Archive for: August 2009
Racy ad watch: Oral-B division
“Up to two times more than a manual brush.”
Sex sells, the saying goes, but this ad appears to rest upon a sublter formula: Selling sex sells. Does Oral B really hope to sell a lot of disguised masturbatory aids, or is it hoping to build customer loyalty by presenting itself as sex-positive?
Design fiction: embedded maps
We’re all familiar with the “you are here” markers, sometimes known as ideo locators, on story-board maps in shopping malls, museums, and parks. But what if maps were actually embedded in the real world. That’s what Timo Arnall, a designer & researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, wondered:
Map/Territory from timo on Vimeo. Hattip: FlowingData.
The cove that got away – updated
Explore, Canada’s outdoor magazine, has added a feature on Pollett’s Cove in northern Cape Breton to its website. Moneyquote:
When you research and read about Pollett’s Cove on Cape Breton Island, NS, you realize it’s one of those special places that consistently puts it at the top of favourite lists among the hikers and backpackers who have conquered it, regardless of where they’ve been in the world… I have to say Pollett’s Cove has been my most rewarding and scenic hike ever.
Yes, that would be the same Pollett’s Cove that Nova Scotia was too stunned to protect when it had a chance to buy the property two years ago for a fraction of the price it paid for lesser scenic attractions on the mainland.
Update: A mainlander responds:
I have to say, Pollett’s Cove is probably the most beautiful place I have ever been, anywhere. Friends from Denmark hiked in with me and we stayed a couple of days. We swam in the river and watched the sun dip into the gulf while cows grazed around us in the ruins of the old village. It was unforgettable.
Where did that contrarian fellow go?
Several real life events and issues, most notably including the need to program our fall film series, have kept the cranky fellow from posting in recent days. Apologies to several readers who have inquired.
Over the next week, we’ll do our best to work our way through a backlog of topics including: Reflections on the life and death of Donald Marshall, Jr.; what the sorry state of provincial finances and its analog, the sorry state of our political leadership; a simple way HRM could save money while curbing greenhouse gasses; and a few nuggets about mapping.
Tories’ copyright ‘consultation’ sneaks into Halifax
The Harper Government’s consultation on proposed changes to Canada’s copyright laws snuck into Halifax Monday for a secretive session with groups representing only industry’s side of the copyright debate.
There was no advance publicity, news release, or announcement, only private invitations to industry reps favoring greater copyright restrictions. The media and the public were barred, no dissenting voices were heard.
University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, Canada’s foremost expert on copyright reform, calls the closed-door Halifax session “by far the most one-sided of the consultation, with no voices representing users, libraries, education, or consumer groups.”
The Atlantic’s James Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic
Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept.
In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia’s Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic. [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]
What the headlines missed about Donald Marshall, Jr.
When then-prosecutor Bob Lutes realized he would be speaking at the same small conference as Donald Marshall, Jr., he braced himself for the rage he thought Marshall must feel toward any prosecutor. Instead, he found a “calm, quiet, respectful” man, who “had a presence about him.”
Lutes’s must-read letter in today’s Halifax Chronicle-Herald recalls the encounter:
He was everything that you would want your children to be when meeting someone for the first time. I watched him, listened to him, and spoke with him. He amazed me…
Working in criminal law for most of my legal career, I saw too many headlines that said nothing about the good person that he was. I wanted to say, from one person’s perspective, that weekend he served not only the aboriginal community well, but was a role model to all humanity.
Not all socialist countries are alike
A US polling website tries to explain the difference between the Canadian medical care system and the British health care system. And does a surprisingly good job.
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UPDATE: Spoilsport contrarian reader JP points out:
Fivethirtyeight.com isn’t quite right, is he? Or he’s at least misleading: Everything BUT doctor services in Canada are owned and run by the state.
Point taken, but after all, this is an American writing about Canadian health care. How much accuracy can one expect?
One step over the line, Sweet CBC
CBC-Nova Scotia ran a long commentary this morning by Halifax resident Dave Hayden about financial rip-off artists like Earl Jones, then used its website to link to Hayden’s online petition urging stiffer penalties for white-collar crimes. A grey zone between information and promotion perhaps, but in contrarian‘s view, the public broadcaster steps over the line when it links to a petition lobbying government on a current issue.
Visual data: 2008 federal election on Google Earth
Stephen Taylor, a Conservative blogger who organized a series of rallies to protest last fall’s proposed coalition government, has created an extraordinary mashup of poll-by-poll results from the 2008 federal election and Google Earth.
The high definition (HD) video may take a few moments to load completely. Elections Canada provides the data that drives this extraordinary tool, but not in a format that Google Earth or Google Maps can read or import. Taylor crashed his computer several times coming up with a program to translate the data into a format Google could use.
Taylor’s creation will shade each federal poll result according to the party that won the poll, any given party’s share of the vote, or the voter turnout.
For the moment, Taylor has not released the KML file that would let Google Earth users play with the results of this project themselves. (KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language, the file format used to display geographic data in Google Earth and Google Maps.) But he is working on an application programming interface (API) that would let developers import similar data, such as the 2009 Nova Scotia election, into Google Maps.
Hattip: Michael Geist
