Category: Media
Highway crash survival – ctd.
Contrarian reader JS writes:
Most if not all news accounts of such accidents provide no information about the factors involved. From your account it is clear that a) slowing down during bad conditions; b) having proper approved child safety restraints; and c) operating a vehicle with a good safety rating are the right ingredients for safe driving with a family. This account is far more valuable to the world in general than a news report that simply says a head-on collision sent five to hospital with non life-threatening injuries and the driver of a second vehicle was killed.
I am a motorcyclist, and I read with great attention every account of accidents involving bikes. Rarely if at all are details given as to circumstances. There may be a statement which says the accident is being investigated but the results are never made public. Such dry reportage has no value if circumstances are left to pure speculation. How can I or anyone else learn anything from that?
As an example, the inordinate number of fatal accidents along the Trans Canada near Antigonish in the last few weeks has left a general impression that all have been caused by impatient drivers trying to pass where they shouldn’t. There have been no facts whatsoever presented to support that assumption, yet it persists. Elected officials are now demanding massive public expenditures to twin the highway. On what facts is that assumption based?
I am sure your deeply personal account will be read by many and give cause for serious thought about our own respective situations and hopefully remind us all that there is a story behind the story.
Thank you to the many readers who wrote messages of concern about Silas, Jenn, Maggie, Josh, and Jacob. We are all grateful. They are all on the mend.
The biosolidity of Ellen Page
If the admirable Ellen Page* wants to contribute to the environment of her home province, she might consider pressuring the Dexter government to rethink its politically expedient decision to delay regulations to control mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Mercury is a dangerous element with well-known impacts on human health, especially the health of young children. The province and Nova Scotia Power have known about their obligation to clean up mercury emissions for years, if not decades. [Disclosure: both NSP and the NS Govt. have been my clients.] The government’s decision to back away from that legislated commitment in the face of a threatened power rate increase came as a huge blow to morale in its Environment Department.
Power rates have been the third rail of Nova Scotia politics ever since they caused the defeat of Gerald Regan’s government in 1978. Darrell Dexter is nothing if not cautious, and he made the pragmatic decision to sacrifice a near-term improvement in public health for political longevity. That’s real politics, and a figure of Page’s stature could make a real contribution by weighing in on the side of health.
That would be a better use of her talents than opposing the productive recycling of biosolids, as she did in this appalling CBC-TV interview. Money quote:
I’m an advocate of hu-manure and utilizing our urine as a great nitrogen source for gardens and plants, but biosolids are very much not hu-manure… I like to refer to it as sewage sludge. It’s highly toxic. Look, I’m not a scientist, so I’ll say that obviously, but I’m a very concerned citizen and I’m worried because this is highly toxic material that is already being put on our land without the transparency of letting citizens of HRM and of Nova Scoti know.
Ellen Page
To paraphrase, Page sympathizes with government’s desire to recycle human shit and urine, and she acknowledges that she brings no scientific expertise to the discussion, but she believes Halifax’s sewage sludge contains too many toxic contaminants, whose implications have not be fully disclosed to or discussed with residents.
No single word is more misused, in journalism and in environmentalism, than “toxic.” It’s a relative term that is almost invariably tossed about as an absolute. The public imagines that everything is either toxic or not toxic, whereas toxicologists and serious environmentalists know that virtually everything, including pure water, is toxic at sufficient dose. Dosis sola facit venenum. Dose is what determines risk.
My hero: Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541)
Mercury is highly toxic at low doses. That’s why scientific risk assessment justifies spending lots of money (and political capital) to keep it out of our air. Untreated sewage also harms the environment, so most countries have stepped up efforts to remove solids from the waste stream. The question is what to do with them.
To answer the question, HRM built a biosolids processing plant at Aerotch Park to treat sewage sludge using the commercial N-Viro process. The HRM website has a description of the plant and the process, together with a schematic. The N-Viro Corporation website has a more detailed description of the process.
The provincial website offers a list of links on the use of biosolids throughout Canada, and a fact sheet on biosolids [PDF] (though the latter, frankly, is long on reassuring generalities and regrettably short on technical specifics.)
When the use of biosolids in Colchester County touched off a not-in-my-backyard furor a few years ago, the province held a public Biosolids Forum at which a variety of experts discussed their treatment and safety. (View their presentations.) Nova Scotia also established a broad-based committee to review provincial policy on agricultural use of biosolids. That led to revised and stricter guidelines [PDF] for biosolid use here.
The guidelines are worth a quick read. In contrast to the raw cow, pig, and chicken manure farmers apply freely to their lands, the HRM biosolids will be treated to kill pathogens. Samples from the plant will be tested regularly for fecal coliform, salmonella, Arsenic, Cadmium, Chromium, Cobalt, Copper, Mercury, Molybdenum, Nickel, Lead, Selenium, Zinc, dioxins, furans, and PCBs. The guidelines restrict the use of biosolids on farmland by proximity to 14 categories of land and land use, including watercourses, drinking water supplies, bedrock outcroppings, drainage ditches, roads, buildings, etc. The setbacks vary according to the slope of the land, and depth to groundwater and bedrock.
Want more information? The Food Action Committee of the Ecology Action Centre (an environmental group I belong to and support) has a short position paper [Word doc] opposing the agricultural use of biosolids, but it’s very general, and focuses on an alleged lack of transparency. The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment’s Biosolids Task Force has a website. A search of US educational websites for “biosolids safety agricultural use” yields 42 scientific papers; the same search on Canadian websites turns up 28.
Forums, task forces, stakeholder committees, websites, guidelines: Is it fair or accurate to describe all this as a lack of transparency?
On balance, HRM’s biosolids program offers a responsible way to recycle critical nutrients that would otherwise pose a pollution problem. Environmentalists ought to celebrate it, not oppose it.
One final note: Even by the lame standards of environmental reporting in Canada, the CBC’s treatment of this story is beyond disappointing. It took this unpaid blogger only a few hours to assemble the information and links included in this post, yet host Tom Murphy appeared to have no research at hand to contest Page’s wild claims about toxicity and non-transparency:
Murphy: But you know there is research out their suggesting, hey, it’s OK, and in this case the city put on, I think, about 25% of the manure they were using was this, so what do you say to that when they roll out the scientists to say it’s OK?
Page: At one point, doctors told us to smoke, so, you know what I mean?
So much for science. So much for journalism. I know television is conflict- and personality-driven, and by its nature must simplify complex issues, but this is negligent reporting by any standards.
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* More disclosure: I like Ellen Page. In 2003, when we were just getting our little film series off the ground, she was generous enough to travel to Sydney to attend our Canadian premiere screening of Marion Bridge, in which she had a breakout role. I have tried to write this post in a way she might find persuasive, although I suppose she won’t. Should she want to respond, Contrarian’s space is hers.
Creepy ad
A United Way ad now on display above urinals in select Halifax bars: What you’re really giving is decapitation.
Herald vs. coyotes
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim is the title of a 1980 compendium of unintended double-entendre headlines collected by the Columbia Journalism Review. It illustrates the power of tiny punctuation flubs — in this case, a missing hyphen — to radically alter meaning. Readers also have to chuckle in wonderment over how small a town must be for the local newspaper to deem dog bites newsworthy.
When the dog is a coyote, however, and the person bitten is a 16-year-old girl in a National Park where a 19-year-old woman was killed by coyotes 10 months ago, there’s no doubt about newsworthiness. Still, consider how differently two daily newspapers reported the story:
“Coyote bites sleeping teen in head,” was the Cape Breton Post’s accurate but subdued headline.
INGONISH — A teenage girl was bitten by a coyote early Monday morning in the same national park in Cape Breton where a woman was killed by the animals last year.
“Coyote attacks girl in Highlands,” screamed the Halifax Chronicle-Herald in a headline that spanned the top of page one.
A second vicious coyote attack on a visitor at Cape Breton Highlands National Park prompted park wardens to start setting traps early Monday morning.
Source: Halifax Chronicle-Herald
A photo of a sinister, prowling coyote illustrated the Herald story, together with a graphic showing a second coyote posing triumphantly astride a map of the Cape Breton Highlands. Lines connected the posing coyote to the sites of the two incidents, which took place 40 kilometres apart, separated by the least hospitable terrain in the Maritimes.
The two stories, both written by competent, journeymen reporters, agreed on the relatively benign facts of the case — a couple of bites to the back of the head, requiring a few stitches at outpatients. The Post’s overall treatment of the event was consistent with these facts. The Herald, by contrast, contrived to hype the story and frighten readers with lurid adjectives, illustrations, and headlines. I’m curious to know whether the unwarranted “vicious” was composed by the reporter, or added later by the desk.
The Herald has long had an outsized appetite for bad news from Cape Breton. Whether staff reductions have contributed to its recent drift into sensationalism (see examples here, here, here, and here) is a topic for another day. For now, it’s enough to point out the striking differences in the two papers’ treatment of a coyote bite.
Hat tip: SP.
Longing for drunks with cigars at Wapo
The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten longs for the way newspapers used to operate.
On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.
These days, by contrast:
Every few days at The Washington Post, staffers get a notice like this: “Please welcome Dylan Feldman-Suarez, who will be joining the fact-integration team as a multiplatform idea triage specialist, reporting to the deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy. Dylan comes to us from the social media utilization division of Sikorsky Helicopters.”
Hat tip: Dave Whynacht via BT
The choropleth problem
Before a reader draws me up short on Monday’s link to an interactive map showing explosive growth of unemployment in the US, I should acknowledge the choropleth problem. James Fallows introduced the issue, and the word, in a blog post about the same map Tuesday.
The problem is that geography does not equal population. A choropleth map depicting social trends (unemployment or election results) can mislead if its geographical units (states or provinces) vary widely in population. (The word derives from Greek terms for “area/region” + “multiply.”) Fallows gives the example of the razor thin 2004 US presidential election, in which the Democratic candidate outpolled the Republican, but a state-by-state choropleth gives the impression of a Republican landslide, because lower density Republican states take up most of the room. Maps that resolve to a county-by-county level (as opposed to state-by-state or province-by-province) greatly reduce but do not eliminate the distortion.
Cartograms are maps that attempt to solve the choropleth problem by distorting their geographical units to reflect the numerical value being measured. The county-by-county cartogram of the same election (at left) distorts boundaries but reflects the results more accurately. More here, here, and here. My earlier, much-complained about post about altitude maps depicting crime in San Francisco, relied on a special category of choropleth known to cartobuffs as a prism map.
Viral solitude – updated
How a video goes viral:
Sometime on Wednesday, Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman uploaded her lovely video, featuring Tanya Davis’s poem about solitude, to YouTube.
At 6:38 a.m., Friday, when Halifax artist Shelagh Duffett reposted the video to her website, it had been viewed 40 times. Kimberley Mosher, an account manager for a Halifax Advertising agency, saw it on Shelagh’s site and put it on her Facebook page, where, in turn, fashion blogger Allison Garber saw it and reposted the link to her FB page. All this happened in less than three hours.
Allison’s and my mutual friend (and brilliant, Baddeck-based communications strategist) Stacey Pineau sent me the link at 9 a.m. Acting the slowpoke, I didn’t get the video onto Contrarian until just before noon. By then, it had been viewed more than 600 times. But I also sent it to Andrew Sullivan, whose Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic magazine’s website is phenomenally popular. Sullivan published it the following day, Saturday, at 2 p.m.
About eight p.m. Saturday night, celebrity film critic Roger Ebert tweeted the link with a melancholy note hinting at its appropriateness for a Saturday night.
Now I am only speculating, but I suspect Ebert saw the video on Sullivan’s blog. By Sunday morning, three days after Dorfman uploaded it, more than 100,000 people had seen How To Be Alone. As of this posting (5:49 p.m., Tuesday), the tally stands just shy of 190,000. As of Wednesday noon, it has 273,899 views.
In case you are wondering, Dorfman and Ebert have a Bacon number of three.
Troublemaking semicentennial – corrected
Friends and admirers gathered in the Midtown Tavern’s antiseptic new digs Thursday evening to honor journalist-businessman David Bentley’s 50 years of afflicting the comfortable.
Among the crowd were foot-soldiers of the late, lamented Halifax Daily News (née: Bedford-Sackville News), the once salacious Frank magazine, and the meaty, fact-packed AllNovaScotia.com, which today ranks Nova Scotia’s premier newsgathering organization. As Frank might put it, all three began life as Bentley organs.
In 1974, Bentley, his wife, and two partners founded the weekly B-S News, modeling it after the sordid tabloids of his native England. Five years later, he took the enormous gamble of moving the paper downtown, transforming it into a daily, and taking on both the stolid Chronicle-Herald and the nacent, corrupt Buchanan administration.
After selling the daily to Harry Steele’s Newfoundland Capital Corp. in 1987, Bentley and business partner Lyndon Watkins founded Frank, a legendary tweaker of toffee-noses. In 2001, with daughter Caroline Wood, he founded AllNovaScotia, an online publication that is, ironically, today’s must-read for Nova Scotia’s ruling elites.
When future historians recount Nova Scotia’s late-20th Century transformation from a staid, British colonial outpost to an almost modern society, Bentley will emerge as an unsung central figure. He taught the province that ritual deference to one’s betters is the surest guarantor of mediocrity.
Our betters are still smarting from the lesson.
Fittingly, the quinquagenary brought out longtime Bentley protégé, celebrity shooter, and onetime Frank co-owner Cliff Boutillier, shown honing his lens in preparation for next week’s edition. The Glace Bay native grimaced at the intrusiveness of today’s bloggers with their pesky iPhones.
“Whoever told you sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander,” he demanded.
David Bentley, that’s who.
HARPER DEFEATS CENSUS
Harper spokespeople argue that sending the voluntary census long form to a larger number of people will compensate for any loss of data quality due to the newly voluntary nature of the form. Milan Ilnyckyj explains the fallacy.
One of the biggest challenges in statistics is collecting a representative sample: finding a subset of the population that will do a good job of approximating the whole group. When a dataset contains a lot of sampling bias and is not reflective of the general population, it is essentially worthless as a guide. That cannot be fixed by using a larger sample size, nor can it be dealt with via fancy mathematics.
The classic example of sampling bias is the ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline, from the Chicago Tribune in 1948. The newspaper got their prediction wrong because they sampled people with telephones, at a time when telephones were comparatively rare. Most of the people who had them were rich, and rich people were more supportive of Dewey. As a consequence, telephone polling provided bad information about the likely voting behaviour of the whole population.
While on the census fiasco, Jim Brown, guest host of CBC Radio’s The Current, was uncharacteristically ill-prepared this morning for his interview with Conservative sock-puppet Tim Powers. He let Powers float unchallenged from one specious talking point to another, even letting him equate the supposed intrusiveness of a standard census question about the number of bedrooms in a respondent’s house to Pierre Trudeau’s decision to repeal laws outlawing private homosexual acts. If you’re going to guest host a national show, you need a passing familiarity with recent Canadian history, and you need to bone up on the issues of the day. Brown is usually better than this.
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:
