News
1. She who shall not be named
A 20-year-old man who pleaded guilty to child pornographywill be sentenced todayat Halifax youth court. Another man, 19, will be tried starting November 24. The case involves a highly publicized incident that happened when the men were boys at a local high school. It involves a girl who was photographed while she was allegedly sexually assaulted by one of the boys. The photo was widely distributed at her school, and she subsequently took her own life. Everyone knows who we’re talking about, but there’s a publication ban on the names of the girl and the boys.
2. Deadly highways
On a fatalities per driver basis, Nova Scotia has the second highest car accident mortality rate in Canada. “There have been 47 collision deaths in Nova Scotia this year,reports Paul MacLeod. “From 2010 to 2013, the fatality totals were 70, 64, 83 and 80, respectively.”
3. Dawgfather v Bike Lane
TheDawgfather is suingthe four-block bike lane, saying it is being built just to put him out of business.
4. Library
The new library will open December 13. Watch out, a 50-year-old Sea King helicopter will be buzzing the crowd.
5. Tickets
Lest we forget,all laws can be ignoredon Remembrance Day. Park by a hydrant, in a bus stop, block a driveway, whatever, it’s all good.
Views
1. Dartmouth
Photo: Stephen Archibald
With all the talk of daylighting the Saw Mill River, Stephen Archibald pulls outphotos of the areahe took last year.
2. No fracking
Jim Guy, professor emeritus of political science and international law at Cape Breton University, has an op-ed in the Cape Breton Post sayingwe shouldn’t frack.
3. Lezlie Lowe
I learned yesterdayLezlie Lowe has a blog. How did I not know this? Anyway, there seems to be a recurring theme.
4. Cranky letter of the day
How many men does it take to patch a hole that is 20 inches long, 11 inches wide and about 1.5 inches deep on one of the local streets in HRM?
Answer: eight men and three trucks. Believe it. I saw it with my own eyes. No wonder our taxes are so high.
H.E. Daine, Halifax
Government
City
Appeals Standing Committee(10am, City Hall)—Windgate Farmin Windsor Junction and the owner of 26 Atlantic View Drive at Sambro Head are appealingunsightly premises citations.
Community Planning and Economic Development Standing Committee(2pm, City Hall)—If we would just unleash theGreater Halifax Partnership, the streets would be paved with gold.
Harbour East–Marine Drive Community Council(6pm, Nantucket Room, Dartmouth Sportsplex)—on the agenda are three “non-substantive amendments” to development agreements.
Province
No public meetings.
On this date in 1911, the Dominion Atlantic Railway was leased to Canadian Pacific for 999 years. The Dominion line ran through the Annapolis Valley, and the company owned a lot of ancillary businesses, including the Digby Pines Resort and the Cornwallis Inn. You can read more about it at theDominion Atlantic Railway Digital Preservation Initiative site, from which the above video was borrowed: “In this clip you will see the Dominion Atlantic Railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Princess of Acadia I and the demolition of our Train Station. The footage dates between the 1950s and early 1970s in Digby, Nova Scotia, Canada.”
On campus
Dalhousie
Today
Dimensionality reduction in the presence of severe and changing class imbalance in cancer data(Thursday, 11:30am, Room 430, Goldberg Computer Science Building)—the speaker is William Klement from the University of Ottawa.
Hagfish Slime Unraveled(Thursday, 4pm, Theatre D, CRC Building)—Douglas Fudge, from the University of Guelph, is the presenter at this week’s Biochemistry & Molecular Biology seminar. Bring popcorn.
Killing Us Softly: Challenging the everyday effects of racism and violence on the health and well-being of African Canadians(Thursday, 7pm, Potter Auditorium, 6100 University Avenue)—Wanda Thomas Bernard is from the Dalhousie School of Social Work, and has just beenawarded the Order of Canada. She “will discuss种族主义和弦乐器的影响ence on the health and well-being of African Canadians.”
Friday
Scotiabank’s Ethics in Action(Friday, 12:30pm, Rowe Management Building)—Scotiabank is sponsoring a student-led conference. “Ethics in Action has four components: a case competition, a video/essay contest on ethical leadership, the presentation of the Scotiabank Ethical Leadership Award, and a one-day conference open to the public.” If those students have any spunk, one of those ethical cases will be about Scotiabank, which had record profits of $6.7-billion last year but is nonethelesslaying off 1,500 employees.
Thesis defence, Medical Neuroscience(Friday, 2pm, Room 3107, Mona Campbell Building)—PhD candidate Éva Gunde will defend her thesis, “Examining Single-Subject Reliability of Functional Magnetic resonance Imaging in Established Multiple Sclerosis.”
Thesis defence, Interdisciplinary Studies(Friday, 3:30pm, Room 430, Goldberg Computer Science Building)—PhD candidate Matthew Numer will defend his thesis, “Gay Men’s Sexual Subjectivities in the Age of HIV-Aids: A Poststructural Discourse Analysis of Activists’ Experiences in Nova Scotia.”
Peter Singer
Peter Singer(Friday, 7pm, Room 105, Weldon Law Building)—歌手is a big name in moral philosophy and has published several influential books, including “Animal Liberation,” “Rethinking Life and Death,” and “The Life You Can Save.” His lecture is titled “Ethics, Morality, and the Law” and will focus onAssisted Dying— “Is it ethical? Should it be legal? With legislation in front of Parliament, a permissive regime being implemented in Quebec, and the Supreme Court of Canada poised to rule in Carter v. Canada, we must confront these questions.”
Stretching the Envelope of New Media Art(Friday, 7pm, CIBC Auditorium, Goldberg Computer Science Building)—Nell Tenhaaf, from York University, will discuss “new media” (bioart, DIY science, nanoart, etc.).
Saint Mary’s
Today
J. Russell Perkins(Thursday, 3pm, Room LI135, Patrick Power Library)—Perkins will talk about his new book, “David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel.”
King’s College
Friday
Puppies(noon–4pm, Senior Common Room)—Therapeutic Paws of Canadais visiting campus, which is arfully cute.
Noticed
The above areInuit maps:
These three-dimensional maps were carved by inuits from the Ammassalik Fjord in Greenland, and used as eyes-free guides for sailing. The left one shows coastline, the right one shows a sequence of offshore islands. These inuit communities had had no direct contact with Europeans before a Danish explorer met them in 1885 and was shown the wooden maps.
And here are those wooden maps transposed onto amodern map of Greenland:
In the harbour
The seas around Nova Scotia, 5:45am Thursday. Map: marinetraffic.com
(click on vessel names for pictures and more information about the ships)
Fusion, con-ro, Saint-Pierre to Pier 36, then sails back to Saint-Pierre
Eagle Stealth, tanker, Port Arthur, Texas to anchor for bunkers, then sails for
Come by Chance, Newfoundland
北欧维斯比, bulker, Ponta da Madeira, Brazil to Pier 30/31
Oceanex Sanderlingsails for St. John’s
Oil tankers servicing the Saint John refinery. Map: marinetraffic.com
有很重的油轮活动约赛nt John for the past couple of weeks (tankers are depicted as red ships in the map above). This morning, there are two tankers at the refinery, four at anchor waiting to unload, and two departing (one off map, down the Bay of Fundy). The global price of oil has collapsed, and so refineries, including the Irving refinery in Saint John, are processing and storing as much oil as they can before an anticipated rise in prices in the near future when winter sets in.
The heavy tanker traffic has caught the attention of the bible of the shipping press,Hellenic Shipping News:
Teekay Tankers noted that the recent strength in tanker rates is in part due to the impact of lower global oil prices, which is having a positive impact on tanker rates in a number of ways. First of all, “lower oil prices encourage stockpiling of crude oil, particularly in China where the government continues to fill the second stage of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve; a contango price structure for crude oil futures encourages buying and could lead to floating storage of oil if the spread between the current and future oil price widens; Lower oil and fuel prices, if sustained, could translate into higher oil demand over time; and reduced bunker prices are positive for tanker earnings by lowering voyage operating costs”.
Footnotes
Feels like Tuesday.
Believe it.
Love the Inuit maps! Just think – tomorrow is Friday, not Wednesday.
Lol the Dawgfather… he is our very own public crazy uncle…. gotta love him. I cant wait to see how posted off bike lanes and plowing works…. We cant get roads and sidewalks plowed. At least we wont have to pay to get the post removed.
RE: Tickets – Anything goes in Jew Jersey
Ok. That was supposed to be New Jersey, but that’s what I get for being “social”, online even, without coffee beforehand. Sorry for the unfortunate typo…
Banks talking about ethics? The prevailing banking systems are the single most fraudulent ‘thing’ in existence today; just ask your mortgage holder to prove that they made you a loan in the first place; ask them to give you back the promissory note (not contract; a negotiable note) that you signed (endorsed) in order to create the money that they “loaned” you.
They can’t and they won’t. That would be blowing the cover on their dirty, no-ethics-involved-here secret.
Just sayin’