Too true, but you have to understand that the primary purpose of HR is not to hire the best talent available to fill the positions that make the company go. That is completely off the mark.

HR exists to minimize what is the largest expense for most companies: the employee payroll.

Like most divisions/departments in large companies, HR has other priorities but the number one priority is to reduce payroll expense.

Seriously.

That's why they dick with benefits every year and implement performance review processes that largely obscure the fact that total available budget for pay raises was set in a high level executive meeting prior to anyone's review and no one will get $$ recognition outside of preset boundaries.

They also like to screen out unstable personalities, hence the typical psych profile questions. Again, this is not about hiring good people; it's just that when an employee goes off the rails it tends to increase corporate expense drastically.

Typically, the only interviewer at the table with a vested interest in hiring the best fit for the job is the manager of the area with the open position. Usually this person is outnumbered by HR flaks.

So, you are absolutely correct: HR is not your friend. They are the fat trimmers and EVERYONE looks like greasy bacon to them.

It is not surprising that the person in the article was treated so badly. Just means that the particular HR dept has gone cannibalistic and has reduced itself to the point that they can no longer execute an efficient hiring process. Again though, this is not dysfunctional for HR. Making it hard for people to get hired works to make HR's stats look good.

Ooooops, there goes my cynicism again. ;->

There have been long standing conflicts between holders of surface rights and of mineral rights, at least in Canada.

One of the touch points has been aquifer damage. Generally speaking, the petroleum industry puts up a wall and admits to no effects of petroleum work on aquifer quality. OTOH, it is easy to find farmers and other rural residents who depend on well water and who have personal evidence (anecdotal, of course) of water quality changing after drilling, well maintenance, and seismic exploration work. Even when the damage is obvious, the oil industry goes into a Pythonesque 'Dead Parrot' routine: it was like that before or it is just pure coincidence etc etc.

What is stunning is the lack of monitoring and ongoing study of our (Canadian) underground water resources.

Ground water threats are everywhere: one foreign producer I worked for was having a terrible time with pipe corrosion in the water flood system used to keep pressure up in one of their richest fields. Since the corrosion was primarily caused by bacteria, someone joked about injecting heavy duty bacteriacide into the supply wells. One should be careful about such jokes as it suddenly became a serious agenda item since it was a very cheap and effective solution. It was dropped when someone else pointed out that the thousands of field workers that the company employed depended on the same aquifer as a drinking water source and that the suggested bacteriacide was very effective at killing people.

It isn't just the Big Bad Oil vs. the Little Guy. The Libyan 'man made river' started under the infamous Col. Khaddafi is/was a project generally for the positive benefit of a dry country but of incredible scope and extent with little or no reliable information of what the long term consequences are. Still listening for news on that front.

Sigh. I love humanity; it's just the things people do that scare me.

Hmmmmmmm . . . I have an old K&E bamboo core that needs a little lubrication when the humidity is high but it does still work; it just gets sticky.

. . . ahhhhhh yeah ..... no. Made me smile though! I wonder what is more attractive: linear or circular rules?

Er ... I included four years of calculus, linear algebra, and number theory in my undergrad degree and never touched a calculator. There was no need. I did use computation tools in some engineering courses but the emphasis was on numbers more than math theory.

And you are welcome. ;-)

Cheers

I respectfully disagree. There is no place for a calculator in High School math. It adds nothing to the experience.

The story is different if you aren't teaching math as a subject but are using math for another purpose and need the numbers.

But everybody is entitled to an opinion . . . no matter how wrong

Cheers

PDP 8I with the flashy light panel!

Fat finger programming the front panel to load it the bootstrap.

Sigh ....

It used to take hours to do something really useful with a computer ; now it takes hours but we have lots and lots of pixels.

Thanks! Been a long time but APL was neat! Now if I could only find a FOCAL interpreter to run my old DEC games.

You insensitive clod: some of us have difficulty controlling our anger and turn green easily. Nuclear accidents happen and this is the result.

I have difficulty waiting while a graphing calculator crunches numbers . . . crunch plot, crunch plot, crunch plot ad nauseum. I wouldn't hurl it at the wall because I think they are cute and it isn't their fault they are slow. . .

  but puny calculators do make me angry! You won't like my math when I'm angry.

Slide rules are interesting because they give visual and tactile feedback about the numbers being manipulated. They also prevent the presentation of ridiculous precision when no level of accuracy is available. Plus the added benefit of forcing the user to keep track of magnitude.

[salivating noisily] slide roools! mmmmm...........

. . . there are some excellent graphing calculator apps for iOS and I am sure Android has a fair selection as well. They do 2D, 3D and solve algebra.

Also there exist a number of HP emulations but I don't know if there are any for TI.

All of them execute at some Warp factor faster than discrete calculators but there are some issues with using a device different from what the school recommends. My experience with guiding my own spawn around the perils of high school math leads me to believe that HSs (in Canada at least) are more interested in teaching button pushing than math. Many teachers have no interest in math and are perplexed when someone has an issue with something such as a different calculator solution.

Besides that, when using alternatives you may get differing results or even some fantastic errors depending on how well written the code is.

[RANT ON]
Sorry, but I gotta say this: CALCULATORS OBSTRUCT THE LEARNING OF MATH

phew, had to get that out

My apologies for the caps but it is a rant after all . . .

There is a place for calculators in engineering courses and in some aspects of learning math but you can get a PhD in Math Science without ever getting near a calculator. I saw my kids get all caught up in the numbers to the detriment of understanding the process and theory. When they started doing courses later on (such as physics, biology, chemistry and sociology-er 'stats'), they had to go back and learn some of the fundamentals that had never been emphasized because of the calculator fixation.

Bottom line: use the TI and don't waste time on alternatives. Use that time to learn the theory.

[RANT OFF]

Well, unless of course you are a real nerd (like the rest of us) and do both: learn the math and are obsessive about calculation tools

Cheers

This is not so far fetched since the AC grid is affected by every load that comes on and off of it, and by every generator source change. Drift may be quite small but with an accurate and precise baseline recording you should, in theory, be able to identify a point in time fairly well. I monitor the AC source in my home and I see a general variation of +- 0.5 Hz but I have seen it momentarily go much further off . . . as much as 5 Hz.

In any case, I don`t think the issue is how wide the drift is but that there is some measurable and continually changing drift due to various issues from load changes (which happen constantly) to generator variations (which also happen as operators monitor and maintain their systems). The variation over a time period (oh, say a minute or more) should create a type of signature that more less is unique to that point in time. Generator sources are automatically controlled to compensate for drift in amplitude and frequency but they do not react to compensate perfectly.

Methods to store and search this sort of signature are quite well advanced now. Consider fingerprints, faces, etc. This is much simpler as it is simply a linear sequence of values within a limited range. No worries about orientation or shadows etc.

The audio recording does not have to be perfect either. It could be up or down in pitch without affecting the signature since only relative changes in hum frequency would be required to create a signature.

Note that the average line frequency value over a long period of time tends to be very close to the standard but the value at any point in time could be off by a fair amount.

Also, power operators have been proposing much less stringent standards since AC is not much called for as a time reference any more and since loads tend to be much less sensitive to frequency than they were 50 years ago. eg: your laptop power supply is the same no matter where in the world the unit is shipped. Just the cord end changes. 50 or 60 Hz, 100 to 260 volts: no worry.

So, very doable and believable IMHO.