The revelations about Prism and other forms of NSA dragnet surveillance has got some people wondering what all the fuss is. When William Hague tells us that the innocent have nothing to fear from involuntary disclosure, it raises questions about exactly what harms might come about from being spied upon. Here are some reasons you should care about privacy, disclosure and surveillance. [continue]

Are you thinking that all this is an American problem, or a British problem, and we’re just fine in Canada? Think again, and see Michael Geist’s article Who Is Watching the Watchers?: Ten Questions About Canada’s Secret Metadata Surveillance Activities.

Sigh.

I think I’ll have a bit of scotch now.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

But let me back up a bit. I googled the group behind this questionnaire, the Gabriola Island Community Safety Collaborative, and found this Shingle article: Safety group considers night lighting. Not because there is some evidence-based, demonstrated need for night lighting, it seems, but rather because some people might feel unsafe in some dark areas at night.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I used to live in the city and hated the bright lights at night. I moved to Gabriola, in part, because I want to live in a rural area where nights are dark, as they should be. Why would we want to light up the night? Anybody who needs a bit of light can take a flashlight, for heaven’s sake.

And about feeling unsafe, oh my. Is Gabriola unsafe, or isn’t it? If people get mugged, raped, beaten, threatened, shot, and so forth on a certain part of Gabriola, then crime statistics will be clear on the subject – that area IS unsafe. But we don’t seem to have that, do we? No, we are now concerned about people feeling unsafe. So what, we should change things based on the way some people feel, even if their feelings are not at all linked to facts?

On to the questionnaire, which seems to express the same concern about feelings. After asking for your gender, age, etc, we get the first concerned for your safety type question.

Then we move on to RCMP services. Which of the following categories would you most want the RCMP to focus their efforts on? I don’t really care, frankly. Surely RCMP members know what crimes get reported, yes? So they can respond based on that information. I would appreciate it if the police would refrain from holding Stop Everybody Days, but that is pretty much all I have to say about them. And does anybody seriously think that the RCMP will adjust their priorities based on a survey? Well, we’ll see, I suppose.

Next we have questions about fire and ambulance services, including doozies like this:

Can you suggest any way our fire department could be more effective at serving the public?

Oh, how about considering advice from people who have training and experience in fighting fires and running fire departments, instead of random members of the public? Soliciting advice from people who know nothing about firefighting is senseless.

Then back to the feeling questions. Where would you feel concerned for your safety? What about some places make them feel unsafe? On and on.

The our philosophy blurb on the survey includes this bit: Evidence-based problem solving approaches promise the most effective approach to reducing crime and enhancing community safety. But it kind of looks like the survey group assumes we have a safety problem on Gabriola. Before we talk about evidence-based problem solving, I’d like to know where the evidence of a problem is in the first place.

Feelings are not evidence.

Paper versions of the questionaire can be found at the following locations:

• Coastal Community Credit Union at 580 North Road
• The Hope Centre at 790 North Road
• The Gabriola Libary in Folklife Village
• The Rollo Centre at 685 North Road
• Village Foods in Folklife Village

Once completed they’re to be dropped off at the Library in Folklife Village, by Monday, July 15th.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Don’t Track Us explains why should care about this stuff, and how most search engines are violating your privacy. The DuckDuckGo privacy page has some good information, too.

Here’s what you get today if you search for Gabriola on DuckDuckGo.

I’ve been watching DuckDuckGo for ages now, and their search results are getting better all the time. I’m happy about that.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

I am so grateful that most of Gabriola is dark at night.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

If you’re living in an environment where every once in awhile you need to run away from a lion, chase a gazelle, defend your village from the next tribe over, you need a system that takes precedence over everything else. You can’t be stalking a mammoth and suddenly be overcome with the urge to pee.

The problem, of course, is that stress [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The Gabriolore blogger is a guy named Rick, and he’s decided that he’d like have his blog posts appear here on Gabriolan.ca, rather than on a site of his own. (Less web maintenance stuff to do.) So I’ve imported all of the Gabriolore blog posts, and they’re now in the Gabriolan.ca archives. To see the clickable list of all Gabriolore posts, visit the Gabriolore profile page.

I hope Rick will write some more Gabriolore posts for us!

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

I’m not much on official events, as you may have surmised. But tomorrow, Saturday June 15th, 2013, something very cool is happening. It’s the Gabriola Tour D’Coop – a tour of island chicken coops. How cool is that? I often have four or six eggs for breakfast, so I buy a lot of Gabriola eggs from people who keep chickens. I’m excited about the chance to meet some of these folks and their birds.

There are twelve stops on the tour. The brochure says join in the fun, learn, buy eggs, share your fowl stories, donate…… Each coop will have a donation tin, and donations will be sent to Free the Children.

This event runs from 10 am to 4pm. If you’d like to take part, pick up a brochure/map from Raven or Artworks.

(Photo of chickens found here on Wikimedia Commons. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Possibly of interest: Biology and Control of Tent Caterpillars from wsu.edu.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Anyway, here’s what’s on offer:

Live Ocean Critters
Interactive viewing and discussion with local marine biologists

Scheduled activities:
12-12:30 Diving Demo
1:45 – 2:30 Streamkeepers Walk & Talk
2:00 Intertidal Beach Walk

Marine Displays & Information Featuring:
Eelgrass
Boat Safety
Kelp
Diving
Seaweed
WaterSmart
Shellfish
Streamkeeping
Marine Mammals
Forage Fish
Groundwater Management
Shorebirds
Oil Free Coast

And Much More!
Kids Crafts & Games
Face Painting
L’il Gabe
Storytelling
Clowning Around!
Snacks & Beverages

Park & Ride the Community Bus for free to the park. Community Shuttle Bus Schedule: http://gabriolacommunitybus.com.

The RDN offers a colour poster of the event as a pdf.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Perhaps the seminal event that highlighted the melding of the two island solitudes, the old pioneer family homestead and the new hippie communal lifestyle, came in the form of the marriage of the daughter of Gabriola’s most prominent sheep farmer to a spaced-out, blonde Afro-coiffed love child from California. The formal tying of the knot took place at the venerable community hall and was the social event of the year, drawing islanders from all walks of Gabriola society.

Unbeknown to most of us in attendance, the wedding cake had been spiked with the devil weed and it was not too long after the ceremony that the bridal party (including the bride herself) were passed out on the front lawn of the hall grounds. Most of the rest of us still standing were stumbling about zombie-like trying to unravel the secrets of the universe (or attempting to figure out how doorknobs work so we could let ourselves back into the hall to listen to the live band). [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. I think he thinks you’re drowning, the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. We’re fine; what is he doing? she asked, a little annoyed. We’re fine! the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. Move! he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, Daddy!

How did this captain know — from 50 feet away — what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, Daddy, she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Usually you do not want fungi in the walls of your home. But Ecovative is building a home in which having fungi in the walls is the entire point. The Mushroom Tiny House will use mycelium (the mass of threadlike roots that mushrooms use to take in nutrition) for insulation.

According to Inhabitat, this stuff is basically asbestos except that it’s not bad for the planet, won’t give you cancer, and is related to something you might put on a pizza: [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Also, maybe one day we’ll have solar panels on road surfaces, because how cool would that be?

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

If the topic interests you, then you might like to read this csmonitor story: How online learning is reinventing college.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Fungi, with the exception of shitake and certain other mushrooms, tend to be something we associate with moldy bread or dank-smelling mildew. But they really deserve more respect. Fungi have fantastic capabilities and can be grown, under certain circumstances, in almost any shape and be totally biodegradable. And, if this weren’t enough, they might have the potential to replace plastics one day. The secret is in the mycelia. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The first sign is the more charming of the two, but the weather’s been getting to it.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Ah, now this is how life is supposed to be for cows! These cows are at Somerset Farm on Gabriola. When you hear people talk about Boulton’s beef, you’re hearing about beef that was raised by the Boulton Family here on Somerset Farm.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The Chicago Sun-Times fired all of its photographers on Thursday. Out the door went 28 people, and decades of experience and skill. All at once the paper emptied a deep reservoir of photojournalistic talent. Before Thursday, it had a staff of professionals with broad knowledge of a great city, with the hard-earned ability to tell stories with pictures — the not-so-easy thing that newspaper photographers do every day.

Now it has some freelancers and reporters toting cheap cameras with their notebooks and pens. [continue]

Yeah, and various readers and their phone cameras.

Have you noticed how newspapers and news websites try to get you to provide free content for them? It’s not just comments on articles that they want you to contribute – it’s your photos, too. And all so they can use your content to sell more advertising.

(When the wild turkeys on Gabriola became a national news story, the Vancouver Sun wanted to use my turkey invasion photo in their paper. No, they couldn’t pay, they said. But they offered to publish put my name in their fine paper, and wow, wouldn’t that be a grand payment? Well, no, I said, it wouldn’t. So no deal.)

(Link to NYT article found here, via @LMacB.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

A team of marine biologists has found that some starfish lose a leg when faced with too-warm environmental conditions. In their paper published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, the researchers describe what they witnessed as they subjected 70 starfish to various heated environments and filmed the results with infrared cameras. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primpoitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

This sign is on that broom-infested bit of land next to the south fire hall on South Road. And beside the sign is quite the pile of broom! (See photo below.)

Here’s a bit from the six secrets page at broombusters.org:

• Cut Broom in Bloom. If you cut broom in bloom (like NOW until mid-June), it will most likely die in the summer’s dry heat. This is the only time each year that it’s so dang easy. Seize the moment!
• Cut the Broom to the Ground if you can. If you can’t cut huge branches, cut off as much as you can. It will still die. You don’t need to disturb the roots. No pulling or sawing required. [continue]

And oh yes, that second photo:

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare. But if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might be the worst possible thing you could do.

Renowned ethicist Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals.

It takes somewhere between two to ten kilos of plants, depending on the type of plants involved, to produce one kilo of animal. Given the limited amount of productive land in the world, it would seem to some to make more sense to focus our culinary attentions on plants, because we would arguably get more energy per hectare for human consumption. Theoretically this should also mean fewer sentient animals would be killed to feed the ravenous appetites of ever more humans.

But before scratching rangelands-produced red meat off the good to eat list for ethical or environmental reasons, let’s test these presumptions. [continue]

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

The gardens are beach areas where clams grow naturally and have been enhanced to increase clam production.

From some groups of elders we’ve talked to, they say these clam gardens basically acted as food banks, said Nathan Cardinal, the cultural resource management adviser for the Gulf Island National Park Reserve. If they couldn’t get enough food to get through the winter, they could come here and grab shellfish.

For the past three years, anthropology students have pitched their tents and spent May and part of June studying historical aboriginal sites around Vancouver Island. The clam gardens they are studying are small fields built on the beach at low tide with surrounding rock walls. The walls acted as a barrier to keep out seaweed and prevent predators from destroying the growing clams and other shellfish.

Like vegetable gardeners, those who tended the clam beds would till the sand, turning it over to provide the clams more oxygen.

It shows that people didn’t passively react to their environment but rather created their own landscape, said instructor Eric McLay. [continue]

Related posts from Gabriolan.ca:

• Gabriola’s clam gardens
• Clam gardens

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

With that in mind, I was interested in this CBC article: Quebec cracks down on unregistered B&Bs amid explosion of online rentals. It caught my eye because I hadn’t really thought of vacation rentals being limited or forbidden in other communities, and I wondered why Quebec would feel the need to regulate such things.

The article begins:

For a mere $40 a night, visitors to Montreal can book a room in a trendy, art-filled loft not far from the city’s Old Port. The apartment’s tenant, Alan Ganev, will sleep on the couch.

For double that price, you can have Ganev’s place all to yourself, and he’ll spend the night at his girlfriend’s. These are just two of the options on offer at Airbnb, a fast-growing website that advertises short-term accommodation in homes and apartments around the world.

There are thousands of places up for grabs in Montreal alone.

Ganev has hosted more than 60 people in the past year and a half. He said the benefits go far beyond helping to pay the bills.

I’ve been able to meet so many wonderful people from all parts of the world, he said. I truly have an honest connection with them, and I learn a lot from them.

However, the Quebec government is trying to crack down on such rentals. [continue]

This led me to wonder if there are any Gabriola listings on that Airbnb site. And you know? There are. The most expensive place is a waterfront home on 8 acres (Dragon’s Lane) that rents for $303 a night. The least expensive is a tiny cottage on Davis Road that goes for 25.00 a night. There’s even a sailboat for rent at 155.00 per night.

I think you get different listings depending on the dates you plug in, so you might have to experiment around if you want to see all of the Gabriola listings.

If you’re a potential host, the site will let you list your house, your spare room, your trailer, or whatever other space you want to offer.

I wonder what inpact this sort of site will have on the vacation rental business. Does it mean that regular people can rent their houses for a few weeks here and there, without having to go to all the work of becoming a B&B, setting up a payment system, finding a rental agent, etc? Kinda seems that way.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

It’s dramatic. It blends in colour-wise, yet stands out in terms of form and size. It’s made of natural materials, and isn’t some tacky plastic thing. What more could you want?

(And yes, it is on that Gabriola trail I’ve been talking about this last week.)

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

Enter our study. We look at a large, randomized, relatively unconditional cash transfer program in Uganda, one the government designed to stimulate this kind of job growth and structural change.

The Ugandan government did what dozens of African governments are doing under the guise of Social Action Funds and Community Driven Development: they sent $10,000 to a group of 20 or so young people who applied for it. This is about $400 a person, equal to their annual incomes.

To many people, this sounds like a crazy development strategy. We don’t trust the poor (let alone a bunch of rural 25-year olds) to spend that kind of money responsibly. We want to tie their hands, or make the decisions for them, or at least make them dig useless ditches for three months in exchange for cash.

We wanted to know. So we worked with the government and World Bank to randomize the grants, and followed nearly 2500 people two and four years afterwards.

Here’s the surprise: Most start new skilled trades like metalworking or tailoring. They increase their employment hours about 17%. Those new hours are spent in high-return activities, and so earnings rise nearly 50%, especially women’s.

The people who do the best are those who had the least capital and credit to begin with–consistent with the idea that credit constraints are holding back youth. The more tightly coiled the spring, the bigger the bounce on release.[continue]

Related:

To end poverty in Canada – gabriolan.ca

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

This wetsuit has neoprene membranes that spread from the wrists down to the ankles and are meant to give the diver feelings of soaring through their submarine wonderland. [continue]

I can’t quite see any of our local divers in this, but what do I know?

(From Gabriolan.ca.)

More trailmarker photos coming; saving my favourites for last.

Related: four photos from this trail.

(From Gabriolan.ca.)