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Business News

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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Entertainment Philosophy

Do you support the policy or the man?

The gag: find people who say they support Obama, offer up stuff he’s done in the past four years but claim it’s Romney’s plan, then ask if they agree. Finally, admit you lied and enjoy the cognitive dissonance.

This might be the best example I’ve seen of how most people hold beliefs for psychological reasons and then construct “logical” scaffolding to justify it after the fact.

Obama Supporters Pwned by Own Ignorance of Obama’s Policies « Political Pwnage

This is such a damning indictment of so many Obama supporters that it may be misconstrued as somehow being in support of Romney. It is not. (just look at our past posts Re: Romney. There’s no doubt one could find a similar video like this calling out the ignorance of Romney supporters, as well. If one such video exists, we would love to know. But, we digress.)

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Programming

Vendor-independent comparison of NoSQL databases

So often, we return to using the right tool for the job, but it’s good to see that MySQL is still quite useful for the general case. The corollary is that it’s rare to find a magic bullet–so don’t expect a wholesale switch to NoSQL to solve your performance issues.


A vendor-independent comparison of NoSQL databases: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak

In 2010, when the world became enchanted by the capabilities of cloud systems and new databases designed to serve them, a group of researchers from Yahoo decided to look into NoSQL. They developed the YCSB framework to assess the performance of new tools and find the best cases for their use. The results were published in the paper, “Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB.”

The Yahoo guys did a great job, but like any paper, it could not include everything:

  • The research did not provide all the information we needed for our own analysis.
  • Though Cassandra, HBase, Yahoo’s PNUTS, and a simple sharded MySQL implementation were analyzed, some of the databases we often work with were not covered.
  • Yahoo used high-performance hardware, while it would be more useful for most companies to see how these databases perform on average hardware.
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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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Entertainment Philosophy

Why the paleo lifestyle is incompatible with religion

If god created people to eat berries and meat, it seems unlikely that he’d then tell people to eat bread. Of course, the bible has god telling his followers to eat shit.