There are two interesting reports noted on the Charity Village web site this week.

According to Charity Village the WorkCanada? 2004/2005 – Pursuing Productive Engagement report issued by Watson Wyatt Worldwide tells us that:

“According to a survey of more than 3,000 Canadian employees, just 43% of respondents said they would rate their company as a good place to work, down from 55% two years ago. Many report that pay and training fall short of their expectations. Only half (52%) feel they have been given the training they need to properly perform their jobs, while only 24% believe that excellent performance is rewarded at their companies.”

At the same time Statistics Canada has issued a new study entitled Are Good Jobs Disappearing in Canada?. Charity Village says that this report:

“…reveals that in 2004, 11% of all (adult) employees … were employed in jobs that paid $30 or more per hour… However, newly hired employees (those with two years of seniority or less) have seen their wages drop substantially relative to their counterparts with greater seniority during that period. For example, newly hired men aged 25 to 64 saw their median wages drop 13% between 1981 and 2004, while their counterparts with more than two years of seniority saw their wages increase 4%. As well, the study showed that newly hired employees have been increasingly employed in temporary jobs since the late 1980s. In 1989, 11% of recently hired employees held a temporary job. By 2004, that number jumped to 21%.” (more…)

Zefrank.com has the most amazing set of Flash goodies that I’ve found. This site is sure to kill at least a half hour.

Start here with “Dance Properly“, then “Advanced Dancing.”

Then check out Ze’s Blog.

Last month I wrote about Wilde Cunningham, a collaborative character within the Second Life online community created by a group of severely physically disabled individuals whose condition keeps them in a care center.

Well, they folks who make up wilde Cunningham have just launched their own blog, and it is an amazing place full of stories, poems, jokes, and all manner of personal and touching content.

What’s more, tomorrow night they will be hosting an on-line roundtable to talk about how they use their virtual world.
Date: Friday, January 28, 2005
Time: 6:00PM – 8:00PM (LINDEN/Pacific Time)

Event description: Please join us on Live2Give Island for a roundtable discussion about how people with physical disabilities can use virtual worlds to overcome the limitations of their physical-world environment. Topics will include a discussion of novel human-computer interfaces and the sociological implications of persistant virtual communities. For more information about Live2Give island, please see http://braintalk.blogs.com/live2give

Click here for all of the Roundtable details.

From the Norton VA, Coalfield Progress…

“Two shotguns and two pistols are still missing from an unmarked city police vehicle stolen Jan. 15, but many expensive electronic devices have been recovered…. Norton Police Sgt. Eddie Bevins, a member of the Regional Drug Task Force, left the 1999 Ford Explorer unlocked and running while he darted for just a minute into his mother’s home in Ramsey. Bevins returned to find the vehicle gone.”

“Brummitte said Friday there were six weapons in the vehicle when it was stolen and four are still missing … Bevins’ department-issued .40-caliber pistol and 12-gauge shotgun were inside the vehicle when it was stolen. Also inside were four personal weapons, which included another .40 caliber pistol, a .22 caliber pistol, a .410-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle, Brummitte said. ”

Seriously, you have to read the whole story! The car was stolen by two teenagers who drove it to Newport News VA because “they wanted to see the ocean.”

Earlier today an e-mail came to my inbox suggesting a marathon radio reading of the work of Ayn Rand.

Isn’t it bad enough that Audible.com will sell you some 77 hours of unabridged Ayn Rand for the low, low price of $195.09?

Interestingly not all of Rand’s work is valued the same, with prices ranging from a low of $1.00 an hour for “The Fountainhead” to a high of $5.03 an hour for “Anthem.” “Atlas Shrugged” comes in at about $3.50 an hour.

Personally I’ll stick with The Floating Head of Ayn Rand – especially the greeting cards.

I just love that picture! If you’re near Belleville WA next month you can catch Janiva Magness live presented by KBCS Radio.

My appreciation of this instrument goes back to a concert about twenty-two years ago when Queen Ida and her Bontemps Zydeco Band played the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.

For those who don’t know the Commodore is a seventy-five year old hall on Granville Street in Vancouver. It’s probably about the finest concert venue in Canada, with a beautiful decor, good acoustics, room for 1000 of your closest friends, and the most wonderful sprung dance floor that I have ever seen.

Queen Ida’s Commodore Ballroom performance came on the heels of an amazing introduction on the main stage of the Vancouver Folk Festival in the summer of 1982.

In 1982 no-one really knew what zydeco music was, and Queen Ida was certainly not a household word. Still she managed to pack the house that night.

In an age when the average concert meant three mediocre opening bands* followed by two short sets by the headliner, followed by one obligatory encore, Queen Ida and her band did three one hour sets with only fifteen minute breaks in between.

They rocked, the room rocked, and the music simply never stopped. A thousand sweating, screaming people became lifelong fans of Zydeco, washboards, and Queen Ida.

* a friend once explained that the opening band has to be mediocre so that they don’t make the headliner look bad. Although I do recall a Canada’s Wonderland concert that featured Mojo Nixon opening for The Pogues. Now that was inspired.

** I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the amazing Washboard Hank, inventor of the Fallopian Tuba, and writer of such hits as Polyester Polly Lit A Fire In My Heart, Are You Scrubbed?, and that ode to Liz’s kid, Do The Prince Charles.

So says Mark Ramsey.

Unfortunately I have no idea what the context was. Play it loud.

http://www.funpic.hu/swf/numanuma.html

Yet another sign that America is going to hell in a handbag, from Alternet.org.

Columnist Annalee Newitz writes about a recent US court decision that it is OK for employers to force women to wear make-up. A strong column, and well worth your time.

Next time somebody loftily tells you that differences between the sexes are grounded in biology, you have my permission to slap them with a judicial case. And I mean that literally: just print out the late-December ruling in the Harrah’s makeup case, roll it into a hefty tube, and take a swing at their head.

One of the highest courts in the land, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, has determined that it’s legal for an employer to fire a female employee who refuses to wear makeup. Think this through slowly and carefully, girls: if you live in the 9th Circuit (which covers California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and Montana), you could be fired tomorrow if your boss decides your “uniform” for work includes makeup.

It’s a snowy day in Hamilton, with something approaching a foot of white stuff since this morning.

We had been invited to visit a friend who lives about 45 minutes away, but are now considering whether that’s a realistic option.

In chatting with a friend in Kentucky I was reminded that when I was a kid in the interior of BC we routinely saw 12″ plus snowfalls and it never seemed to be a big deal. You just shovelled out and carried on with your life. In particular you made sure that you had snow tires, and just jumped in the car and returned to takin’ care of business.

So what has happened? Why suddenly does a few inches of snow bring whole cities to a halt?

Finally it came to me:

Twenty years ago every town and city had a fleet of snowplows and sanders which could be called on to quickly clear roads and make travel safe. It was normal to assume that you could travel safely, especially if you stayed on main roads.

In the last ten or fifteen years though we have seen every level of government get sucked into the privatization craze.

Cities like Hamilton have sold off their snow clearing equipment, and laid off the people who did the work, and instead have sub-contracted that work to the lowest bidder.

The outcome is predictable to any right thinking person. The lower the bid, the greater the likelihood that the sub-contractor is going to cut corners to avoid losing money. That means less equipment, less supplies, and fewer employees.

So streets that would have been plowed in a few hours when I was young now sit untouched for days or get one cursory run down the middle of the road. Ordinary tax paying citizens may not be able to get to work, or to the doctor, and may wind up in more accidents as their cars slip and slide on unplowed streets, but the sub-contractors can point to a profit, and the politicians can make yet another promise to lower taxes.

Maybe it’s time that each of us took a minute to call our elected officials. Instead of whining that taxes are too high, perhaps we should begin by telling them what services are so essential that they can’t be pawned off to the lowest bidder.

More excellent griping about snow can be found at Bill Doskoch’s blog.

This is actually a pretty amazing web site. Stop laughing! It’s all about how our geopolitical view of the world alters our perception of world events and our ability to understand large and complex issues!

“If it is important to get your message across then you need to do what the media and other organisations have been doing for years – use an analogy that people are more familiar with!

For example, nobody knows what 20000km² looks like; but say it is an “area the size of Wales” and it suddenly becomes much clearer. (To see how commonly this analogy is used click here to see what a search on “area the size of Wales” in Google throws up!)

At SizeOfWales.co.uk a set of conversion utilities for lengths, heights, areas, volumes and weights will enable you to express your feature of interest in terms of something more familiar.”

Be sure to also check out CyberToilets.com

Massive Change is a project by Toronto’sBruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries, commissioned and organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The web site describes Massive Change as a project which:

“…explores paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image and information. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves: Now that we can do anything what will we do?”

What the project attempts to do, from my first scan of the web site, is to apply concepts related to design to all manner of global questions including urbanization, politics, markets, and energy.

A description of the VAG gallery installation reads:
” The urban room is designed to be an immersive visual and audio experience – a six-screen, five minute video is continuously projected onto a 56 ft. long cityscape sculpture while a voiceover encourage a different view of the city and our increasingly urbanizing world. As you go through the room five questions are presented on transparent globes. Is urbanization our unspoken belief system? How can we provide shelter for the entire world? How can cities be sustainable? Does density offer hope? Where does the reach of the city end? Designed to be optimistic and encouraging the urban video begins to address the five questions and is filled with stories about green design, sustainable city development, vertical growth and land use, affordable housing designs, greenroofs, and how looking at the entire world as one urban system can change how we design things.”

Really though you’ll find a wealth of thoughtful information, video, radio, and ideas on this site, along with ways to become involved in discussions and activities. The Exhibition is due at Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto March 11, 2005 to May 29, 2005, and travels to Chicago later this year.

You must also check out Bruce Mah’s superb An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.

Through 43 points it travels from:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

to….

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

to…

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

On-line news source Ananova offers up the kind of story that they may be best known for.

You can read the whole thing here, but in a nutshell police in Germany are hunting pranksters who have been sticking miniature US flags into piles of dog poo in public parks.

Two to three thousand piles of dog poo, over several months.

Legal experts say there is no law against using feces as a flag stand and the federal constitution is vague on the issue.

Post Script: It seems odd, but searching google for fake dog poo seems to mostly bring up British websites……

In the wake of the Asian Tsunami there has been an interesting exchange on the web site run by science fiction author Jerry Pournelle.

It began with this comment:
“I have been thinking about the tsunami. It’s now up to 250,000 perhaps. Startling. Yet over a million a year die of malaria because we don’t send DDT to appropriate places. Overuse of DDT was not a good idea and some Americans sprayed it everywhere. More was used in some farm counties than would be needed for one spraying a year in African residences — all of them in Africa in mosquito areas.

If we had a tsunami like that every month for a year it would be 3,000,000 people. That’s about how many die every year from controllable infectious diseases of which malaria is a major factor. For about what’s being spent on emergency aid we could eliminate many of those diseases.”

This led to some very interesting exchanges (here and here) about the relative safety of DDT, the veracity of the claims made about it in Rachel Carson‘s “Silent Spring“, the relative costs of DDT as compared to other pesticides, and of course, the larger question of why so many resources are available for tsunami relief, but so few are available for African epidemics of either malaria or AIDS.

These are discussions worth reading, and questions worth asking.

From there I would encourage you also to think for few minutes about why Canadians have been willing to donate so many millions of dollars to Tsunami relief, while let our own social agencies and charities struggle along in a hand to mouth existence. Why are the homeless, and orphaned, and injured of Asia more worthy of help than the same sort of people in our own city? And why are our governments willing to match donations that will flow overseas, but unwilling to do the same for charities who provide essential services right here?

If you want to look more closely at the ways that Canadians support charities – and they do – a good place to start is Bill Doskoch’s blog post titled “How Canadians give“.

Well! CBC North tells us that last month’s south asian earthquake has actually moved the North Pole!

If you read the story you’ll find out that it only moved about an inch, but still it must have annoyed Santa Claus.

Even more annoying though was my challenge: finding a picture of the North Pole on the Internet. We’ve all seen a million of those cute candy cane North Poles, usually somewhere near Santa’s house or the reindeer pen.

So I entered “north pole” into Google and found…. nothing remotely cute.

Just lots of pictures of American military guys standing around the pole (like those dudes in the picture) and lots of references to “North Pole, Alaska“, which is hundreds of miles from the North Pole, which of course is in Canada!

Hmmmph!

The Creation Museum

“We’ll begin the Museum experience by showing that ‘facts’ don’t speak for themselves…”