opportunity in changing #demographics and #education

Here are my abstract ideas on changing demographics and education which were sparked by this report from stats Canada. Page 20 if you wish to follow along. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-551-x/91-551-x2010001-eng.pdf

The change in demographic composition, and particularly the influx of the immigrants in their prime working age in the next 20 years will have various impacts on Canadian society, whether they are good or bad is up to everyone to decide and is going to vary vastly. I feel like since this influx is going to be coming from Asian countries where education is highly sought after. It would support the inflation of education. It’s already felt that bachelors’ degree is nothing really special, and a master’s degree is almost expected for the really high paying jobs. Having people come to Canada with those sought after degrees will only raise the bar for the rest of the workforce.

I find that the employers approach to degrees right now is very general in most scenarios. They would only be looking if the degree was completed and then they put a checkmark to the candidate file. That is understandable in a way since the degrees are run of the mill sort of speak, but it’s not conductive of true competition on the labor market, especially with the new immigrants. They are facing so many obstacles (from culture, to language, to Canadian experience requirement) coming into a new country, which often people get lost in the shuffle and the society doesn’t get to reap the benefits of all the skills that are available out there. Employers often don’t know how to assess the candidate’s file if it has foreign experience and foreign education.

I support the idea of creating a centralized way to verify the credentials of the immigrants that can rate and summarize the obtained experience and that can be trusted by employers during the hiring decision. This could also be used for various degrees around Canada, which would provide a central benchmark for the credentials that are obtained by students.

It has to be used on voluntary bases by the candidates kind of like TOEFL tests that assess language proficiency. This would embrace the global workforce reality and hopefully put the most qualified and appropriate people in available jobs.  

Awesome video @safinr found through a friend of a friend.

Samsung I am disappointed

Today I tried to updated my Samsung Galaxy S on my Apple computer. This is somewhat humorous considering that there are so many patent battles happening between the companies. It's almost as if it was a patent war. Although perhaps it's not even close to how amusing it is to find out that Samsung and Apple were actually business partners involved in the production of iPhones, particularly Samsung was/is supplying the coveted retina displays.
Being a humble consumer I care not of their relationship, I just want some gingerbread on my phone, that I bought last year and that should be totally eligible. So i install the Kies app and then when I plug in my Galaxy S it informs me that my device is not supported, a quick search online does not reveal a technical work around and apparently Samsung tech support was saying the same thing to the customers call in.
ARE YOU SERIOUS SAMSUNG? You mean that not only do I have to put up with your touchwiz delays on Android releases which are usually around 1 year of delay for both Froyo and Gingerbread. Now you are telling me that my phone is too old.
This is the thing that pisses me off the most about android, the manufacturers are given too much freedom to intervene with the OS releases. I think Android should put their foot down and make everyone run the same non modified OS by default and allow people to get the most recent updates. This would stop fragmentation and make Android competitive with iOS. But as of right now, I wish I had an iPhone.
Maybe I will install some unauthorized unlocked version of gingerbread risking bricking my phone, that would be awesome.

How @safinr watched #PayItForward and wanted to do it with small deeds

Pay it Forward is a movie that has an interesting idea in it: to initiate 3 significant non-reciprocal good deeds. And then ask the people that you have helped to do the same. Pretty much a pyramid for goodness. To critic the movie I'd say that it's a bit too preachy and not really my cup of tea, which did not entice me to watch it until the end. Nevertheless, the idea behind the movie is interesting and is worthy of a post. Especially when I'm feeling guilty about becoming very sporadic with the content on the site.
I am not convinced that this significant deed part of the idea would become adopted, so I am making a compromise and downgrading the significance of the deeds to favor-worthy. So if you help someone out and they pronounce the polite "I owe you one", hold them to it and ask them to spread the compassionate nature and help out 3 other people with the same premise.
If anything this will bring up the conversation about genuine goodness and the innate nature of people. That's one of my favorite topics to discuss.
I believe that this idea is based on Kant's Idea of

universalizabilityThe applicability of a moral rule to all similarly situated individuals. According to both Kant andHare, universalizability is a distinguishing feature of moral judgments and a substantive guide to moralobligation: moral imperatives must be regarded as equally binding on everyone. The force of this principle, however, depends upon the generality of the judgments and the particularity of the situations to which they are applied.

In laymen terms something should be considered moral if you can live with everyone doing it. In this case the movie Pay It Forward tries to create this ideal universalizabal (Emmanuel Kant decided to create new words, so I'm not too certain about how I should use it) Utopian shift in the society. I applaud big and brave ideas, so this is right up there.


Til next time

How @safinr heard a podcast from #TBJ about #humanresources

This is my favourite podcast, and I think that these guys are the most entertaining reporters that cover NBA out there. It's a bonus that they are local and operate out of Toronto. Check out their latest podcast where they talk about job interviews. They got jokes and jokes and jokes.
 http://blogs.thescore.com/tbj/2011/10/06/the-blank-jones-job-interview/

@safinr updates about #competitive use of #socialmedia

In my article about competitive use of social media I have mentioned Second Cup, which drew some traffic from a service called Sysomos Map. Apparently someone was searching for Second Cup customer satisfaction from that service, this is derived based on the keywords that I saw them search. Looks like either Second Cup is monitoring their social media presence through this service or perhaps their competitors are engaging in some competitive use of social media. And I am leaning more toward the latter because when you look at this company's website it lists their notable clients and Second Cup is not listed there, however McDonald's is listed. Now this is pure speculation on my part but it is entirely possible that they are doing some research on their competitors. This is exciting stuff and I just wanted to provide a quick update to my possible readers and if the guys from Sysomos Map see this, I see you looking at my site, thanks for that ;).

@safinr trying to answer #Google #interviewquestions

I'm going to have to stop you right there, we know what you did last summer

I thought I'd test myself with these puzzles that became famous because Google used them in their interviews. I find them to be rather cruel and unusual punishment to have people try to answer these on the spot, but if it's suitable anywhere, it's suitable at the almighty El Goog.
I found these questions here: http://www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2010-11#in-a-country-in-which-people-only-want-boys-3

In a country in which people only want boys…

…every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
Job: Product Manager

Train of thoughts: So this is a probability question which seems hard at first, but once you start breaking it down it really crumbles quite nicely. First thing is crucial, the number of families = number of boys. Then you look at the probabilities, and you can draw up a little tree to make the answer come to you visually. There's 50 percent chance that the family will not have a boy and hence keep conceiving, then after that there's 50 percent chance that they will keep on conceiving and it's starts to look like a factor tree of an integer if you substitute probabilities with an actual or a sample number of families. You realize that the number of girls being born will always get reduced by half until it eventually reaches 0, when you add it up it will equal the number of boys.  
Answer: 1

How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

Job: Product Manager

Train of thoughts: What classifies a piano tuner, it potentially could be anyone who owns the piano.
Answer: As many as there are pianos (C'mon Google this is just too easy)

How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

Job: Product Manager

Train of thoughts: Let's assume that there are Hour, Minute and Seconds hands. They all overall only when Hour and Minute hands overlap, as Seconds hand is the fastest one. Minute hand overlaps with Hour only once an hour, which would make the total 24.
Answer: 24

Let's stop with 3 questions. I think I answered these questions pretty well, if you think that I have failed somewhere, you can contact me @safinr or troll away here. This product manager interview seems pretty easy, I am looking forward hearing from Google recruiters in the near future. :)