April 6th, 2009, 9 Comments »
Broadly speaking, Vancouverites (and, really, people everywhere) feel one of two ways about the Olympics:
- They’re a huge, heinous waste of taxpayer dollars.
- They’re a celebration of the city, province and nation which, through infrastructure investment and international exposure, brings new wealth to the region.
The more left of centre you are, the likelier you are to be in Camp #1. I like to think of myself as near the centre, and this conversation highlights that position. I haven’t done enough reading. However, looking at previous Olympics in North America, it seems that both outcomes are true, depending on who you ask. The key facts that I wrestle with are:
- The money available for the Olympics wouldn’t necessarily be available to house the homeless or increase the police force.
- It’s incredibly difficult to accurately measure the benefits of an event this big, which impacts so many sectors in the short, medium and long term.
We can see this discussion on a simpler, smaller scale in the current grumblings by the BC NDP about BC Place’s new roof. The roof will apparently cost CAN $365 million, and the NDP is running a marketing campaign against the expenditure. It’s worth noting, of course, that neither party are strangers to absurd over-spending (how now, PacificCat Explorer).
Here’s the NDP’s position, and here’s the BC Liberal’s response (I note that the NDP is winning the search engine optimization battle). To be honest, I can’t even grok this simpler issue. What’s the value of the roof’s refurbishment? How long will it extend the life of BC Place, and much event-related and spin-off revenue will that generate? How many jobs does the project and the subsequent expansion create? What’s the value of an MLS franchise to the city?
On the other hand, what would $365 million mean to the Downtown Eastside? Knowing that $1.4 billion over the past nine years has barely made a dent in that neighbourhood’s problems isn’t particularly encouraging.
It’s easy to say “I like sports, and therefore the Olympics and the roof replacement are a good thing”. It’s much, much harder to be a good citizen and dig up the empirical data that makes an unbiased case one way or another. I’m sorry that I haven’t done that in this blog post, but time marches ever onward and all that.
What do you think? Should BC Place get a new roof?
Photo by Chris Coleman.
9 Comments »
March 10th, 2009, 15 Comments »
Something else kind of stuck in my brain from Stephen Hume’s column. His claim that the Vancouver Sun had received 10 million page views in February, 2009 seemed unusually high.
Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.
I checked out the Sun’s online advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:
vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com
theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com
There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.
Analytics and Panels
I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.
Read more…
15 Comments »
November 18th, 2008, 13 Comments »
A while back I subscribed to the RSS feed for Statistics Canada. As you might imagine, the agency produces statistics and reports on a wide and occasionally bizarre array of stuff–fertilizer shipments, iron piping and so forth. As you know, these reports are regular fodder for journalists (and, uh, bloggers) hunting for low-hanging trend stories.
Today Statistics Canada released data on divorces across the country in 2005 (the newest year available, presumably). Using their handy data manipulation tool, I generated this chart:
So which province has the highest divorce rate? As you can see, it’s Alberta. I’m ignoring the northern territories, because the sample size is pretty small (Nunavut suffered all of 10 divorces in 2005).
Is Alberta a Red State?
What gives? Why are there 27% more divorces per capita in Alberta than in Saskatchewan? Is this like the US, where so-called conservative red states have a considerably higher incidence of divorce than blue states?
Here’s one thesis: people marry younger in Alberta, and the younger you marry, the likelier you are to get divorced. That’s disproved, though, because Saskatchewan has the lowest marriage age (27 for women, 29.3 for men) in the country as well as a low divorce rate. That’s the red state theory–earlier marriages combined with lower socio-economic standing and less education. Stereotypes aside, I don’t think those factors apply to Alberta.
Here’s another idea that sounds plausible: compared to other provinces, Alberta has a low immigration rate. New Canadians, particularly those from Asia, are less likely to divorce.
Why do you think Alberta has the country’s highest rate of divorce?
Incidentally, while looking through some Statistics Canada research, I found this chart. The rate of divorce is apparently highest for those married about 4.5 years. After that there’s a long decline (to quote Neil Young). Once you hit 40 years of marriage, your odds of divorce are roughly two in 1000.
13 Comments »
