ThansCorner

More employees jump ship as economy improves (AP)

This is excellent news.  The fact that people have enough confidence to quit their current jobs in search of new ones is incredibly heartening.

As we worked our way out of this recession, companies cut back on everything they possibly could to get the bottom line out of the gutter.  The broad positive earnings across the board released last quarter are proof that they were effective in their efforts.  A big effect of these cuts was a greater workload for those who did not get fired.  Productivity skyrocketed because people with jobs were just happy to have them, and worked extra hard to keep them.

Still, unemployment stayed relatively high since companies felt less need to hire given the greater productivity they were enjoyed.  Fortunately employee confidence has risen and people feel they can find better jobs.  Companies across the board will have to give their employees a break or risk losing them to those who will – and this means hiring more people to take off the load.  Good news for job-seekers and excellent news for the economy.  

Now if we could only get over this European debt thing…

When looking for something in Google Maps, sometimes it’s nice to browse.  Say you’re looking for a campground in a certain area, or all of the restaurants in a city, or the location of the nearest amusement park or apartments nearby.  Or say you’re curious about all of the nuclear waste repositories in the world or the locations of all cities that have hosted the Olympic Games or all of the locations with free Wifi in Wisconsin.

Google MyMaps allow users to organize locations into collections and share them with the world.  To search for MyMaps that fit what you’re looking for, go to Google Maps, click the link for “Show Search Options” and select “User-created maps” from the menu.  Have fun!

I heard an interview the other day with Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.  The basic idea is that the brain is a flexible machine that grows and improves itself based on how it is used.  If you spend a lot of time practicing an activity, like playing the piano, your brain is designed to emphasize those skills so that it’s better suited for each subsequent try.  While the brain is improving in one area, however, those that remain unused don’t get the same type of attention.

Mr. Carr’s argument suggests that throuh years of surfing the web and becoming daily more immersed in the online experience, we have trained our brains to be good at that type of interaction.  Reading an article, we expect lots of links and widgets pulling in and exposing lots of information at one time.  The very activity – “surfing” – expresses the flowing nature which is really good for absorbing a broad range of information at once.  This breadth, however, comes at the cost of depth.  Just as Nicholas describes, we find ourselves leaping from thing to thing without the same kind of focus and dedication as we might with a long news article or chapter of a book.

Conversations come in short chat or text messages, squeezed in between or layered on top of other activities.  At any given time, I have access to huge wealths of information, but not the time or focus to get into any of it.  It takes real work to hone in on the details of anything and we’ve been training ourselves to do be bad at exactly this.  Skimming the surface can be great, but it comes at a cost.  It will be a sad day when generations begin to grow up in a world of hyper-experience, without the grounding of concrete and focused interaction with the world.

NPR Interview with Nicholas Carr