Alistair Watt writes: The negative effects of living next to a wind power generating station have been known for some time. Consequently, to label opposition to them on that basis as NIMBY is unfair. Not In Anyone's Back Yard (NIABY) would be more appropriate. OK, let's review. We have to do something about electrical generation in Nova Scotia, because we currently burn the dirtiest possible fuel, coal, to produce about 75 percent of our power, and greenhouse gasses pose a grave and urgent risk to the future of the planet.  However: We can't use hydro, because there are no big rivers left to...

16 September, 2009
Contrarian's submission to the National Consultation on Copyright focuses on an issue that has received little attention in the consultation, an area in which current Canadian law provides a striking lack of balance, an issue in which Canadian law is not decades but centuries out of date: the issue of Crown Copyright. To view the submission, please click the "read more" button.
13 September, 2009

At its recent Data Expo, the American Statistical Association held a contest for the best graphical display of the factors involved in commercial flight delays. This image, the second prize winner, from a team at Iowa State University, shows the prevalence of delays by day of the week and time of the year over a five year period. The more delays, the redder the square. Notice how 9/11 really did change everything. Contestants were given a 12-gigabyte dataset consisting of flight arrival and departure information for all commercial flights within the USA, from October 1987 to April 2008. There were...

10 September, 2009

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...

01 September, 2009

We're all familiar with the "you are here" markers, sometimes known as ideo locators, on story-board maps in shopping malls, museums, and parks. But what if maps were actually embedded in the real world. That's what Timo Arnall, a designer & researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, wondered: Map/Territory from timo on Vimeo. Hattip: FlowingData....

19 August, 2009
The Harper Government's consultation on proposed changes to Canada's copyright laws snuck into Halifax Monday for a secretive session with groups representing only industry's side of the copyright debate. There was no advance publicity, news release, or announcement, only private invitations to industry reps favoring greater copyright restrictions. The media and the public were barred, no dissenting voices were heard. University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, Canada's foremost expert on copyright reform, calls the closed-door Halifax session "by far the most one-sided of the consultation, with no voices representing users, libraries, education, or consumer groups."
12 August, 2009

Stephen Taylor, a Conservative blogger who organized a series of rallies to protest last fall's proposed coalition government, has created an extraordinary mashup of poll-by-poll results from the 2008 federal election and Google Earth. The high definition (HD) video may take a few moments to load completely. Elections Canada provides the data that drives this extraordinary tool, but not in a format that Google Earth or Google Maps can read or import. Taylor crashed his computer several times coming up with a program to translate the data into a format Google could use. Taylor's creation will shade each federal poll result according...

10 August, 2009

One of the great things about running a blog is that when you write about something interesting that you know little about, readers rush in with a wealth of further information. Contrarian friend Andrew Weissman directed us to an extraordinary TED talk by Hans Rosling illustrating the phenomenal potential of the digital graphs we touched on this morning. Rosling is a professor of international medicine at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet (the organization that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine). He discovered Konzo, a previously unknown paralytic disease associated with hunger in Africa. He also co-founded the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the...

05 August, 2009

One of the neat developments of the digital era is the rapid advance of what geeks call the visual presentation of numerical information. Just as word processors revolutionized the mechanics of writing, Photoshop revolutionized image manipulation, and Google Earth revolutionized mapping, new digital tools are giving everyday users the power to produce amazingly useful and instructive interactive graphs. Two online newspapers produced beautiful examples this week: USA Today produced this interactive approval tracker comparing the approval rating for all US presidents since Harry Truman. The crimped screen shot reproduced here doesn't even hint at the power of this tool, so...

05 August, 2009
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