Category: rePosts

The Difference Between Goals and SystemsWhat’s the difference between goals and systems?If you’re a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.

Source: Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.

And how is one to move up from the lower group to the higher one? Education is key, Temin writes, but notes that this means plotting, starting in early childhood, a successful path to, and through, college. That’s a 16-year (or longer) plan that, as Temin compellingly observes, can be easily upended. For minorities especially, this means contending with the racially fraught trends Temin identifies earlier in his book, such as mass incarceration and institutional disinvestment in students, for example. Many

Source: Peter Temin: Economic Mobility Requires the Nearly Impossible – The Atlantic

I believe Computer Science education could benefit greatly from copying and repetition at the beginner level and possibly later.  Copying is how a vast majority of programmers learned to code, but many CS educators deny this fact.  If you’re imagining yourself at 12 trying to learn to code, then I’m betting you had either a book or website with code that you copied and made work.  This should just be how we start people in programming, and not the current method of conceptual “weed out” classes. Repetition

Source: Copying & Repetition – Zed A. Shaw
 
I try to do this when mentoring new programmers in the company I work for. I purposely google stuff that I know to hint that googling is important and should not make them ashamed. Having a model software project is also useful in a sense that I tell them this is how we believe this should be done, please try copying how they did what they did in the the model project.
Being given the permission to make mistakes.
Being given the guidance of how we believe it should be done.
Being given the latitude to make up ones mind.

An excellent primer on PhilHealth

The Philippine Health Insurance Corporation or Philhealth is a government owned and controlled corporation (GOCC) founded on February 5, 1995. Its main goal is to ensure the health of every Filipino through social health insurance regardless of social status: poor, rich, young, old, sick, healthy, working or jobless. To achieve this, all premiums paid by members are pooled nationally and in effect, there is a cross-subsidization across districts.

Source: Essential Things About PhilHealth Contribution, Requirements and Benefits

Create a formal mentorship program. Build it into the HR Title System. Senior Developers mentor Junior, etc. Formalize the goals for the program with HR and build it into their job description.

Give homework. “We’re doing a lot of Threading work lately, here’s some assigned reading.”

Inspire a culture of learning. If you’re (assuming you’re the Alpha Geek) not giving off an encouraging and enthusiastic vibe, your developers have little reason to be excited themselves.

Create a Thanks A Bunch Cabinet. Corillian had a great system where peers could reward peers. Our administrator, Kate, had a budget given her by the Engineering Department. I think it was less than $1000 a quarter. She’d go and get as much cool stuff as she could, each under $25. This included iTunes cards, stuff from Sharper Image, Flashlights, just nerdy stuff. If you went above and beyond in some aspect of your job, one of your peers could reward you by sending you to the TABCab. You get to go home with a cool, unexpected free gift, and your peers get to tell you you’re appreciated. It was a great system.

Source: Sharpen the Saw for Developers – Scott Hanselman

The relationship employees have with each other clearly plays a critical role in creating an effective team, keeping employees happier over time, and ultimately, impacting an organization’s overall success.

So, what was the secret ingredient in how these successful teams treated one another? Simply said, being nice! Which made perfect sense to us.

Source: Disney InstituteVoice: What’s The Secret To Successful Teamwork? Just Be Nice

Fearless Girl also changes the meaning of Charging Bull. Instead of being a symbol of “the strength and power of the American people” as Di Modica intended, it’s now seen as an aggressive threat to women and girls — a symbol of patriarchal oppression. In effect, Fearless Girl has appropriated the strength and power of Charging Bull. Of course Di Modica is outraged by that. A global investment firm has used a global advertising firm to create a faux work of guerrilla art to subvert and change the meaning of

Source: seriously, the guy has a point | gregfallis.com

By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engage in an activity that when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in the facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting and chose the friend’s office to kill time. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political sc

Source: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

The article goes on to remind readers, that this unfortunate circumstance is mitigated by regulations that require the airline to compensate passengers “up to four times the value of their tickets, maxed at $1,350.” But that’s chicken feed compared to what Dr. Dao’s will get if he decides to take United to court.  Because for all the stories about overbooked flights and required compensation, on United Flight 3411 on Sunday four passengers were kicked off the plane with no document, condition or rule givin

Source: United Flight NOT Overbooked CEO Admits

Sustainable recruitment of nurses (Triple Win) Project description Title: Triple Win nurses – Sustainable recruitment of nurses from four countries Commissioned by: Employers in Germany Countries: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Philippines; Tunisia also expected Lead executing agency: Employment agencies in the partner countries Overall term: 2016 to 2018 Context Germany’s nursing sector is already feeling the impact of a significant shortage of nurses today. According to an assessment by the Federal

Source: Sustainable recruitment of nurses (Triple Win)