A Bit More Detail

Ryan Davidson, over at Law and the Multiverse, has an essay analyzing the Avengers‘ S.H.I.E.L.D.

He comes to the conclusion that, as depicted, makes most sense to see the organization as an American one with token representation from allies.

On balance, from a legal perspective and making allowances for artistic license, it would be better if S.H.I.E.L.D. were an American organization. Movies pretty consistently ignore what would be acts of war in the real world, even in non-speculative/comic book political and military thrillers. So if we give them a pass on that bit, the way S.H.I.E.L.D. acts a lot of the time really looks like a domestic military force. There’s still a problem though, given that The Council does appear to have members from multiple nations, but there might actually be a way of fixing that. There isn’t actually any obvious reason the U.S. couldn’t start a military force completely under domestic authority but, in a spirit of international cooperation, permit representatives from select foreign nations to participate in its operations. Given that S.H.I.E.L.D. is involved in some pretty hairy and advanced weapons R&D, this might actually be a decent way of convincing our allies to support the project, as they could exercise some control over the organization, trying to keep it focused on extra-terrestrial threats. This is, of course, not discussed in the movie at all, but there isn’t any obvious reason it couldn’t work.

Livejournaler dewline has posted on the nature of S.H.I.E.L.D., the paramilitary agency of great power in the Avengers universe that’s of uncertain constitutional status. He favours the idea of the agency as a paramilitary first-response team.

linked to journalist Catherine Solyom’s interview in the National Post with fugitive hacker Christopher Doyon. Doyon, allegedly one of the coordinators of the Anonymous movement of cyber-hackers, here in this article claims to have global reach and access to everything.

Q: Anonymous started out as online pranksters but has gotten a whole lot more serious in the last two years. What happened?
A: I believe Egypt was really a turning point for us emotionally in Anonymous. Obviously there was always that sort of prankster edge to us. But people often ask me, “Why are you so mean nowadays?” It started in Egypt – when you work for days to set up live video feeds and the first thing you watch through those feeds is people killing your friends with machine guns – that becomes personal. And then it’s not just Egypt, it’s Libya, Tunisia, over and over again these Freedom Ops are really what gave us a sort of take-no prisoners attitude. We get to know these people. It may not be the same as you and I sitting here, but when you Skype with people and spend hours and hours talking with them on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and they share their hopes and their dreams with you for their country, their future, when they tell you how they’re risking their lives so their children can have a better future in some far-off land, you bond with those people and they become your friends and family.

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Is this last sentence really true? Or is this just bragging?

Tess Kalinowski’s Toronto Star article seems–to my mind–to gush overmuch about the new light rail scheduled to be constructed along Toronto’s midtown/west-to-east Eglinton Avenue. It is interesting to be in town to see the process start, but the sheer geographic scope of the process could potentially allow for plenty of flaws to be manifested.

When MPP Mike Colle takes a mental stroll down Eglinton Ave., he sees pokey one- and two-storey buildings, gas stations, parking lots. In his mind it boils down to a whole lot of potential.

Now, after decades of neglect, the Liberal MPP for Eglinton-Lawrence says the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT, still eight years from completion, is already transforming the neighbourhood he loves to boost.

“We need more people living on Eglinton. It’s the forgotten middle of Toronto. For decades nobody ever paid attention to it. Now this gives us a chance to pay attention. This is a chance to give it some light and some investment. The transportation is really the catalyst. And it’s already happening,” said Colle, who cites the redevelopment of the 50-year-old China House restaurant at Bathurst St. into a condo that sold out in a couple of weeks.

How Eglinton looks once the Crosstown is running will depend on a two-year city planning exercise called an avenue study that begins community consultations Thursday at the Fairbank Memorial Community Centre on Dufferin St.

The $1.3 million study, which will eventually go before city council, is the first step in envisioning what Eglinton will look like after the Crosstown is built, how it will be zoned, what kind of buildings and public spaces will be encouraged.

Avenue studies typically focus on one or two kilometers of a street. But this one, like the ambitious 26-kilometre, $6 billion Crosstown line itself, will be unprecedented. It will traverse 14 wards through the tunnelled west and central portions starting at Black Creek Dr. and at street level from Laird Rd. to Kennedy Station in the east, said Toronto director of Transportation Planning Rod McPhail.

It will look at all kinds of potential development — from retail and residential to public realm issues such as what to do with the bus lanes that will no longer be required in the Dufferin-Keele area.

What Andrew Barton said at Acts of Minor Treason. Building fiction universes which make sense, and which–when they diverge from the world we know–do so in ways that are readily comprehensible, is something that’s not only important for science fiction, either. Plausible characters and settings and plots count everywhere.

Sometimes it’s difficult to really wrap one’s head about why this is important. Recently I came across an article on Gizmodo regarding the Pentagon’s withdrawal of support from the movie The Avengers. As author Spencer Ackerman put it, their reason was that “the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.” Presumably, the implied conclusion we’re supposed to draw is that this is ridiculous, hair-splitting stuff, and that the Pentagon is just being a bunch of jerks who want to cramp the movie’s style.

You know what, though? The military is right. According to the Defense Department, their main problem is that they couldn’t figure out where the US military stood in relation to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Wikipedia describes as an “espionage and secret military law-enforcement agency,” which really narrows it down – and, hell, I imagine it’s easy as hell to maintain secrecy over something like a giant flying aircraft carrier. S.H.I.E.L.D. has, from what I understand, been the subject of fan debates over just what it is for a good chunk of the last fifty years.

Answering questions like this is important. They define what you can and cannot do in a story, and as such reduce the unmanageability of everything being possible into more restricted channels that can guide the flow of a narrative. Something that is shadowy, nebulous, and ill-defined even to the people writing it does not lend itself well to the best writing. Creators need to know how their creations work, even if that information never filters down to the audience.

One of the Andrews I know on Facebook linked to Canadian science journalist Bob McDonald‘s post describing why the Canadian and Québec science writers’ organizations received a press freedom award. He’s right to note that we really shouldn’t be proud of the reasons why.

Posted in its entirety, due to its importance.

This past week, the Canadian Science Writers Association, and its Quebec equivalent, received the Press Freedom Award from the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom and Canadian Commission for UNESCO for their efforts to stop the muzzling of Canadian federal scientists. The award was given on May 3, World Press Freedom Day.

The award is given to a Canadian person or group who has defended or advanced the cause of freedom of expression. The science writers collectively wrote an open letter to the prime minister last February, asking to free federal scientists from restrictions imposed on them when speaking to the press about their own work, especially those in environmental science.

This type of award is usually given to reporters working in countries where oppressive governments or dictatorships attempt to control the press and threaten the lives of journalists pursuing the truth. It’s not the type of issue we normally associate with Canada.

Every year, another organization, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, honours journalists, usually from a war-torn or oppressed country, who have risked their lives just doing their job – seeking the truth and informing the public. The huge gala evening, which I have had the privilege to witness, is attended by hundreds of journalists in all media from across the country who support our international colleagues.

The event is a highly emotional one, as we listen to the tragic and heroic stories of journalists who have had their families threatened, been shot at or even killed by governments that do not want the media’s message to be heard.

Hearing about the difficulties journalists in other countries face underlines how privileged we are in Canada to uphold the principles of journalistic integrity.

But this award to the Canadian Science Writers Association is a sign that the tip of that oppressive iceberg is showing here.

Of course, no science writers are being threatened, but there have been numerous incidents where journalists, including us at Quirks & Quarks, have requested interviews with federal scientists about their own work and have either been refused or delayed access until after our deadlines by government media relations.

The scientific perspective on the world is an important one because science is the pursuit of truth. Most of the universe is still unknown to us, whether it be the dynamics of our atmosphere and how it interacts with the oceans, land and life, or the dark matter hidden between the stars.

We know that human activity has had a negative impact on our planet and we need to make some hard decisions about ways to reduce that impact without destroying the economy or our way of life. Those decisions need the scientific point of view. Science is the voice of reason that is often overshadowed by political, social or economic priorities.

This is not to say that science has all the answers, nor should decisions be made for purely scientific reasons. But that perspective needs to be part of the mix, and for that reason, the scientists need to be heard.

So, congratulations to the Canadian Science Writers Association for the award – but it’s really a bit of a sad day for Canada.

Tumblr’s lostmuskrat linked to Winslow Wheeler’s Foreign Policy article about the existential failings of the F-35. The cause of significant pricetag-related issues in Canada, it’s all the more problematic for the country that’s actually building it.

How bad is it? A review of the F-35′s cost, schedule, and performance — three essential measures of any Pentagon program — shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

First, with regard to cost — a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment — the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however — they pledged to finally reverse the growth.

The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don’t expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program’s cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion — and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.

[. . .]

A final note on expense: The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion — making for a grand total of $1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain. And that estimate is wildly optimistic: It assumes the F-35 will only be 42 percent more expensive to operate than an F-16, but the F-35 is much more complex. The only other “fifth generation” aircraft, the F-22 from the same manufacturer, is in some respects less complex than the F-35, but in 2010, it cost 300 percent more to operate per hour than the F-16. To be very conservative, expect the F-35 to be twice the operating and support cost of the F-16.

[. . .]

The F-35 isn’t only expensive — it’s way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial batch of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is “to be determined.” A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony — almost 10 years late.

If the F-35′s performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications — and it will not — it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

[. . .]

The design was born in the late 1980s in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon agency that has earned an undeserved reputation for astute innovation. It emerged as a proposal for a very short takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft (known as “STOVL”) that would also be supersonic. This required an airframe design that — simultaneously — wanted to be short, even stumpy, and single-engine (STOVL), and also sleek, long, and with lots of excess power, usually with twin engines.

President Bill Clinton’s Pentagon bogged down the already compromised design concept further by adding the requirement that it should be a multirole aircraft — both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber. This required more difficult tradeoffs between agility and low weight, and the characteristics of an airframe optimized to carry heavy loads. Clinton-era officials also layered on “stealth,” imposing additional aerodynamic shape requirements and maintenance-intensive skin coatings to reduce radar reflections. They also added two separate weapons bays, which increase permanent weight and drag, to hide onboard missiles and bombs from radars. On top of all that, they made it multiservice, requiring still more tradeoffs to accommodate more differing, but exacting, needs of the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy.

Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig reports on news that Japan is apparently altering its policy on the Kurils, hoping that a partition of the Kurils between Japan and Russia on north-south lines, giving Japan the islands nearest Hokkaido–Shikotan and the Habomai islet groups–and letting Russia keep the northern islands. This is an attempt at compromise, true, but I don’t think it’ll work out for the reasons Pereltsvaig highlights. Me, as I noted in 2010, Japan is the only defeated Second World War country still claiming territory lost in 1945; there’s something off about that. IMHO.

The idea to negotiate the return of Shikotan and the Habomai group as a first step in the resolution of this long-standing diplomatic impasse belongs to the then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who proposed it to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2001. However, negotiating the return of two rather than all four islands at once met with resistance in Japan, because of fears that such an arrangement would result in Moscow retaining control of Etorofu and Kunashiri indefinitely. Such concerns prompted Mori’s successor Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to seek a comprehensive resolution to the dispute before the two sides conclude a peace treaty, but Putin ultimately dismissed the suggestion. The revival of the idea to negotiate over just two islands coincides with Putin’s return to the presidency yesterday, as the president-elect expressed a certain degree of willingness to resolve the issue in an interview with foreign media outlets in March of this year. However, other Russian media outlets, such as Fontanka.ru, claim that “no Russian president will ever relinquish the Kurils to Japan” and cite sources in the Kremlin as saying that “Japan missed its historical chance to solve this territorial problem already in 1996 when President Boris Yeltsin met with the Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto in Krasnoyarsk”.

Michael Balter’s ScienceNOW is another interesting data point.

Three years ago, a stone-throwing chimpanzee named Santino jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that nonhumans could plan ahead. Santino, a resident of the Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, calmly gathered stones in the mornings and put them into neat piles, apparently saving them to hurl at visitors when the zoo opened as part of angry and aggressive “dominance displays.”

But some researchers were skeptical that Santino really was planning for a future emotional outburst. Perhaps he was just repeating previously learned responses to the zoo visitors, via a cognitively simpler process called associative learning. And it is normal behavior for dominant male chimps to throw things at visitors, such as sticks, branches, rocks, and even feces. Now Santino is back in the scientific literature, the subject of new claims that he has begun to conceal the stones so he can get a closer aim at his targets—further evidence that he is thinking ahead like humans do.

The debate over Santino is part of a larger controversy over whether some humanlike animal behaviors might have simpler explanations. For example, Sara Shettleworth, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, argued in a widely cited 2010 article entitled, “Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology,” that the zookeepers and researchers who observed Santino’s stone-throwing over the course of a decade had not seen him gathering the stones, and thus could not know why he originally starting doing so. Santino, Shettleworth and some others argued, might have had some other reasons for caching the stones, and the stone throwing might have been an afterthought.

In the new study, published online today in PLoS ONE, primatologist Mathias Osvath of Lund University in Sweden—author of the earlier Santino paper—teams up with Lund University primatologist Elin Karvonen to report new observations of Santino’s behavior during 2010. Santino’s first attempts to throw stones during 2010 came during the May preseason. As a zoo guide led visitors toward Santino’s island compound, the chimpanzee began to engage in a typical dominance display: screeching, standing on two feet, and carrying a stone in his hand. The guide and the visitors retreated before Santino began hurling the stones, and then advanced again for a total of three approaches. When the people returned about 3 hours later, Santino advanced toward them, holding two stones, but he did not act aggressively, even picking up an apple from the water surrounding the island and nonchalantly munching on it. But when Santino got within close range, he suddenly threw one of the stones. (It didn’t hit anyone.)

The next day, Santino again threatened visitors with stones, but the group again backed away to avoid being hit. Santino was then observed pulling a heap of hay from inside his enclosure and placing it on the island close to where the visitors approached. He put several stones under the hay and waited until the group returned about an hour later. Then, without performing a dominance display, Santino pulled a stone from under the hay and threw it. Later, he pulled a stone that he had apparently hidden behind a log and tried to hit the visitors with that, as well.

Over the course of the summer, Osvath and Karvonen observed repeated episodes of this behavior, and also recovered stones that Santino had hidden under hay or logs, racking up 114 days of observation. They recovered a total of 35 projectiles that Santino had apparently concealed: 15 under hay heaps, 18 behind logs, and two behind a rock structure on the island. The researchers conclude that Santino deliberately engaged in deceptive concealment of the stones, and that this was a new, innovative behavior on his part: Before 2010, Santino had never put stones under hay piles or behind logs.

Ella Davies’ BBC Nature report about humpback whale sociability makes me think.

A BBC/National Geographic film crew have recorded rare footage of humpback whales intervening in a killer whale hunt.

[. . .]

“To be honest we weren’t expecting to see anything – it was our very first day out on the boat,” said Victoria Bromley, a researcher with the crew that witnessed the scene.

Working from a whale-watching boat from Monterey Bay Whale Watch, the team set up to film in an area known for sightings of gray whales.

Every year female gray whales travel north from the birthing waters off the coast of Mexico to the nutrient rich waters of the Bering Sea with their calves.

Along the route, they are targeted by orcas, which co-ordinate their attacks – aiming to separate the defenceless young from their mothers.

To minimise their risk from the predators, gray whales swim in relatively shallow water but at Monterey Bay the whales must swim over the Monterey Canyon that in places can reach two miles deep.

The film crew arrived at the scene of the hunt following a tip off call from a sister boat.

Using a camera mounted on the boat, Ms Bromley told BBC Nature: “we saw a lot of grey shapes in the water and quickly realised they were humpbacks.”

According to the crew the additional whales were not just observers of the hunt but were actively involved.

The humpbacks at Monterey Bay were trumpeting, diving and slapping their pectoral fins against the water.

“It didn’t seem at all like they were confused… they were definitely there with a purpose,” said Ms Bromley.

Shortly after the crew arrived the orca successfully caught their prey. The mother whale fled the scene but the humpbacks remained.

“I have never seen anything like this before,” said marine biologist Alisa Schulman-Janiger who accompanied the filmmakers.

Mrs Schulman-Janiger has studied California killer whales since 1984 and is currently the director of the American Cetacean Society/Los Angeles Chapter’s Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project.

After the attack, two humpback whales moved into the area where the calf was last seen alive. They continued to make trumpeting calls, rolled in the water and slashed their tails aggressively at killer whales that came near.