region:south wales

  • Office worker launches UK’s first police facial recognition legal action
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/21/office-worker-launches-uks-first-police-facial-recognition-legal-action

    Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, says ‘intrusive’ technology is used on thousands of people An office worker who believes his image was captured by facial recognition cameras when he popped out for a sandwich in his lunch break has launched a groundbreaking legal battle against the use of the technology. Supported by the campaign group Liberty, Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, raised money through crowdfunding to pursue the action, claiming the suspected use of the technology on him by South Wales police (...)

    #CCTV #biométrie #procès #facial #vidéo-surveillance #surveillance #Liberty

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c1a40be9bb16ddac7902147d384d6e3236964721/0_0_3500_2100/master/3500.jpg

  • Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply | Quanta Magazine
    https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-discover-the-perfect-way-to-multiply-20190411

    Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians invented multiplication. Last month, mathematicians perfected it.

    On March 18, two researchers described the fastest method ever discovered for multiplying two very large numbers. The paper marks the culmination of a long-running search to find the most efficient procedure for performing one of the most basic operations in math.

    “Everybody thinks basically that the method you learn in school is the best one, but in fact it’s an active area of research,” said Joris van der Hoeven, a mathematician at the French National Center for Scientific Research and one of the co-authors.

    The complexity of many computational problems, from calculating new digits of pi to finding large prime numbers, boils down to the speed of multiplication. Van der Hoeven describes their result as setting a kind of mathematical speed limit for how fast many other kinds of problems can be solved.

    “In physics you have important constants like the speed of light which allow you to describe all kinds of phenomena,” van der Hoeven said. “If you want to know how fast computers can solve certain mathematical problems, then integer multiplication pops up as some kind of basic building brick with respect to which you can express those kinds of speeds.”

    Most everyone learns to multiply the same way. We stack two numbers, multiply every digit in the bottom number by every digit in the top number, and do addition at the end. If you’re multiplying two two-digit numbers, you end up performing four smaller multiplications to produce a final product.

    The grade school or “carrying” method requires about n2 steps, where n is the number of digits of each of the numbers you’re multiplying. So three-digit numbers require nine multiplications, while 100-digit numbers require 10,000 multiplications.

    The carrying method works well for numbers with just a few digits, but it bogs down when we’re multiplying numbers with millions or billions of digits (which is what computers do to accurately calculate pi or as part of the worldwide search for large primes). To multiply two numbers with 1 billion digits requires 1 billion squared, or 1018, multiplications, which would take a modern computer roughly 30 years.

    For millennia it was widely assumed that there was no faster way to multiply. Then in 1960, the 23-year-old Russian mathematician Anatoly Karatsuba took a seminar led by Andrey Kolmogorov, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century. Kolmogorov asserted that there was no general procedure for doing multiplication that required fewer than n2 steps. Karatsuba thought there was — and after a week of searching, he found it.

    Karatsuba’s method involves breaking up the digits of a number and recombining them in a novel way that allows you to substitute a small number of additions and subtractions for a large number of multiplications. The method saves time because addition takes only 2n steps, as opposed to n2 steps.

    “With addition, you do it a year earlier in school because it’s much easier, you can do it in linear time, almost as fast as reading the numbers from right to left,” said Martin Fürer, a mathematician at Pennsylvania State University who in 2007 created what was at the time the fastest multiplication algorithm.

    When dealing with large numbers, you can repeat the Karatsuba procedure, splitting the original number into almost as many parts as it has digits. And with each splitting, you replace multiplications that require many steps to compute with additions and subtractions that require far fewer.

    “You can turn some of the multiplications into additions, and the idea is additions will be faster for computers,” said David Harvey, a mathematician at the University of New South Wales and a co-author on the new paper.

    Karatsuba’s method made it possible to multiply numbers using only n1.58 single-digit multiplications. Then in 1971 Arnold Schönhage and Volker Strassen published a method capable of multiplying large numbers in n × log n × log(log n) multiplicative steps, where log n is the logarithm of n. For two 1-billion-digit numbers, Karatsuba’s method would require about 165 trillion additional steps.

    Schönhage and Strassen’s method, which is how computers multiply huge numbers, had two other important long-term consequences. First, it introduced the use of a technique from the field of signal processing called a fast Fourier transform. The technique has been the basis for every fast multiplication algorithm since.

    Second, in that same paper Schönhage and Strassen conjectured that there should be an even faster algorithm than the one they found — a method that needs only n × log n single-digit operations — and that such an algorithm would be the fastest possible. Their conjecture was based on a hunch that an operation as fundamental as multiplication must have a limit more elegant than n × log n × log(log n).

    “It was kind of a general consensus that multiplication is such an important basic operation that, just from an aesthetic point of view, such an important operation requires a nice complexity bound,” Fürer said. “From general experience the mathematics of basic things at the end always turns out to be elegant.”

    Schönhage and Strassen’s ungainly n × log n × log(log n) method held on for 36 years. In 2007 Fürer beat it and the floodgates opened. Over the past decade, mathematicians have found successively faster multiplication algorithms, each of which has inched closer to n × log n, without quite reaching it. Then last month, Harvey and van der Hoeven got there.

    Their method is a refinement of the major work that came before them. It splits up digits, uses an improved version of the fast Fourier transform, and takes advantage of other advances made over the past forty years. “We use [the fast Fourier transform] in a much more violent way, use it several times instead of a single time, and replace even more multiplications with additions and subtractions,” van der Hoeven said.

    Harvey and van der Hoeven’s algorithm proves that multiplication can be done in n × log n steps. However, it doesn’t prove that there’s no faster way to do it. Establishing that this is the best possible approach is much more difficult. At the end of February, a team of computer scientists at Aarhus University posted a paper arguing that if another unproven conjecture is also true, this is indeed the fastest way multiplication can be done.

    And while the new algorithm is important theoretically, in practice it won’t change much, since it’s only marginally better than the algorithms already being used. “The best we can hope for is we’re three times faster,” van der Hoeven said. “It won’t be spectacular.”

    In addition, the design of computer hardware has changed. Two decades ago, computers performed addition much faster than multiplication. The speed gap between multiplication and addition has narrowed considerably over the past 20 years to the point where multiplication can be even faster than addition in some chip architectures. With some hardware, “you could actually do addition faster by telling the computer to do a multiplication problem, which is just insane,” Harvey said.

    Hardware changes with the times, but best-in-class algorithms are eternal. Regardless of what computers look like in the future, Harvey and van der Hoeven’s algorithm will still be the most efficient way to multiply.

    #mathematiques #multiplication

  • David Carpanini - Wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carpanini

    Découvert du lundi matin #art #peinture #david_carpanini

    David Lawrence Carpanini (born 1946) is a British artist, etcher, teacher and printmaker whose drawings, paintings and etchings are mostly concerned with the natural and industrial landscapes of South Wales. He was President of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (1995-2003) and was Professor of Art at the University of Wolverhampton (1992-2000).[1][2]

  • The Theft And Return Of Australian Indigenous Land 1788 To 2013

    The map above shows that between the establishment of the British penal colony of New South Wales in 1788 and the mid-1960s, Indigenous Australians were deprived and dispossessed of virtually all their land.

    https://brilliantmaps.com/indigenous-australia
    #aborigènes #contre-cartographie #cartographie_radicale #cartographie_critique #peuples_autochtones #cartographie #visualisation #Australie #géographie_du_plein #géographie_du_vide #terres #dépossession
    ping @reka

  • Churchill Was More Villain Than Hero in Britain’s Colonies - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-16/churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-in-britain-s-colonies

    The recent flap over Winston Churchill — with Labour politician John McDonnell calling Britain’s most revered prime minister a “villain” and prompting a rebuke from the latter’s grandson — will astonish many Indians. That’s not because the label itself is a misnomer, but because McDonnell was exercised by the death of one Welsh miner in 1910. In fact, Churchill has the blood of millions on his hands whom the British prefer to forget.

    “History,” Churchill himself said, “will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” He did, penning a multi-volume history of World War Two, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his self-serving fictions. As the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies remarked of the man many Britons credit with winning the war, "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase, so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.”

    Awkward facts, alas, there are aplenty. As McDonnell correctly noted, Churchill as Home Secretary in 1910 sent battalions of police from London and ordered them to attack striking miners in Tonypandy in South Wales; one was killed and nearly 600 strikers and policemen were injured. It’s unlikely this troubled his conscience much. He later assumed operational command of the police during a siege of armed Latvian anarchists in Stepney, where he decided to allow them to be burned to death in a house where they were trapped.

  • Australia Starts Tackling Modern Slavery

    A new law in Australia requires companies of a certain size operating in Australia to publicly state the steps they are taking to keep their supply chains free from the worst forms of modern-day slavery. The law, which went into effect on January 1st, is aimed at ending child and forced labor as well as human trafficking.

    Companies will have to file annual statements on their modern slavery efforts according to a set of mandatory criteria, including a description of the company’s operations and supply chain, any risks for modern slavery in the supply chain, and a description of the steps the company is taking to address those risks. The first of these statements is likely to be due by mid-2020.

    A government-run database, accessible to the public and free of charge, will house these statements. One glaring gap is that the Australian law currently does not penalize companies for noncompliance, though the Minister for Home Affairs can make an inquiry if a company has not complied. If a company fails to respond, the minister may publicly disclose information about the company’s failure to comply.

    Australia joins the United Kingdom and France, who have implemented similar laws. Several other countries are contemplating modern slavery legislation, including Switzerland, Germany, and Canada.

    Subnational governments in other countries have also adopted similar laws, such as the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act. Additionally, last June the Australian state of New South Wales passed its own modern slavery law, making critical additions to the national law by creating an independent anti-slavery commissioner to monitor implementation and promote action against modern slavery. The law also creates a range of monetary penalties for companies with employees in New South Wales that fail to comply with the modern slavery statement requirements.

    Australia’s modern slavery law is an important initial step to ensuring that company supply chains are free from modern day slavery and trafficking, but the national or state governments government can go further to ensure compliance. Future legislative efforts, whether in Australia or in other countries, should include systems for monitoring as well as consequences for non-compliance – innovative and pioneering elements found in the New South Wales law.

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/08/australia-starts-tackling-modern-slavery

    #esclavage_moderne
    ping @reka

  • Mall Grab
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/mix-delivery/mall-grab--2

    Dance music is supposed to be about fun,” 23-year-old Jordan Alexander tells us. “It’s such an issue these days. A lot of people aren’t willing to just enjoy themselves and focus on the moment – instead, they’re Snapchatting the whole night.”

    This no-nonsense approach, alongside killer releases and a busy schedule, has seen Mall Grab become the poster boy of the blossoming lo-fi house sound in 2016. Hailing from New South Wales, the 23-year-old Australian has been impossible to miss, and has relocated to London due to high European demand for his fun-filled, on-point DJ sets. Ready for a #jungle Special Retrospective selection (...)

    #jungle
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/mix-delivery/mall-grab--2_05739__1.mp3

  • CppCast Episode 165: Formal Verification with Matt Fernandez
    http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2

    Episode 165 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Matt Fernandez from Intel Labs to discuss Formal Verification.

    CppCast Episode 165: Formal Verification with Matt Fernandez by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

    About the interviewee:

    Matthew Fernandez is a Research Scientist with Intel Labs. Matt began his programming career building Windows GUI applications and designing databases, before moving into operating system architecture and security. He has a PhD in formal verification of operating systems from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and worked with the Australian research group Data61. In the past, he has worked on compilers, device drivers and hypervisors, and now spends his days (...)

    #News,Video&_On-Demand,

  • How the Hogwarts Express was saved from a Welsh scrapyard - BBC News

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-45303331

    Olton Hall was left to rust at Woodham’s scrapyard between 1964 and 1981

    The Hogwarts Express in all its glory

    More than 80% of steam locomotives on heritage railways in the UK today can be traced back to Woodham’s

    Emerging from the clouds of steam engulfing platform nine and three-quarters, the gleaming Hogwarts Express commands a special place in the hearts of Harry Potter fans.

    Yet there was a time when the only place this engine could call home, was a south Wales scrapyard where it lay rotting among the hulks of a bygone era.

    That is because the locomotive that entranced millions of Potter viewers and now sits proudly in Warner Brothers Studios, was once earmarked to be dismantled for the furnace.

    Written off, abandoned and forgotten for 17 years, this lowly engine’s final destiny was originally far from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

    #transport #héritage #mémoire #Train #nostalgie #présence-du_passé ou #le_passé_présent ou encore #garder_le_passé_présent pourquoi c’est important #garder_le_mémoire etc...

  • Formal Verification with Matt Fernandez
    http://cppcast.libsyn.com/formal-verification-with-matt-fernandez

    Rob and Jason are joined by Matt Fernandez from Intel Labs to discuss Formal Verification. Matthew Fernandez is a Research Scientist with Intel Labs. Matt began his programming career building Windows GUI applications and designing databases, before moving into operating system architecture and security. He has a PhD in formal verification of operating systems from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and worked with the Australian research group Data61. In the past, he has worked on compilers, device drivers and hypervisors, and now spends his days exploring new tools and techniques for functional correctness and verification of security properties. On the weekends, you can usually find Matt in a park with a good book, hunting for good coffee or helping a newbie debug (...)

    http://traffic.libsyn.com/cppcast/cppcast-165.mp3?dest-id=282890

  • Police face legal action over use of facial recognition cameras
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/14/police-face-legal-action-over-use-of-facial-recognition-cameras

    Campaigners say technology risks turning UK citizens into ‘walking ID cards’ Two legal challenges have been launched against police forces in south Wales and London over their use of automated facial recognition (AFR) technology on the grounds the surveillance is unregulated and violates privacy. The claims are backed by the human rights organisations Liberty and Big Brother Watch following complaints about biometric checks at the Notting Hill carnival, on Remembrance Sunday, at (...)

    #CCTV #biométrie #procès #facial #surveillance #vidéo-surveillance #criminalité #Liberty #BigBrotherWatch

    ##criminalité
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/92a871e9ecddbf52665f3dcd9560b765789302d1/0_230_3500_2100/master/3500.jpg

  • Yang Ming Containership Loses 83 Containers in Heavy Seas Off Australia – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/yang-ming-containership-loses-83-containers-in-heavy-seas-off-australia


    A grainy photo shows stacks of containers collapsed on board YM Efficiency

    Watch out, sailors! A Yang Ming containership has lost more than 80 containers overboard while battling heavy swells off the east coast of Australia.

    The Liberian-flagged ship YM Efficiency was sailing from Taiwan to Port Botany near Sydney when the stack of containers collapsed at as the ship was underway off New South Wales’ central coast at around 4 a.m. Friday morning.

    Officials say 83 containers tumbled overboard approximately 30 kilometers off the coast in Commonwealth waters. Another 30 containers were reportedly damaged but remained on board the vessel.

  • UK police use of facial recognition technology a failure, says report
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/15/uk-police-use-of-facial-recognition-technology-failure

    Civil liberties group says systems used by Met and South Wales police are wrong nine times out of 10 Police attempts to use cameras linked to databases to recognise people from their face are failing, with the wrong person picked out nine times out 10, a report claims. The report from Big Brother Watch, published on Tuesday, warns that facial recognition technology turns innocent British citizens into “walking ID cards”. It says the technology, whereby computer databases of faces are (...)

    #Met #CCTV #biométrie #facial #vidéo-surveillance #surveillance #BigBrotherWatch

  • The forgotten suffragette jailed for blowing up a post box | Politics | The Guardian

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/13/the-forgotten-suffragette-jailed-for-blowing-up-a-post-box

    The largely forgotten story of a Welsh suffragette who was jailed for blowing up a post box, survived a shipwreck, and played a key role in the fight to allow women into the House of Lords is being celebrated in a series of music events and talks.

    Despite a life full of adventure, as well as political activism, Margaret Haig Thomas – Lady Rhondda – is not even a well-known figure in her native south Wales. A blue plaque on the red-brick house by the post box in Newport that she targeted is one of the few nods to her.

  • 92% false positive rate for police facial recognition system.
    http://www.statewatch.org/news/2018/may/wales-police-face-recog.htm

    "A police force has defended its use of facial recognition technology after it was revealed that more than 2,000 people in Cardiff during the 2017 Champions League final were wrongly identified as potential criminals.
    South Wales police began trialling the technology in June last year in an attempt to catch more criminals. The cameras scan faces in a crowd and compare them against a database of custody images.

    As 170,000 people arrived in the Welsh capital for the football match between Real Madrid and Juventus, 2,470 potential matches were identified.

    However, according to data on the force’s website, 92% (2,297) of those were found to be “false positives”.

    South Wales police admitted that “no facial recognition system is 100% accurate”, but said the technology had led to more than 450 arrests since its introduction. It also said no one had been arrested after an incorrect match.

  • Facial recognition tech used by UK police is making a ton of mistakes
    https://www.wired.co.uk/article/face-recognition-police-uk-south-wales-met-notting-hill-carnival

    South Wales Police, London’s Met and Leicestershire have all been trialling automated facial recognition in public places. But a lack of legal oversight exists around the technology At the end of each summer for the last 14 years, the small Welsh town of Porthcawl has been invaded. Every year its 16,000 population is swamped by up to 35,000 Elvis fans. Many people attending the yearly festival look the same : they slick back their hair, throw on oversized sunglasses and don white flares. (...)

    #CCTV #biométrie #facial #vidéo-surveillance #surveillance #erreur #sport

  • Welsh police wrongly identify thousands as potential criminals
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/05/welsh-police-wrongly-identify-thousands-as-potential-criminals

    South Wales force defends use of facial recognition technology at 2017 Champions League final A police force has defended its use of facial recognition technology after it was revealed that more than 2,000 people in Cardiff during the 2017 Champions League final were wrongly identified as potential criminals. South Wales police began trialling the technology in June last year in an attempt to catch more criminals. The cameras scan faces in a crowd and compare them against a database of (...)

    #algorithme #CCTV #biométrie #facial #sport #surveillance #vidéo-surveillance

    • Bunnies by the boxful
      https://pateblog.nma.gov.au/2016/03/27/bunnies-by-the-boxful

      Opened in 1916, the freezing works supplied rabbit meat to markets around southern Queensland (Brisbane, Toowoomba, and Warwick), while pelts were sent to Sydney for auction and to hat factories in Melbourne. In 1917 the works processed over 110,000 rabbits. This success led to plans to expand capacity and establish exports.

      ‘The plant which did the freezing was small at first, supplying mainly Brisbane markets, but this grew until it was supplying a large city in Indonesia, then as the years went by, a firm in England…’

      Bert Wright, 1992

      Bert Wright was one of many locals who found employment at the works, operated in the 1920s by local businessmen Bill Wilkinson and Ted Maher.

      ‘I worked for the Yelarbon chiller for years on and off. The rabbit kept me in good work whenever I needed it. … I drove for them … from Yelarbon to Stanthorpe – 90 odd miles. Of course you were all over the place picking up, grading and buying rabbits. A docket was issued – so many pair of large, medium and small – all at different prices.’

      Bert Wright, 1992

      Bert recalled that in the interwar years (1919-1938) Yelarbon was known as a ‘rabbit town’. Over 20 tons of rabbits were trucked to Brisbane each week in peak periods and 151 trappers were on the freezing works’ books. During the 1930s Depression prices for rabbits were very low but trappers were able to make a little over £1 a week, enough for their families to survive the difficult times.

      With the start of the Second World War in 1939, most of the young trappers enlisted for the Army and the flow of rabbit carcasses to the freezing works dropped significantly, but the company remained in business. Bert explained the impact that the absence of trappers had on rabbit populations: when the war finished ‘… there were rabbits everywhere – even living under the freezing works itself.’ The trappers came back and shipments of rabbits started coming from as far away as St George, approximately 250 km west of Yelarbon. The record catch Bert remembers was 4007 pairs delivered by one trapper in 1947-48. The works closed in 1955.

      https://patenma.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/naa-a1200-l2648.jpg?w=425&zoom=2

      https://patenma.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/naa-a1200-l2650.jpg?w=323&zoom=2

    • Louis Pasteur and the $10m rabbit reward
      http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/louis-pasteur-and-the-$10m-rabbit-reward/6703072

      Image: Plague proportions: farmers with one evening’s cull in central Victoria, 1949. (State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection/ Accession no H19019)

      In the 1880s, the greatest threat to Australia’s political and economic future was the rabbit, and our desperate struggle with the bunny resembled a Looney Tunes plot, involving biological warfare, a scientific genius, a world famous actress and a $10 million reward. Lorena Allam reports.

      Rabbits arrived in Australia with the First Fleet but didn’t thrive initially. The great bunny plague is commonly blamed on Thomas Austin of Barwon Park near Geelong, who decided in 1859 to organise a ’spot of hunting’ by releasing two dozen rabbits into the wild.

      ’Those two dozen rabbits went on to multiply, as rabbits do, to be a plague of a billion rabbits by the 1880s,’ says historian and author Stephen Dando-Collins.

      The speed of the invasion was astonishing.

      Some of the strong contenders were people who thought, “Well, let’s bring in something that will eat the rabbits.” In fact, some animals were brought in ... mongooses, cats.
      Brian Coman, author and research scientist

      ’In the west of NSW in particular, properties were quite marginal to begin with,’ says Dando-Collins. ’Once the rabbits arrived and stripped them of all the crops and stock feed, these places became dustbowls and totally useless to farmers.’

      Next the rabbits invaded politics.

      ’At that time there was no income tax, no company tax and the colonial government’s single biggest source of income was from the lease of crown lands,’ says Dando-Collins. ’By the late 1880s a lot of these leases were coming up for renewal, and farmers said to the government, “If you don’t sort out this rabbit problem, we’ll just walk away. We will not renew our leases.”’

      Under the Rabbit Nuisance Act, the NSW government paid a rebate for rabbit scalps. The act spawned an entire industry.

      ’In just 12 months near Wilcannia 782,510 rabbits were caught, and they were still saying the property was useless,’ Dando-Collins says.

      ’Near Menindee 342,295 were scalped over three months. Word came back to the government in Sydney: “It’s just not working!”’

      In 1887, the premier of NSW, Sir Henry Parkes, appointed an Inter-Colonial Rabbit Commission made up of prominent graziers, men of science and government administrators. The commission’s task was to find a biological solution to the rabbit problem. It sent out a global call for entries, with prize money of £25,000 ($10 million in today’s terms) for ’any method or process not previously known in the colony for the effectual extermination of rabbits’.
      Rabbit plague Image: Plague proportions: farmers with one evening’s cull in central Victoria, 1949. (State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection/ Accession no H19019)

      The Rabbit Commission received more than 1,500 suggestions, most of them ’pretty insane’ according to author and research scientist Brian Coman.

      Coman worked for the Victorian Department of the Environment for 23 years, battling rabbits for much of that time.

      ’Some of the strong contenders were people who thought, “Well, let’s bring in something that will eat the rabbits.” In fact, some animals were brought in ... mongooses, cats. There was a whole trainload of cats dispatched into outback Australia and let loose at various points along the line,’ he says.

      The NSW government and pastoralists sought a ’magic bullet’ because keeping rabbit numbers down was (and still is) expensive, backbreaking and unrelenting work. Coman, who grew up in the Western Districts of Victoria, can relate.

      ’Back then the first sort of crude methods—other than trapping and bounties, which were totally ineffectual—were broad-spectrum poisons like arsenic and phosphorous. These were terrible poisons to use in the bush because they were non-specific. A lot of other animals got killed as well,’ he says.

      ’They were also very dangerous. My father has a recollection, as a little boy, of coming home at night after he’d been with his uncle poisoning on a farm up near Euroa, and rubbing his hands and they glowed in the dark. That was the phosphorous all over his hands.’

      The Rabbit Commission did receive a few useful suggestions, including one from a great man of science: Louis Pasteur.

      Pasteur claimed he could eradicate rabbits with chicken cholera—something he’d trialled with some success in France. Pasteur dispatched his nephew, the scientist Adrien Loir, on a steamer from Paris to Australia with vials of chicken cholera in his luggage.

      The Rabbit Commission agreed to allow Loir’s team to conduct experiments and built them a laboratory and accommodation on tiny Rodd Island, which sits in a quiet bend of the Parramatta River, a safe distance from civilisation.

      Loir’s plan was to ’inject nine rabbits with food containing microbes of chicken cholera, placed in equal numbers in wooden hutches, wire-bottomed cages, and artificial burrows with healthy rabbits, and to place two healthy rabbits in a hutch with the excrement of diseased rabbits.’

      They would also ’feed sheep, cattle, calves, lambs, horses, pigs, goats, dogs, cats, rats and mice once a day for six days with cholera-tainted food. Various birds, including nearly all kinds of poultry and the principal native birds, are also to be fed and inoculated.’

      It soon became clear that chicken cholera killed the rabbits, but only those who ate the tainted food. It was not contagious for them but—and perhaps the clue was in the name—chicken cholera killed all the birds.

      The Rabbit Commission retired to consider its decision, and Adrien Loir was left to wait. Over the next few months he used the lab on Rodd Island to research the mysterious Cumberland disease which at the time was devastating Australia’s sheep and cattle. Loir established that Cumberland disease was actually anthrax and—better still—he had a vaccine.

      The Rabbit Commission eventually decided against ’recommending any further expenditure by government on testing the efficacy of this disease’. Nobody won the £25,000 prize. Instead, Loir and The Pasteur Institute made a healthy profit manufacturing anthrax vaccine on Rodd Island for the next four years.

      In 1891 Loir’s island life took a dramatic turn, thanks to a visiting actress and her two dogs.
      Sarah Bernhardt Image: The greatest actress of her age, Sarah Bernhardt (Photographed by Felix Nadar, 1864; Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

      ’Sarah Bernhardt was the superstar of her age, and she brought her entire acting troupe to Australia for a tour,’ Stephen Dando-Collins explains. ’She arrived with her two dogs, and just as Johnny Depp ran afoul of quarantine regulations, she had her dogs taken off her, and she too was threatening to leave the country.

      ’Young Loir had bought tickets to all her shows, he was such a huge fan, and he approached her and said, “I think I can convince the NSW government to declare Rodd Island a quarantine facility and I’ll look after your dogs while you’re in Australia.”’

      Dando-Collins says the pair dined in her hotel each evening and Bernhard spent her weekends on Rodd Island ’visiting her dogs’. After one particularly boisterous party, Bernhard and her entourage were ’found on the laboratory roof’ drinking champagne.

      Loir eventually returned to France and Rodd Island is now a public recreation space.
      Rodd island Image: The view from Loir’s balcony on Rodd Island on a sunny winter’s day (Lorena Allam)

      So, what about that pesky plague of a billion rabbits?

      Australia had to wait another 60 years before the magic bullet was found.

      In 1950, after years of research, scientists released myxomatosis—and it was devastating. The rabbit population dropped from 600 million to 100 million in the first two years. The change was immediate.

      Brian Coman remembers walking in a field with his father as a boy and looking at a hill, part of which was covered with bracken fern.

      ’He clapped his hands, and it was almost as if the whole surface of the ground got up and ran into the bracken fern. There were hundreds upon hundreds, perhaps thousands of rabbits. It was a sight I’ll never forget.’

      But after myxomatosis ’the grey blanket’ disappeared.

      ’You could walk all day and not see a rabbit,’ says Coman.

      Even scientists were shocked by the cruel effectiveness of the disease.

      ’I had a friend, Bunny Fennessy, who was of course fortuitously named,’ says Coman.

      ’He remembers walking to the crest of this hill. There was a fence line there and a gate. He leaned over the gate and looked down. In front of him was this mass of dead and dying rabbits, blind rabbits moping around, birds of prey flying in the air, flies everywhere, a stench in the air—he was simply overawed. He had never seen sick rabbits before.’

      Genetic resistance to myxomatosis has been increasing since the 1970s and even after the release of the virulent rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD, or calicivirus) in 1991, the search for a biological solution continues.

      In the meantime, the ’traditional’ means of keeping rabbits under control—poisoning, and warren destruction—are still necessary. Coman says it’s a war that doesn’t end.

      ’You’ve got a situation here where an animal is causing immense ecological damage, not to mention economic damage, and you simply cannot let that go on. You have to act.

      ’We simply can’t allow them to gain a foothold again; the cost environmentally and economically would be enormous.’

    • La myxomatose c’est vraiment sale, le lapin souffre beaucoup avant d’en mourir. Cet enflure de français d’Armand-Delille est allé l’inoculer aux lapins de sa propriété d’Eure-et-Loir et ça a finit par gagner toute la France puis l’Angleterre et à la fin des années 1950, toute l’Europe était touchée. Ce ne sont pas seulement les lapins sauvages qui en sont morts, mais aussi les domestiqués ou dans les élevages familiaux. WP note Entre 1952 et 1955, 90 à 98 % des lapins sauvages sont donc morts de la myxomatose en France.

      Aujourd’hui le lapin élevé industriellement a moins de considération qu’une poule, c’est dire les conditions de vie infectes dans lesquelles il est maintenu.

      #épizootie

    • Nouvelle-Zélande : les autorités répandent un virus pour décimer les lapins nuisibles RTBF - Antoine Libotte - 28 Février 2018
      https://www.rtbf.be/info/monde/detail_nouvelle-zelande-les-autorites-repandent-un-virus-pour-decimer-les-lapin

      Le ministère néo-zélandais de l’Agriculture a annoncé le déploiement à travers le pays d’une nouvelle souche du virus de la maladie hémorragique virale du lapin. Il s’agit du RHDV1-K5, provenant de Corée.

      Les lapins, qui ont été introduits dans l’archipel au début du 19ème siècle, causent beaucoup de soucis aux agriculteurs du pays. Selon la BBC, ils « entrent en concurrence avec le bétail pour le pâturage et causent aussi des dégâts en creusant des terriers. »

      Selon le ministère de l’Agriculture, les pertes de production imputées aux lapins s’élèvent à 50 millions de dollars néo-zélandais (soit un peu plus de 29,5 millions d’euros), à quoi il faut ajouter 25 millions (environ 14,8 millions d’euros) pour la lutte contre les lapins.

      La population divisée
      Si la Fédération des fermiers néo-zélandais (FF) se réjouit de cette décision, la Société pour la prévention de la cruauté envers les animaux (SPCA) aurait préféré une autre solution au problème.

      Andrew Simpson, porte-parole de la FF, explique à la BBC que certains agriculteurs sont désespérés : « Si une autre année s’écoule sans le virus, les dégâts écologiques causés à certaines propriétés seraient effrayants. »

      Pour Arnja Dale, de la SPCA, cette décision est décevante, vu « les souffrances que le virus causera aux lapins touchés et le risque potentiel pour les lapins de compagnie. Nous préconisons l’utilisation de méthodes plus humaines. »

      La SPCA pointe également du doigt le vaccin conçu pour protéger les lapins domestiques et dont l’efficacité n’aurait pas été suffisamment prouvée. Or, pour le ministère de l’Agriculture, la souche RHDV1-K5 a été déployée en Australie en 2017 et aucun lapin domestique n’a été touché par la souche virale.

      Vidéo : An introduction to the rabbit problem in Australia
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xieW62u2bZQ

      #Nouvelle_Zélande #Australie #virus

  • Violent Brawl Breaks Out Aboard Carnival Cruise Ship in Australia – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/violent-brawl-breaks-out-aboard-carnival-cruise-ship-in-australia

    A 3-day Australian cruise aboard a Carnival cruise ship turned into a trip from hell for some as an unruly group allegedly spent two days terrorizing other passengers on board, culminating in a violent brawl with ship security.

    Police in New South Wales say they are investigating the alleged fight aboard the Carnival Legend, which occurred just after midnight on February 16 as the ship was about 220km off Jervis Bay during a cruise out of Melbourne.

    According to media reports, the hooligans behind the melee were all members of the same group, described as a large Italian family. The situation onboard was so bad in fact that the ship had to make an emergency stop in Eden where six men and three teenagers were kicked off the ship, according to police. Fourteen others, reportedly from the same group, also disembarked.

    The ship arrived back in Melbourne on Sunday, where passengers described just how bad it was onboard.

    le sujet de CBS
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KqWw7i8D_s

  • The Last Drop of Water in Broken Hill - Issue 57: Communities
    http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/the-last-drop-of-water-in-broken-hill-rp

    “If the Lord won’t send us water, oh, we’ll get it from the devil.”—Banjo Paterson, “Song of the Artesian Water” (1896) It’s April in the outback of New South Wales, a southeastern state of Australia, and the afternoon sun is warming the red, sandy, and scrubby plains. We’re near the desolate area where The Road Warrior was filmed. But the movie got it wrong. The real fight around here is not for oil. It’s for water. “You’re under five meters of water right now,” Barry Philp says. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” I look through the windshield of his pickup. The sky is blue and empty and the land is dead flat. We’re rattling along the gray clay bottom of Lake Menindee, several miles from its shore. Three years ago the lake was full. Together with surrounding lakes, it held five times the water in Sydney (...)

  • Australian licence plate sells for record A$2.45m - BBC News
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-41078877


    (soit 1,6 M€)

    An Australian licence plate bearing the number four has fetched A$2.45m (£1.5m; $1.9m) at auction, setting a national record.

    The New South Wales (NSW) state plate, from 1910, was bought by a local businessman in Sydney, auctioneers said. His name was not disclosed.

    NSW 4 was purchased on Monday for about A$1m more than had been estimated.

    The previous record for an Australian number plate was A$689,000, for NSW 2 in 2003, said auction house Shannons.
    This is the first single-digit plate to come up publicly for sale within the last 10 years,” spokesman Stuart Roberts told the BBC.
    […]
    Local media reported that the winning bidder is also believed to own the NSW 2 plate.

  • Great Scott! Fruity find puts icing on Antarctic cake (From South Wales Argus)
    http://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/national/15469663.Great_Scott__Fruity_find_puts_icing_on_Antarctic_cake

    A century-old fruitcake has been discovered in Antarctica in “excellent condition” after being preserved in the continent’s sub-zero temperatures.

    It was found in the Cape Adare and is believed to have belonged to British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who is better known as Scott of the Antarctic.

    The tin containing the discovery had rusted, but conservators found the cake still wrapped in paper and smelling edible.
    […]
    The cake is said to have links to Scott’s expedition in the 1910s as he was recorded as having been partial to those made by Huntley & Palmers.

    Scott’s mission to the South Pole – named Terra Nova – may have ultimately been successful but the group was beaten to the milestone by a Norwegian group of explorers.

    The entire party died on the way back from the Pole, with their bodies discovered some 13 months later.

  • UK police arrest man via automatic face recognition tech
    https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/police-automatic-face-recognition

    Camera-equipped van in South Wales apparently spotted man whose face was in a database. Automatic facial recognition (AFR) technology has been used to arrest a man, the South Wales Police told Ars. While AFR tech has been trialled by a number of UK police forces, this appears to be the first time it has led to an arrest. South Wales Police didn’t provide details about the nature of the arrest, presumably because it’s an ongoing (...)

    #NEC #biométrie #facial #vidéo-surveillance #surveillance

  • Non-Muslims flock to buy burkinis as French bans raise profile of the modest swimwear style
    http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/news-features/nonmuslims-flock-to-buy-burkinis-as-french-bans-raise-profile-of-the-modest-


    The burkini is seen as a symbol of integration, says its designer. Here lifesaver Mecca Laa Laa wears a burkini on her first patrol at North Cronulla Beach [New South Wales, Australia] in 2007.
    Photo: Getty Images

    Over the past eight years, Aheda Zanetti​ has sold 700,000 swimsuits to clients all over the world. Her designs, costing from $80 to $200, are sought out from Norway to Israel and are each made in Villawood, western Sydney.

    Zanetti is the Australian inventor of the #burkini and the swimsuits she sells under the label Ahiida are full body, hooded and inspired by Islamic modesty.

    But what is particularly interesting about Ahiida, which now finds itself in the crosshairs of controversial French rules banning the garment on the basis of secularism laws, is that 45 per cent of its clients, Zanetti estimates, are non-Muslims.

    This is about choice,” says Zanetti, who hails from Lebanon and moved to Bankstown when she was two. “The burkini stands for freedom, flexibility and confidence, it does not stand for misery, torture and terror.