We recently wrote about Joe Bernstein's excellent Harper's cover story, which argues that we're all looking at disinformation/misinformation the wrong way, and that the evidence of disinformation on social media really influencing people is greatly lacking. Instead, as Bernstein notes, this idea is one that many others are heavily invested in spreading, including Facebook (if the disinfo story is true, then you should buy ads on Facebook to influence people in other ways), the traditional media (social media is a competitor), and certain institutions with a history of having authority over "truth" (can't let the riffraff make up their own minds on things).
We've also seen other evidence pop up questioning the supposed malicious impact of social media. Yochai Benkler's work has shown that Fox News has way more of an impact on spreading false information than social media does.
And even with all this evidence regarding disinformation, there are also people who focus on attitude, and insist that social media is responsible for otherwise good people turning awful. Yet, as was covered in an fascinating On the Media interview with Professor Michael Bang Petersen, there really isn't much evidence to support that either! As Petersen explained in a useful Twitter thread, his research has shown that there's no real evidence to support the idea that social media turns people hostile. Instead, it shows that people who are assholes offline are also assholes online.
But in the interview, Petersen makes a really fascinating point regarding echo chambers. I've been skeptical about idea of online echo chambers in the past, but Petersen says that people really have it all backwards -- and that we're actually much more likely to live in echo chambers offline than online, and we're much more likely to come across different viewpoints online.
One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn all of our notions about social media upside down. And here I'm thinking about the notion of 'echo chambers.' So we've been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media creates echo chambers. But, in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one that we live in in our everyday lives.
I'm a university professor. I'm not really exposed to any person who has a radically different world view or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I'm online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with. And that might trigger me if I'm a hostile person and encourage me to reach out to tell these people that I think they are wrong.
But that's because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers. I can see the views of other people -- what they are saying behind my back. That's where a lot of the felt hostility of social media comes from. Not because they make us behave differently, but because they are exposing us to a lot of things that we're not exposed in our everyday lives.
And then this upside down view of echo chambers also explains why people feel like the internet is a more hostile place full of assholes and trolls. It's more that it's because we're now being exposed to these points of view and can respond. As he notes, this kind of hostility actually happens all the time, but it's usually just not witnessed by more than a couple people at a time. Now, online, it's witnessed by a much larger audience, and so we overcorrect and think that it's making people worse.
In our offline lives, there is a lot of hostility as well, but that happens behind closed doors, in private. It happens in bars where we cannot hear what is going on. But we're exposed to all that when we enter the online realm.
Another interesting tidbit in the interview (and in his Twitter thread) is the idea that people who tend to share misinformation often know that it's misinformation, but they don't care because they're just so focused on pissing off the people they don't like (see: "owning the libs") that they don't care. It's more important to anger the "other side" than to share legit info. This was based on a detailed study they did of people on Twitter.
The people who are sharing misinformation are not ignorant. They are used to navigating social media and the internet. They know more about politics than the average person. But where they're really different from the average is they have much more negative feelings towards members of the other party. And that's really what's predicting, not only their sharing of fake news, but also their sharing of real news. They want to derogate people that they don't like, and they are actively searching for information that they can use for that purpose.
So it's not that social media turns people into assholes, nor does it put them into echo chambers where their minds are turned to mush by disinformation. The evidence suggests that some people -- who were already predisposed to such kinds of "us/them" bickering, just jump right into the fray online as a kind of status thing to anger the people they don't like. Because those people can actually hear them now.
Later, he notes that it's not that they're purposefully sharing misinformation -- it's just that whether or not something is true or false is "not part of the calculus." All that matters is basically "will this trigger people I dislike."
And then the interview brings us back around to a similar issue that we noted with Yochai Benkler's research about the problems of Fox News. Petersen notes that his research has shown that Republicans tend to share somewhat more misinformation than Democrats, but it's not because (as some people believe) the relative education levels, but rather that the media ecosystem set up for Republicans (i.e., Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, etc.) is much more designed to feed them the kinds of news that they want to share for this very purpose -- the "own the libs" kind of stories. Though, as he then notes, the fact that these kinds of news sources exist and feed into this is (like the social media panic) more of a symptom, rather than the real problem.
His conclusion?
Misinformation is not, in itself, a big problem. So that's the good news. The bad news is that it's a symptom of a much worse problem. And here we come back to the polarization in society, because that is what's driving the sharing of misinformation. I think we've been focusing a lot on the symptoms -- Fox News, Trump, Facebook -- but I think that there is some evidence that suggests that rising inequality over the last decade has been a fundamental driver of political instability in the US and beyond. It's a problem in many Western Democracies. That's where I would start to look for solutions.
All of this is quite fascinating -- and backed up by his research. And, it does get back to the point that some of us have been making for years. That social media isn't so much "the problem" as it is a mirror that reflects the kinds of societal problems that civilization has been dealing with for centuries. It's just that now it plays out in a way where more people can see it all happen.
Yesterday I wrote about some BMOW blog troubles displaying special characters and international characters, which was apparently triggered by a recent update to MySQL 8 at my web host. Old pages containing special characters like curly quotes, accented letters, or non-Latin characters were suddenly rendering as garbled combinations of random-looking symbols, whereas they were previously OK. If you read the follow-up comments, you saw that I was eventually able to resolve the problem (mostly) by adding these lines to my wp-config.php file:
But I didn’t fully understand what those lines changed, or exactly why this problem appeared in the first place. After some digging in the MySQL database, I think I have a slightly better understanding now.
Back to Kristian Möller
I returned to the example of Kristian Möller, whose name contains the letter o with umlaut. After the MySQL update, the name was appearing incorrectly as Möller. This is what you’d expect to see if the UTF-8 bytes 0xC3 0xB6 for ö were incorrectly interpreted as two separate Latin1 bytes, 0xC3 for à and 0xB6 for ¶.
Using phpmyadmin, I was able to connect to the live WordPress DB, and examine the wp_comments table where this name is stored. The result for comment_id 233746 is shown above, displaying the author’s name as both text and as raw hex bytes. You can see the hex bytes contain the sequence C3B6, which is the correct UTF-8 byte sequence for ö. That’s great news. It means the contents of my database text are correct and uncorrupted UTF-8 bytes. But all is not well – the metadata associated with the table is wrong. It thinks the text is Latin1, and displays it as such in the myphpadmin UI. I was able to confirm this by executing the SQL command:
show create table wp_comments
This echoes back the SQL command that was originally used to create this table, way back in 2007. And lo and behold, part of that original SQL command specified CHARSET=latin1. Ever since then, WordPress has been storing and retrieving UTF-8 text into a Latin1 table in the database. This is bad practice, but it worked fine for 14 years until the MySQL update earlier this month.
Why Does DB_CHARSET latin1 Help?
Defining WordPress’ DB_CHARSET variable to be latin1 sounds like it’s telling WordPress what type of character set is used by the database. But if you think it through, that doesn’t fit the evidence here. If I tell WordPress that my DB data is in Latin1 format, even though as we’ve seen it’s really UTF-8, then I would expect WordPress to convert the data bytes from Latin1 to UTF-8 as it loads them during a page render. That would do exactly the wrong thing; it would cause the very problem that I’m trying to prevent.
I searched for a detailed explanation of precisely what the DB_CHARSET setting does, but couldn’t find one that made sense to me. Most references just say to change the value, without fully explaining what it does.
While I don’t have any strong evidence to support this, my guess is that a MySQL client has a choice of connecting to the MySQL database in Latin1 mode or UTF-8 mode, and this is what DB_CHARSET controls for WordPress. If the client connects as a UTF-8 client but the table is marked as being Latin1, my guess is MySQL automatically translates the data. Normally that would be a good thing, but if UTF-8 data were stored in a table improperly marked as being Latin1, it would cause unwanted and unnecessary character conversions, causing the types of problems I saw on the blog.
Why Did This Break Now?
So what changed during the recent MySQL update to suddenly break this? Why did the problem appear now? Initially I suspected the underlying data bytes had become corrupted during the update, but the hex display from phpmyadmin showed the data bytes are OK.
I can’t say for certain whether the problem was caused by exporting and reimporting my database, or whether it’s due to new behavior in MySQL 8. Now that I think about it, I’m not even certain whether the result I saw from that show create table wp_comments was actually the original SQL command from 2007, or the SQL command from eight days ago when the database was migrated to MySQL 8.
If these database tables were always explicitly marked Latin1, going all the way back to 2007, then I think this character set conversion problem would always have happened too. Or at least it would have happened as soon as I updated to my current version of WordPress, instead of when I updated to a new version of MySQL.
One possibility is that with the old database and old version of MySQL, the character set for the database tables wasn’t explicitly defined. It relied on some database-wide default which just happened to be UTF-8, so everything worked when WordPress connected to the DB as a UTF-8 client. Then during the MySQL 8 update, somehow the tables were explicitly set to Latin1 and the problem appeared.
Another possibility is that the tables were already explicitly Latin1, but WordPress was previously connecting to the database as a Latin1 client, so it worked OK. Since my version of WordPress hasn’t changed recently, this would mean the default database connection type for WordPress must somehow come from the database itself, or the database server, and that’s what changed during the MySQL 8 update.
Whatever the explanation, changing DB_CHARSET now seems like only a temporary solution. I still have UTF-8 data stored in tables that say they’re Latin1, which seems likely to cause more problems down the road. If nothing else, it makes the output display incorrectly in the phpmyadmin UI. A full solution will probably require some more significant database maintenance, but I hope to postpone that for a while.
Only a TRUE Sonic Fan could know stats of Sega Korea Account Manager for Eastern Regional Sales from 2017 Q2. I've NEVER seen anybody pull numbers like that.
A few months back I wrote about some web site troubles with the HTML entity, non-breaking spaces, and UTF-8 encoding. A similar problem has reared its head again, but in a surprising new form that seems to have infected previously-good web pages on this site. If you view the Floppy Emu landing page right now, and scroll down to the product listing details, you’ll see a mass of stray  characters everywhere, screwing up the item listings and making the whole page look terrible. Further down the page in the Documentation section, the Japanese hiragana label that’s supposed to accompany the Japanase-language manual appears rendered as a series of accented Latin letters and square boxes.
The direct UTF-8 encoding for a non-breaking space (without using the entity) is C2 80. Â is Unicode character U+00C2, Latin capital letter A with circumflex. So somehow the C2 value is being interpreted as a lone A with circumflex character rather than part of a two-byte sequence for non-breaking space.
The strangest part of all this is that the Floppy Emu landing page hasn’t been modified since September 6, and I’m sure it hasn’t looked this way for the past month. In fact the most recent archive.org snapshot from September 8 shows the page looking fine. So what’s going on?
I’ve noticed a related problem with some other pages on the site. The Mac ROM-inator II landing page hasn’t been modified in six months, but it too shows strange encoding problems. The sixth bullet point in the feature list is supposed to say Happy Mac icon is replaced by a color smiling “pirate” Mac, with the word pirate in curly double-quotes. In the most recent archive.org snapshot it looks correct. But if you view the page today, the curly quotes are rendered as a series of accented letters and Euro currency symbols. There are similar problems elsewhere on that page, for example in the second user comment, Kristian Möller’s name is rendered incorrectly.
These problems are visible in all the different browsers I tried. And none of them seem to correspond to any specific change I made in the content of those pages recently.
I’m not a web developer or HTML expert, but I’m wondering if the header of all my HTML pages somehow got broken, and it’s not correctly telling the web browsers to interpret the data as UTF-8. But when I view the page source using the Chrome developer tools, the fourth line looks right:
And what’s more, Unicode characters in this very blog post appear to render just fine. For example I can copy-paste those hiragana characters from the archive.org snapshot of the Floppy Emu page, and paste them here without any special encoding tricks, and they render correctly:
??????????????
Nevermind, I’m wrong. I can paste those characters into the WordPress editor, and they appear correctly, but as soon as I save a draft or preview the page they turn into a string of question marks. I’m sure that direct copy-and-paste of this text used to work, it’s how I added this text to the Floppy Emu page in the first place.
So if the character set is configured correctly in my pages’ HTML headers (which I could be wrong about), what else could explain this? The alternative is that the text is stored in a broken form in the WordPress database, or is being broken on-the-fly as the page’s HTML is generated. Perhaps some recent WordPress action or update caused the text of previously-written pages to be parsed by a buggy filter with no UTF-8 awareness and then rewritten to the WordPress DB? But I haven’t changed any WordPress settings recently, performed any upgrades, or installed any new plugins. I can’t explain it.
I dimly recall seeing a notice from my web host (Dreamhost) a few weeks ago, saying they were updating something… I think MySQL was being upgraded to a newer version. Maybe that’s a factor here?
Whatever the cause, the important question is how to fix this mess. I could go manually edit all the affected pages, but that would be tedious, and I wouldn’t really be confident the problem would stay fixed. Even if I were willing to make manual fixes, it still wouldn’t fix everything, since some of the broken text is in users’ names and comment text rather than in my own page text. For the moment, I’m stumped until I can figure this out.
An Example: Möller
On the ROM-inator page there’s a comment from Kristian Möller. I’m using the explicit HTML entity here for o with umlaut to ensure it renders correctly. Until recently, it also looked correct on the ROM-inator page, but now it appears as Möller, again using explicit HTML entities for clarity. So what happened?
The two-byte UTF-8 encoding for ö is 0xC3 0xB6. The one-byte Latin-1 encoding for à is 0xC3 and for ¶ is 0xB6. So a UTF-8 character is being misinterpreted as two Latin-1 characters, but where exactly is it going wrong? Is the browser misinterpreting the data due to a faulty HTML character encoding meta tag? Is the data stored incorrectly in the WordPress DB? Or is WordPress converting the data on the fly when it retrieves it from the DB to generate the page’s HTML? I did a small test which I think eliminates one of these possibilities.
First I wrote a simple Python 2 program to download and save the web page’s HTML as binary data:
I think this code will download the bytes from the web server exactly as-is, without doing any kind of character set translations. If urllib2.urlopen().read() does any character translation internally, then I’m in trouble. Next I examined the downloaded file in a hex editor:
This shows that what the web browser renders as ö is a four-byte sequence 0xC3 0x83 0xC2 0xB6. Those are the two-byte UTF-8 sequences for à and ¶. So this doesn’t look like the web browser’s fault, or a problem with the HTML character encoding meta tag. It looks like the data transmitted by the web server was wrong to begin with, it really is sending à and ¶ instead of ö.
This leaves two possibilities:
During the MySQL upgrade, 0xC3 0xB6 in the database was misinterpreted as two Latin-1 characters instead of a single UTF-8 character, and was stored UTF-8-ified in the new MySQL DB as 0xC3 0x83 0xC2 0xB6.
0xC3 0xB6 was copied to the new MySQL DB correctly, but a DB character encoding preference went wrong somewhere, and now WordPress thinks this is Latin-1 data. So when it retrieves 0xC3 0xB6 from the DB, it converts it to 0xC3 0x83 0xC2 0xB6 in the process of generating the page’s final HTML.
I could probably tell which possibility is correct if I used mysqladmin to dump the relevant DB table as a binary blob and examine it. But I’m not exactly sure how to do that, and I’m a bit fearful I’d accidentally break the DB somehow.
If possibility #1 is correct, then the DB data is corrupted. There’s not much I could do except restore from a backup, or maybe look for a tool that can reverse the accidental character set conversion, assuming that’s possible.
If possibility #2 is correct, then I might be able to fix this simply by changing the faulty encoding preference. I need to find how to tell WordPress this is UTF-8 data, not Latin-1, so just use it as-is and don’t try to convert it.
I've never heard of Panic In Year Zero! (a.k.a. End of the World), a 1962 science fiction movie starring Ray Milland about a family that survives a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles. It was just uploaded to the Internet Archive and I've got it bookmarked to watch later. — Read the rest
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said on Wednesday that the Supreme Court changed its oral argument structure after studies showed that female justices were being disproportionately interrupted by male justices and advocates, according to CNN. During remarks at New York University School of Law, Sotomayor said the studies had an “enormous impact” on Chief Justice John Roberts’s […]
Thanks to beta tester Bryan V., I’ve discovered that Apple II Pascal disks don’t boot normally with the prototype Yellowstone disk controller card. This includes the Pascal master disk as well as other disks built on Pascal, including Fortran, “Apple at Work”, and the game Wizardry. These disks begin to boot normally, and several tracks’ worth of data are loaded from the disk successfully, but then they halt with an error like “SYSTEM.PASCAL not found” or “Insert boot disk with SYSTEM.PASCAL”. These same disks work OK when Yellowstone emulates a plain Disk II controller card, so it looks like a ROM/software issue rather than hardware. For what it’s worth, a Laser UDC card also shows the same problem when attempting to boot these same Pascal disks.
The behavior is strange, because for every other disk I’ve seen with a ROM dependency on the Disk II controller card, it crashes or freezes during boot when it tries to use the missing Disk II controller card ROM. But the Pascal disks are failing with a nice error message about a missing file, making me think the problem is probably something else.
One clue: I found three Pascal-based disks that fail to boot even with a real Disk II controller card, on an enhanced //e: Pascal 1.1 Apple0 680-0003-01.dsk, Apple Pascal Basics and Integer & Applesoft II, and Pascal Profile Manager. I’m unsure if there’s a missing hardware requirement or if I’m doing something wrong. Even with a standard Disk II controller card these disks halt with the messages “No file SYSTEM.APPLE”, “Insert BASIC disk and press any key”, and “Insert boot disk with SYSTEM.PASCAL”, respectively.
I’m not very familiar with the low-level details of Apple II Pascal disks, or how Pascal does disk I/O. Maybe it expects a different set of API entry points in the disk controller ROM than ProDOS? Or maybe there’s something else unique about its disk I/O behavior?
The good news is that these Pascal-based disks do work OK when Yellowstone is configured in its Disk II controller emulation mode, but I’d like to understand why the normal Yellowstone mode doesn’t work.
The Sunset books have been featured here more than a few times. They covered everything: camping, home decorating, fashion/crafts, and of course cooking/entertaining. I am sure we have only scraped the surface of the awful possibilities. Back in the olden days, I probably would have bought them for the collection, just because they were so well known.
Microwave cooking was all the rage in the mid 1970s. However, as I remember my mother (and myself) trying to microwave something, I swear the food always turned a grayish color and looked awful. Although my mother and I are hardly cooking experts, this was pretty much universal. The food just looked bad and nothing like what this book shows. (Pop the word “microwave” into our post search and see how many of these books come up!)
These recipes are just ridiculous. There is also a lot of prep involved that doesn’t seem to “save” any time to the cook. Reheating leftovers, popping some popcorn and some selective defrosting should be the only job of a microwave.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) thinks he has found a way to stabilize Texas’ electric grid in case another deep freeze hits the state. He wants to use the power of bitcoin.
“Because of the ability of bitcoin mining to turn on or off instantaneously, if you have a moment where you have a power shortage or a power crisis, whether it’s a freeze or some other natural disaster where power generation capacity goes down, that creates the capacity to instantaneously shift that energy to put it back on the grid,” Cruz told the Texas Blockchain Summit last week.
There are a few reasons why what he said doesn’t add up. But let’s start with his assumptions. First, large bitcoin-mining operations use hundreds or thousands of powerful computers, which create a demand for power. If power plants can profitably mine bitcoin using the electricity they generate—and there are examples of that already—it stands to reason that bitcoin mining could create enough demand that investors would be enticed to build new power plants. Those plants could theoretically be tasked with providing power to the grid in cases of emergency.
About seven years ago, I worked for Company A. I met a lot of nice folks, and there is a lot of good to be said for the company. But the actual job function I was paid to do I hated, and it was in an industry I came to have a dim view of. As you can probably guess, I was not very good at this job. Throw in some unpleasant things going on in my personal life at the time, and the whole situation was very bad.
Eventually my boss had to fire me, and I deserved to be fired! My boss (Jane) handled the firing with all the dignity and sensitivity that I could have hoped for. No complaints there. I took some time after the firing to really think about my life, what I wanted, and what I wanted out of work. I made some changes, and one of those was to go to work for a nonprofit that advocates on an issue I care deeply about. I am MUCH better at this job, have received a couple promotions along the way, and feel like I have the respect of my colleagues. I am in a much better place compared to where I was with Company A.
Last month my nonprofit was onboarding some new hires, and I was surprised to see Jane among them. She wanted a change, and thus went from Company A to us. She had no idea I was working here. I work on the advocacy side, she works on the financial side, but our job titles are approximately equal. We spent a few pleasant minutes catching up. I was genuinely glad to see her.
Unfortunately, things have taken a turn. I have started hearing rumors that Jane has been regaling our colleagues with stories of what a screw-up I was back at Company A. While the stories are superficially true, they lack the context I described above and do not consider my good work since then, so I find these stories both embarrassing and unfair. I have asked Jane to stop doing this, but she feels I am overreacting as it is all meant in good fun.
But I am already seeing people become a lot more particular in their dealings with me. For example, I organize several public facing events with one of my colleagues. These events have always gone well, and he has been easy to work with; he tells me what he needs, I tell him what I need, then we do what needs to be done. Lately, he has been checking, and double checking, and triple checking that I understand what is required and my progress on meeting those requirements. That never happened before Jane. And when I called him out on it, he replied that my “track record” justified his attention. I replied that my track record with him was unblemished, and he sheepishly said, “Yeah, but I hear from Jane …”
I am appreciative of how Jane treated me back in the day, so I want to cut her all the slack I can. I do not believe she is being malicious. I think she just wants to integrate herself with her new colleagues and thinks telling funny stories is a way to do so. But she has badly misjudged the effect these stories have had. Do you have any thoughts on how I can get her to stop?
WTF Jane.
Since you know her and I don’t and you don’t think she’s being malicious, I’ll try to give her that benefit of the doubt too — but this is really messed up. She’s come into a place where you’ve established a reputation for yourself and is chipping away at it in the name of … what? Entertaining her new colleagues? That’s honestly really crappy.
It would be one thing if she’d made one or two comments without realizing they could have real effects for you at work, and then stopped when you pointed it out. But you talked to her about it and she blew you off. “It’s all in good fun” is BS once the person who’s the target of the “fun” asks you to stop.
If you believe Jane is genuinely a good person and is just badly misjudging how her stories are being received, it’s worth another conversation. This time, be very explicit about the ways her stories are harming you, so that it’s clear you’re not just bristling at some teasing but are seeing concrete effects on your work. For example, you could say: “I want to ask you again to stop joking around about my work at Company A. I understand you mean it in good fun, but it is not being taken that way. I have worked hard to establish a good reputation here, but since you started sharing these stories, people have started double- and tripling-checking my work and supervising my progress on projects much more closely. I’ve asked why, and at least one person told me it’s because of what he’s heard from you. So even though you mean this to be light-hearted, people are taking it seriously and it’s harming the reputation I’ve worked to build.”
You could also say, “I had some difficult things happening in my life when I was at Company A, and I was really struggling. It’s not something I want to see turned into entertaining stories for others. It was very serious for me.”
And/or you could say, “I was so grateful to you for how you handled the ending of my employment at Company A. I felt you really cared about preserving my dignity. I’m asking you to extend that same dignity to me now.”
If Jane refuses to back off after that, she’ll be demonstrating pretty clearly that she’s not the good person you thought she was — just a bully and a jerk. Who knows why — maybe there’s stuff going on in her life now that wasn’t affecting her when you worked together the first time; I tend to think jerks often are struggling with something or other. But if she doesn’t budge after you spell it out for her, let yourself see her for who she really is right now.
If that’s the case, your best bet is to address it directly with your other coworkers. For example, with that colleague who told you that Jane’s stories made him distrust you, you could say, “You have X years of experience working with me. Do those stories reflect what you know of me? I’m asking that you trust what I’ve shown you about how I operate, not stories from years ago.”
Or: “Yep, I screwed up in a job years ago. Different job, different work, different time. Can we go on what you’ve seen from years of working with me in this job?”
Ultimately, your work will be the strongest antidote to the stories Jane is telling, but you may need to explicitly connect those dots for some of your coworkers.
There is a lot of complaining about worker shortages and a lot of jokes going on–like the above, which points out the ridiculousness of the interview process.
The thing is, it wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t based in reality. Many companies have ridiculous hiring processes. Perhaps yours does.
Or perhaps, you’re looking for a free intern to do work. Like this posting on LinkedIn (yes, I notified the company that their internship was illegal and I notified LinkedIn.)
YOU WILL:
• Source, attract, select, and recruit top talent candidates using various outlets, such as social media networks and other platforms including LinkedIn, Podio, Handshake, and Jobsoid.
• Focus your efforts on Talent Acquisition strategies to bring the most qualified candidates for each position open.
• Seek out and recommend creative new ways of sourcing talent.
• Conduct the first interview and schedule the second interview with the Leader of the Team.
• Administer all hiring paperwork for new Teammates and assist with the orientation process.
• Be the main point of contact for new Teammates.
• Update Teammate Bios; create profiles for new Teammates and update profiles for existing Teammates.
• Conduct and train new Teammates on our on-boarding and recruiting processes.
• Handle Employment Verification and Letters of Recommendation.
• Process departures.
• Attend team and senior meetings as needed.
YOU ARE:
• Able to bring the most talented candidates to help this company grow!
• Passionate about the full cycle recruitment, from sourcing candidates through the onboarding process.
• Open-minded and have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion.
• Adaptable to changes in projects and priorities and can handle multiple projects at once.
• Great communicator and can express sympathy and friendliness to new candidates and team members.
• Highly motivated, detail-oriented, reliable, and organized.
• Adaptable to changes in projects and priorities and can handle multiple projects.
• Highly motivated, detail-oriented, reliable, and organized.
• Excellent in verbal and written communication, email etiquette, the Internet, and MS Office.
• Able to work independently with minimum supervision and attend video conferencing meetings whenever needed.
• Enthusiastic and grateful to have the opportunity to work with us!
• Tech savvy and own a computer with reliable access to an Internet connection.
• A Super Human Resources Specialist!
COMPENSATION:
This is an unpaid virtual internship, but the experience and connections you will get for your professional portfolio and LinkedIn profile are priceless!
Sorry, you can’t have an unpaid intern do that because it is benefiting the company and this is not a non-profit.
Or you could be like the companies that this man applied to.
Now, of course, I don’t know if he’s telling the truth about the process, but it seems to make sense to me.
If you’re struggling to find candidates do the following:
Be honest in your job postings. Sure, maybe you won’t get as many applicants, but you’ll get ones that want the job.
Don’t try to get interns to fill vacant positions. And chances are, you can’t legally have an unpaid internship.
If you aren’t getting applicants, then try increasing the pay, revising your job requirements, and lowering your standards.
People are looking for work. They aren’t looking to be exploited. They aren’t looking for lying liars.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order late Monday prohibiting all state entities, including private businesses, from requiring people to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
The Republican governor also noted that he has added the issue to the legislature’s special session so that his executive order can become law.
His executive move bucks the vaccination efforts of the Biden administration, which last month announced sweeping mandates that would apply to federal employees, health care workers, and private businesses. The order is also a reversal for Abbott, who had previously steered clear of interfering with the decisions of private businesses. As the Houston Chronicle notes, it was just in August that Abbott’s spokesperson, Renae Eze, said that "private businesses don't need government running their business."
Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo, a star in law enforcement circles, appears to be out of a job after six months. He's had a rocky tenure, clashing with city leaders who he says are meddling.
