The Two Sides of Stephen Harper: Cold War Warrior and Compassion

2014/06/02 Leave a comment

Starting with the former, a reminder that the PM is not only driven by diaspora politics in relation to Ukraine as he channels his internal Cold War warrior:

“Evil comes in many forms and seems to reinvent itself time and again,” he said.“But whatever it calls itself — Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism — they all have one thing in common: the destruction, the end of human liberty.”

Canadians, the prime minister said, are well aware of that destruction.

“We feel this pain so acutely because nearly one-quarter of all Canadians were either held captive by communism’s chains or are the sons and daughters of those who were.”

Stephen Harper takes aim at Putin.

And yet his softer side can be seen in his support for the recent summit on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) and his media interview with Melinda Gates (as well as a rare admission of the values of scientific evidence and experts):

“It’s hard for me not to get very emotional about this because we know, we scientifically know, what vaccinations and immunizations have done for us, personally, in our generation and for generations after us,” he said on the second day of the government’s maternal, newborn and child health summit.

“I frankly don’t understand people who are walking away in our society from something that’s proven to work.”…

Harper then offered his advice to those who “go off on their own theories and not listen to the scientific evidence.”

“Don’t indulge your theories, think of your children and listen to the experts,” he said.

‘If you love your child,’ vaccinate your child: Melinda Gates

 

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iBooks Author Is the Most Interesting Apple Software You Aren’t Using | TIME

2014/06/02 Leave a comment

For those interested in self-publishing, the article on iBooks Author captures the ease of use and advantages. I used it for Living with Cancer: A Journey and the formatting and visual possibilities were so much better than writing it on Pages or Word.

But given that it doesn’t have footnote capabilities, I couldn’t use it for Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism.

Ultimately, the proposition Apple is offering–powerful and elegant free authoring software, plus a way to get the things you create with it in front of vast numbers of people–seems like a reasonable deal to me. The next time I have an idea that feels like it might be a book, I may well decide to turn it into an iBook.

iBooks Author Is the Most Interesting Apple Software You Aren’t Using | TIME.

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Faking Cultural Literacy – ICYMI

2014/05/31 2 Comments

A fun piece, unfortunately all too true, about how conversation and commentary, and the need to present oneself as well-informed, is exacerbated by the sheer volume of information. How many us have the time to deep dive anymore given this pressure? We scan more than read, and tweet more than reflect:

What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

NPR’s April Fools’ Day web story “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” went viral on Facebook, where pranksters in on the joke linked to the piece and others then argued that they do too read and indignantly shared the link with exhortations to “read the story!” without actually clicking on it themselves to see that the only content was the revelation that the whole thing was a prank: “We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this ‘story.’ ”

Faking Cultural Literacy – NYTimes.com.

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Review of Living with Cancer: A Journey

2014/05/20 Leave a comment

Nice review in our community newspaper of my book, Living with Cancer: A Journey. My other identity that unfortunately, too many of us, or those close to us, have.

Glebe Report Review

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How Change.org amplified the act of protest

2014/05/16 Leave a comment

For those interested in social media campaigns, an interesting article on change.org and what makes a successful campaign:

Started in 2007 as an online activism platform by Ben Rattray, a Californian educated at Stanford and the London School of Economics, Change.org transitioned to a petition-only platform in 2011. The site made world headlines when a Change.org petition started by the parents of murdered teen Trayvon Martin helped secure charges against George Zimmerman, his killer. That earned Rattray a spot on Time’s 100 most influential people of 2012. Today, the site has offices in 18 countries—and nearly 70 million users across the globe.

The site is an often-cacophonous clearing house for petitions calling for some sort of action in just about every imaginable domain. In Canada alone, there are petitions to “add women from Canadian history to Canadian bank notes”; to have fluoride removed from tap water; to have fluoride added to tap water; to have a “fully independent investigation” into the Senate scandal; to reverse Canada Post’s decision to end home delivery; to have Prime Minister Stephen Harper stop “using Sir Paul [McCartney’s] beautiful music to humanize his evil robot-man public image.” Some are successes. Most aren’t.

Successful campaigns “have two things,” Rattray says. “It has to be specific, for one, and there needs to be good reason to think that a sufficient amount of public attention around an issue can convince a decision-maker to make the choice to change.” David and Goliath narratives seem to work best, which might explain why Garrett’s petition was so successful. It spiked the contentious issue of animal rights with a dose of celebrity (Barenaked Ladies) and pitted both against a large, faceless corporate entity. Not coincidentally, animal rights is also one of 10 “cause areas”—criminal justice, environment and immigration are among the others—Change.org tends to promote on its site. In Garrett’s case, Change.org staff contacted him to help in the PR push for the petition, and emailed the petition to site users who had signed animal rights petitions in the past.

“We look at things that are most popular, that are trending, that people are interested in, and some things that are already taking off in the media or that have an appeal to a wide audience that the media might want to cover,” says Rattray. “Those are the ones where we’ll reach out to the petition creator and make sure that they’re using the tool most effectively.”

How Change.org amplified the act of protest.

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ICYMI: How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2 – NYTimes.com

2014/05/05 Leave a comment

Second part on what Google looks for and interesting remark on  liberal arts, citing behavioural economics as an example:

They are “phenomenally important,” he said, especially when you combine them with other disciplines. “Ten years ago behavioral economics was rarely referenced. But [then] you apply social science to economics and suddenly there’s this whole new field. I think a lot about how the most interesting things are happening at the intersection of two fields. To pursue that, you need expertise in both fields. You have to understand economics and psychology or statistics and physics [and] bring them together. You need some people who are holistic thinkers and have liberal arts backgrounds and some who are deep functional experts. Building that balance is hard, but that’s where you end up building great societies, great organizations.”

Steve Jobs always claimed Apple was at the intersection of liberal arts and technology…

How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2 – NYTimes.com.

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Andrew Coyne: Free speech withers when we abandon judgment, proportion, open-mindedness and tolerance

2014/04/23 Leave a comment

Andrew Coyne’s more balanced take on recent free speech controversies:

People arbitrarily declaring issues “settled” about which there remains room for doubt, or at least for honest error, or trying to open issues that really are settled. How should we tell the difference? There are rules of thumb — whether it involves modelling highly complex phenomena decades into the future, like global warming, or whether, like evolution, it involves explanations of the existing order that have been tested and refined over 150 years. But mostly it is a matter of judgment.

Judgment, proportion, humility, open-mindedness, tolerance for human frailty: these are the soil in which free speech flourishes. Where we abandon them, it withers.

Andrew Coyne: Free speech withers when we abandon judgment, proportion, open-mindedness and tolerance | National Post.

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Mental Health Break: Spin and Branding

2014/03/29 Leave a comment

For those of you tired of corporate spin and branding, a wonderful ironic and sarcastic take at the clichés used from Dissolve Video:

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Ottawa man wins religious rights complaint against Commissionaires

2014/03/19 Leave a comment

Right decision, and would hope that the same decision would be provided if it had been a Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist or other applicant (most Commissionaires basically control entry points into government buildings and accompany visitors inside – an important but limited security role):

Cybulski, 24, started training with the Commissionaires in late 2010. His complaint stemmed from one question, asked at his pre-screening interview in March 2011 — what was his opinion on “Canada’s involvement overseas?”

Cybulski said he responded that “I’m Catholic and a religious guy and I don’t think it is morally or ethically right to kill people.” They asked him to elaborate and Cybulski declined.

Ottawa man wins religious rights complaint against Commissionaires.

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How to Get a Job at Google – NYTimes.com

2014/02/24 Leave a comment

Good piece on Google’s hiring practices. Antitheses to how government hires:

To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

How to Get a Job at Google – NYTimes.com.

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