An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast's craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson. The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper's website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation. Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them...

12 May, 2010

Nature by Numbers, a four-minute film by Spanish graphic artist Cristóbal Vila, explores the natural world's use of Fibonacci's number, the golden ratio, the golden angle, the Delaunay Triangulation, and Voronoi Tessellations. Very cool. If you know a math teacher, send her the link. View HD version here. Hat tip: FlowingData.com....

12 May, 2010

First Fivethirtyeight.com gets Canadian politics bassackwards, now the Daily Dish's Andrew Sullivan compounds the error: The Americanization of British politics continues. First the TV debates, now fixed parliamentary terms. If that's true, it means that the new government will not be a caretaker before another snap election, but a potential fusion of the Liberal and Tory brands over several years - perhaps the embryo of a whole new center-right party. It feels a little like Canada's Progressive Tories. [Emphasis added.] Canada's Progressive Tories? How is it possible for US* journalists to misperceive Canadian politics so utterly? The Conservative Party of Canada was...

11 May, 2010

We've read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up? Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar's apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote: It has been...

11 May, 2010

Contrarian reader M. Austin writes: Your reporting on Go Ogle taking the pi** out of some has brought to my attention the fact that whiz is spelled with an h. This realisation has me looking at Velveeta's jarred cousin with suspicion....

10 May, 2010

This big: [Correction appended.] Google Engineer Paul Rademacher has produced a tool that will put a shadow the size of the Gulf oil spill anyplace on earth. (You may need to install the Google Earth Browser Plugin, which Rademacher developed, in your browser.) If the spill occurred off Sambro Island near Halifax, the slick would extend from Rose Bay, Lunenburg Co., in the west, to Port Bickerton, Guysborough Co, in the east: Here's how it would look on Sable Island, where Shell Oil's Uniacke G-72 gas well blew out for 13 days in 1984: Here it is on George's (!) Bank, where Canada...

09 May, 2010

Matt McKeon turned the Electronic Freedom Foundation's chronology of eroding Facebook privacy settings into an interactive graphic showing how much of your FB data is visible, by default, to various categories of Internet users, by year. You can get a sense of the problem from these screenshots, but the details emerge best in McKeon's website. Still plotting my escape. Hat tip: Flowing data....

08 May, 2010

Two weeks ago, Contrarian featured a exceptionally funny and creative YouTube video by two dorky techno musicians from Leeds, comprising two-thirds of the Brett Domino Trio. I didn't say so at the time, but these guys strike me as worthy 2010 inheritors of the 1960s folk revival. They make their own music, using an assortment of real and pseudo instruments. They exemplify the indie knack for using the Internet to bypass industry middlemen en route to fans (and, potentially, a living). Here, thanks to James Fallows, is a similar but even more successful YouTube group, Pomplamoose, covering the sublime Chordettes hit, Mr....

08 May, 2010
Show more
Loading...