In March, 2013, the non-profit, open-source research organization, OCEARCH, caught a four-metre, 900 kg, female great white shark off the Atlantic coast of Florida near Jacksonville, then released it after attaching monitoring and tracking devices. In the year since, the shark has travelled 31,000 kilometres, visiting Cape Hatteras, Bermuda, George's Bank, Placentia Bay, and the Grand Banks, before crossing the mid-Atlantic ridge to a point 1200 kilometres off the coast of Ireland. In late October, Lydia, as the researchers nicknamed her. spent three days exploring Newfoundland's Placentia Bay and Merasheen Island: You can follow Lydia's travels on OCEARCH's interactive, live-tracking map. You can follow...

11 March, 2014

If you're under 30, probably not. It's a sonogram of a dialup modem connecting to an internet server, courtesy of Scotty Hull on Youtube. Quite beautiful, actually, as long as you don't have to listen to it to get on line. For your further edification, Oona Räisänen has diagrammed the component sounds and explained what's happening each step of the way. H/T: Flowing Data...

21 November, 2013

Elections Nova Scotia quietly posted the poll-by-poll results of  the October 8 Nova Scotia election on its website last Thursday Preliminary poll-by-poll results are normally released immediately after the vote, but this year, for the first time in living memory, elections bureaucrats decided to keep the detailed results to themselves for three weeks. The only explanation offered was that the Chronicle-Herald wasn't interested in publishing them (as it had traditionally), so Chief Electoral Officer Richard P. Temporale decided no one else could have them either. Aside from this inexcusable delay, the agency did a good job of presenting the tallies, making them available in...

03 November, 2013

Dan Conlin has kept track of the trick-or-treaters who called at his Duncan St., Halifax, home for the last 17 years. Yesterday's numbers showed a modest uptick, but the overall trend is dramatic and downward: This year's visitors began arriving at 5:35 pm, peaked at 7 p.m., and had vanished into the night by 8:15. Vampires, Princesses, and Ninjas led the parade, at six each. Only one cat made an appearance, likely the one pictured, feline fancier Rosa Eileen Barss Donham, who lives one street over from Dan. Conlin gives his Best Overall Costume Award to an eight-year-old walking box of Ritz Crackers, English in...

01 November, 2013

Pitch Interactive, a data visualization shop in Berkeley, California, has produced an interactive infographic illustrating the results of US drone attacks in Pakistan. I can't embed it, but clicking on the link will take you to a 90-seconds chronological overview. Clicking on the ATTACKS, VICTIMS, NEWS, and INFO links in the upper left corner of the infographic adds background information and sources. Less than 2% of the victims are high-profile targets. The rest are civilians, children and alleged combatants. This is the story of every known drone strike and victim in Pakistan. Since 2004, the US has been practicing in a new kind of clandestine military...

23 October, 2013

Lisa reigned through the '60s, Jennifer in the 70's and early 80s, before yielding to Jessica. Jezebel assembled the map gif from data published annually by the US Social Security Administration (which issues social security cards at birth). At the SSA website, you can look at data for the last 100 years, wherein you will find that Mary held sway from 1911 through 1946, when Linda took the lead before yielding to Mary again from 1953 through 1961. Anyone got data from Canada?...

21 October, 2013

ESRI Canada, a Canadian supplier of geographic information system services, has produced an interactive map of the Nova Scotia Liberal election sweep. Slide the vertical bar back and forth to change from the 2009 election results to last Tuesday's. Unfortunately, I can't embed the tool, but clicking on the screenshot below will take you to it. With help from Dave MacLean of COGS, the image is now embedded. Find the source page here. " H/T: Dave MacLean. Credits: Elections Nova Scotia and ESRI....

14 October, 2013

PC Leader Jamie Baillie's election promise to hold power rates at current levels came in a position paper that included the following unsourced graph, purporting to show that something called "energy costs to rate payers," measured in units it did not explain, have increased by 27 percent since 2009: Wow, that certainly looks shocking! Contrarian is no statistician, and my graphic skills are tenuous, but I read Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics shortly after it came out in 1954, and Chapter 5, "The Gee Whiz Graph," stuck with me. Of the persuasive power of graphs, Huff had this advice...

07 August, 2013

Facebook continually pesters me to entrer the "city" where I live, but rejects Kempt Head, Ross Ferry, Boularderie, and Cape Breton all of which are more-or-less accurate. It will allow me to enter Halifax, Sydney, or Baddeck, none of which is accurate. Contrast this with Google, which embraces locations with admirable granularity. Google effortlessly adopts islands, villages, hamlets—even micro-locations like Frankie's Pond and Parker's Beach—as long as it sees real people using them. This may seem a small thing, but it strikes me as a profound difference in the cultures of the two organizations. One constantly cajoles you into ill-fitting pigeonholes. The...

08 July, 2013

In some ways, at least. Our old friend Hans Rosling (previous Contrarian appearances here, here, here, and here) brings us up to date, and highlights the amazing recent prograss in (parts of) Ethiopia: Rosling's Gapminder data visualization software now has some tools you can download to your own computer....

12 June, 2013
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