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Month: February 2012

Dead dog offered credit card

Kelly Sloan’s dog Spark could be eligible for up to $30,000 in credit, even though the sheltie-spaniel mix died 10 years ago. The Sarnia man was leafing through his mail last week when he found a letter from Capital One, urging its addressee to apply for a special credit card offer.

“We’re not offering our low long-term rate to just anyone,” said the letter, addressed to Spark Sloan, who died nearly at age 13.

“They’ve got the right name, the right address, and it’s a heck of a deal. She can apply online today, and I guess, get her card,” Kelly said.

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10 Ways the CIA Tried to Kill Castro

On this date in 1959, Fidel Castro became the Prime Minister of Cuba. Since then, according to the man who was charged with protecting him for most of his regime, he’s survived over 600 assassination attempts. Fabian Escalante, the former head of the Cuban Secret Service, claims that the assassination endeavors break down like this: the Eisenhower administration tried to kill Castro 38 times; Kennedy, 42; Johnson, 72; Nixon, 184; Carter, 64; Reagan, 197; Bush Sr., 16; Clinton, 21. (The accuracy of Escalante’s statistics, especially attempts since the Nixon administration, is in dispute.) There are only so many different ways you can ambush someone with a sharpshooter, so some of the ways the CIA plotted to kill Castro were pretty wild.

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Facebook Profiles Accurately Predict Job Performance

Do you want to know how that applicant you just interviewed will actually perform on the job? Check out their Facebook profile.

That’s the advice of a new study from the Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University. The researchers recruited a group of four Facebook-savvy human resources professionals and students to evaluate the Facebook profiles of 56 users. The four perused each of the profiles for about 10 minutes each before grading them according to the so-called Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism).

Six months later, the researchers compared the evaluations of the 56 users’ work supervisors and found a strong correlation for traits including intellectual curiosity, agreeability and conscientiousness. The evalauations are, of course, subjective, but job seekers shouldn’t necessarily worry that they need to clean up their Facebook profile.

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