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I couldn’t agree more.

It’s time for most of “Agile” and especially Scrum to die. These aren’t just bad ideas. They’re more dangerous than that, because there’s a generation of software engineers who are absorbing them without knowing any better. There are far too many young programmers being doomed to mediocrity by the idea that business-driven engineering and “user stories” are how things have always been done. This ought to be prevented; the future integrity of our industry may rely on it. “Agile” is a bucket of nonsense that

Source: Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible | Michael O. Church

How do we compare with other countries? In 1995 Thailand and India were “cleaner” than us, and China and Indonesia (the lowest scorer) were more corrupt. In 2000 we got overtaken by China, but at least we scored the same as India. Thailand was still higher than us. Only Indonesia was below us. In 2005 we barely kept pace. Vietnam came into the picture, and it was less corrupt than we were. Indonesia was still lower than us. By 2010, however, all these countrieswere considered cleaner than us. That was our nadir.But look what has happened in the past four years: Aside from being higher in rank than half of the countries on the list, we are at par with Thailand (never since 1995) and India, and are better off than China, Indonesia and Vietnam. I don’t know about you, but that gives me great comfort. It feels good to be in the upper half for once. The daang matuwid has taken root.There will be gnashing of teeth among the opposition, of course. But what can one do?And of course, let us not forget that our CPI is still only 38. We still have a lot of cleaning up to do.   But it is good to know that the combined efforts of government and civil society (who are monitoring and who are yelling when things go wrong) are finally gelling.

Source: Cause for celebration | Inquirer Opinion

There’s some really good news that gives us cause for celebration, and there’s also some bad news that gives us cause for concern. First, the good news: We have made some solid strides in our fight against corruption. While preparing for a talk at the Asian Development Bank, I looked at Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from when it first started doing this index in 1995, and traced it through to 2014, for the Philippines, and for comparator countries. Here’s what I found:Our Corruption Perception Index(Various Years)Year(1)     CPI Value(2)   Country Rank(3)     Percentile(4)1995        2.8          36th of 41        122000        2.8          69th of 90        232005        2.5          117th of 159            262010        2.4          134th of 178            252011        2.6          129th of 182            292012        34           105th of 174            402013        36           94th of 175             462014        38          85th of 175             51

Source: Cause for celebration | Inquirer Opinion

Unfortunately, this type of miscarriage of justice isn’t an isolated one-off case.According to researcher estimates, about 4.1% of death penalty convictions are erroneous. In other words, for every 100 people on death row, at least four people shouldn’t be there. And that’s not even looking at those wrongly convicted of smaller crimes with lesser penalties.Sadly, the people it usually happens to are those who can’t afford the most highly qualified defense attorneys and who can’t keep paying legal fees to appeal. And they’re mostly people of color. The National Exonerations Registry shows that as of 2015, 60% of exonerations after a wrongful conviction were for non-white defendants.

Source: 30 years on death row but you’re innocent. When you’re freed, the prosecutor comes to apologize.

To repeat: more than 62 per game. Perhaps players in every match could each wear 62 black armbands. Then again, that would probably contravene Fifa’s strict rules on what constitutes official kit, infringements of which it punishes ferociously. On infringements such as mass slave death, however, the evidence suggests it is more relaxed.

Source: How many slave deaths for the Qatar World Cup can Fifa put up with? | Football | The Guardian

In mathematics, a predicate is commonly understood to be a Boolean-valued function P: X? {true, false}, called the predicate on X. Informally, a predicate is a statement that may be true or false depending on the values of its variables. It can be thought of as an operator or function that returns a value that is either true or false. In java 8, Predicate a functional interface and can therefore be used as the assignment target for a lambda expression or method reference. So, where you think, you can use these true/false returning functions in day to day programming? I will say you can use them anywhere where you need to evaluate a condition on group/collection of similar objects such that evaluation can result either in true or false e.g. 1) Find all children borned after a particular date 2) Pizzas ordered a specific time 3) Employees greater than certain age and so on.. So Predicate seems to be interesting thing. Let’s go deeper. As I said, Predicate is functional interface. It mean we can pass lambda expressions wherever predicate is expected. For example one such method is filter() method from Stream interface.

Source: How to use Predicate in java 8 – HowToDoInJava

“I thought it was a brilliant idea, brilliant,” says Mitch Huhem, who is looking to buy a trailer park with his wife, Deborah. “These people need a place to live, and they don’t want to mess around.“They’ve got to live somewhere, so you combine them in a certain place. They don’t go out to hurt people. I think it’s a community service, because if not they will be in your neighbourhood. Now they’re all in one place, you can watch them all in one place. And they pay well and won’t mess things up. I mean, why would you not? I think it’s a brilliant idea.”
via America’s trailer parks: the residents may be poor but the owners are getting rich | Life and style | The Guardian.