Ryerson alumni discounts
Note to self: The Alumni Card & Discounts page has a boatload of useful discounts alumni of the university can take advantage of, including 20% – 30% off admission to the ROM and 10% off at SoftMoc.
The tyranny of fun at the workplace
Here’s an enjoyably curmudgeonly Schumpeter post in The Economist on the idea of fun at work gone mad.
The Economist – Down with fun
One of the many pleasures of watching “Mad Menâ€, a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy: they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work.
The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk.
These days many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease. Acclaris, an American IT company, has a “chief fun officerâ€. TD Bank, the American arm of Canada’s Toronto Dominion, has a “Wow!†department that dispatches costume-clad teams to “surprise and delight†successful workers. Red Bull, a drinks firm, has installed a slide in its London office.
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This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are “fully engaged with their jobâ€. Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that “fun†will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.
The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with a large dose of coercion. Companies such as Zappos don’t merely celebrate wackiness. They more or less require it. Compulsory fun is nearly always cringe-making. Twitter calls its office a “Twofficeâ€. Boston Pizza encourages workers to send “golden bananas†to colleagues who are “having fun while being the bestâ€. Behind the “fun†façade there often lurks some crude management thinking: a desire to brand the company as better than its rivals, or a plan to boost productivity through team-building. Twitter even boasts that it has “worked hard to create an environment that spawns productivity and happinessâ€.
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“Mad Men†reminds people of a world they have lost—a world where bosses did not think that “fun†was a management tool and where employees could happily quaff Scotch at noon. Cheers to that.
Don’t stretch before you exercise
To summarize: Beforehand, do slow, even movements that mimic what you’ll be doing during the workout. Afterwards some stretching won’t hurt if your aim is to increase your flexibility.
CTV News – Experts agree: Don’t stretch before you exercise
It may sound counter to everything your gym teacher or soccer coach told you, but stretching your muscles and holding them before you run (or hit the ice, the slopes, or the golf course) not only risks injury; it might actually slow you down.
Traditional stretches, like “the flamingo,” the quad stretch of standing on one leg and pulling back the other, are what fitness experts call “static” stretches. While almost all of us have done them ahead of exercising, recent research suggests such stretching before a workout can actually cause your muscles to tighten rather than relax — exactly the opposite of what you want.
What’s more, pulling and holding your muscles before you exercise causes little “micro-tears” that damage the muscle and can lead to injury.
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Stretching your muscles when they’re cold is a recipe for disaster, say Lum and other fitness experts, such as Nic Martin, the fitness manager at Toronto’s Union Station GoodLife fitness club, and Jennifer Wilson, the director of personal training at GoodLife. A better idea is what’s called “dynamic stretching.” That means slow, even movements that are similar to the moves in your sport.
“It’s about mimicking the movement you’re about to perform,” Wilson says. “You just want to take your muscles, unweighted, through the range of movement that you plan to perform. You’re not holding the position; you’re just getting your body moving.”
So runners, for example, can do a dynamic warmup by simply walking for five to 10 minutes. Tennis players would rally a few balls over the net. Skiers might do a few squats.
“Doing the movement at a slower pace to allow blood to flow into the muscle, that is good preparation. Static stretching is not,” Lum says.
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As for the idea that stretching before a workout can help prevent injuries? Or the belief that stretching prevents muscle soreness the nest day? Chalk those up to yet more exercise urban myths.
Experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who combed through more than 100 studies on static stretching found that people who stretched before exercise were no less likely to suffer injuries, such as a pulled muscle, than others.
And a systematic review from experts at the well-regarded Cochrane Library, that looked at how stretching before or after exercise affected muscle soreness, found consistent findings: “They showed there was minimal or no effect on the muscle soreness experienced between half a day and three days after the physical activity,” the authors concluded.
Despite static stretching’s new-found bad reputation, there is still a place for stretching, particularly if you want to become more flexible. And that place is after your workout.
“You can enhance your flexibility by stretching after your workout, when your muscles are nice and warm; that’s useful,” say Lum.
Creating a Windows Service in Visual Studio 2010
Once in a blue moon I’m tasked with a project whose requirements call for a long-running (or periodically running) application that needs little in the way of user interaction. As I’ve a small cadre of .NET developers and plenty of Windows OS surrounding me, one solution has been to implement a Windows Service.
Creating a Windows Service project in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 takes all of three or four mouse clicks. What isn’t immediately clear, and what will serve as the topic for this entry, is:
- How to get your Windows Service to run every X seconds/minutes/hours (on a timer)
- How to make your Windows Service installable
- How to read application settings from a .CONFIG file
- How to perform real-time debugging upon your Windows Service
Excited? All right, let’s roll!
How much money makes a long commute worth it?
My personal commute horror story: The worst I’ve ever had it was my four years of study at Ryerson, where I commuted two to two-and-a-half hours – in either direction – from my parents’ place in Mississauga’s west end. For six months immediately after graduation I narrowed that down to one-and-a-half hours from Mississauga to my office on Bay Street.
I learned my lesson and moved downtown. My commute is a leisurely twenty minute walk west on King and south on Bay. Believe me, it makes a difference.
ScienceBlogs – Commuting: The Frontal Cortex
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A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called “the commuters paradox”. They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that the big house in the exurbs will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional hour to work.
Of course, as Brooks notes, that time in traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. Another study, led by Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, surveyed nine hundred working women in Texas and found that commuting was, by far, the least pleasurable part of their day.
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Consider two housing options: a three bedroom apartment that is located in the middle of a city, with a ten minute commute time, or a five bedroom McMansion on the urban outskirts, with a forty-five minute commute. “People will think about this trade-off for a long time,” Dijksterhuis says. “And most them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad.”
What’s interesting, Dijksterhuis says, is that the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes. They’ll imagine all sorts of scenarios (a big birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, another child) that will turn the suburban house into an absolute necessity. The pain of a lengthy commute, meanwhile, will seem less and less significant, at least when compared to the allure of an extra bathroom.
But, as Dijksterhuis points out, that reasoning process is exactly backwards: “The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute does become a burden after a while.”
The trouble with capitalism
The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.
— National Review Online: Willi Schlamm, Apr. 20, 2005
How losing your job affects your long-term earning potential
Via Ezra Klein comes a graph from an International Monetary Fund discussion paper illustrating the effect of long-term unemployment on the average male’s overall earning potential:
International Monetary Fund – The Challenges of Growth, Employment and Social Cohesion
Loss of earnings: There is empirical evidence that layoffs are associated with substantial loss of earnings both over the short and long run. That is, even when workers are re-employed shortly after displacement, they suffer a decline in wages compared to the pre-displacement job and compared to similar workers that were not displaced.
The decline in earnings is on average observed for job losers in any period, but is most pronounced for job losers during a recession (see Farber, 2005). Studies for the US show that these earnings losses persist even in the long run: 15-20 years after a job loss in a recession, the earnings loss amounts on average to 20% (see e.g. Jacobson et al., 1993; von Wachter et al., 2009).
The moves that make men attractive to women
The Economist has an article on what particular dance moves are the most attractive to females – and it looks like being left-handed is a (hopefully slight) disadvantage!
The Economist – Dancing and sexual selection: Lord of the dance
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The motion-capture data were used to animate a humanoid avatar that was featureless and gender-neutral. Heterosexual women were then asked to judge the quality of the dancing. The results, published in Biology Letters, were intriguing: the most attractive movements were those that had “variability and amplitude†in the head, neck and trunk.
Dr Neave explains that humans move in three planes. You can nod your head backwards and forwards, side to side or twist your neck to look over a shoulder. The women rated big movements in these three planes for both the head and the trunk as the most attractive. However, there was an additional factor, says Dr Neave.
Headbanging (sorry, Motörhead fans) was simply not attractive: although it would show a large amplitude of movement in one plane it would not show the variability of movement that seems to appeal to women. Choreographers have told Dr Neave that movements in these three planes comes from strength and suppleness, so they would help to indicate a genetically fit male.
One curiosity was that, statistically, the speed of movement of the right knee also appeared to be important in signalling dance quality. Dr Neave, however, believes this may simply result from 80% of men being right footed, and so tending to place more weight on their left foot in order to demonstrate leg-waggling prowess with the right one.
Best duffel bag ever
“It’s one of our top sellers because there are so many people that have some kind of connection with aviation in Canada, or the Air Force, that it appeals to. It’s rugged, the webbing goes all the way around, you can put a ton in it. That’s why we don’t put a shoulder strap on it, it would be too heavy. Recently a customer was using the bag and sent us a note. He said, “I’ve got Louis Vuitton and I’ve got Gucci bags, and yet I’ve never had so many people comment on my bag as with this one.'”
— Red Canoe via Retail Therapy
What if the U.S. Senate was elected in proportion to voter income? Or by age?
An interesting thought exercise. Organizing the upper house of the U.S. (or here in Canada, if it ever becomes elected) by territory is really as arbitrary as by any other means.
The Washington Post – What if senators represented people by income or race, not by state?
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What if the 100-member Senate were designed to mirror the overall U.S. population — and were based on statistics rather than state lines?
Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.
Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator).
Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families.
The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.
Imagine trying to convince someone — Michael Bloomberg, perhaps? — to be the lonely senator representing the richest percentile. And what if the senators were apportioned according to jobs figures? This year, the unemployed would have gained two seats. Think of the deals that would be made to attract that bloc!
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What about a Senate in which voters cast ballots for candidates campaigning to win over a certain age group? Thirteen senators would vie for 18-to-24-year-olds, who strongly support measures such as the cap-and-trade climate bill and marriage rights for gays. Nearly all of these senators would be Democrats.
Americans over 65 would control 16 seats — and would be mostly Republicans interested in protecting Medicare and the broader status quo. The baby boomer bubble would be largely in the eldest category, though its stragglers would round out the segment of voters, probably split between the parties, that is edging up on retirement.
Thirty-six senators would serve 25-to-44-year-olds, and 35 senators 45-to-64-year-olds — and would be likely to push the very issues now on the table, including health care, entitlement viability and tax breaks for the middle class.