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As journalism instructor Steve Doig correctly notes:

“…estimating the size of crowds at mass public events is much more about public relations than a quest for truth. Whether the crowd is gathering for an anti-war protest, a sports team's victory parade, a golf tournament, a pope's outdoor Mass or the swearing-in of the most powerful man on Earth, organizational reputations and personal egos are ballooned or deflated by public perceptions of whether the crowd is surprisingly large or disappointingly small …”

Indeed, as NBC Chicago is reporting, some civic officials are pushing for an accurate official headcount:

“I am an advocate for open and transparent government,” D.C. Council member Kwame R. Brown said in a statement Friday. “If there is a way to provide an accurate count of how many people attended this historic inauguration, the information should be made available to the public.”

Most organizers say that Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration could draw the largest crowd to Washington in modern times. In a hair-raising moment for some inaugural planners, District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said 3 million or more people might show up, more than double the 1.2 million at Lyndon B. Johnson's inauguration in 1965, the largest turnout the Park Service has on record.

But how do you get those numbers? Are they accurate? It's a important part of a journalist's job who is covering such an event is getting an accurate crowd count even if there are “official” or “police” sources giving one a head count.

Personally, I can't remember ever covering an event where there was a crowd that wasn't too big to actually count. So that's what I do. But when you're talking 100,000 plus or an area that is just too large to see from one vantage point, you've got to be creative. Doig, in his piece, reviews some of the creative ways journalists have tried to accurately estimate crowd size.

And then Doig does the math on the crucial question: Could 2 million people actually jam the Washington Mall to watch Obama's inauguration? His answer is no but you'll want to read his piece to find out how many he believes could fit there.

The New York Times has a neat graphic which takes a look at this issue, as well.

And here's a great statistical nugget I did not know before. Doig has calculated that if a human being who is standing up needs about 10 square feet of space (what he calls the “loose crowd” standard), you could get every single human being on Earth into Miami-Dade County at the tip of Florida. Wow.)

Technorati Tags: journalism

A lobbyist friend here in Ottawa who works on issues that help promote Canadian research and development sends me this note today:

“In all the discussions about Nortel, one point that hasn't been made is that Nortel accounts for about one-third of all the commercial R&D done in Canada. If it goes south in bits and pieces, that would be double jeopardy – short term job losses coupled with longer term loss of R&D capacity in Canada.”

CTV Newsnet debuted its new afternoon politics show today. You'll remember that that show was called Mike Duffy Live but that name, of course, is now a little problematic. (I don't know why they couldn't have had a little fun and called it Mike Duffy's In the Senate).

So what's the re-branded show called? On the Hill.

Wait a minute. I'm On the Hill !

Couldn't they have called it Inside the Queensway ? Or Beyond the Commons ? or Capital Diary ? Or Political Bytes ? What about Question Period ? Why not make that franchise a six-day-a-week affair?

Oh well. On the Hill it is. Good luck with it CTV Newsnet!

For most of the 1980s I was a fixture on the second floor of the University Centre or UC at the University of Guelph. Those who went to Guelph will know what this means. The second floor was the location of the offices for the university's and each college's student government, for both student newspapers, and for the campus radio station. I was on the board of the student government, the Central Student Association or CSA; spent a decade at the paper, The Ontarion , eventually becoming it's editor-in-chief; and for most of the 80s, had a weekly morning show on CFRU, the radio station. I started volunteering on the second floor in 1981 when I was 17, two years before I actually became a student at Guelph, and, despite my best attempts to stay there forever, I didn't leave the place until the early 1990s.

One of the things I Ioved about Guelph at the time was that its politics were decidedly anti-establishment. Guelph stood up for the underdog, for peace, for social justice and for tolerance. Some called us leftist and, for some, that might have been true. I don't think I was that dogmatic and I know that some of my contemporaries at the time — people like Mike Wallace, now the Conservative MP from Burlington but back then, a leader of the student government for one of university's colleges — would vote and work for both the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties at election times.

Still, it seemed to me that, for the course of a decade, The Ontarion's writers and editors and most of the leaders of the student government had a decidedly anti-establishment bent particularly compared to our student politician/journalist contemporaries at Western, McGill or Toronto, I'm certain I was the author of anti-free trade columns, for example, and was no fan of then prime minister Brian Mulroney. And no one I knew then thought much of Ronald Reagan and the military activities of the U.S. in Central America. Guelph was radical enough, in fact, that we had not one, but two very active student communist clubs — the Maoists had their office and the Marxist-Leninists had theirs. And I loved all that radicalism.

With that context, let me now say how saddened and ashamed I was this morning to see, thanks to a pointer at The Torch, a hateful and vicious smear at the online newsletter of the Central Student Association. I have never, in more than 25 years as a professional journalist ever written a letter to the editor complaining about somone's coverage or asking for someone to censor themselves but I did so today. I believe that speech must be free and should have as few limits as possible, even if that speech is occasionally hurtful. But this morning's piece, its placement, and its prominence was beyond the pale so here's what I wrote:

Hello —

As an otherwise proud University of Guelph alumni, a former Ontarion Editor-in-Chief, and a former Central Students Association board member, I ask you to consider removing the piece found here:

http://www.thecannon.ca/viewpoint_details.php?id=7723

This is a piece the editors of the Cannon.ca now have at the top of its main index page with the absolutely shameful headline “U of G to honour war criminal”.

As a journalist, I encourage and defend robust discussions of Canada's foreign policy and recognize that participants on all sides will have opinions and views which others in the debate may find objectionable. I'm personally and professionally committed to fair and accurate presentations of this discussion.

But labelling any individual “a war criminal” is a tremendously serious charge. Not only that, I suspect your lawyers would advise you that you have just committed monstrous libel. I know the lawyers who work for our chain would provide that advice.

More seriously, though, your vicious attack on Canada's former chief of defence staff does little to advance any debate on an important public policy issue. And to allow such a smear to be published in a forum which claims to speak for “the undergraduate students at the University of Guelph” brings dishonour to the University, the CSA and the those undergrads.

I often get asked, usually by colleagues, where I find the time to blog and why would I want to blog.

Well, here's an answer: On average, just under 100,000 different people are dropping by here every month. And I don't know many journalists who'd pass up a chance to tell 100,000 people something they don't know.

So, first: Thanks all for dropping by.

I just ran some of the big numbers on 2008 and found that:

• This blog served up more than 2.1 million page views in 2008.
• This blog average 99,213 unique visitors each month. What does that mean? Well, if you drop by here once or a 100 times in a month, you only count once as a “unique visitor”. So unique visitor is the closest thing to what newspapers talk about when they talk about their circulation figure.
• The best month for traffic here was last month, with more than 127,000 unique visitors. The slowest month was July with about 70,000 unique visitors.

And here are the 20 most popular posts on this blog for the month of December, 2008 (If you want to review any of these, just select and copy the title, paste it into the search box on the left, and away you go):

1. This ain't the Canadian way (Wed 03 Dec 2008 06:06 PM EST)
2. Liberals want answers (Mon 15 Dec 2008 10:41 AM EST)
3. The Senate Man (Fri 12 Dec 2008 10:18 AM EST)
4. The errant e-mail (Mon 01 Dec 2008 02:36 PM EST)
5. 24 Sussex Drive — Great for street hockey (Mon 19 Jun 2006 10:46 AM EDT)
6. F-35 – Test Flight (Wed 10 Jan 2007 03:07 PM EST)
7. More senators — lots more senators (Wed 10 Dec 2008 10:54 PM EST)
8. Can Iggy transform the Liberals? Can he transform Canadian politics? (Tue 09 Dec 2008 11:02 PM EST)
9. And that's that: Parliament prorogues (Thu 04 Dec 2008 02:47 PM EST)
10. Ramping up (Sat 26 Nov 2005 11:08 PM EST)
11. Will PM Dion bunk in at Motel 8 and shun 24 Sussex, like he said he would? (Tue 02 Dec 2008 10:29 AM EST)
12. Ignatieff on liberalism and the Canadian Liberal Party (Tue 09 Dec 2008 04:14 PM EST)
13. Michael Ignatieff on liberalism and the Canadian Liberal Party (Fri 04 Mar 2005 09:34 AM EST)
14. Dion resigns (Mon 08 Dec 2008 01:43 PM EST)
15. Harper promises “unprecedented fiscal actions” to calm “state of fear” (Fri 21 Nov 2008 10:00 PM EST)
16. Look out! It's the Duceppetives! (Wed 03 Dec 2008 11:37 AM EST)
17. Poilievre announces budget date (Sat 29 Nov 2008 03:29 PM EST)
18. Mercedes' SmartCar (Thu 20 Jan 2005 01:03 PM EST)
19. A very special 40th anniversary: Your Computer Mouse (Sun 07 Dec 2008 10:05 PM EST)
20. The anti-abortion MPs (Fri 12 May 2006 07:00 AM EDT)

Again – thanks!

Automotive consultant Dennis Desrosiers recently updated his list of the top-selling cars and light trucks [PDF] in Canada. Here's a slightly edited version his rankings with the manufacturer and model, the number of units sold for the first 11 months of 2008 and the percentage change in units sold compared to the first 11 months of 2007:

Cars

1. Honda Civic – 68,904 – 8 %
2. Toyota Corolla – 55,535 – 44 %
3. Mazda3 – 47,351 – 3.5%
4. Toyota Yaris – 39,416 – 20.1%
5. Chevrolet Cobalt – 32,231 – 4.4%

Of some note, four of the top-selling cars in Canada are made by Toyota: Corolla, Yaris, Camry and Matrix. Two are made by General Motors, the Cobalt and the Pontiac G5. Ford has one: The Focus was number 10. Chrysler and Nissan failed to place any car in the top 10. Honda and Hyundai each had one in the top 10.

Light trucks

1. Ford F-Series – 63,977 – -6.7 %
2. Dodge Ram – 39,350 – 2.4 %
3. Dodge Caravan – 37,587 – 25.6 %
4. Chevrolet Silverado – 32,265 – -12.7 %
5. GMC Sierra – 32,161 – -13.5 %

Looking just at those two top five lists, you'll being to get a sense of the problems the Detroit Three are having. For the Detroit Three, the franchise has been pickup trucks and minivans. Chrysler did OK with its best-selling pickup truck the Dodge Ram, but sales of the minivan Caravan plummeted. Desrosiers says that overall sales of small pickups was down 6.7 for the year at the end of November. Large pickup sales were off 9.2 per cent. Minivan sales plunged 17.4 per cent.

Meanwhile, Toyota is seeing a great year with the RAV4 SUV, with YTD sales up 31.7 %. Honda saw sales of its CRV jump 3.8 %. Both the RAV4 and CRV made the light truck top ten.

It wasn't so bad with cars. Sales of subcompacts are up nearly 21 per cent and compacts are up 9.1 per cent. so if you are, like Toyota with top-selling subcompacts (Yaris) and compact (Corolla), you had a great year.

The car segments that lost ground so far in 2008: Sport (-16.3%), Mid-size (-4.8%), Luxury high-end (-12.7%) and Luxury Sport (-8.9 %).

Zogby International has released its fourth annual New Year's Eve poll, a telephone survey of 2,000 Americans commissioned by the good folks who bring you New Year's Eve in NYC's Times Square. The headline on the poll is a result you probably didn't need to poll on: Americans are less optimistic this New Year's than they were a year ago.

But dig deeper into the poll for these nuggets:

• Two-thirds of all respondents said they will kiss a loved one at midnight but one in five said they will kiss no-one.
• More people will kiss a pet at midnight than kiss a person.
• 69% expect their kiss to last “a few seconds,” 11% expect it to last “a minute or two,” and 6% expect it to last “until the next morning.” (I hope those are not the people kissing their pets!)
• Apparently Democrats are more likely than Republicans to spend NY Eve with a pet than a friend. Poor old Democrats. If you know one, phone him or her up and invite them out with you on New Year's Eve.
• Respondents were asked: Would you rather spend New Year's Eve with Sarah Palin or Tina Fey? Results were pretty evenly split with 39 per cent on each side.
• When asked to name someone or something that they'd like to bid “good riddance” to with the passing of 2008, the most common answer was “George Bush”. Bush was mentioned twice as often as the number two “good riddance” item which was the 2008 U.S. election.

Technorati Tags: polls

Snapped pics of and then processed 59-odd album and 12″ single covers today. The results have been posted at Facebook and you don't need to be my FB friend to see them.

Technorati Tags: barry manilow, dolly parton, frank sinatra, james bond, judy garland, kingbees, mills brothers, pere ubu, primal scream, queen latifah, steve martin

Some excerpts from an essay by Georgetown University law professor David Cole:

The critical question, now that the administration is changing hands, is how to address the fact that the United States after September 11 adopted an official practice of cruel, inhuman, and degrading interrogation tactics, some of which . . . rose to the level of torture. Some, including current Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former Bush administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith, have argued that no further investigations, much less prosecutions, are needed, and we should simply move on . . .

. . . [What about] the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which holds that any country has the right to prosecute certain war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter where or by whom they were committed, so long as it observes the fundamental requirements of a fair trial. [There was the] landmark UK extradition case against General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, in which the UK's Law Lords ruled that even a former head of state was not immune to prosecution by a foreign country (Spain) for torture and other crimes against humanity . . . Still, as a matter of realpolitik, it is difficult to imagine any nation greeting the Obama administration with an international prosecution of former high-level US officials.

Criminal prosecution within or outside the United States is highly unlikely.

But even if criminal prosecution seems unlikely, the acts of the past administration demand accountability. Here's what Eric Holder, whom Obama will nominate as attorney general, said several months ago:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution…. We owe the American people a reckoning.

. ..there has been no official acknowledgment of high-level criminal wrongdoing. The treatment of prisoners authorized by the administration clearly violated the prohibitions on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment contained in Common Article 3 and the Torture Convention; and waterboarding unquestionably qualifies as torture. All these violations were war crimes. Yet no high-level official has been held accountable for the torture policy.

Here are the leaders of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, commenting on the release, on Dec. 11, of their committee's report following an 18-month investigation into torture techniques in the U.S. military:

McCain: ““The Committee’s report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody. These policies are wrong and must never be repeated.”

Levin: “The abuses at Abu Ghraib, GTMO and elsewhere cannot be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples. Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable. The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees. Our investigation is an effort to set the record straight on this chapter in our history that has so damaged both America’s standing and our security. America needs to own up to its mistakes so that we can rebuild some of the good will that we have lost.”

Sensing a chance to get rid of the 1,000-plus vinyl records in our basement, my wife Colleen bought me the coolest Christmas gift I've had in a while: a USB turntable. This is a regular turntable that plays 45 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm records but, in addition the regular phono jacks which you'd connect to your amplifier, there's a USB cable dangling out the back of the unit which you connect to your computer. Find some decent audio software — I'm using Audacity for the Mac (which, though useful, is still might flaky) — and, presto, you're puttin' your vinyl on yer iPod.

Of course, as any vinyl fan knows, one of the chief attractions to that format is the album cover itself. The CD jewel case area just can't compare to the canvas that is the cardboard that encases your 12″ of vinyl.

Now for some of my records, neither iTunes nor any of the databases that store album art, has a digital cover version so I'm taking pics of them and posting them here. (Well, actually, I'm posting them via my Facebook account but this is the public link to them.) Up tonight, the following:

Jimmy Durante: At the Piano In Person (top left)

Sal Solo: Sandamiano

Topper Headon: Drumming Man

Otto Klemperer • Philharmonia Orchestra: Beethoven: Symphony #3

Various Artists: Dynamic Sounds (K-tel 1974 collection)

Various Artists: Hurt So Bad – Rock Of Ages Early Sixties Soul

Various Artists: I Want To Take You Higher – Rock of Ages American Soul

Technorati Tags: beethoven, jimmy durante, k-tel, soul music, sal solo, sal solo, Topper Headon