Chan's Personal Blog

The ban voted in on Sept. 10 means that the Canadian Armed Forces will be unable to attend the annual recruiting fair put on by UVic's Career Services in the SUB every January. The Armed Forces attended last year's recruiting fair.

At the Sept. 10 meeting, UVSS director of academics Caitlin Meggs read a statement by Jennifer Margison, manager of Career Services, urging students not to ban the military and to invite a member of the Armed Forces to speak to them before making a decision. Margison was unable to attend the meeting.

'If the policy would be implemented as a ban, I would ask the board to consider that this could be a very slippery slope, and one that I don't believe is in the spirit of a university campus, where alternate and opposing views, debate and discourse, personal choice and decision making should be fostered,' Meggs read on behalf of Margison. 'I would suggest that banning any organization from campus, if they are operating in accordance with Canadian law, and with university policy, is an infringement on the rights of students to make their own decisions about their futures.

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

The Israeli government was not saying. “The security sources and IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are demonstrating unusual courage,” said Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. “We naturally cannot always show the public our cards.” [...]

Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country.

Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: “There are North Korean people there. There’s no question about that.” He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, could be involved.

But why would nuclear material be in Syria? Known to have chemical weapons, was it seeking to bolster its arsenal with something even more deadly?

Alternatively, could it be hiding equipment for North Korea, enabling Kim Jong-il to pretend to be giving up his nuclear programme in exchange for economic aid? Or was the material bound for Iran, as some authorities in America suggest?

According to Israeli sources, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented Olmert with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea.

[Google's] ability to get all these people has been a competitive weapon, since Google can afford to hire talent pre-emptively, making it unavailable to Microsoft and Yahoo!. Google tends to win talent wars because its brand is sexier and its perks are fantastically lavish. Googlers commute on discreet shuttle buses (equipped with wireless broadband and running on biodiesel, naturally) to and from the head office, or “Googleplex”, which is a photogenic playground of lava lamps, volleyball courts, swimming pools, free and good restaurants, massage rooms and so forth.

Yet for some on the inside, it can look different. One former executive, now suing Google over her treatment, says that the firm's personnel department is “collapsing” and that “absolute chaos” reigns. When she was hired, nobody knew when or where she was supposed to work, and the balloons that all Nooglers get delivered to their desks ended up God knows where. She started receiving detailed e-mails “enforcing” Google's outward informality by reminding her that high heels and jewellery were inappropriate. Before the corporate ski trip, it was explained that “if you wear fur, they will kill you.”

Google is a paradise only for some, she argues. Employees who predate the IPO resemble aristocracy. Engineers get the most kudos, people with other functions decidedly less so. Bright kids just out of college tend to love it, because the Googleplex in effect replaces their university campus—with a dating scene, a laundry service and no reason to leave at weekends. Older Googlers with families tend to like it less, because “everybody, even young mums, works seven days a week.”

Another Xoogler, who held a senior position, says that by trying to create a “Utopia” of untrammelled creativity, Google ended up with “dystopia”. As is its wont, Google has composed a rigorous algorithmic approach to hiring, based on grade-point averages, college rankings and endless logic puzzles on whiteboards. This “genetic engineering of their workforce,” he says, means that “everybody there is a rocket scientist, so everybody is also insecure” and the back-stabbing and politics are reminiscent of an average university's English department.