Silver Donald Cameron
Silver Donald Cameron is a Canadian journalist, author and university teacher whose writing focuses on social justice and the environment. His 15 books of non-fiction deal with everything from history and politics to education and community development. An avid sailor, Cameron has written several books about the sea, he is the author of a young adult novel and a thriller, both set in Nova Scotia where he has lived for more than 40 years. Two of his books, The Education of Everett Richardson and The Living Beach are included in Atlantic Canada's 100 Greatest Books. Cameron's only stage play, The Prophet at Tantramar, is about Leon Trotsky's month-long confinement in a prisoner-of-war camp in Amherst, Nova Scotia; that play was produced as a radio drama, one of more than 50 Cameron wrote for both CBC Radio and CBC Television. In addition, he has produced television documentaries, his magazine articles number in the hundreds and his newspaper columns have appeared in The Globe and Mail and the Halifax Chronicle Herald.
He has written extensively for provincial and federal government departments as well as for corporate and non-profit clients. Cameron's latest project involves a series of interviews with environmental thinkers and activists that appear as videos on a subscription website called The Green Interview. Interviewees include Farley Mowat, James Lovelock, Jane Goodall and David Orton. Cameron has written and narrated two documentary films for The Green Interview, Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness and Salmon Wars: Salmon Farms, Wild Fish and the Future of Communities. Cameron has served as Writer-in-Residence at two universities in Nova Scotia as well as at the University of Prince Edward Island, he was Dean of the School of Community Studies at Cape Breton University and has taught at Dalhousie University, the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick. He holds a Ph. D. from the University of London. His writing and journalism have earned him numerous awards including the Evelyn Richardson Award, the Atlantic Provinces Booksellers Award and the City of Dartmouth Book Award.
One of his television dramas won a Best Short Film award and he has earned four National Magazine Awards as well as two awards for his corporate writing. In 2012, Cameron received both the Order of Nova Scotia, he is married to the writer, Marjorie Simmins and is the father of five adult children from two previous marriages. He divides his time between Cape Breton. Donald Cameron was born in Toronto in 1937, but has joked that, at age two, he fled to British Columbia taking his parents with him, he grew up in Vancouver and attended the University of British Columbia receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960. He earned his Master of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and returned to UBC to teach for two years before leaving for the University of London, where he received his Ph. D. in 1967. He based his doctoral thesis on his study of the structures in six major novels by Walter Scott, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University before becoming an English professor in 1968, at the University of New Brunswick.
While teaching at UNB, Cameron served as publisher and founding editor of The Mysterious East. During its four-year existence, the left-leaning, monthly magazine published a wide variety of articles and editorials on issues in Canada's Maritime Provinces including everything from pollution and censorship to birth control and the problems of native peoples. In 1971, Cameron took a leave of absence from UNB and moved to D'Escousse, a village on Isle Madame, a small island off the southeastern coast of Cape Breton, he wanted to write, he missed his first marriage had ended. He arrived in a divorced father of three sons and a daughter; as he told a journalist 20 years "Dr. Donald Cameron left his university office, drove to the village of D'Escousse, stepped into a phone booth and emerged as the award-winning author and playwright Silver Donald Cameron." Cameron settled in D'Escousse after buying a house he describes as "composed of two tiny ancient buildings pushed together to make one comfortable home."
He adds that the house was "spang on the roadside, the floor plan was awkward, it was half-renovated in a style not much to my taste. But it felt right: a serene and happy little house where generations had loved and laughed and wept and died."Cameron had published magazine articles and a literary book, Faces of Leacock, a 1967 study of the great Canadian humorist, but now he was free to begin his apprenticeship as a full-time writer. For him, D'Escousse was an ideal home base. "For a writer," Cameron writes, "the great benefit of a village is the way you can know people." He added that in cities, writers are drawn into limited circles, but villages let them escape. "My friends in D'Escousse include welders, fishermen and mothers on welfare as well as teachers, potters and businessmen." Moreover, a writer who lives in a village watches people grow. "An electrician becomes a politician, schoolboys become truckers and contractors, middle-aged civil servants retire and old people take their departures.
Knowing them year by year, I can grasp something of the flow of their lives." In 1973, Silver Donald Cameron bought an unfinished boat named Hirondelle in Nova Scotia. In the book Wind and Whisky, he writes about sp
Ponzi scheme
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from product sales or other means, they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors contribute new funds, as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own; the scheme is named after Charles Ponzi. The idea had been carried out by Sarah Howe in Boston in the 1880s through the "Ladies' Deposit". Howe offered a female clientele an eight-percent monthly interest rate, stole the money that the women had invested, she was discovered and served three years in prison. The Ponzi scheme was previously described in novels. Ponzi carried out this scheme and became well known throughout the United States because of the huge amount of money that he took in.
His original scheme was based on the legitimate arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps, but he soon began diverting new investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and to himself. Ponzi schemes require an initial investment and promise above average returns, they use vague verbal guises such as "hedge futures trading", "high-yield investment programs", or "offshore investment" to describe their income strategy. It is common for the operator to take advantage of a lack of investor knowledge or competence, or sometimes claim to use a proprietary, secret investment strategy to avoid giving information about the scheme; the basic premise of a Ponzi scheme is "To rob Peter to pay Paul". The operator pays high returns to attract investors and entice current investors to invest more money; when other investors begin to participate, a cascade effect begins. The schemer pays a "return" to initial investors from the investments of new participants, rather than from genuine profits.
High returns encourage investors to leave their money in the scheme, so that the operator does not have to pay much to investors. The operator sends statements showing how much they have earned, which maintains the deception that the scheme is an investment with high returns. Investors within a Ponzi scheme may face difficulties when trying to get their money out of the investment. Operators try to minimize withdrawals by offering new plans to investors where money cannot be withdrawn for a certain period of time in exchange for higher returns; the operator sees new cash flows. If a few investors do wish to withdraw their money in accordance with the terms allowed, their requests are promptly processed, which gives the illusion to all other investors that the fund is solvent and financially sound. Ponzi schemes sometimes begin as legitimate investment vehicles, such as hedge funds that can degenerate into a Ponzi-type scheme if they unexpectedly lose money or fail to legitimately earn the returns expected.
The operators fabricate false returns or produce fraudulent audit reports instead of admitting their failure to meet expectations, the operation is considered a Ponzi scheme. A wide variety of investment vehicles and strategies legitimate, have become the basis of Ponzi schemes. For instance, Allen Stanford used bank certificates of deposit to defraud tens of thousands of people. Certificates of deposit are low-risk and insured instruments, but the Stanford CDs were fraudulent. According to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, many Ponzi schemes share similar characteristics that should be "red flags" for investors; the warnings signs include:High investment returns with little or no risk. Every investment carries some degree of risk, investments yielding higher returns involve more risk. Be suspicious of any "guaranteed" investment opportunity. Overly consistent returns. Investment values tend to go up and down over time those offering high returns. Be suspicious of an investment that continues to generate regular positive returns regardless of overall market conditions.
Unregistered investments. Ponzi schemes involve investments that have not been registered with the SEC or with state regulators. Registration is important because it provides investors with access to key information about the company's management, products and finances. Unlicensed sellers. Federal and state securities laws require that investment professionals and their firms be licensed or registered. Most Ponzi schemes involve unregistered firms. Secretive or complex strategies. Avoid investments that you do not understand or for which you cannot get complete information. Issues with paperwork. Do not accept excuses regarding why you cannot review information in writing about an investment. Account statement errors and inconsistencies may be signs that funds are not being invested as promised. Difficulty receiving payments. Be suspicious if you do not receive a payment or have difficulty cashing out your investment. Keep in mind that Ponzi scheme promoters encourage participants to "roll over" investments and sometimes promise higher returns on the amount rolled over.
If a Ponzi scheme is not stopped by authorities, it falls apart for one of the following reasons: The operator vanishes, taking all the remaining investment money. Since the scheme requires a continual stream
Overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish from a body of water at a rate that the species cannot replenish in time, resulting in those species either becoming depleted or underpopulated in that given area. Overfishing has been present for centuries. Overfishing can occur in water bodies of any sizes, such as ponds, lakes or oceans, can result in resource depletion, reduced biological growth rates and low biomass levels. Sustained overfishing can lead to critical depensation, where the fish population is no longer able to sustain itself; some forms of overfishing, such as the overfishing of sharks, has led to the upset of entire marine ecosystems. The ability of a fishery to recover from overfishing depends on whether the ecosystem's conditions are suitable for the recovery. Dramatic changes in species composition can result in an ecosystem shift, where other equilibrium energy flows involve species compositions different from those, present before the depletion of the original fish stock.
For example, once trout have been overfished, carp might take over in a way that makes it impossible for the trout to re-establish a breeding population. Overfishing has stripped many fisheries around the world of their stocks; the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in a 2018 report that 33.1% of world fish stocks are subject to overfishing. Significant overfishing has been observed in pre-industrial times. In particular, the overfishing of the western Atlantic Ocean from the earliest days of European colonisation of the Americas has been well documented. Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist known for pioneering work on the human impacts on global fisheries, has commented: It is as though we use our military to fight the animals in the ocean. We are winning this war to exterminate them, and to see this destruction happen, for nothing – for no reason –, a bit frustrating. Strangely enough, these effects are all reversible, all the animals that have disappeared would reappear, all the animals that were small would grow, all the relationships that you can't see any more would re-establish themselves, the system would re-emerge.
Examples of overfishing exist in areas such as the North Sea, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the East China Sea. In these locations, overfishing has not only proved disastrous to fish stocks but to the fishing communities relying on the harvest. Like other extractive industries such as forestry and hunting, fisheries are susceptible to economic interaction between ownership or stewardship and sustainability, otherwise known as the tragedy of the commons; the Peruvian coastal anchovy fisheries crashed in the 1970s after overfishing and an El Niño season depleted anchovies from its waters. Anchovies were a major natural resource in Peru. However, the following five years saw the Peruvian fleet's catch amount to only about 4 million tons; this was a major loss to Peru's economy. The collapse of the cod fishery off Newfoundland, the 1992 decision by Canada to impose an indefinite moratorium on the Grand Banks, is a dramatic example of the consequences of overfishing; the sole fisheries in the Irish Sea, the west English Channel, other locations have become overfished to the point of virtual collapse, according to the UK government's official Biodiversity Action Plan.
The United Kingdom has created elements within this plan to attempt to restore this fishery, but the expanding global human population and the expanding demand for fish has reached a point where demand for food threatens the stability of these fisheries, if not the species' survival. Many deep sea fish are at risk, such as orange sablefish; the deep sea is completely dark, near freezing and has little food. Deep sea fish grow because of limited food, have slow metabolisms, low reproductive rates, many don't reach breeding maturity for 30 to 40 years. A fillet of orange roughy at the store is at least 50 years old. Most deep sea fish are in international waters. Most of these fish are caught by deep trawlers near seamounts, where they congregate because of food. Flash freezing allows the trawlers to work for days at a time, modern fishfinders target the fish with ease. Blue walleye became extinct in the Great Lakes in the 1980s; until the middle of the 20th century, it was a commercially valuable fish, with about a half million tonnes being landed during the period from about 1880 to the late 1950s, when the populations collapsed through a combination of overfishing, anthropogenic eutrophication, competition with the introduced rainbow smelt.
The World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London jointly issued their "Living Blue Planet Report" on 16 September 2015 which states that there was a dramatic fall of 74% in worldwide stocks of the important scombridae fish such as mackerel and bonitos between 1970 and 2010, the global overall "population sizes of mammals, reptiles and fish fell by half on average in just 40 years." Several countries are now managing their fisheries. Examples include New Zealand; the United States has turned many of its fisheries around from being in a depleted state. According to a 2008 UN report, the world's fishing fleets are losing US$50 billion each year through depleted stocks and poor fisheries management; the report, produced jointly by the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, asserts that half the world's fishing fleet could be scrapped with no change in catch. In addition, the biomass of global fish stocks have been allowed to run down to the point where it is no longer possible to cat
Fishing fleet
A fishing fleet is an aggregate of commercial fishing vessels. The term may be used of all vessels operating out of a particular port, all vessels engaged in a particular type of fishing, or all fishing vessels of a country or region. Although fishing vessels are not formally organized as if they were a naval fleet often the constraints of time and weather are such that they must all leave or return together, thus creating at least the appearance of an organized body. Fishermen operating a particular type of vessel or in a particular port belong to a local association which disseminates information and may be used to coordinate activities, such as how best to prevent overfishing in particular areas. In 2002 the world fishing fleet numbered about four million vessels. About one-third were decked; the remaining undecked boats were less than 10 metres long, 65 percent were not fitted with mechanical propulsion systems. The FAO estimates; the average size of decked vessels is about 20 gross tons. Only one percent of the world fishing fleet is larger than 100 gross tons.
China has half of these larger vessels. There is no international instrument in force concerning the safety of fishing vessels. International conventions and agreements awaiting ratification which concern safety at sea are exclusively aimed at vessels 24 metres in length and over, therefore do not apply to artisan vessels in developing countries. Safety regulations for all fishing vessels are left entirely to national discretion; the fishing fleet was an ironic reference to the shipping of unmarried young women from the UK to India during the middle and latter years of the Raj, for the purposes of becoming married to colonial administrators and plantation supervisors. FAO: CWP Handbook of Fishery Statistical Standards: Section L: Fishery Fleet FAO: Fishing vessels
YouTube
YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion. YouTube allows users to upload, rate, add to playlists, comment on videos, subscribe to other users, it offers a wide variety of corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers, live streams, other content such as video blogging, short original videos, educational videos. Most of the content on YouTube is uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can only watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos and add comments to videos. Videos deemed inappropriate are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.
YouTube and its creators earn advertising revenue from Google AdSense, a program which targets ads according to site content and audience. The vast majority of its videos are free to view, but there are exceptions, including subscription-based premium channels, film rentals, as well as YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, subscription services offering premium and ad-free music streaming, ad-free access to all content, including exclusive content commissioned from notable personalities; as of February 2017, there were more than 400 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute, one billion hours of content being watched on YouTube every day. As of August 2018, the website is ranked as the second-most popular site in the world, according to Alexa Internet. YouTube has faced criticism over aspects of its operations, including its handling of copyrighted content contained within uploaded videos, its recommendation algorithms perpetuating videos that promote conspiracy theories and falsehoods, hosting videos ostensibly targeting children but containing violent and/or sexually suggestive content involving popular characters, videos of minors attracting pedophilic activities in their comment sections, fluctuating policies on the types of content, eligible to be monetized with advertising.
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. According to a story, repeated in the media and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos, shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story, digestible". Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson's role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast was exposed during her performance, from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site.
Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any type of video. YouTube began as a venture capital-funded technology startup from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital and an $8 million investment from Artis Capital Management between November 2005 and April 2006. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California; the domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, the website was developed over the subsequent months. The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo; the video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, can still be viewed on the site. YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005; the first video to reach one million views was a Nike advertisement featuring Ronaldinho in November 2005.
Following a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in November, the site launched on December 15, 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day. The site grew and, in July 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos in May 2010. In May 2011, 48 hours of new videos were uploaded to the site every minute, which increased to 60 hours every minute in January 2012, 100 hours every minute in May 2013, 300 hours every minute in November 2014, 400 hours every minute in February 2017; as of January 2012, the site had 800 million unique users a month. It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. According to third-party web analytics providers and SimilarWeb, YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world, as of December 2016.
Fishing down the food web
Fishing down the food web is the process whereby fisheries in a given ecosystem, "having depleted the large predatory fish on top of the food web, turn to smaller species ending up with spurned small fish and invertebrates". The process was first demonstrated by the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly and others in an article published in the journal Science in 1998. Large predator fish with higher trophic levels have been depleted in wild fisheries; as a result, the fishing industry has been systematically "fishing down the food web", targeting fish species at progressively decreasing trophic levels. The trophic level of a fish is the position; the article establishes the importance of the mean trophic level of fisheries as a tool for measuring the health of ocean ecosystems. In 2000, the Convention on Biological Diversity selected the mean trophic level of fisheries catch, renamed the "Marine Trophic Index", as one of eight indicators of ecosystem health. However, many of the world's most lucrative fisheries are crustacean and mollusk fisheries, which are at low trophic levels and thus result in lower MTI values.
Over the last 50 years, the abundance of large predator fish, such as cod and tuna, has dropped 90 percent. Fishing vessels now pursue the smaller forage fish, such as herrings, sardines and anchovies, that are lower on the food chain. "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton" says Pauly. Beyond this, the overall global volume of fish captured has been declining since the late 1980s; the mean trophic level is calculated by assigning each fish or invertebrate species a number based on its trophic level. The trophic level is a measure of the position of an organism in a food web, starting at level 1 with primary producers, such as phytoplankton and seaweed moving through the primary consumers at level 2 that eat the primary producers to the secondary consumers at level 3 that eat the primary consumers, so on. In marine environments, trophic levels range from two to five for the apex predators; the mean trophic level can be calculated for fishery catches by averaging trophic levels for the overall catch using the datasets for commercial fish landings.
Pauly's team used the catch data from the FAO. Ecopath is a computerised ecosystem modelling system; the functioning of an ecosystem can be described using path analysis to track the direction and influence of the many factors controlling the ecosystem. The original Ecopath model was applied to a coral reef food web. Scientists tracked tiger sharks at the top of the food web and collected data on their feeding behaviour, what they ate and how much, they collected feeding data on the other organisms in the food chains down to the primary producers, such as algae. This data was fed into an Ecopath model, which described the energy flow, in terms of food, as it moved from the primary producers up the food web to the apex predator; such models allow scientists to compute the complex effects that occur, both direct and indirect, from the interactions of the many ecosystem components. The model showed that over the last 50 years the mean trophic level of fish catches has declined by somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 trophic levels.
This decline applied both globally, on a worldwide scale, more locally on a scale specific to oceans, that is, for the separate FAO subareas: the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Mediterranean-Black Seas. Pauly's team argued in their 1998 paper that the larger, more valuable predatory fish, such as tuna and grouper, had been systematically overfished, with the result that fishing effort was shifting to less desirable species further down the food chain; this "fishing down the food web", said Pauly, would in time reduce people to a diet of "jellyfish and plankton soup". The colourful language and innovative statistical modelling by Pauly's team triggered critical reactions. In the same year and his team from the FAO argued a counter position in a paper published in Science, they argued that Pauly's team had oversimplified the situation and may have "misinterpreted the FAO statistics". The response of Pauly's team was published in the same paper, claiming that the corrections suggested by the FAO, such as accounting for aquaculture made the trend worse.
The concerns raised by the FAO were further countered by Pauly and others in 2005. Other researchers have established that "fishing down" applies to smaller, regional areas, such as the Mediterranean, North Sea, Celtic Sea, in Canadian and Icelandic waters. In 2000, the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty aimed at sustaining biodiversity, adopted by 193 member countries, selected the mean trophic level of fisheries catch as one of eight indicators for immediate testing, they renamed it the "Marine Trophic Index", have mandated that member countries report over time on changes in ocean trophic levels as a primary indicator of marine biodiversity and health. The Marine Trophic Index is a measure of the overall health and stability of a marine ecosystem or area; the index is a proxy measure for overfishing and an indication of how abundant and rich the large, high trophic level fish are. Changes in the Marine Trophic Index over time can function as an indicator of the sustainability of a country’s fish resources.
It can indicate the extent that the fishing effort within a country's fishing grounds is modifying its fish stocks. A negative change indicates that larger predator fish are becoming depleted, an increasing number of smaller forage fish are being caught. A zero or positive change in the Marine Trophic Index indicates the fishery is improving. Eco
