One of the most fun parts of my job is doing research. There are times when I have to remind myself of that, like the recent Saturday night I spent recoding 800 pieces of data because one statistical program wouldn’t talk to another one. But I really enjoy finding something that makes me wonder, (more…)
work
“All About Work” Is Taking a Holiday Break
All About Work will be taking time off over the holidays – which I hope all its readers will be able to do as well. I’ll be posting again starting in mid-January.
I began this blog in March 2012, and the response has been extremely gratifying – more than 6,000 hits so far. I’m very appreciative of all the visits and all the reader comments – and I’m looking forward to continuing the interaction.
It’s been a busy year. (credit: my own photo)
To summarize the year’s activity at All About Work, here’s a list of the most popular posts from 2012.
- Imagine: How Did This Happen? (Special thanks to the kind folks at WordPress who selected this post to be featured on the Freshly Pressed page.)
- Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up
- One Year and Counting: Rocky Mountaineer Lockout Keeps Chugging Along
- Best Author Acknowledgement Ever
- Things that Make You Go…Wow
Thanks, everyone, for your support. See you in 2013!
New Labo(u)r Laws: Solving Problems that Don’t Exist
The program I teach in puts a big emphasis on using case studies – giving students a description of a problem situation, getting them to think the situation through, and getting them to come up with solutions to the problem. I really enjoy teaching with case studies, because one of the things they train you to do is to reason through a problem, rather than just jumping at a solution. (more…)
The “Union Transparency” Bill: How Transparent is This?
Back in March of this year, Conservative MP Russ Hiebert introduced the so-called “union transparency” bill in Canada’s federal House of Commons. Bill C-377 is a private member’s bill that would require unions to file financial statements with the federal government that would be made publicly available through the Canada Revenue Agency. The statements would have to provide, among other things, the details of any union financial transactions worth more than $5,000, as well as the salaries of union officials and staff.
The bill received initial support in the House of Commons and most recently has been the subject of discussion in Parliamentary committee hearings. But this story from the CBC (more…)
Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up
As regular readers of this blog know, it bugs me when writers get things wrong or can’t be bothered to justify their facts. Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of references to the “10,000 hour rule” – the idea that you need to spend 10,000 hours on an activity to be successful at it. I knew that this idea was popularized by writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, but I didn’t know where he got the idea from or what it was based on.
So imagine my surprise when I Googled “10,000 hour rule” and found a letter by K. Anders Ericsson, the lead author of the study that Gladwell cites as “Exhibit A” in support of the “rule”. (ETA: The full text of the letter is no longer available online, but its contents are described here.) Not only does Ericsson say that Gladwell “invented” the 10,000 hour rule, but he also describes Gladwell as making a “provocative generalization to a magical number”. (more…)
Federal Labour Minister Intervenes in Yet Another Dispute
Apparently, we have become so used to Federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt prematurely intervening in public sector labour disputes that, when it happens, it isn’t even considered news any more. (more…)
What You Can Do With A Ph.D.
Crowdsourcing and Unpaid Workers: When Worlds Collide
A while ago I wrote about crowdsourcing, which is becoming more and more interesting to me as an organizational theorist. Crowdsourcing bypasses traditional organizational structures and processes by creating what organizational theory would likely identify as a “networked organization”, Crowdsourcing creates a network of supporters around an artist or a project, and that organization can be temporary (for a one-time-only project) or ongoing (when the artist calls on those supporters whenever they have something new they want to pursue).
Thanks to the lively minds over at The Afterword, I was recently alerted to a situation that we might call “crowdsourcing gone wrong”. (more…)
Jonah Lehrer’s ‘Imagine’: How Did This Happen?
This past week, I had the opportunity to read Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine – the book that’s part of the controversy about plagiarism and fabrication in Lehrer’s writing. Imagine has been pulled by its publisher as a result of that controversy, so pointing out additional problems with it may now be somewhat redundant. (The copy I read came from my public library.) Nevertheless, after reading it, I want to outline the problems I found with the referencing in the book – an area which other commentators have also raised concerns about. (more…)
Labour Day News Review
Well, if Labour Day is indeed the time of the year when labour and workers get the most media attention, we might as well take advantage of it and take a quick look at some of what was said. (more…)
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