A fictitious retailer which I am calling Malwart sells automobiles and automotive parts.  On this blog I will be focused on the sale of a particular automobile model called the Blair - a sporty compact that can be ordered in custom colour schemes.  Because all sales must be done by clients that also have accounts,…

For my graduate paper, I studied perceptions of workplace stress through the critical lens of social disablement.  Writing this paper was certainly an intellectual exercise that at the time didn’t seem to have many practical applications.  I am therefore honoured to become better acquainted with the “mechanics” of quantitative alienation through my day-to-day duties.  I respect the fact that I can’t share any substantial details about my actual work processes on a blog.  It will therefore be…

I sometimes ask myself while musing over the need for a particular service, "I wonder if this is commercially viable?" If the service is routine and the required software is rather inexpensive, perhaps there is little need for a company to outsource. I cannot think of any company that would routinely outsource work normally performed on a spreadsheet. I suspect that decades ago some companies hired specialists to handle spreadsheets; this seems much less likely today in light of the…

In recent blogs, I wrote about using codified narrative as a form of data. I also discussed using attribution models to systematically evaluate codified narrative for ontological constructs: e.g. "child abuse" "physical confinement" "cannibalism." I provide a brief overview of these topics a bit later in the blog. The third important piece to make use of narrative data involves "attribution profiling" in a process that I call "catching scent." Following the odour of data involves…

When the performance of an employee is evaluated, ideally there are no externalities to complicate the analysis. If the employee has a computer that is constantly freezing up - or the servers in the company frequently operate slowly - the employee's performance data will reflect the functionality and effectiveness of these systems. If the company occupies a highly competitive market, declining sales data is attributable at least in part to competition rather than the behaviours of employees.…

When I returned to university to do a graduate degree, I was interested to discover how certain terms are subject to "intellectual interpretation." A word that I was asked to explain during one of my earliest classes was "ontology." Since this term was absent from my dictionary, I originally confused it with "oncology." I faintly recall that oncology involves the study of tumors. After consulting a few sources, I said that ontology is the study of how things come to exist or into being. I…

A few semesters into my undergraduate studies, I decided to move away from campus in order to escape the incessant party atmosphere. I chose to rent an old but roomy apartment in Kitchener, Ontario. I read somewhere that this city was formerly called New Munich. One day in the dead of morning, I heard loud banging and smashing downstairs. It seemed that neither I nor my cat could sleep, so I went to investigate. I saw the owner of the building at the front entrance of the apartment holding a…