Daily Stuff 8/27/2012

Languages--Chinese

I watched episode 41 of Travel in Chinese. This episode covered the scenario of losing your wallet.

Articles:

I read two Wall Street Journal articles. The first one was about time banks that have sprung up in Spain since it's economic trouble. Time banks are places where people can go to get some sort of service done, like a ride into town to run errands, in exchange for another service, maybe taking care of someone's elderly parents for them. Places that also take donated goods and redistribute them to people who need them and other similar places have sprung up as well. Some experts worry that this sort of set-up could end up hurting the overall economy in the long-run. That's a possibility but overall, I think it's a good thing. People are being resourceful in order to keep on living, which is definitely a good thing. It shows that they're willing to help each other out in a crisis.

The second article was about pair programming. At places like Facebook, programmers are being paired up. One person does the actual programming while the other checks for bugs and other errors so less time is wasted on programs that turn out to be full of bugs. Both programmers share one computer. This could be both a good thing and a bad thing. There's one possible problem with clashing personalities and even people who get along well could get sick of each other after working in such close proximity to each other. On the other hand, this method would save a lot of time and is ideal for someone who's not as confident in their programming ability, in which case they would be the person looking out for bugs.

Philosophy:

I read about contextualism in regards to Dewey's moral philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). A contextual standard of value is one the solves the problem it was supposed to solve. So if one standard of value doesn't accomplish this, another one might and you could go through several before finding one that solves the problem. Dewey also believed that values can't be made out the context that gives them meaning.

Internships:

I saw a lot of jobs for IT engineers on the Qualcomm website. One in particular was one for a job involving IT Data Management.