Simple Updates

I have been somewhat busy.  Two companies that I am very interested had their job application due March 19.  That’s a day before my birthday.  And as I mentioned before, many Korean applications want the candidates to write out “personal statement.”  In other words, (and in average) there are three to five questions where you have to answer within the given word limit.  Many of these questions are interview questions in US.  In addition, depends on the company the word limit is such a variety – a firm that I am most interested in limits the answers to be no longer than 2,000 words.  Then one of the firms I applied last week limited the answer to be less than 300 words.  Of course they are pretty much asking same stuff.  So now I applied three companies so far – I keep my fingers crossed.

In the middle of daily job hunting, I got a connection invitation on LinkedIn from my college alum.   It’s good but I wondered why on earth he would like to connect with this young gal alum at a small Asian country.  It turned out that he saw my profile randomly on my college community on LinkedIn, saw my status as “seeking employment” and wanted to help me out.  In addition, he hosted homestay an exchange student from Korea and his daughter visited South Korea several times.  What a small world!

He offered me to call him so we can talk about possible career opportunities and practical advice.  Yes, I had to get up at 6 am and am pretty sure some of my answers did not make sense, even with strong black tea.  But it was incredibly helpful – he introduced me to several new ways and connections.  On the top of that he gladly revised my English resume.  Though that early morning international phone call really screwed up my normal sleep cycle, I am not going to complain.  I can’t.  I guess all that karma paid off – for sure I’ll do more good.

Meanwhile I had some strange contacts, too.  A guy whom I sent a job-lead e-mail said he will try to call me.  So I emptied that day’s schedule.  But he ended up not calling me.  At the end he did call me, but then started to go on and on and on about my last job and duties.  Well…I would not have sent him that job-lead e-mail if I am still related to my last work.  I said I am no longer involved in that work.  Then he went on about how the things in his company works with much detail.  Some of it was helpful, but my job-lead e-mail was not about that.  It was simple: “I know you, and here’s my background.  Please let me know if you know any fit opportunity for me  or can spread the word.”

And then, another guy whom I met through one of the recruiters, is flirting with me.  Yes he is a very friendly guy, and thanks for your interest in me…but I really don’t want to initiate a romantic relationship who is +10 years older than I am.  I haven’t been dated for two years and consider myself pretty open person, but still.  No.

My Korean-style job session is over for now.  And there are more employers who posted their openings – and luckily some of them are the field I am interested.  To be honest it is a bit frustrating that I have an open schedule but not THAT open.  Now it is the major hiring season here, so I would not dare to take a luxury of vacation trip away to Bali.

I hear stories that many Koreans made it through big name grad schools, because the competition rate was lower than before, thanks to bad economy.  Maybe I should have gone to the grad school.  But what I care most is what AFTER grad school.  If I am to go to grad school, I want it to be a “ticket” out of here, or at least not having to deal with bunch of mono-cultured Koreans.

Seriously, if only I was born 5 years earlier, my life would have been much easier.  This morning I read an article regarding the international economic depression, written by an economic professor at Yale.  He, too, said no one can really predict what would happen – when would this depression end? How long would this depression continue? We really don’t have much data to predict.  In human history there was only one economic depression that affected every single country on earth.  The one at 1930’s.

I know, I know – the life itself is a bet.  It takes turn at the most unexpected part.  Or, when you expect it would be curvy, the road is straight.  Someone said there’s no road ahead because it’s all about what I make of it.

Yeah…I should’ve graduated college in 90’s.

[Via http://kumasim.wordpress.com]

The drones club

Waging War with the Click of a Mouse

Der Spiegel reports:

The US has two drone programs operating out of two command centers. CIA drone pilots are located on the east coast, in the catacombs of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. They are 11,000 kilometers (6,800 miles) away from Kabul. The US military’s drone pilots are even further west, at Creech Air Force Base in the deserts of Nevada, about an hour’s drive northwest of the gamblers’ paradise Las Vegas.

Both flight control centers look alike — they’re computer rooms that are sterile, insular and above all secure. Members of the Air Force’s 42nd Attack Squadron, who operate drones in Afghanistan from the base in Nevada and mostly live in Las Vegas, call themselves “combat commuters”. They perform their military duties for the day, then drive home.

“In the morning you carpool or you take a bus and drive into work, you operate for an eight-hour shift, and then you drive back home,” Air Force Major Bryan Callahan, 37, explained to SPIEGEL ONLINE. Callahan flew drones for four years in Nevada and now serves as assistant branch chief at the Air Combat Command Headquarters in Langley, sharing responsibility for all US drones worldwide. He is well acquainted with the somewhat bizarre lifestyle of a drone pilot.

“I do emails in the morning, rush to the airplane, come out, go to the BX (editor’s note: Base Exchange), get myself a hamburger, do some more email, do it again, drive home,” he relates.

[Via http://oakblue.wordpress.com]

What makes a voting system fair?

What makes a voting system fair?

What makes a voting system fair?

Most will agree that “fairness” of the vote is the most important criteria for a voting system whether paper voting or online voting.  “Fairest” vote could be defined as the vote which best represents the wish of the majority of the electorate.

Many things can affect fairness of the vote. For example:

* the openness of the contest to willing candidates

* the ease with which people can vote and gain access to information on candidates

* the vote counting method

* the integrity of the vote harvest, vote counting and result reporting

* the existence and transparency of an audit trail

* ease with which voters can confirm that their vote was recorded and counted correctly, and

* the time, cost and resources required to run a vote.

The choice between an online voting system, paper voting system or hybrid voting system can affect all these aspects of the vote fairness.  As the manager of BigPulse.com, a firm that has specialized in high security online voting for ten years, my bias is clearly declared towards online voting and in some cases hybrid voting.

Security and protection of anonymity are the hardest to get right in any voting system, requiring many years of testing in electronic voting systems.  However a properly tested online voting system can offer many advantages for security, transparency, accessibility, flexibility and cost.

A flexible online voting system will cater for many vote counting methods. The choice of vote counting method is an important consideration in fairness, for example first-past-the- post voting (FPTP) , Single Transferable Vote (STV), Instant-runoff voting (IRV) or range voting – and each method can produce different winners.

However it is not always clear which voting counting method provides the best measurement of majority opinion as there is not always a definitive mathematical answer to this question.

For example a single round vote FPTP contest with three or more candidates can produce a winner which never wins in a paired contest with any other candidate, while it is possible that a losing candidate in a FPTP vote contest may win in any paired contest.  Most people will agree that in this case the FPTP result is not fair and an alternative voting method that comes closer to emulating the paired result is fairer. Preferential voting, that is, ranked voting methods and FPTP with multiple rounds of voting tend to reduce this risk of eliminating candidates that do better in paired contests.

Maximizing the degree of proportional representation and minimizing the incentive for strategic voting are two important measures of fairness. Proportional representation means the elected candidates represent the natural divisions within the electorate.  Strategic voting means voting for what you think is the best possible or likely outcome even if it means not voting according to your true preferences – for example in a contest with three or more candidates, voters can be tempted to guess how others will vote and attempt to vote in a manner that gives the best likely result, rather than voting their true preferences.

A degree of proportional representation is possible in contests with more than one winner, the more winners the more proportional it can be.  In this case the form of preferential or ranked voting known as Single Transferable Vote is fairer than FPTP because the Single Transferable Vote is much better than FPTP at producing proportional representation.  However in a single winner contest (known as instant-runoff in the case of Single Transferable Vote), neither system can produce proportional representation, although Single Transferable Vote may be considered fairer in the sense that it leaves the door open to proportional representation.

If elimination of strategic voting is the criteria of fairness then the fair choice between FPTP and instant-runoff is not quite so obvious as it depends on the number of candidates and how many rounds of voting can be tolerated with FPTP voting.  For example, if only one candidate is eliminated after each round of voting then, from the perspective of strategic voting, the FPTP vote is just as fair as instant run off and also allows people to simply vote their first preference in each round of voting.

However FPTP is inferior to instant-runoff when more than one candidate is eliminated after any round of FPTP voting.  Also with multiple round FPTP voting, voter fatigue, cost and time delay may all impact on fairness.  For example a contest with 10 candidates can require up to nine rounds of voting using FPTP if it is to match the fairness of an instant runoff vote. The instant-runoff vote requires only one round of voting.

For more information : online elections, online voting system, online voting software

[Via http://onlinevotings.wordpress.com]

"Shout"

Today was my old uni roommate’s Match Day. Basically what Match Day is, is the day that (generally) 4th year medical students find out which residency program they’ve been matched with. To some, this is the bigger day than graduation because it’s your future, your definite future, the next step in your medical career.

This was basically the only part of the graduation ceremonies that I could attend in its entirety…everything else, I’ll get out of my teachers program class just in time to make it for the celebration. I’m an awesome friend, what can I say.

The event kicked off with a sample from the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started In Here” (one of the few popular songs that I actually did know) and the Ball High School Drumline doing their thing. It was really cute to watch the boys, especialy the two front boys, who obviously have watched Drumline and some stepshows before.

One of the funniest moments was after Titi picked up her envelope detailing where she is headed, a swarm, and I mean swarm of people surrounded her, wanting photos, wanting details, etc. She says that she doesn’t know anyone, but every time we turn around someone wants to say hi to her and catch up with her. And that was evidence by the fact that her own personal presscore shut down one of the aisles in the auditorium.

Apparently one of the guys from the Bachelor (some ridiculous reality TV show where one guy picks out of a large number of girls to marry one on national TV), his brother is graduating with Titi and several of our friends were excited about that fact, to the point that one stopped to talk to them and another took a picture of the back of their heads from across the room.

But back to the star of the day, Titi, who got one of her top choices, Cincinnati Children’s  Hospital! So looks like I’ll be visiting Cincy at least once during the next three years. Part of her reasoning was that Cincy has a great program, that offers her the chance to grow and the chance to experience life and work outside of Texas. It’s not like I can fault her logic on that one, since I’ve basically been out of the country for most of the last 8 years.

I’m really excited for her and I’m glad that she got matched with a program that she wanted. Congrats again!

[Via http://baikeunsook.wordpress.com]

The Market for Anti-ageing Foods (2nd Edition) - Aarkstore Enterprise

The global functional foods market continues to develop at a fast pace with growth outstripping that of conventional foods, and product innovation rife. The EU Nutrition and Health Claims Directive’s strict approach to health claims however will clearly influence the future development of the sector, and heightens the need for the latest intelligence. Anti-ageing products such as foods that provide a cognitive benefit or skin health-promoting ingredients tap into one of the biggest shifts the food industry faces: the ageing consumer base. This report covers developments in the US, Japan, Australia and Europe, including latest market data and key market drivers, product trends, the regulatory environment, ingredients and patents, and future prospects.

More information:
http://www.aarkstore.com/reports/The-Market-for-Anti-ageing-Foods-2nd-Edition–38996.html

[Via http://aarkreport.wordpress.com]

Political Action

Well. This country. The grand old United States of America. Well, not so much. To me, it seems at least.

For the past few months, the once defunct and thought dead health care debate has once again rose up and started rearing it’s ugly head again. This time, however, it has turned into an all out war between the two parties and idealists, between people who think this is bettering the country or people who thinks your killing everything this country once and now stands for. I am one of the few people in between these camps.

Mr. President Obama, we are in the middle of a recession that is getting worse and worse every time I look. I have been out of a job for a year and a half due to no fault of my own, and my Dad has been out of work for about a year or so now. And yet, despite campaign promises, you have yet to really pass anything that has helped this country out. Sure, you passed the stimulus package that maybe helped some people, but not people like this family. You have been focusing alot more of your time on healthcare. While I do believe that hey, we may need to kick the system in the but and get it moving again, your doing so in such a fashion that seems more like your taking out the heart of the old system, putting in a new one, and sealing everything up with duct tape and pray to God it works.

Now, I am not an Obama hater. I am completely neutral towards the man- I believe he can do good, even great, things, but unforutnately, it is getting harder and harder for me to stay neutral when he keeps focusing on things that are, at the moment, not that important. I compare it to this: It’s the equivalent of a nuclear weapon being detonated on this soil, by some crazy radical group who hates this country, and the current president going: “WE MUST FOCUS ON IMMIGRATION.” It’s despicable.

So, this is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna write. I’m gonna write to every single politician that represents me in Washington, in Olympia. I will call them, email them, write them letters. Even if it takes a time longer than I thought it would, I’m going for it. Just a note, I’m thinking of maybe 3-6 months before anything goes on. So, I’ll be having fun. Join me, won’t you?

[Via http://kevinmac92.wordpress.com]

The 10 best restaurants for a business lunch

Despite the global economic downturn, business deals still take place over delicious meals every day — paid for by corporate expense accounts.

After all, when you’re trying to seal that important deal, there’s nothing like a buttery steak and a glass of Claret to help you close.

Courtesy of Business Insider  here are the 10 best restaurants for a business lunch in

London

NYC

Los Angeles

[Via http://cityandout.wordpress.com]