A mea culpa in yesterday's Washington Post, criticizing the use of anonymous sources in a story widely regarded as a puff piece on Obama lieutenant Rahm Emanuel, sparked these comments from Salon.com's excellent Glenn Greenwald: In very limited circumstances, anonymity is valuable and justified (e.g., when someone is risking something substantial to expose concealed wrongdoing of serious public interest).  But promiscuous, unjustified anonymity -- which pervades the establishment press -- is the linchpin of most bad, credibility-destroying reporting.  It enables government officials and others to lie to the public with impunity or manipulate them with propaganda, using eager reporters as both...

08 March, 2010

Saint Mary's professor Larry Haiven thinks blaming unions for unnecessary snow days is silly: This is part of a syndrome of "if in doubt, blame the unions."  So convenient.  So wrong. A few years ago I was taking a tour of the new Toronto opera house.  We were allowed to go everywhere except on stage, even though the stage was bare, with no current production going on. One of the tour members asked the docent why we couldn't go on stage.  The tour member said he had been on tours of all the great opera houses of Europe and had never been barred...

07 March, 2010

Educational consultant Paul W. Bennett, a former principal of Halifax Grammar School, thinks we should not be too quick to dismiss the connection between unsnowy snow days and the provisions of the teachers' collective agreement. [T]he key factor [in school closures] is the collective agreement which has been in place in Nova Scotia since the mid-1970s. In that sense, the Education Department is just as culpable as the NSTU. The teachers' agreement originally included an understanding that about five days a year would be written off as "throw-away" snow days. The Agreement with the NSTU also stipulates...

07 March, 2010

This winter, Contrarian hosted an interesting discussion about whether Down syndrome needs a cure. Now reader Denis Falvy offers an intriguing footnote. It seems that people with Down syndrome rarely get tumors. Recent research at Children's Hospital in Boston, reported in the journal Nature, suggests that a gene (gene 231) on the extra chromosome (chromosome 21) carried by people with DS may inhibit cancer by blocking the activity of a protein tumors need to grow. Money quote: The gene suppresses the growth of new blood vessels that cancers need by blocking the activity of the protein calcineurin, suggesting a new target for...

07 March, 2010
Several readers have questioned, taken issue with, and even canceled subscriptions (!) over my criticism of overly cautious school closures, particularly my suggestion that union sympathies may play a role in unwarranted snow days.
Since when are school administrators (who make decisions about snow days) part of the teachers' union? [TB]
Snow days are decided upon by the School Board. The teachers and their union have nothing to do with it. Teachers have to show up on snow days to babysit any kids dropped off by parents. The fact that you are so silly as to blame Unions—good heavens how silly!—I have now figured you out: Another Conservative who will blame the victims for all the country's ills. [AMcG]
At least in HRSB, the school officials who make the call are school board Superintendents - not unionized, but management. [AB]
Another possible explanation is the requirement to please big, risk-averse insurance companies. [BW]
OK, so now I've done what I should have done before posting, checked with Peter McLaughlin, my ex-Daily News colleague who now speaks for the Nova Scotia Department of Education. Turns out the situation is at once more complicated than I suggested, and less clearcut than my interlocutors believe. Full explanation after the jump.
06 March, 2010

Contrarian will be at the Inverary Inn's Thistledown Pub in Baddeck this evening to lead a discussion about blogging sponsored by the Cabot Trail Writers' Festival, the group that organized this event last fall. In addition to an annual fall festival, the group plans a series of satellite events, of which tonight's discussion is the first. I'll be talking about the writerly (journalistic, aesthetic, ethical) aspects of blogging; Mike Targett will be on hand to backstop me on those issues, and to add his technical smarts to the discussion. The pub serves supper from 5:30 to 8; The fireside blogging discussion,...

06 March, 2010

This is what a snow day looks like in Nova Scotia in 2010: Ridiculous. Ludicrous. How does this happen? Is it yet more proof that Environment Canada/CBC weather hysteria has destroyed our ability to distinguish normal weather from that which is dangerous? Is it further evidence of our society's atrophied ability to assess and manage risk? Of our obsession with danger? Have we become a nation of 'fraidy cats? A friend offers an alternative explanation: They haven't filled their quota of snow days. Gotta get 'em in, in other words, like the employee who makes sure to take all her available sick days,...

03 March, 2010

In addition to her invaluable work on Sable Island, Zoe Lucas has, for the last five years,  hosted annual public meetings where scientists, government officials, industry representatives, and naturalists like herself have briefed the public on developments affecting the island.The sixth of these sessions takes place at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 3, at the Theatre Auditorium, McNally Building, Saint Mary's University. This year's meeting takes on special significance because of the secret deliberations currently underway between the Harper and Dexter governments over the level of protection to be afforded Sable in years to come. Federal Parks Minister Jim Prentice and provincial...

02 March, 2010

Contrarian amused himself yesterday by seeing how long a non-sports fan living in Canada without television and with the radio turned off could avoid learning the outcome of the Canada-US hockey game. Answer: Until a 6:59 p.m. AST email bulletin from the New York Times. Herewith some of the very few Olympic nuggets that actually tweaked my interest: What a difference a second makes: Amanda Cox of the New York Times uses a musical interactive graphic to illustrate the extent to which elite athletes cluster near the winning time in various events. When you "play" each event, a staccato musical tone represents each contestant...

01 March, 2010
The Atlantic's* blog section, my single favorite part of the Internet and a frequent source of posts and links here, is in turmoil this morning owing to a redesign that has stripped its superb habitues of the graphical personality and color that made their individual pages so compelling. It didn't help that a series of glitches accompanied the changeover, including the (apparently temporary) loss of RSS feeds and the (hopefully temporary) disappearance of daily email updates. The esteemed James Fallows, though characteristically uber-polite, is unable to conceal his unhappiness:
[T]he new layout scheme -- in which you see only a few-line intro to each post but no pictures, block quotes, or other amplifying material -- unavoidably changes the sensibility and tone of personal blogs. It drains them of variety and individuality, not to mention making them much less convenient to read. Only now that it is gone do I realize how important the placing of photos has been to my own sense of what I wanted to convey, along with the ability to alternate between longer and shorter posts on a "landing" page, or to deliberately save some material for "after the jump" placement.
01 March, 2010
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