Seafood Watch, a sustainable seafood recommendation program, recently updated its sustainability ratings for Atlantic salmon farming regions. These updated ratings have been making news in Nova Scotia where Atlantic salmon raised in marine net pens has been upgraded from a red rating (avoid) to yellow (good alternative) according to Seafood Watch’s “traffic light” system. Meanwhile, […]
We are finally here – the last blog of the year. As we are going through another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I don’t want to share another devastating fact about Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). Instead, I want to highlight a few of the exciting and positive findings (in my eyes) that happened in the scientific […]
Thank you to all who have followed along with my blogs throughout my time as an OpenThinker. I am writing my final blog at the airport, eager to see family for the holidays but anxious yet again about this ongoing pandemic. As we go into our second COVID Christmas, I wanted to leave us with […]
Thus far I’ve written about a range of topics I find interesting, but my personal research is on the parasitic manipulation of behaviour. Some parasites manipulate the behaviour of their host for their own reproductive and survival benefit, often in dramatic and specific ways. How any of these can hijack the brain and nervous systems […]
There is no question that as you get older, you start to notice changes in your metabolism, but in what point of life do these changes actually occur? For a long time, metabolism (total energy expenditure) has been assumed to correlate with organ-specific needs with respect to growth and development. In other words, metabolic activity […]
To tackle cybercrime, we must understand complexity. Cybercrime is a form of Organized Crime with which we are getting uncomfortably familiar. Thousands of Canadian websites were offline this month due to a cybersecurity threat. Media coverage suggests nearly 60% of Canadians have been targeted by cybercrime and warns of an ongoing “epidemic of cybercrime”. Contrary […]
In 2013, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged Canadians not to “commit sociology” to better understand the roots of terrorism, the social conditions that nurture extremism and drive people to commit violent acts. He failed to understand that nobody makes choices in a vacuum. They are necessarily affected by myriad social and political forces that shape […]
And just like that we approach the end of the year, and here I am writing my last blog as an OpenThinker. (I thought about including a joke about reverting back to being a “Closed Thinker” now that it is done, but I won’t subject you to such a groan-inducing attempt at humour…) However, for […]
As my term with Dalhousie’s OpenThink initiative comes to a close, I wanted to take this opportunity to go full Brene Brown and allow myself to be a bit vulnerable with you all. I want to talk briefly about my own personal reasons for investing my time and energy into the research that I do […]
At one time, economics was considered “the dismal science.” Today, in the midst of crisis and chaos, the realm of political science seems even more gloomy by comparison. In the past year alone, there have been military coups in Myanmar, Mali, Guinea, and Sudan – and with attempted coups in several other countries, including former […]
