Author: admin

I applaud the reporter for double checking his/her facts. And getting expert opinion. I believe I was a little too harsh with my previous rant.

Avoid the fault line
The reasonable thing to do would be to avoid purchasing a property that sits atop or is not at least 5 kilometers away from a fault trace, according to Dr. Renato Solidum, head of Phivolcs.
(Editor’s Note: 5 kilometers was what Solidum said in a recording of the interview the writer had with him. However, we double-checked this fact with Mahar Lagmay, a geologist from UP, and Benito Pacheco from the Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers, Inc. who both said it’s 5 meters.)
Leave the building if it is already located above a fault, advised Dr. Mahar Lagmay of the UP National Institute of Geological Sciences. “There is no engineering solution to that,” he said.
via Is your property near the fault line? | Newsbreak | Independent Journalism.

“This was one incident, I think the only conclusion we can generally make is that that soldier does indeed come across as soft and pampered,” said Bernard Loo, an expert on military affairs at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
But he said it was unfair to generalize the picture, and that current servicemen were actually fitter than their predecessors.
“I think the statistics probably would tell us that by and large, the average national serviceman is physically fitter today than his counterparts were, say 15, 20 years ago,” Loo told AFP on Wednesday.
The defence ministry said it was investigating the matter, as online design wags went to town with parodies of the photograph.
One superimposed the image of the burdened maid onto a poster of a soldier firing a rocket inside a military vehicle.
Another had the maid with the backpack striding across a battlefield behind a tank as a soldier fires his gun into the distance, with the caption in capital letters: “My Maid, Our Army.”
Local daily the New Paper also surveyed 23 national servicemen and found that 22 of them had their maids wash and iron their army uniforms, while 17 had their domestic helpers clean their rooms for them.
Close to 200,000 maids — largely from Indonesia and the Philippines — were estimated to be working in affluent Singapore last year.
via Maid carrying Singapore soldier’s pack sparks row | ABS-CBN News | Latest Philippine Headlines, Breaking News, Video, Analysis, Features.

 

So what should a developer job interview look like then? Simple: eliminate the exam part of the interview altogether. Instead, ask a few open-ended questions that invite your candidates to elaborate about their programming work.
– What’s the last project you worked on at your former employer?
– Tell me about some of your favorite projects.
– What projects are you working on in your spare time?
– What online hacker communities do you participate in?
– Tell me about some (programming/technical) issues that you feel passionately about.
These questions are designed to reveal a great deal about the person you have in front of you. They can help you decide whether the candidate is interested in the same things as you, whether you like their way of thinking, and where their real interests lie. It’s tougher for them to bullshit their way through here, because the interviewer can drill deeper into a large number of issues as they present themselves.
via Hiring Developers: You’re Doing It Wrong.

Strangely this mirrors the advice that I got on how to interview?

Consider this alternative formulation from ECONNED:
Let’s use a different metaphor to illustrate the problem. Say a biotech firm creates a wonder crop, the most amazing creation in the history of agriculture. It yields far more calories per acre than anything else, is nutritionally extremely complete, and can be planted and harvested with far less machinery and equipment than any other plant. It is tasty and can be prepared in a wide variety of ways. It is sweet too, so it can be used in place of sugar and high fructose corn syrup at lower cost. We’ll call this XCrop.
XCrop is added as a new element in the food pyramid and endorsed by nutritionists and public health officials all over the globe. It turns out that XCrop also is an aphrodisiac and a stimulant (hmm, wonder how they engineered that in) and between enhanced libido and more abundant food supplies, the world population rises at a faster rate.
Sales of XCrop boom, displacing traditional agriculture. A large amount of farmland is turned over from growing other types of produce to XCrop. XCrop is so efficient that agricultural land is taken out of production and turned to other uses, such as housing, malls, and parks. While some old-fashioned farms still exist, they are on a much smaller scale and a lot of the providers of equipment to traditional farms have gone out of business.
Twenty years into the widespread use of XCrop, doctors discover that diabetes and some peculiar new hormonal ailments are growing at an explosive rate. It turns out they are highly correlated with the level of XCrop consumption in an individual’s diet. Long-term consumption of high levels of XCrop interferes with the pituitary gland, which controls almost all the other endocrine glands in the body and the pancreas.
The public faces a health crisis and no way back. It would be very difficult and costly to put the repurposed farmland back into production. Some of the types of equipment needed for old-fashioned farming are no longer made. And with the population so much larger than before, you’d need even more farmland than before. The world population has become dependent on the calories produced by XCrop, so going off it quickly means starvation for some. But staying
on it is toxic too. And expecting users simply to restrain themselves will likely prove difficult. The aphrodisiac and stimulant effects of XCrop make it addictive.
Advanced economies have become hooked on debt technology, which, like XCrop, is habit forming and hard to wean oneself off of due to its lower cost and the fact that other approaches have fallen into partial disuse (for instance, use of FICO-based credit scoring has displaced evaluations that include an assessment of the borrower’s character and knowledge of the community, such as
stability of his employer). In fact, the current debt technology results in information loss, via disincentives to do a thorough job of borrower due diligence (why bother if you are reselling the paper?) and monitoring of the credit over the life of the loan. And the proposed fixes are not workable. The Obama proposal, that the originator retain 5% of the deal and take correspondingly lower fees, is not high enough to change behavior. And a level that would be high enough to make the originator feel the impact of a bad decision would undercut the cost efficiencies that made securitization popular in the first place. You’d have better decisions, but less lending, and higher interest rates. That’s ultimately a desirable outcome, but as in the XCrop situation, no one seems prepared to accept that a move to healthier practices will result in much more costly and less readily available debt. The authorities want to believe they can somehow have their cake and eat it too.
via OMG, Greenspan Claims Financial Rent Seeking Promotes Prosperity! « naked capitalism.

 
6. Your brand-new boyfriend Gerald Anderson is late to your parents’ anniversary party because he has to attend an official function with Father President. You call and text but he doesn’t reply pronto, being preoccupied with official duties. What will you do?
a. Shrug if off. If I wanted someone who would spend all his time with me, I’d date the unemployed.
b. Ano ang magagawa ko, anak siya ng presidente samantalang ako’y isang hamak na mortal huhuhu hindi ako karapat-dapat na pansinin ng katulad niya hikbi.
c. First I will force him to choose between me and his family and country. Then I shall leverage this incident into a perpetual guilt trip and use it to manipulate him throughout our relationship!
d. Announce on facebook and twitter that I am committing suicide. Then slash my wrists and take an overdose of sleeping pills (2) but leave the door unlocked and make sure someone will check on me. Then take pictures of him weeping and post them on facebook and twitter.
e. Other (Explain.)
via Catch Me. . .I’m in Notting Hell (Now with more hell!) | JessicarulestheUniverse.