Sorta, Kinda Owning the Podium

Further to all our handwringing over "Own the Podium", as it turns out, Canadian athletes competing at Vancouver 2010 did just about that: 

How to describe Canada's shocking success at the 2010 Winter Olympics? Here's one way: Canada won more gold medals in Vancouver than the United States and Russia … combined.

 

Going into these games, Canada had never won a gold medal on home soil. But by the time Sidney Crosby's wrist shot beat Ryan Miller in the overtime of yesterday's glorious men's hockey final, we'd won 14 — more than any other nation in the history of the Winter Olympics. This newspaper would like to add its voice to those congratulating our Olympic athletes for their stunning accomplishment.

 

The all-too-Canadian irony of it all is that many pundits have spent the last two weeks wringing our hands over Canada's supposedly disappointing performance.

 

The slogan "own the podium" — along with the declared goal of beating the world in total medal count — was mocked as arrogant and unrealistic. (By this tally, we came in third, behind the far more populous nations of United States and Germany.) Yet as far as most of the world is concerned, “owning the podium” is exactly what we did. A focus on total medal count is a unique quirk of North American sports culture: In the rest of the world, the currency of a national squad’s Olympic success comes in only one colour.  

No doubt, Canadians are feeling especially jubilous this Sunday, especially given how the men's hockey turned out.

 

Was this all money well spent? Are we better off today for having witnessed Canadian athletes soar to new heights at these games?

 

Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner asks some difficult questions: 

But why are we proud? That question brings me to the hard way to criticize the Olympics.

 

A legion of analysts has crunched the numbers to figure out what factors determine a country's medal haul at the Olympics. The evidence suggests four factors matter most.

 

Not surprisingly, the size of the country's population makes a big difference. So does the country's gross domestic product. There's also a small bump from hosting the Games. And lastly, "the best predictor of success in winning medals is the absolute amount of funding allocated to higher performance sports," writes Peter Donnelly, director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at the University of Toronto.

 

Spend more money and, other things being equal, you will get more medals. It's that simple. Analysts and officials know this. They even make dollars-per-medal calculations.

 

 (...)

Stand back and look at Olympic funding around the world and it's obvious that nations are locked in an arms race. Each seeks to beat the other by boosting funding but they find it is harder and harder to pull ahead by spending more. Worse, "it costs more and more money even to stay in the same place in the medal tables," notes Peter Donnelly.

 

Now, does any of this sound like a fair athletic contest? Not really. It's a funding competition. The "winners" are those countries most willing to take money from health care and jobs and other national priorities and spend it on the Olympics.

 

Canada could win this competition, if that's what Canadians want. We're a rich country. We could outspend the Chinese. For a while.

 

But would that be something to be proud of? No. It would be foolish. And shameful.  

A national conversation worth having - once our collective hangover wears off.

Herald Column: The Wrong Questions on Minimum Wage

Further to issues discussed in this post, this week's Calgary Herald column from yours truly explores the debate over minimum wage following the government's decision to freeze the wage here in Alberta:

...[Edmonton Tory MLA Naresh] Bhardwaj was expressing his concern over the decision to freeze Alberta's minimum wage at $8.80 an hour.

He wondered why the recently introduced policy of indexing the minimum wage to average weekly earnings was abandoned, and pointed out that other provinces are increasing their minimum wage.

Of course, any policy, regardless of its age, should be reassessed if it no longer makes sense. Moreover, policy decisions should be based on facts, not based on a tally of what's being done elsewhere.

However, it is certainly true that this month's decision to freeze the minimum wage is an abrupt policy shift.

In March of 2008, in announcing the new policy, Premier Stelmach declared that it would "ensure that minimum-wage earners share in Alberta's continuing economic prosperity."

The following March, when the minimum wage was increased to its current level, the government boasted that minimum wage earners would be "as protected as possible during these changing times”

Now, though, in announcing the wage freeze, the government is telling us how this decision will protect jobs and help keep small business viable.

That severely undercuts the rhetoric from 2008 and 2009, and would seem to be an admission that minimum wage increases are indeed a threat to jobs and a threat to small business viability.

Perhaps the government's proposed all-party committee review can examine the question of whether we need a minimum wage.

The ostensible purpose of having, and then increasing, a minimum wage is to "help" those holding low-skill, entry level jobs.

In order to accept the premise that they are being "helped", one must look solely at wages: going from $8 to $10-an-hour, for example, would indeed appear to be an improvement.

However, if that increase has been forced upon your employer, and your employer's earnings are stagnant or worse, where is that increase going to come from?

It may mean that positions are cut, or that hours are reduced. It might mean that benefits are trimmed or training opportunities eliminated.

If you go from 40 hours a week at $8 an hour, to 30 hours at $10 an hour, simple math tells you that you've actually just received a pay cut. Factor in lost benefits and/or on-the-job training and it's hard to see how you've been "helped".

Of course, another way an employer would cover the cost of a mandated wage increase would be to simply raise prices. So now the employee working fewer hours (assuming he still has a job) and earning less now has to pay more for goods and services.

As the late Ronald Reagan so aptly put it, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

The negative impact of minimum wage policy can be seen through the research on the subject.

As the Fraser Institute has pointed out, a major review by two economists of more than 100 studies from 20 countries found that the "overwhelming majority" consistently show decreases in employment stemming from minimum wage increases.

As we all know (or should know), it is the marketplace which determines the value of certain skills, and therefore the value of certain jobs.

If we really want to help those with few skills, and therefore what is likely to be a low-paying job, then we ought to find ways of helping those people make themselves more marketable. Minimum wage increases do nothing to help in that capacity, and may actually accomplish the opposite.

Unfortunately, it's easier for politicians to simply mandate a higher minimum wage and bask in the glory of being the perceived champion of the working class.

Coma Man Debunked

Remember "Coma Man"? 

 

 

We discussed the matter back in November - you can read more here, including audio from our interview with leading skeptic Michael Shermer.

 

It would now seem that all those expressing skepticism about this case have been proven correct (emphasis added): 

...The staff at (Rom) Houben's care center first tried an on-screen keyboard that he could operate using his right index finger, which is not fully paralyzed. For a while, it seemed like a good idea and, after some practice, Houben was able to type rather quickly. He made many mistakes, but his messages were understandable. Still, using that method required the assistance of a speech therapist, who stood behind him to support his hand.

At one point, Laureys, the neurologist, claimed that he had ruled out the possibility that it was actually the speech therapist doing the writing. But it turns out that his checks weren't quite thorough enough. Obtaining reliable results requires a rather protracted procedure. Patients with serious traumatic brain injuries are not always capable of following difficult instructions. They also sleep a great deal, and sometimes they sink into extended periods of delirium. In order to rule out false negative results, repeated tests need to be conducted over the course of several weeks.

Laureys has now carried out those tests, and his results hold that it wasn't Houben doing the writing after all. The tests determined that he doesn't have enough strength and muscle control in his right arm to operate the keyboard. In her effort to help the patient express himself, it would seem that the speech therapist had unwittingly assumed control. This kind of self-deception happens all the time when this method -- known as "facilitated communication" -- is used. 

More here and here, where Steven Novella observes: 

Rom Houben’s story has grown to encapsulate the plight of those with disorders of consciousness, our attempts to better assess and communicate with them through advancing technology, and the mischief that can still be caused by lingering pseudosciences. It is truly a scandal that FC is still around. Like homeopathy, therapeutic touch, and many similar medical pseudosciences – their persistence is not a failure of science, which has adequately shown them to be nothing but illusions, but rather of collective rationality

A Good Week for Science (And a Bad Week for Antivaxxers)

Better late than never: 

For a decade, many parents have worried that vaccines might somehow be causing autism in children. Repeated assurances from respected experts that there is no link have failed to quiet those fears. Now The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal that published the paper that first gave wide credence to those fears, has retracted it, saying that the paper’s authors had made false claims about how the study was conducted.

The journal acted after a British medical panel had found the lead author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, guilty of dishonesty and flouting medical ethics.

 

 

More background on those findings here and here.

 

A great take from the Skepchick Rebecca Watson on why this all matters:

 

 

More analysis from Phil Plait: 

...Of course, that won’t even slow Wakefield or the antivaxxers. They don’t care for the real world, based on evidence and fact. They are, for all intents and purposes, religious zealots now, believing in Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and the rest with such fervor that there is literally no amount of evidence that can ever sway them. And they will continue to spin, fold, and mutilate the truth, while we watch as diseases rise back from the dead, infecting hundreds of thousands of people, and killing many of them.

Never forget what’s at stake here. Never.

 

 

Steve Novella: 

This should be the final nail in the coffin of this controversial and harmful study. Coming 12 years after the original paper, after just about every element of the research and its findings have been refuted, the Lancet retraction almost seems unecessary. But it is necessary and important. As the retraction indicates – it removes this dubious research from the published record.

 

(...)

 

I applaud the Lancet for finally retracting the Wakefield study and removing it from the published record. It should not, however, have taken this long.

David Gorski: 

When will the madness end? I fear that it will only end when vaccine-preventable diseases return to the point where every parent fears them again. No, it’s more than that. Vaccine-preventable diseases are already returning. That’s why I fear it will only end when they return to the point where the fear of disease is more intense than the fear of the vaccine-autism bogeyman. In the meantime, while Third World countries clamor for life-saving vaccines and Bill Gates pledges $10 billion to bring vaccines to the world, here in the developed world we have men like Andrew Wakefield feeding an irrational fear of vaccines that threatens to reverse all the progress of the last few decades.

Herald Column: Abortion and Free Speech

Further to the controversy discussed here, this week's Calgary Herald column from yours truly looks at the debate surrounding a pro-life TV ad, and the broader debate about whether there should be an abortion debate: 

...What has made this a story, however, is not so much the content of the ad itself, but rather the decision to air it. That decision, as you can imagine, is not sitting well with everyone.

 

A spokeswoman for the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada called the ad "disturbing, offensive and frightening," and suggested it could incite violence against those providing abortions or those seeking them.

 

Those opposed to abortion may be on the losing end policy-wise, but opposition to abortion is still a legitimate political opinion, one held by millions of Canadians. The suggestion that some holders of that opinion are possibly capable of violence is a flimsy excuse for censorship.

 

This is not the first time pro-life groups have presented such images -- the recent controversy over the display used by the U of C's Campus Pro Life is but one example.

 

No violence followed that display, and assuming a similar calm prevails in Kelowna, this canard should be laid to rest.

 

There is nothing at all violent in this particular ad. The appearance of a severed hand might seem jarring to some, but that hardly constitutes a call to arms.

 

Incitement is a clearly defined legal term. Having and expressing a strong opinion on something does not in any way meet that definition.

 

Ironically, the debate over the airing of pro-life ads has raged south of the border. An ad from the group Focus on the Family, which features college football star Tim Tebow, has apparently been given the green light for Super Bowl halftime by CBS.

 

I wonder, however, if those who took up the free speech banner in the battle over this ad will come to the defence of the ads rejected by CBS, including one for an online dating service for gay men.

 

Whether there exists a lack of commitment to freedom of expression on the part of pro-lifers or social conservatives in general is irrelevant to the question of whether their freedom of expression is deserving of protection. And it most certainly is.

 

Private media outlets shouldn't be forced to run each and every ad that comes their way. But if a media outlet is prepared to allow ads of a political nature, it ought not single out and exclude certain legitimate points of view.

 

Furthermore, with Canada's broadcasters very publicly pleading poverty, it would certainly weaken their position to be seen turning down ad revenue because they frown on certain political opinions.

 

For those who are dismayed by the content of the Kelowna Right to Life ad, or merely fear that it might sway public opinion, the opportunity exists to counter it either through the media coverage or by running a counter ad.

 

Demanding or hoping for censorship might seem like an easy solution, but it is a cop-out and probably counterproductive in the long run. The pro-life side will find some way to get its arguments out, and a failure to address them will eventually be seen as ceding the point.

 

Let the ad run. Let the debate exist. Freedom of expression demands no less.

Funny Man Trapped in Unfunny Human Rights Hell

It's one of those cases - now tragically numerous - which show how Orwellian and Kafkaesque Canada's human rights bureaucracy has become.

 

Comedian Guy Earle is one of the unfortunate souls trapped in an ongoing nightmare - almost three years now - stemming from his smackdown of some rude and aggressive hecklers. The hecklers happened to be lesbian, which is why this matter is now in the hands of the BC Human Rights Tribunal.

 

Background on the story here - I've written about it here.

 

Just as it seemed as though this case was close to a just and proper dismissal, Guy Earle gets word that his nightmare will continue: 

Did ya hear the one about the BCHRC Chair that ignored the Canadian Supreme Court? Well, apparently, even though the S.C. has quashed the process that has been brought against me, the BC Human Rights Commission has decided to proceed with the original tribunal?!! At great expense (and suffering), I went to Vancouver last year for the tribunal. My lawyer had the process QUASHED, so I came back East to get back to work... Well, we are still a-go for March 29, 2010. So, I was a little premature in thinking there is justice in this world. Fans of freedom, we are not out of this mess yet!

Even though Canadians (and denizens of many other countries) have shown their 99.9% disgust for this action (read the comments) AND the Supreme Court has ruled against it; the tribunal happily marches on, regardless. You would think that their philosophy should be in line with the opinions and desires of the Canadian people as a whole...(?) Not so. Their money is made by sucking the life out of good Canadians. Wasting taxpayers money, hand over fist. I don't want to even imagine the loss of revenue, the cost of fighting this and the time wasted which has been leeched from me. I can't - it makes me sick to think about it.

 

UPDATE: From the great Mark Steyn: 

Guy Earle sounds like he could use a bit of Ezra-type advice right now, so for what it's worth here it is: Get on with your life. Do comedy shows. Do a show somewhere in Vancouver while the trial is on, even if you have to rent the room yourself. You're a full-time comic and a part-time defendant, not the other way round. And, if you do talk about the case, don't meet 'em halfway by talking bullshit about making donations to "women advocate groups". The only issue is this: Canada is now a land where the state regulates comedy acts.

The trial on March 29th will be a disgrace. You don't apologize, you don't donate, you put the system on trial.

That's really the only insight you need: It's about them, not you.

(Via The Shotgun)