johnbowman.net

Thanks to The Phantom Observer for reminding me of the idea of online vote tracking for MPs. I e-mailed the guy who runs (or ran) howdtheyvote.ca months ago. It is a lot of work to get that voting data in a usable form. And what votes do you track? Every little motion and amendment? Or just the important stuff? How do you write code that can differentiate that?

I believe he mentioned using a version of Parliament Parser which is used behind the scenes for sites like TheyWorkForYou.com and The Public Whip, both British. The latter’s Ministerial whirl (a Java app that isn’t working for me right now) is a very interesting visualization of cabinet shuffles.

Of course, in the States, all this data is readily available on sites such as the Washington Post’s Votes Database, written by, of course, Adrian Holovaty. It helps that the U.S. government makes so much of its data available in usable (or, at least, scrapable) forms.

Clearly we need to elect more nerds in Canada.

My article about the Canadian farthing has been reddited.

There’s also a Your View discussion going on.

Update Aug. 8:  And dugg!

It looks like this story would be a great case for a critical thinking class.

From the story:

Occasional smokers were 40 per cent more likely to suffer from psychosis, while dedicated tokers who used marijuana daily or weekly increased their risk by 50 to 200 per cent.

From STATS.org:

To epidemiologists a 40% increase is not especially noteworthy– they usually don’t find risk factors worth worrying about until the number hits at least 200% and some major journals won’t publish studies unless the risk is 300 or even 400%.

Next Your Interview podcast:

Sports nutritionist Monique Ryan

CBCNews.ca welcomes sports nutritionist Monique Ryan to answer your questions on Friday, Aug. 3.

Today is the last day you’ll see this on the video player on the CBC News page:

Kdz on ur intar-t00bs, weirdin ur languaj ZOMG!!1!1eleven kthxbi (Runs 2:25)

Click through to the last page (5 of 5).

I wondered at the time if I’d get away with it. Nobody even mentioned it.

The next Your Interview podcast:

Chats: Author Andrea Mandel-Campbell: Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson

CBC.ca welcomes journalist and author Andrea Mandel-Campbell on Thursday, May 24 to answer your questions about Canadian business and her new book Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson.

A proof-of-concept, displaying geographical information stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet on a Google Map, as described here:

Official Google Maps API Blog: Creating Dynamic Client-side Maps Mashups with Google Spreadsheets

The current version, with a lot more information but without a database or spreadsheet back-end, is on the CBC site.

(Grrr… I gotta change my layout. Curse these narrow fixed-width columns.)

(more…)

I’ve been producing a podcast for CBC News Online for a few weeks now and it’s going pretty well. Here’s the next episode:

Chats: Criminal defence lawyer Greg DelBigio on the government’s anti-crime bills

CBC.ca welcomes Greg DelBigio of the Canadian Bar Association on Friday, May 11, to answer your questions about two anti-crime bills the government is currently debating.