Thousands of onlookers were busy snapping photos on their digital cameras and smartphones of rioters tipping cars, setting fires and smashing storefront windows following the Vancouver Canucks' loss in the Stanley Cup final.
Many of those photos quickly made their way onto the web and social networking sites, and now some angry residents are hoping they also become evidence against the rioters and looters.
By late Wednesday evening, even before the riot was fully under control, blogs and Facebook groups were already encouraging users to submit photos from a night that left the city's downtown core a burning, tear-gas-filled mess.
And police were also asking for those photos.
A site dubbed the "Vancouver 2011 Riot Criminal List," on the microblogging service Tumblr, started with a simple invitation:
"Lets hold people accountable for their actions!" the post began. "All right everyone, lets start posting pictures of the idiots setting fires and looting. Let’s get identifying these criminals."
That prompted a series of postings, including photos taken during the riot and screen shots from TV news broadcasts, showing out-of-control people, many wearing Canucks jerseys, smashing windows and towering over burning cars.
In most, the faces of those rioters are clearly visible, often with triumphant grins.
The unidentified operator of the site was also encouraging visitors to send their pictures directly to the police.
A Facebook group also asking for photos of rioters didn't specifically mention helping the police, but focused instead on public shaming.
"Let's post those pictures and put a label on the losers that made this city look so bad, ruined my neighbourhood," said the group's description.
"We know you just took the photos, so post them, and let them speak a thousand words."
The tiny southern French hamlet of Bugarach has drawn scrutiny from a government sect watchdog over droves of visitors who believe it is the only place in the world that will survive a 2012 Apocalypse.
A report by the watchdog, Miviludes, published on Wednesday said the picturesque village near Carcassonne should be monitored in the run-up to December 21, 2012, when many believe the world will end according to an ancient Mayan prophecy.
Miviludes was set up in 2002 to track the activity of sects, after a law passed the previous year made it an offence to abuse vulnerable people using heavy pressure techniques, meaning sects can be outlawed if there is evidence of fraud or abuse.
Surrounded in legend for centuries, Bugarach and its rocky outcrop, the Pic de Bugarach, have attracted an influx of New Age visitors in recent months, pushing up property prices but also raising the threat of financial scams and psychological manipulation, Miviludes said in its report.
"I think we need to be careful. We shouldn't get paranoid, but when you see what happened at Waco in the United States, we know this kind of thinking can influence vulnerable people," Miviludes president Georges Fenech told Reuters.
[. . .]
Bugarach, with a population of just 200, has long been considered magical, partly due to what locals claim is an "upside-down mountain" where the top layers of rock are older than the lower ones.
The Internet is awash with myths about the place -- that the mountain is surrounded by a magnetic force, that it is the site of a concealed alien base, or even that it contains an underground access to another world.
And now many have seized on it as the ultimate refuge with Doomsday rapidly approaching.
Alerted to an influx of visitors by the mayor of Bugarach, Fenech said he recently visited the area, and found six settlements in the surrounding countryside set up by members of the American Ramtha School of Enlightenment.
Other "gurus" and messianic groups have been organising fee-paying conferences at local hotels, according to Fenech. "This is big business," he told Reuters.
When the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet.
The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil.
But what wasn't known is whether the interbreeding made any difference to their evolution. To find out Peter Parham of Stanford University in California took a closer look at the genes they picked up along the way.
He focused on human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), a family of about 200 genes that is essential to our immune system. It also contains some of the most variable human genes: hundreds of versions - or alleles - exist of each gene in the population, allowing our bodies to react to a huge number of disease-causing agents and adapt to new ones.
The humans that left Africa probably carried only a limited number of HLA alleles as they likely travelled in small groups. Worse, their HLAs would have been adapted to African diseases.
When Parham compared the HLA genes of people from different regions of the world with the Neanderthal and Denisovan HLAs, he found evidence that non-African humans picked up new alleles from the hominins they interbred with.
One allele, HLA-C*0702, is common in modern Europeans and Asians but never seen in Africans; Parham found it in the Neanderthal genome, suggesting it made its way into H. sapiens of non-African descent through interbreeding. HLA-A*11 had a similar story: it is mostly found in Asians and never in Africans, and Parham found it in the Denisovan genome, again suggesting its source was interbreeding outside of Africa.
Parham points out that because Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived outside Africa for over 200,000 years by the time they encountered H. sapiens, their HLAs would have been well suited to local diseases, helping to protect migrating H. sapiens too.
While only 6 per cent of the non-African modern human genome comes from other hominins, the share of HLAs acquired during interbreeding is much higher. Half of European HLA-A alleles come from other hominins, says Parham, and that figure rises to 72 per cent for people in China, and over 90 per cent for those in Papua New Guinea.
This suggests they were increasingly selected for as H. sapiens moved east. That could be because humans migrating north would have faced fewer diseases than those heading towards the tropics of south-east Asia, says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
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james_nicoll linked to graduate student Melissa Rice's guest post at the Planetary Society Blog describing the terrible, empathy-inducing cuteness of NASA's doomed Mars rover Spirit.
The Spirit and Opportunity rovers brought something brand new to space exploration: cuteness. The rovers' solar panels vaguely resemble wings, the camera masts look like long necks, and the Pancam instruments – two on the top of each rover's mast – seem to be the "eyes" of space-faring creatures. I'm certainly not the first to say this; in a press conference, Callas even called them "the cutest darn things out in the solar system."
Why is cuteness so important? Because humans tend to respond emotionally to cute things. We can't help it. It's hardwired into us, as it's related to our instincts to protect our young. OK, you say, but Spirit doesn't look at all like a human baby. To that I would reply: in ways that matter, it actually does.
It's not necessarily "human" characteristics that trigger this biological response in us; rather, it's the "juvenile" characteristics. Things that are cute tend to exhibit the characteristics that distinguish juvenile humans from adults, such as big eyes, flat faces, and large foreheads. These are the characteristics that make us go "awww" when we see puppies and that compel us to watch videos of kittens on YouTube.
In a fascinating article (PDF) written for Natural History magazine, paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, "When we see a living creature with babyish features, we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness. The adaptive value of this response can scarcely be questioned, for we must nurture our babies." He argues that "abstract features of human childhood elicit powerful emotional responses in us, even when they occur in other animals,"[. . .]
Gould also showed that we can quantify cuteness. In that same 1978 Natural History article, titled "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,"he measured three characteristics of Mickey's face to show that everyone's favorite mouse had grown cuter over 50 years: (1) eye size as a percentage of head length (base of the nose to the top of rear ear); (2) head length as a percentage of body length; and (3) cranial vault size measured by rearward displacement of the front ear (base of the nose to top of front ear as a percentage of base of the nose to top of rear ear).
“We need to do much more to get the graduation rates up in terms of our kids who aren't getting through school,” Mary Simon, head of Canada's national Inuit group, said Thursday at the release of a report on the future of Inuit education.
More related to this story
The report is the result of more than two years of work by federal, provincial, territorial and aboriginal representatives. It concludes that the key to improving a 25 per cent graduation rate for Inuit children is teaching them in their aboriginal language as well as in English or French. Education is considered by many as crucial to addressing many of the North's pressing social issues.
[. . .]
Bilingual education, the subject of three of the report's 10 recommendations, has long been controversial in the North.
Some argue that since proficiency in English is key to success for young Inuit, classes should be given in English alone. Others argue that children do better if they have solid skills in their mother tongue — which remains Inuktitut in Nunavut and other parts of the North — before they cope with a second language.
Ms. Simon has pointed to a 2008 United Nations panel that found the greatest predictor of success in school for aboriginal children was how long they were taught in their first language. As well, a 2006 study by retired justice Thomas Berger found that Nunavut's current education system is producing graduates competent in neither English nor Inuktitut.
Mr. Berger recommended bilingual schools and said it would take about $20 million a year to implement them.
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