Q&A: The Surprising Upside of Getting Old

Americans have tremendous fear of aging — and a great deal of prejudice against the elderly. But, as the joke has it, being old is better than the alternative. And, despite our fears, new research suggests that being old is also a lot better than it looks.22

I spoke with Dr. Marc Agronin, whose new book, How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old, explores these issues through the rich stories of his patients’ lives. Agronin is the psychiatrist for the Miami Jewish Health Systems, a nonprofit that is the largest provider of health care for seniors in the Southeast.

What led you to want to work with older people?
When I went to medical school, I knew I wanted to go into psychiatry, that was a given. In my second year, by a chance encounter I began working with a geriatric psychiatrist and I loved the work. I took an immediate interest in working with older patients. They reminded me not only of my grandparents but also of my wonderful aunts and uncles. I felt that there was so much I could learn from these elders that I was just drawn to it and never looked back.

Many people would think that would be a very depressing field of medicine.
I see that all the time and experienced it even when I was doing my training. The older patients were often the ones that the students didn’t want to be around.
[But] the difference wasn’t just in attitude for me: whenever I had experience with older individuals I quickly had deep appreciation for not only their life experience, but also the gratitude they had when someone younger would spend time with them. It was always a positive experience. I never regarded it as something frightening or unpleasant.
I love the stories they tell and hearing about history. So, for me, writing this book was natural — it would be full of stories.

Research now suggests that as we age, our moods improve and we actually grow happier.
There’s great potential. It didn’t occur to me right away how much people learn and grow as they age. That message really transformed my view of aging. I wasn’t trained to look for strengths, but found over time that those strengths are the things that get people through difficult times, whether psychological or spiritual or emotional. They also allow people not only to overcome challenges but even to thrive. The more I saw, the more impressed I was.
Aging, in spite of the inevitable [challenges], is a long process and has its rewards. Amid all the challenges, often the rewards not only balance things out, but most individuals experience a greater degree of well-being and a deeper sense of meaning than they do when they are younger. I often find I get a little taste of that. I feel when I’m with older individuals, I’m as close to the fountain of knowledge as one can get.

The Hidden Truths about Calories

By Rob Dunn

Odds are you sometimes think about calories. They are among the most often counted things in the universe. When the calorie was originally conceived it was in the context of human work. More calories meant more capacity for work, more chemical fire with which to get the job done, coal in the human stove. Fat, it has been estimated, has nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrates and proteins have just four; fiber is sometimes counted separately and gets awarded a piddling two. Every box of every food you have ever bought is labeled based on these estimates; too bad then that they are so often wrong.

A Food is Not a Food—Estimates of the number of calories in different kinds of foods measure the average number of calories we could get from those foods based only on the proportions of fat, carbohydrates, protein and sometimes fiber they contain (In essence, calories ingested minus calories egested). A variety of standard systems exist, all of which derive from the original developed by Wilbur Atwater more than a hundred years ago. They are all systems of averages. No food is average.

Differences exist even within a given kind of food. Take, for example, cooked vegetables. Cell walls in some plants are tougher to break down than those in others; nature, of course, varies in everything. If the plant material we eat has more of its cell walls broken down we can more of the calories from the goodies inside. In some plants, cooking ruptures most cell walls; in others, such as cassava, cell walls hold strong and hoard their precious calories in such a way that many of them pass through our bodies intact.
It is not just cooked vegetables though. Nuts flagrantly do their own thing, which might be expected given that nuts are really seeds whose mothers are invested in having them escape digestion. Peanuts, pistachios and almonds all seem to be less completely digested than their levels of protein, fat, carbohydrates and fiber would suggest. How much? Just this month, a new study by Janet Novotny and colleagues at the USDA found that when the “average” person eats almonds she receives just 128 calories per serving rather than the 170 calories “on the label.”

[Image 1. Some of the calories our bodies do not digest go to the dung beetles
and flies whose empire rises around our inefficiencies.
Photo of the species Garreta nitens by Piotr Naskrecki]

It is not totally clear why nuts such as almonds or pistachios yield fewer calories than they “should.” Tough cell walls? Maybe. But there are other options too, if not for the nuts themselves then for other foods.

For one, our bodies seem to expend different quantities of energy to deal with different kinds of food (the energy expended produces heat and so is referred to by scientists as “diet-induced thermogensis”); some foods require us to do more work than others. Proteins can require ten to twenty times as much heat-energy to digest as fats, but the loss of calories as heat energy is not accounted for at all on packaging.

The 7 deadly sins of résumé design

by Chanpory Rith

So you’ve labored with sweat and tears writing your résumé, and now you’re all set to turn it into a magnificently designed creation. Unfortunately, with the freedom of modern computers and fancy software, comes huge opportunities for abuse. When it comes to résumés, both non-designers and professional designers commit some almost unforgivable sins. Here are the 7 deadly sins of résumé design and how to repent:

The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?

Yvain over at lesswrong.com writes:

David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.

If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."

Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?

It sounds dumb only because we are talking soberly of categories and features. As soon as the argument gets framed in terms of words, it becomes so powerful that somewhere between many and most of the bad arguments in politics, philosophy and culture take some form of the noncentral fallacy. Before we get to those, let's look at a simpler example.


Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"

Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.

This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the noncentral is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument.

Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was the good kind of criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver, and it may be even harder in some of the cases where the noncentral Fallacy is commonly used.

Now I want to list some of these cases. Many will be political¹, for which I apologize, but it's hard to separate out a bad argument from its specific instantiations. None of these examples are meant to imply that the position they support is wrong (and in fact I myself hold some of them). They only show that certain particular arguments for the position are flawed, such as:

"Abortion is murder!" The archetypal murder is Charles Manson breaking into your house and shooting you. This sort of murder is bad for a number of reasons: you prefer not to die, you have various thoughts and hopes and dreams that would be snuffed out, your family and friends would be heartbroken, and the rest of society has to live in fear until Manson gets caught. If you define murder as "killing another human being", then abortion is technically murder. But it has none of the downsides of murder Charles Manson style. Although you can criticize abortion for many reasons, insofar as "abortion is murder" is an invitation to apply one's feelings in the Manson case directly to the abortion case, it ignores the latter's lack of the features that generated those intuitions in the first place².

Eugenics (Photo credit: gennie catastrophe)

"Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics!" Okay, you've got me there: since eugenics means "trying to improve the gene pool" that's clearly right. But what's wrong with eugenics? "What's wrong with eugenics? Hitler did eugenics! Those unethical scientists in the 1950s who sterilized black women without their consent did eugenics!" "And what was wrong with what Hitler and those unethical scientists did?" "What do you mean, what was wrong with them? Hitler killed millions of people! Those unethical scientists ruined people's lives." "And does using genetic engineering to cure diseases kill millions of people, or ruin anyone's life?" "Well...not really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's eugenics!"

Continue reading...

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Ten Tips For Writing A Resume That Will Get The Right Kind Of Attention

Trent at thesimpledollar.com writes:

Over the last month, I’ve helped three different readers polish their resumes as they look to make a major career shift. In each case, I noticed several problems crop up over and over again. These problems weren’t ones that would sink the person, but they did prevent that person from standing out from the crowd, and adding the problems together ended with a forgettable resume.

resume comparison (Photo credit: TheGoogly)

Here are ten things I would always do when writing a resume, regardless of the conventional wisdom about resumes.

1. One page only, period.
This often bothers some people. “I have tons of good things to write about,” they think, so they fill up their resume with six pages of good stuff with just a sprinkling of great stuff in there. Hot tip: it’s not the “good” stuff that will get you the job. The only stuff you want on your resume is the cream of the crop, and that cream will fit on one page. If it doesn’t, you’re not cutting out enough merely “good” stuff.

2. Write everything with active verbs.
Every bullet point on your resume should sound like you took some sort of decisive action, and the more action-oriented, the better. Employers want people who get things done, not people who “participate.” Don’t write that you were involved with a project that produced $5 million in sales, state that you wrote 20,000 lines of code for a project that produced $5 million in sales. Don’t say that you “helped with the development of a new system” – write that you developed that system in a team environment.

3. List everything positive that you can think of about past positions, and use the best.

resume wordle (Photo credit: gloomybrook)

Was there positive growth at the organization while you were there, even if you weren’t directly involved? Mention it. Were you involved, even in a cursory fashion, with a hugely successful project? Mention it. Only mention the things that were clearly and strongly successful on your resume.

4. Be concrete.
Don’t state that you were involved with a hugely successful Project X, state precisely (in an action-oriented form) what your role was with that project, followed by a statement of exactly how successful it was in a quantitative fashion. Don’t state that you were involved with writing a new HR manual – instead, state that you contributed 24 proofread pages to a documentation system used by 25,000 employees. Don’t state that you did some coding for the public interface – state that you wrote 41% of the code for a website used by 2,000,000 visitors a month. If you’ve done the job of trimming things down to only the big successes, these numbers should be impressive ones.

The Insanity Defense: An Intersection of Morality, Public Policy, and Science

by Ronald Schouten, M.D., J.D. in Almost a Psychopath
 

 There are times when the insanity defense, with all the controversy that surrounds it, is in the news. This is one of those times:

• It is highly likely that James Holmes, who is facing 142 felony counts in connection with the Aurora, Colorado shootings on July 22, 2012, will raise an insanity defense. First, he’ll have to be found competent to stand trial, which is a separate issue. http://www.thealmosteffect.com/blog/trying-the-man-who-shot-gabrielle-giffords/

Breivik_GP4 (Photo credit: Uppdragsmedia)

• Anders Breivik admitted to killing 77 Norwegians in July 2011 in a carefully prepared bombing and mass murder, which he claimed was an act of self-defense against Islamization and multiculturalism in Norway. On August 24, 2012, he will learn the court’s verdict. Prosecutors urged the court to find Breivik legally insane, as this would lead to a lifetime of confinement in a mental hospital. Breivik argued against an insanity verdict, because under Norwegian law he could conceivably be released from prison some day, if found guilty.

 • Clayton Osbon, the JetBlue pilot who disrupted a March 27, 2012 flight from Las Vegas to New York by screaming about terrorists and religion, was found not guilty by reason of insanity on July 3, 2012.

What is the Insanity Defense?
 For a person to be convicted of a crime, the prosecution must prove not only that the person engaged in a guilty act (actus reus), but also that he or she had guilty intent (mens rea). If a person does not have criminal intent during an act, no crime occurs: a person who takes someone else’s property, honestly believing it is his own, is not guilty of larceny.

But what about situations in which the person commits the act, and intended to do so, but was suffering from a mental or physical condition that impairs their ability to appreciate that they are doing something wrong or to control their behavior? That’s where the insanity defense comes in.

While the insanity defense is a legal doctrine, at its heart it is the expression of a moral principle found in societies across time and multiple cultures: individuals should not be punished for their otherwise criminal acts if they lack certain characteristics that relate to the ability to engage in rational thinking, including an appreciation of the wrongfulness and consequences of their actions, or control their behavior. Take, for example, children. A five year old who sets fire to the drapes because the flames are pretty, will not be charged with arson when the house burns down. The same is true for people with severe developmental disabilities. What about people who cause harm to others or commit crimes while sleepwalking? Yes, those cases exist, and the defendants are generally not held criminally responsible.

5 crazy inventions from the mind of Nikola Tesla

Earthquake machines! Death rays! Those far-fetched gadgets are part of a plan to build a museum dedicated to one of history's most famous mad scientists

Early 20th century inventor Nikola Tesla was ahead of his time with concepts that ranged from x-rays to robotics. Photo: Herbert Barraud/Getty Images

Nikola Tesla signature (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Matthew Inman, proprietor of web comic The Oatmeal, is on a mission to build a crowd-funded museum dedicated to inventor Nikola Tesla, who Inman refers to as "the greatest geek who ever lived." Inman's goal was to raise $850,000 (which would be matched dollar-for-dollar by a New York state grant) in 45 days. But surprisingly, a little more than a week into it, the online campaign has gathered more than $1.1 million in donations. Many of the inventor's fans think Tesla was more brilliant than his more famous contemporaries, including Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Even though Tesla isn't exactly a household name, his unsung accomplishments and wild imagination have turned him into something of a folk hero. Here, a rundown of five of Tesla's craziest inventions:

Wireless transmission of power and energy demonstration during his high frequency and potential lecture of 1891 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Wireless energy transfer
About 120 years ago at the 1893 World Fair in Chicago, Tesla demonstrated that you could wirelessly transmit electricity by firing up a series of phosphorous light bulbs in a process he called electrodynamic induction. He dreamed that such technology would allow us to one day shoot power over long distances in the atmosphere, supplying distant destinations with the energy needed to live comfortably. Now over a century later, companies such as Intel and Sony are interested in applying the non-radiative energy transfer to things such as cell phones to allow you to charge your battery without messy power cables.

2. X-raysTesla's research in the field of electromagnetism helped give radiologists everywhere the ability to peer into a person's anatomy without cutting them open — a concept that, in the late 1800s, sounded far-fetched. Although German physicist Willhelm Röntgen is widely credited with the discovery of X-rays in 1895, Tesla's own experiments with the technology eight years prior highlighted some of the inherent dangers of using radiation on human flesh.

3. Death ray
In the 1930s Tesla reportedly invented a particle beam weapon that some, ironically, called a "peace ray," says Lauren Davis at io9. "The device was, in theory, capable of generating an intense targeted beam of energy" that could be used to dispose of enemy warplanes, foreign armies, "or anything else you'd rather didn't exist." The so-called "death ray" was never constructed, however, even though Tesla shopped the device around to various military divisions. The plans for the laser were never found after Tesla's death.

4. Robotics
Tesla imagined that, in the future, a race of robots "would be able to perform labor safely and effectively," says io9's Davis. In 1898, he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat he'd invented, which many credit as "being the birth of robotics." He envisioned a world filled with "intelligent cars, robotic human companions, [various] sensors, and autonomous systems."

5. Earthquake machine
"In 1898, Tesla claimed he had built and deployed a small oscillating device that, when attached to his office and operating, nearly shook down the building and everything around it," says Shea Gunther at Revmodo. The device weighed just a few pounds, but Tesla was able to tune the timing of the oscillator at such a frequency that each little vibration added just a little more energy to the wave of flex in the building. "Given enough little pushes, even the largest structure could be shaken apart." Realizing the potential terrors such a device could create, "Tesla said he took a hammer to the oscillator to disable it, instructing his employees to claim ignorance to the cause of the tremors if asked."

Source, Maximum PC, RSNA.org, An Engineer's Aspect, io9, Activist Post, Revmodo

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Tips for Preparing Cover Letters

Cover Letter Wordle Cloud (Photo credit: herzogbr)

A cover letter is an important part of your application submittal. It gives employers an opportunity to evaluate your ability to communicate. They'll be reading to see:

• Do you know the proper form for a business letter?
• Can you string together coherent sentences?
• Are you able to express yourself well on paper?
  

Here are some things to consider when putting your cover letter together:

• A cover letter should draw employers to your resume.
• Don't clutter it with needless facts.
• Keep it brief; no employer wants to read your life's history.
• Tailor it to the position and company to which you are applying; in other words, a cover letter shouldn't be "canned." 
• Begin by explaining why you are writing to this person and where you heard about the job opening. You should include something like "Your job announcement on govtjob.net. caught my attention." 
• Be sure to say why you think you would be a good match for the position. If the advertisement lists several traits or skills the employer wants to see in job applicants, refer to those skills in your letter and say how you exemplify them.
• Mention traits that will set you apart from other candidates. 
• Refer the employer to your resume. You may include a phrase, such as: "During your review of my resume, you may note that my background contains the qualifications and experience you are looking for." This will be a way to reinforce that your qualifications match the job profile.
• Write in a business-like but not overly formal manner; use your own wording.
• Don’t be too pushy. While it is acceptable to state that you are looking forward to meeting the recruiter to explore the position in a personal interview, don’t be presumptuous or state that you will contact the person to arrange an interview.
• Thank the person for his/her time and attention to your application.
• Remember to sign your cover letter.
• Note "enclosure" or "enc." two lines after your signature because your resume is enclosed.
  

Source
 

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Three Quick Job Search Tips

By Kevin Donlin

Here's a collection of job search tips that have helped my clients over the years.
I couldn't think of any clever theme to tie them together, but you know what? So what! The theme here is that these tips work! And they can help you find work, faster.
So here they are. Read them and reap …

1) Create your own momentum

The Big Mo -- you hear about it all the time in sports. Teams with momentum get on a roll, score more often and win more games than teams without it.
If your job search is stuck, you can create your own momentum and move toward the position you want by starting each day with a victory of some sort, no matter how small.

HOLLYWOOD, FL - OCTOBER 05: Lamar Smith (L) speaks with Salvation Army job recruiter, Esther Rush, as he interviews for an opening as a bell ringer in the upcoming Red Kettle Campaign at the Workforce One South Employment Solutions center on October 5, 2012 in Hollywood, Florida. The Labor Department announced today that the United States economy had gained 114,000 jobs in September and the jobless rate fell from 8.1% to 7.8%, which is the first time it's been below 8% since 2009. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Example: Make your first networking call in the morning to your best friend or favorite family member. Why? There's zero chance of rejection and you'll likely hang up the phone smiling (if not, call somebody who makes you smile).
Or, you can call a former co-worker you haven't seen in months to schedule a networking lunch. Or invite your favorite neighbors over for a barbecue where you can ask for advice on your job hunt.
In other words, make your first action a slam dunk -- something you know will turn out well. A successfully completed task every morning will help you tackle more-challenging work later. Because you will have momentum on your side.

2) Ask for help, listen -- and act!

Question: How many people have you asked this month for advice about your job search? If you're absolutely honest in your answer, the number will be small. Too small.

SAN MATEO, CA - JUNE 07: A job seeker looks over employment pamphlets during the Job Hunter's Boot Camp at College of San Mateo on June 7, 2011 in San Mateo, California. As the national unemployment rate sits at 9.1 percent, U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) hosted a Job Hunter's Boot Camp that attracted hundreds of job seekers. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Why put all the pressure on yourself to find all the employment answers? Why not ask and discover what's worked for other people, and then model your actions on theirs?
Here's how to do it. Ask the following question of friends and family: "How did you find your last three jobs?"
Notice, you're NOT asking, "Do you know anyone who's hiring?" or some equally unimaginative, conversation-killing question. Instead of begging for a job, you are flattering others by asking for advice. Just be sure to shut up, listen, and write down every word they say in reply.
I guarantee this "magic question" will give you a plethora of ideas every time you ask it, and open your eyes to new ways of getting hired. Plus, you'll be raising your profile among the people who know you, which will put you "top of mind" with them when employment leads do pop up.
Stop trying to figure it all out on your own. Instead, start multiplying your brainpower by asking others for advice.

3) Know that change is your friend

According to the US Bureau of Labor, voluntary employee turnover across America was 20.20% in 2004, the most recent year available. This means that about one in five employees quit their jobs every 12 months, on average.
What does that mean for you?

HOLLYWOOD, FL - OCTOBER 05: Gloria Richter fills out a job application for the bell ringing openings that the Salvation Army needs to fill in the upcoming Red Kettle Campaign at the Workforce One South Employment Solutions center on October 5, 2012 in Hollywood, Florida. The Labor Department announced today that the United States economy had gained 114,000 jobs in September and the jobless rate fell from 8.1% to 7.8%, which is the first time it's been below 8% since 2009. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Today's "no" in your job search could be tomorrow's "yes." Because, in a company with 100 employees, approximately 20 of them will quit within the next year. That's 20 chances for you to get hired.
But you won't be hired if they don't remember you.
So, every time you hear, "Sorry, we're not hiring," or "We don't have any openings right now," don't despair. Keep in regular touch with the companies you want to work for, because one in five of their employees will probably leave this year. It's only a matter of time until something opens up for you.
Now, go out and make your own luck!

Source

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The Divorcé's Guide to Marriage - Five Lessons Divorced People Learn About Marriage

Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces

Sometimes it takes going through a bad marriage to figure out what makes a good marriage. Five strategies for a successful, happy marriage from divorced people who learned these lessons the hard way. Elizabeth Bernstein has details on Lunch Break. Photo: AFP/GettyImages.

Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.
People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.
Research shows that most divorced people identify the same top five regrets—behaviors they believe contributed to their marriage's demise and that they resolve to change next time. "Divorced individuals who step back and say, 'This is what I've done wrong and this is what I will change,' have something powerful to teach others," says Terri Orbuch, a psychologist, research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research and author of the new book "Finding Love Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship." "This is marriage advice learned the hard way," she says

Dr. Orbuch has been conducting a longitudinal study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, collecting data periodically from 373 same-race couples who were between the ages of 25 and 37 and in their first year of marriage in 1986, the year the study began. Over the continuing study's 25 years so far, 46% of the couples divorced—a rate in line with the Census and other national data. Dr. Orbuch followed many of the divorced individuals into new relationships and asked 210 of them what they had learned from their mistakes. (Of these 210, 71% found new partners, including 44% who remarried.) This is their hard-earned advice.