Do the evolution (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 6:27 PM - 6 Comments

Dan Gardner, who must be having quite the day, responds to Gary Goodyear.

Apparently, the problem here is not merely that the minister of science does not accept the veracity of a basic scientific fact. It’s that he doesn’t have a clue what that scientific fact is.

He also has some words for Radwanski.

On re-announcements

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 6:24 PM - 7 Comments

Today, John Baird dragged the media out to Ottawa’s train station to boast about the $500k they had spent fixing up the bathrooms there. The money was originally announced in 2007. His colleague Peter Mackay is flying around bragging about military spending that has been announced once, twice, maybe even three times before.

The re-annnounce is an old game; it’s the political equivalent of Keynes’ multiplier effect, where one ounce of bullshit miraculously turns into a truckload.  But with billions of money still unspent from the 2007 budget, with actual problems facing the country, is this really the best use of senior ministers’ time? And if so, doesn’t that raise rather profound questions about what we need any of these guys for?

So long Chrysler?

By John Intini - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:49 PM - 3 Comments

Chrysler is already at work preparing a possible shut down of its Canadian operations, reports the Canadian Press. Chrysler president Tom LaSorda said last week the company would leave Canada if it didn’t win substantial labour concessions. That was no idle threat. The company is said to be looking at “alternative locations” for its assembly plants in Brampton and Windsor, where it employs close 10,000 people. The Canadian Auto Workers came to an agreement with General Motors to cut costs (by an estimated $7 an hour) and has said it won’t offer anything more than that to Chrysler. Chrysler, however, says that doesn’t go far enough. It wants to cut wages by more than twice that. If there’s any hope of bridging the gap, it may lie in cuts to workers benefits like paid vacation time and overtime premiums.

Canadian Press

Do the evolution (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:48 PM - 28 Comments

Interviewed on the political chat show that’s named after a hockey term, Gary Goodyear has confirmed his belief in evolution. Sort of.

Jane Taber: So you do believe in evolution. You believe in the theory of evolution. Let’s just get this off the table right now.

Gary Goodyear: We are evolving, every year, every decade. That’s a fact. Whether it’s to the intensity of the sun, whether it’s to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it’s running shoes or high heels, of course, we are evolving to our environment. But that’s not relevant. And that’s why I refused to answer the question. The interview was about our science and tech strategy, which is strong…

From a couple offices over, Wells argues that this is positively Lamarckian (see here, here or here).

Full interview with Goodyear here.

Bad News For Advocates of Longer Episodes

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:40 PM - 1 Comment

Fox’s experiment with “remote-free TV” — a fancy DVR-era name for returning to the old practice of having longer episodes and fewer commercials — didn’t turn out too badly, but it didn’t turn out well enough for them to continue with it. They won’t be repeating it with other shows, and when Fringe returns for another season (and if Dollhouse does) it will probably be back to shorter running times and longer commercial breaks.

But despite positive results from advertisers that participated in the effort, Fox got bogged down in dealing with a smaller pool of TV marketers that will pay a premium to be in a prime-time show with fewer commercials. Plus, Fox incurred some additional costs in producing extra content for the two-hour drama–about five minutes or so.

The cost per thousand viewers (CPMs) are some 25% to 30% higher for two shows compared with shows of similar appeal, according to one media executive. Initially, Fox was asking for a 50% premium.

I still think the idea can work; advertisers like the idea of not having their ads lost in a pile of local ads and promos. And the experiment actually did work in the way it was supposed to, keeping viewers watching the show and the commercials straight through instead of switching to another channel or fast-forwarding through the commercials. This was not a great time to try something that depended on charging higher advertising rates and increasing the per-episode budgets, so the noble cause of fewer commercials/longer episodes may just be a victim of poor timing. I figure someone will try it again, or something like it, if only because the commercial-load has grown to the point where it no longer makes any economic sense. But maybe it would work better with a cheaper show, like a multi-camera comedy, where you can produce additional minutes without the huge costs of a long Fringe episode. (Besides, as I’m always saying, comedies really need an extra minute or two. The 19-20 minute running time is murder on storytelling, while the 40-42 minute running time of an hour-long show is actually not a bad length.)

Confidence man

By John Geddes - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:09 PM - 24 Comments

Central bankers aren’t often looked to for a steady supply of lively quotes. They’re usually so worried about spooking financial markets that they couch every phrase in monetary mumbo-jumbo and economic escape clauses. But Mark Carney, who took over as governor of the Bank of Canada early last year, has a punchier way of expressing himself.

About those reckless lenders who got the world into its current economic mess, he has observed that they were too easily distracted by “opera or the ski slopes of Davos.” Concerning the naysayers who doubt that stimulus policies will restore growth, he’s lectured that “the laws of economics have not been suspended.” And to those who say he’s too much of an optimist, Carney recently rebutted, “We don’t do optimism, we don’t do pessimism. We do realism at the Bank of Canada.”

Continue…

'He also had some important successes'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:01 PM - 17 Comments

Monte Solberg blogs George W. Bush’s speech in Calgary.

I’m at his speech in Calgary. He is well received, and gives an animated and funny speech. He praises Canada. Speaks passionately about democracy and freedom. Good for him.

Lots of anti-Bush nutters outside wearing T-shirts like “investigate 9/11″. Okay….that’s real credible.

Former Ambassador Frank McKenna is interviewing him. Frank just noting that W is credited with saving millions of lives because of his support for malaria eradication and the prevention of aids. Hmmmm the nutters outside didn’t talk about that.

Sure W made mistakes, but a little balance please. He also had some important successes. If you don’t acknowledge those please don’t expect people to take your criticisms seriously. 

Ignatieff is getting better, but is he good enough?

By Andrew Coyne - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 33 Comments

Not long after Michael Ignatieff entered Canadian politics, about the time of his first run for Liberal leader, Maclean’s ran a cover story on him with the memorable title, “Are you good enough for Michael Ignatieff?” It was a funny line, but it also captured the real dilemma that confronts him, as a patrician intellectual who is slumming it in democratic politics, an international media star stooping to, of all places, Canada.

Politics is always a complicated interplay of resentments and insecurities, the public’s as much as the candidate’s. We want them to be better than us in some way, and yet the same as us in others. They have to want the job, but not to need it. It’s a messy, not to say chaotic process, but also incredibly subtle: we have such finely tuned antennae, we humans, for reading each others’ needs and weaknesses—even through a TV set. I suppose what we really want is someone secure enough in himself to be willing to debase himself for our benefit.

Continue…

Afghanistan: a mea culpa, and a growing sense of worry

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 4:47 PM - 9 Comments

Earlier this week I mocked Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon for “taking the weekend off” while extraordinary change was roiling Pakistan. Turns out he was preparing for a trip to Afghanistan, or en route. I know that when you’re about to fly to Afghanistan, it certainly doesn’t feel like taking the weekend off. I’m sorry I wrote what I did.

And now this. Stockwell Day was also on the trip, and he said something really worrisome because it is profoundly out of step with the reality on the ground, and he’s the chairman of the cabinet committee on Afghanistan, and he’s not supposed to be living in Fantasyland.

Mr. Day said he was encouraged by the security situation in Kandahar. The people of the city “are actually beginning to see enough stability that relative prosperity and economic progress is now within their grasp.”

There is simply no objective support for this assertion. The Canadian government has polled on the specific question of Kandaharis’ sense of security; it’s plummetting. As the Globe story points out:

In fact, a press conference with Mr. Day and Mr. Cannon on Sunday had to be moved from the governor’s palace in downtown Kandahar to the PRT grounds for security reasons…

A report by the Canadian government released on March 4 found that security in Kandahar deteriorated in late 2008 as Taliban militants stepped up their attacks and crime spiked.

“In Afghanistan generally, and in Kandahar specifically, security conditions remained especially dangerous and by some measures deteriorated during the quarter,” the report said.

But this is Stockwell Day, isn’t it. I’ve sat in a Centre Block press theatre twice for the release of the government’s quarterly reports on progress in Afghanistan; felt the sinking feeling as nameless officials leave the podium to be replaced by Day; known that that moment marks the end of pertinent answers and the return of… of… of answers from Stockwell Day. As Geddes pointed out last time, if you blame enough quarterly reports on “seasonal” violence, pretty soon you’ll have a full year of bad seasons.

Deaths of coalition soldiers are a handy proxy for civilian deaths in Afghanistan, because the same thing — IEDs — is now doing most of the killing. For coalition troops, January was the deadliest January since this all began in 2001. February was the deadliest February. And March is on track to be the deadliest March.

Leave CNBC Alooooooone

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 4:45 PM - 2 Comments

I was a little underwhelmed by the Stewart/Cramer showdown, but even I can enjoy the fun of Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen — one of the most clueless of all tenured op-ed columnists, possibly even more clueless than Maureen Dowd — writing a whole column about how Stewart was being mean to CNBC and blaming them unfairly and taking a “cheap shot at business media.”

The whole column is a classic example of the “pretend to miss the point” technique. First, acknowledge in passing that you do understand the actual point that was being made. Cohen does this when he makes the concession that “CNBC has often been a cheerleader for the zeitgeist — up when the market’s up, down when it’s down. This is true of the business media in general.” Having conceded the point, he then spends the rest of the piece attacking a straw-man point that was not being made by anyone: namely the idea that CNBC was to blame for the whole bubble or could have single-handedly stopped it. (His proof: there were financial meltdowns and bubbles before CNBC existed!)

When not refuting something that nobody believes, he’s attacking comedians for being uncivil, something he’s done before when he attacked Stephen Colbert for being mean to the President and reporters. (That column started with the following sentence: “First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy.”) Cohen is one of a number of columnists who are obsessed with the importance of civility, the idea that being properly respectful of elites is more important than being right or wrong or saying anything sensible. We saw another example of this recently when CBS’s Chip Reid asked whether the press secretary was being sufficiently respectful of Dick Cheney. Several other network news guys similarly denounced the lack of respect shown to Cheney. Now, apart from the fact that the rules for what is and isn’t properly civil are hard to figure out, this kind of thing means that a lot of columns and cable news minutes are devoted to how someone said something, as opposed to issues and stuff like that.

Do the evolution (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 3:21 PM - 24 Comments

Adam Radwanski on all this nonsense.

I agree wholeheartedly with Kady O’Malley that Gary Goodyear displayed an appalling lack of political acumen in walking straight into a discussion of his belief – or lack thereof – in evolution. Coming so soon after his weird blow-up with representatives of the CAUT, it suggests our science minister is in way over his head in a portfolio that’s taken on more profile than Stephen Harper probably anticipated when he appointed him to it. And yes, Goodyear’s background as a chiropractor is probably not going to help him much in his discussions with Steven Chu.

All that being said, does anyone else get the feeling we’re losing the plot a wee bit here?

More to the point, when people are weary of the viciousness that’s come to characterize federal politics in this country, attacking the personal knowledge or views of your opponents is a dangerous game to play. At least, I’d like to think it is. And I’d also like to think that those of us in my line of work will keep our eye on the ball as much as we’ve implored our politicians to do.   

He then points to another case of religion meeting public policy that might be more worthy of discussion. He might’ve mentioned this too.

Afghanistan: The Americans arrive in the south, and we're not the Americans

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 2:28 PM - 11 Comments

I have been meaning to write about a striking Washington Post article from the weekend about what the new American deployment in the south of Afghanistan entails, but it’s a weirdly busy day around here so I’ll just point you to Mark From Ottawa at the indispensable Torch blog, because he annotates the Post story usefully. Money quote:

People at the regional command now joke that the three provinces should be renamed Canadahar, Helmandshire and Uruzdam [emphasis added].
“It’s a totally dysfunctional way of fighting a war [emphasis added],” said a U.S. officer in the south. “You’ve got each of these guys doing their own thing in their provinces with very little coordination.”

Also note that the new Petraeus-led enthusiasm for importing what worked in Iraq — enticing congenial ethnic factions to do some of the heavy lifting — does not seem to be in the cards for the Afghan south, which is an ethnic stew orders of magnitude more complex and hard to influence than the Iraq or the rest of Afghanistan. This promised restraint is no small blessing, and if it works out this way we can all be grateful.

Layton gets the shiv

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 2:14 PM - 9 Comments

In which Terry Glavin rips Jack Layton’s pretenses on Afgh to shreds.

On the utility of peering into dusty books

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 2:12 PM - 51 Comments

A commenter on my last post asked why I’m willing to say a good word for such silliness as social-sciences and humanities research. Here are some of the winners of top awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s top prizes in recent years. (Full disclosure: I acted as host for this year’s SSHRC awards and was paid at the rate my speakers’ bureau usually charges. I am sure my enthusiasm for social-science research led to the gig, rather than the other way around.)

Ian Hacking:

His wide influence, however, seems natural given the tremendous range of his research. In 1975, he published the Emergence of Probability—a book he today refers to as his first love. It was the first time someone examined the rise of probability and statistical thinking from a historical-philosophical point of view, and it launched a new sub-discipline within the philosophy of science. The Taming of Chance (1990)—named one of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century—expanded on this work, demonstrating how probability moved from the margins of society to mainstream thinking on everything from crime to medicine to debates about free will.

In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (1995) Hacking used the emergence of multiple personality disorder to examine how scientific exploration of social and psychological conditions can produce the very phenomena it studies. In a completely different vein of research, Hacking’s 1983 book, Representing and Intervening, changed the way philosophers approach science by placing how experimental scientists carry out their work on equal footing with theorists. Continue…

Do the evolution

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 2:05 PM - 15 Comments

Dan Gardner reads the front page of the Globe.

I thought it was embarrassing when a chiropractor was appointed Canada’s minister of science and technology.

I thought it was more embarrassing when physicist Steven Chu became US Secretary of Energy, thus setting up future meetings at which American science is represented by a Nobel laureate and Canadian science is represented by a man who thinks putting pressure on the spine is a wonder cure for all that ails us.

And it was still more embarrassing when the Conservative government, in a budget that tossed money to any upstretched hand, actually cut funding for scientific research. This, I thought, is the very depths of embarrassment. It can’t get any worse than this.

Well, I was wrong. Oh lord, oh lord! Was I wrong!

Later, he disagrees somewhat vehemently with our Paul.

The quest for knowledge, in Goodyear and bad

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 12:25 PM - 114 Comments

I’m told that when he was meeting the recipients of the NSERC’s Steacie Fellowships and the nominees for the Herzberg medal yesterday, the Prime Minister expressed surprise that so many were from outside Canada (one’s American, one is Dutch, and one had returned to Canada after spending most of her career in the UK. I may be missing other cases). I can’t imagine why he would be surprised. One of the main selling points of the invigorated national science effort since 1997 is that it has created a climate that makes smart people want to come to Canada. Thousands of researchers from around the world have made Canada their home or returned home from abroad in the last decade. Somebody might have wanted to brief up the PM before yesterday, but apparently the PMO is a little short on people who feel like telling the boss things he wasn’t expecting to hear. Stephen Harper then went on to talk about his plans for more narrowly targeting new research dollars, and for commercializing the products of research. “But we were maybe a bad audience,” one of the researchers told me. “The Steacie Fellows do pure research.”

I am also pleased to announce, given the unpleasantness on the front page of this morning’s Globe, that they believe in evolution. In fact, one of them is a freaking poster boy for evolutionary theory. Continue…

A case, gulp, for paying the AIG bonuses

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 12:01 PM - 10 Comments

You won’t like it, but there is a solid argument in favour of letting AIG pay its employees the controversial $165 million in bonuses. As inconvenient as it might sound, those bonuses fall under contracts that shouldn’t be so easily cast aside by the government. It’s one thing to try and renegotiate them, but to tear them up? Some argue it would lead down a slippery slope, spreading worry through the business community. Sure, the bonuses are going to people who helped create this mess, but they’re also the ones who will help fix it. Arguably, the problem would be made worse if they were driven from their jobs. Perhaps that’s why AIG offered the bonuses in the first place—it knew just how badly it needed to keep some of these people.

The New York Times

Richardson's family reacts to news of actress’s tragic skiing accident

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

The family of actress Natasha Richardson, who is in a Montreal hospital with critical injuries sustained in a skiing accident, have expressed their concern for her health and requested privacy, reports the Telegraph. The UK media is avidly following the sad story due to Richardson’s place in one of Britain’s great theatrical dynasties: her mother is Vanessa Redgrave, with whom Richardson had planned to co-star in a Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Her father was famed film director Tony Richardson; her grandfather was Sir Michael Redgrave and her sister is actress Joely Richardson. The 45-year-old actress is married to actor Liam Neeson, who was filming a movie in Toronto when the accident occurred. They have two sons.

Telegraph.co.uk

Denmark pays women who developed breast cancer after working the night shift

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Denmark’s government has begun paying out compensation to 40 women with breast cancer, after the UN health body said that working nights probably increased the risk of the disease. To qualify for the pay-out, the women could not have had a history of breast cancer in the family, and they must have developed the disease after working at least one night shift a week for 20 to 30 years. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) maintains that shift work is as bad in terms of cancer risk as anabolic steroids, ultraviolet radiation and diesel engine exhaust. Doctors at the IARC believed that alterations in sleep patterns could lower the body’s production of melatonin (which helps prevent cancer).

Telegraph.co.uk

Goodbye, Google?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 7 Comments

Imagine a world without Google, Yahoo! or any other way to find the phone number for that new pizza place on the corner. Terrified yet? You should be, according to the Ottawa Citizen, which reports that a case currently before the BC Supreme Court involving the Canadian Recording Industry Association’s legal threats against tiny BC-based bit-torrent search engine ISOhunt has the potential to plunge Canadian internet users into an information blackout. If the court accepts CIRA’s argument that the search engine should be held liable for any unauthorized download of pirated material by its users, it could apply the same logic to any other search engine that could be used for the same purpose, according the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, which calls this “the most important copyright litigation” currently underway in this country. If that’s the case, the BC ruling could leave even the most law-abiding web user in the dark. 

Ottawa Citizen

Hollywood hates California, loves Canada

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

As the Hollywood studios start shooting pilots for the new TV season, they’re filming everywhere except Hollywood, where production costs are too high and tax incentives too low. That means that after several years when Canada wasn’t being used for many big network pilots, U.S. production companies are once again coming to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal to film their vampire stories and relationship comedies. Of course, if Governor Schwarzenegger  gets his tax-break program in place, the studios may abandon Canada and go back to California. They’re fickle that way.

Variety

Rethinking business school

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Did business programs contribute to the financial crisis? With the economy in freefall, the New York Times traces the history of business schools, from the reform efforts of the 1950s to the current call to implement standards and a code of ethics. Critics argue that the degree that’s long been key to lucrative Wall Street finance careers has focused too much on making money, leaving grads unprepared to mitigate disaster.   

The New York Times

Even J-school students don't read newspapers anymore

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

According to research conducted by a professor at the Queensland University of Technology, nine out of 10 journalism students in Australia don’t read newspapers. It’s not that they’re not interested in following the news, says Alan Knight; it’s just that they’d rather get their fix from a television or the Internet. The most common complaints against newspapers were that they contain “too many long-winded articles,” “you have to buy them,” “they fall apart,” as well as the time-tested grievance that “they get ink on your fingers.” Knight found that students strongly believe newspapers will eventually give way to other news sources, but if it’s any comfort to the ink-stained wretches who work in the newspaper industry, Knight predicts “it’ll take a long time for them to die.”

ABC News

Airlines may have to step up for losing luggage

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

The European Union’s transport commissioner has launched an investigation into how unlucky passengers are compensated when airlines lose their luggage. The investigation is in response to the Air Transport Users Council in Britain saying some passengers are left paying serious “out of pocket” expenses when airlines don’t fully meet compensation requests. Over 42 million bags went missing around the world in 2007 (up 8 million from the previous year). The EU office handling the investigation has said guidelines over compensation regarding lost luggage would become stricter if the investigation found they were ineffective.

Guardian.co.uk