hc's blog

Super web site in terms of content,
has videos too.
Example read this chapter from the book:
http://marcbousquet.net/Bousquet_4.pdf

I found that this "earn to learn" UPS
job program existed at our local university. Don't you want to check yours?

This guy really is in the loop about
things going on. Another gem I found
on his web site:
http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/24

I haven't even begun to look at all the things there. His site has the mark of the truly great information source, it's not a cheerleader club for true believers eg those who support their union leadership on
anything and everything they do or say no matter what. This guy is IMHO pro-union but he does now and then let unions have it. I say more power to him. (But of course I welcome any union that got singed on their actions to write a response on their side.)

Notice of upcoming Labornotes Conference. April 11 - 13 2008
Dearborn, Michigan (very near Detroit).

http://labornotes.org/conference/

People who have gone to this before tell me it is great, really.

I just noticed this story of a university blocking union email.
There needs to be a way to test this. Maybe email blocking is
widespread and we don't know it. (Eg a site where a university
employee can click on something and get an email sent to him/her
from the appropriate union domain.)
http://www.realcities.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/fred_grimm/172...
*****

Here is service I heard about where a group can create a
mailing list:
http://help.riseup.net/
Some interesting articles about secure mailing lists
such as sympa and sels:
http://dev.riseup.net/grimoire/list-server/

"But the video put together by the Programmers Guild is providing explosive material for H-1B critics."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&...

Oops I should've mentioned this sooner but there still may
be time to go:
https://www.ussf2007.org/

Interesting book for sale:
Immigrants, Unions and the New U.S. Labor Market
by Immanuel Ness
https://ssl30.pair.com/unionist/ccp51/cgi-bin/cp-app.cgi?rrc=N&pg=prod&r...

In Labourstart newsletter an interesting item:
****
ONLINE CAMPAIGNS WORK: CHIQUITA BACKS DOWN

Check this out:
http://www.apple.com/education/hed/

You might something pertinent. One thing that really
comes to my mind is that unions need to get their
foot in there. Make unions visible, promote union ideas
such as collective bargaining, due process, seniority,
job security, pensions...

Is it now relatively easy perchance to install drupal
via one of those hosted accounts (where one's capabilities
tend to be pretty restricted and they tend to assume any
thing that needs to be done can be done via cpanel)? It was once
the case that drupal was seriously on the outs with cpanel.
I hope that has changed?

I'm thinking of getting back in the web site business
to promote select issues in my corner of the jungle especially since I got kicked off of my "own" mailing list! (Ok they couldn't really evict me when I owned the account housing the list since only I could remove addresses, but in the interests of democracy I decided to go along with the group's decision which was basically that the really talkative people should shut up. Democracy can be a pain when it doesn't go your way :-) Seriously tho it just takes one of those "I cannot tolerate any 'nonessential' messages" types to completely chill off a list in my experience. I've seen many a technical mailing list get sunk by one or two of the 'signal-to-noise' or "off-topic" chronic dampeners. It is very unlikely in my experience that a mailing list won't just plain die once even just one person of stature puts out the "stifle it" message.

Which is probably why people invented forums :-) What is good about a mailing list is potentially limiting it to the right
people eg if one wants to cover workplace issues and not have
management reading along. I have yet to see a really good way
to implement this as a forum without having people apply and
be approved to have accounts which they have to log in to and
all that... Am I missing any developments in that area?

upbeat article about the potential political power of
the web:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0529/p01s01-uspo.html?page=1

Here's a good article:
http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/2007/01/attack-of-seo-bots-on-edu-domain.html

Well searching a few well known domains around here turns
up plenty of bot tracks. People that have wikis and you
don't have this problem, how are you preventing it?

ouch! Link

In our state (I'm not making this up) it was discovered that statistically people with more education make more money. Therefore, they "reasoned", if they got everyone in the state to get more educated, the income level in the state would go up. They found that a lot of degreed people were being produced from colleges and tech schools but they would leave the state for jobs in other states. In particular there are few technology/science jobs in this state but that doesn't stop them from rallying to the cause of trying to con women in particular into going into science.

I think it is true that if you put a lot of rabbits in a field, that more owls may move in, but I'm not at all sure the same logic will apply with jobs, that the employer will move to where the potential employees are produced. Can't they just send a letter to the graduates, "move to our state, we have jobs."?

I think this is a great article that floats the theory that women are too smart to go into traditional science and technology because they know the jobs are not there and these career choices are poor for a number of reasons:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

I think this illustrates how the employers have really gotten the upper hand in research universities in particular, to the extent that people are not going into those fields. The solution
could be unionization to improve job security, pay, benefits and working conditions.