Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
Joan Osborne does a lovely cover of the song Cathedrals, originally by Jump, Little Children.
It makes me think of a young man I knew back in my Baffin Island days. Let’s call him Markosee. Born in Cape Dorset, he followed his father into the mines of nothern Quebec. The money was good, and he holidayed in New York, Montreal and other nice places.
He quit eventually, because the joints of his hands began to lose their strength. When I met him, he could bend his fingers back almost into a ‘U’ shape. It didn’t hurt, he told me, but it meant that he could no longer operate heavy machinery. I never found out the cause of his affliction.
I first encountered him at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, where he was learning jewellery making. Kind, good-natured and with a gentleness that belied his strenth, he made an impression on me from the first, when he crowded me into a doorway to show me some drawings he’d made with a Bic pen. They were naive and beautiful.
He dropped out after about 6 months and returned to Cape Dorset (I suppose it’s Kinngnait, now). When next I saw him, he was working roughly an hour a day as a baggage porter for the local airline. I invited him to join me at Cal’s diner, the only restaurant in town. When he came by that night, we chatted about his past.
I asked Markosee about New York, wondering what impression a city like that would have on a man born into such a vast, quiet land. His face was pained when he explained that the southern cities were nice, but they made him feel like he was drowning. There was no place for him there. It was clear that this realisation had cost him.
Markosee died at the age of 27, about a year after I last saw him. He took a hunting rifle and placed it against his chest, then shot out his heart.
I know why he did it. It was a simple equation, and the answer was inescapable. He was lost, and there was no going home.
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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
“Ask not what You can learn from the Web,
but what the Web can learn from You.”
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Monday, January 26th, 2009
International development theory explained.
That really is the problem with most development projects (and philosophies) I’ve come across: They’re predicated on the assumption that the system as it is today is what we want to start with. But the systems are organic, not mechanical.
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Monday, January 26th, 2009
[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]
A week ago today, four men entered the offices of the Vanuatu Daily Post and attacked publisher Marc Neil-Jones, punching him hard enough to fracture his nose and then kicking him while he was down.
Asked about the assault, Neil-Jones half-smiled and described it in philosophical terms, suggesting that this kind of treatment comes with the territory. “This isn’t the first time this has happened to me,” he said, then added wryly, “of course, I’m older now than I was.”
Neil-Jones was beaten because his staff did their job, reporting on events and recording their views, for the public good and for posterity.
This column isn’t about the events that led to the attack. It’s not about prisons, politics or even publishers. This column is about getting results. It’s about resolving issues instead of exacerbating them.
Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
[This week's Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]
Last Thursday, members of the IT industry, researchers and interested members of the public got together with Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities to discuss proposed new laws governing Vanuatu’s burgeoning telecommunications sector.
At issue was a Bill to define the precise role of the Telecommunications Regulator. Designed to supplement the existing Telecommunications Act of 1989, it outlines in detail the extent of the Regulator’s mandate to influence the newly-liberalised telecoms market.
The draft Bill describes an environment wherein the Regulator has wide latitude to impose his will on telecoms operators if they misbehave. Among other things, he can enforce fair and equitable access to rare or unique infrastructure (known as bottleneck resources), he can intervene if telecoms operators are deemed to be offering preferential or prejudicial prices to others and if necessary he can enforce tariff or pricing regimes on carriers if they don’t play fair.
Viewed in the light of their exemplary track record, the draft Bill reflects well on both the Ministry and the Regulator. To date, their attitude has been to let market forces work with little if any intervention. They have nonetheless made sure that the regulatory stick they hold in reserve holds real clout. The proposed Bill gives this all the force of law. Rather than relying in the language of various negotiated agreements, they’ve outlined a set of rules that applies to anyone and everyone operating in the telecoms sector.
Others aren’t so sure that a big regulatory stick is such a good thing….
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
I’d use the metaphor of shooting the messenger for this story, but unfortunately, that’s exactly what the attackers threatened to do.
I wrote about the issue in this feature. More to come in this weekend’s column.
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Saturday, January 17th, 2009
[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]
There is only one thing worse than a badly played football match: a badly refereed match.
What makes a bad referee? Players the world over agree that it’s not strictness or laxity; what makes a referee really bad is when he’s inconsistent and unpredictable. The ref consistently calls offsides in favour of the defence? Not great for the strikers, but a team can adjust and try different approaches to the net. The ref calls them consistently in favour of the offence? Drop the zone defence and mark your man carefully.
But when neither team knows how the play will be called, it creates uncertainty, which leads to sloppy play and sometimes a little opportunistic cheating, hoping that this time the ref won’t call a questionable play.
This principle applies everywhere. In numerous business surveys, company leaders consistently report that continuity and predictability in economic management and government affairs matter more to them than the economic structures themselves.
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Originally published at the Scriptorum. You can comment here or there.
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