Cultural Fit

These days more and more companies are looking for cultural fit. But, what exactly does this mean? And, how does one go about measuring the fitness? Is it by asking the right types of questions or is it the attributes that one draws from some superficial bias? It seems cultural fit is a nice way of diplomatically labelling all the things that a company cannot state in a straightforward way, in case it comes out politically incorrect. Cultural fit really means whether the team likes one as an individual, not whether one can do the job. It can boil down to a lot of tongue and cheek nonsense as well as possibly just gibberish of managerial buzz of what they think is the feel of the culture. It is almost like whether they class one as the in crowd, a bit like at school where everyone hung around with their own type of people. Cultural fit is no real indicator of whether the person will perform or even add any value. They could even be culturally unfit when they join. Managers often devise strange ways of measuring recruitment processes and they have equally more bizarre practices of retaining staff as well as keeping them satisfied. The relative buzz of a company may be its culture. But, if the company is not doing well and has no direction then that is also a spontaneously combustible culture to have with very little in way of positive growth. Some companies go so far as to look for so called culturally fit individuals that they basically end up with a bunch of useless rejects with no direction, skills and the business goes belly up. With so many directionless and overpaid managers, is it any wonder we are seeing economic meltdown and uncertainties for businesses.

Divergent

Another copycat movie to The Hunger Games albeit providing another source of earning for box office. Perhaps, we are seeing a trend here in the way the selection process works for giving the go ahead for production of such movies. There is even a sequel lined up in future. Divergent was quite well positioned and exciting enough to watch. But, the ending is a bit of a let down where the build up of the plot draws to a close, only to make one realize they could have done so much more towards the end. Shailene Woodley might just end up being another upcoming Jennifer Lawrence or possibly a lead up to a significant movie. 

Noah 2014

A movie dramatized through excessive changes in storyline almost like a jigsaw. The movie is an amalgamation of sorts in interpretation especially from the vantage point of vegans, atheists, and lord or the rings trilogy. There is a clear reliance on the acting of Russell Crowe for dynamics and the many graphic dramatizations. The movie brings together artistic imagery in terms of heroic epic only to distort and leave one pondering over the questionable character of Noah. It also leaves one puzzled and confused as to how disrespectful the movie appears to be to the true depictions of Noah and the associated religious faiths of the world. Perhaps, in some ways it displays the very purpose of how Hollywood purposely provided such a misrepresentation of character with an explosive drama for cashing in on box office. At least, they could have provided some justice by staying true to the story as well as respecting the religious significance of Noah's character. 

Semantic Web For Dance

Dancing is deeply ingrained in almost every society on the planet. The art is so varied in routines and styles often providing depth into the cultural diversity of a society. It is an open expression, an exercise in one's freedom, and provides for unlimited ways of displaying creativity as well as a way for humans to identify with their individuality. With the ever growing styles of dancing, it also is an added complexity in keeping up to new changes in moves and routines. It also makes it complicated for learning as well as in keeping track of all the different types. Semantic web could come in handy in area of dance for insurmountable ways. It could help choreographers with planning routines. It could also help enhance learning in dance. It could even help semantically categorize all the different dance styles, trends, and moves as well as provide for better ways to track them. It could also help annotate dance videos and general content on the web for indexing. It could even help in knowledge discovery through linked data. Also, such approaches could go further in historical context towards understanding the cultural diversity, evolution, and the importance of dance in various societies over time. They could even help towards gaining insights for developing even newer dance styles. Dances also have embedded messages within them in form of expression, one can attempt to understand the semantically rich feelings and attitudes of an individual with the moves and choice of routines.

List of dance style categories
List of dances
IDTA
Popular Dance Styles
most popular dance moves from music videos 2013
top 10 list

Emoji

Emojis and emoticons can be extremely useful in capturing subliminal messages and moods within the social context of conversations. An almost perceived sentiment is captured with such simplicity can give added information to a document with actionable intent. However, they may be difficult to define in metadata translation unless each iconic derivation can be interpreted from their pictograph representations. And, as such most have a Unicode representation with a standard pixel grid size. These ideograms add much variety to text speak in reducing verbage but also adding valuable meaning. May be, even a semantic data could be incorporated over such emojis supported with such open sentiment dictionaries like sentiwordnet. They are portable as well as quite varied, available as plugins, website services, on desktops, and mobile phones. Symbols and signs have always held valuable cues in our society from traffic signs, health and safety, to various other domains. The semiotics of such symbols holds much value in understanding language pragmatics over the web to discern, relate, pattern recognize in their universality, and then to even catagorize with their specific distinctions. In general, such pictograph ideograms can be categorized into the level of abstractions they provide for an individual from quality of feeling, to reaction and relation, and for their explicit representations. Such interpretations can often be provided through philosophical logic influenced in part by their psychological and sociological implications for inference.

Arquillian Testing

Arquillian tests are quite useful as alternatives to mocking especially for in-container testing where one needs to do a full component test end-to-end at runtime, most aptly appropriate for JEE environments. It builds on JUnit and TestNG. It is amazingly good for integration testing and is portable across multiple environments and containers allowing one to control each run mode through in-process invocation or through remote client. This is also faciliated with multiple ways of injection on fields and methods with annotations. Additionally, one can utilize the shrinkwrap to declaratively define an archive that encapsulates the tests and resources. One can use the arquillian to package the shrinkwrap to deploy and run in the container which will then execute the tests and provide the captured results as it remotely communicates with the server.

When To Use Nodejs

The ideal sort of projects have need for long polling, real-time streaming and potentially also are using functional approaches yet want to stick to JavaScript for both front and backend work. They also want to move away from a standard web project implementation to a full application view. There may also be multiple data sources to stream from. Perhaps, one wants to keep things simple but agile. And, also have time constraints. Maybe, there is even a need to evolve the project but initially have a need to prototype with a responsive feel. Maybe, there is a desire for the whole approach to be flexible from create, run, test, share, and deploy. There might also be a necessity for easy builds with plugins as well as cloud friendly environment. There could even be a need to build with flexibility to relational models as well as NoSQL. The primary reason for using nodejs for a project would be if there is a huge requirement for a callback concurrency model that does not excessively hog on CPU cycles per request, marginalizing on complexity with using a single language across the stack, have little overhead on serialization/deserialization of JSON, reuse across the full stack, as well as keeping the code base as lightweight as possible with no limitations on configuration and plugins. 

Typical Use Cases:

Chat Application

Online Games

Collaboration Tools

Real-Time Analytics Dashboards

Command-Line Utilities

Web APIs

Desktop Apps

Simple Web Servers

Single Page Apps

Educational Apps (especially with Gamification)

Service Monitoring Dashboards
Search Aggregation

Most anything on Ruby/Rails can be switched to Nodejs
....and possibly more and growing use cases

Air Pollution

We have wind power, solar power, water purifiers, and even dehumidifiers. We even have air purifiers that we can buy for home and office. And, yet we are not able to build air purifier solutions for large scale. As South East of England suffers high levels of smog it is necessary to run air purifiers over cities to reduce the pollution and treat the many contaminants in the air. Perhaps, people can learn from the carbon and nitrogen cycle in an aquarium as a model example. We often have solutions for agriculture in form of crop dusting, why not use something like that to neutralize the pollutants in the air. A lot of times, it requires an agent to activate and speed up the chemical process of reduction. Even aquariums have it resolved by reducing ammonia levels in tanks by using filtration chemicals to speed up the nitrification process. Even plants are a natural source of filtration. In similar respects, the air could be filtered out through a cyclic process. Even furnaces fuel an excessive amount of pollutants into the air and so does road traffic. Perhaps, it is time to start installing smarter filters and renewable energy sources. Maybe, this might even push for more action and interest for electric powered vehicles.

London Pollution
Pollution in South East England