13 Articles about What to do on the Job

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The virtues not listed on your resume

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David Brooks, in his book, The Road to Character (Random House), distinguishes between what he calls "résumé virtues" and "eulogy virtues." The former are the skills that get you good grades, good jobs, nice houses, and hefty bank accounts. The latter are what make you a good person. Though I think the distinction between skills and virtues is an important one, Brooks is wrong to imply that résumé virtues are all that we need to produce excellence at work, or that eulogy virtues are for what comes after one’s work has ceased. Eulogy virtues are just as important to becoming good doctors, good lawyers, good teachers, good nurses, good physical therapists, and even good bankers as are résumé virtues. And they are also important to becoming good children, parents, spouses, friends, and citizens. As Aristotle knew, virtue is needed for material success just as it is needed for moral success.

Barry Schwartz writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Steps to Influencing Behavior

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There are five stages in what’s known as the “behavioural change stairway model” that take anyone from “listening to influencing behaviour”. The first stage is active listening – namely, being able to show the other person that you have taken in what they’ve said and, more importantly, have a sense of what it means to them.

Rather than focusing on what you want to say, listen to what the other person is telling you, then try to repeat it back to them. Start with, “It seems like what you’re saying is” or “Can I just check, it sounds like what you’re saying is”. If that feels too contrived, it often works simply to repeat the last sentence or thought someone has expressed (known in counselling practice as “reflecting”).

Try, “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated with this situation – is that right?” Always give the other person the opportunity to comment on or correct your assessment. 

Rosie Ifould writing in The Guardian

Stripping Away

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As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace. 

Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

The Good Myth

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Six developmental trends may be identified as a standard or a criterion against which we may compare a particular personal myth. Over the course of adolescence through middle adulthood, a personal myths should ideally develop in the direction of increasing (1) coherence, (2)  openness, (3) credibility, (4) differentiation, (5) reconciliation, and (6) generative integration. The prototype of the “good story” in human identity is one that receives high marks on these six narrative standards.  

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

Tuesday Tech Tools: 14 QR Generators

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Legit QR generators will have SSL certification along with positive reviews from notable companies.

delivr
Creates QR codes. Privacy focused.

Kaywa
5 dynamic codes for free, then $13.75 and up a month for analytics, etc.

Mashable
Article on how to create a QR code.

QR Explore
Offers a bulk QR code generator and label generator.

QR Stuff
QR code generator for both static and dynamic QR codes. Must sign up for an account first. Especially for small businesses. Free.

QRicket
Free QR code generator for static QR codes. Works especially with bit.ly and Google analytics. Free.

QRTIGER
A reliable QR Code generator that can integrate with 1000s of apps. Both for business and personal projects. Generate a static QR code for free if the content needs no editing.

Shopify
Offers a static QR code generator.

Sparq code (formally Maestro) no longer available

Unitag QR
EU company offering a QR code generator and a QR code reader. Must create an account first. Especially for small companies that conduct transactions in Euros.

Visme
Create graphics and maps just for a particular platform for social-specific content. Free for up to five maps with limited features. Paid accounts starting at $15 month. Also has a QR code generator for static codes.

Visualead
Integrate QR codes seamlessly into branded packaging. Good for marketers, small businesses, and professionals with limited graphic design skills.

Zebra QR
Create QR menus in a PDF or a landing page. Especially for dining places (cafes, restaurants, etc.)

Zxing Project

More Tech Tools

11 Articles about Job Negotiation

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Painting your Internal World

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Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.

As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar, it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s clients paint their internal worlds.  

Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.  

Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap of product shilling.  

But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those collections are worth millions.

Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine 

25 Data Science Articles from July 2022

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Is machine learning about to face a reproducibility crisis?

The US Space Force has picked Wallaroo’s AI & machine learning platform to solve edge model deployment challenges in space  

A new Python package for computing effect sizes

Deep learning researchers should try other techniques when solving a problem

Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers is capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications

A small satellite mission for DARPA called Red-Eye comes to light that tested crosslinks and on-orbit processing

NGA is supporting the new Dept of State-funded Conflict Observatory program which helps document potential war crimes

US military cybersecurity experts at DARPA are concerned about the ubiquitous & open source Linux kernel

“Satellite modularity may be the key to answering new imperatives for the military space”

Large language models are not very good at being factual. “It looks very coherent. It’s almost true. But it’s often wrong.”

AI-enabled image fraud in scientific publications

It’s turning out to be harder than expected to integrate multiple types of satellites with a new ground architecture using custom-built ground stations

What does the smallsats trend & the rise of low earth orbit constellations mean for Geostationary Orbit?

China sent a new data relay satellite into orbit that can work in different orbital positions low- and mid-orbiting satellites

From physicist to machine learning engineer for Google—talking about skills he had to learn, “use cases, best practices & the field of ML”

Making atomic force microscopy more accurate with artificial intelligence by using machine learning techniques to reduce AFM uncertainty

Apache Hive hacks for a data scientist

Countries that have launched the most objects into space ranked

A practical guide for time series data forecasting using machine learning models in Python

He dropped out to become a poet. Now he’s won the top award for mathematics: “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty”

How predicting the occurrence of a word (n-gram language modeling) can be used at the convergence of artificial intelligence & linguistics (natural language processing)

Team seeks to improve coordination between data from geospatial intelligence information systems – operated by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and US Air Force aircraft

Some of the best spreadsheets with the power of Python and the ease of use of Excel

“The question of whether space is really crowded is hotly debated in the industry” Myths vs. Reality

Adversarial machine learning poses a new threat to national security

Daily data science articles here.

Deep Roots (published on this day in 1954)

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All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be the blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, from the “Fellowship of the Ring” published July 29, 1954