depression

Saturday March 18, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday March 18, 2023

Ontario experienced its darkest winter in more than 80 years

October 15, 2021

If you felt Ontario had an abnormally dark and dreary winter this year, the science backs you up.

In fact, parts of the province saw the least amount of direct sunlight in more than eight decades.

Data by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) shows that between December 2022 and February 2023, some regions of Ontario recorded the lowest levels of solar energy since 1940.

Brian Brettschneider, an Alaska-based climatologist with the U.S. National Weather Service, analyzed the data published by the ECMWF and presented the findings in several maps.

“There’s kind of this bullseye over southern Ontario, where the solar energy was quite a bit lower than, comparatively speaking, anywhere else,” he said, in an interview with the Star.

Though Ontario had “unremarkable” levels of sunlight in December, it was in January when the province experienced “exceptionally low” amounts of solar energy, said Brettschneider. It was followed by a February season which also had lower-than-normal levels of sunlight.

Looking back at the weather in Toronto this season, the city experienced 14 consecutive days in late January without the sun appearing, according to David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada. Earlier in the season, between Dec. 30 and Jan. 13, there was only one day that was described as mainly clear.

August 25, 2021

“It’s hard to imagine a year that was so cloudy and overcast,” said Phillips. “We also had fog, drizzle, snow, freezing rain, blowing snow and snow showers — a whole litany of precipitation types.”

The wet and overcast conditions were due to persistent flows of moisture arriving from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, said Brettschneider.

“You just get a lot of efficient cloud production when that happens,” he added.

Phillips also noted that southern Ontario had an unseasonably warm winter season, except for this March. But the low-pressure systems that bring these balmy conditions usually bring clouds and moisture as well, he said. (The Toronto Star) 

 

Tuesday November 1, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 1, 2022

U.S. Headlines Expressing Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness Increased Hugely Since 2000

About 42 percent of Americans now actively avoid news coverage, according to the Reuters Institute’s 2022 Digital News Report. That’s up from 38 percent in 2017. Nearly half of Americans who’ve turned away from the news say that they are doing so because it has a negative effect on their mood. As it happens, a new study in the journal PLoS One tracking the headlines in 47 publications popular in the United States reports that they have trended decidedly negative over the past two decades. 

Coincidence?

June 12, 2019

In their study, the team of New Zealand-based media researchers used a language model trained to categorize as positive or negative the sentiments of 23 million headlines between 2000 and 2019. In addition, the model was finetuned to identify Ekman’s six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise), plus neutral, to label the headlines automatically. Using the 2019 Allsides Media Bias Chart, the publications were ideologically categorized as left, right, or center. For example, The New Yorker, the New York Times Opinion, and Mother Jones were identified as left; National Review, Fox News Opinion, and The New York Post as right; and A.P., Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal as center. (Reason was pegged as right-leaning.)

After turning their language model loose on the millions of headlines, the researchers found “an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000.”

June 5, 2012

Overall, the researchers find that the prevalence of headlines denoting anger since the year 2000 increased by 104 percent. The prevalence of headlines denoting fear rose 150 percent; disgust by 29 percent; and sadness by 54 percent. The joy emotional category had its up and downs, rising until 2010 and falling after that. Headlines denoting neutral emotion declined by 30 percent since the year 2000. Breaking these down by ideology, headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets.

Why are negative headlines becoming more prevalent? “If it bleeds, it leads” is a hoary journalistic aphorism summarizing the well-known fact that dramatic, even gory, stories engage the attention of news consumers. In other words, journalists are supplying news consumers with what they want. Given the global reach of modern news media, there is always some attention-grabbing horror that occurred somewhere that can be highlighted between weather and sports on your local TV news.

November 4, 2020

Journalistic catering to people’s negativity bias ends up misleading a lot of their audiences into thinking that the state of the world is getting worse and worse. However, looking at long term trends, the opposite is the case. Yes, yes, there are wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen and, of course, a global pandemic during the past two years has killed around 6.5 million people so far. “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell, and become huffy and scornful when some idiotic optimist intrudes on their pleasure,” wrote economist Deidre McCloskey. “Yet pessimism has consistently been a poor guide to the modern economic world.” (Continued: Reason) 

 

Monday, September 1, 2014

Tuesday, September 2, 2014By Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday, September 2, 2014

5 Effective Remedies for the Post-Summer Blues

Are you ready for the transition to a new season? A melancholy sadness can creep into our spirit as summer closes. For some, it harkens back to our childhood. The loss of freedom and joy, of carefree days playing with friends, the literal and figurative warmth of summer evenings, combined with the knowledge of imminent confinement to the four walls of a classroom, can create a lasting fear deep inside us that is still felt every year at this time. The quiet child inside our adult selves is still nervous to begin a school year with new classmates and teachers. There is also the dread as adults of vacations coming to an end. September begins a natural time of change in the rhythms of the year — a season for shifting, getting ready for harvest, and preparation for the winter season ahead. The sun is becoming noticeably lower in the sky, rising later, and setting sooner, signaling our biorhythms that there are only several weeks left until the Fall Equinox, at which time the nights become longer than days in the Northern Hemisphere. We start to feel wistful, nostalgic, and sometimes more seriously saddened and heartbroken at a sense of underlying loss.

We are born to be joyous, but sometimes we need a little nudge to get us there. I am a very sensitive person, and I often feel the weight of the collective consciousness. I feel things at a very deep level, and have found that consciously preparing myself for shifts has helped me so much with transitions. I depend on my spiritual practice to carry me. It is not enough to say, “Oh, just change your attitude.” We all have tools that can bring us out of those blues and into the natural joyfulness of our own being.

Here are five wonderful ways to transition out of the late summer blues. These tips can help you swing back to radiance: (Continued: Huffington Post)

 

Tuesday September 4, 2007

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday September 4, 2007

When summer ends, vacation redux begins

Labour Day is the final act of a grand and happy play. The songs have all been sung. The lovers have been reunited at last! The curtain must come down, but hold the applause for just a few more moments.

Shakespeare once wrote that “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” This time of year, those words really hit home. Summer is definitely too short here in Southern Ontario. Perhaps that is why we grasp its beauty so tightly. In the hills, the song of the cicadas is getting louder and the hay rolls are appearing everywhere like magic out of summer’s magic hat.

In a few more days it will be time to pack up the tools of the season: wiffle balls, baseball mitts, grilling implements. Time to wave goodbye and head back to reality. In a few more days I’ll have to finish the last Harry Potter, the last ear of corn, the last 10 o’clock breakfast.

Still, there is reason to celebrate in spite of car packing and impending tie wearing. Even after we return home, there is more to look forward to. All is not lost to the dedicated vacationer. When summer ends, vacation redux begins.

Vacation redux is a special phenomenon that everyone has experienced and most have ignored.

Being away from home, even for a few days, means breaking from the routine. Vacations are fun and energizing because we can sleep later or get up earlier, depending on our interests. (Source: Buffalo News)