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Cell Phones Aren't Killing Bees After All
radioweather writes "A couple of weeks ago, there was a nutty idea discussed in The Independent that claimed the electromagnetic radiation from cell phones was causing bees to become disoriented, preventing them from returning to the hive. The flimsy cell phone argument was used to explain Colony Collapse Disorder. Today the LA Times reports that researchers at UC San Francisco have uncovered what they believe to be the real culprit: a parasitic fungus. Other researchers said Wednesday that they too had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country."
Cellphones don't kill bees, Video games kill bees.
Honestly, until the other explanations started coming out I lost a LOT of faith in scientists and researchers. I mean, come on.
Technology must be blamed somehow! It's always technology's fault!
It certainly seems a more plausible cause.
I see more and more in common media that everybody tries to blame everything on new technology going from cancer to depression, blamed on cell phones to video games. Yet, they don't bother looking or trying to understand the deeper reasons like our old friends in the mushroom... euhm, fungi world.
Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe? (Like the sun and moon worshipers, or offerers of livestock and enemies, witchhunting?)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
they shouldn't use cell phones while flying.
I wonder which collection of deluded vegan hippies thought that 2-3GHz RF could disorient bees, seeing as how a housefly will gladly buzz around inside a running microwave oven as the fly is much smaller than the wavelength of the RF?
Mostly random stuff.
so its safe to give my little Bee a cell phone!
I hope that there is a good solution, I don't want to have to manually pollinate, plus mead is good stuff!
"I think there is a fungus among us."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Correlation does not necessarily equate to causality"
Repeat 100x.
Apply to all the other dumbass pop-sci suburban "crises". Cell phones cause brain cancer. MMR vaccine and autism. Etc.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Cell phones are causing the fungus to grow!
Its always easier to blame it on something that people don't really understand and/or already fear. Remember the fear of brain tumors from cell phones? Now when a Journalist or whatever hears bees cant find their way home, they obviously feel compelled to link it to the fearsome x-rays (I call them x-rays in the sense that x is unknown and scary rays of course). Surely, such "news" - "sell" more than some boring research into fungi. Nobody, cares about fungus. They care about scary invisible rays.
http://caughtinthexfire.mu.nu/archives/snl_bee.jpg
What a waste of a talent. Thanks, dope!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I thought my mom was just being goofy....
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Organism or Phone. What's the difference, the both are 'cell' based.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
cell phones that are causing an increase in the fungus. I mean, after all, something bad that happens in nature has to be the fault of humans or technology somehow....
...can do weird things - The Jungle episode of Planet Earth the other week showed fungi infecting insects, *making them seek higher ground*, and then growing out of their dead bodies to spore anew. The behavior controlling bit was the freakiest to me - might explain the mass evacuations if it is something similar to that. I also seem to recall something a while back on /. linking to a study showing parasites 'remote controlling' host insects...
Stop making phone calls all the time, bees! I see people driving around in cars with those stupid things stuck to their faces all the time. It's a wonder they can concentrate enough to find their way back home. You, being insects, have small brains and could never carry on a simultaneous phone call conversation without losing track of what you're doing and losing the hive. I mean, it's no wonder cellphones are giving bees so much trouble. Turn off the phones, bees, fly back to your hives, puke up our honey, and fly out with new instructions. Stop being lazy and using cellphones.
You know those phones are sold with that fungus on them, bees.
Of course, it is global warming. Both directly and indirectly making the bad fungus thrive this far north of the equator. All problems are related to global warming. No need to study anything anymore.
This headline and summary are so misleading as to seemingly be an intentional fabrication.
"Uncovered...the real culprit." Oh, really? From TFA:
"But the results are 'highly preliminary' and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. 'We don't want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved.' "
So basically there's as much evidence in support of this fungus theory as the cell-phone theory.
Criminy, sensationalize much?
We got to get off of the "blame something or someone" attitude until we get our facts straight. I seen enough times we were wrong the first thing that comes to our mind for some problem we faced. It is so stupid that after all this time we go back to our unproven instincts to blame something or someone for a problem. We living in the 21st century now but it feels like we are still dark ages with how we go about blaming some superstitious things for our ills.
Bee were being killed by other things other than this fungus. In the early 1990s there we another diseases that were killing bee also and those were mites but no one ever got into the "blame the technology" witch hunt back then.
Please our proven scientific methods before we going on our witch hunts.
Now we've been dealing with normal nosema for a while. Nosema weakens bees. Imagine if a dozen roaches crawled into your lungs and lived there, multiplying. You'd have trouble breathing, and so do the bees. Nosema leaves the bees barely able to crawl in some cases, so here's how CCD could play out:
Bees get Nosema in the fall. It weakens them greatly. In the spring as the hive turns the corner to build up, the foragers start taking cleansing flights (hell, the house bees do it too. Anything alive long enought o harden the wings probably takes a flight or two). Nosema leaves them weak, so they fall to the ground on their flight and die of exposure. House bees are held in their position by the presence of foragers but the hive's trying to build up. Soon house bees are pressed into foraging. These are infected too. Now the nurse bees are left. The ones older than five days take a few orienting flights and go at it. Nosema's a pain, so they die. What do you have left? Basically the CCD profile - a queen, the capped brood and a few dozen nurse bees in her retinue.
You want to know how cell phones kill bees? When you set the phone down on top of one.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
Does this mean Al Gore won't be able to plug Global Swarming as a problem?
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
...mating them with heartier wild bees from... AFRICA! Yeah! That'll do it!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Correlation does not prove causality, it doesn't disprove it either. Enough anecdotal evidence can justify reasonable suspicion. E.g. brain cancer on the side of the head of people who heavily use cell phones, or children who become autistic within weeks of a vaccination. I don't think anybody with any sense believed the cell phone - bee dying association, since cell phones represent only a small slice of the EMR that is ubiquitous.
I don't know what I hate more... People who take advantage of eye-catching events in order to push their own agenda without bothering to research and check facts....
Or bees.
Q: What did one Queen bee say to the other?
A: Mind your own beeswax!
Life is not for the lazy.
So what happened to Slashdot's tagging system? Why the sudden rash of stories tagged "undefined"; is this evidence of censorship or a bug in the system or just the latest fad?
Remember all the articles tagged "mafiaa"? At time of writing there's one left. But why that one?
I seem to remember this being launched as being "our" tagging system for the readers to use. Did that change? Is it just another way of listing the official section headers now with the odd token exception? Are we going to be told?
I see more and more in common media that everybody tries to blame everything on new technology going from cancer to depression, blamed on cell phones to video games. Yet, they don't bother looking or trying to understand the deeper reasons like our old friends in the mushroom... euhm, fungi world. Is it an artifact of ancient religion or superstition maybe? (Like the sun and moon worshipers, or offerers of livestock and enemies, witchhunting?)
Did it occur to you that human stupidity has a lot to answer for? Individually we are quite clever animals, but we're also the only creature which will pollute our own drinking water, our own air and poison our own food.
We give the rule of unintended consequences meaning.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...there's just a massive apiary chondroitin deficiency -- it's the bee's knees.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Who would have guessed it was a disease and not cell phones? I was so sure, I already threw mine away.
There isn't one word in that article for or against cellular signals disrupting bee navigation systems.
The article is about one common factor that has been found in many of the hives. The researchers stress that this is only a small sample of the hives and that they don't think this fungus alone could cause the problem.
Its also depressing because if the fungus is central to the problem there MIGHT be an untested chemical that COULD have some detrimental affect on the fungus... MAYBE.
My startup was just about to unveil a new type of cell phone safe for bees based on the single-celled parasite Nosema ceranae instead of EM radiation.
Or who knows. It is possible that it simple mutated and it could be that it is simply being spread by mankind's transports.
Occams solves this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
..we learned that humans are not the source of all the changes that take place in nature. The world will go on, with or without our intervention.
Just because a fungal parasite is infesting the bee colonies, it doesn't rule out the possibility that EMF is impacting the bees' navigation.
Today the LA Times reports that researchers at UC San Francisco have uncovered what they believe to be the real culprit: a parasitic fungus.
:P
What they failed to mention was that this parasitic fungus thrives on electromagnetic radiation from cell phones...
Today the LA Times reports that researchers at UC San Francisco have uncovered what they believe to be the real culprit: a parasitic fungus.
So now all they have to do is get the fungus to stop using cell phones, and everything should be fine.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sounds to me like they took a bunch of inconclusive findings, then made a sensationalist rebuttal to the cell phone argument to prevent problems in the market.
... but it may be one of the key players."
But the results are "highly preliminary" and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. "We don't want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved."
N. ceranae is "one of many pathogens" in the bees, said entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University. "By itself, it is probably not the culprit
This doesn't refute anything that was put forth before. It doesn't demonstrate any causality whatsoever.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Interesting if they find the fungus everywhere. The previous articles talked about how bees are trucked all over the country for jobs. Gee, do you think maybe this might have spread the fungus and hence it is a problem everywhere?
the bees didnt have unlimited nights and weekends and had to go into hiding.
Yup, it's gotta be the parasites. But why are they suddenly killing off all the bees?
Some are saying (not me, I don't know enough about it) it could be genetically modified food crops.
The rationale being that genes have been demonstrated to jump species, specifically, even, from crops into microbes in the guts of bees (RTFA).
Just posting this because I heard about it and it sounds somewhat reasonable, not because I'm advocating against genetic modification of anything.
It still leaves the question open as to why it appears more bees are dying from this parasitic fungus in recent times. Could be completely due to natural causes, but there is also speculation that certain insecticides are harming the bees, causing them to be more vulnerable to parasites, fungi and disease.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
So has the threat from those Killer bees that were supposed to doom us all for the last 20 years been eliminated now? Gypsy Moths and Killer Bees are passe now so I guess it on to the threat of Fungi.
Not cell phones?
Must be the Chemtrails
Really, read that one for a good laugh.
I raised bees in Texas back in the 1970's and it was common knowledge then that nosema was a hive killer.
I guess this means we have to scrap the theory that quarks released by solar flares are messing up the bees six dimensional navigation systems too?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
NPR had an extensive piece on this parasitic fungus a number of weeks ago and its effects on the overall bee population. As I remember, they had a lot of detailed coverage on the scientists who discovered the phenomenon and have been monitoring/tracking it ever since.
I guess the crowd of shrill criers never miss a chance for bullshit sensationalism over thinking things through. Or, you know, looking at the rest of the news.
It's very easy to leap to the Isle of Conclusions, but it's a long swim back...
It was so unbelievable, we just had to put it on the front page of
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/22/news/wirele ss23.php
the study in question had nothing to do with mobile phones and was actually investigating the influence of electromagnetic fields, especially those used by cordless phones that work on fixed-line networks, on the learning ability of bees.
***
So was it a reasonable scientific investigation hyped by a reporter and picked up by Luddites who blamed technology.
SSDD. Sigh.
from a fellow entomologist-
- the "paper" that mentioned the cell phone correlation was not peer reviewed, its German, and was given at a conference
- better yet, the person giving the paper is a scientist "for hire" and apparently has correlated several other problems with cell phone use
- there is absolutely no evidence for cell-phones being the problem, zero. many PCOs (pest controll "officers" routinely take healthy hives from high voltage powerlines, microwave towers etc.
- bee scientists in general like the attention because it may lead to future funding, thus it is unlikely that they will come up with a quick solution, which may be, wait for it,
- tainted (i.e. "poison") high fructose bee food
- this is more likely the reason because no (few?) clear signs of epidemiology (i.e. infection radiating from a single source) are being found, the problems are seemingly more random, i.e. one producers hives will half die, half live (the overall "everything is dying" is a gross generalization, similar large scale die offs have occurred in the past)
- poison bee food happens when producers by cheap food (high fructose corn syrup)
- cheap food is processed in a manner that produces compounds toxic to bees, many bee keepers buy food from the same sources
- these toxins can fractionate out when exposed to heat, and will settle out to a certain layer, bee keeper draws food from that layer, and colony croaks, bee keeper draws food further down, and bee colony flourishes
- what is the likely problem? a freak correlation of said poison food, and one or two major outbreaks of mites/fungi
It's spelt 'consider'.
I'm not supporting the "mobile phone" argument one bit, but I'm still skeptical of this as the reason. The fungus plays a role, as it really is the simplest explaination for CCD; it's just the smoking gun. You need to slice with the razor one more time.
Ask yourself: why is this fungus so successful at killing domestic honeybees, why now, and how is it moving from hive to hive so well?
I think the answer comes down to one of a few possibilities:
* The honeybees are stressed (diet, environment, travel, etc) and can't fight the infection
* The plants the bees pollenate are favoring growth of this fungus like never before (GMO's, pesticides, fertilizers, etc)
* Hives are being kept in containers/conditions that favor fungus growth
* The fungus is an invasive species and hence, the bees have no/little natural defense against it
The first one, unfortunately, seems most likely to me. We can *hope* that it's one or more of the others, since they're much more fixable IMO; they pretty much come down to "doing things they way grandpa did" and see if things change.
sometimes when I read headlines hear I lose my mind for a second and think I'm in the tabloid section of a supermarket.
This doesn't refute anything that was put forth before. It doesn't demonstrate any causality whatsoever.
Neither did the cell-phone argument. The cell phone argument can't be refuted because it didn't put anything solid forward to begin with, it was more or less self-refuting. At least this, although inconclusive, is still a lot more solid that what we had before.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
of course it was not the cell phones... it was their laptops exploding
What am I to do with all these tin foil hats I made for all the bees now?
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
It's the bills that kill them...
Phones carry fungi; never ever use someones phone without knowing the person or get funga!
(I think
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I bet this is caused by cellphones, or perhaps by in-hive wifi for the bees to watch drone-on-drone porn.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"But the results are "highly preliminary" and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. "We don't want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved."
... but it may be one of the key players."
N. ceranae is "one of many pathogens" in the bees, said entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University. "By itself, it is probably not the culprit
--This doesn't refute anything that was put forth before. It doesn't demonstrate any causality whatsoever.
So what you're saying is, that no one should get the impression that this thing has been solved?
Interesting viewpoint, I'll keep that in mind.
With the climate change issue, people often claim that there exists a consensus among scientists that indeed climate change is real and is a result of human activities, however again you almost never get any citation or way to verify these claims.
Not is all lost though! It can be very easy to find out the facts for yourself, unfortunately very few people realize this in large part because of the inadequate education provided in the mandatory science classes in high school...but that's another matter. In the case of the bees, and the public health risks of cell phones that the article assures us are real and very scary, you can go to a website like http://aps.org/, click on "Policy and Advocacy" and then, "APS Statements" where you will see a statement titled, "Electric and Magnetic Fields and Public Health" (http://aps.org/policy/statements/05_3.cfm) click on it and you'll get a very clear, concise, nontechnical, authoritative stance on the issue at hand. Statements like these, by societies such as the APS, define scientific consensus. You aren't likely to get much better or more satisfying or useful answers than that unless you spend 10 or so years getting a PhD in the field and then a few more years after that researching the topic.
I know this wasn't exactly a short post, but I hope it is clear and helpful for you. Finding out the facts on your own is the best way to go about things dealing with science. In this case it took me about 30 seconds to find what I was looking for to make this post (the APS statement) so it isn't like there is a big time investment to find out for sure. You can probably find statements like this in less time than you would otherwise spend thinking "who should I believe?" Remember, journalists usually aren't scientists, they usually have no idea what they are writing about but even so some do an excellent job; don't trust articles that don't back up claims with verifiable sources. The New York Times generally does a pretty good job (even though their journalists need to learn to stop using the word "theory" in the vernacular).
*They do cite some sources in the article, but they make many claims that go without any citation.
Wikipedia article on the APS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Physical_So
"We still haven't ruled out other factors, such as pesticides or inadequate food resources following a drought," she said. "There are lots of stresses that these bees are experiencing," and it may be a combination of factors that is responsible.
It seems that given the high penetration of cell phones in Europe it is likely that Europe would have been hit earlier and harder with CCD. Given that neither of these things are true, it is highly unlikely that it is cell phone tower that are the problem. Some people have bandied about GMO crops as a possible link because GMO penetration is much higher in the US, but I'm pretty sure the mainstream media will ignore that possibility.
A blog about stuff.
There is a certain mal-contented segment of the population that looks to blame corporations and modern living for the ills of the world. These were the people who tried to blame cell phones for killing bees and are likely the very same people floating the "cell phones cause BRAIN TUMORS" meme. I can see it now, "How Cell Phones Kill : an inconvenient truth that the corporations DONT want you to know!".
The slashbots will regurgitate and agitate, go update wikipedia to "make it a well established fact", and contact their favorite mainstream media outlets to keep the echo effect going a little longer. The hype machine is becoming exposed.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
But using some basic reasoning skills, what seems more likely:
1) A parasite, known to kill bees, and found widely in bee-hives, is killing bees, contributing to their declined population.
or
2) Despite a complete lack of evidence, despite the sudden decrease in population, despite years of low populations having happened before the introduction of cell phones; cell phones did it.
Of a Bee using a Cell Phone and colliding with some object; Hence the reason why all the Cell Phone Bee deaths.
* The honeybees are stressed (diet, environment, travel, etc) and can't fight the infection
* The plants the bees pollenate are favoring growth of this fungus like never before (GMO's, pesticides, fertilizers, etc)
* Hives are being kept in containers/conditions that favor fungus growth
* The fungus is an invasive species and hence, the bees have no/little natural defense against it
How about:
* The fungus MUTATED and the bees aren't as resistant to the new mutation.
This kind of stuff happens all the time with microorganisms. With the beekeepers hauling hives all over the country this stuff can spread pretty fast.
Eventually some bees will develop resistance (or some have it already). But (as with any plague) you still need a big die-off to separate the ones that are resistant from the great mass of are very vulnerable.
And remember that with hive insects it's the hive that's the reproducing individual while the bees within it are effectively organs of one distributed body. So a lot of bees dying is very little sorting-out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why don't the bees evolve something to counter this? Is it likely they would without human intervention?
The article says, in the third paragraph, "these results are very preliminary." It goes on to say that there is no certainty that this is the problem; rather, it's just repeating something that we've suspected for quite some time, with more data: they've actually identified genetic material from a number of viruses and a particular fungus. And if the problem turns out to be that fungus, there may be an antibiotic that will take care of the problem. This is /not/ the same thing as saying that they /know/ what the problem is.
/this/ season. So we didn't need this article to know that it probably wasn't cell phone towers. Unfortunately, at this juncture we really don't know what's going on - we just have more data. Data + theory != fact. Hopefully the guy's right and the antibiotic works, though. It'd be scary if it didn't turn out that way.
The idea that it was cell phones is fairly ridiculous, since cell phone tower buildouts have been going on for years - you can't really point at cell phone towers as something that changed
Not Cell phones, not parasites (this time), not Genetically Modified crops, and not modern pesticides.
y Id=7806292
m ay-be-sunspots/pg/49/aid/88083
You are technical, that is why you are on Slashdot.
Ask yourself, How do bees navigate, how do they see? Keep those questions in the front of your mind, and read on...
The beekeepers are not reporting dead bees, they are reporting missing bees.
I first hear about this on NPR Science Friday report about missing honey bees.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Although it is 26 minutes long, you need to listen to it.... nothing about sunspots, but about MISSING bees.
As a follow up, just google "bees crops", you will find this is happening in all over planet earth.
The sun spot cycle is just starting, it won't peak until 2010 - 2011. Google nasa sites.
The sun flips its poles every 11 years (yea, I didn't know that either)
The worst is yet to come, the sun spots just started and won't peak until 2010 - 2011.
And finally, I seem to have some independent agreement, I recently found this.
http://science.qj.net/Scientists-honeybee-killer-
Of while the US is losing in science. No one thinks in the scientific method anymore here.
What if I don't have fast access to a fly swatter?
Phones carry fungi; never ever use someones phone without knowing the person or get funga!
(I think
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
... worldwide. Many frogs and other species just seem to vanish without proper explanation, but fungus has been speculated as a reason. What's up? Fungus for world domination?
There is one thing pretty much all GMO has in common and that is the terminator gene. They are all made to not reproduce, thus it is completely reasonable that they could have an effect on an animal that is part of their sexual cycle.
A blog about stuff.
I submit that anyone who would call the search for the truth nutty is an idiot. Hear me now: Without bees, as with many many things Homo Sapiens is ignorant of, Mankind is doomed. Read it. Learn it. Live it.
Close reading of TFA shows that the second team found the same fungus in the same samples tested by the first team, and that sample was not particularly large.
:-)
What tickles me is that the researchers wish to emphasize that this fungus discover is not the conclusion of the bee conundrum. If it was, their funding would end.
That's not the most disturbing problem with it in my opinion. T. gondii's life cycle basically involves inhabiting cats and mice. In mice, it causes reckless behavior and poorer reflexes to encourage predation of its hosts by cats. Similarly, in humans, it also seems to encourage the same sort of problems. This results in a doubling or tripling in the likelihood that a T. gondii infected human will get into a traffic accident. Note that current estimates are that 30-60% of the populace has latent Toxoplasmosis.
(Incidentally, T. gondii isn't a worm. It's a protozoa.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
My favorite parasite that he covered unfortunately didn't make it into Parasite Rex. On his blog he covered Ampulex compressa a wasp that "zombifies" roaches by inserting a stinger into their brain, piloting them back to the wasp's nest, injecting them with a venom that keeps them alive in suspended animation for eight days while one of its larva eats the roach's organs and then pupates inside the shell of the now finally dead roach which is bursts out of four weeks later.
The suspended animation and the laying of eggs inside is pretty neat/creepy, but it's the way the wasp doesn't paralyze the roach but instead enslaves it and directly manipulates its motion back to its nest that's the most fascinating thing about it to me.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The date on the Bees -vs- Sunspots story is April 1st, you bonehead.
Naturally that would be +2.718.
I can imagine that there's a parasite inhabiting humans that needs to move to the body of a bird for its next stage. May explain skydiving, jackass-behaviour, and crossing the road without looking. Obviously buzzards, crows, and other carrion-eaters are the next stage!
vortexau
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
The best summary of climate change "skeptics" and their various bogus motivations and conflicts is, as usual, from http://sourcewatch.org/
a nge_controversy
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Climate_ch
When evidence/source/authority is at issue, go to Sourcewatch first.
http://openpolitics.ca/evidence/source/authority