[PHOTO] "The green trees of High Park"

[PHOTO] "Shipwrecked camera found underwater after 2 years with photos intact"

This CBC article describing how a digital camera belonging to one Paul Burgoyne was recovered two years after it was lost in a shipwreck, images intact, is personally quite heartwarming to me. The resilience of modern technology is grand.

A camera lost in a shipwreck off the west coast of Vancouver Island two years ago is finally to be returned to its owner — with the memory card and its images intact.

Vancouver artist Paul Burgoyne lost the camera in 2012, when his boat the Bootlegger was shipwrecked on a 500-kilometre voyage from Vancouver to his summer home in Tahsis, B.C. His camera and treasured photos went down with the ship.

"That just shocked me," said Burgoyne. "Getting the camera, or the photos back, that's really quite wonderful."

Two years on, earlier in May, Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre university students Tella Osler and Beau Doherty were conducting research dives with BMSC Diving and Safety Officer Siobhan Gray off Aguilar Point, B.C., where they discovered Burgoyne's camera 12 metres down.​

According to Isabelle M. Côté, Professor of Marine Ecology at Simon Fraser University, there were multiple marine species, from two kingdoms and at least seven phyla, living on the camera when it was found.

The Lexar Platinum II, 8 GB memory card still worked and Côté was able to post online a family portrait she found among the photos, in hopes of finding the owner.

[LINK] "The secret short list that provoked the rift between Chief Justice and PMO"

The Globe and Mail's Sean Fine reports on the background behind the clash of Prime Minister Stephen Harper with the Supreme Court, in the failed nomination of Marc Nadon. It turns out that Harper really wanted to stack the Québec seat with an ideological peer and couldn't find one, hence the procedurally sketchy nomination.

Early last summer, Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin sat down with five federal politicians at the stately court building on Wellington Street, just down the road from Parliament.

The Supreme Court selection panel – three Conservative MPs, a New Democrat MP and a Liberal MP – had come bearing a list of six candidates to replace Justice Morris Fish of Quebec, who was nearing 75 and about to retire.

That list, crafted by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Justice Department, was so troubling to Chief Justice McLachlin that she phoned Justice Minister Peter MacKay and took initial steps toward contacting the Prime Minister. These attempts to raise potential eligibility issues would later trigger an unprecedented public dispute between the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice, a coda to the ultimately failed appointment of Justice Marc Nadon.

Until now, the list of six candidates has been a closely held secret. But The Globe and Mail has obtained both that list, and the short list ultimately chosen by the selection panel. The names on those lists not only shed light on Justice Nadon’s appointment but the larger political machinations behind it – and its fallout. A judge rejected. A court short-handed. A Prime Minister’s public accusation of impropriety by a Chief Justice.

The lists also show how the government, though aware of the risks, worked the selection process to find a more conservative judge than it believed was available in Quebec. The province’s top judges and lawyers were largely ignored for a job reserved by law for Quebec candidates because of the province’s unique civil code. Four of the six judges put forward were from the Federal Court in Ottawa, even though it wasn’t clear judges from that court were eligible. Adding salt to Quebec’s wound, one of those judges had been publicly rebuked by an appeal court for copying from government briefs.

[LINK] "Mortality Risk and Survival in the Aftermath of the Medieval Black Death"

Via the Russian Demographics blog I came across a paper by one Sharon N. Dewitt that argued that the aftermath of the Black Death seems to have include an improvement in mortality. This may be linked to the post-plague improvement in living standards.

he medieval Black Death (c. 1347-1351) was one of the most devastating epidemics in human history. It killed tens of millions of Europeans, and recent analyses have shown that the disease targeted elderly adults and individuals who had been previously exposed to physiological stressors. Following the epidemic, there were improvements in standards of living, particularly in dietary quality for all socioeconomic strata. This study investigates whether the combination of the selective mortality of the Black Death and post-epidemic improvements in standards of living had detectable effects on survival and mortality in London. Samples are drawn from several pre- and post-Black Death London cemeteries. The pre-Black Death sample comes from the Guildhall Yard (n = 75) and St. Nicholas Shambles (n = 246) cemeteries, which date to the 11th–12th centuries, and from two phases within the St. Mary Spital cemetery, which date to between 1120-1300 (n = 143). The St. Mary Graces cemetery (n = 133) was in use from 1350–1538 and thus represents post-epidemic demographic conditions. By applying Kaplan-Meier analysis and the Gompertz hazard model to transition analysis age estimates, and controlling for changes in birth rates, this study examines differences in survivorship and mortality risk between the pre- and post-Black Death populations of London. The results indicate that there are significant differences in survival and mortality risk, but not birth rates, between the two time periods, which suggest improvements in health following the Black Death, despite repeated outbreaks of plague in the centuries after the Black Death.

[LINK] Two links on the decline of the homepage

The apparent decline in visits to the homepages of sites, triggered by people heading directly to the pages hosting articles, was analyzed at The Atlantic by Derek Thompson.

The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years.

[. . .]

If the clicks aren't coming from homepages, where are they coming from? Facebook, Twitter, social media, and the mix of email and chat services summed up as "dark social" (dark, because it's hard for publishers to trace). [. . .]

News publishers lost the homepage firehose, and gained a social media flood. This social flood corresponds with the emergence of another powerful piece of technology: audience analytics software that tells digital publishers what people are reading, and how long they're reading it, with greater specificity than ever.

One theory is that the rise of twin technological forces—the social flood and the age of analytics—will (a) make the news more about readers; and (b) make news organizations more like each other.

Why should the death of homepages give rise to news that's more about readers? Because homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers. These digital grazers have shown again and again that they aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, self-help, awe, and outrage dressed up news. Digitally native publishers are pretty good at pumping this kind of stuff out. Hence quizzes, hence animals, hence 51 Photos That Show Women Fighting Sexism Awesomely. Even serious publishing companies know that self-help and entertainment often outperform outstanding reporting.

It's also the subject of discussion at Marginal Revolution.

I would put it this way: the fewer people use RSS, the better content providers can allow RSS to be. There is less fear of cannibalization, and more hope that easy RSS access will help a post go viral through Facebook and other social media.

When a blog is linked to the reputations of its producers, rather than to advertising revenue, the home page remains all the more important. That is who you are, and many people realize that, even if they are not reading you at the moment. I call those “shadow readers.” For MR, I have long thought that the value of shadow readers is quite high. (“Tyler and Alex are still writing that blog — great stuff, right? I don’t get to look at it every day [read: hardly at all]. Why don’t we have them in for a talk?”) In other words, a shadow reader is someone who hardly reads the blog at all, but has a not totally inaccurate model of what the blog is about. For Vox or the NYT the value of a shadow reader is lower, although shadow readers still may talk up those sites to potential real readers. For companies which run lots of events, such as The Atlantic, the value of shadow readers may be high because it helps make them focal even without the daily eyeballs.

[LINK] "HBO Teaches the Streaming Wannabes How to Make Big Money on Original Shows"

Kyle Stock's Bloomberg BusinessWeek article noting the success of HBO makes me wonder if HBO's model could be generalizable to cultural industries more generally.

HBO revenue increased 9 percent in the recent quarter, to $1.3 billion, according to an earnings report this morning from Time Warner (TWX). What’s more, HBO managed a 36 percent operating margin, which is no small accomplishment in a hit-driven business that requires such expensive employees as Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

[. . .]

It’s not so much that HBO’s hits have smaller budgets than most might think. After all, the network spent $8 million on one Game of Thrones episode. It’s just that its flops are relatively rare—though not unheard of. Girls generates plenty of cultural conversation, but only 670,000 viewers tuned in for its Season 3 finale in late March, down from 1.1 million who watched the first episode.

But even those smaller audience numbers are insulated a bit by the subscription model. HBO executives don’t have to worry about each installment striking a chord with advertisers, and seasons are kept short enough that the network isn’t compelled to pull the plug midseason on a subpar offering.

And the growing field of streaming services is still clamoring for HBO’s leftovers. So-called content revenue from old shows increased 13 percent in the recent quarter, a $24 million improvement. Time Warner believes that the more people who watch HBO shows on places other than the cable-TV channel, the more likely they are to become subscribers—a philosophy that has led to a hands-off approach to those borrowing HBO Go passwords from friends and family. ”We firmly believe that if you have great content, giving consumers control over where, when, and on what platform they watch it will drive increased consumption and value,” Bewkes said.

[LINK] "Life in space is impossible"

James Nicoll linked to Dwayne A. Day's article at The Space Review criticizing recent movies for suggesting that space colonies are pointless and dangerous, or worse, potential homes for only the 1%. As commenters noted, Day's critique doesn't take into consideration the fact that, with what we know now, space colonization is pointless and dangerous, and doesn't note some of the separatist issues lurking behind the space colonization memeplex.

The tag line for the new Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar premiering in November could have been written by a space settlement enthusiast: “Mankind was born on Earth, it was never meant to die here.” Based upon the newly released trailer, however, it appears as if humanity’s salvation is not asteroid mining or Mars settlement, but sending a spaceship to another solar system (because “nothing in our solar system can save us”). Quite possibly the answer is “aliens.”

But at least Interstellar’s message seems to be that there is hope in our stars. For the past several years a theme that has emerged from a number of movies is that space, and spaceflight, is at best a pretty distraction, and not humanity’s future. Human destiny, these movies argue, is on Earth, which we need to stop trashing. These movies indicate that the pro-space movement has essentially failed in its primary message. A few thousand people attending pro-space conferences and claiming that space settlement is the solution is nothing compared to the millions of people around the world who have been exposed to the message that space is at best a distraction. Space is pretty and wondrous, but also dangerous and pointless, and at best, a playhouse for the rich.

[. . .]

One of the biggest and most praised movies of 2013 was Gravity. The film stormed the box office and received rave reviews and numerous Oscars, including one for best director. Although astronauts and spaceflight experts stumbled all over themselves to discuss the technical inaccuracies in the movie while praising it for its visual and excitement, what was lost in all the chattering is that Gravity is one of the most anti-space movies to come along in a long time. It may have done just as much damage to NASA’s image as the frequent reports during the October government shutdown that NASA was the “least essential” agency, based upon the determination that 97% of its employees should stay home.

Gravity makes its message blatantly clear in text at the very beginning: “Life in space is impossible.” But the rest of the film simply reinforces that message. The resounding theme, repeated again and again throughout the film, is that space is a very dangerous place and that people do not belong there. Sandra Bullock’s character, astronaut Ryan Stone, is only in space because she’s fleeing the grief she experienced on Earth, the gravity that killed her daughter in a fall, a fact that her colleague’s ghost tells her when she’s about to give up and die. By the end of the movie, every person who was in space at the beginning of the film, most of whom are never seen, has either abandoned it for the safety of Earth, or died. And low Earth orbit has become so polluted that it is clear nobody is going back. Goodbye Hubble, goodbye space station. Goodbye Mars colony.

The other major film of 2013 that took aim at the pro-space message was Elysium. It lacked the visual grandeur of Gravity but tried to make up for it in heavy-handed symbolism. Its story was more ambitious, but also messily convoluted, and possessing all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: poor, sick masses on Earth, abandoned by the rich who have fled to the sky. This is a relatively straightforward adaptation of the pro-space message touted by groups like the L5 Society and later the National Space Society (NSS), which in the 1970s started proposing space as a means of dealing with resource depletion on Earth. More recently, NSS and others in the pro-space community have embraced space as a tourist destination for rich people, out of the belief that maybe, someday, it will become affordable for the rest of us. The film’s look deliberately borrowed from 1970s-era artwork of space colonies.

The message was so similar to ones that have been around for decades that the National Space Society went so far as to issue a press release separating themselves from the film. Clearly the NSS leadership recognized that their vision had been perverted in the movie. Rather than cities in the sky where people worked in support of providing services to Earth—Gerard K. O’Neill’s original vision for space solar power—the beautiful space station is an escape from the thoroughly unpleasant Earth.