In the service sector where employees have to interact with the general public, it has long been recognized that it is much easier to teach employees the skills they need to actually carry out their jobs than to teach them the kind of good attitude that will make a positive impact on customers. So “hire for attitude and teach the skills” has been a useful aphorism for them. [Read more…]

David Simon is a successful screenwriter of political dramas and in a blog post he writes what I too have felt all along, that even under the remote chance that New Jersey governor Chris Christie did not explicitly and personally order the closing of the lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September, thus massively tying up traffic for four days right at the beginning of the school year, now that we know that its was deliberately ordered by his close political aides as an act of retribution for whatever reason, the nature of the political relationships within the coterie of people close to major political figures strongly suggests that Christie would have been informed immediately afterwards, thus making a lie of his claim that he did not know anything about this until the story of the emails broke on Wednesday. [Read more…]

In his keynote talk at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress (30C3) conference last month to an audience that consisted to a large extent of computer professionals and systems administrators, Glenn Greenwald talked about how the US government’s spying apparatus can, must, and will be foiled. [Read more…]

Lester Grinspoon, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, has studied the effects of marijuana for decades and has given an interview in which he dispels many of the myths about the drug, especially in comparison to alcohol. [Read more…]

I wrote recently about services like Wickr and Silent Circle that have systems that prevent (or at least highly hinder) the ability of the NSA and other US government agencies to spy on their members’ communications. Nico Sell is the head of Wickr and in an article Max Eddy has Sell explain how their operating model prevents them from being complicit with the government in snooping. [Read more…]

Apparently your responses to 12 apolitical questions can reveal your political leanings. After doing it, you can check the rest of the article that explains the reasoning behind it. Of course, these things are meant just for fun. The whole uniaxial liberal-conservative spectrum is itself problematic.

I came out as 67% liberal, 33% conservative.

Women tend to face considerable repression in the Arab world and so it was with some surprise that I read this news report from Tunisia that has just voted to require equal representation for women in its legislative bodies. Noah Feldman writes: [Read more…]