Toronto relating to the wars that have ravaged central Africa from the mid-1990s on. While I would fault the poster for not emphasizing the roots and ideological sustenance of the conflict in the region’s political and ethnic conflicts, I don’t disagree with its message about how resource exploitation has literally fueled the different factions.

“Since 1997, more people have died in Central Africa over precious metals found in your phone than died in the Holocaust (6 million). A woman is raped every 70 seconds on average by young soldiers who are used to clear villages near areas that are to be mined. Children are spared only to become slave workers in the mines. Fair Trade would cost only $1 more per device. The news has made no major effort to report the subject. The only person who can help is you. Please let other people know, too. If the majority of people know about this issue, companies will be forced to use Fair Trade instead of rape, murder, deceit and slavery. Find out more at conflictminerals.org or watch the documentary, Blood In the Mobile (bloodinthemobile.org). Good organizations to donate through are fallingwhistles.com and foodgrainsbank.ca.”

There are two footnotes, the first explaining what coltan ore and the metal tantalum are, the second emphasizing that the added cost would be trivial. The graphic at the bottom features the African continent drawn in the fashion of the Apple icon, and the transformation of the word “iPad” into an abbreviation for “innocent People are dying”.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton has a photo of the Danforth subway tunnel, looking east from Chester at a point where Pape is barely visible.
• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling writes about a Montréal exhibition of the history of computing.
• Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin starts an insightful discussion, inspired by the controversies about same-sex marriage, about the ideological cleavages in France.
• The Dragon’s Tales Will Baird discusses exoplanets: briefly, dim orange and red dwarfs frequently have Earth- and Neptune-sized planets but not larger giants, while there are fewer Earth-sized planets than one would expect from the distribution of discovered ones.
• Eastern Approaches notes that clerical sex abuse scandals are starting to break in Poland.
• Far Outliers’ Joel quotes Chinua Achebe on the anti-Ibo pogroms of Nigeria in 1966.
• Language Hat links to a site examining documentary evidence of the presence of the French language in pre-revolutionary Russia.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes about the collapsing infrastructure of the United States.
• Peter Rukavina describes how he used a 3-D printer to print replacement parts for his desk. The replicator cometh.
• Torontoist examines the origins of the name of Toronto and points to Andrew Cash’s interest in bolstering the position of precarious urban workers.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell is rightfully unimpressed by the incompetence of British Tory Iain Duncan Smith.

[LINK] “Indonesians are loving Toronto start-up’s app MavenSay”

Toronto Star technology journalist Radu Mudhar notes the surprising success of Toronto-made app MavenSay in Indonesia, aided by social networks in that country (specifically, prominent Instagram users based in Jakarta).

“Here we are just a group of guys sitting at a startup in Toronto and we woke up one morning realizing that we had this massive spike in Asia,” said Bryan Friedman, one of three of MavenSay’s founders. “We rose to become the No. 1 free iPhone app across all categories in Indonesia. And we sort of sat at the top of the charts for five days, beating out Angry Birds, the Iron Man app, Facebook, Twitter, everyone.”

Friedman, who started the company with his former University of Toronto classmates Mike Wagman and Jesse Dallal, said they were floored when they saw the 15,000 downloads that first day, which continued the following week as well.

MavenSay, built by a seven-person team, had initially focused garnering its users from cities like New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Celebrities, including Samantha and Charlotte Ronson, are sharing their likes. Maple Leaf Joffrey Lupul has recommended the Harbour Sixty Steakhouse, among other things.

Things were going well, said Friedman, but nothing could have prepared them for breakout success half way around the world. Looking back at the data, he chalks it up to some early adopters in Jakarta who had massive Instagram followings. Indonesia is home to an extremely tech savvy culture with high usage of social media platforms. At the end of 2012, Jakarta was the city with the most posted tweets in the world, and was the No. 5 country in the world for Twitter usage.

“We’ve tried to retrace the steps and find the exact person or group of people who started it,” he said. “The night this all started happening we noticed that a couple of these big Instagram users, who had about 16,000 followers each, and one of things you can do is publish your MavenSay profile on Instagram. So they cross-posted their profiles and it just went from there.”

[LINK] “Is Huawei Giving Up on the U.S.? Pretty Much”

I’ve blogged in the past about the problems faced by Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in gaining access to North American markets, on security grounds. (For the record, both my cell phones have been Huawei models.) BusinessWeek‘s Bruce Einhorn now reports that Huawei is giving up its efforts.

Is Huawei, the huge Chinese technology company, giving up on efforts to build its business in the U.S.? Today, spokesman Scott Sykes told Bloomberg News in an e-mail that the U.S. won’t become a primary revenue source for its network equipment business for the “foreseeable future.” He was responding to reports by Reuters and the Financial Times citing Deputy Chairman Eric Xu saying at a meeting with analysts that Huawei is “not interested in the U.S. market anymore.”

Huawei Technology (002502) has good reason to sour on the U.S., given the strong opposition it has encountered from lawmakers and regulators in Washington. For instance, on April 8, Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Bloomberg Television that Huawei is a security risk to the U.S. Rogers also said he wants to ensure that Clearwire, the wireless company owned by Sprint Nextel (S), won’t use Huawei equipment. While Clearwire relies on equipment from Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Ciena (CIEN) for its core network, it does use some Huawei equipment, said Chief Technology Officer John Saw in October.

What Rogers thinks about what equipment Clearwire can buy is of significance now, since Japanese telecom operator Softbank (9984) is trying to acquire Clearwire’s parent, Sprint. In Japan, Softbank is a Huawei customer, and Rogers seems intent on making sure the Japanese company doesn’t continue that relationship in the U.S. Indeed, his April 8 statement is just the latest in a series of comments expressing worries about risks posed by Huawei. On March 28, Rogers told Bloomberg News that the companies had told him they wouldn’t use Huawei products in Sprint’s network. “I expect them to make the same assurances before any approval of the deal,” he wrote. “I have met with Softbank and Sprint regarding this merger and was assured they would not integrate Huawei into the Sprint network and would take mitigation efforts to replace Huawei equipment in the Clearwire network.”

The GOP isn’t the only party taking shots at Huawei. In Washington, speaking out against the perils posed by the Chinese company is a rare issue of bipartisan accord. Last month, President Obama signed the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of Fiscal Year 2013. Amid the appropriations bill’s many provisions is Section 516, prohibiting the Departments of Commerce and Justice, NASA, and the National Science Foundation from buying IT systems from Chinese companies unless those agencies cooperate with the FBI or other Federal investigators to assess the potential for cyber mischief.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Crooked Timber’s Tedra Osell gives a very positive review of a monograph by Ari Kelman describing the long, complicated process of memorializing the United States’ Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that arguments the liberal world order hasn’t been working well post-2008 are wrong, not least because they rest on the assumption that things were going well before then.
• Eastern Approaches notes that political cohabitation in Georgia between President Mikheil Saakashvili and new Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream opposition isn’t working because the two sides are so divided on, well, everything.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan argues that lifting China’s one-child policy wouldn’t change fertility rates, which a) were declining before the policy’s imposition and b) are now as low as elsewhere in East Asia.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer writes about the Chavez-era changes to the Venezuelan military. His take? In general, these reforms, which include the entrenchment of a popular militia with links to Chavez’s revolutionary institutions and efforts at conscription, are confused.
• Torontoist’s Chris Riddell notes the multiple failed plans before the final, successful, 2006 plan to transform the Don Valley Brick Works into something.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Orin Kerr, who on the Aaron Swartz case has generally been critical of the arguments made by his supporters, recommends to his readers the long articles he thinks provide the best overviews on the case. Controversy ensues in the comments and on Twitter.
• Window on Eurasia reports on the resurgence of Buddhism in Russia, especially in the traditionally Buddhist republics of Kalmykia and Buryatia, and its implications on links with Mongolia.

[LINK] “Brains of rats connected allowing them to share information via internet”

The Guardian‘s Ian Sample reports on a rather remarkable new technological development. The paper’s title is “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information”, but I’ve seen people on Facebook talking about rat telepathy, too.

Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information in a major step towards what the researchers call the world’s first “organic computer”.

The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water.

[. . .]

Led by Miguel Nicolelis, a pioneer of devices that allow paralysed people to control computers and robotic arms with their thoughts, the researchers say their latest work may enable multiple brains to be hooked up to share information.

[. . .]

The scientists first demonstrated that rats can share, and act on, each other’s sensory information by electrically connecting their brains via tiny grids of electrodes that reach into the motor cortex, the brain region that processes movement.

The rats were trained to press a lever when a light went on above it. When they performed the task correctly, they got a drink of water. To test the animals’ ability to share brain information, they put the rats in two separate compartments. Only one compartment had a light that came on above the lever. When the rat pressed the lever, an electronic version of its brain activity was sent directly to the other rat’s brain. In trials, the second rat responded correctly to the imported brain signals 70% of the time by pressing the lever.

Remarkably, the communication between the rats was two-way. If the receiving rat failed at the task, the first rat was not rewarded with a drink, and appeared to change its behaviour to make the task easier for its partner. In further experiments, the rats collaborated in a task that required them to distinguish between narrow and wide openings using their whiskers.

In the final test, the scientists connected rats on different continents and beamed their brain activity back and forth over the internet. “Even though the animals were on different continents, with the resulting noisy transmission and signal delays, they could still communicate,” said Miguel Pais-Vieira, the first author of the study, in a statement. “This tells us that we could create a workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.”

[LINK] “Pastoral Uruguay Yields a Crop of Digital Yetis and Adventures”

Noel, do you have any insights on the situation described in this New York Times article?

For a start-up that has a hit video game for the iPhone, the new loft-style offices of Ironhide Game Studio are exactly what one would expect — a newly hired staff labors feverishly on software updates not far from a pinball machine and custom-built monster arcade cabinet intended for letting off steam.

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

[. . .]

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.