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Tag: Technology

In Tech, We are All Maritimers

I got a bit of blowback for Friday’s blog criticizing that U of T/Brock piece on the alleged Brain Drain.  Nobody tried to argue that my critique of the methodology was wrong, but some argued that a) data on migration is always terrible and I was making the perfect the enemy of the good and b) I was ignoring the core truth that a lot of Canadian tech talent does head south and this makes things difficult for Canadian tech firms, and

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May 7, 2018 1 Comment

The Canadian IT Sector: From Self-Hype to Self-Pity

The Canadian tech sector has two modes: self-hype and self-pity.  Neither is very pretty. You may recently have seen articles floating around the internet talking about how great Canada is as a tech destination, how Canada is “winning”/ can “win” the AI race (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean – the verb “to win” takes on vast new meanings in these articles).  There’s been one every two weeks or so, often from big American magazines, for the last

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March 27, 2018 No Comments

La Nausée des Supergrappes

So, yesterday, the Government of Canada ended two years of tediousness by announcing the winners of the supercluster process. To briefly recap.  At some point in 2015 or early 2016, the Liberals became enamoured with the idea of technology superclusters, mainly because they got to spend money on hip-sounding industries in a spatially-restricted manner, which meant they could claim points on both the economic growth and regional development scorecards.  To this end, they invited groups of businesses (large, medium & small

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February 16, 2018 1 Comment

The Unfolding Disaster of the Liberals’ Innovation Policy

This Government, man.  It is something else. Today, the Hon. Navdeep Bains, Minister of Shaking Hands With Tech Executives, is in Halifax to – are you ready for this? – kick off a nationwide tour to announce the shortlist of the Superclusters competition.  Yes, the man has decided that it’s a good use of public money to spend the Parliamentary recess week jetting from one-part of the country to another announcing not the winners of this jumped-up contest but the shortlist. 

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October 10, 2017 2 Comments

Why Education in IT Fields is Different

A couple of years ago, an American academic by the name of James Bessen wrote a fascinating book called Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages and Wealth.  (It’s brilliant.  Read it).  It’s an examination of what happened to wages and productivity over the course of the industrial revolution, particularly in the crucial cotton mill industry.  And the answer, it turns out, is that despite all the investment in capital which permitted vast jumps in labour productivity, in fact

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May 10, 2017 4 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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