[PHOTO] The Acadian flag, Doucet House, Rustico

Flying in front of Doucet House in Rustico on a beautiful day last August was the Acadian flag. Although Acadia is not a province, the Acadian flag is flown widely throughout the Maritime provinces, wherever there are Acadian communities. The Acadian flag was actually created on Prince Edward Island, in the Second Acadian National Convention held in Miscouche in 1884. The French tricolour was picked for obvious reasons, while the yellow star in the upper left corner was picked to stand for the Virgin Mary, the previously-chosen Acadian saint and patron of mariners.

Wikipedia and Flags of the World have more on the flag.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Dragon's Tales notes that, to cut costs for its Ariane 6 rocket, the European Space Agency is no longer going to try to source parts for the Ariane 6 across its member-states, insteading aiming for more efficient distribution of suppliers.


• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig wonders about the consequences Spain's offer of citizenship to the descendants of Jews deported in 1492 might have. How many will take up Spain on the offer?


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen is not a locavore at all.


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla wonders, with others, just what Mercury's unique hollows are.


• Strange Maps chronicles the "hippie trail", a route popular with backpackers in the 1960s and 1970s that stretched from Europe through Turkey and Afghanistan towards Southeast Asia.


• Towleroad notes the vicious homophobia of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little chronicles the not-entirely unreciprocated sympathy of Karl Marx for the liberator Abraham Lincoln.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that immigration is unlikely to increase the size of the American welfare state. (If anything, as European rhetoric suggests, it might decrease it.)

[LINK] "Suspended senator Patrick Brazeau working at Ottawa strip club Barefax"

I've given this post the tags "oddities" and "humour", among others. There is something funny in the fact that Canadian senator Patrick Brazeau, suspended as a result of various civil and criminal charges (some connected with his office, some not), is now managing an Ottawa strip club. Steve Rennie and Ben Makuch's Canadian Press article does touch on the humour. At the same time, the sordid--well.

The suspended senator, who faces criminal charges in connection with the expense scandal that roiled the august upper chamber last year, is now working as a manager at an Ottawa strip joint.

Brazeau has been spotted inside the Barefax Gentlemen’s Club in recent days, but he declined Wednesday to speak to reporters camped outside the establishment who trailed him inside to the door of his office.

[. . .]

Working at the Barefax is the latest in a string of odd jobs for Brazeau since he was suspended from the Senate last fall.

He took to Twitter to find work and tried his hand as a columnist for the Halifax version of Frank magazine, a separate entity from the Ottawa publication of the same name that first reported on Brazeau’s new job.

But the magazine canned him after one-and-a-half columns, prompting an apology from the editor for subjecting readers to Brazeau’s “narcissistic ramblings.”

Brazeau has been without a steady Senate paycheque since his suspension in November. Prior to that, his pay had been docked to recover more than $48,000 in inappropriate housing and travel expenses.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the utility of Google Plus

Claire Cain Miller's weekend New York Times article claiming that Google Plus meant more to Google as an identity service than as a social network competitive with Facebook caught the attention of many people.

Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does.

The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.

Before Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the company can build a database of your affinities.

Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network.

“Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that common understanding of who you are,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google Plus.

Plus is now so important to Google that the company requires people to sign up to use some Google services, like commenting on YouTube. The push is being done so forcefully that it has alienated some users and raised privacy and antitrust concerns, including at the Federal Trade Commission. Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, tied employee bonuses companywide to its success and appointed Vic Gundotra, a senior Google executive, to lead it.

The value of Plus has only increased in the last year, as search advertising, Google’s main source of profits, has slowed. At the same time, advertising based on the kind of information gleaned from what people talk about, do and share online, rather than simply what they search for, has become more important.

At one end, writing at Slate Lily Hay Newman argued that Google Plus isn't that significant a component in Google's decade-long effort to consolidate individuals' online data. And at the other, the New York Times shared the statements of loyal Google Plus users, many of whom found the network hosted more personally relevant content and was technologically innovative than Facebook. (Google Hangouts seem to feature.)

Me? I'm a Google Plus member, but I use it much less than I do Facebook. Simply put, the vast majority of the people I know and I'm likely to know are on Facebook. Spending time on a new network isn't that worthwhile. Perhaps more to the point, practically the only thing I use Google for is for its search and news-aggregation functions. I don't use Gmail, and the closure of Google Reader forced me to take my RSS habits away. Yahoo, between Flickr and Yahoo Mail and Tumblr, is something I use much more frequently.

[LINK] "'Divorce your theory' – A conversation with Paul Farmer"

I was pleased to come across, at Savage Minds, Ståle Wig's two-part interview (1, 2) with anthropologist and doctor Paul Farmer. Known for his commitment to public health in Haiti, Farmer is someone I've liked for a while, as my (2006 review of his book AIDS and Accusation suggests. Unsurprisingly, Farmer's anthropology is very socially engaged.

SW: I get a sense from what you are saying here that social science has been too concerned these last few decades with deconstruction, or destructive critique.

PF: Well, I feel that academia can contribute very constructively through critique and understanding, and partly does so already. For example, a lot of people in NGOs, aid and development work are unable to do social analysis. And that is hurtful to them; because they are not aware of what they are doing can hurt beneficiaries, or doesn’t help them. So I think there is a big role for the weaving together practical policy and social analysis. It has to be an accurate analysis though. Let’s say you write a book about an institution and you don’t do ethnographic work – you wouldn’t do that as an anthropologist.

But I think it comes down to a division of labor. And if there is enough division of labor, people who do critical academic work can perform a valuable service to people living in poverty. But the answer to the question of “what is to be done” is not always to write a new book.

The people living in poverty are my core constituency. And I have never, in 30 years of engagement, had a patient ask me to write another book. But I write them anyway, so that I can think more clearly. I can’t think clearly without reading a lot of other people’s work and writing. Some people I am told can do that, and I believe it, but not me. But no-one’s ever said to me, “Dr. Paul, we really wish you would stop seeing us as patients and building hospitals, and work more on a book about social theory.” That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it, if I had more time. I think I would actually enjoy writing a whole book about a concept like structural violence. But I can’t do that, because I don’t have enough time. But if other people do that, and enjoy it, and I’m cheering them on.