Embracing Uncertainty

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Research by Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, suggests that learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty is not just the key to a more balanced life but often leads to prosperity as well.

For one project, she interviewed 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive business plans or conducting extensive market research.

They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls "effectuation." Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends. Effectuation also includes what she calls the "affordable loss principle." Instead of focusing on the possibility of spectacular rewards from a venture, ask how great the loss would be if it failed. If the potential loss seems tolerable, take the next step.

Oliver Burkeman writing in the Wall Street Journal

Embracing Errors

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In the 1950s and 60s, the psychologist BF Skinner advocated the adoption of "errorless learning" methods in education in the belief that errors by learners are counterproductive in result from faulty instruction. The theory of errorless learning gave rise to instructional techniques in which the learners were spoonfed new material in small bites and immediately quizzed on them while they still remained on the tongue, so speak, fresh in short-term memory and easy to spit out onto the test form. There was virtually no chance of making an error. Since those days we've come to understand that retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one's mastery over new material. Yet in our Western culture, where achievement is seen as an indicator of ability, many learners view errors as failure and do what they can to avoid committing them. The aversion to failure may be reinforced by instructors who labor under the belief that when learners are allowed to make errors it's the errors that they will learn.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Tuesday Tech Tools: 12 Timeline Makers

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Aeon Timeline
A desktop timeline creation tool especially for creative writers. $50 per license.

BEEDOCS Timesline 3D
Build family trees, and other timelines. iOS only. Free with certain in-app purchases.

Dipity
Embeddable timeline generator w/photos and text. Sample.

Office Timeline
A free PowerPoint add-on that helps you create charts and timelines.

Preceden (formally Time Glider)
Create web-based timelines using images & videos. Easy-to-use.

Sutori
A tool for teachers and students to craft historical timelines combining graphics, video, audio, text, quizzes, and more. Drag and drop little boxes of content. Built for collaborative efforts. Basic accounts are free or paid account with more features $49 a year.

Tiki-Toki
Web-based data-focused timeline maker. Easy-to-use. Free to students while paid accounts run from $5-24 a month with more options.

Timeline Maker
Lots of options but a bit of a learning curve. Not cheap: Starts at $49 for a single-user edu license.

TimelineJS
Knight Lab’s free tools to build visually-rich interactive timelines. It can pull in media from different sources such as Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, etc. The process for making one involves filling out a supplied spreadsheet template.

TimeMapper
Timelines and maps. Sample video here.

TimeToast
Nice visualization for historical timelines but no customization. Good for teachers and students. Free version or more templates starting at $5.99 a month.

Xtimeline
Creates timelines.

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Literature as antidote

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Poetry was always more than poetry in Russia. Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camps when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them.

Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture. Literature is an antidote to the poison of the Russian imperialist way of thinking. The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression.

Mikhail Shishkin writing in The Atlantic

15 Resume Help Sites

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Some places to find resume templates.

Older but not Wiser

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There are reasons why older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re twenty. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were twenty cause the aperture to slowly narrow.

By fifty, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment.

George Packer, writing in The New Yorker

Balance

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Focusing on one goal at the expense of all other factors can distort a corporate mission or an individual life, says Christopher Kayes, an associate professor of management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Prof. Kayes, who has studied the "overpursuit" of goals, recalls a conversation with one executive who "told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of 40 … and he'd done it. [But] he was also divorced, and had health problems, and his kids didn't talk to him anymore." 

Oliver Burkeman

21 Data Science articles from August 2022

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R vs. Pandas: Understanding, slicing, filtering, and manipulating dataframes in R and Python Pandas

A Python Cheat Sheet for Data Structures and Algorithms

A new method for the spatial point patterns generation by classifying remote sensing images using convolutional neural network

Intelsat has lost the ability to command its Galaxy 15 satellite

School yourself on space junk—with some cool graphics

This fall the US Defense Innovation Unit will test ways to mitigate GNSS disruptions accelerating the use of commercial GEOINT and NAVWAR tools

The US Air Force is asking researchers to develop quantum computing software algorithms to boost AI and machine automation technologies for new generations of command and control systems

The evolution from artificial intelligence to machine learning to data science

The limitations of blockchains and criterion for judging when a blockchain is applicable

Some prominent members of the AI community are expressing doubt about machine learning’s role in AI’s future

Data manipulation using the dplyr package In R including filtering, selecting, arranging, summarizing and more

If war comes to space, who will control US spy satellites?

As US intelligence & military speed new sensors to space they are still working on details of who’s ultimately in charge during a conflict

Machine learning innovation among military industry companies has dropped off in the last year

How datasets are used in neural networks

A primer on how neural networks work

Some background on neural networks

A new area of artificial intelligence called analog deep learning promises faster computation with a fraction of the energy usage—by propelling protons through solids at unprecedented speeds

A scorecard to evaluate open-source software risks based on potential vulnerabilities and dependencies

Satellite imaging, not tourism, is the modern space race: “The full potential of readily available, nearly instantaneous space imagery has yet to be harnessed”

Action in in Ukraine reveals the vulnerabilities of drones

Mother Nature doesn’t care if you are happy

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Perhaps the greatest error people make about happiness is assuming it will come naturally if we follow our instincts—that is, If it feels good, do it. There’s a simplistic sort of logic here: Humans desire lots of worldly rewards, like money, power, pleasure, and admiration. We also want to be happy. Thus, if we get that worldly stuff, we will be happy. But this is nature’s cruelest hoax.These fall broadly into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor, which the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas called substitutes for God. Whether you buy Aquinas’s assessment or not, you can’t really argue with him that these rewards overpromise and underdeliver happiness. They simply don’t satisfy.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Tuesday Tech Tools: 15 Storage options

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Authory
Automatically backs up a journalist’s articles regardless as to which  site they’re published on.  Lets readers “subscribe” to journalists, so that they can receive email notifications when one of them publishes something new. Two week free trial. After that the service is $7 a month or $70 a year.

Box
Digital storage focused on business solutions.

Dropbox*
Online file storage for backups. Syncs folders automatically on several devices. 2 GB free. 100 GB for $10 a month.

Flickr
Easy to navigate, though not the best app for shooting and editing photos. But the free terabyte of storage makes a a good place to dump everything. The Creative Commons licensing section has free stock photos.

Google Drive*
Document storage. Open and edit files from within browser windows. 5 GM free. 200 GB for $10 month.

Inkrypt
An app that allows journalists to save their content on many servers, (instead of one) that can be accessed anywhere, at any time and can't be traced, so that government and other entities cannot block it.

Instapaper
Save articles to read later. Free.

Media Fire
Free cloud storage service.

OneDrive (formally Skydrive)
Microsoft provides 15 GB free backup to the cloud for storage. OneDrive includes a nice interface for scrolling through material (particularly photos). 

Pocket*
Save articles to read later. Free.

Resilio Sync (formally Bittorrent Sync)
A widely used cloud storage format.

Save My News
Lets journalists save links to the Internet Archive and WebCite. Clips and archived links can be downloaded in Excel.

Social Blade 
Shows YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, & Twitter account rankings

Spundge
Read, save, filter and annotate content from the web — Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube included. (Free and paid versions)

SugarSync
File backups accessible on all operating systems and platforms. 5 GB free. 60 GB for $10 a month. 

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Lasting happiness comes from habits, not hacks

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For enduring happiness changes, you need habits, not hacks. And by habits, I don’t mean mindless routines; I mean mindful, daily practices to strengthen your relationships, deepen your wisdom, and uncover meaning in your life. Happiness hacking tends to trivialize happiness as little more than a feeling, but this is an error. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness, which is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Formatting your Resume

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Formats for Resumes:

1. Chronological
Possible Headings: Experience, Education, Activities and Skills (computer, language),

2. Functional or Skills
Possible Headings: Experience, Education, Skills (computer, language),

Professionnal experience

  • A resume should begin with the job candidate’s experience in the field in which they are applying, especially jobs, internships or work for student media or the college rather than the candidate’s education.

  • All experience that reflects the career goals, whether paid or unpaid.

  • Internships and assigned responsibilities.

  • Paid volunteer positions that reflect interests and skills, especially when it included a title.

Education

  • GPA if 3.5 or above

  • Coursework and papers can be highlighted as a special subsection under “Education.” For instance, one candidate was helped getting a position at CNN by taking Media Ethics and Media Law. For formal academic papers related to the field, include a one-sentence description of the length, focus, and scope of the paper or project. For instance, “Analyzed and compared journalistic styles in the Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine and Washington Business Journal.”

  • Awards and scholarships including the Dean’s List, etc.

  • If your education was self-financed or you paid a large percentage of your college expenses.

  • Conferences or special meetings you've attended having to do with the area of the job for which you are applying.

  • If you worked while attending college.

International Experience

International experience, including semesters abroad and other significant travel. Living in another country or having spent time overseas, shows a broad range of life history, the ability to adapt and experience with diverse groups.

Skills

A list of computer programs you are proficient using that are not assumed. For instance, an ability to use Microsoft Word or Google Docs would be assumed but not experience with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Activities (or interests)

If you have any odd skills or abilities, you might consider adding them under "interests" or a similar title. For instance, winning a chess tournament. While it might not directly relate to the job, including it suggests the candidate is smart, has diverse interests and self-displiined.

References

The cliché "references available upon request" is not worth including. If they want references, they will ask. Just be ready to present them. Including a list of references will take up vital real estate on resume, especially when it's just one page. Besides, when you are asked for references, it's an alert that you are truly being considered in the final batch for hire. Otherwise, you might not know that you are under serious consideration or a finalist.

If you decide to include references, make a courtesy call and ask each person for permission to use them as a reference. Tell them who might be calling and which of your skills you’d like them to emphasize. Include their relationship to you, such as “former supervisor.” It’s good to have a letter of recommendation on file in case you are asked by prospective employers to provide them on short notice.

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