VancouverGo.com - your Vancouver BC Canada online information hub

photos from http://flickr.com/photos/dtes_people

What to do with DTES????

Suggestion - right or wrong?

What about some sort of mass institutionalization scheme? Sort of a forced rehab for the habitually homeless, drug addicts and the like? We could take away their children, and take preventative measures to stop conception amongst the less capable. We might be able to break the cycle of parent to child if we removed them from the stiuation early enough. Those that were rehabilitated could rejoin the community, and the rest could be warehoused until they died, and then due to the lack of procreation, and the taking of their children, in a few generations, there would be hardly any ne’er-do-wells left.

Now, of course it would be expensive, in the short term, but property crime would be so reduced, it might help to offset the costs, and if we ran it bare bones, like a prison island, we might be able to keep costs down as well. The more able ones could be used as a workforce as well.

As for the human rights argument… honestly, would they be any worse off than they are now, dying on the streets of the modern plague?

Think the Gulag system.

Thoughts?

from http://www.blogosaurusvex.com

WRONG -WRONG -WRONG

http://eflora.bc.ca/

E-Flora BC is an electronic atlas of the plants of British Columbia that provides key information on our plant species for use in conservation, education and research. The atlas covers both vascular plants, including our many colourful wildflowers, and non-vascular plants, which includes the myriad species of mosses, liverworts, lichens, algae and fungi that are found in BC.

http://efauna.bc.ca/

E-Fauna BC is an electronic atlas of the wildlife of British Columbia that provides detailed scientific information on the animal species of our province for use in conservation, education and research. In the atlas, you will find information on species ranging from familiar animals such as bears, wolves and birds, to less familiar animals such sea stars and sea cucumbers, insects, spiders and ticks, and much more.

In developing E-Fauna BC, we have brought online key information on BC wildlife from several expert sources and publications, including both published and unpublished information. Click here to view all of the sources of information that have been brought online in E-Fauna BC.

Read the atlas pages to learn more about species distributions, ecology, behaviour, and food sources. E-Fauna BC provides you with an easy to access, comprehensive, and centralized information on BC wildlife in a simple, easy to use atlas format.

http://feelgoodinside.ca/

Five reasons the Change Everything community has earned the Webby:

• It’s a community committed to social change. As someone who scours the Internet Movie Database obsessively, I’m the last person to complain that so much of the web is devoted to the trivial and inconsequential. But when a site weighs in with a substantive mission and becomes a real success, it encourages others to follow suit, pursuing real-world results – and for those of us convinced of the social web’s potential as a tool for social change, that’s powerful stuff.

  By the way, among those real-world results for Change Everything: a warm clothing drive that self-organized on the site in its early days, after a particularly nasty cold snap threatened the poorest and most vulnerable residents of the Downtown East Side. Within a few days, the drive had netted more than 70 garbage bags filled with hats, gloves, scarves and coats – and triggered several spin-off initiatives.

• It embraces the open-source spirit. Change Everything is built on the Drupal content management system in a sector (financial institutitons) where closed-source software is the near-universal rule. And yet, in contrast to its closed-source Webby competition (with the notable exception of open-source browser Flock), Change Everything isn’t just built on Drupal – it regularly contributes back to the development community (most recently releasing the Nudge module).

  What’s to stop another credit union or (gasp) bank from using Nudge as part of a site designed to steal Change Everything’s thunder? Not a thing… and the fact that Vancity isn’t letting that fear stop them is a clear sign they’ve embraced the community ethos that underlies the open-source movement.

• It’s a Vancity project… but not the Vancity project. Social networking may not be your business, the way it’s Facebook’s business, but it’s not Vancity’s business either – and that’s why Change Everything is such a success. What Vancity does know is how to serve the needs of its members: not just their banking needs, but their needs for a vibrant, sustainable community. If you’re part of an organization with a distinct social mandate, approach and values, your social smarts are needed in the social networking world.
• It’s small and focused. How can Change Everything’s 3000 users hope to beat Facebook’s 70 million? In sheer numbers, they can’t. But there’s a quality to be had in a small, focused community: intimacy, shared interest, and perhaps a little more willingness to trust a fellow community member. (Not to mention the fact that you’re much less likely to be tracked down by people you’ve been trying to avoid since grade four.)

  There’s room online for both the online giants and the nimble niche or hyper-local communities; each serves a different purpose. But it’s about time we started paying a little more attention to those niche communities – while the Facebooks and MySpaces of the web may provide utility, it’s the niche communities that are more likely to capture users’ passion.

• The content, in all modesty, kicks ass. Feeling a little tired of pokes, vampire bites and which of your friends is the hottest-looking? Change Everything can give you the often-hilarious story of EnviroWoman, who went a year trying to live plastic-free (and mostly succeeding) – told with wit and humility. It can give you posts like Alex’s on plastics and BPA, posted nearly a full year before the media started really taking notice and the Canadian government announced a ban. And it can give you stories like this one, about the difference a simple bicycle ambulance design is making in Malawi and Namibia.

But the best way to understand why Change Everything is to explore the community itself. http://ChangeEverything.ca

from http://www.changeeverything.ca/blog

Internet calling company Skype said on Monday that it would offer an unlimited long-distance calling service for customers who want to reach friends and family without computers or Internet access.

Skype, owned by eBay, is one of the best-known Internet calling firms which allow free calls among Internet users. Users pay to call landlines and mobile phones, but the fee is often lower than standard long-distance services.

The company said it was offering unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada for $2.95 a month.

It also offers unlimited calls to phones in 34 countries including Australia, China, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, for $9.95 per month, it said.

Skype users in Europe can choose from unlimited plans ranging from 2.95 euros to 8.95 euros a month depending on the destination of calls, the company said.

Skype is one of eBay’s biggest divisions. The parent firm took a $1.4 billion write-down off Skype’s $4.3 billion price tag last year due to problems in making money from largely free Internet voice communications.

Skype’s new chief executive, Josh Silverman, told Reuters in an interview on Friday that he was pleased with the support it has received from eBay, and brushed off media reports that Skype might be put up for sale.

From http://ca.reuters.com

Photo from http://flickr.com/photos/iatp/2293462190/

Eluta is a search engine that specializes in just one thing: finding new job announcements at employers across Canada. Our goal is to create a searchable database of every new job opportunity in the nation.

As a vertical search engine, Eluta monitors new job announcements at tens of thousands of employers across Canada every day. Whenever an employer posts a new job on its website, Eluta adds the position to our searchable database. Once added, jobs on Eluta are searchable by keyword and location. An Advanced Search option lets you find new job announcements in other interesting ways, including by occupation and industry.

Eluta also lets you set up an email notification that alerts you as soon as new jobs matching your search are posted. You can also set up an RSS feed that tells you when new jobs matching your criteria are added.

Eluta’s search results include trusted editorial information to help job-seekers evaluate the job announcements they find on our search engine, including:

* a popup tooltip that quickly describes what each employer does;
* a brief review that rates the recruiting programs at thousands of employers; and
* a detailed review of working conditions at the very best employers, supplied by the editors of Canada’s Top 100 Employers.

Objective and unbiased, these valuable editorial features are updated continuously to help you decide which job opportunities – and employers – are right for you.

Eluta also aims to harness the power of mathematics to make job searching easier. Because employers don’t pay to be included in our search results, we can offer more relevant results and filter out commercial messages that aren’t related to your search. Eluta also uses sophisticated mathematics to keep track of recruitment by individual employers, so we can tell you which employers offer good growth prospects and advancement opportunities.

From http://canadianjobs.blogspot.com/2008/03/elutaca-vertical-job-search-engine.html

http://www.sedi.org

SEDI stands for Social and Enterprise Development Innovations.

We are a non-profit organization that assists people who are struggling economically. We motivate them to aim higher and develop the tools they need to achieve their goals, in partnership with community groups across Canada.

http://www.gettoknow.ca

The Robert Bateman art contest

“These kids are only ten years old!” marvels Corwin. He wishes he had some other skill besides wicked-mad photoshop-text-adding.

From http://flickr.com/photos/cool_dry_place/203362362/

It’s an effort to get kids off the couch - and back in touch with the great outdoors. World renowned Canadian wildlife artist and naturalist, Robert Bateman, is launching his “Get to Know Program” to students of the Greater Vancouver Area. Bateman says the interactive CD attempts to bridge the gap between kids and their environment - and that can have a positive effect.

“Here’s what happens - you get less obesity, less attention deficit disorder, less depression, less suicide, less drug and alcohol abuse and kids get better marks.” The CD features hikes and will allow students the opportunity to virtually explore parks in various Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton. The Get to Know Program is the result of years of collaboration with leading environmental organizations, educators and community stakeholders across the country.

Bateman founded and launched the program in the province of BC in 1999.

From http://www.news1130.com

What could have been a long and fruitless journey has become an unusual and inspiring tale for a Manitoba man and his birth mother after they reunited on a social-networking website.

Travis Sheppard and Lori Haas had applied for adoption documents to narrow their search for each other but their breakthrough came through a few keystrokes on Facebook, not a letter in the mail.

“I never would have imagined that it would be so easy,” said Sheppard, 20, a Brandon man who moved to Vancouver in March to begin his search.

“The funny thing is I was actually planning to delete my Facebook profile.”

Haas found Sheppard’s online profile in late June, almost a year after she obtained his name in his closed adoption file. Before that, her efforts to find him had stalled. She gave birth to him when she was 17 and unprepared to raise a child.

“It’s been my biggest regret,” said Haas.

Sheppard said she shouldn’t feel bad about her decision.

“She was trying to give me a better life,” he said.

Looking at Sheppard’s profile picture, Haas was certain he was the son she gave up at birth. She sent a Facebook message to him stating she was looking for a relative with his name.

Sheppard didn’t recognize her name, but browsed her profile.

“I saw a picture of her and I knew instantly it was her because of how much we look alike,” Sheppard, who once lived in Winnipeg, said last week.

When Sheppard replied a day later, they realized their search was over.

“I nearly lost it. I was crying, shaking and laughing,” Haas, a 37-year-old nurse, said from Vancouver.

“This couldn’t have worked out better if someone wrote it in a story.”

Within 48 hours of Haas’s message they were face-to-face at a Vancouver restaurant, where Sheppard learned he has an 11-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister.

“We said, ‘Hi,’ and we hugged and got a little emotional,” Haas said. “His personality and my personality are so similar, it’s scary. I think we bonded automatically.”

Later that day, Sheppard met his birth father, who has stayed in touch with Haas.

“All along there’s been something missing and I never knew what it was,” he said. “Since I met them, now I know what’s been missing in my life.”

Meanwhile, Sheppard is still waiting to receive the documents that would have revealed his birth mother’s name.

“It’s pretty much irrelevant now because she found me,” he said.

From http://winnipegsun.com/News/Manitoba/2007/07/21/4356745-sun.html

A 33-year-old Vancouverite has downloaded what appears to be about 60 per cent of the seventh and final Harry Potter book - even though the children’s novel isn’t officially supposed to be released until midnight Saturday.

The apparent discovery of major portions of the novel on a European website is part of the continuing Harry Potter hype over the imminent release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

It also follows on the heels of the recent release of the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Byron Ng said he started on his search for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Monday after reading a newspaper account of the heightened security around release of the book - including using measures such as global positioning technology to track the trucks delivering the books to retailers.

Oddly enough, Ng doesn’t consider himself a big Harry Potter fan. “I know the basics and I’ve watched some of the movies but I don’t really pay attention to it,” he said in an interview.

“This is a high-value release so I looked at it for fun.” Ng said he went online and found what appear to be the novel’s first few paragraphs mentioned in an article that appeared Sunday in The Guardian, based in the U.K. He used that information to Google to find the rest of the novel.

On a peer-to-peer-sharing website where directions to pirated movies and other material are located he found that someone had posted what purported to be the first 495 pages of the 794-page book.

So he downloaded it too.

“It is not an E-book or Word file, which is what people would normally do” he said.
“What some guy did was take pictures of it, 500 little files, each with a picture of a page. Someone took the trouble to do that.”

Read more - http://www.canada.com/