Archive for: May 2010
No evidence, but we’ll keep you locked up anyway
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald notes the lead paragraph in a New York Times story Saturday:
WASHINGTON — The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday.
The report itself concludes that “for many detainees at Guantanamo, prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission.” Greenwald comments:
They can’t even be prosecuted in the due-process-abridging military commissions we invented out of whole cloth for those who can’t be convicted in a real court. In other words: of course we’ll provide a fair tribunal for proving your guilt — as long as we’re certain we can convict you — otherwise, we’ll just imprison you indefinitely without charges. All this even though 72% of Guantanamo detainees have been found to be wrongfully held since the Supreme Court compelled habeas hearings in 2008. And then there are the numerous Yemeni prisoners who have been cleared for release but who will be kept in a cage anyway because we arbitrarily decreed that we’re not going to release even innocent prisoners back to Yemen.
The whole post is worth a read, as Greenwald nearly always is.
Kansas travelog
The stupidest thing the late, lamented Halifax Daily News ever did was to fire weekly columnist Jane Kansas over sloppy attribution of an Internet joke. Busybodies elevated the offense to plagiarism, requiring capital expiation — the irony of firing Nova Scotia’s most original writer for unoriginality lost on all concerned.
Currently on Sabbatical from Halifax, Kansas is travelling on foot from Helena, Montana, to Medicine Hat, Alberta (a 543 kilometer side-trek to visit a friend), thence from Western North Dakota to Toronto (which Google maps calculates at 2082.5 km.). Kansas likes a challenge. Along the way, she files occasional dispatches to the Dear Halifax section of The Coast website. From Friday’s entry:
Just out of Turtle Lake [North Dakota] I see the McClusky Canal and its Maintenance Roads on either side. It’s a beautiful day and I take the canal. The walking is good. In the canal are ducks which take flight at my approach and scare the big brown carp who twitch their tails on the surface and glide into the depths. Turtles plop off their sunny rocks into the water. A dear hightails it into some scrub. Handsome gold-headed birds hang out with the red-winged blackbirds. I think about the way to do things—experiencing the days moment by moment, one step at a time. Taking it as it comes—all the T-shirt wisdom that is so simple and brilliant and easily forgotten. I delight in my delightedness that life and this trip is a series of problem-solving exercises and decisions. Just what I wanted! To practice solving problems. I’m as happy as a lark. Is this trip my life or just something I’m doing? I trundle along, calling to cows I see, stopping to admire birds in marshes. I’m a one-woman life-is-what-you-make-it songbird.
What Nova Scotia journalist writes this well? Harry Thurston, maybe? Silver Donald Cameron on his best days? Harry Bruce? None of these have Jane’s knack for quirky insights combined with raw self-exposure.
Longtime Kansas fans will be relieved to know that the idyllic frolic along the McClusky Canal ends badly. A lightning storm soaks her tent and scant worldly possessions, and Jane ends up back in Turtle Lake, arriving in the rear seat of a police cruiser — not her first experience with this mode of conveyance.
A short history of the search engine
In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post’s Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote:
Brin and Page’s billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly.
These innovations remain the backbone of today’s search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web’s first search engines, had only 54,000 pages. To put the proliferation of electronic data in perspective, humankind had generated 5 trillion megabytes of data by the year 2003. We now produce that volume every two days.
Hat tip: Research Buzz
Why I drink black coffee – updated x 2
Men’s Health offers graphic equivalencies for the 20 sugariest drinks in America. A 20-oz Starbuck’s Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with Whipped Cream has as much sugar as as 8½ scoops Edy’s Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Coffee Ice Cream.
A 20 oz bottle of SoBe Green Tea has as much sugar as four slices of Sara Lee Cherry Pie.
Tim Horton’s medium black coffee, no sugar:
[Update] But Jocelyne Marchand of Grand Pré points out:
A teaspoon of sugar has 16 calories – the issue is not a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee.
Source: Tim Horton’s nutritional calculator.
And then there’s the Cold Stone offering: equivalent to 68 strips of bacon.
The same product family being tested at select Tim Hoton locations in Nova Scotia: Bedford (980 Bedford Way), Dartmouth (577 Main Street), Halifax (6455 Quinnpool Rd), Sydney (479 George St), and Wolfville (370 Main St).
Hat tip: Flowingdata.com
Dan O’Connor’s posting style – ctd.
[Update below] Peter Spurway, who was director of communications for Premier John Hamm, writes:
I have no knowledge of what Dan may or may not have done around the Herald story.
That said, if he had simply declared who he was in the comment he posted in response to the story, all of this would have been avoided. (And whether his online comment qualified as an email to the newspaper is hair-splitting.)
By not posting his real name and interest in the story, Dan failed to be sufficiently transparent, in my view.
[Update] Defeated Liberal byelection candidate Miles Tompkins writes:
Amazing what one can miss on a four day excursion to the hills of the Margaree’s. I see the NDP is apoplectic about the charges of expenses re the wind energy announcement. I’m not sure what the real expense was, and it is hardly a priority of mine in a province that has the lowest growth in Canada, the most unfavorable age structure. the poorest in migration, the highest disability rate in Canada, highest dependency on CPP, the lowest labor force participation rate, and the highest income dependency ratio in Canada, and perhaps second in the per capita civil service workers. Lord knows we can spend.
Watching Dexter in opposition for so many years, it was like getting pecked to death by ducks. One reaps what they sew. My advice is to thicken your skin and get to work… it is one year into your mandate and I still look at their literature of the campaign every day on my board and see gaping holes in the promises PR’d to us as truths at that time. I knew they couldn’t do it and said as much, so please forgo the lectures regarding double standards and something called “the truth.”
My concern is the efforts on “Back to Balance” and the fact that that too is a falsehood greater than the 42,000 pesos being fought about…. and will not occur during this mandate. While in Margaree for 4 days we spent 11 million in interest payments. The fact that someone isn’t screaming that in the CH makes me ill.
The Herald’s misreporting – ctd.
Sharon Fraser is a Halifax journalist, women’s rights advocate, and the wife of Dan O’Connor, the chief of staff to Premier Dexter embroiled in a controversy over inaccurate reporting by the Chronicle-Herald over the weekend. She describes the events at the heart of the Herald’s misreporting:
I have no desire to keep this going eternally but I wrote this summary this morning and thought you might be interested.
Here’s what happened:
On Friday, the Herald published a front-page story reducing an important government initiative and its announcement to the amount of money that was spent over several months in its preparation. The headline — the government announcement was about wind-power and other forms of renewable electricity — was “Blowing money.” The headline and lead stated that the cost of the announcement included the cost of preparing the new five year renewable electricity policy.
There were other inaccuracies in the story and its whole premise was based on the Herald’s contention that the government was squandering taxpayers’ money.
Dan wrote a comment to the Herald online forum, strongly criticizing the story, its inaccuracies and the fact that Opposition Leader Stephen MacNeil had been called for a comment for the story but no government representative had been called.
At this point, the Herald had choices: It could have said, “we stand by our story,” and published Dan’s comment. Or, as it seems to know who its anonymous commenters are, it could have called Dan (or another government representative) and interviewed him about the alleged inaccuracies and do a follow-up story about the government’s position on the story — and on the original event.
The Herald didn’t make either of those choices. Instead, using the same reporter who had done the original story, it went after Dan, ultimately smearing his reputation by falsely claiming he had twice “denied” writing the comments, then writing that he had “confessed” after “repeated questions.”
I was standing right beside him during the phone calls. The reporter called him twice. In the first call, she asked him if he had sent an email to the paper that day. He said no. She called him back, very shortly after, and said she had asked the wrong question. She then asked if he had sent comments to the online forum. He said he had. There were no denials, no repeated questions, no “confession.”
On Saturday, the Herald filled much of its front page with a story (and full-length photo) — centred on the fact that Dan had submitted anonymous comments to the online forum and the fabrication that he had lied about it. His comments, which they had refused to post on Friday, were on Saturday’s front page. Well into the story, the Herald reported the government’s objections to the inaccuracies in the original story, and the first comments from a government representative about the previous day’s front page story. (In conversations with several government representatives, the Herald never denied fundamental errors in the original story, but refused to correct them, refused to apologize, and said they “stood by” the various editorial staff who decided to write, edit and present the Friday story.)
On Saturday, I sent a comment to the online forum under my own name, disputing their version of events and accusing them of fabricating what they had written about Dan. My comment was not published and within a short period of time, the story was closed to further comments.
On Monday, the Herald ran an editorial that was presented as a defense of the original story without ever ever repeating its premise or endorsing its errors. The editorial added information that changed the topic from the renewable electricity announcement to the use of consultants — which had not been the subject of a Herald news story or news gathering. The editorial said not a word about the earlier inaccuracies or the failure to offer the government a chance to participate in the story and concluded by suggesting the government should simply send out press releases when it wants to make an announcement.
Why organizations use consultants
Contrarian reader and consulting engineer Jeffrey Pinhey considers the pros and cons of using consultants, and the media’s treatment of the Dexter government:
So you are just getting around to the realization that the media are not going to be pro-NDP anything unless they are in opposition? I am no member of any of these “parties” (my parties are a lot more fun) but it sure seems obvious that the Herald is holding Darrell Dexter to a higher set of expectations that any other Premier has been in some time, even to the point of somehow twisting things to the point of blaming him for the indiscretions of members of the other parties. It almost seems like the last government’s lack of accountability is now the NDP’s fault?
This latest lack of interest in the truth around what that $43,000 actually paid for is just another example. I am sick and tired of the media going on about consultants doing work for government. What percentage of the words in a typical run of the Herald were actually written by their full time staff? Organizations hire consultants to do things they can’t do that well themselves, because they don’t do it all the time, the amount of work is above their own capacity to do in the tie required, the work is a specialized area of knowledge, and/or it is simply more cost effective.
This hiring of consultants to justify decisions that have already been made, and only releasing those studies that support the party line, has got to stop, though.
What part of NS do tourists photograph?
Estonian travel buff Ahti Heinla used the distribution of photos on Panaramio to create a world heat map of touristiness. Yellow indicates high touristiness, red medium touristiness, and blue low touristiness. Areas having no Panoramio photos at all are grey. The analysis takes account of both the number photos and the number of authors in a given area. Here is a lo-res blowup of the Nova Scotia section.
Sou’wester
A stiff sou’west breeze pounds the stratified shoreline of Green Point, in Gros Morne National Park, on Newfoundland’s west coast Sunday afternoon.
Do it yourself Aliant sleuthing
Art Ortenburger is a home-schooled teenager who can’t get high-speed Internet at his home in Bonshaw, PEI, 24 km. west of Charlottetown. Ortenburger wondered how many other Islanders were beyond reach of broadband, so he crafted a set of automated computer programs to find out.
His tools submit each address from the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database to Aliant’s web page. Aliant, the only provider of DSL (or telephone-based) high speed Internet on the Island, responds with one of two messages:
Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…”
or:
Your address … does not currently qualify for Bell Aliant High Speed Internet service.
Ortenburger’s bot is polite; it only submits one query a second, so it takes several days to work through the entire database. To run the program, Ortenburger sought help from island ‘net guru Peter Rukavina, who provided a server to run the program.
The results:
Total Addresses: 68,040
Addresses with no DSL: 10,439
Addresses with Basic DSL: 19,559
Addresses with Ultra DSL: 38,039
If you download this Google Earth KML file of the no-DSL addresses and import it into your copy of Google Earth, you can zoom in to any area of the province to see the broadbandless areas close-up.
Ortenburger has released his complete toolset with an open source license, in case anyone wants to see how it works—or wants develop a similar tool.
Hat tip: Peter Rukavina via Adrian Noskwith.
