Risking your life

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Sometimes we make decisions on the basis of past experience, out of experiments we or others have conducted in the course of our lifetime. But we cannot conduct experiments that will prove either the existence or the absence of God. Our only alternative is to explore the future consequences of believing in God or rejecting God. Nor can we avert the issue, for by the mere act of living we are force to play this game.

Pascal explained that belief in God is not a decision. You cannot awaken one morning and declare “Today I think I will decide to believe in God. You believe or you do not believe. The decision, therefore, is whether to choose to act in a manner that will lead to believing in God, like living with pious people and following a life of “holy water and sacraments”. The person who follows these precepts is wagering that God is. The person who cannot be bothered with that kind of thing is wagering that God is not.

If God is not, whether you lead your life piously or sinfully is immaterial. But suppose that God is. Then if you bet against the existence of God by refusing to live a life of piety and sacraments you run the risk of eternal damnation; the winner of the bet that God exists has the possibility of salvation. As salvation is clearly preferable to external damnation, the correct decision is to act on the basis that God is. “Which way should we incline?” The answer was obvious to Pascal.

Peter L Bernstein, Against The Gods

Resume advice from an internship supervisor

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Top left is most important place.

Tell me about yourself in 300 words total on one page.

Only include highlights of your career.

List in order of relevance to the job you are applying for.

Your resume does not have to be chronological.

For internships: education comes first, put your graduation date to make it clear you-are you still in school.

For jobs: works comes first.

Sell me on how the experience you have is relevant to the job:- Make dairy queen relevant (ex: promoted in job while also attending school).

You must make it simple in order to catch the gatekeepers eye.

Did you include technical skills? Software and such to show technical skills "Strong knowledge of.."
"Familiar with..."

Include student organization involvement as experience if you are weak in this area.

Only include study abroad if it's related to the internship or job.

Marketing students and graphic design should have more than a black and white resume—show your design skills.

Don't include salary requirements—put negotiable if asked.

Avoid acronyms.

Be clear on your previous employers: What the company does and what you did there.

Include things/skills you learned for the job you want—what you would not know if you hadn't had that experience.

List projects including why it is relevant.

Send PDFs rather than Word doc so you avoid font issues.

Is it easy to read?

Show it to someone who doesn't work or study in your field—if they have any questions, something they don't understand, then change it.

Don't include references unless asked.

Does it look good when you print it out?

If awards are included, then is the relevance to the internship or job clear?

Try to keep your resume to one page.

No perfumes.

Bring copies of your resume and other material with you to interviews

Research the company ahead of time.

Be prepared but not overly rehearsed

Pro tip: The more you say, the more likely they will find something they don't like. Be concise.

Ask for feedback.

Before leaving, ask for “next steps” and when is it OK to follow up.

Don't take the decision personally.

The ideal erotic relationship

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Our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.  

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. 

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn. 

Jonathan Franzen, excerpt from Kenyon College 2011 Commencement speech   

Tuesday Tech Tools: 17 Organizers

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Need to get yourself organized? Here are some tools that will help.

Airtable
Manages projects and processes-weddings, movie shoots, companies, etc. Allows you to log entries in spreadsheets which can be turned into sets of data stored in the cloud. Some limitations you won’t find in tools like Trello. There’s a video explanation here.

Boomerang (formally Baydin)
Schedule Gmail or Outlook email for a later send date.  Add-on for Firefox and Chrome. Free.

Buffer*
Popular social media scheduling service for posting to multiple sites at one time or later, including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. Provides analytics. Free, but $10 (and up) a month gives you unlimited scheduling so you can plan your content well ahead of time.

Evernote*
Access notes on any computer, tablet or phone. Search function lets you find a note in either text or audio format. Free for iOS and Android. For more options there is Evernote Plus $2.99 a month, while Premium is $5.80 per month.

Freshbooks
A cloud-based accounting app that helps you manage clients and projects, send invoices, and track time, expenses, and estimates right from your iPhone. Best for running a business in which you have specific projects for different clients that involve billable hours. The first three clients are free; then $20 for up to 25 clients or $30 for unlimited clients per month. 

Meetways
Find a halfway point between two locations. Great for setting up meetings between people.

Nozbe
Task management system. Organizes according to the context in which they are done (online, at the office, at home, etc.) . Designed with teams in mind-which could be as simple as sharing a shopping list. Available for most devices. Works with Google Calender.  Monthly fee: $8 for a single user, $16 for a family, $40 for a team.

OmniOutliner
Mac program that keeps lists and organizes outlines. Low learning curve to create rich, multi-column, collapsible outlines in many styles. Add embedded notes, images, links, etc. $40 to buy the standard version, $70 for the pro model. An educational discount of $25 and $50 is available here.

Google Now
Tracks your online behavior and uses this data to predict the information that you will need, such as local traffic or weather updates.

PinBoard
Bookmark things you find in social media. One time $9.94 cost.

Podio
Social work platform for basic project management tasks — calendar, contacts, activity stream — that helps teams collaborate and communicate. Both free and paid versions.

Process Street
Document, manage, and track your workflows and business processes. Records tasks in templates – lists which show what tasks to do and what order to do them in. A video explanation here.

Scrivener*
App that gives you a single place to dump all your ideas. Especially helpful for creating and managing complex writing projects: writing a novel, play, TV show, magazine feature, etc. Write in fragments and then shuffle scenes/chapters in a "bulletin board" mode.. throw in research notes, multimedia files, and character sketches.  Allows you to slowly "grow” books, scripts, and articles. Easy to convert the document to an e-book, web page, a PDF, or Word doc. Works with Mac and Windows.  Free 30-use trial. $45 for the latest version. Many writers swear it's worth it. Doesn't work on iPads though.

Trello
Organizational tool that integrations with many other apps. Tasks or projects are stored in cards which are then arranged into columns.

TripIt
Organize all your travel plans into mobile itineraries.

Ulysses
Writing app for Mac. Uses plain text or Markdown for writing, but also includes notes, exporting, organization and more. $44.99.

WorkFlowy
Digital note taking app. Excellent design, but lacks due dates, reminders of upcoming deadlines and calendar view. Free version limits you to 500 lists or "items" per month.  Pro accounts can be backed up to Dropbox. Individual pro accounts ($4.99 per month or $49 per year) and Team ($3.99 per month per user, or $39 per year per user, with a two user minimum) A short video introduction here.

Find more tools here.

True Listening in action

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Since true listening is love in action, nowhere is it more appropriate than in marriage. Yet most couples never truly listen to each other. Couples are often surprised, even horrified, when we suggest to them that among the things they should do is talk to each other by appointment. It seems rigid and unromantic and unspontaneous to them. Yet true listening can occur only when time is set aside for it and conditions are supportive of it. It cannot occur when people are driving, or cooking or tired and anxious to sleep or easily interrupted or in a hurry. Romantic “love” is effortless, and couples are frequently reluctant to shoulder the effort and discipline of true love and listening. But when and if they finally do, the results are superbly gratifying.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Where the value lies

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Education is not acquiring knowledge; it is best defined as using knowledge. The dictionary defines knowledge as the fact or awareness of knowing something. I recognize that you have to know something to use it, but except in some television quiz shows or party games, there is little value in merely knowing something. The value is in using what you have learned. Education is worth the effort; schooling is not.

William Glasser, Choice Theory

Data Science articles from June 2021

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The Essence of Nonlove

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Keeping one's eye on a four-year-old at the beach, concentrating on an interminable disjointed story told by a six-year-old, teaching an adolescent how to drive, truly listening to the tale of your spouse's day at the office or laundromat, and understanding his or her problems from the inside, attempting to be as consistently patient and bracketing as much as possible--all these are tasks that are often boring, frequently inconvenient and always energy-draining; they mean work. If we were lazier we would not do them at all. If we were less lazy we would do them more often or better. Since love is work, the essence of nonlove is laziness.

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Tuesday Tech Tools: 12 Animated GIF Makers

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Want to created your own animated GIFs? Here are some options:

Animated GIFs in Photoshop
A tutorial for creating Animated GIFs in Photoshop.

AwesomeGIFs
Animated GIF maker. 

EzGif.com
”Animated GIFs made easy.” Includes many images that could be turned into GIFs or use your own saved files. Adjust the speed, resize, etc.

Gickr*
Create animated GIFs. Free but a small watermark is placed in the corner.

Gif Me
App with control options such as speed, filters, adding text, stickers, etc.

GifSoup
Find animated GIFs.

Gifbin
Find and create animated GIFs.

Giphy
GIF search engine.

Picasion
Create animated GIFs. Free but a watermark is placed in the corner.

RecordIT
Simple screen record and save for creating GIFs.

Screen to Gif
Select a portion of your screen and record anything that happens in that specific area.

Video to GIF
This GIF-making app is tailored to iPhone users. Easily convert GIFs from videos in your iCloud library and add moving text. Free.

Find more tools here.

A strong faith in the ability of students

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The best teachers we encountered expect “more” from their students. Yet the nature of that “more” must be distinguished from expectations that may be “high” but meaningless, from the goals that are simply tied to the course rather than to the kind of thinking and acting expected of critical thinkers. That “more” is, in the hands of teachers who captivate and motivate students and help them reach unusually high levels of accomplishment, grounded in the highest intellectual artistic, or moral standards, and in the personal goals of the students.

We found that the best teachers usually have a strong faith in the ability of students to learn and in the power of a healthy challenge, but they also have an appreciation that excessive anxiety and tension can hinder thinking. Thus, while they help students to feel relaxed and to believe in their capacity to learn, they also foster a kind of disquietude, the feeling that stems from intellectual enthusiasm, curiosity, challenge, and suspense, and from the wonderful promises that they make about what students can achieve.

Ken Baine, What the Best College Teachers Do

More Alive

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So many people who glowingly report that their lives have been turned around by a seminar, a church, or a counselor sometimes make me think of figures in a wax museum. They look like the real thing, but they don't breathe. You expect them to move like living people, but they never do. These are not the folks you want to be with when you're in real trouble or deep pain. Their words of encouragement are always appropriate and warmly offered, but they fall flat. You never feel more alive after a conversation with them- a bit cheered or instructed, perhaps, but never alive. Developing the spark that is the unmistakable evidence of life is the challenge before us-and also the mystery.

Larry Crabb, Inside Out