MbAlog
Business & Education Blog of an MBA Grad and PhD Student
Lies, D*mn Lies, and Statistics Canada II: Internet Privacy & Security
Sep 2nd
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With Statistics Canada having been criticized in the news recently, it’s good to see some of the real applications that impact Canadian businesses and lives, such as the Canadian Internet Use Survey. But I think practitioners–and the general public–still aren’t quite fulfilling “due diligence” in either citing the Statistics Canada information or in how they perceive and interpret it. Even following Statistics Canada’s own perfectly-correct guidelines about whom the results do and do not represent or whether a significant correlation can or cannot imply causation, the data may still not be giving the answers we think they are.
Statistics Canada’s Canadian Internet Use Survey is often cited by public interest groups, not-for-profit organizations, and marketers to support all manner of opinions. What I am mostly concerned about this time is the portion of it concerning Internet Privacy and Security concerns.
Although the mere five questions with only three possible levels of concern (None at all, Concerned, or Very concerned) may have been sufficient to determine that Privacy and Security is one of Canadians’ leading concerns, we know consider Privacy and Security a top concern. Five questions with only three levels of concern is no longer responsibly-adequate to be meaningful. (I am mostly-facetious More >
Think You Can Define “Strategy”? Post your attempt as a Comment
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In my initial CIRA post http://robincheung.info/mbalog/2010/08/30/how-i-cira-i/ I tried to convey the clarity of some major threats to CIRA's brand and strategy.
Because I recognize that many professionals have not refined a discplined, systematic approach to strategic analysis, my post was lengthy to explain why the threats were credible, to those who know strategy is important, but are accustomed to analyzing strategy by textbook and not with conceptual reasoning. Even amongst MBA graduates of various degrees of experience, you will find as many different definitions for "Strategy" as people you ask.
How do you define Strategy? Try to answer that conceptually as a comment, covering all the important aspects, without relying on any specific
examples. Although there are myriad books and references on Strategy now, they're not all equally-good, and they're not all equally-applicable. Although it's undergone several revisions and changes since I used it as a text in my P601 Introductory and and P710 Advanced Strategy during my MBA studies at McMaster University in 2000-2003, perhaps you could start with Thompson & Strickland's Crafting and Executing Strategy; it's an easy read that everyone could benefit from (including scheduling a re-reward, for myself). And I stress again, reading critically, using the words as a conceptual guide, still More >
How I CIRA the Internet in Canada
Aug 30th
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In order to make it to the final ballot, I still need to collect at least 20 votes of support! Please vote for me at the CIRA election site! https://elections.cira.ca/2010/en/election.html
If you are a .ca domain-owner (or care enough about Internet policy, such as CIRA representation of public interests in meetings with the CRTC and infrastructure in Canada, such as the implementation of DNSSEC, BIND10, and IPv6)
• The branding of dot-ca domains consistent throughout the CIRA site is clear:
- the .ca brand is associated with organizations Canadians trust;
- eligibility for .ca top-level domains is contingent on a legitimate Canadian connection, as defined by Canadian presence requirements;
- .ca domains convey comfort and confidence to form business relationships; many top-level domains can be registered by anyone, anywhere; interacting with a business emphasizing its .ca domain encourages business relationships; clarity that Canadian law applies to transactions promotes confidence to form relationships that view clear legal framework as a source of strength rather than restrictions to avoid.
I share Rick’s straightforward values that emphasize the integrity that a .ca top-level should be reflective of a true Canadian presence.
CIRA asserts the .ca top-level domain as a “key public resource” consistently; however, technology remains a cat-and-mouse game where the reality is even More >
Research Design 102 Redesigning a Better CIRA survey
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Yvon, selon le commissariat aux langues officielles, ni CIRA ni les programmes fédéraux n’oublige qu’il ait besoin évident: http://www.ocol-clo.gc.ca/html/faq2_f.php#q4
The following post was actually primarily a response to “Canadian Public Interest in Internet Policy and Decision Making” sent by CIRA in October, 2009. If it were a one-off survey conceived by someone at CIRA whose responsibility never before included surveys or questionnaire design, I could overlook the survey as a meaningless make-work project; however, the intent to find something out does seem genuine.
AndWalden\’s Scholar-Practitioner Researcher Model as a Social Change Agent something as fundamental as the apparent intent of the survey to identify what issues concerned CIRA most and the apparently desire to understand more about these important issues from the consistent use of open-ended questions seems worth, if not hiring a marketing research consultant to design and execute the research, any researchers on the Board might be able to improve survey questions and internal validity, even if their specialization was not at all a social science.
As a Canadian actively online since the late 80s I chose to participate in this year’s CIRA board election because of my keen desire to make meaningful contributions that may not be voiced on their own or informed More >
The Dog Published my Research (and how I got a free Kindle 2 from Springer!)
Aug 29th
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In response to the article dated 23 August, 2010, wherein Patricia Cohen, New York Times, explains how Dan Cohen, George Mason University, considers current academic culture–literature, in particular–the “exclusive” domain of “the charmed circle of tenured academe” (Cohen, 2010). They crticize the dearth of individuals that have invested significant time and effort to develop disciplined higher order reasoning as a “monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals.” The de-emphasis of prestige that I believe social media and revolutionary applications of it to research, such as Mendeley, has the power to encourage and the consequent emphasis on scholarliness and quality of research can improve integrity in science by raising expectations on all researchers to be familiar with research regardless of the Impact Factor of the journal it was published in.
Doing so would allow quality research to be published in a timely manner, quality assured by peer review, but eliminating “the dog ate my paper” as an excuse as well as the “dog published my paper” excuses that come free in the box with allowing submissions and revisions from everyone and their dogs. Just like so many other blogs, I launched mine (http://robincheung.info/mbalog/) without any more inspiration than the myriad More >
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