Environmental Scan Blog

I have spent years trying to get off the advertising mailing lists of both Bell Canada and Rogers, without success. I keep getting snail mail offering various services from both of them, and despite several calls and emails, neither Bell nor Rogers seem to have any idea how to deal with people who don’t want to be spammed.

Typical interaction: I called Rogers today regarding a letter asking me, as usual, to sign up for their internet services. The person who answered asked for my account. I don’t have an account. He asked me to stay on hold. He came back and asked for my name and address. Then more time on hold. He came back and told me to call the Do Not Call list of the CRTC (in Canada). I explained that I was calling about mailings, not telemarketing, and I was already on all of the do not disturb lists I could find. I was put on hold. He came back to explain that there was no way I could get off the mailing list since no-one had a clue about where it was developed or who was responsible. He suggested I email corporate public relations. So I did. No response yet.

The same thing has been happening with Bell.

I just hate this. I travel a lot, and my mail is forwarded or opened and faxed to me. I’ve been able to get off almost every spam list except for Bell and Rogers, the communications experts.

Does anyone have any idea about how to stop it? If so, I’ll share it here. Email me at news at realworldsystems.net.

Many online music services are unavailable in Canada because of licensing restrictions (Pandora, Rhapsody, Spotify, Google’s new DiscoverMusic, etc.). For a while I was using last.fm but they recently began charging users outside the U.S.

There are thousands of free internet radio stations that you can get through Screamer Radio, but I prefer to select specific albums and artists rather than listen to someone else’s playlist. Actually, my favourite way to listen to music is to start with some songs I like and then generate an automatic playlist based on the characteristics of the selected songs using a recommendation engine.

So I was delighted to find Imeem and then, even better, Grooveshark. In both you can select the songs, artists and albums of your choice and create your own playlists. Grooveshark, which is much easier to use, also gives you the option of selecting any song and pressing ‘Radio’, creating a personalized stream of songs based on their user database. You can give feedback on each song that the Radio lists, which will refine future recommendations (they say). Now I’m just hoping that they don’t start barring Canadians.

Great news for open access research:

A Harvard University Library news story updates the great news of the Harvard research community’s leadership of open access to scholarship through DASH. The release begins:

September 1, 2009—Harvard’s leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.

“DASH is meant to promote openness in general,” stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. “It will make the current scholarship of Harvard’s faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard’s library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth.”

Visitors to DASH (http://dash.harvard.edu) can locate, read, and use some of the most up-to-the minute scholarship that Harvard has to offer. DASH users can read “Anticipating One’s Troubles: The Costs and Benefits of Negative Expectations” by Harvard College Professor Dan Gilbert.

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Harvard’s DASH for Open Access.

Terrific article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review on the unrecognized costs of organizational overhead – pointed out by Lori Criss Powers.

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.

Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle (August 18, 2009).

Lori Criss Powers pointed out McKinsey’s Capacity Assessment Grid, which is a very nice framework for thinking about nonprofit capacities in the areas of:

• Aspirations
• Strategy
• Organizational skills (including performance management, planning, fundraising etc)
• Human resources
• Systems and infrastructure
• Organizational structure
• Culture

Interesting… From

Feeling the Heat: The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams’ Knowledge Use and Performance  HBS Working Knowledge.

Why do teams often fail to use their knowledge resources effectively even after they have correctly identified the experts among them? Project teams are a prominent feature of the knowledge-based economy, and member expertise has long been recognized as an important resource that can greatly affect team performance, but only to the extent that it is accurately recognized and used to accomplish the objective. The step between recognizing others’ expertise and then actually applying it to achieve a collective outcome, however, is highly problematic: Even when individuals know who holds relevant task expertise, they are often unwilling or unable to give the experts appropriate influence over the group process and outcomes. HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner takes a multidisciplinary approach to develop theory explaining how interpersonal dynamics in teams affect members’ use of each other’s distinct knowledge, ultimately leading to differential performance outcomes. Key concepts include:

* Teams facing significant performance pressures tend to default to high-status members at the expense of using team members with deep knowledge of the client, with detrimental effects on team performance.
* The more important the project, the less effective the team: Excessive performance pressure results in the team reverting to less effective ways of divvying up influence over its end product, in turn leading to lower performance ratings for the whole team.
* Team process is important in enabling organizations to harness knowledge resources for the benefit of maintaining strong relations with their clients.

Interesting… From The Magazine » How to Manage Outside Innovation « MIT Sloan Management Review.

Should companies organize outside innovation through collaborative communities or competitive markets?

Findings

* Communities are useful when an innovation problem involves cumulative knowledge, continually building on past advances. Markets are effective when an innovation problem is best solved by broad experimentation.

* In general, communities are more oriented toward the intrinsic motivations of external innovators (the desire to be a part of some larger cause, for instance), whereas markets tend to reward extrinsic motivations (such as through financial compensation).

Kanter’s law says, “Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is just the middles that involve hard work.”

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the former editor of the Harvard Business Review, writes:

I hit upon this law of management (and life) after observing hundreds of major changes slide into lethargy following the pep rallies and press conferences, as grand promises gave way to the tough challenges of implementation. That’s the point in the middle when true believers have doubts. And that happens even without throwing in a gigantic global economic crisis.

All new initiatives – big new government directions, business turnarounds, new venture start-ups, new products, or internal process changes – can run into trouble before reaching fruition. Troubles increase with the number of ways the initiative differs from current approaches. The more innovation, the more problems. Problems tempt people to give up, forget it, and chase the next enticing rainbow. But stop the effort too soon, and by definition it is a failure. Stay with it through its hurdles, make appropriate adjustments, and you could be on the way to success. Though some ideas are dead-ends, many simply need mid-course corrections.

Change Is Hardest in the Middle – Rosabeth Moss Kanter – HarvardBusiness.org.

Here’s a funny polemic against nonprofits, in a blog post at HarvardBusiness.org recommending that the US provide tax deductibility on  “products and services they buy from for-profit companies whose work have embedded social good”. His rationale? – It

would open the door to social change to the most powerful economic force known to humanity: the entrepreneurial spirit — a spirit which is effectively eradicated in any nonprofit setting by

1. The obstructing power of Boards of Directors, which are notoriously risk-averse
2. The inability to offer stock options to attract a kick-ass team
3. The inability for entrepreneurs to own any of their creation themselves
4. The inability to hire without interference from an outdated moral code on compensation

The entrepreneur bets everything on her dream and is free to pursue it in a for-profit setting. Enter non-profit governance, and the entrepreneur is suffocated and demoralized — she no longer has say over her dream. Her board does, and the IRS, and the charity watchdogs.

My goodness. What a lot of dogmatic, ideological, non-evidence-based junk.  

Want to Change the World? Change the Tax Code – Dan Pallotta – HarvardBusiness.org.

This article suggests ‘Potential Years of Life Lost’ as an important outcome indicator  in national healthcare systems 

PYLL works like this: If a male lived to age 60, but average life expectancy was 69, 9 years of potential life would have been lost. PYLL is an interesting number to economists because it is a measure of opportunity cost: how much life is foregone in different healthcare systems. […]

The United States gets the smallest bang for the buck in terms of life itself amongst developed countries: it realizes the lowest level of “life returns.” The U.S. healthcare system returns the fewest life years for each dollar spent. The United States, for example, has invested an additional 8.3% of GDP in health since 1971. That investment yielded a PYLL reduction of 5157 years. America realized a return of 621 potential years of life gained for each additional percentage point of GDP invested in health. […]

Canada, in contrast, has invested a marginal 2.6% of GDP in health since 1971. That investment yielded a PYLL reduction of 5393 years. Canada realized a return of 2074 years for each additional percentage point of GDP invested in health. The Canadian healthcare system delivers life returns more than three times greater than those of the American healthcare system.

How Effective is American Healthcare? – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org.

I just love HBR’s working paper series. Here’s an executive summary of another online working paper –

Why do teams often fail to use their knowledge resources effectively even after they have correctly identified the experts among them? Project teams are a prominent feature of the knowledge-based economy, and member expertise has long been recognized as an important resource that can greatly affect team performance, but only to the extent that it is accurately recognized and used to accomplish the objective. The step between recognizing others’ expertise and then actually applying it to achieve a collective outcome, however, is highly problematic: Even when individuals know who holds relevant task expertise, they are often unwilling or unable to give the experts appropriate influence over the group process and outcomes. HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner takes a multidisciplinary approach to develop theory explaining how interpersonal dynamics in teams affect members’ use of each other’s distinct knowledge, ultimately leading to differential performance outcomes. Key concepts include:

* Teams facing significant performance pressures tend to default to high-status members at the expense of using team members with deep knowledge of the client, with detrimental effects on team performance.
* The more important the project, the less effective the team: Excessive performance pressure results in the team reverting to less effective ways of divvying up influence over its end product, in turn leading to lower performance ratings for the whole team.
* Team process is important in enabling organizations to harness knowledge resources for the benefit of maintaining strong relations with their clients.

Feeling the Heat: The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams’ Knowledge Use and Performance – HBS Working Knowledge.

This may be an important finding if it holds up in practice: The entire working paper is available at the link 

Policies that would create net benefits for society but would also involve costs frequently lack the necessary support to be enacted because losses loom larger than gains psychologically. To reduce this harmful consequence of loss aversion, we propose a new type of policy bundling technique in which related bills that have both costs and benefits are combined. Using a laboratory study, we confirm across a set of four legislative domains that this bundling technique increases support for bills that have both costs and benefits. We also demonstrate that this effect is due to changes in the psychology of decision making, rather than voters’ willingness to compromise and support a bill they weakly oppose when that bill is bundled with one they strongly support.

Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes - HBS Working Knowledge.

From the MITSloan Management Review:

A new working paper tackles an interesting topic: the relationship between tolerance for failure and innovation. In particular, authors Xuan Tian and Tracy Y. Wang looked at venture capitalists’ tolerance for failure  — and its effect on the innovativeness of the young companies they invested in.

One of Tian and Wang’s interesting findings: Venture-backed companies that eventually conducted IPOs (initial public offerings) and were backed by more failure-tolerant venture capitalists were significantly more innovative than other venture-backed IPO companies. 

What’s more, the researchers’ analysis suggests that what particularly matters is investment at an early stage by a failure-tolerant investor.   Venture capitalists, Tian and Wang conclude, appear to influence the culture of the early-stage start-ups they invest in — and failure-tolerant early investors result in IPO companies that are more innovative. 

A new working paper from Harvard Business School on filesharing and copyright policy suggests that:

Copyright protection exists to encourage innovation and the creation of new works—in other words, to promote social welfare. … It’s difficult to argue that weaker copyright protection has had a negative impact on artists’ incentives to be creative.

Furthermore,

We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

The full working paper is available for download.

Canada, like many other countries, continues to chip away at privacy protections for online information. Two good articles here:

From Michael Geist:

As expected, the Government has taken another shot at lawful access legislation today, introducing a legislative package called the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act that would require mandated surveillance capabilities at Canadian ISPs, force SPs to disclose subscriber information such as name and address, and grant the police broad new powers to obtain transmission data and force ISPs to preserve data.

And, on the same topic by Lawrence Munn, a Canadian lawyer specialising on legislation and policy development:

Section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act provides that the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the head of a police service constituted under the laws of a province may designate a limited number of persons who may request particular personal information from a telecommunications service provider. In some respects this power is similar to section 7(3)(c.1) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), legislation which applies to private organizations in the federal sphere, which permits the disclosure of personal information collected by an organization without an individual’s consent if a “government institution” (which presumably includes police) requests that the information be disclosed. However, under section 7(3)(c.1) of PIPEDA, the government institution must identify its lawful authority to obtain the information, and the request must be made for the purpose of enforcing a law, carrying out an investigation or gathering intelligence. In contrast, section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act contains no similar limitation: the designated person need only request the information.

You can’t really critique online privacy protection without knowing something about what privacy involves and how hard it is to maintain. A new book on the topic, just published by the Oxford University Press, is available for download under a Creative Commons license, “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the importance and impact of anonymity and authentication in an networked society”. Sponsored by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and containing chapters from international experts and researchers, it’s a terrific basis for discussion on the issues underlying privacy and anonymity.

For example, the chapter on redeeming privacy for battered women describes ‘the feminist rejection of privacy’ and analyzes the need for privacy (enabling women to hide from their abusive partners) as well as its dangers (enabling domestic abuse to be carried out under the veil of family privacy). The book also has chapters on anonymity and the law in Canada, the US and other countries. And ‘Soul Train: the new surveillance in popular music’ looks at “the close links between surveillance and culture, and control and entertainment”.

Michael Geist, the Canadian law professor and anti-copyright hero, has posted an analysis of how copyright lobbying relies on

a clear strategy of deploying seemingly independent organizations to advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations. Over the past three years, this strategy has played out with multiple reports, each building on the next with a steady stream of self-citation.

This kind of analysis should be done more often in policy development. The use of self-referential key documents with overlapping contributors is probably pretty common, and not necessarily sinister. It’s a good case study of how advocacy groups can create a sense of momentum with relatively few papers and organizations that look independent but aren’t. However, it can also lead to bad policy based on an insufficient research base, as in the case of the emerging international copyright laws.

An inconvenient talk: An article in Walrus Magazine on the end of the fossil fuel age has finally convinced me that policy analysts need to include low-energy scenarios into all our planning. Our entire way of life is based on essentially free energy. According to Thomas Homer Dixon’s Carbon Shift, “oil and coal are such rich energy sources (for example, 3 tablespoons of gasoline is the equivalent energy of an entire human’s day of labour) that it’s hard to replace them ‘one for one’ with renewable energy sources, at least using conventional technologies” (from an article in SpeakUp Winnipeg describing how radical energy reductions might affect Canadian cities).

Appropriate social policy responses, as far as I can see, will be to develop systems and services that will be resilient in the face of decreased energy consumption. In other words, when we design social responses to poverty, ill health, etc., we need to consider how feasible they will be given two or three reasonable scenarios for the next 20 years. That would include the necessity of educational systems that are based around neighbourhoods within walking distance, increased use of online communication to replace travel, etc. Depending on the severity of the scenarios we may need to use railways for food delivery in urban areas, supplemented by urban agriculture, and build community services around those activities.

A New York Times article about Dr Kessler, the former head of the FDA, on how the food industry has engineered food to literally make it irresistible. Kessler is recommending a social shift in how we deal with ‘hyperpalatable foods’ in the same way that society stopped tolerating cigarette smoking. In this online speech about the neurology of eating, he describes how prepared foods are designed to elicit over-eating. Individuals are not able to resist the conditioning alone; as a society ‘we should be saying that this is a deadly, disgusting product’. It’s a fundamental public policy issue.

Wired has pulled together a set of recommendations for transparency of government data in response to the Obama administration’s policy of open government.

The article includes ‘models for opening and using government data’, including:

Socrata

Socrata is a social data discovery site which hosts lots of government datasets with a simple appealing UI to browse, search and analyze the data.

Infochimps.org

Infochimps is dedicated to finding and hosting free, redistributable datasets. It’s a simple but absolutely enormous mission. So far, they’ve got thousands waiting for you to use.

Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America

Sunlight Labs is an organization dedicated to “turning government data into useful information.” They are currently hosting an Apps for America contest to design web services that promote transparency in Congress.

From Tech Crunch:

A coalition of non-profit organizations, technology developers, designers, marketers and others has unveiled the alpha version of a new Web service dubbed All for Good in an effort to build some sort of ‘Craigslist for volunteer services’. …

All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network.

It’s not clear why the group behind All for Good didn’t work with existing sites such as volunteermatch.org, but it looks like their approach is to facilitate data sharing among many different sites and social networking tools rather than compete head to head with any of them.

There are already some Canadian listings that may have been scraped from other sites.