Making Better Decisions

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For many of us, the main concern over decision-making is practical — how can we make better decisions? Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher said that his research has helped him develop specific strategies. “Rather than pick what I hope is the best, instead I now always start by eliminating the worst element from a choice set,” he said, reducing the number of options to something manageable, like three. “I find that this really works, and it derives from our study of the math. Sometimes you learn something simple from the most complex stuff, and it really can improve your decision-making.”   

Emily Singer writing in Quanta Magazine

The Order of the Soul

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The function of man is an activity in accordance with a certain arrangement or order in the soul (according to Aristotle). That is why Aristotle can conclude that the human good is an activity of soul in accordance with virtue: for virtue is a certain organization of the soul. How this order is instilled in man’s soul is a central issue of ethics. Of course, the exercise of the virtues will often involve man’s practical reason. But if the practical reasoning did not flow from a certain organization of the soul, it would be empty. In fact It is because a man’s life has a certain order that he is able to reason about it: the logos (or rational principle) in his mind will reflect the logos in his soul.

Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Know

54 Articles about Your Resume

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3 tips for a ‘hyper-focused’ resume to grab recruiters’ attention at a job fair, according to a career coach - CNBC

4 things Bill Gates did wrong on his 1974 Harvard student resume, from experts - CNBC

4 Things to Leave off your resume - Mashable

4 websites to help you create a clean, attractive resume - The Next Web

6 Tips to Write a Winning Resume Summary (With Examples) - MakeUseOf

6 Unexpected Skills To Boost a Journalism Resume - American Journalism Review

7 Mistakes that Doom a College Journalist's Resume - Michael Koretzky

10 Creative Social Media Resumes to learn from - Mashable

17 mistakes that can cost you a Job - Medium Post

50 Action Verbs You Can Use For A More Dynamic Resume - Refinery29

93% of employers want to see soft skills on your resume—here are 8 of the most in-demand ones - CNBC

The classic advice to limit your résumé to one page might be wrong after all - Business Insider

Attractive women should not include a photo with a job application - the Economist

Avoid These Overused Phrases to Make Your Resume Stand Out - LifeHacker

Beautiful & Functional Resume Templates you can Download - Girlboss

Best and Worst Fonts to Use on Your Résumé - Bloomberg Business

Best and Worst Terms for Resumes - Huffington Post

Create a Strong Resume by Keeping it Brief - LifeHacker

Do Resume Typos Matter? - Fast Company

FontPair (Helps you pick font combinations for your resume. so you stand out from the typical Times New Roman)

Google recruiters explain how to demonstrate 'past experience' on your resume-even if you've never had a job - Business Insider

How to Build a Great Resume as a College Student - TIME

How to fix five things you’re doing wrong on your resume (video)

How to get your résumé past the robot reading it - Vox

How to Make Sure Your Résumé Passes Muster With an AI Reader - Wall Street Journal ($)

How to write a good resume for human and AI assessors alike - Telegraph India

How to Write a Great Resume - Dr. Matthew Hale (video)

How to Write a Resume - Glassdoor

How to Make a Resume that Works - Wall Street Journal ($)

How To Write Your Human-Voiced Resume - Forbes

This ideal résumé template to use if you’re looking for a job in tech - Fast Company

Inside the Shady New World of Fake Resumes, Professional Interviewees, and Other Job-Seeker Scams - Inc

Meet the New Boss, Big Data - Wall Street Journal 

The Most Efficient Way to Keep Your Resume Up to Date - LifeHacker

The LinkedIn hacks this Gen Z corporate TikToker swears by to stand out in the job search - CNBC

Resume advice from an internship supervisor

Resume expert reveals what a perfect resume looks like - Biz Insider

This is exactly how to showcase your soft skills on a résumé - Fast Company

This is how often you should update your resume—whether or not you’re looking for a new job - CNBC

This Resume got me interviews at Google, Buzzfeed, and more than 20 top startups - Business Insider

The skills you put on your résumé are the most important factor in hiring. Here’s how to make yours stand out - Fast Company

Steps you can take to modernize your resume - Boston Herald

Stop Confusing Your Job Skills with Your Credentials - FastCompany 

Stop Saying You 'Helped' on Your Resume (and Use These Verbs Instead) - Lifehacker

This Google Executive Reviewed More Than 20,000 Resumes--He Found These 5 Stunning Mistakes Over and Over - Inc

Tiny Typos Can Add Up To a Big X - Washington Post

To get a job, write your story instead of a resume - Quartz

Using SEO Strategies to Optimize your Resume - Yahoo

Want a new journalism job? 'Crawl' your resume first - Poynter

What the perfect Resume Looks Like - Business Insider (video)

Why I tossed your Resume - Chronicle of Higher Ed

Will Temp and Retail Jobs Hurt my chances at a real career - LifeHacker

Will Your Resume Impress Employers? Take This Quiz To Find Out - Forbes

Why you need these 5 skills on your resume today - CNBC

Life is like a Party

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As we grow up, we realize it becomes less important to have more friends and more important to have real ones. Remember, life is kind of like a party. You invite a lot of people, some leave early, some stay all night, some laugh with you, some laugh at you, and some show up really late. But in the end, after the fun, there are a few who stay to help you clean up the mess. And most of the time, they aren’t even the ones who made the mess. These people are your real friends in life. They are the ones who matter most.

Marc & Angel Chernoff

The Emergency Exit Rule

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People who have high emotional intelligence understand that if you want to be more persuasive and even win most arguments, it's important to do two things:

·       Avoid distracting, emotional mini controversies.

·       Offer easy ways for people to overcome emotional objections, and more easily follow the path you want them to take.

I call this whole concept the "Emergency Exit Rule." It's about planting seeds that allow people to save face and maintain their pride--while ultimately agreeing with you.

Imagine a police detective arrests a suspect. During interrogation, he or she uses a common but controversial strategy called the Reid technique. It involves questioning frameworks that can be summarized by example, like this:

·       "We know that you walked out of the store with the jewelry, but you don't seem like a bad person. Maybe you didn't realize how expensive it really was?"

·       "It's clear you were intoxicated when the police pulled you over. Am I right in thinking you'd probably had only a couple of drinks, and didn't realize you might have been over the limit?"

 The Emergency Exit Rule is all about giving them the easiest, most attractive way possible to back down and agree with your position.

Bill Murphy Jr. writing in Inc.

Teens & Social Media

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Teenagers are using TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%) more than other social media platforms to stay in touch with one another, according to the Pew Research Center. YouTube (95%) is their destination site for consuming media. Meanwhile, Facebook has lost most of its teen audience (from 71% in 2014 to 32%). The survey did not include chat and audio app Discord.

About a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Black teens were more likely to use TikTok while Hispanic teens were more likely than other groups to use WhatsApp. Read the details of the survey here and you’ll find a Washington Post article on the findings here.

Give Yourself Time to Write

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Many smart people tell themselves lies like, “I do my best work at the last minute.” It’s not true. Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don’t worry that what you write is not very good and isn’t immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don’t just write down ideas.

Denise K. Magner writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Tuesday Tech Tools: 20 Research Tools

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Academic OneFile
This Cengage database, often available through public libraries, has access to thousands of journals. Not all articles are available in full text. Subscription required.

Academic Search Premier*
This database provides access to the latest research published in thousands of scholarly journals. Subscription required.

Brookings
A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars who produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics.

Comparea
See a visual comparison of two states, cities, countries or continents. Move them around.  It will also tell how many times bigger a geographic area is to another.

Connected Papers
A visual literature-mapping and recommendation tool that finds publicly available scholarly papers. Around 200 million articles, including preprints. The articlle alert system builds a list of recommended papers that users can train by liking or disliking the articles.

Contact Out
A plugin that surfaces email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. Free plan allows 100 search credits. Paid plans starting from $19 a month.

Content Gems
Monitor blogs, social media, etc Filter content based on keywords. Dends you links. Limited free account or paid accounts (starting at $10) based on the number of researched keywords.

Data.gov
US government data sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals
A growing database that covers only journals that are free and open to the public.

Directory of Open Access Repositories
This free site is operated by the University of Nottingham in the UK. It aggregates databases from around the world, locating open access research across disciplines.

Fact Check
A political fact checking site run by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Feedly
Web-based and largest RSS feed. Subscribe to get new posts from a site. Uses upvotes and downvotes to learn which new articles is most relevant to the user. Useful to academic researchers looking to stay on top of new papers but also for those who want to monitor news, RSS feeds, Reddit, Twitter and podcasts. Free, but a paid account offers more features such as the ability to follow more than 100 sources and hide adverts. $6 or more a month. Compare to Inoreader.

Google Scholar*
The dominant tool in the field of research, users can set alerts for publication of new scholarly papers on particular research topics, authors, or keywords. Sometimes picks up useful preprints, theses, and dissertations. Access to the studies could be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Widely acknowledged as the biggest corpus in existence, one estimate puts the volume at close to 400 million articles.

Google Trends
Real time search info that can be broken down by day or region. Pulls data from YouTube and Google News as well. Insights on what people want to know right now.

Hunter
Searches for contact information by employer. 100 searches free. Paid plans range from $49 – $399.

Open Knowledge Map
A visual-mapping tool that creates maps based on keywords to arrange 100s of scholarly papers, data sets, and software that are related into bubbles. Users can change and update them. It can group papers into themes you may not have considered to find subfields of research.

Research Rabbit
Launched in 2021, it describes itself as “Spotify for papers”. Users save relevant papers to a collection. A list of recommended articles updates based on the collection. Alerts are more personalized than Google Scholar. Free.

Research Gate
Sends email recommendations of scholarly papers and offers a feed of them. Users can also see a chronological newsfeed of papers posted by their ResearchGate contacts. Around 150 million publication pages and 20 million users. Free.

TLDR
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers.

Storyful Multisearch
Chrome browser extension that searches multiple social networking platforms at the same time. Free.

More Tech Tools

The Dictatorship of Data

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The dictatorship of data ensnares even the best of them. Google runs everything according to data. That strategy has led to much of its success. But it also trips up the company from time to time. Its cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, long insisted on knowing all job candidates’ SAT scores and their grade point averages when they graduated from college. In their thinking, the first number measured potential and the second measured achievement. Accomplished managers in their 40s were hounded for the scores, to their outright bafflement. The company even continued to demand the numbers long after its internal studies showed no correlation between the scores and job performance.

Google ought to know better, to resist being seduced by data’s false charms. The measure leaves little room for change in a person’s life. It counts book smarts at the expense of knowledge. And it may not reflect the qualifications of people from the humanities, where know-how may be less quantifiable than in science and engineering. Google’s obsession with such data for HR purposes is especially queer considering that the company’s founders are products of Montessori schools, which emphasize learning, not grades. By Google’s standards, neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg nor Steve Jobs would have been hired, since they lack college degrees.

Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, writing in MIT’s Technology Review

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