Wednesday's flowers

knowing when to re-optimize your website

Google recently made website optimization freely available to everyone. Perhaps this truly is a key element in Google’s plan for world domination. But in any case, it’s good news for those times when you want to choose data analysis over whimsy and hope. A danger of free, fast, and easy testing might be that its [...]

ikebana: D.C. No. 1

Living in Tokyo in 1956 with her husband, a general in the U.S. Army, Ellen Allen Gordon founded Ikebana International to promote “friendship through flowers.” When Gordon returned to her home in Washington, D.C. she established the organization’s first chapter outside of Tokyo — Ikebana International, Washington D.C. Chapter No. 1. Ikebana International now has [...]


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COB-22: recruiting new bureaucrats

In an article entitled “C’mon and Be a Bureaucrat,” a U.S. national weekly magazine discussed the importance of recruiting new U.S. government bureaucrats. The article noted: When an interest group wants to torpedo a government initiative, it simply invokes the “bureaucrat” as an emblem of ineptitude. “We saw a slight change during the ‘West Wing’ [...]

Wednesday's flowers

communication about administrative problems

Good government must respond effectively to administrative problems. In China, claims of wrongful government action are addressed through petitions to complaint offices (the Xinfang system) and through court cases (administrative litigation). From 1996 to 2004, Xinfang petitions were perhaps forty times as numerous as court cases.[1] How these two processes shape communication with persons not [...]


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bureaucrats help the sun shine

on the way

On an uncertain quest, caught in the back eddies of time and place, like a Christmas poinsettia dropping a brown leaf in June, like black mould sketching a fresco on the bathroom ceiling, there’s a soreness in the soul of my foot. “A half million people have gone by this booth,” the Mississippian said. People [...]

Wednesday's flowers

successful municipal fiber network

The city of Burlington, Vermont is providing communication services for its residents over a new, advanced municipal fiber optic network. Burlington is a city of about 40,000 persons. The city department that builds the network, operates it, and sells communications services is called Burlington Telecom (BT). BT had been designed and operated to be self-sufficient. [...]


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