Screenshot of PDC’s interactive map services For anyone who has listened to me bloviate about baseline Covid-19 data gathering, and the need to employ cell phones in the effort, it appears to be happening at last: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/apple-google-smartphone-covid-19-1.5529407 Thank Jonathan Yen for bringing it to my attention. You’ll all enjoy my silence on the matter now. The…
Read more
Systems Are More Than The Sum Of Their Parts
Yesterday I was reacting to the way a health agency minimized a terrible problem by presenting data in a misleading way, and I framed it as predictable behavior by a bureaucratic system. While I may find the charts fascinating, this is a terrible way of introducing people to the healthcare challenges of people living in…
Read more
Northern Disclosure
When big, complex, bureaucratic systems know they have a problem, they try to fix themselves. This results from a mix of motives. There is a natural impulse to improve the system for the benefit of end users. There is an equally natural impulse to avoid the intervention of outsiders in the repair of internal system…
Read more
What’s News With You?
Sometimes the most astonishing aspect of news isn’t in the headline or the fine print, it’s the priority we give to certain stories. Last month I was in Victoria, the capital of our third biggest province. On the front page of the daily paper I read that an octopus had attacked a bald eagle in…
Read more