[Update below] Peter Spurway, who was director of communications for Premier John Hamm, writes: I have no knowledge of what Dan may or may not have done around the Herald story. That said, if he had simply declared who he was in the comment he posted in response to the story, all of this would have been avoided. (And whether his online comment qualified as an email to the newspaper is hair-splitting.) By not posting his real name and interest in the story, Dan failed to be sufficiently transparent, in my view. [Update] Defeated Liberal byelection candidate Miles Tompkins writes: Amazing what one can miss...

26 May, 2010

Sharon Fraser is a Halifax journalist, women's rights advocate, and the wife of Dan O'Connor, the chief of staff to Premier Dexter embroiled in a controversy over inaccurate reporting by the Chronicle-Herald over the weekend. She describes the events at the heart of the Herald's misreporting: I have no desire to keep this going eternally but I wrote this summary this morning and thought you might be interested. Here's what happened: On Friday, the Herald published a front-page story reducing an important government initiative and its announcement to the amount of money that was spent over several months in its preparation.  The headline...

25 May, 2010

Contrarian reader and consulting engineer Jeffrey Pinhey considers the pros and cons of using consultants, and the media's treatment of the Dexter government: So you are just getting around to the realization that the media are not going to be pro-NDP anything unless they are in opposition? I am no member of any of these "parties" (my parties are a lot more fun) but it sure seems obvious that the Herald is holding Darrell Dexter to a higher set of expectations that any other Premier has been in some time, even to the point of somehow twisting things to...

24 May, 2010

Estonian travel buff Ahti Heinla used the distribution of photos on Panaramio to create a world heat map of touristiness. Yellow indicates high touristiness, red medium touristiness, and blue low touristiness. Areas having no Panoramio photos at all are grey. The analysis takes account of both the number photos and the number of authors in a given area. Here is a lo-res blowup of the Nova Scotia section. Note that despite the Nova Scotia Government's decades-old policy of promoting boring and exciting parts of Nova Scotia equally to tourists, visitors still flock to Cape Breton. ...

24 May, 2010

A stiff sou'west breeze pounds the stratified shoreline of Green Point, in Gros Morne National Park, on Newfoundland's west coast Sunday afternoon. ...

24 May, 2010

Art Ortenburger is a home-schooled teenager who can't get high-speed Internet at his home in Bonshaw, PEI, 24 km. west of Charlottetown. Ortenburger wondered how many other Islanders were beyond reach of broadband, so he crafted a set of automated computer programs to find out. His tools submit each address from the freely-available PEI Civic Address Database to Aliant’s web page. Aliant, the only provider of DSL (or telephone-based) high speed Internet on the Island, responds with one of two messages: Congratulations! You can choose from the following list of services currently available to you…” or: Your address … does not currently qualify for...

24 May, 2010

Friday Night on Sydney's The Esplanade. Don't ask for ketchup. ...

23 May, 2010

Lindsay Brown doesn't like anonymous posting: The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary. First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters. Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They'll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware. The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic...

23 May, 2010

Contrarian has some highbrow friends, including Mike Targett, who weighs into the begrudgery debate quoting Wittgenstein:  "The meaning of a word is its use in the language." That is the classic formulation of descriptivism, the reigning philosophy among lexicographers. The trouble with descriptivism is that it leads to definitions like this one, from Merriam-Webster: "biweekly: 1. occurring twice a week; 2. occurring every two weeks." It's true, people use biweekly to mean both things, but sometimes you need a prescriptive dictionary to tell you what a word really means. I'm with Lindsay Brown on that score....

23 May, 2010

Martin MacKinnon writes: I am appalled by these NDP apologists — I do hope they're getting paid — on the  $42,000* press release. Regardless if some of the $42K should not have been included, it did include funding for things like buses and "marketing consultants." If this was a Rodney MacDonald Tory event, I am sure these people would have also pointed out that the $42K was overstated. These NDP'er's are double hypocrites. One because they are governing like Tories (John Buchanan should be proud) and because they told their party members they would govern...

23 May, 2010
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