The Massey Lectures are an annual Canadian tradition: lectures on social interests broadcast on CBC Radio. I’m not sure how long they’re up, but as part of the “Special Delivery” series is a 1979 talk by Jane Jacobs on “Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association” (34 minutes).
Download it while you can! (I already have). There’s also a 1965 lecture in the series by John Kenneth Galbraith that looks good.
Peter Harding, in the Globe and Mail1, is cited as a high-level bureaucrat — he managed six departments under five different prime ministers — who is respected by both Canadian political parties. In 2000, he received the Prime Minister’s Outstanding Achievement Award for leadership in the public service. He has now left the public service, and is free to express his opinion on globalization. He proposes three laws:
These are interesting ideas. I’m not sure that I’m in 100% agreement with the interpretations of these laws in the newspaper column, but they do represent a departure from the preconceptions of the 20th century. Let’s think about these a little deeper.
Japan would seem to be a wonderful place to live, socially and economically. Merrill Lynch ranks Canadians as #2 in the G7. Here’s a summary that I’ve put together from news sources.
| Misery index (2007) | Misery index (2005) | |
| Japan | 1.6 | < 3.2 (inferred)1 |
| Canada | 6.4 | 7.1 |
| Germany | 6.5 | > 6.5 (inferred)1 |
| Italy | 13.9 | 15.4 |
| France | 15.2 | 14.7 |
| United States | 17.3 | 17.9 |
| Britain | 19.6 | 17.6 |
John Partridge, in the Globe & Mail, explains how these numbers are calculated:
When I’m in an academic setting looking into research into services, there’s one idea that I’m continually looking out for: finding a measure that is superior to counting billable hours.
Billable utilization is one of the measures common in knowledge intensive business services (KIBS). This category of services includes professionals such as consultants, lawyers and accountants.
I’ve been triggered on this topic by reading “Exile on Bay Street” by Alec Scott, in the September issue of Toronto Life. This well-written personal account of the life of lawyers on Bay Street — the financial centre of Canada — parallels that of management consultants. Firstly, there’s the external perception of what the life is like (or at least what it was):
The lawyers of the last generation lived the cliché; they worked and played equally hard. Unlike my peers, they loved telling war stories, vividly recounting the ups and downs of the practice. [….]
I recently attended the Service Engineering and Management (SEM 2007) summer school at the Helsinki University of Technology. One of the more interesting themes that came up was on “Improving Competitiveness and Performance through Service Productization?” by Katriina Valminen and Marja Toivonen. The workshop brought up some discussions on the question mark in the title, but the paper is still under development, so maybe there will be some small modifications of the content still coming.
The focus of the paper is on KIBS (Knowledge Intensive Business Services), but the theoretical work provides a broader foundation. Here’s some excerpts from an early section of the paper:
What is productization in services?
A systematic development of services is becoming increasingly important when the improvement of companies’ competitiveness is pursued. [….]
One of the downsides of managing a blog is having to fight comment spam. The first defence against spam is moderating comments — actually approving a commenter, the first time he or she adds to the blog post. This means that readers of the blog don’t see links to undesireable sites.
Automation helps sort out most comment spam. Akismet has become a standard spam detector for WordPress, and I’ve used it since day one. I’ve also now installed Bad Behavior and Referrer Bouncer, but they don’t really reduce the workload.
I’ve resisted using CAPTCHA — “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” — because I’ve been trying to ensure that my blog continues to be readable by the visually impaired.
I’ve just implemented the reCAPTCHA plugin for WordPress on my blogs. There are multiple reasons for this:
qoto.org/@daviding (Mastodon) on IngBrief on daviding.com on Media Queue
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