Halifax's unaccountable parking czar Ken Reashor used his arbitrary powers yesterday to end the Halifax peninsula parking ban 26 days earlier than expected. The ban held sway for 84 days, from December 14 through March 4. I can't find actual snowfall data for that period, but the table below (sources here and here) shows average snow conditions in Halifax (the only data available to officials when they impose the ban). So in an average year, the 84-days period from December 14 through March 4 would include about 16 days with snowfall and about 68 without. Why not target the 16 days when a...

05 March, 2011

A line from Steve Jobs propelled Emory University student Ien Chi to produce a remarkable YouTube film: Click here to view on a flash-impaired IOS device. (Impaired by decree of S. Jobs, that is!) H/T: Silas...

03 March, 2011

For now, the last word on Spirit Place (previous instalments here and here) will go to Jeff Scott, pediatrician, Willow Street resident, St. John's Church parishioner, and a guy I admire, having witnessed his courage and grace under pressure when we worked together to get the Sydney Tar Ponds cleaned up. As is often is the case in controversy, both parties are crying foul. The opponents of the church development feel victimized by the “holier than thou, social justice, inclusive ‘nonsense’” and fear they will “bear the burden of living with the impact of this vast structure because St. John’s United Church...

03 March, 2011

I wrote yesterday that only one Canadian news source had taken note of a Robert Kennedy Jr. column on HuffingtonPost slamming Stephen Harper. In fact, the CBC's Kady O'Malley took note in a tweeet (which is what @kady does): So did Jane Tabor in the Globe and Mail. Neither piece turned up in a Google search at the time of my post. O'Malley took umbrage at my post, arguing that RFK's "entire piece was pure crap" and "a kennedy being staggeringly wrong on facts isn't news." This is a strange standard for news selection, especially coming from Canada's Parliamentary press gallery, where...

03 March, 2011

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of a famous man, former congressman, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and professor at Pace University, used a column in the Huffington Post to laud the CRTC for resisting efforts by the PMO to lift Canada's ban on false news. Kennedy links the PM's efforts to Sun Media's plans for a Canadian version of Fox News. Moneyquote: Harper, often referred to as "George W. Bush's Mini Me," is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of...

02 March, 2011

Kill the Friendly Giant. That's how Cape Breton University political science professor Tom Urbaniak describes the response of school boards and the Nova Scotia Teachers' Union when the Dexter government sought ideas for reducing the education budget. That's the tactic the CBC used a few years ago when the government announced a cut in its budget: The cuts would force it to cancel Canada's favorite children's show. Parents and children rose up, and the cuts got cut. As former education bureaucrat Wayne Fiander wrote to Contrarian recently, "the school boards and the teachers' union...

02 March, 2011

I've never been to Rome and never seen the Sistine Chapel. If you're in the same boat, check out this interactive, 360-degree, wrap-around representation of the chapel interior produced for the Vatican last year by Villanova University. Pretty neat. (The image below is just a screenshot. Click here for the full 3D effect.) H/T: Roland McCaffrey...

02 March, 2011

German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, known in tabloid headlines as Baron Cut-and-Paste, resigned Tuesday following revelations that parts of his doctoral thesis had been cribbed without acknowledgement from the work of other writers. It wasn't justa few lines, either. Gregor Aisch, who runs a German data visualization website, has produced a graphical depiction of zu Guttenberg’s borrowings. [Larger version here.] Dark red lines represent complete or masked plagiarism, while the lighter red depict other categories of plagiarism. Longer bars correspond to normal text, while smaller bars represent material in footnotes. Altogether brazen. For the data underlying his image, Aisch drew on another...

02 March, 2011

In response to my post on the Dexter government's obsessive management of routine government communications, Bruce Wark writes: When I arrived in Nova Scotia in October, 1986 as CBC Radio's National Reporter for the Maritimes, I found that the Nova Scotia government's public relations system was generally third rate. I had just come from six years covering the Ontario legislature and was used to dealing every day with a professional civil service and public relations officers who provided accurate information quickly and efficiently. In fact, I realized  during my years at Queen's Park that the Conservatives' decision to create a professional (and...

27 February, 2011

Eamonn Fingleton, an ex-pat Irish financial journalist who lives in Tokyo, takes a decidedly contrarian view of the Japanese economy. Far from stagnating for 20 years, as received media wisdom would have it, Japan's economy has been ticking along just fine, he contends. Guest-blogging for James Fallows at TheAtlantic.com website (where Contrarian will take a guest-blogging turn the week of March 14), Fingleton cites a couple of inconvenient facts in support of his analysis: Japan's current account surplus in 1990, regarded as the onset of its 20-year economic malaise, stood at $36 billion. By last year, it had risen to $194 billion. Over the...

26 February, 2011
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