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My friend Jacques has been looking around for a new boat. Looking at steel hulled boats no less. We'll, I've found one for you. Got a steel hull, can go around the world (and you don't have to worry about pirates of the Carribean), and sleeps 1299 of your friends and family.
At least it's different people that can't get their stories straight from the same data that's illustrated in this item: Economists strongly divided on Canada's outlook for next year. I suppose that if there weren't some mystery, nobody would hang around for the last reel.
According to this G&M article, "Canadian employees report working at an unrelenting pace in greater numbers than their counterparts in the United States and Europe, according to an international comparison on the quality of work."
Yet it seems we're getting less done than those counterparts, as other research I can't put my hands on right now indicates a widening productivity gap with the USA. What's the real question to ask, I wonder?
News -- d'oh -- about wireless take-up in Canada that only a telecomm operator and someone planning to use the system as a foundation for a service offering could love in this National Post item:
"Telus, like rivals Bell Mobility, the wireless arm of BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada; and Rogers Wireless Communications Inc., expects to capitalize on growth projections that, if right, will see more than half of all Canadians own a cellphone by 2005 compared to 43% today, according to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, an industry-backed organization."
And they wonder why people in general think less of lawyers than used car sales people? This little tid-bit is a good start.
Apparently one Michael Kraik Esq., attorney and definitive judge of hockey skill and capability, has, in defense of his son, Alexander, filed suit against the local minor hockey association because his superstar child was cut from the "A" club. The suit alleges that rampant nepotism was behind the younger Mr. Kraik's debasing playing on the "B" squad. The humiliation, pain, and suffering is worth $50,000 in Mr. Kraik's estimation.
So, what if you were working at an organizational level beneath your station and self-determined skill level? Sue! Here's some language as generously prepared by Mr.Kraik the Elder in his Statement of Claim:
"The tortious acts of the defendants, in their public branding of Alexander Kraik [<-- replace with your name] as an inferior hockey player [<-- your occupation], was especially hurtful to Alexander Kraik [<-- your name again] because the conclusions of the defendants were at odds with his objective performance at the evaluation sessions staged by the defendants,"
If there was ever any doubt, the NDP has now solidified its position with environmentalists across Canada. After all, they recycle. HEH
Bravo to Doc for saying what many of us silently think and dread. His post, Seeing through slides03, makes the point (from Scott Rosenberg): The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides. Then goes on to provide some advice for those who would like to avoid doing so.
In the beginning was the Plan.
And then came the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the Workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying,
"It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh."
And the Workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pail of dung, and none may abide by the odor thereof."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying,
"It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors then went unto the Vice Presidents, saying unto them,
"IT promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went unto the President, saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company,
With powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan, and saw that IT was good.
And the Plan became Policy.
This is how shit happens.
Every now and then we hit a trouble patch and I have to put in full days (and then some) at the day job. It's been like that recently. Blogging has been light -- obviously -- despite there being a lot to blog about recently.
Saddam. Caught. Skeptic in me says that Saddam wasn't found quickly after the war ended but too late for real effect. So, when he was found a few months or so ago, the Bush machine (read: Karl Rove) convinced everyone to pin him down and hold on for a while so the catch could be used. Wait for Osama to be discovered in the crosshairs around mid to late summer.
The realist in me says, "No way." Despite him being in a location that would have been searched over and over, he wasn't found until this weekend. Any sane person would not have waited to act and capture the guy. So, I imagine the Administration wasn't up to any monkey business. Still, the dark side is quite seductive.
New prime minister in Canada. The longest awaited coronation in history is over and nary a shot was fired (that anyone will admit to). The most interesting thing about this acsention is what it does for the blogosphere. To wit: Google the following words (without quotation marks): "What is the worst blog in the world?" Unless something has changed, the first listing is the new prime minister's blog. Ouch! Thanks to David for the heads up.
Anyway, more to come soon.
About 5,000 years ago, when I was but a lad, Coca-Cola produced an ad campaign based on a song/jingle: "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." The kids from around the world sang, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke . . .". The ad and campaign was -- apparently -- very successful.
The Coca-Cola Company advised the world yesterday that in Great Britain (for now anyway) it would again like to teach the world to sing -- or at least give it the music to sing over. Instead of buying the world a Coke, Brits will be able to buy the world a song from Coca-Cola, who, as Wired reports, will enter the paid music download business.
What exactly are the limits of brand, core competence, etc., etc., etc., in a new communications, information, commercial, and social paradigm such as the Internet? Does it just take some cojones to (attempt to) reinvent for fun and profit? Is it the ultimate opportunity to salvage one's corporate self from stagnation or yesterday's position? Infinite success is non-linear, and sometimes finite success has to be abandoned . . .
If there is anything to be "proud" of in being a "geek," as my wife so lovingly calls ("Come here, you big geek stud . . ."), this is it. I've got a few minutes at home this morning and needed to get online. Open up the notebook and I've got no signal from my wifi network. Obviously something was screwed up in the settings (and has been corrected), but I didn't have time to screw with it just at that moment. So, I look at the airport signal window and find that one of my neighbours has a home net as well. What the hell," I think. My network is secure and closed, but . . . let's give it a run. Sure enough: low signal but an open network. Result: I get on the Internet, did my thing, and was finished in time to wake up the kid.
Back on my own network. Apparently when the Powerbook had a little self-imposed shut down it change the setting from airport to ethernet. We're back on and rocking. Gotta go.
"We're a team (used to be "family," but not even in Japan anymore)," is the refrain that echoes down from the peaks of the executive floors. Nobody really believes it. The down-sizing of the 80s and late-90s took care of that on the employee side; the rampant, acquisitive job-hopping of the mid-80s and most of the 90s did the same for employers still potentially deluded into believing they had loyal troops.
But, as this piece (Point, click, predict turnover) from Scripps Howard News Service shows, the divide grows. Essentially, SAS has created a tool that allows employers' HR departments to make judgments about the likelihood that an employee is considering leaving based on "data such as the number of days absent, salary, age, performance evaluations and other job-related information."
All good use of technology. What SAS needs to do now is create a converse application that it can provide on a subscription basis to employees who could increase their knowledge of whether their employer is considering dumping them based on changes to data points such as pass-over for promotion, reduced meaningful work, exclusion from meetings, spurious negative performance reviews, lateral shifts to "siberian" postings, increase/decrease in tedious day-filling work, etc.
Then, optimization applications could be created to "work over" the statistical apps for best fit of the data calculus. While the computers fight it out maybe we all could do a little work.
This item in the NYT today, FAO to File for Bankruptcy and Break Up Toy Empire has to make anybody who was once a kid very sad. Toys were them.
I'm not going to remove the post immediately below about soft power. I just want everyone to know that I DO, in fact, recall and bear in mind what I've put up on the recursive Website: that I'm not going to jump in to the heat of the fray with just another stupid opinion.
I've held the stupid opinion about "soft power" for years. The (obviously positioned) report by Queen's is just a really good excuse to blather on about it.
For a long time, the brother of a friend and a fixture on the Liberal front benches in the House of Commons was Lloyd Axworthy. Princeton educated, left-leaning to the point of toppling over in a light wind, and un-unelectable in his Winnipeg South riding: Axworthy was the country's single-most ardent proponent of "soft power." As best I can recall, soft power has two definitions: one from the supply side as it were; one from the demand side:
Canada's air force, as well as either the army or navy, will likely cease to exist around the end of this decade unless the federal government orders a massive infusion of cash, warns a Queen's University study to be released today.
The next government will be caught up in a cascading policy entanglement initiated by the rapid collapse of Canadian Forces core assets and core capabilities,' the report says.
'Even if the next government were to provide nearly unlimited funds in an attempt to overcome this deficit, little can be done before the apprehended crisis becomes fact. The downward slope of the capabilities curve is too steep, and the slide is too fast.
A couple years ago I wrote an essay for Policy Options about Canada and its "brand" in the world stage entitled, "Brand Canada or 'branded' Canadian." As I recall, my point was that with all the chatter about a Canadian "brand," we really needed to start with a defining identity. In today's New York Times is an item entitled "Canada's View on Social Issues Is Opening Rifts With the U.S." This wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind, but it's good to see Canada rear up on its hind legs for some fun-filled internecine prodding.
Frankly, I'm not entirely certain the differences are as social and a-political as the article would have one believe. The thrust of the problem is not the social differences: gay marriages, pot smoking, etc., etc. as it is the political differences that make these issues more than niggling differences as among states of the union.
A headline like Dieting hurts your brain could obviously cause those of us who may be -- from time to time -- "fitness challenged," shall we say, a little well-deserved anxiety. Vanity be damned: brains over beauty, I say. As it turns out though, the Australian study does NOT raise any issues with protien excess and metabolization, carbohydrate debt, brain tissue starvation, or other scientific causes.
Apparently dieters obsess about thoughts of food, body image, and so forth while on their self-imposed calorie reduction. This puts them off on their other mental duties such as remembering sequences of random numbers and doing simple math. Uh huh. Of course, the fact that when I'm not dieting (but aware that I'm in need) I might be obsessing about my body image and the straining seams on my clothing, as well as plagued with vanity-induced guilt, doesn't appear to be included in the benchmarking done in the study.
Cosmetic surgury. No obsessive thoughts to cloud mental processing; completely body shaping. Hmmmmm.
Roy Disney worked his butt off two decades ago to get Michael Eisner appointed to his position at the top of Disney. Now, showing he's not above moving with the demands of circumstance, he's publicly trying a second time to secure Eisner's ouster. Just as he did twenty years ago, Disney resigned from the board to make the importance of his case perfectly clear. This time, he's had a little help from Eisner.
What lesson is there here?