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Showing posts from July, 2023

Canada's 2022 Best Employer for Diversity according to Forbes

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In 2022, Forbes listed  Manuelle Alix-Surprenant (picture),   Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Hydro Québec to be Forbes' Best Employer for Diversity 2022.   The diversity ranking was performed with cooperation from market research company Statista, and was calculated from the feedback of more than 10,000 Canadians working for businesses with at least 500 employees in Canada, with extra weight given to respondents from underrepresented groups ( Todd-Ryan S., 2022). The article also mentioned how other public institutions such as   University of New Brunswick, National Bank of Canada, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Toronto Metropolitan University as well as private companies such as Nike, IKEA, Canada Goose also ranked highly on the list due to their diversity score.  The article notes that whether people like it or not,  " equality may be thrust upon them through public pressure or policy" ( Todd-Ryan S., 2022) citing Canada Pay Equity Act and pay transparen

Scholar pushes back against university “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” initiatives as anti-academic

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This article by True North is about Philosophy Professor Mark Mercer at Saint Mary University in Halifax voicing his objection against the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) agenda recently embraced by various colleges and universities in Canada and the US.  Mr. Mercer is the President of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. The Society was founded in 1992, and has recently  His primary objection is that  “EDI initiatives and EDI ideology are fundamentally anti-academic. They don’t embody academic values and they don’t serve academic goals,” (Cantin-Nantel, 2023). Professor Mercer cites that the two most important criterion for academic recruitment  should be teaching and research capabilities instead of irrelevant factors such race and non-academic criteria ( Cantin-Nantel, 2023.) For Mr. Mercer, non-academic factors should only be taken into consideration where academic merits alone are insufficient to differentiate two different candidates. Other than that, academic

Control System Design: Geniebook

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  I. Organization Introduction Geniebook is an Ed-tech company found in Singapore in 2017 specializing in providing individualized lessons and exercises in various grade school subjects. I worked for Geniebook from 2020 to 2022 as a curriculum specialist. The company has a corporate structure with about 350 employees. There are primarily three main goals to the business: The first is a goal of sales department which is to improve sales, i.e., student enrollment. The second objective is that of the IT department which is to deliver more features and sophistication of the Geniebook App. The third objective is that of the curriculum department which is to deliver quality content via building a database of practice exercise in various subjects such as Math, English, Mandarin and Science.  II. 3 Forms of Control     1.) Output Control Insofar as the outputs of all three main objectives of the company are quantifiable and measurable, output control is appropriate for use in all three dep

Canada 2021 Immigration Population Census

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  https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/dv-vd/imm/index-en.cfm They say the devil is in the details. In order to understand the actual cultural composition of Canada's future workplace, I decided to look up government statistics on cultural identities of immigrants coming to Canada. This webpage allows public access to general statistical data on the diversity of immigration population coming to Canada in 2021. More than half of immigrants coming to Canada in 2021 are from Asia. About a quarter came from Europe. other Americans and Africans make up about another quarter of the immigration population.  Half of all these immigrants end up in Ontario. About a fifth of immigrants end up in British Columbia. Quebec also took in about a fifth of the immigrants. About a sixth of the immigrants go to Alberta and the rest end up in other provinces and territories.  In 2021, the majority of newcomers are people from South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia. The percentage

Managing a Diverse Team

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Interviewee profile Introduction:  Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH3ioZtvcEo The main interviewee in the video is Ernest Betsina,  Chief of the YellowKnife Dene First Nation. In his youth, he had problems with alcohol which prevents him from fulfilling his responsibilities to his family and his job. His alcohol addiction was especially severe when he lost his father and his wife. Summary: Alcohol addiction is a serious workplace issue that can severely hamper productivity. In the Indigenous community, drug addiction and alcoholism is a widespread problem due to lack of family support and strong safety network. Many people in the indigenous communities fell into modern trappings such as drugs and alcohol and lose their ability to function normally.  People who have trouble with alcohol usually have other underlying issues going on in their life. While alcohol intoxication directly hamper workplace productivity and daily functioning of a person, the root of the problem is usually

Big corporations push for racial diversity

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  This article on MarketWatch lists a host of corporations and companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Paypal, GM, Salesforces that are pouring money into charity organizations, political movements, and advocacy groups pushing for racial diversity and racial justice as of 2020. Their donations added up to 45% of total funding for racial equity movement in 2020 (Albrecht, 2021). The article also points out how there are many transparency problems with the entire processing of financing these "racial justice" movements. These companies do not always publicly disclose how much and where they donate the money and clients and recipients also sometimes do not want to disclose their identity. In addition, the article also raise questions about how much of the funding will actually impact real life of minority groups.  This article shows me that across the spectrum, big corporations are making a big push to politicize race and are spending a lot of money both financing dubious

US Supreme Court rejects affirmative action in university admissions

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  Recently, US Supreme Court rejects affirmative action in university admission at Harvard and University of North Carolina. The Court ruled that affirmative action admission violate U.S. equal constitutional protection under the law.  For decades, Harvard, and a host of other ivy league schools have been actively discriminating against admission of Asians and white students. This decision, in theory, bars these institutions from continuing their admission discrimination based on race instead of merit. In an ideal world, we would have a system that admits students and employees solely on the basis of merits without any considering for race or ethnicity. Unfortunately, with affirmative action, a typical Asian student has a SAT score 450 points higher than that of Blacks to be considered for the same spot in university.  Although this case is only restricted to academic institution, its legal implications are widespread considering many institutions of higher education, corporations and

Geniebook

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  Company :  Geniebook, founded in 2017, a Educational Tech Company that specializes in developing AI learning to help students access affordable personalized learning. Geniebook has grown to become Singapore's largest online learning platform (Shu, 2021). Vision: To becoming the leading online learning platform for grade school students across Southeast Asia.  Mission: Geniebook firmly believed that education is personal, and that students should have access to a personalized world-class education that brings together the best of technology and learning pedagogies, to help them grow into confident learners and contributors to society. Goals: - Streamline the process of incorporating students' reward incentives across platforms in all countries.  - Build specialized curriculum tailored to each country's demand. -To become the dominant online learning platform in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Relationship: I was an Curriculum Specialist for the company. I built and desig