Widely Used Pesticide Is a Buzzkill for Honeybees

Findings add fuel to the debate over whether a commonly used chemical damages insect populations



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Cheese tea, Domino’s, and Tinder: PR roundup!

The time has come for us to take a look at our favourite PR campaigns from this week, and it’s certainly been an interesting...

He Thought He'd Laid His Son To Rest. Then He Heard His Voice On The Phone

If LAB is pinning its hopes on by-elections in CON held seats then history is not on its side

There’s been just one by-election in past 16 years caused by death/illness of CON incumbent

There is a lot of hope on the Labour side that the small CON working majority with the DUP could be cut as result of a by-election loss.

The only problem with this is that historically there have been very few by-elections caused by the illness or death of the CON incumbent. Since 2001 there has been just one compare with 15 Labour health/death ones. Note that I have excluded Jo Cox.

Most by elections in Tory seats have been caused by the voluntary resignation of the Sitting MP such as David Cameron in 2016 or the weird resignation by David Davis in the 2005-2010 Parliament when he quit and stood again to make a point the purpose of which has long since been forgotten.

In 2014, of course, we had two resignations in CON seats caused by the defections of Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless to UKIP.

Last year, Zac Goldsmith, quit his Richmond Park seat seat and the party to fight a by-election over LHR3. He regained it on June 8th by 45 votes a margin somewhat down on the 23k of GE2015.

In the current parliamentary situation the TMay’s Tories are going to do everything in their power to stop voluntarily by elections.

So we could experience something like the 2001 to 2005 Parliament when the Tories did not have to defend a single seat.

Mike Smithson

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Report: 38 percent of Canadian tech firms place marketing operations in the US

A new study by the Impact Centre at the University of Toronto suggests that Canadian marketing leaders are less experienced than their US counterparts.

The study, The CMO Search: Where are Canada’s Chief Marketing Officers?, looked at the employment patterns of Canadian and US tech companies identified by CB Insights as having raised money from VCs. Specifically, the study looked at the qualifications of the most senior marketing officers at 47 Canadian tech companies, including their past experience and education. These marketing leaders’ qualifications were then compared with those of the top marketing officers of 47 US-based unicorns.

The goal of the study was to examine and compare the quality of marketing leadership in Canadian and American tech companies by looking at factors such as education and past work experience.

“We are not developing a local talent base that will enable us to solve the marketing challenges our firms face.”

The study revealed that 38 percent of Canadian tech firms have made the strategic decision to place their marketing operations in the US. It also found that senior marketing leadership in the US had a job title that featured the term “marketing” in 61 percent of the cases, while in Canada, there was a senior marketing person in only 35 percent of cases.

In its analysis, the Impact Centre suggested that Canadian firms conducting marketing activities out of US offices creates a “severe problem.”

“We are not developing a local talent base that will enable us to solve the marketing challenges our firms face,” the report reads. “This has implications for public policy and the development of support programs aimed at accelerating the growth of Canadian companies.”

The Impact Centre study also suggested there is some lack of clarity about who is responsible for marketing within Canadian tech firms. “In the case of American firms, marketing leaders had a senior marketing title 90 percent of the time,” the report reads. “Compared to Canada, US companies are much clearer as to who is responsible for marketing. The role is more senior on average, and it is not combined with other roles in the company.”

When it comes to the educational background of marketers in Canada and the US, the Impact Centre study found that Canadian marketers may not be as qualified in marketing than their US counterparts.

The study revealed that 48 percent of Canadian marketing leaders located in both the US and Canada had no business degree. Ten out of 23 of these individuals had a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM), and only two percent had both a graduate and undergrduate degree in business.

In comparison, 75 percent of American marketing leaders had a business degree, and 26 percent had both a graduate and undergraduate degree in business. Overall, there were five times as many business graduate degrees among US marketing leaders as there are among Canadian marketing leaders.

Forty-eight percent of Canadian marketing leaders located in both the US and Canada had no business degree.

When looking at past experience of Canadian and US-based marketers, the study found that 83 percent of US-based marketers working for Canadian firms had prior experience working with high-growth firms, while only 38 percent of Canadians had prior experience with VC-backed high-growth firms.

This is not the first study by the Impact Centre to look at Canadian tech companies sales and marketing efforts. In May, the centre released a report finding that Canadian tech companes are generally delaying investment in marketing and sales, which can delay their revenue and growth in the long run.

In March, Workbrain and Rypple co-founder David Stein also shared a playbook on scaling startups, which noted that marketing is a frequent issue for the Canadian tech market. At the time, Stein said, “There isn’t a deep pool of seasoned marketing leaders that have been through this elsewhere. So finding the people as you continue to grow who have seen what it takes a couple sizes ahead of where you are — there aren’t a lot of those people around, especially in enterprise software.”

Overall, the report suggests that Canadian tech companies may be lagging behind their US counterparts because the country’s senior marketers aren’t as qualified for the job — an issue that can make it harder for companies to scale.

“When Canadian tech companies are sold, the marketing function typically moves to

the headquarters of the acquirer,” the report reads. “Thus, Canadian marketing personnel lose out on the opportunity get the experience of taking a company from start-up to a world-class company. As a result, there are very few people in Canada developing a base of experience that can help us address our marketing challenges.”

Read the full report here.

Mika Brzezinski responds to Trump’s Twitter attack: ‘I’m very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president&#8217

“I’m fine,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said on “Morning Joe.” “My family brought me up really tough. This is absolutely nothing for me personally. But I’m very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States.” The president lashed out at Brzezinski in two vicious tweets Thursday morning, calling her “low […]

The delusion that things can’t get any worse

That’s it really. You probably know exactly what I am thinking. So get commenting.

My thoughts along these lines were provoked by a comment on this piece in The Sun by Iain Martin, who is prophesying Corbynite doom, in the event of a Corbynite victory.

The comment, in response to what Martin and the first few commenters all say, went thus:

But standards of living are falling and poverty is increasing while those that rule over us get richer and this is happening under a Tory government, so how is this any better than the nightmare scenario that you portray. Truth is that any system that leads to the politicians thinking that the rule over us rather than govern on our behalf is flawed.

Some systems, however, are more flawed than others.

Sliding down a hill is very troubling, but the idea that jumping off a cliff is the answer is crazy. Unless, and this is my real fear, enough British voters are now so angry at the world and the way it is treating them that they are willing totally to ruin their own lives in order to at least knock a little of the stuffing out of the bastards who are doing this to them. Wreck the country would it? Boo hoo. That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. The fucking country fucking deserves to be fucking wrecked. The vote as suicide bomb, you might say.

This, I believe, was the psychological fuel behind a significant chunk of the Brexit vote, and if anything could make me regret voting Brexit myself, it is the knowledge that if we get Brexit and then full-on, in-our-faces Corbynism, we really will be in a bad way, every bit as bad as the Remainers have been saying.

The result of the recent British general election was very bad. But it did, perhaps, have this mitigating feature, that it created a country full of people who are seriously scared of Corbynism (that being a link to another piece of writing very similar to Martin’s), before Corbynism has actually struck, and who are able and willing to get their act together to stop such a national catastrophe.

It may be that the electoral rise of Corbyn will, for him and for his cadre of demented followers, turn out to have been premature. From the point of view of the socialists-that-really-mean-it, the time for a country to be realising for the first time what a catastrophe socialism-that-really-means-it would be, needs to be after the socialists-that-really-mean-it have seized command, and when, from the point of view of all those of us who would prefer to live in a half decent country, it’s too late.