Steve Maher and Glen McGregor, the two Ottawa reporters who broke the Robocall scandal, have a long story in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen that warrants a close read. The story leads with an account of Liberal robocalls in the Guelph riding on the eve of the May 2, 2011, federal election—calls that expressed dismay at CPC candidate Marty Burke's opposition to abortion "in all circumstances." In a glaring escalation of false equivalence, Maher and McGregor say "revelations" about the automated calls "are giving the Conservatives a new line of defence against allegations of vote suppression and further muddying the events leading up to...

13 March, 2012

The deniers have some explaining to do: The Weather Underground reports that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Climatic Data Center rates last month as the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, while  NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calls it the third warmest (behind June 1998 and June 2009). Both NOAA and NASA rated the year-to-date period, January - June, as the warmest such period on record. Moneyquote: A withering heat wave of unprecedented intensity brought the hottest temperatures in recorded history to six nations in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, in June 2010....

18 July, 2010

Advocates of the Genuine Progress Index argue that traditional measures of our economic health, mainly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), mislead us by mixing up good spending (on the likes of lobster, turnips, and bicycles) with bad (on oil spills, crime, and car crashes), and because it fails to account for depletion of natural resources. Those critiques, while valid and important, don't completely obviate the relevance of GDP. A new chart from Gapminder (previously mentioned in one of my all-time favorite Contrarian posts), shows that higher GDP per person equals longer life: The trend is unmistakable, and at first glance, the...

04 June, 2010

A mysteriously anonymous website, Herald Daily (or at least weekly), has published this intriguing graphic contrasting the population density and land mass of the Earth's 19 most capacious nations. I've included only a stub of the original, very large graphic here. Click on the image to see the whole thing. Hat tip: Flowingdata.com....

15 November, 2009