The Science of the Job Search, Part VII: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements” – is a nice article in the series, with a few interesting numbers. The one that stands out the most is:
You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.
This sounds about right. And it also explains how the recruiting is still around, with all those ridiculous requirements in every other vacancy.
Slashdot is running a story, which is both insightful and hilarious:
Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft. But before you leap to any rash conclusions, you had better hear the whole story. The gold standard for medical research is a study that randomly assigns volunteers to try an intervention or to go without one and be part of a control group. For some reason, nobody has ever done a randomized controlled trial of parachutes. In fact, medical researchers often use the parachute example when they argue they don’t need to do a study because they’re so sure they already know something works. Cardiologist Robert Yeh, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, got a wicked idea one day. He and his colleagues would actually attempt the parachute study to make a few choice points about the potential pitfalls of research shortcuts.
They started by talking to their seatmates on airliners. […] In all, 23 people agreed to be randomly given either a backpack or a parachute and then to jump from a biplane on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts or from a helicopter in Michigan. Relying on two locations and only two kinds of aircraft gave the researchers quite a skewed sample. But this sort of problem crops up frequently in studies, which was part of the point Yeh and his team were trying to make. Still, photos taken during the experiment show the volunteers were only too happy to take part. The drop in the study was about 2 feet total, because the biplane and helicopter were parked. Nobody suffered any injuries. Surprise, surprise. So it’s technically true that parachutes offered no better protection for these jumpers than the backpacks.
Via this kottke blog post I came across the @TerribleMaps Twitter account that collects links and images of funny, non-sense, inaccurate and other terrible maps. Most of this stuff is quite funny.
This title almost sounds stupid, right? I mean, pretty much everyone who has ever been online knows how to Google. Even kids.
But I promise you it’s not. Searching for quick and simple stuff – yes, sure, is easy. But not many people I’ve met know how to use even Google’s advanced search options (despite there being a gadzillion articles online), let alone other search engines. Searching for something non-trivial, like research papers and books, is even trickier.
Hence the Internet Search Tips. Here’s the intro from the author:
Over time, I developed a certain google-fu and expertise in finding references, papers, and books online. Some of these tricks are not well-known, like checking the Internet Archive (IA) for books. I try to write down my search workflow, and give general advice about finding and hosting documents.
It is via this Cyprus Mail article that I’ve learned that not only Cyprus has an official Open Data portal, but that it’s also the best in Europe:
Cyprus is one of the top five European Union countries in the field of Open Data for 2018, while the new National Open Data Portal data.gov.cy scored highest among 31 open data portals in Europe, a special honour and recognition for the Open University of Cyprus (OUC) that developed and implemented the National Open Data Portal in collaboration with the public administration and personnel department of the finance ministry.
So far I’ve only had a quick look around, and I have to say that it’s quite impressive! Even though most of it is in Greek, Google Chrome translation handles it nicely. Here are a couple of interesting bits to get you started:
And there is so much more … Well done, Open University of Cyprus!