Employers Look at GPA

According to an article in The New York Times, the factor that matters most to many employers is a recent college graduate’s grade-point average.

In the article, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., senior vice president of human resources for the IAC/InterActiveCorp, says "he has found that a young applicant’s G.P.A. is the best single predictor of job performance in the first few years of employment. . . . G.P.A. is the best indicator an individual is likely to succeed. . . . It demonstrates a strong work ethic and smarts."

The article also reports that the National Association of Colleges and Employers' Job Outlook 2007 survey "found that 66 percent of employers screen candidates by G.P.A."

In fact, Tory Johnson, the chief executive of Women for Hire in New York, "tells recent graduates never to put a grade-point average that is below 3.0 on a résumé. 'That is like saying "Hi, I’m mediocre," ' she says."

So what to do if your GPA is not above a 3.0? Here are a few tips from human resource directors:

• Omit your GPA. If you get through the first cut, you may have a later chance to explain your grades.
  
• Play up your GPA in your major. If your overall GPA looks low, then use the 3.1 that you earned in your major discipline.
• Play up your GPA in your senior and junior years, if they are an improvement over your first college years.
• If you were working your way through school, supporting a family, or dealing with family illness, then say so. These can be admirable reasons for a lower GPA.
  

Better yet, avoid the problem altogether by realizing how important that GPA may be and working hard now to achieve a good one.

Source: Those Low Grades in College May Haunt Your Job Search

National Geographic's Top 10

National Geographic News offers the year in review through image and word:

• Top Ten Stories of 2006
• Top Ten Photos of 2006
• Top Ten Videos of 2006

Scary Mary

We've blogged about remix movie trailers before, but this one takes the cake. Scary Mary is Mary Poppins recut as a horror movie trailer. You'll never look at Julie Andrews the same way again.

How to Spend Your Money

If you received gifts of money over the holidays, there are experts in cyberspace who will cheerfully advise you on how to spend it. Two credible sources recently have come to our attention:

• Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide and Almanac (PDF): (Uncle) Mark Hurst says, "Sure, plenty of websites and magazines – even Consumer Reports – can give you 17 different options of digital cameras, but that doesn’t help much. You’re not asking to see all the available choices. . . . A better question is, which ONE product should you buy, and why?" Uncle Mark tells you which one product to buy among all the major consumer technology products.
• Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools: "Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. I am chiefly interested in stuff that is extraordinary, better than similar products, little-known, and reliably useful for an individual or small group." Use the categories in the left-hand margin to find your interest areas.
  

An Oral History of the War in Iraq

For its 45th anniversary issue (November/December 2006), The Columbia Journalism Review has published Into the Abyss - Reporting Iraq 2003-2006: An Oral History.

In its introduction, the CJR says, "we interviewed [Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz] Fassihi and forty-six other journalists who have covered the war in Iraq. Out of their anecdotes and insights we constructed an oral history — the first of its kind. These people are covering the most significant story of our time and doing it under circumstances that nearly defy belief. They have lived and studied 'the situation' closely, some of them for four years or more. This is their story."

In their comments, reporters speak candidly about the cross-cultural aspects of covering the war. Excerpts:

Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

I know how religious the people in Iraq are, how traditional they are with regard to gender relations and stuff like that. I would see certain stuff and I would just cringe and want to say [to U.S. soldiers], “You guys are really, really making a bad name for yourself here by storming into this guy’s house with your shoes on. This guy’s done nothing and yet you’re going to make an enemy out of him because he’s gonna talk about you guys for the rest of his life, and that day when they came storming into my house with their shoes on — nobody walks into my house with their shoes on!"

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post

It became clear that you didn’t want to go to some of these places after dark. Even with that, you still got around pretty well through the summer of 2003 and into the fall of 2003. After, it became evident that a lot of contractors were driving around in Jeep Cherokees that looked like ours, I took one and then the second of four SUVs to Sadr City and did the Baghdad equivalent of Pimp My Ride. For sixty bucks, I had it sandblasted and had it painted to look like an Iraqi taxi cab. The really nice paint job on this $90,000 vehicle was stripped off and it was made to look like a ghetto mobile, like a Shiite ghetto mobile from Sadr City. . . .

Elizabeth Palmer, CBS

I've been struck by how essentially humane a lot of the soldiers are, with a very strong sense of right and wrong, which I think comes with growing up in America. And how ill-equipped they were to apply that to a situation like Iraq, without enough historical or geographical or cultural knowledge to actually — unless they were under the command of a very gifted officer, and there are some who are extremely well-equipped, but a lot of them are not — to apply that sort of fairness to Iraqi society. I feel that a huge majority of them are good men trapped in an impossible situation and have not really understood where they are historically, as well as culturally and physically. I think they’re hostages of a terrible situation as well; it’s given me enormous sympathy for them, and certainly a new appreciation for how ill-prepared they were for the mission, at least in the early days.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing recommends the graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report that was created by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, saying, "The adaptation works surprisingly well. The Report is notoriously easy-to-read and gripping, more thriller than bureaucratic tome, and its most important conclusions are well suited to being depicted in sequential art."

You can read the first chapter online at Slate.

Faux Pas, Nation by Nation

Wikipedia has useful and amusing articles on national expectations of etiquette. Examples:

• Australia & New Zealand: "When riding alone in a taxi, it is considered more polite to sit in the front passenger seat next to the driver. However, it is not considered impolite for women to choose the back seat if the driver is male, especially at night."
• European countries: "Avoid hand gestures with which one is unfamiliar; many hand gestures are impolite. Also, some gestures have different meanings in different cultures. For example, a variation of the thumb-to-index finger "okay" sign is an obscene gesture in some European countries."
• Scandinavia: "Not finishing one's food implies that the taste or quality was poor and it could not be eaten or the host does not correctly serve the quantity of food one needs."
• Middle East: "Among Muslims, the left hand is reserved for bodily hygiene and considered unclean. Thus, the right hand should be used for eating. Shaking hands or handing over an item with one's left hand is an insult."
• India: "It is considered immature and hoggish to open a gift in front of the person who has given it. Gifts are opened in private."

"They Call Me Naughty Lola"

"Shy, ugly man, fond of extended periods of self-pity, middle-aged, flatulent and overweight, seeks the impossible. Box no. 8623."

"Things I won't do for love include replacing corroding soil pipes and trepanning at home. Everything else is A-OK. Eager-to-please woman (36) seeks domineering man to take advantage of her flagging confidence. Tell me I'm pretty, then watch me cling, at box no. 3286."

"They call me Naughty Lola. Run-of-the-mill beardy physicist (M, 46). Box. 4023."

Since 1998, the London Review of Books has featured a column of remarkable personal ads. Now, the LRB advertising director--David Rose--has gathered the most memorable of these eccentric ads into a collection called They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books.

All personal ads are a wonderful exercise in concise writing, but those from the LRB serve up something extra: wordplay, wit, erudition, and "the occasional philosophical reference."

They are also often self-deprecating and brutally honest. One ad starts, "I’ve divorced better men than you." Surely this volume deserves a home in the Christmas stocking of someone you know.

• Personal ads from the current issue of LBR
  
• Review from The New York Times
• Review from Salon.com

Faces of the Fallen

According to washingtonpost.com, we have lost 3,294 American service men and women in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom (based on reports as of 20Dec06). The Washington Post honors these casualties with Faces of the Fallen.

PBS's Online NewsHour provides a similar service in its Honor Roll.

Department of Your Government Cares about You

The National Institutes of Health provides free MP3 audio reports at NIH Radio.

Phishing

According to the FBI, phishing has become the leading type of internet fraud and costs billions of dollars a year:

"The typical phishing attack involves the scammer sending the victim an e-mail message, which appears to be from a legitimate business. The e-mail message requests the victim to update, or verify, personal information by clicking on a link in the e-mail message. This link will take the victim to what appears to be a legitimate company web page. However, the web page is actually a well designed phony web page, which only looks authentic . When the victim enters personal information into the web page, the victim is actually supplying information directly to the scammer."

Here's how the FBI says to avoid phishing:

1. Never use the links or phone numbers contained in an email that asks you to verify personal information. Legitimate institutions never ask for this information electronically.
2. To verify any unexpected emails, call your financial institution using a trusted phone number--the number printed on your bank statement or on the back of your credit card.
3. Keep your anti-virus software and firewall up-to-date.

For more guidance, see the articles on phishing from Yahoo! Tech.

British Museum | Ancient Greece

The British Museum has developed a wonderful online exhibit about Ancient Greece for children aged 9-11.

Featuring objects from the British Museum's collection, the site's staff room provides plenty of ideas and resources for teachers, too.

TV's Great Writer

David Milch is the dark writing genius behind NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues, and Deadwood. MIT World provides a lecture by Milch from last spring, when Milch appeared as part of MIT's Television in Transition lecture series.

When asked about the inspiration for his writing, Milch reveals how his life has intersected with his work:

Prodded to reflect on some of his twisted but charismatic TV characters, Milch says, "My old man used to beat me pretty good. And I adored him. He wound up taking his own life." That’s for starters. Milch goes on to describe his surgeon father’s gangland relatives; his father’s suicide; and where he’d learned that his father had died (at a "pitch" meeting). It should not surprise, then, that Milch deeply understands "the torment some souls are exposed to." He has suffered bouts of heroin and alcohol addiction, and describes himself as an obsessive-compulsive who doesn’t let his hands touch anything while writing, and so dictates his TV scripts.

Video length -- 1:23:15.

The Wealth of American Slang

cube farm*
prairie-dogging*
idea hamster*

A charming interview on NPR's All Things Considered introduces Paul Dickson's 3rd edition of Slang: The Topical Dictionary of Americanisms.

---

* Dickson says that the American office environment has been a rich source of new slang terms during the 10 years since the previous volume. A cube farm is an office filled with cubicles. Prairie-dogging occurs when a loud noise happens and heads pop up over the tops of cubicles trying to see what's going on. Idea hamsters are people who always seem to have their idea generators running.

American Essays

The charm of the essay lies in the fact that it is not formal, that it may be whimsical in its point of departure, and capricious in its ramblings after it has got itself under way. --Introduction, Brander Mathews

Hooray for expired copyrights! Brander Matthews's The Oxford Book of American Essays (1914) is available online via Bartleby.com. Some of America's finest essay-writers appear here (of the--ahem--male persuasion . . . after all, these selections were made with academia's prejudices of 1914).

When speaking of the essay, Northwest College professor Renee Dechert refers to Montaigne, saying that the essay form allows us to watch "a mind at work"--to observe an intelligence work its way through the tangle of thought.

LIFE

LIFE | A Journey through Time is a stunning exhibit of photographs by Frans Lanting, composed around the history of life on earth.

In addition to exhibits & performances and a book, LIFE has a wonderful online exhibit that's worth a visit.

"I Yam What I Yam"

"View the early 'Popeye' strips from a distance, and you notice that they're almost all about class stratification: the WASP-y, middle-class turned nouveau-riche Oyl family exploiting the determinedly lower-class Popeye, with his immigrant's tortured English and willingness to undergo incredible suffering in the hopes of catching a break. Which he never will . . .."

Fantagraphics Books has brought out the first volume of E.C. Segar's Popeye comic strip. With five more volumes projected, the books will chart the progress of Popeye from his early appearances in "Thimble Theatre" to his becoming a huge franchise and an American icon.

In this first volume (up to 1930), there's no spinach, no "Swee'Pea, no Alice the Goon, no Jeep, barely any of the Sea Hag and, most regrettably, no J. Wellington Wimpy." But there is the full cast of Olive Oyl's family (including Castor Oyl, Nana Oyl, Cole Oyl, and Cylinda Oyl).

As Salon.com points out, these early strips show Segar learning his craft, but Popeye appears as "an independent-minded brawler whose good humor masked the effects of a life as rough as anyone on the funny pages has ever endured."

• For more on this topic, see Cartoon America, a Library of Congress exhibit.