5 Campaign Lessons for Your Job Search. “Whether you love politics or hate them (or feel bound by the Hatch Act to reserve all opinion), you can’t escape them this time of year. While you’re free to tune out much of the campaign rhetoric, there are lessons to be learned. Here are five campaign tips that directly apply to your job search and career networking. . . .”
Understanding Federal pay. “To an outsider looking in, federal pay systems can be difficult to understand. Our mission is to help clear up some of the confusion. Basically there are five different pay systems . . . . Fair pay for work done is just one benefit of working for the Federal government. Some of the benefits equally attractive include leave (vacation, family and sick), retirement, paid travel, and for veterans, seniority based on military service.”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
“Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, said on Tuesday that if President Bashar al-Assad of Syria continues to block access of humanitarian aid to besieged cities and towns, they were prepared to help the World Food Program airdrop food and emergency supplies. . . . Mr. Kerry added later that Mr. Assad ‘should never make a miscalculation about President Obama’s determination to do what is right at any given moment of time, where he believes that he has to make that decision.’” (The New York Times)
“The Iraqi government is putting the ISIS-controlled city of Fallujah as next on its target list. That’s not because of increasingly dire reports that the citizens of Fallujah are suffering from starvation and torture under ISIS’s cruel grip. . . . Rather, Iraqi officials have told their American counterparts that they suspect the restive Sunni-dominated city is sending jihadists to attack Baghdad, the Shiite-dominated capital.”
“Hopes were high that the war would disappear with the exit of most US and NATO troops by 2014, and that the new technocratic President Ashraf Ghani would usher in better and less-corrupt governance. Yet his unity government in Kabul is hobbled by corruption, gridlock, and shriveling Western interest and investment.” (The Christian Science Monitor)
“For most Americans, Memorial Day is about barbecues, big furniture sales, and trips out of town. But for the many who’ve been touched by war directly—those who are veterans, or family of veterans—there often isn’t much to celebrate. . . . There is nothing happy in the 1.3 million lives that have been lost, and countless more broken, since 1776. This is what led David Jay, a former fashion photographer, to turn his lens on wounded soldiers.” (Quartz)
CONTRACT WATCH
“A new final rule four years in the making will amend the Federal Acquisition Regulations, or FAR, with new sections on the basic safeguarding of contractor information systems. The rule, published on May 16 in the Federal Register and issued by the Defense Department, General Services Administration and NASA, will add a subpart and contract clause on contractor systems that process, store or transmit federal contract information, and calls on contractors to apply a minimum of 15 security control requirements.” (FierceGovernmentIT)
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
“Cyber security is the biggest risk facing the financial system, the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Tuesday, in one of the frankest assessments yet of the threat to Wall Street from digital attacks. . . . A former member of the World Bank’s security team, Tom Kellermann, who is now chief executive of the investment firm Strategic Cyber Ventures LLC, called it ‘a historic recognition of the systemic risk facing Wall Street.’” (Reuters)
“Most of the machines developed to help navies hunt the stealthy underwater predators called mines require a big crew and a ship or helicopter, which is why the U.S. military is excited about a two-person underwater robot that weighs less than 200 pounds. The Saab Waterborne Anti-IED Security Platform, or SEA WASP, is a small remote-operated drone outfitted with an electric arm, sonar, and radar to collect information on where it is and what’s around it.” (Defense One)
“Hair-thin electronics can now be built mid-air, thanks to a new 3-D printer. Developed by a team of researchers from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the university’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, ‘laser-assisted direct ink writing’ can structure highly conductive metal into intricate designs.” (The Christian Science Monitor)
