wolfewylie

Snow is community-building.

Honestly: All I could want. Tron Legacy was mediocre at best, but elevated because Daft Punk made it work. NIN is what sells this movie.

Imagine all cars were electric, and then one Volkswagen engineer comes up with another idea …

#EMobility

Something I worked on recently with CBC's new Visual Investigations unit.
www.bing.com/search?q=htt...

#whitesupremacy #neofascism #journalism

Map the Govt. of Canada + Miro This takes the open data from the Government of Canada phone book and inverts it into a tree of each department's structure.

An #OpenData project: A full org chart of the entire Government of Canada using employee contact information, built as a Miro plug-in for easy implementation and visualization. Both en Francais and in English.

Tool: miro.com/marketplace/...

Github: github.com/wolfewylie/g...

Trump order prompts Canadian cancer research group to scrub gender-inclusive language from U.S.-funded trials Critics say the Canadian Cancer Trials Group’s decision to remove the wording gives in to political overreach and undermines scientific integrity

Scoop: Canadian cancer research group scrubs gender-inclusive language from U.S.-funded trials to comply with Trump executive order:
www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/e0c398c...

Manually editing XML to update an RSS feed for a student media podcast; Google Reader always open; keeping my Blogspot updated.

New fentanyl data undercuts White House’s portrayal of Canada’s role in U.S. drug crisis Fentanyl identified as coming from Canada amounted to barely more than one-10th of 1%, according to data obtained through American freedom-of-information laws

That 43 pounds of fentanyl that was the Trump administration's legal justification for imposing tariffs on Canada?

Just 0.74 pounds – or 0.13% – has been positively attributed to Canada, according to new data obtained by The Globe's Kathryn Blaze Baum:
www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

The pace of FOI in Canada...

* I filed a request for ER data with Alberta Health Services in August. I asked for stats in machine-readable format.

* They respond in November, with 66 PDF pages.

* I file a complaint. Finally they relented today and sent me the records in Excel spreadsheets. (1/n)

YouTube video by Jeff Douglas We Are Canadian

This actually made me cry. So good.
We are Canadian.
youtu.be/_OzbmriDgQc

No, USAID Isn’t Giving Billions to Canadian Universities | The Tyee The American agency is not funding the ‘woke indoctrination’ of youth in Canada, no matter what you read on X.

Pretty sure some of the uni comms I contacted for this piece thought I was an idiot for even asking. But that's my promise to you: I will ask the dumb Qs. via @thetyee.ca thetyee.ca/News/2025/02...

A shadow war on libraries Some Canadian politicians and influencers, inspired by an American-born movement, are trying to roll back 2SLGBTQ+ rights in Canada — one book at a time.

A shadow war on libraries: 📚 Some Canadian politicians and influencers, inspired by an American-born movement, are trying to roll back #2SLGBTQ+ rights by limiting what Canadians can read — one book at a time. www.cbc.ca/newsinteract... via @cbcnews.ca

Here’s how to share sensitive leaks with the press Thinking about securely leaking information to news organizations? This guide will show you how.

I'm just going to leave Freedom of the Press Foundation's excellent guide to leaking to the press right here in case anyone happens to need it: freedom.press/digisec/blog...

Over the past 4–5 years, Facebook has sunset tools (chiefly CrowdTangle) used by researchers and journalists, made data difficult and expensive to get, and iced out academics studying disinformation.

Now, it's shutting down the fact checking on its platform.

This is my regular callout for pitches for the Globe and Mail's business opinion section. Pitch me at elou@globeandmail.com. For reference, these are the pieces that have run in my section: https://buff.ly/44EmWcA.

Next time you're walking through a "quiet residential neighbourhood" in Toronto, keep a look out for corner lots with excessively large large windows & doorways along the corners.

Those are all former stores.

This. Indy markets, stuff you found on your travels, small artisan shops: A little basket of delicious things is always a hit.

The LGBTQ2S+ community is not a bunch of different coloured houses on a block, one for each letter, where we lend each other sugar once in a while.

We all live in the same big communal lodge. A lot of us are a few different letters. We are fluid. We are intersectional. And we are in this together.

Life of the Mother When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, doctors warned that women would die, but lawmakers who passed state abortion bans didn’t listen. The worst consequences are now becoming clear.

👋 new followers … I’ve been helping lead this project at ProPublica about preventable maternal deaths in states that ban abortion: Amber Thurman and Candi Miller in Georgia. Josseli Barnica, Nevaeh Crain and Porsha Ngumezi in Texas. Here’s our coverage so far … www.propublica.org/series/life-...

Catch up with the State of Open Data in the 9th yearly survey from Digital Science. See what others are doing and what the possibilities might be for your research data.

It's fascinating reading - enjoy!

It lives here: litigate.com/assets/uploa...

I'll, of course, be watching this one evolve very closely.

The part of this case that makes me nervous is shifting that benefit of the doubt on Terms of Use violations in favour of site owners, which could make some forms of data journalism in Canada more legally difficult. Certainly some of my past reporting was done in violation of those Terms.

But the bulk of the statement of claim focuses on a violation of the terms of use of the websites for commercial gain. Canadian courts have been hesitant to come rule against terms of use claims in the past, to the benefit of journalism organizations that use website data for research in reporting.

The critical part I'll be watching is (b) where very little case law exists in this country.

In short: "Through its conduct, OpenAI has and
continues to: (a) Infringe, authorize, and/or induce the infringement of ... copyright ... (b) Circumvent the technological protection measures employed ... to protect the Works ...; and, (c) Breach the Terms of Use of the ... Websites."

This case is going to be enormously important for journalism and copyright law in Canada, particularly as it'll be one of the most significant cases to talk about web scraping in a generation. litigate.com/assets/uploa...

OPINION The bike lane debate isn't a war on cycling - it's a war on data SARAH ELTON AND MADELEINE BONSMA-FISHER CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED 3 HOURS AGO A car stops halfway into the dedicated eastbound bike lane on Bloor St. West near Huron St., in Toronto, on July 9, 2018. FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

く Sarah Elton is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology. Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher is a Data Sciences Institute postdoctoral fellow in civil and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto.

Innumerable studies conducted in cities around the world have found that safe bike infrastructure has many other benefits. For example, people arriving by car spend less money at main street businesses serviced by bike lanes in comparison to people arriving by bike - and cyclists also stop at these businesses more often than drivers do. This has been known for a long time. Ten years ago, a study from New York City's Department of Transportation evaluated case studies where active transportation infrastructure was added and found higher sales relative to comparison sites. That's not to mention the individual benefits of improved health supported by safe infrastructure, as well as the money that people save when they replace car trips with cheaper transportation, or the shared benefits of reducing air pollution and helping to meet urban sustainability goals.

There is a lot of data to support expanding bike lanes. Yet the provincial government plans to destroy existing infrastructure, regardless of the cost to taxpayers, and prevent new safe cycling infrastructure investments if they take space away from drivers. What we see here is a contest over what informs transportation and infrastructure policy: either that irritated feeling you get when you're stuck in traffic, or actual data-driven evidence. Ripping up bike lanes based on frustration is bad policy. Canadians may think that post-truth policy-making is a condition more prevalent south of the border, but buckle up: With Doug Ford in the driver's seat, frustration - not data - is leading the way.

The facts don’t lie even as this government tries it’s best to do and say otherwise.

Fantastic deconstruction of Bill 212 in the @theglobeandmail.com via @sarahelton.bsky.social and @mbonsma.bsky.social

h/t @uoft.bsky.social www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

Please allow opt-out from firehose/API download. Your promise that Bluesky will not train AI on user data was nice. But open data lets everyone else do it easily. Yes, public posts could be scraped by other means, but that’s more work & you can block it by behavior pattern.