“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
— Isaac Asimov
Sure, Beethoven has been dead for almost 200 years, and his music is in the public domain. That doesn’t mean you currently have the ability to share the 9th Symphony with friends, or use the Moonlight Sonata as the background music for your YouTube video. The problem is that there are no public domain recordings of his work. The “Musopen” project is attempting to change this.
From Ars Technica:
A radio host recently “referred to me as a Communist,” says Musopen’s Aaron Dunn. Music professors berate him by e-mail because his project is “like Napster.” Dunn’s crime? Setting music free.
In fact, though, Dunn’s version of “freedom” looks little like Napster. Instead of distributing a recording without permission, Dunn raises money, hires orchestras to record terrific classical music that has fallen into the public domain, and then makes those recordings available to anyone, for any reason.
To drum up the excitement and donor base needed to give Musopen ongoing life, Dunn put the project on Kickstarter, seeking $11,000 to “hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record and release the rights to: the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies. We have price quotes from several orchestras and are ready to hire one, pending the funds.”
See Musopen.com for more information and to donate.
Seen on Bruce Schneier’s web site:
Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:
- Kidnapping
- School snipers
- Terrorists
- Dangerous strangers
- Drugs
But how do children really get hurt or killed?
- Car accidents
- Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
- Abuse
- Suicide
- Drowning
Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? Barnes says parents fixate on rare events because they internalize horrific stories they hear on the news or from a friend without stopping to think about the odds the same thing could happen to their children.
Think about this the next time you don’t let your 10 year old walk down the street to the store.
I just discovered this article, as well as an earlier article on Coding Horror, and can’t help but agree – the majority of programming/software engineering candidates out there looking for jobs are not qualified to be programmers. They do not have the skills and cannot write anything beyond simple programs.
From the article:
“…I am stunned, but not entirely surprised, to hear that three years later “the vast majority” of so-called programmers who apply for a programming job interview are unable to write the smallest of programs. To be clear, hard is a relative term — we’re not talking about complicated, Google-style graduate computer science interview problems. This is extremely simple stuff we’re asking candidates to do. And they can’t. It’s the equivalent of attempting to hire a truck driver and finding out that 90 percent of the job applicants can’t find the gas pedal or the gear shift.
I agree, it’s insane. But it happens every day, and is (apparently) an epidemic hiring problem in our industry. “
Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software had also written about this problem back in 2005, positing a hypothetical 200 resumes received for a job posting:
Now, when you get those 200 resumes, and hire the best person from the top 200, does that mean you’re hiring the top 0.5%?
No. You’re not. Think about what happens to the other 199 that you didn’t hire.
They go look for another job.
That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he’s the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they’re getting the top 0.5% when they’re actually getting the top 99.9801%.
Interesting insight, and I think very close to reality.
Recruiters are of little help, as they 1) are not technical enough to weed out the weenies, and 2) in some instances they lie and maneuver to get these weak candidates past your screening process.
The importance of the screening process cannot be overstated. There’s no reason why you should have to perform in-person interviews on anyone that can’t do the job.
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