Today’s feature in meaningless survey research is this new poll by the American Management Association on American workers communication skills. MSN is reporting that ‘American workers fall short’. Should anyone be surprised that this is the conclusion of the American Management Association?
There’s an obvious bias right there on the part of the executives who are being surveyed. Would it really be in their interest to say that American’s workers are doing well?
Venkatesh Rao, the blogger at ribbonfarm has written a three-part series “Entrepreneurs are the new labor” for Forbes. His basic argument is that entrepreneurs are becoming a new labor class. Twenty years ago technology entrepreurs, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, were the Robber Barons of the current technology wave, riding the development of personal computres to massive individual fortunes. Today the entrepreurs in Silicon Valley are building upon the shoulders of these giants, many of their companies are small bore endeavors creating the latest social-this-social-that app for consumer smartphones.
A recent post at my favorite godless liberal weblog, Pharyngula, on the gender and age distribution of writers for skeptical magazines such as the Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic prompted me to think a bit about attitudes toward religious expression in the workplace. I’d be interested to see what Eric thinks.
My personal opinion is that religion should be kept to a minimal level in the workplace as much as possible. I’ve been relatively lucky to work in environments where religion has never been a major issue or concern.
I officially started my summer internship at Tablus today, although I’ve been working there part time for the past two semesters. My current project is creating a dictionary/taxonomy of terms connected to ITAR, the International Trade in Arms Regulations. The United States Munitions list has about a dozen categories, from firearms to satellites, and I have to break each one of them down into terms that can be recognized by the Tablus filter programs.
The Small Things Loosely Connected student group had its kickoff meeting this afternoon. As Brian noted it was a good start to a very interesting endeavor. Michael Cohen mentioned that he had thought more student groups like STLC would have formed at SI before now. I was surprised by the same thing when I first arrived last fall. There are a couple of chapters for student professional organizations such as the ALA, SLA, SOCHI, SIMPLE, but no ad-hoc interest groups.
I’ve also worked in tech support so I could relate to this story in Salon, “We don’t support that.” Working on internal support meant that I never had to learn the Mantra, but the overall process could be just as disappointing.