New website will help thousands unhappy in their jobs

OnRec, the online recruitment forum, pointed to Careershifters.org. OnRec's article is written in a somewhat more "hypey" than is usual for ADSET so I asked Dawn to go and look.

The site has a strong emphasis on motivation and self-help, so I'm not sure that "validity" is too much of an issue. Expert advice is given by "career coaches" but again seems to focus on helping people to get moving. The advice given seems pretty straightforward. It's very clearly written and is inspirational without being cloying. I like the way the site is organised. It is simple to navigate and invites browsing.

I checked it myself and found:
a) that it was VERY slow to load (using an ADSL connection before 7am when connection speeds are usually good).
b) terrestrial address information is given (based in Islington) but not the company information as required.
c) I could not find a privacy statement.

Overall judgement: "worth a look and directing your clients to - if they're into self-help but it's not for everyone".

Who says we know: an original essay for Edge by Larry Sanger

If you haven't come across Edge before allow me to introduce you to a non-academic, but never simplistic, source of philosophical debate. Edge's mission is to:

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex
and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each
other the questions they are asking themselves.

In the most recent publication my mind stuck on "everybody knows". Sanger tells us that: "Everybody knows that Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, that 2+2=4, that most people have two eyes." I will admit, however, that the reason I got stuck on this phrase was that I regularly say to the significant other in my life (aka husband not dog) "well, I'm not everybody". He seems to assume that the knowledge that in his head is also in mine. OK, 2+2=4. The inner workings of a computer? Forget it - I don't even understand the words he uses.

What is knowledge? How do we "know" what we know? Or, as Sanger titles his essay, "Who says we know".

In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media—in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.
But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.

12 days of nothing

I wondered whether the withdrawal symptoms I'd been suffering were to do with a lack of coffee in the house but then realised that it was twelve whole days since I had published anything here. Lots of reading of other people's postings, a fairish amount of tagging "I must come back to this so that I can decide whether to tell others about it", and NOTHING to show for it. "You should be ashamed of yourself" was a favourite saying of my mother's - and she was, as always, perfectly correct.

Business and the Environment: Policy Incentives and Corporate Responses

This book summarises the results of an OECD project which collected and analysed data from the business sector on their motivations and decision-making processes relating to the environment.

The analysis of the inner workings of the firm has been largely absent from economic assessments of environmental policy. In an effort to partly fill this vacuum, this book summarises the results of an OECD project which collected and analysed data from over 4,000 facilities in seven OECD countries. Issues addressed includethe role of 'flexible' policy instruments in encouraging clean production strategies and environmental research and development; the effectiveness of different environmental policy incentives on the introduction of environmental management systems and tools; and the relationship between environmental and commercial performance.

Available in paperback and PDF E-book from the OECD online bookshop
Print (paperback) 24 Euros, PDF 16 Euros (plus the cost of printing 114 pages)

Jobsforinfopros.com launches

Thursday 12 April saw the launch of a new, state-of-the-art jobs board dedicated to the library and information profession, http://www.jobsforinfopros.com/. Peter Haastrup, Business Director said, "Job-seekers’ methods of finding work are becoming more sophisticated as they become more Internet-savvy. Not all job-seekers want to go to an agency to find work but most want quick and easy access to work specific to our sector, at their convenience. Jobs boards like this give them such options."

Sounds good but my, admittedly fairly cursory, look at this newcomer leads me to say "could do better -- a lot better". I guess that "£18.10 a year" means "£18,100 a year" but I'm not sure and I couldn't find any means of searching by geography.

Stolen hospital laptop prompts ID theft concerns

A laptop stolen from a hospital in Cornwall contained the personal and financial information of 10,000 NHS staff.

Thanks to PC Pro news for this story. Whilst it's worrying for people in the area at least you know that there's a possibility of your identity being used. What about the stolen laptop that didn't get reported? Is your information on it? Is mine?

ONS National and Regional Monthly Labour Market Statistics

Latest ONS First Release of Labour Market Statistics covering employment, unemployment, activity, earnings, productivity and vacancies. All documents are PDF.

Latest is a relative term as used here -- sorry. It has been Dawn's habit to provide me with these links on a monthly basis intending that the information should be included in ADSET Members' Update. Now that we've got a means of publishing so that you can link to the data quickly we will be doing this BUT here's the statistics for MARCH first of all.

UK (39pp) Wales (34pp) Scotland (41pp) East Midlands (35pp) West Midlands (35pp)
North East (34pp) North West (37pp) London (36pp) South West (37pp) East (37pp) Yorkshire and Humber (35pp)

and for APRIL
UK (39pp) and you can link through the ONS map for regional data.