Are All Charter Rights and Freedoms Really Non-Absolute?

This article challenges the conventional legal wisdom that no right or freedom in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is absolute. Section 1 of the Charter is the most commonly cited source of this wisdom, but this provision merely sets out the standard that the state must meet to justify a limit on a Charter right or freedom. Section 1 does not provide advance confirmation that limits satisfying this standard exist for all Charter rights and freedoms. This interpretation, if correct, does not automatically render any of the rights or freedoms in the Charter absolute. Indeed, the standard in section 1 may ultimately capture all of these rights and freedoms. Nonetheless, this article proposes two candidates for absolute status: (a) freedoms that concern the internal forum of the person (e.g., freedom of thought) and (b) the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment

Trevor Lloyd (1906-1995)

Trevor Lloyd died in Ottawa on 6 February 1995, at the age of 88. For more than half a century he had been one of Canada's foremost geographers. He had gained an international reputation for his social science studies of the circumpolar world and particularly for his contributions in northern economic and political geography. Henry Trevor Lloyd was born in London, England on 4 May 1906. His Quaker parents had come from Wales, and as a young boy he returned with them when they made their home in the Rhondda valley. Before he left school the valley had become the most economically and socially depressed part of the South Wales coal field, and his deep, lifelong concern for social justice in society clearly dated from his personal observations at that time. ... By 1942 he was attracted to university teaching and was increasingly interested in the North. ... In the last year of the war he went to Greenland to replace Max Dunbar as Canadian consul. He had hardly been back in his Dartmouth department (of which he had become chairman) when in 1947 he returned to Ottawa for a year to be appointed Chief of the recently created Geographical Bureau. In this position, continuing the objectives of his predecessor, Diamond Jenness, he was able to encourage and support young scientists who were developing research in the Canadian Arctic ... these included women as well as men. It was in this period that Trevor Lloyd began his close ties to the newly created Arctic Institute of North America. He edited the first two volumes of Arctic (1948-49) and the editorial standards as well as the format he established were to remain unchanged for the next 25 years. Created a Fellow in 1948, he became a Governor in 1950. His main contribution to the Institute was maintained in the sixties when he was almost continuously a Governor and for 1967-69, Chairman of the Board. His special interest was in encouraging the expansion of the Institute's outstanding research library. ... He left Dartmouth in 1959 to become the first Professor of Human Geography at McGill University; three years later he became chairman of the department, a position he held until the end of 1966. He was fortunate in his period of tenure as McGill departmental chairman, as it coincided with a period of stability and considerable economic prosperity in the university. Under his guidance and driven by his great energy, the department doubled its size and expanded its northern research interests, which until then had been primarily in the physical environment, into social, economic and cultural fields. He revitalized the Stanstead Geography Summer School which specialized in arctic programs. He paid particular attention to the need of schoolteachers specializing in geography and put into effect his plans to improve the quality of geography teaching in McGill's Institute of Education. With external help, he initiated a review of the map resources of the university, a consequence of which today is the large map and airphoto collection, now part of the university's Hitschfeld environmental library. ... When the Arctic Institute left Montreal in 1975, Trevor Lloyd felt he had lost close contact with two first-class northern libraries, the Arctic Institute's and the Baker collection. He worked wholeheartedly to develop McGill's Centre for Northern Studies and Research, and was its director in the last years before he retired in 1977. After retirement he ... returned to Ottawa where he continued to work for the rest of his life on Canadian northern administrative policies. He became deeply committed to founding a national Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies and became its executive director in 1980. ..

Maximum likelihood and pseudo score approaches for parametric time-to-event analysis with informative entry times

We develop a maximum likelihood estimating approach for time-to-event Weibull regression models with outcome-dependent sampling, where sampling of subjects is dependent on the residual fraction of the time left to developing the event of interest. Additionally, we propose a two-stage approach which proceeds by iteratively estimating, through a pseudo score, the Weibull parameters of interest (i.e., the regression parameters) conditional on the inverse probability of sampling weights; and then re-estimating these weights (given the updated Weibull parameter estimates) through the profiled full likelihood. With these two new methods, both the estimated sampling mechanism parameters and the Weibull parameters are consistently estimated under correct specification of the conditional referral distribution. Standard errors for the regression parameters are obtained directly from inverting the observed information matrix in the full likelihood specification and by either calculating bootstrap or robust standard errors for the hybrid pseudo score/profiled likelihood approach. Loss of efficiency with the latter approach is considered. Robustness of the proposed methods to misspecification of the referral mechanism and the time-to-event distribution is also briefly examined. Further, we show how to extend our methods to the family of parametric time-to-event distributions characterized by the generalized gamma distribution. The motivation for these two approaches came from data on time to cirrhosis from hepatitis C viral infection in patients referred to the Edinburgh liver clinic. We analyze these data here.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS725 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Practical Broad-Band Tuning of Dye Lasers by Solvent Shifting

We have operated a dye laser over a broad wavelength range (593.8-667.0nm) by shifting the dye emission profile with incremental changes of solvent composition. This was accomplished with the laser operating continuously, and only minor adjustment of the laser optics was required. Solvent tuning was facilitated by the critical dependence of the optimum laser wavelength on concentration of the second solvent. Using the known solvent-sensitive laser dye 9-diethylaminobenzo[a]phenoxaz-5-one (DBP), 87% of the tuning range from pure xylenes to pure methanol was covered by cumulative addition of 24 vol. % methanol to the starting xylenes solution. The optimum dye concentration was found to be independent of solvent composition, so that maximum laser power could be maintained by mixing equimolar dye solutions in the two solvents. These results establish the practicality of solvent-tuning as a method of conducting laser experiments over a broad wavelength range

Conservation or co-evolution? Intermediate levels of aboriginal burning and hunting have positive effects on kangaroo populations in Western Australia

pre-printStudies of conservation in small scale societies typically portray indigenous peoples as either sustainably managing resources, or forsaking long-term sustainability for short-term gains. To explain this variability, we propose an alternative framework derived from a co-evolutionary perspective. In environments with long histories of consistent interaction, we suggest that local species will frequently be well adapted to human disturbance; but where novel interactions are introduced, human disturbance may have negative environmental consequences. To test this co-evolutionary hypothesis, we examine the effect of Aboriginal burning and hunting on hill kangaroo (Macropus robustus) abundance. We find that hill kangaroo populations peak at intermediate levels of human disturbance, showing that in ecosystems characterized by long-term human- environmental interactions, humans can act as trophic mediators, resulting in patterns consistent with epiphenomenal conservation. Framing the question within this co-evolutionary perspective provides an explanation for the underlying mechanisms that drive environmental outcomes of subsistence practices

Alternative aboriginal economies: Martu livelihoods in the 21st century

book chapterIn the western deserts of Australia, hunting and gathering endures as an important social and economic activity. That foraging persists within the boundaries of developed industrialized nation states may come as a surprise to those who evaluate foraging as less profitable than agricultural, wage or market alternatives (or to those who see it as a somehow inferior economic mode, e.g., Morgan 1877). However, the tendency to dismiss foraging as a less viable mode of production may be an error given the evidence that foraging can sometimes be the best option within constraints (e.g., Tucker et al 2010, Kramer and Greaves, chapter 2, this volume). If this is the case in Australia, then the maintenance of foraging into the twenty-first century may be as much an economic decision as one aimed at maintaining social relations, identity and connections to traditional lands and practices

Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science

pre-printThe future of archaeological science relies as much (if not more) on theoretical as on methodological developments. As with anything in biology, explaining past human behavior will require the application of evolutionary theory. As with anything in archaeology, theory is useless without clear ties to a material record. Human behavioral ecology (HBE) has become one of the central theoretical frameworks in archaeological science by providing a broad conceptual toolkit for linking principles of natural selection to operational hypotheses about variability in behavior and its material consequences. Here we review the general approach and outline cases where applying HBE models can contribute to key research issues in archaeology. These examples illustrate how foundational applications of HBE are being built upon to explain complex and diverse phenomena ranging from the origins of agriculture to the emergence of institutionalized inequality. With each case, we outline avenues where this research strategy can advance archaeological science into the future