The result of a collaboration between Sara Hendren, graduate student at the Harvard School of Design, and Brian Glenney, philosophy professor at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, the revised icon recasts the passive, static International Symbol of Accessibility (demeaningly known as the “handicapped sign”), investing it with vigor and a sense of motion. The Chronicle reports:

New York, in a move that could spark similar updates worldwide, has now agreed to use a Gordon-inspired logo that shows the stick figure with active arms, leaning forward, a participant rather than a dependent.

“It’s such a forward-moving thing,” said Victor Calise, commissioner of the New York mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities, who plans this summer to begin putting the new logo all over the nation’s largest city.

Memo to Mayors Cecil Clarke and Mike Savage:  Which of your cities will seize the honor of becoming the first Canadian municipality to adopt the active symbol for its wheelchair-using citizens?

From the Accessible Icon Project blog, a fuller explanation of how the revised icon reflects the reality of wheelchairs and the people who use them:

1.  Head Position:  Head is forward to indicate the forward motion of the person through space. Here the person is the “driver” or decision maker about her mobility.

2.  Arm Angle:  Arm is pointing backward to suggest the dynamic mobility of a chair user, regardless of whether or not she uses her arms. Depicting the body in motion represents the symbolically active status of navigating the world.

3.  Wheel Cutouts:  By including white angled knockouts the symbol presents the wheel as being in motion. These knockouts also work for creating stencils used in spray paint application of the icon. Having just one version of the logo keeps things more consistent and allows viewers to more clearly understand intended message.

4.  Limb Rendition:  The human depiction in this icon is consistent with other body representations found in the ISO 7001 – DOT Pictograms. Using a different portrayal of the human body would clash with these established and widely used icons and could lead to confusion.

5.  Leg Position:  The leg has been moved forward to allow for more space between it and the wheel which allows for better readability and cleaner application of icon as a stencil.

H/T:  The James MacGregor Stewart Society.

More information about the Accessibility Icon project on Facebook, on Twitter, on the project’s blog, and Sara Hendren’s Ablersite blog.

In his latest report, and in the three press statements he released today to promote it, M. Lapointe complains that only 41 percent of his 2010 recommendations have been implemented to his satisfaction, and only 71 to 79 percent of the recommendations in his reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009. (He didn’t add the “to his satisfaction” qualifier, but it’s worth noting, since Premier Darrell Dexter complained that Lapointe sometimes refuses to sign off on recommendations that have been largely carried out, but for which a few small details are not yet in place.)

Long gone are the days when auditors general confined their attention to ensuring columns of figures add up correctly, and accurately reflect cheques drawn and receipts submitted. Nowadays, the Jacques Lapointes of the world concern themselves with “value audits” that go far beyond objective arithmetic, venturing into subjective, sometimes sweeping, judgments about public policy. Given the range and scope of his reviews — Children’s Services one day, Transportation Department mechanical shops the next — M. Lapointe of necessity spends a good deal of time reviewing matters about which he and his staff are far from expert.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s always good to have independent eyes review important policy matters. It’s also good to remember that elected Members of the Legislature hold the ultimate responsibility for policy. Reasonable and responsible people can and do disagree about such matters. Sadly for him, Lapointe’s is not the last word in a parliamentary democracy.

Finally, the ship of state is more ocean liner than jet ski. Course alterations take time. There should be no surprise that implementation rates are higher for reports submitted in 2007 than in 2010.

I’d like to hear more specifics about which matters remain undone, and the extent to which they are unfinished. The government and its bureaucrats may prove to be dragging their feet. It could also be that some Lapointe recommendations work better in press releases than in practice. Maybe 79 percent isn’t such a bad target.

[video link]

Vitsmun had planned to ride out the tornado with her 19-month-old son Anders by huddling in the bathtub of their home, but 10 minutes before the storm hit, she panicked and fled with with the boy in the family car. She and Anders survived unscathed; their house was flattened.

Encouraging survivors to praise the lord is standard reportorial malpractice in these stories, but the presumptuousness with which Blitzer thrust religion into the interview is arresting, and strikes a marked contrast with atheist Vitsmun’s gracious demurral.

H/T: Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.

Here’s the full interview via The Coast’s Tim Bousquet.

[If the Opposition] would slow down and ask short simple questions, rather these kind of multiple-part grandstanding theatrics, but they don’t seem to be capable of that.

What sort of short questions, host Peter Mansbridge asked.

[S]imple questions of fact that put ministers on the record, where you can then compare what they say on the record with what they say later. It’s more in the nature of the way a lawyer asks questions in court.

It’s hard for them to resist, unfortunately, going for the big windup, you know, the big preamble beforehand, the big stream of accusations. And as we saw with John Baird, anybody who’s got any experience with those is very adept at just swatting them away. It gives him license, frankly, to give non-answers when you don’t ask real questions.

This is obvious to anyone who watches any question period in any Canadian legislature. Why don’t opposition MPs get it, and change their tactics? Perhaps because short, simple, lawyerly questions that build an embarrassing step-by-step case against a government policy or practice do not make onto the nightly television news.

“A jumbled Rubik’s Cube fixed in stone, really heavy stone,” said West Dublin resident Peter Barss, who waxed philoshical about its deeper artistic significance:

A monumental monument to confusion and frustration? A puzzle that never changes… and can never be solved? An implied order, an order that can never be realized? A metaphysical statement about some absolute truth about the universe?

This week, the nerdish joke got better when someone — Glooscap? Giant MacAskill?  — solved the cube.

Contrarian does not condone the defacement of Nova Scota granite, but we are prepared to make an exception in this case.

The late Harry Piers served as curator of the Nova Scotia Museum from 1900 and 1939. He was also Keeper of the Public Records, a position now known as Public Archivist. In these capacities, Piers received and cataloged hundreds of Nova Scotia animal, fossil, plant, and mineral specimens—along with a few crime scene photos.

Piers meticulously recorded each donation, listing its source, date, and location, together with significant details in a series of accession ledgers. Owing to their fragile condition, these records have been largely unavailable for the last half century, but the museum and the archives have recently collaborated on a project to digitize them, giving researchers ready access to the Piers Accession Ledgers.

The two institutions are celebrating the achievement with an online exhibit highlighting 60 of their favorite Harry Piers artifacts. They also produced a short YouTube video about Piers.

Those with a strong stomach may want to begin with images of the barquentine Herbert Fuller, scene of a triple murder described in this July 21, 1896 New York Times dispatch from Halifax.

The Public Archives of Nova Scotia has made great use of digital technology and social media to gain wider exposure for its collections [e.g.: here]. Unfortunately for those wanting to view online artifacts at higher resolutions, the archives employs an unwieldy Adobe Flash viewer that can only zoom into frustratingly small fragments. The effect is like viewing a large painting through a small-diameter tube. An upgrade to HTML-5 imagery is planned, and that should be a big improvement.

In the meantime, the two institutions have kindly granted Contrarian permission to reproduce a full-sized version of my favorite image from the 60 displays, a 1906 reference collection of 100 “economic seeds (useful and noxious plants) of Canada,” prepared by George H. Clark, Seed Commissioner of Canada, and made available to “seed merchants and agricultural institutions” for $2.

You’ll find everything from Hare’s Ear Mustard and Russian Pigweed to Prickly Lettuce and Cow Cockle, each in its own glass vial, capped with an aluminum screw-top, neatly labeled in English and Latin, and secured to the cardboard display by a brass spring clamp.

The image at right shows just one of the vials, containing the blue-grey seeds of common vetch. [Click here to view the whole imagine at this resolution.]

There is something about the variety of shapes, colors, and sizes of plant seeds that captures a naturalist’s fancy—the miniaturization of nature’s infinitely complex blueprint, perhaps, or the magical potential of spring growth.

Do check out the full Piers exhibit for yourself.

[Place-marker here for future discussion] The civil servants responsible for husbanding Nova Scotia’s voluminous documentary and photographic records responded promptly and courteously to my request for an extra large version of this image, and I am grateful to them.

However, antiquated traditions have saddled these officials with a command-and-control approach to record access, complete with application forms, contracts, fees, Crown copyright, etc. This is an artifact of a bygone era, when such resources were precious and scarce. The world has moved on to an economy of abundance in digital and print resources, and the provincial government needs to adjust.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite, soon to be renamed Landsat 8, captured the image from an altitude of 438 miles (705 km.) by assembling 56 photographs taken over a 20-minute period on April 19 into a seamless unit. ThE 15-minute video below traverses its entire length. Be sure to view it in full screen mode by clicking the [   ] full screen icon at the lower right corner of the video, and at the highest resolution your monitor will accommodate by clicking the gear icon and selecting 1080p.

Others ways to view “The Long Swath” include:

• A four-minute compressed version, complete with labels and cheesy musical soundtrack. [Again, use full screen and hi-res.]
• An interactive display using the amazing Gigapan viewer. 

More information here, here. and here. H/T: Digg.com.

Researchers and scientists from the National Museum of American History and the Library of Congress in Washington, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the University of Indiana have collaborated on a project to catalog and decipher the primative recordings, using high-resolution digital scans to convert them to audio files.

One wax-and-cardboard disc, recorded on April 15, 1885, contained a recording of the eclectic inventor himself:

“Hear my voice — Alexander Graham Bell.”

The Canadian writer and Bell biographer Charlotte Gray describes the find in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Gray once asked Dr. Mabel Bell Grosvenor, whether her grandfather had an accent.

“He sounded,” she said firmly, “like you.” As a British-born immigrant to Canada, my accent is BBC English with a Canadian overlay: It made instant sense to me that I would share intonations and pronunciations with a man raised in Edinburgh who had resided in North America from the age of 23. When Dr. Mabel died in 2006, the last direct link with the inventor was gone.

The tantalizingly brief recording reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s voice, but Gray offers a more pertinent association:

In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface to the play).

I heard, too, the deliberate enunciation of a devoted husband whose deaf wife, Mabel, was dependent on lip reading. And true to his granddaughter’s word, the intonation of the British Isles was unmistakable in Bell’s speech. The voice is vigorous and forthright—as was the inventor, at last speaking to us across the years.

H/T: Dave Johnson

Their arguments deserve scrutiny because of what they reveal about the logic underpinning the anti-wind movement.

In a CBC interview this morning, a spokesperson for the NIMBYists pointed to an elderly lifelong Hillside resident who has grown distraught about the project, and worries it will render her unable to live out her years in the beautiful place she has always called home.

Back in March, an Australian researcher cataloged every illness complaint related to wind turbines in that country and concluded that “wind turbine syndrome” was a disease spread by word of mouth. Its prevalence bears no relationship to the number and proximity of wind turbines, but correlates closely with the intensity of nearby protests against wind farms.

The Boularderie NIMBYists have spent months promoting fear of wind farms, with little success. Now they cite the fear they themselves aroused in a single elderly woman as a reason not to allow the project. This is akin to electroseining every fish in a disputed pond, and then citing the lack of fish as a reason to ban fishing.

In their magnanimity, however, the Boularderie NIMBYists would allow the turbines to go ahead as long as they are erected at least two kilometres from the nearest dwelling (a condition that would preclude their location on Boularderie, and virtually everywhere else in Nova Scotia), and as long as the proponents can prove they will do no harm — in other words, unless they prove, not just a negative, but every conceivable negative.

While it is sometimes possible to prove a specific negative proposition, it is impossible to prove an ill-defined an all-encompassing set of imaginary negatives. We’d have a better chance of disproving the existence of Bertrand Russell’s celestial teapot.

The really sad thing is to see environmentalism—probably the most important -ism of our time—distorted and corrupted to fight trivial or imaginary problems, at the expense of fighting real and pressing environmental threats, like emissions from burning coal.

And where do we burn coal? Why at the Point Aconi Generating Station, barely 10 kilometres upwind from Hillside.

Thanks for sharing that wonderful video. It is inspiring to see what creative minds can do when faced with a challenge.

There have been some astonishinglynegativecomments posted on various web sites with respect to the recent generosity of the Fountain family in creating the endowment for Dalhousie’s performing arts program. The gist of much of the derogatory discussion was that there is no value in training people in performance skills.

Well, here is one excellent example of the value of performers to society. I won’t be surprised if this goes viral and breaks all records for fundraising for the Janeway.

[Update] Greg Lukeman points out a New Zealand children’s hospital fundraising video posted  August 27, 2012, that may have provided inspiration for the creators of “Please Whatever Your Name Is” (posted May 15,. 2013).