Events
Relieving Stress, Chinese-Style
Monday 7 September 2009
Grace Ng, the China Correspondent for The Straits Times has an interesting article in todays edition of the paper. In it she discusses some ways in which '...nie nie zhu or 'pinch brigades' have spread like wildfire' and are attempting to relieve the stress of working long hours or no hours because they are unemployed. Said to be aged in their twenties and thirties, some of their actions include massing inside supermarkets to crush packets of noodles, and street based large scale pillow fights.
Ng reports that many are graduates from smaller cities who have migrated to work in larger cities, only to discover minimal work or very poor wages and working conditions that included no annual leave, no medical benefits and even no lunch breaks. I suspect that these young Chinese workers aren't the only ones in the world facing a major downgrading of their current working conditions and typically in an upturn, those conditions will not improve as quickly as the company balance sheet.
But I reckon they are the only workers with the inventiveness to use 'pillow technology' as a core approach to stress relief - and more power to them!
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Events
Friday 16 July 2010
A series of recent activities has me writing on the idea of 'future strategy' and how different organisations are approaching their future development. What is interesting is the strong sense that preparing for your potential future requires multiple paths forward, not a single 'home run'. To that end I've recently considered sporting bodies and local community driven programs which has triggered these 'thought bubbles'
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Monday 5 July 2010
Stephen Downes is one the handful of bloggers I follow consistently. I do so because Downes (unlike many others unfortunately) like to write about his thinking AS WELL AS promoting the thinking of others, whether or not he agrees with them. In that way you get a solid collection of alternative views within his field of endeavour (learning & teaching et al). The link below will take you to a presentation by David Harvey that walks you through an interesting interpretation of the Capitalist model and where we are at in the world affairs. Whether or not you agree with the content, it is highly recommended
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Monday 28 June 2010
Coming off what has been undoubtedly my busiest period (3 months) in the past decade, I'm in the throws of catching up on some light reading. I usually have at least two books on the go and my preference is for the books to be about diverse topics because it allows the mind to seek out random connections. I once 'solved' the nuclear fusion problem whilst reading books by Umberto Eco and John D Barrow. A physicist friend of mine suggested my idea was radical and yet theoretically possible. But I digress. Right now I have a wide combination - 'From Poverty to Peace' by Duncan Green looks at ways in which we can empower people to help themselves more effectively, whilst looking at the myriad of mistakes so commonly made in the area of 'aid'. 'New knowledge in Human Values' is an older book edited by Ambraham Maslow with a wide contribution of thoughts from the likes of Pitirim Sorokin, Dorothy Lee and Paul Tillich (among others) and is a walk through some of the thinking about Human Values emerging in the late 1950's. The chapters are appropriately dense undertakings and I'm finding it hard to stick with, especially as I'm more inclined to lean towards the model of Clare W Graves and his Value Systems Thoery; 'Coercion as Cure' by Thomas Szasz is a ripper of a book thus far, though I'm only a few chapters in, I can tell the quality of a book by how much 'tagging' I do within a text
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