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Opposable Planets Social Profiling – The New Terms of Employment » Opposable Planets

Maybe because it’s obvious, but the essential prerequisite is a profound sense of cynicism. Is this an ad for a social strategist, or a politician? Maybe it’s part of the upcoming DSM V, meant to help psychiatrists identify modern psychopaths.

We can only hope this is really a honeypot strategy to attract trolls for adding to our personal shun lists. Oh, Old Spice won’t be releasing the list of applicants? Damn!

Opposable Planets Social Profiling – The New Terms of Employment » Opposable Planets

I was amused by a recent job listing for Social Strategist at Wieden + Kennedy.  The successful candidate will need to prove themselves in a harrowing public competition.  Here is a sample of the challenges that will mark the “lucky” winner:

Challenge 1 – Create the best original Pinterest board dedicated to the sport of inline speed skating (NOT roller-hockey).

Challenge 2 – Create and post an original piece of content to Reddit that then receives the most upvotes in a single week.

Challenge 4 – Get the most people to friend your mother or your father (or a parent-like figure in your life) on Facebook in a single week.

Challenge 8 – Create the most reviewed recipe on allrecipes.com in a single week using cottage cheese as an ingredient. The reviews don’t have to be good.

Challenge 9 – Upload the most pictures of your armpit(s) to Instagram during the course of this challenge. The pictures must have your face in them to verify your identity and include the hashtag #mypits.

Reading through it one realizes that the veil between job assessment and fraternity hazing rituals are thin indeed.

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Business News Philosophy

Open Wireless Movement

Yes, open wireless everywhere would be beneficial from a practical sense. Let me call attention to something amazing: this is a call for voluntary participation rather than begging for a government edict enforced at the end of a gun. And Comcast immediately responded by temporarily opening their xfinity network.

Why We Have An Open Wireless Movement | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Communication is critical in time of crisis, and the Internet allows for the most effective way of getting information in and out. With readily available networks, government officials could use tools like Twitter to quickly spread information, citizen reports could help focus assistance where it is needed most, and social media updates could help reassure friends and loved ones—keeping mobile phone lines open for emergencies.

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Knowit

Here’s an interesting take on alternative education. The system mines your twitter stream to build some sort of matrix of what you know and what others know.

Update: my profile is knowitapp.com/leonatkinson

Knowit

Knowit figures out what people are interested and know about from what they share online.

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News

Free language courses

Audio courses in many foreign languages. All free since it’s from the U.S. federal government.

FSI Language Courses – Home

language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute.

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News Programming

Have a PHP question? Have 20-30 minutes? Ask Stack Overflow.

It looks like if you don’t ask a really hard question about PHP or Javascript, you will will get an answer almost immediately.

How long waiting for an answer in StackOverflow – Interrupted

I think it’s amazing the speed an answer is given for any asked question, like freaking fast. If you are using Google Reader to peek new questions filtered by tag, when you see a question, almost for sure it’s already answered.

Fortunately all StackExchange data is open, so we can see exactly how fast is that. I used the online data browser, more than enough for the task.

I decided to consider only the questions having an accepted answer, since questions with many bogus answers should not be treated as having an answer at all.

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