[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Crooked Timber’s Jon Mandle reflects on his experiences of a visit to Auschwitz.
• The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird notes the development of a robot that can walk like a cat.
• Eastern Approaches suggests that Croatia, set to enter the European Union, should pick up economic tips from Finland’s experience in the 1990s.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen argues convincingly that the lack of payment for sperm donors in Canada means that domestic sperm–from paid domestic sperm donors, at least–is short.
• Savage Minds considers language revival among tribal peoples in Taiwan by looking to the mixed experience of Southern Maori revivalists in New Zealand.
• The Search offers guidelines as to the digital archiving of images. (Keep them in TIFF but don’t worry if they’re JPEG.)
• Torontoist’s Desmond Cole notes a recent protest in Toronto to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the federal government’s limiting of access to healthcare to refugees.
• Towleroad reports on the GLBT components of the anti-government protests in Turkey.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton photographs the Gibraltar Point lighthouse and wonders about the Toronto Islands.
• Bag News Notes visits Iraqi Kurdistan and the survivors of Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurdish city of Halabja.
• At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather notes that the projected size of the American population in decades hence has decreased owing to the recession-related fall in the birth rate.
• Eastern Approaches notes the church-sponsored attack on a gay pride protestin Georgia, its implications for law and order in Georgia, and the impact on Georgia’s reputation abroad.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Perelstvaig goes over the fluctuating Russo-Finnish border regions.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan argues that devoting ten thousand hours to practising a particular skill, as described by Gladwell, won’t do anything if one doesn’t have the requisite talent.
• Language Hat notes an article on the life of Alice Kober, one of the linguists who helped decrypy the Minoan script Linear B.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio wonders how astronomers would recognize artifacts of a supercivilization–Dyson spheres, FTL warp bubbles, et cetera–as artifacts.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes that many Russian nationalists are opposed to integrating with post-Soviet countries, particularly in Central Asia, that are currently de-Russifying.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bag News Notes features multiple interesting brief photo essays: one about the downloadable gun; one about the woman miraculously rescued from the wreckage of the factory in Bangladesh; one about how modernism, done right, can be quite beautiful.
• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling links to a critique of the English words and terms used by European Union officials and to a description of the post-democratic “info-state”.
• Crooked Timber commemorates the conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Mott by noting that Ronald Reagan spoke highly of him.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh introduces the work of a blogger who suggests that, between emigration and the consequences of a low birth rate, Portugal’s economy is set to crater.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley considers Edward Hugh’s suggestion that some countries might face state failure as depopulation proceeds.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen seems to like Feedly as an alternative to Google Reader.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín blogs about the way in people transgressed identities–national, occupational, and so on–can be quite commonsensical while others who don’t get this can be stuck.
• Savage Minds interviews journalist and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior about experience in her two professions.
• Strange Maps links to a map of chimpanzee and bonobo populations in central Africa, divided not only by their behaviour (the first violent, the second sexual) but by the Congo River.
• Une heure de peine’s Denis Colombi tackles the idea that French emigrants are refugees fleeing a hostile environment at home, as opposed to being mobile professionals in a global workplace.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin argues that judicial rulings legalizing same-sex marriage have not harmed same-sex marriage at the ballot box.
• Window on Eurasia touches on the ethnic divisions among Russian Buddhists–Kalmyks, Tuvans, Buryats–that is preventing the establishment of a Buddhist sanctuary in Moscow.

[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.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.
• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into text, diacritical marks are endangered in the Polish language. A campaign has been launched.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis links to an essay by feminist and historian Ruth Rosen wherein she states–basically–that early feminists didn’t think about campaigning against violence against women in the 1970s because violence against women was taken for granted as inevitable.
• British journalist Mark Simpson unearths a vintage article about Napster and the Internet and free culture from 2001 that’s still relevant today.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen links approvingly to a book, Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, that examines “Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times”. It does look interesting.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the ways in which the sex industry of New York City’s Times Square was an integral part of the neighbourhood, in photos and posters.
• Torontoist notes that City Council has just declared Toronto a sanctuary city, guaranteeing undocumented residents access to municipal services. More on this later.
• Eugene Volokh in a couple of posts (1, 2) starts speculating whether or not indigenous peoples in the New World would have seen European migrants as illegal immigrants and starts to head in problematic directions. Again, more later.
• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his love of libraries.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes, via various sources, that Chechen refugees in the European Union are facing forced returns to their ever-problematic homeland.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• BCer in Toronto and Liberal Party stalwart Jeff Jedras is happy that the NDP is encountering controversy on the national unity front.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster notes, briefly, exoplanets with retrograde orbits around their stars (revolving around their suns in a direction opposite their suns’ rotation).
• Cosmic Variance’s Julianne Dalcanton wonders if Google+ might have a future as a social network for niches, like young people who want to social network independent of their parents.
• Daniel Drezner notes that even Israeli hawks think Iran is several years from developing nuclear weapons. Why do some Americans choose to think otherwise?
• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, a book on Scientology that’s an expansion of Wright’s earlier article in The New Yorker.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan posts some personal research suggesting that speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages in South Asia are historically recent immigrants.
• Norman Geras posts excerpts from a Matthew Parris article in The Times pointing out, contra Argentine claims of British colonialism re: the Falklands, that Argentina’s own very white population is a product of its own genocidal state-building imperialism in the 19th century.
• Torontoist’s Steve Kupferman notes that Ana Bailão, my city councillor, has pled guilty to charges of drunk driving, paying a thousand dollar fine.
• Inspired by Aaron Swartz, the Volokh Conspiracy’s Orin Kerr starts a debate as to what the prosecution should do if a defendant becomes suicidal.
• Window on Eurasia posts an article suggesting that the Circassian diaspora is caught between two very strong globalization currents, one Westernizing them the other Islamizing them.

[LINK] “Massacres Alter Social Structure of Africa’s Elephants”

Writing about elephants, ScienceNOW‘s Virginia Morell notes the sociological and demographic impacts of poaching on elephant populations. They’re worrisome: leaving aside the actual decreases in the number of elephants, the selective killing of older elephants destabilizes the family groups that form the nuclei of elephant society. Even the baby boom that the researchers note is worrisome, indicating that the elephants’ habitat can support far more elephants than actually live.

Poachers are slaughtering elephants across Africa at an unprecedented pace. But scientists tracking the animals’ carcasses—their faces and ivory hacked away—are seldom able to explain in detail what these deaths mean to the pachyderms’ populations and social structure. Now, a 14-year study of elephants in northern Kenya concludes that the adult behemoths are more likely to die at the hands of humans than from natural causes. At the same time, the elephants have responded to the heavy poaching with a baby boom, providing the researchers some hope for the jumbos’ survival.

[. . .]

In 1997, the scientists began a study on elephant behavior in two adjacent national reserves, Samburu and Buffalo Springs, which together measure 220 square kilometers. The parks’ elephants were accustomed to vehicles and easy to study; they had also recovered from heavy poaching in the 1970s. At the beginning of the study, illegal killing was rare. “We might lose one big male a year,” says George Wittemyer, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and the study’s lead author. “We thought the population was stable.” That changed in 2009 as poachers began shooting elephants en masse. The scientists then shifted their study to look at the effects the poaching was having on the elephants they knew.

At the study’s outset, the researchers focused on 934 individuals (509 females and 425 males). The team used a standard method for identifying each elephant, noting each animal’s unique markings on its ears and face, as well as the shape of its tusks. Then each week, from 1997 to 2011, the researchers drove along five, 20-kilometer routes inside the reserves and recorded the presence or absence of the study elephants. They considered any animals that they didn’t spot for more than 3 years to be dead. The scientists seldom found the carcasses of these animals, but they investigated any dead elephants reported by tourists or rangers that were inside the parks or within 10 kilometers of the reserves’ boundaries.

Although the elephant population was increasing when the study began, it began to decline as poachers targeted the animals. The older elephants, which have larger tusks, were especially hard hit. In 2000, there were 38 males over 30 years old in the study population. By 2011, their number had dropped to 12—and of those, seven had matured into this age class. Older females also suffered huge losses, with almost half of those 30 years old dying between 2006 and 2011. By 2011, 56% of the elephants that were found dead had been poached, the team reports online today in PLOS ONE.

The poaching spree has also altered the elephants’ social organization, the study shows. When the work began, males made up 42% of the population; by 2011, they had been cut down to only 32%. And 10 of the 50 elephant family groups that the scientists were studying were effectively wiped out. “They no longer have any breeding females,” Wittemyer explains. “And so, the family group has disappeared, leaving surviving juveniles on their own.” These youngsters may join other families, or, without a leader to guide them, try to survive in sibling groups typically led by the oldest sister.

“Some elephants died from a bad drought that hit the region between 2009 and 2010,” Wittemyer adds. “But at least half of these deaths were due to poaching.” The poaching took place outside the reserves on lands that are largely unpatrolled. In addition to the reserve, the elephants roam over a vast area of more than 3500 square kilometers.

[URBAN NOTE] “Why the City Hesitated to Proclaim the Anniversary of the Nanking Massacre”

Torontoist’s David Hains noted earlier this week the reluctance of some Toronto politicians to grant official recognition to the Nanking Massacre. Many of the usual suspects seem to be involved.

Inasmuch as there are certainly more than three hundred thousand people of Chinese background in the city of Toronto (roughly 283 thousand in 2006), a reluctance to recognize one of the worst atrocities committed against the Chinese during the Second World War could very well lose some people votes.

Official proclamations of special commemorative occasions are plentiful at City Hall: the City has publicly declared everything from Foursquare Day to Bullying Awareness Week. But Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) was frustrated by the difficulties she encountered when she tried to win official recognition for the 75th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre. Council finally decided to make that proclamation, at Wong-Tam’s urging, earlier today.

“I don’t believe we’re asking anything extraordinary, although this is a significant anniversary,” she said during an interview before the council decision. “You would never say to the Jewish community that you would not proclaim Holocaust Awareness Week.”

[. . .]

When City Hall’s Protocol Services office received Wong-Tam’s request for the proclamation, they denied it on the basis that it was “politically controversial,” and therefore against the proclamation criteria. In explaining this decision, they sent Wong-Tam a link to the Nanking Massacre Wikipedia page, which has a section that describes its associated “controversy.” The mayor’s office, which has the power to act independently of Protocol Services, relied on the office’s rationale, and chose not to proclaim the anniversary. Even so, despite a ruling from council speaker Frances Nunziata that Wong-Tam’s motion requesting the proclamation (seconded by Ward 41 councillor Chin Lee) was not urgent, council adopted it today.

The difficulty in passing the proclamation—normally a simple matter—highlights the underlying importance of raising awareness about the massacre. In an effort to share understanding of Nanking with the mayor, Wong-Tam offered books and DVDs, but received no response. “It’s important to understand and validate the fact that [the victims'] pain is real,” she told Torontoist. A difficult process like the one she faced, she said, “effectively re-victimizes the victims.”

Wong-Tam said Councillor Norm Kelly (Ward 40, Scarborough-Agincourt), a Governor General’s Award–winning historian, told her before council’s lunch break on Tuesday that “it’s time for you guys to move on.” When asked about the statement, which Wong-Tam called “shocking,” Kelly said he couldn’t recall any specific exchange, but he didn’t deny it. The Scarborough councillor, who taught a Chinese history course at Upper Canada College in the 1970s, added that he would support the proclamation of the 75th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, but would prefer more awareness of Canadian history, like the treatment of Canadian prisoners of war during World War Two. “[The massacre] is something that happened purely in an Asian context between two Asian societies,” he said during an interview.

“I’m not sure Canadian society is at a point where it has to be instructed about these things,” he added, “because I think we have values that preclude being attracted to behaviour like that.”

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Crooked Timber’s Niamh Hardiman writes about the tensions between democracy and effective supranational governance in the European Union, in Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s statements.
• Eastern Approaches’ T.J. profiles one of the first prominent Sikh immigrants in Slovenia, a business-owner.
• The Global Sociology Blog gives a qualified positive review of Paolo Bacigalupi’s young-adult novel Ship Breaker.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan considers the ways in which the people of Madagascar, descended from Austronesian-speaking migrants from Southeast Asia, seem to have developed in isolation from trends in the ancestral homeland and elsewhere. Interesting comments.
• Language Hat notes the shift from “vous” to “tu” in French.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s SEK expects that in the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s collapse as a candidate, American extremists are likely to be even more vocal than before.
• Marginal Revolution links to a remarkable essay claiming the Khmer Rouge never committed genocide in Cambodia but instead did as much good as they could in its brief reign. There are no words.
• A guest post at Registan observes that Uzbek culture and language are gradually being excluded from public space in Kyrgyzstan’s Osh, which saw anti-Uzbek pogroms two years ago.
• Torontoist follows protests of Toronto Muslims outside the American consulate at the infamous Innocence of Muslims video.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 80 Beats reports on new research arguing that Easter Island was doomed not by the people’s overuse of resources but rather by invasive rats.
• Writing at the Everyday Sociology Blog, Colby King describes how he experienced Las Vegas as a sociologist and as a tourist at once.
• Eastern Approaches notes the success of the heavily Russophone-supported Harmony Centre party in the recent Latvian election.
• Far Outliers quotes from Bloodlands about the ways in which casualty numbers and perpetrators are used to deploy Second World War casualty figures for political reasons.
• Geocurrents reports on the nationalism and history of the Barotse people of western Zambia.
• The Global Sociology Blog observes that Western countries allow the export of relatively inexpensive and highly capable surveillance technologies that permit governance both minimalist and repressive.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín (originally writing in Spanish but translated via Google Translate) talks about how migrants are willing to take risks–including participate in the sex trade–in order to benefit themselves in the longer run in unknown or uncertain ways.
• Normblog’s Norman Geras is overkind to people who suspect that Gadaffi wouldn’t have engaged in a bloody massacre of Benghazi had his forces been allowed to enter the city before the NATO intervention.
• Slap Upside the Head seems not that pleased that queer men in Britain can now donate blood if they haven’t had sex in the year prior to their donation.
• Writing in French at Une heure de peine (but translated into English thanks to Google Translate), Denis Colombi argues that the example of Steve Jobs shows that capitalism needs charismatic businessmen if it’s to innovate.