Archive for: April 2010
Woman walks dog and…
As Wendy Southgate of Elmswell, Suffolk, UK, took her dog, Trixie, for a stroll around the neighborhood one morning last spring, she noticed an odd looking car cruising slowly along the street. She wondered vaguely what it was up to.
Then last week, Wendy’s husband Terry, a firefighter, decided to look for their Cross St. house on the British version of Google Street View, and there were Wendy and Trixie. He looked a little further down the street, and there they were again. He checked a nearby street, and found them again. And again. Finally, Terry followed Wendy’s customary dog-walking route—and found 43 images of his wife and Trixie.
Contrarian has but one question: Was she carrying a plastic bag?
Hat tip: ResearchBuzz
The Canadian example? Not one to follow.
How does a government that takes human rights obligations seriously handle warnings of detainee abuse?
It would be too easy to ignore these warning signs, only to find that detainees previously held by UK have been mistreated while in Afg hands. The fallout of that, as we have seen from Canada’s experience, would, at best, be unwelcome.
Read on:
Hat tip: Cheryl Cook via @DougSaunders
How to choose a typeface
Danish design student Julian Hansen offers an infographic to guide us through an increasingly common task: choosing just the right typeface.
Click the image to bring up an enlargeable version.
Three reporters spearheaded devastating CBC survey
Three national reporters for CBC Radio News carried out the devastating survey posted here last night, a source tells Contrarian.
Veteran reporters Vic Adhopia of St. John’s, Dave Seglins of Toronto, and Greg Rasmussen of Vancouver conducted the survey in March after months of grousing by colleagues about the operation of The Hub, the Toronto unit that co-ordinates all assignments for radio and TV news reporters.
They submitted the survey to CBC brass, who responded in a conference call with all national reporters two weeks ago. News head Jonathan Whitten led the management team on the call, which one reporter described as “like throwing a snowball into hell.” Senior Managing Editors Greg Reaume and Cathy Perry also participated.
Introduced last fall, the much criticized Hub is a central feature of a reorganization that sought to merge previously separate radio and TV news operations into a single, seamless operation. Located on the fourth floor of the CBC building in Toronto, it has three components: The “Live Hub,” which fields live hits on the CBCNews Network (formerly Newsworld) and other shows; the Daily News Desk, which handles radio and TV news assignments; and the Planning Desk, which looks after everything after midnight on the current day.
The radio reporters say television priorities dominate the new system, with little regional input, and an obsessive concern with pizzazz over journalistic substance.
Jeffrey Dvorkin of the Ryerson University Journalism School, formerly with CBC Radio and National Public Radio, has more on the dispute.
Survey details tanking morale at CBC Radio News
A survey of 24 CBC Radio national news reporters shows dismal morale and widespread dismay over organizational changes that funnel all radio and TV news assignments through a single “hub” in Toronto. A couple of nuggets:
If anything, the individual reporters’ comments are even more devastating:
Read the full report below:
Oops! – II (updated)
Contrarian reader Dave Atkinson writes:
Both you and Bill Turpin used the word “fulsomely” to describe an apology. I assume you both know what you’re doing.
How droll. Bill and I probably knew once, but we, or at least I, forgot. William Safire rises from the dead to remind us. (As a bonus, he throws in “noisome” and “enormity.”)
[Update] Bill T. didn’t forget after all:
Sheesh! I’ve been lectured by Harry Flemming on the use of fulsome, so I chose it with care to describe The Coast’s apology, and did so because of its ambiguity. It’s nice that Dave Atkinson picked up on it, but I think Parker was too quick with the strikethrough.
As for me, I chose it carelessly, and I’m with Safire on this: Claiming that “fulsome” can also mean “full-bodied” (or whatever), because people use it when they mean to say “full-bodied,” strikes me as descriptivist lexicography run amok.
Two Catholic churches
I’m about as un-Catholic as they come. I grew up in Massachusetts, where the Roman clergy formed a reactionary vanguard scorned by my family and friends. The magical beliefs at the core of Christian dogma strike me as risible, and I’ve been known to bedevil Catholic friends by making sport of them.
Not much fun in that these days, so palpable is the pain and frustration among Catholic laity over Pope Benedict XVI’s Nixonian defense of the sex abuse cover-up scandal enveloping his papacy and the church. No one can take pleasure in their present grief. Like other non-Catholics I suspect, I’ve been struggling with how to express sympathy for their estrangement from an institution they love and I find unlovable. In Sunday’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof’s offered an answer:
In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid, all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules, and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized.
Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.
This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives. This is the church of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America and the Cabrini Sisters in Africa.
Or, you might say, the church of L’Arche.
The youngest two theologians to take part in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) were Joseph Ratzinger, now pope, and Hans Küng, a Swiss priest whose right to teach Catholic theology was later suspended by the Vatican for his persistent criticism of the Roman hierarchy. Last week, the Irish Times carried an open letter from Küng to all Catholic bishops, in which he enumerated the missed opportunities of Benedict’s papacy, and proposed a route out of the crisis.
The consequences of all these scandals for the reputation of the Catholic Church are disastrous. Important church leaders have already admitted this. Numerous innocent and committed pastors and educators are suffering under the stigma of suspicion now blanketing the church. You, reverend bishops, must face up to the question: What will happen to our church and to your diocese in the future? It is not my intention to sketch out a new program of church reform. That I have done often enough both before and after the council. Instead, I want only to lay before you six proposals that I am convinced are supported by millions of Catholics who have no voice in the current situation.
Both Kristoff’s column, and Küng’s letter, are worth reading in full.
Oops!
The folks at Informationisbeautiful.net got their numbers wrong by a factor of, er, 10. The amount of CO2 emitted by the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano was not 15,000 tons of CO2 per day, but 150,000. To their credit, they owned up to the mistake, apologized fulsomely, and published a revised graphic:
Although the planes vs. volcano equation is more of a saw-off than it first appeared, the eruption still looks like a net gain for the atmosphere (or it was until flights resumed today).
This is a useful reminder of the adage, garbage in, garbage out — especially important when it comes to vivid graphics.
Hat tip: Wayne Fiander.
The Coast caves – feedback
Two readers see The Coast’s failure to lift a finger in defense of its reader-posters not as an unwelcome blow to free expression but as an overdue comeuppance for the well-known excesses of anonymous Internet posting.
Bill Turpin writes:
The Coast’s greatest failure to its readers was in allowing anonymous posts in the first place. It’s The Coast, not Samizdat, and this is Canada, not the former Soviet Union. You’re free to write what you want in this country, subject to defamation laws which, while imperfect, are not odious. There is no need to hide behind an alias. But when you do, you don’t have to think about what you’re saying, you don’t have to ask yourself where your “facts” originate, you don’t have to consider the reputation of the people you’re writing about, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’ve succeeded in communicating something. The resulting discussion rarely rises above eight-year-olds debating whether girls should be allowed in their tree-house. It’s a poor excuse for what Parker calls “free expression.” By publishing anonymous posts, online media have squandered an opportunity to enhance public discourse and chosen to debase it instead.
It’s interesting to see that The Coast promptly and fulsomely apologized for the comments at issue, which all but eliminates its own legal liability. This sends an additional message to anonymous commentators, i.e., not only is your anonymity illusory, but when you choose anonymity, you’re solely responsible for what you write. For this, The Coast deserves our gratitude.
Defamation suits are expensive for all concerned, even thought most don’t make it to court. This creates an unfair advantage for those who can afford them and it would be nice to see the law changed to level the playing field. Meanwhile, though, it would be wonderfully ironic if a defamation suit finally managed to let the sun shine on the subterranean world of online “commentary”
Dana Phillip Doiron agrees:
I don’t believe that individuals or groups should be allowed to use anonymous posting to slander someone with impunity. The “comment” facility is akin to letters from the editor or op ed commentary in a printed news medium and, the “name withheld” feature encourages comment from sources (employees, relatives, neighbours, etc.) who would not participate were their name published. It isn’t a license to slander. It is the policy of most media to accept commentary as long as they have the contact information of the source. Readers should have the level of confidence in the information that goes with the possibility of identification and accountability in court and the subject of commentary should have that recourse.
I share Bill and Dana’s distaste for the un-moderated, anonymous newspaper comment sections; they are havens for ignorant bile. That’s why comments on Contrarian are closely moderated (though sometimes anonymous). But the legal and ethical issues around anonymous Internet posting are more complicated than Bill and Dana let on, and you don’t have to be a fan of anonymous posts to believe The Coast shirked its responsibilities here.
The Coast has long encouraged anonymous posting, in the newspaper and on line. (True, as co-founder, editor, and part-owner Kyle Shaw argued in an email to me, the paper does require online posters to create a profile that includes a working email address, but this profile may have scant connection to their real life identities.)
If The Coast “deserves our gratitude” for having chilled anonymous expression, it certainly chose a sneaky route to that end. Having lured their readers down the garden path of anonymity, the paper owed them an ethical obligation to at least ensure that the judge in the case had the benefit of hearing both sides of the anonymity debate.
When an Ottawa judge ordered a conservative website to cough up identifying information about eight “John Does” who had posted allegedly defamatory comments on the site, the website appealed, and was joined by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.
Both argued that a court should issue such an order only after a plaintiff has demonstrated a prima facie case for defamation, not merely leveled an accusation. Even then, the groups argued, a court should order disclosure only after determining, on the merits, that the public interest in disclosure outweighs concern for freedom of expression and privacy. As the Ottawa Citizen’s Don Butler reported:
In its factum, the CCLA argues anonymous expression on the Internet “fosters a veritable ‘marketplace of ideas’ online.
“Anonymity reduces the possibility of identification and fear of reprisal and encourages individuals to engage in legitimate, even unpopular, expression,” the civil liberties group says.
“It permits participation in public debate by those who would otherwise remain silent out of fear of persecution, loss of status or ostracism.”
Unlike Madame Justice Heather Robertson, who rushed to judgment having heard only one side of the argument, a three-judge panel of the Ontario Sessional Court has reserved its decision.
Although the lawyer for the two Halifax fire officials who sought disclosure said the identities were needed so they could commence a libel action, I am skeptical. It seems at least possible that the real purpose is one of command and control: to unmask any Halifax firefighters among the anonymous posters and take disciplinary action against them. If so, the application was an abuse of court processes. One consequence of The Coast’s failure to contest the application is that this possibility was never considered or tested by the court.
The issue before Justice Robertson might better have been, “Should accusations of racism against public figures, however intemperate, be a firing offense? And if so, how can minority employees combat what they genuinely believe to be racism in a public organization?”
This smells like a classic SLAPP suit—a strategic lawsuit against public participation—with taxpayers footing the bill, and The Coast acquiescing. It makes the paper’s left-wing editorial stance look more like a marketing ploy than anything borne of conviction.
I want to stress again that I have no knowledge of, or opinions about, the inner workings of the Halifax Fire Department; I have not read the comments at issue in this application; I have no opinion about their merits, about the merits of the Halifax Fire Service, or about its officials.
Crowdsourcing art
Chris Milk, who has directed videos for Kanye West, U2, Courtney Love, and Barack Obama, is assembling a few thousand volunteers to complete an animated music video for Ain’t No Grave, title track of the last album Johnny Cash recorded.
The Johnny Cash Project invites participants to use custom drawing tools to create the 1,368 frames in the 2 minute, 51 second, video. Since more than one artist will end up submitting artwork for each frame, the video will look different each time it’s played. Writes Milk:
Strung together and relayed in sequence, your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the legendary Man in Black.
