For some time, Contrarian has been struck by the Parliamentary Press Gallery's abhorrence of elections. It seems they cannot resist any pretext to drum up a story about what an abomination it would be to let Canadians vote. What would World War II vets make of this mindset. Tories scarcely need to press this partisan talking point; the press gallery does all the heavy lifting for them. Could the media's incessant nattering on this point could be driving public opinion? Maclean's Magazine's ineffable Kady O'Malley wonders the same thing. Moneyquote: [I]s anyone else sick to death of hearing about how Hill...
Dating from April 23, 2005, the first video ever uploaded to YouTube is a 19-second clip showing one of the site's founders, Jawed Karim, talking about elephants. To Virginia Heffernan, writing this morning in the New York Times, the clip echos a technique used by Jean-Luc Godard. When this technique of redundancy was used in the films of Godard, it was considered the height of sophistication, a comment on the way movies pile on information: they show, they narrate and they describe. The elephants are unmistakable to viewers, and yet Karim identifies them. Then he names the iconic shape right in...
Tucows Inc., the Toronto-based company best known for its online library of free and modestly priced software, has produced a trenchant submission to the federal government's copyright consultation. The company commissioned David Weinberger, renowned US Internet marketing pundit, to examine the contention that strong copyright protection and robust creativity march hand in hand toward the New Jerusalem. His witty, insightful rejection of that canard stands out from the pack in this debate. Moneyquote: The argument seems simple: (a) If every time you put apples out on your fruit stand, they’re immediately stolen, pretty quickly you’ll stop putting out apples. (b) What’s...
CTV Anchor Steve Murphy writes: Have you had an opportunity to watch Cindy Day's very measured approach to forecasting these recent storms? Cindy constantly stresses that tropical cyclones are extremely difficult to predict with precision, especially when they are several days away. Her forecasts employ likely and anticipated storm tracks and include ranges for rainfall and wind speeds. A review of last week's coverage would confirm that Cindy Day's prognosis for Hurricane Bill was remarkably accurate even several days ahead of time. Our news coverage of the arrival of the storm focused mainly on surf conditions and danger from the waves....
Tropical storm Danny is currently a 'disorganized' system that may or may not become a hurricane, 'albeit a weak one.' By contrarian's back-of-the-envelope calculations, it lies roughly 2300 km south-southwest of Halifax. At its present speed of 17 km/hr, it could reach Nova Scotia in a just under six days—if it traveled in a straight line, which it won't. But that's close enough for the weather hysterics at CBC News to warn that it "could strengthen into a hurricane and affect Atlantic Canada by the weekend." Gee, maybe they should cancel normal programming. This continues a policy established last winter, when the first...
This month, Apple approved a free CBC Radio app that offers yet another reason to own an iPhone. It will prove a boon to radio listeners not tied to their radios all day. The CBC Radio app will give iPhone or iPod users live audio streams from of Radio 1, 2, and 3 (the corp's net-based, indy-oriented network). It will let users listen in any time zone, so when Atlantic Canadians miss a national program, they have four chances to catch up. Want to listen to a local show in real time? Pick it off the station menu (below left), our use...
"Up to two times more than a manual brush." Sex sells, the saying goes, but this ad appears to rest upon a sublter formula: Selling sex sells. Does Oral B really hope to sell a lot of disguised masturbatory aids, or is it hoping to build customer loyalty by presenting itself as sex-positive?...
Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept. In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia's Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic. [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]...
CBC-Nova Scotia ran a long commentary this morning by Halifax resident Dave Hayden about financial rip-off artists like Earl Jones, then used its website to link to Hayden's online petition urging stiffer penalties for white-collar crimes. A grey zone between information and promotion perhaps, but in contrarian's view, the public broadcaster steps over the line when it links to a petition lobbying government on a current issue....