krafttakt or pilot-project

While German websites in China are going blank over a controversial unmasking concerning Chinese tax-havens and there is some hand-wringing over the decision whether to dub as worthy a connoisseur a share of cultural heritage, Germany is aggressively recruiting nursing assistants to try in a small way to compensate for the shortage of care-givers have imported from China and the first five of an expected 150 nurses have arrived in Frankfurt.

These trained and hopefully linguistically and cultural ready individuals have been brought over to mainly assuage the shortage of qualified personnel to care for an aging demographic, in old folks' homes. Nursing professionals are not quite the same as exported au pairs who come without credentials except by recommendation and reputation. At the same time, the body representing care-givers is bemoaning the labour-conditions and wage for the existing workforce, which is hardly an incentive in itself to recruit and retain capable individuals. Of course, in such vocations, mere money and comfort are not what motivate people. I wonder what the broader implications are of not just furthering the tradition of guest-workers but of native aspirations and ambitions that have out-grown such levels of service.

flun-dazzler

Collectors' Weekly has a brilliant gallery of Theodore Geisel's early works as an marketing artist enthralled to Big Oil and others. Seeing the shining countenances of his characters shilling for causes that seem counter to Doctor Seuss' message in The Lorax may appear a bit disenchanting at first, until—that is one remembers that everyone has to get their break somewhere, like Shel Silverstein working for Playboy magazine.

autoclave

Though most product-launches in the hygiene industry are just affirmations of ones inner-verminophobia, however now working in a clinical environment whose undefended boundaries are packed with the everyday filth and detritus and contiguous with work-stations, packed lunches, personal affects, etc.

Nothing horrifying or unsanitary but neither a comfort—especially considering the culturing stunts performed recently with swabbing a cell phone and growing the results in a Petri dish. While I am certain that any surface, handled or not, could be conduced to yield similarly repulsive results and believe that taking things to extremes is not a healthy practise either, polio erupting in part because hermetically-sealed children had no natural immunity and that abuse of anti-bacterial compounds and the like have led to truly monstrous pathogens resistant to any treatment and besides the body has its own ecology that's usually a happy, harmonic symbiosis, but I do like the idea of a kiln for ones smart phones, tablets, keyboards and other hard to clean personal peripherals. I only caught a snatch of the piece on the radio describing this product, available only in the States, and I am not sure how it functions—possibly by heat, ultra-sound or inert gas or magic, but I think such a disinfecting box would come in handy.

bricolage

As a fairly regular occurrence—one can almost expect at least one data breach per week, customers have become rather inured to the compromise of their vital demographics in the States—not that this attitude has made the majority more cautious or defensive by any measure, but this sort of development, unprecedented but probably, unfortunately a record soon to be toppled, in Germany inspires users and government agencies alike to circle their wagons.

Some sixteen million email accounts had their passwords lifted and authorities are particularly concerned, not over spam and spear-fishing but rather because many people recycle passwords, using similar credentials to access shopping sites or on-line banking. Das Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) in Bonn has even established a help-line. It's not merely the breach of one virtual version of a retailer or networking-group that nearly goes as far as inviting a hack but rather the further-reaching repercussions are realised. One would think that the omnipresence of the American intelligence agencies would have gotten to be really good at prevention or at least persecution of such spillage and pillage, having already exploited system weaknesses, but we probably don't want their help. Those three letter initialisms, however, have become something like the US Secret Service, whose chief charge is not to protect the president but rather to combat counterfeiting of legal-tender, expanded far beyond their original mandate.