Where the Wild Things Are: Morning File, Thursday, November 13, 2014

News

1. She who shall not be named

A 20-year-old man who pleaded guilty to child pornography will be sentenced today at 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

The Dawgfather is suing the 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 ignored on Remembrance Day. Park by a hydrant, in a bus stop, block a driveway, whatever, it’s all good.

Views

1. Dartmouth

With all the talk of daylighting the Saw Mill River, Stephen Archibald pulls out photos of the area he 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 saying we shouldn’t frack.

3. Lezlie Lowe

I learned yesterday Lezlie Lowe has a blog. How did I not know this? Anyway, there seems to be a recurring theme.

4. Cranky letter of the day

To the Chronicle Herald:

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 Farm in Windsor Junction and the owner of 26 Atlantic View Drive at Sambro Head are appealing unsightly premises citations.

Community Planning and Economic Development Standing Committee (2pm, City Hall)—If we would just unleash the Greater 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 the Dominion 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 been awarded the Order of Canada. She “will discuss the effects of racism and violence 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 nonetheless laying 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 (Friday, 7pm, Room 105, Weldon Law Building)—Singer 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 on Assisted 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 Canada is visiting campus, which is arfully cute.

Noticed

The above are Inuit 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 a modern map of Greenland:

In the harbour

(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
Nordic Visby, bulker, Ponta da Madeira, Brazil to Pier 30/31
Oceanex Sanderling sails for St. John’s

There’s been very heavy tanker activity around Saint 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.