Summer 2013, Qualicum Beach
- Population/Biology and Statistics
- Geology, Geography, Atmosphere
- History of Science and Democracy
- How do we Know, Measurment, Proportion, Scale
- Critical Thinking and Argumentation
- Exercising the Judicious Mix of Numbers and Letters
Join us as we explore the tidal plain, draw the solar system to scale out on the sand, talk about history, and learn basic scientific techniques.
with Public presentations on:
Thursday, April 12, 2012, 7pm, at the Qualicum Beach Civic Centre.
Read the Summary of the Presentations ...
Qualicum School District Facilities Review Information Sessions, presented by, and for, concerned citizens.
You are invited to attend Public presentations on:
The 3rd Annual Qualicum District Population Forum, will be held on
January 17 and 31, 2011 from 5:30 to 7:00pm at the Qualicum Beach Civic Centre
There will be more forums as well, where we can address other important issues in depth such as transportation cost forecasts, capacity and utilization, the funding formula, regarding issues of relevance to community members.
These info sessions will provide an opportunity to ask others to participate in research and provide presentations of findings.
Better decisons are made when people are well informed and consulted rather than when people are ill informed and easily led.
For more information, see the Public Consultation Advocacy website
The 20th October 2010 marks the first worldwide celebration of the role and achievements of official statistics at international, national, and provincial levels.
The Royal Society has convened a working group of experts, chaired by Sir John Sulston FRS, to revisit some of these issues and analyse how population variables will affect and be affected by economies, environments, societies and cultures over the next forty years and beyond.
The aims of the study are to provide policy guidance to decision makers and inform interested members of the public based on a dispassionate assessment of the best available evidence. The scope of the study will be global. It will explicitly acknowledge regional variations in population dynamics. It will look at the implications of population decreases, and increases that are observed and predicted in different parts of the world. It will consider how scientific and technological developments might alter the rate and impact of population changes and affect human well-being.
The Royal Society has issued a call for evidence and is seeking as wide a range of informed views as possible to assist our study, from both a national and an international audience.
Two such Official Statistical Agencies are BC Statistics and Statistics Canada. Both use different population methods and models to estimate population, by single year of age and sex at the regional level. Read the proposal ....
Are you interested in official community plans, business or market planning, sustainability planning, enviromental impacts resulting from human activity, or just opening or closing public or private facilities, then you will likely need to talk about population change. The second Population Forum,was held on June 1, 2010, 7:00 pm at the civic centre.
Sara Chan writes "In a landmark ruling, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has decided that researchers at a university must make all their data available to the public. The decision follows from a three-year battle by mathematician Douglas J. Keenan, who wants the data to do his own analysis on it. The university researchers have had the data for many years, and have published several papers using the data, but had refused to make the data available. The data in this case pertains to global warming, but the decision is believed to apply to any field: scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property." There's more at the BBC, at Nature Climate Feedback, and at Keenan's site.
For All You Population Geography Enthusiasts, I have compiled most of the information from the course into one document (around 200 pages with the charts and graphics) and am continuing to add more. I won't burden you with the full version, but will boil it down to the main points we covered.
I want to thank you for making the course so interesting. The difficulty in dropping the outline for the course in favour of addressing students interests is that there is little structure... I apologize for that; however, the benefit is that we can touch on a wide variety of intersting topics....then the trick is too somehow tie these together, which for me, was a tough but rewarding challenge. The people who take the next (second) course will benefit from your contributions.
Here is the outline sketch of the First Class
This area is unique in Canada. It has the oldest population (median age continues to rise - ~60 in 2006 to ~65 in 2011) in the country and will lead Canada into a very different population composition. We should all be looking at demographics and know more about our population make-up, perhaps even as much as we know about hockey statistics.
Also, given that BC is impacted by boom and busts in economic activity, when will the next bust occur?
Qualicum Foods conference room at 7pm on February 18, 2008
How does Parksville/Qualicum reflect global population change? It leads Canada as an aging population...something the rest of Canada will go through over the next thirty years.
Presentation to Parksville and Qualicum Beach Chambers of Commerce, January 2008. Read more ...