Sayang Ka
April 24, 2009 Admin: No comment
Job Fair for Pinoy
April 20, 2009
KEEP track of upcoming job fairs, have your CV ready, and get a career going.
1. Job Fairs by LGU/Public Employment Service Office (PESO): April 22 (Municipal Hall, Rizal, Nueva Ecija) and April 25 (Municipal Hall, Manaoag, Pangasinan)
2. Skilled Jobs Fair and Training Expo by EventWorx Company: April 25-26 (Riverbanks Center, Marikina)
3. Medical and Pharma Career Fair by Neotrade Enterprises: April 28-29 (Robinsons Manila)
4. 2nd National Career Fair 2009 by Adexhibit Inc.: April 29-30 (Glorietta Activity Center, Glorietta Mall, Makati)
5. Job Fair by PESO: April 30 (3rd Floor, Bazaar Area, SM City Lucena)
6. Cebu Province Local Job Fair: May 1 (Capitol Social Hall). Please bring the following requirements: typewritten resumé or biodata, college diploma/transcript of records (for college graduates), high school diploma (for high school graduates), 2″ x 2″ colored or black & white photo, certificate of employment (if any). All job applicants are advised to register now at the PESO located at the ground floor of Capitol Building. No more registration during the Local Job Fair.
7. Labor Day, Tayo Na! Trabaho Na! Jobapalooza ’09 to be held simultaneously in 16 regions on May 1, with the main celebration at SMX Convention Hall at SM Mall of Asia (MOA) in Pasay City
8. First Shoppers Choice and Job Fair and Career Symposium 2009 by Netmark International Inc.: May 20-22 (UPAA Bahay ng Alumni, UP Diliman, Quezon City)
9. Business Career Fair Manila 2009: May 21-22 (Atrium Ever Gotesco Mall, Ortigas Extn. Pasig City)
10. Job Quest Employment Fair: May 22-23 (Megatrade Hall, Hall 1)
APRIL
April 22 - 23, 2009
10TH RETAIL CAREERS & SERVICES JOBS FAIR
ROBINSONS
MAY
May 6 - 7, 2009
11TH RETAIL CAREERS & SERVICES JOBS FAIR
May 22 - 23, 2009
JOBQUEST EMPLOYMENT FAIR
MEGATRADE HALL 3, SM MEGAMALL
JUNE
June 8 - 9, 2009
APPLY HERE: JOBS FAIR
GLORIETTA MALLS, AYALA
June 10 - 11, 2009
IMMEDIATE HIRING PART 2
JULY
July 13,14 & 15, 2009
DZRH JOBS FAIR
ALIW THEATER,
July 24 - 25, 2009
BE HIRED JOBS FAIR 2
MEGATRADE HALL 1, SM MEGAMALL
SEPTEMBER
Sept. 4 - 5, 2009
JOBQUEST JOBS FAIR
MEGATRADE HALL 1, SM MEGAMALL
Sept. 18 - 19, 2009
12TH RETAIL CAREERS & SERVICES JOBS FAIR
Sept. 25 - 26, 2009
9TH ULTIMATE WEDDING & DEBUT FAIR
MEGATRADE HALL 3, SM MEGAMALL
OCTOBER
October 2 - 3, 2009
4TH PINOY NURSE EXPO
MEGATRADE HALL 3, SM MEGAMALL
October 23 - 24, 2009
14TH JOBS FAIR @ THE MEGA
MEGATRADE HALL 1, SM MEGAMALL
NOVEMBER
November 10 - 11, 2009
GET A JOB @ TRINOMA : JOBS FAIR 2
November 27 -28, 2009
JOBQUEST.PH JOBS FAIR
MEGATRADE HALL 3, SM MEGAMALL
Neanderthals
April 18, 2009
Reconstruction by Kennis & Kennis/Photograph by Joe McNally
In March of 1994 some spelunkers exploring an extensive cave system in northern Spain poked their lights into a small side gallery and noticed two human mandibles jutting out of the sandy soil. The cave, called El Sidrón, lay in the midst of a remote upland forest of chestnut and oak trees in the province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay. Suspecting that the jawbones might date back as far as the Spanish Civil War, when Republican partisans used El Sidrón to hide from Franco’s soldiers, the cavers immediately notified the local Guardia Civil.
But when police investigators inspected the gallery, they discovered the remains of a much larger—and, it would turn out, much older—tragedy.
Within days, law enforcement officials had shoveled out some 140 bones, and a local judge ordered the remains sent to the national forensic pathology institute in Madrid. By the time scientists finished their analysis (it took the better part of six years), Spain had its earliest cold case. The bones from El Sidrón were not Republican soldiers, but the fossilized remains of a group of Neanderthals who lived, and perhaps died violently, approximately 43,000 years ago. The locale places them at one of the most important geographical intersections of prehistory, and the date puts them squarely at the center of one of the most enduring mysteries in all of human evolution.
The Neanderthals, our closest prehistoric relatives, dominated Eurasia for the better part of 200,000 years. During that time, they poked their famously large and protruding noses into every corner of Europe, and beyond—south along the Mediterranean from the Strait of Gibraltar to Greece and Iraq, north to Russia, as far west as Britain, and almost to Mongolia in the east. Scientists estimate that even at the height of the Neanderthal occupation of western Europe, their total number probably never exceeded 15,000. Yet they managed to endure, even when a cooling climate turned much of their territory into something like northern Scandinavia today—a frigid, barren tundra, its bleak horizon broken by a few scraggly trees and just enough lichen to keep the reindeer happy.By the time of the tragedy at El Sidrón, however, the Neanderthals were on the run, seemingly pinned down in Iberia, pockets of central Europe, and along the southern Mediterranean by a deteriorating climate, and further squeezed by the westward spread of anatomically modern humans as they emerged from Africa into the Middle East and beyond. Within another 15,000 years or so, the Neanderthals were gone forever, leaving behind a few bones and a lot of questions. Were they a clever and perseverant breed of survivors, much like us, or a cognitively challenged dead end? What happened during that period, roughly 45,000 to 30,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals shared some parts of the Eurasian landscape with those modern human migrants from Africa? Why did one kind of human being survive, and the other disappear?On a damp, fog-shrouded morning in September 2007, I stood before the entrance to El Sidrón with Antonio Rosas of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, who heads the paleoanthropological investigation. One of his colleagues handed me a flashlight, and I gingerly lowered myself into the black hole. As my eyes adjusted to the interior, I began to make out the fantastic contours of a karstic cave. An underground river had hollowed out a deep vein of sandstone, leaving behind a limestone cavern extending hundreds of yards, with side galleries spidering out to at least 12 entrances. Ten minutes into the cave, I arrived at the Galería del Osario—the “tunnel of bones.” Since 2000, some 1,500 bone fragments have been unearthed from this side gallery, representing the remains of at least nine Neanderthals—five young adults, two adolescents, a child of about eight, and a three-year-old toddler. All showed signs of nutritional stress in their teeth—not unusual in young Neanderthals late in their time on Earth. But a deeper desperation is etched in their bones.
Rosas picked up a recently unearthed fragment of a skull and another of a long bone of an arm, both with jagged edges.”These fractures were—clop—made by humans,” Rosas said, imitating the blow of a stone tool. “It means these fellows went after the brains and into long bones for the marrow.”
In addition to the fractures, cut marks left on the bones by stone tools clearly indicate that the individuals were cannibalized. Whoever ate their flesh, and for whatever reason—starvation? ritual?—the subsequent fate of their remains bestowed upon them a distinct and marvelous kind of immortality. Shortly after the nine individuals died—possibly within days—the ground below them suddenly collapsed, leaving little time for hyenas and other scavengers to scatter the remains. A slurry of bones, sediment, and rocks tumbled 60 feet into a hollow limestone chamber below, much as mud fills the inside walls of a house during a flood.
There, buffered by sand and clay, preserved by the cave’s constant temperature, and sequestered in their jewel cases of mineralized bone, a few precious molecules of the Neanderthals’ genetic code survived, awaiting a time in the distant future when they could be plucked out, pieced together, and examined for clues to how these people lived, and why they vanished.
The first clue that our kind of human was not the first to inhabit Europe turned up a century and a half ago, about eight miles east of Düsseldorf, Germany. In August 1856 laborers quarrying limestone from a cave in the Neander Valley dug out a beetle-browed skullcap and some thick limb bones. Right from the start, the Neanderthals were saddled with an enduring cultural stereotype as dim-witted, brutish cavemen. The size and shape of the fossils does suggest a short, stout fireplug of a physique (males averaged about five feet, five inches tall and about 185 pounds), with massive muscles and a flaring rib cage presumably encasing capacious lungs. Steven E. Churchill, a paleoanthropologist at Duke University, has calculated that to support his body mass in a cold climate, a typical Neanderthal male would have needed up to 5,000 calories daily, or approaching what a bicyclist burns each day in the Tour de France. Yet behind its bulging browridges, a Neanderthal’s low-domed skull housed a brain with a volume slightly larger on average than our own today. And while their tools and weapons were more primitive than those of the modern humans who supplanted them in Europe, they were no less sophisticated than the implements made by their modern human contemporaries living in Africa and the Middle East.One of the longest and most heated controversies in human evolution rages around the genetic relationship between Neanderthals and their European successors. Did the modern humans sweeping out of Africa beginning some 60,000 years ago completely replace the Neanderthals, or did they interbreed with them? In 1997 the latter hypothesis was dealt a powerful blow by geneticist Svante Pääbo—then at the University of Munich—who used an arm bone from the original Neanderthal man to deliver it. Pääbo and his colleagues were able to extract a tiny 378-letter snippet of mitochondrial DNA (a kind of short genetic appendix to the main text in each cell) from the 40,000-year-old specimen. When they read out the letters of the code, they found that the specimen’s DNA differed from living humans to a degree suggesting that the Neanderthal and modern human lineages had begun to diverge long before the modern human migration out of Africa. Thus the two represent separate geographic and evolutionary branches splitting from a common ancestor. “North of the Mediterranean, this lineage became Neanderthals,” said Chris Stringer, research leader on human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, “and south of the Mediterranean, it became us.” If there was any interbreeding when they encountered each other later, it was too rare to leave a trace of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in the cells of living people.
Pääbo’s genetic bombshell seemed to confirm that Neanderthals were a separate species—but it does nothing to solve the mystery of why they vanished, and our species survived.
One obvious possibility is that modern humans were simply more clever, more sophisticated, more “human.” Until recently, archaeologists pointed to a “great leap forward” around 40,000 years ago in Europe, when the Neanderthals’ relatively humdrum stone tool industry—called Mousterian, after the site of Le Moustier in southwestern France—gave way to the more varied stone and bone tool kits, body ornaments, and other signs of symbolic expression associated with the appearance of modern humans. Some scientists, such as Stanford University anthropologist Richard Klein, still argue for some dramatic genetic change in the brain—possibly associated with a development in language—that propelled early modern humans to cultural dominance at the expense of their beetle-browed forebears.
But the evidence in the ground is not so cut and dried. In 1979 archaeologists discovered a late Neanderthal skeleton at Saint-Césaire in southwestern France surrounded not with typical Mousterian implements, but with a surprisingly modern repertoire of tools. In 1996 Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and Fred Spoor of University College London identified a Neanderthal bone in another French cave, near Arcy-sur-Cure, in a layer of sediment also containing ornamental objects previously associated only with modern humans, such as pierced animal teeth and ivory rings. Some scientists, such as British paleoanthropologist Paul Mellars, dismiss such modern “accessorizing” of a fundamentally archaic lifestyle as an “improbable coincidence”—a last gasp of imitative behavior by Neanderthals before the inventive newcomers out of Africa replaced them. But more recently, Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux and Marie Soressi, also at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, analyzed hundreds of crayon-like blocks of manganese dioxide from a French cave called Pech de l’Azé, where Neanderthals lived well before modern humans arrived in Europe. D’Errico and Soressi argue that the Neanderthals used the black pigment for body decoration, demonstrating that they were fully capable of achieving “behavioral modernity” all on their own.
“At the time of the biological transition,” says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, “the basic behavior [of the two groups] is pretty much the same, and any differences are likely to have been subtle.” Trinkaus believes they indeed may have mated occasionally. He sees evidence of admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans in certain fossils, such as a 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young child discovered at the Portuguese site of Lagar Velho, and a 32,000-year-old skull from a cave called Muierii in Romania. “There were very few people on the landscape, and you need to find a mate and reproduce,” says Trinkaus. “Why not? Humans are not known to be choosy. Sex happens.”
It may have happened, other researchers say, but not often, and not in a way that left behind any evidence. Katerina Harvati, another researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, has used detailed 3-D measurements of Neanderthal and early modern human fossils to predict exactly what hybrids between the two would have looked like. None of the fossils examined so far matches her predictions.
The disagreement between Trinkaus and Harvati is hardly the first time that two respected paleoanthropologists have looked at the same set of bones and come up with mutually contradictory interpretations. Pondering—and debating—the meaning of fossil anatomy will always play a role in understanding Neanderthals. But now there are other ways to bring them back to life.
Two days after my first descent into El Sidrón cave, Araceli Soto Flórez, a graduate student at the University of Oviedo, came across a fresh Neanderthal bone, probably a fragment of a femur. All digging immediately ceased, and most of the crew evacuated the chamber. Soto Flórez then squeezed herself into a sterile jumpsuit, gloves, booties, and plastic face mask. Under the watchful eyes of Antonio Rosas and molecular biologist Carles Lalueza-Fox, she delicately extracted the bone from the soil, placed it in a sterile plastic bag, and deposited the bag in a chest of ice. After a brief stop in a hotel freezer in nearby Villamayo, the leg bone eventually arrived at Lalueza-Fox’s laboratory at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. His interest was not in the anatomy of the leg or anything it might reveal about Neanderthal locomotion. All he wanted from it was its DNA.
Prehistoric cannibalism has been very good for modern-day molecular biology. Scraping flesh from a bone also removes the DNA of microorganisms that might otherwise contaminate the sample. The bones of El Sidrón have not yielded the most DNA of any Neanderthal fossil—that honor belongs to a specimen from Croatia, also cannibalized—but so far they have revealed the most compelling insights into Neanderthal appearance and behavior. In October 2007 Lalueza-Fox, Holger Römpler of the University of Leipzig, and their colleagues announced that they had isolated a pigmentation gene from the DNA of an individual at El Sidrón (as well as another Neanderthal fossil from Italy). The particular form of the gene, called MC1R, indicated that at least some Neanderthals would have had red hair, pale skin, and, possibly, freckles. The gene is unlike that of red-haired people today, however—suggesting that Neanderthals and modern humans developed the trait independently, perhaps under similar pressures in northern latitudes to evolve fair skin to let in more sunlight for the manufacture of vitamin D. Just a few weeks earlier, Svante Pääbo, who now heads the genetics laboratory at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Lalueza-Fox, and their colleagues had announced an even more astonishing find: Two El Sidrón individuals appeared to share, with modern humans, a version of a gene called FOXP2 that contributes to speech and language ability, acting not only in the brain but also on the nerves that control facial muscles. Whether Neanderthals were capable of sophisticated language abilities or a more primitive form of vocal communication (singing, for example) still remains unclear, but the new genetic findings suggest they possessed some of the same vocalizing hardware as modern humans.
All this from a group of ill-fated Neanderthals buried in a cave collapse, soon after they were consumed by their own kind.
“So maybe it’s a good thing to eat your conspecifics,” says Pääbo.
A tall, cheerful Swede, Pääbo is the main engine behind a breathtaking scientific tour de force: the attempt, expected to be completed next month, to read out not just single Neanderthal genes, but the entire three-billion-letter sequence of the Neanderthal genome. Traces of DNA in fossils are vanishingly faint, and because Neanderthal DNA is ever so close to that of living people, one of the biggest hurdles in sequencing it is the ever present threat of contamination by modern human DNA—especially by the scientists handling the specimens. The precautions taken in excavating at El Sidrón are now becoming standard practice at other Neanderthal sites. Most of the DNA for Pääbo’s genome project, however, has come from the Croatian specimen, a 38,000-year-old fragment of leg bone found almost 30 years ago in the Vindija cave. Originally deemed unimportant, it sat in a drawer in Zagreb, largely untouched and thus uncontaminated, for most of its museum life.
Now it is the equivalent of a gold mine for prehistoric human DNA, albeit an extremely difficult mine to work. After the DNA is extracted in a sterile laboratory in the basement of the Max Planck Institute, it is shipped overnight to Branford, Connecticut, where collaborators at 454 Life Sciences have invented machines that can rapidly decipher the sequence of DNA’s chemical letters. The vast majority of those letters spell out bacterial contaminants or other non-Neanderthal genetic information. But in the fall of 2006, Pääbo and his colleagues announced they had deciphered approximately one million letters of Neanderthal DNA. (At the same time, a second group, headed by Edward Rubin at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, used DNA provided by Pääbo to read out snippets of genetic code using a different approach.) By last year, dogged by claims that their work had serious contamination problems, the Leipzig group claimed to have improved accuracy and identified about 70 million letters of DNA—roughly 2 percent of the total.
“We know that the human and chimpanzee sequences are 98.7 percent the same, and Neanderthals are much closer to us than chimps,” said Ed Green, head of biomathematics in Pääbo’s group in Leipzig, “so the reality is that for most of the sequence, there’s no difference between Neanderthals and [modern] humans.” But the differences—less than a half percent of the sequence—are enough to confirm that the two lineages had begun to diverge around 700,000 years ago. The Leipzig group also managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from two fossils of uncertain origin that had been excavated in Uzbekistan and southern Siberia; both had a uniquely Neanderthal genetic signature. While the Uzbekistan specimen, a young boy, had long been considered a Neanderthal, the Siberian specimen was a huge surprise, extending the known Neanderthal range some 1,200 miles east of their European stronghold.
So, while the new genetic evidence appears to confirm that Neanderthals were a separate species from us, it also suggests that they may have possessed human language and were successful over a far larger sweep of Eurasia than previously thought. Which brings us back to the same hauntingly persistent question that has shadowed them from the beginning: Why did they disappear?
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/neanderthals/hall-text/7
Most Expensive Motorbikes in the World 89
April 14, 2009By Mark Knowles
There are many different types of motorcycles – fast ones, big ones, good cruisers, motor crossers, all sorts. But this is about a different kind of bike – Insanely expensive, ridiculously trick, made-from-the-most-exotic materials-on-the-planet bikes.
Really, if you have to ask how much these are – you can’t afford one. I had to ask so you don’t have to, but if you see one of these on the road, just remember, the rider is probably as scared of scratching it as you are of dropping your baby. They are in no partucular order except that I have saved the most expensive for last.
MV-Augusta F4CC
Manufacturer’s Suggested Price - $120,000
You heard right, a hundred twenty thousand dollars, although if you stump up this much cash, you do get a free leather jacket and watch. It’s a pretty fancy watch, but it’s still just a watch. Claudio Castiglioni, the boss of MV said, “I decided to put my name to this bike as I originally dreamed of it for myself,” and 90% of the components are hand made to be as light as possible. In fact, the alternator cover saved 2 kilos in weight over the standard model.
Brembo racing brakes, hand made engine internals, a 1078cc engine, titanium racing exhaust, one-off mechanical slipper clutch. This weighs just 187 kilos and produces 200 hp. According to the designers, they were going for a “little black number.” Gimme gimme. Only 100 were made, and as far as I know, they didn’t sell them all yet, so you can still pick one up.
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Aprilia RSV1000R Factory
MSRP $17,999
The Aprilia Factory RSV makes the MV look as insanely expensive as it actually is, but at 18K, that’s still a fair chunk of change compared to the competition – you can buy a GSXR-1000 and still have enough money left over to appease the spouse. The RSV has an extremely impressive spec sheet and pedigree, but in this class, it’s just too cheap. Fully adjustable front and rear Ohlins suspension, Ohlins steering damper, Brembo radial mount brakes and forged magnesium wheels make this a serious performance animal. Maybe if they gold plated it or something? It’s a nice looking bike though and universally acclaimed as a good ride.
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MTT Turbine SuperBike
MSRP $150,000
Perhaps the most impractical bike on this list, the MTT Turbine SuperBike is powered by a Rolls Royce Allison 250 Series
turbine which produces 425 ft/lbs of torque at 2000 rpm and 320 hp at 52,000 rpm and drives through a two speed
automatic gearbox. It’s a turbine so revs aren’t quite the same as a normal engine. The MTT was clocked at a record breaking 227 mph and according to the Guinness Book of Records is “The Most Powerful Motorcycle Ever to Enter Series Production.” At the time it was also the most expensive, but that is no longer the case. It’s available as a single or two-seater, but you wouldn’t catch me on the back of this.
Macchia Nera concept bike
MSRP $201,000
Nera means “Black,” in Italian. This was produced as a concept in 2004 and never got any further than that. Based on a Ducati 998 WSB engine, some Italian journalist suggested this was the perfect track day bike, but he was crazy – no one in their right mind throws a two hundred thousand dollar bike down a track. This was the one and only produced and if you are the guy who bought it, I would love to hear from you. This certainly qualifies as the “Most Exclusive Bike in the World.”
Dodge Tomahawk
MSRP $250,000
In true American style, the Dodge Tomahawk weighs in at a beefy 1,500 lbs curb weight. It’s no slouch though – at least in a straight line. I’m not sure I would try going round a corner on it though. And with a measly 3.25 gallon tank (little American gallons at that) I’m not sure you would get as far as a corner. Powered by a liquid-cooled 90-degree 8277 cc V-10 it produces 500 bhp @5600 rpm and 525 lb/ft of torque. A serious challenge for the “Most Impractical Bike in the World,” award.
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Ecosse Moto Works’ Limited
Edition Titanium
MSRP $275,000
Last, but by no means least is the first ever Titanium motorcycle. With handcrafted, clear coated carbon fiber bodywork, hand painted tank and get this – a fuel injected, supercharged, intercooled 2,150cc billet motor, clear coated carbon fiber wheels and a hand made titanium exhaust system. This bike weights 440 lbs and puts out “more than,” 200 hp – at the rear wheel, and produces “more than,” 210 ft/lbs of torque. This is a little like the old expression from Rolls Royce when they were asked how much power their car engines produced – enough. Available exclusively from Robb Report.com Oh, and you get a free watch. I should bloody well hope so for over a quarter million dollars. Unlike the Dodge and Macchia, this one is actually in production - 10 have been built.
How to Resolve Conflicts at Work
By eHow Careers & Work Editor
How To Evaluate Employees?
April 5, 2009Employee evaluation or appraisal is a primitive administrative art that is considered by many to be a dirty job, as it involves one person judging another, which always leaves a sense of dissatisfaction and a doubt whether it is a foolproof method. However, it is done by each and every company, big and small, as it is essential for the growth of the company. In some companies, it is documented as a proper appraisal system; whereas, in others it is done informally.
The evaluation systems should be designed in such a way that they lessen any bias on employees. There is no one method that is better than another and it all depends on individual organizational setting. A method most suitable for one may spell disaster to another.
Reason for Evaluation
There are several reasons why employee evaluation is done. It is done to see if an employee deserves a change in position or compensation, to determine if an employee is performing well during training, to see if an employee needs to be terminated or just as part of a continuous research on personnel that many companies conduct.
Who is evaluating?
The next step is to determine who is going to perform this evaluation on a regular basis. This is based on the kind of information that is sought and it may involve one or more people. It is also a good idea to have the customers and co-workers provide evaluation, as well as the employees themselves evaluating their performance. This way all angles are taken care of and the evaluation is bound to be more comprehensive.
Methods Of Evaluation
A comprehensive evaluation includes one that focuses on the employees’ traits, behavior and results; although some organizations focus on any one or two of these traits.
Trait-focused: In an evaluation system where the focus is on the traits of the employee; the punctuality, discipline, helpfulness and dependability among other traits are looked at. Many experts are of the opinion that this is a very biased evaluation related to circumstances. It has also been found that the accuracy of this type of evaluation is low and it is advised that this form of evaluation be used to supplement other types of evaluation.
Behavior-focused: This entails focusing on the behavior of the employees. This actually entails looking at what each employee does, whether an employee is performing in an appropriate manner in the company or if any inappropriate behavior is noted. This trait is rated from poor to excellent on the rating scale. It shows in which areas an employee excels and the areas they will have to work on.
Result-focused: The last but the best form of evaluation is the one that focuses on the performance of an employee. It shows what each employee has accomplished in their jobs. This is the most commonly used employee evaluation tool that helps in gauging the employees’ contribution to the company. It entails evaluating the quantity of work done, quality of work done, attendance and employee safety. Towards this end, production reports are created on a daily basis and the evaluation, whether it is monthly or quarterly or yearly is based on facts and figures from these reports. The safety incident reports, safety evaluation reports, quality reports and attendance reports are checked. In many companies, interviews with the employee’s supervisor, co-workers, customers as well as the employees themselves are conducted.
Informing The Employees
Once the employee evaluation system is in place, employees should be intimated as to the way they are going to be evaluated. There should be no surprises in store for them and they should know everything the management is planning. This encourages employees to show better results, which is what any company should be looking at. If some employee fails to live up to the mark in spite of having been told about the evaluation, the employer has a legal right to terminate or take disciplinary measures.
The Actual Employee Evaluation
Once the employees are informed, the next thing to do is to put the system into practice. Employee evaluation cannot be a quick process. It is a continuous process and the results taken either every month, 3 months, 6 months or yearly depending on the company. This evaluation helps with any administrative decisions, such as hiring, promotion, rises and firing.
These evaluation reports should consist of both positive and negative aspects of an employee’s performance and critical incidents involving the employees should be logged separately.
Discussing the evaluation
This is done with the employees themselves and they should be given a clear picture of their performance and some companies even give a small evaluation report to the employees. They even have a self-appraisal form that the employee fills up, which may reveal crucial points from the employee’s perspective that the management may have not noticed.
As long as the evaluation reports do not contain remarks, such as “She is God’s gift to the company and the company survive without her” or “He has fallen so low with his performance, he is digging his own grave,” employee evaluation helps a company improve by having good reliable employees as well as maintaining a good employer-employee relationship.
Semana
SENAKULO / HOLY WEEK RITUALS & PROCESSIONS
April 6 12 | Nationwide
A nationwide celebration of Lenten Season
SEMANA SANTA SA BIKOL
April 6 12 | Calabanga, Camarines Sur
A week-long observance of Bicolanos unique religiosity and a pilgrimage to “Amang Hinulid”
MORIONES FESTIVAL
April 6 12 | Marinduque
A festival of the moriones, colorfuly garbed and masked soldiers and centurions; culminates in the reenactment of the beheading of Longinus. The entire towns of Boac, Mogpog and Gasan are virtually converted into huge stages as the story of Longinus unfolds.
ALLAW TA APO SANDAWA (TRIBES HONOR MT. APO)_
April 7 | Kidapawan City, North Cotabato
A gathering of all highland tribes in honor of Mt. Apo as the country’’s highest peak, it comes as no surprise that Mt. Apo is considered sacred ground. Join the highland tribes of Mindanao to the mountain in this annual gathering.
“3RD ASEAN PARAGAMES VISMIN ELIMINATION GAMES”
April 7- April 9 | Zamboanga City
Paralethics from Visayas and Mindanao will converge in Zamboanga City for a three-day sports competition. Champions in this event will then compete in the 3rd ASEAN Paragames to be held in Manila in December 2005.
NATIONAL INVITATIONAL SKIMBOARDING COMPETITION
April 8- April 9 | Misamis Oriental
A showcase of skills, courage and agility of skimboarders coming from various parts of the country.
MT. HAMIGUITAN JOURNEY
April 08 - 12 | La Unino, San Isidro, Davao Oriental
A trek to Mt. Hamiguitan where one finds the 600 hectares Bonsai Field or the so called “Pgymy Forest”.
GEMS OF THE PHILIPPINES (YAMAN NG PILIPINAS)
April 08 | Maharlika Hall of Casino Filipino, Parañaque City
A dinner/cultural show presented by the Asian Gem Tourism Foundation, Inc. in cooperation with DOT and PAGCOR. It is an authentic cultural extravaganza showcasing the rich heritage of Filipino culture, fashion, traditions and festivities through dances, music and songs.
ARAW NG KAGITINGAN_
April 9 | Mt Samat, Bataan
The fall of Bataan is commemorated every year. Top government officials, Japanese and American WW II veterans including their Filipino counterparts and visitors go to Mt. Samat to participate at the annual rites held to honor the bravery of the soldiers who fought for the defense of Bataan.
PASKO SA KASAKIT (SEMANA SANTA SA BANTAYAN)_
April 9 10 | Bantayan, Cebu
A unique mixture of solemn religious rites and local celebration in Bantayan Island where friends of the residents and tourists experience the scenic rites and cool off the summer heat in beautiful white sandy beaches
