Archive for: July 2010
Letter of resignation
The libertarian devotion to individual freedom that led the Harper Government to kill Statistic Canada’s mandatory long form census questionnaire apparently did not extend to the Chief Statistician of Canada’s letter of resignation.
Munir A. Sheikh posted a note about his resignation on the agency’s website late Wednesday night. The Harper Libertarians redacted it Thursday morning, replacing it with an uninformative generic message.
Here, for the record, thanks to Kady O’Malley, is the full text of the Chief Statistician’s censored message to Canadians:
July 21, 2010
OTTAWA — There has been considerable discussion in the media regarding the 2011 Census of Population. There has also been commentary on the advice that Statistics Canada and I gave the government on this subject.
I cannot reveal and comment on this advice because this information is protected under the law. However, the government can make this information public if it so wishes.
I have always honoured my oath and responsibilities as a public servant as well as those specific to the Statistics Act.
I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.
It can not.
Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister. I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity of serving him as the Chief Statistician of Canada, heading an agency that is a symbol of pride for our country.
To you, the men and women of Statistics Canada – thank you for giving me your full support and your dedication in serving Canadians. Without your contribution, day in and day out, in producing data of the highest quality, Canada would not have this institution that is our pride.
I also want to thank Canadians. We do remember, every single day, that it is because of you providing us with your information, we can function as a statistical agency. I am attaching an earlier message that I sent to Canadians in this regard. In closing, I wish the best to my successor. I promise not to comment on how he/she should do the job. I do sincerely hope that my successor’s professionalism will help run this great organization while defending its reputation.
Munir A. Sheikh
Frank MacDonald night
Frank MacDonald chats with friends among the capacity crowd that packed the Inverness County Centre for the Arts Wednesday night for a tribute to the Inverness County author and poet. The River Hill Players performed several of MacDonald’s songs and plays, and read from his poems, newspaper columns, and the novel A Forest for Calum, widely touted as a Canadian classic.
Docking fees
Docking fee: $150 if you’re from around here; $250 if you’re not.
So the summer residents who return year after year — buying goods in our stores, attending our concerts, paying property taxes for services they don’t use, spreading the word about Cape Breton to folks back home — let’s stick them for an extra 67%. Wouldn’t want them to think we’re neighbourly, or appreciative of their commitment to Cape Breton, now would we?
Mean-spirited. Dumb.
If the Fraser Institute operated park benches
The only voice I’ve heard in support of the Harper government’s census vandalism is that of the libertarian Fraser Institute, which believes data of the kind produced by the mandatory long form should be available only to those who can afford to pay to gather it. Coincidentally, German artist Fabian Brunsing has produced a whimsical video that hints at the dystopic world we might achieve if the Fraserites get their way (or Harper gets a majority):
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
WaPo unmasks a hidden, top-secret America
The blogosphere is agog at a Washington Post series that uncovers the astonishing, bloated, secret, and likely ineffective national security apparatus that has grown up in the United States following 9/11. Two crack WaPo reporters, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, spent two years tracking down the story, an increasingly rare example of what the dead-tree media can do when it taps its traditional strengths. Here’s the opening sentence:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
Some highlights:
– Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on Top Secret programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence at over 10,000 locations across the country. Over 850,000 Americans have Top Secret clearances.
– Redundancy and overlap are major problems and a symptom of the ongoing lack of coordination between agencies.
– In the Washington area alone, 33 building complexes for Top Secret work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.
Andrew Sullivan rounds up blogger reaction. Money quote to Glenn Greenwald:
We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.
Flowingdata highlights the infographic:
Click the image (or here) to activate the graphic and explore that the Post calls, “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” [Note: the graphic was sluggish this morning, presumably owing to heavy traffic.]
After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine…
Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications….
The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.
9/11 happened not because intelligence agencies hadn’t detected elements the plot, but because inter-agency secrecy meant no one could put the pieces together. A core finding of the WaPo investigation is that this inability to connect the dots is worse than ever. They detail how various agencies collected ample evidence about alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan and attempted Christmas Day bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, but didn’t recognize its significance.
PBS even has a “making of” video:
Roaming children through the generations
As a child of eight in 1926, George Thomas Of Sheffield, England, thought nothing of walking six miles to his favorite fishing hole. Today, his eight-year-old great-grandson Edward is forbidden to wander more than 300 yards from home. The London Daily Mail mapped the diminishing scope of childhood roaming through four generations.
Grandfather Jack, who turned eight in 1950, could roam through a one-mile radius. Mother Vicky, who turned eight in 1979, could walk unaccompanied half a mile to the local swimming pool.
Jack’s experience mirrors mine, as a 1953 eight-year-old in Chappaqua, NY, with a roaming scope of about one mile radius. My own children, who turned eight in 1978 and 1983, also had about a mile of roaming scope, but they were generational exceptions, growing up in ultra-rural Kempt Head, Cape Breton. We used a fog horn to summon them home from the beach or the woods. Their children, who are not yet eight, lead closely accompanied lives.
What is this doing to the next generation’s ability to manage danger and make decisions? How is it constricting and distorting their knowledge and understanding of the world? Danah Boyd thinks children turn to social media sites [link fixed - thanks CC] on the Internet in part of fill this gap in their world experience.
Child survival is the new green
In his latest Ted talk, population guru Hans Rosling says improving child survival rates is the counterintuitive path to population control:
Previous Rosling post here. View more of Rosling’s Gapminder graphs here (click on “browse example graphs,” at lower left).
Annals of climate change: June, 2010
The deniers have some explaining to do:
The Weather Underground reports that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Climatic Data Center rates last month as the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, while NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies calls it the third warmest (behind June 1998 and June 2009). Both NOAA and NASA rated the year-to-date period, January – June, as the warmest such period on record. Moneyquote:
A withering heat wave of unprecedented intensity brought the hottest temperatures in recorded history to six nations in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, in June 2010. At least two other Middle East nations came within a degree of their hottest temperatures ever in June.
To judge from the map, Greenland and the the midwestern US got zapped pretty good, too.
Hat tip: Gus Reed.
Observation post
A burrow of puffins surveys Sydney Bight from Hertford Island off Cape Dauphin in Cape Breton Friday afternoon.
From late May through early August, Hertford and nearby Ciboux — the Bird Islands — host vast flocks of razor-billed auks, black guillemots, Atlantic puffins, and black-legged kittiwakes, seabirds that spend the rest of their lives on the open ocean. The province designated the islands a protected wildlife management area last year. Regulations bar the the public from landing, but Bird Island Boat Tours offers close up views from twice-daily, two-and-a-half hour boat tours. (Joshua Barss Donham photo)
The Old Hen – a moral authority and a role model
Christian Lüdde of Germany, who worked as an assistant at L’Arche Cape Breton in 2002 and 2003, writes:
I… was fortunate to live [in Janet Moore's residence].
I very much appreciate the way Jenn kept us informed on Janet’s state and I also appreciate the very appropriate words you found to briefly describe Janet’s impact. You are right, it is hard to overstate her impact on L’Arche Cape Breton and many individuals like me. Janet was nothing short of a moral authority for me, a role model that I slowly learned to accept. So I thank you for your article and try to think that remembering somebody like Janet makes me sad, but really should make me smile and feel warm in my heart. Because this is her legacy.Jenn Power and Janet Moore
