A folksinger, masquerading as two folksingers, takes on a notorious British tab. Hat tip: CC....

30 March, 2010

From November, 1972, to June, 1999, Ron Caplan published Cape Breton's Magazine from his farmhouse in Wreck Cove, Victoria County. Typeset on an IBM Selectric, printed in a one-of-a-kind, out-sized format, each issue was packed with oral history of a beloved island whose way of live was rapidly changing. Caplan has now digitized the whole ungainly collection and made it available, in searchable form, online. The interface feels a bit dated and awkward to use, but it's all there - an extraordinary resource. Want to know what an eyestone was? Check Issue 4. Women steelmakers in World War II? Issue 37....

16 March, 2010

Contrarian reader Ken Clare thinks Contrarian's standards slipped with our post of a chart comparing US food subsidies: Edward Tufte, the “Galileo of Graphics” you introduced us to back in June, refers to images like these as “chartjunk." I haven’t taken the time to measure the images you copied (from a committee of physicians who may have had a passing relationship with math sometime in their pasts), but the subsidies pyramid eyeballs closer to a 100-to-1 ratio than the 75-to-25 ratio it is labeled. Update: A Diligent Reader award goes to Contrarian's insomniac friend Alistair Watt, who spent time with a ruler and...

13 March, 2010

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

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
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

Liberal economist Paul Krugman is fielding questions in a live chat on the New Yorker website, in connection with a profile of him in the current issue. On the subject of the inherent inefficiency of government: [G]overnment isn't nearly as bad -- or the private sector nearly as good -- as it's often portrayed. I know I lot of very good, very hard-working government employees; and while I don't work for a large corporation, I do read Dilbert. ...

24 February, 2010

David Beck of Clarkson University and Jennifer Jacquet of the University of British Columbia won an honorable mention in the illustration category of the [U.S.] National Science Foundation's 2009 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for Jellyfish Burger. Other winners include a comic strip about brain development, an animation showing why identical twins become less similar as they grow older, and a two minute video about airline routes. Fuller account here. Slideshow of other winners here. Podcast interview with some of the winners here. (The last two sites may require free registration.)...

19 February, 2010
Previous installments here, here, and here. A longish dissent from reader Jay Wilson:
The way you make it sound, we, the public, are the ones who indirectly caused this problem by forcing our poor beleaguered elected representatives underground and into making the kinds of reckless spending judgements they made. I take issue with that. As you said in your blog, "Upon taking office, most MLAs set aside established careers in exchange for a job with far less security than comparable positions in the private or public sector." That once was the case, for a good reason. Once upon a time, MLAs made very little money as elected representatives. To offset their costs of travel, constituency responsibilities, etc, they were given expense money. Fine. Then more people from different walks of life started getting involved in politics who didn't necessarily make as much as the usual assortment of doctors, lawyers and businesspeople who had mostly made up the elected ranks. Not to mention the complaints from the very sorts of individuals you referenced: People from higher-paying occupations who said it wasn't enough to live on and they could make more in the private sector. Over time, a new sensibility developed along the lines of "Let's pay them a better salary so that they can afford to live while serving our best interests." In the interests of fairness, the thought occurred to some that the money spent on expense accounts and the like could be decreased as now these elected officials would actually be making more. That's not what happened. In fact, as salaries continued to increase, so did money for expenses and then it diversified into a whole host of different expense categories. MLAs were getting money for everything and the kitchen sink, and who made these changes? Who increased their salaries and expense money? Who made the rules so deliberately ambiguous and full of holes so wide you could drive a tank through them? They did, behind closed doors and in quick legislative motions, with cursory mentions in the local press for the most part. Please don't try to excuse MLAs for their sorry behaviour. This is about three things: A pronounced sense of entitlement, a disconnect from reality and pure abject greed. Maybe it isn't on the same scale as the scandals in Britain and even Newfoundland, but those three things are present in each situation and they are things we should all be vigilant against.
19 February, 2010

Previous installments here and here. Paul Pross, emeritus professor of public administration at Dalhousie and the author of several books on lobbying, NGOs, and the formation of public policy, thinks we are being too hard on our politicians: I first met a politician fifty years ago. Since then, as a political scientist teaching at Dalhousie and, since retirement, as an active party member, I have met many more. A few turned out to be crooks. There were some self-important, pompous twits. But the majority were decent men and women who worked hard at a challenging and often stressful...

18 February, 2010
Show more
Loading...