This is hilarious and educational. Ze Frank explains how to vent one’s impotent rage when replying to e-mails while maintaining one’s professional integrity. Herein lies Ze Frank’s exquisite advice.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Ah, the wonderful careers we pondered when we were young. I can only recall ever having two career dreams for myself: when in elementary school, I knew absolutely that I would become an elementary school teacher when I grew up, and in high school I changed my mind and wanted to earn my degrees in physical therapy.

Practical and lacking incredibly in imagination, I know. What a lame kid I was. Didn’t I ever want to be a queen or a ballerina? Nope. I would have totally ganged up with the Dukes of Hazard, and in the fourth grade, during the 1984 Olympics, I spent a few months trying to work out how I could actually become Mary Lou Retton (cute, short, and all gymnastics-y, just like fourth-grade me).

The most impractical my real dreams and aspirations ever were: the bizarre number of graduate degrees I felt I needed to hold in order to follow my teaching/physical therapy paths. I was always certain that my working life would not begin until I had at east one PhD on my wall. Why? I have no good answer other than the fact that I thought my grandparents were all amazing and had all been academic badasses.

There’s a study in Britain that’s been going on for over fifty years, called the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study. When this group hit the age of eleven, the children were asked to write 30-minute essays about what their lives would be like at the age of 25. It’s fascinating to read how clear their plans were at age eleven, and how things turned out when reality hit.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(when I grow up…)

Meat school! That might be it. That may be all I’ve got to say about this NPR story. Meat school. One can attend meat school. It makes sense, of course. How else would one learn to cut meat in the days of supermarkets, Styrofoam, and the possibly extinct neighborhood butcher?

Meat school, however odd it sounds, is actually a good thing. The month-long intensive certificate course at SUNY’s meat lab in Cobleskill, near Albany, teaches everything a student needs to know to run their own small meat-processing business. Graduates can then do good things, like keep well-raised, local, small-farm meats local. The farmers can send their animals to a nearby small slaughterhouse, have their meat prepared and handled by a professional.

Raising meat that has been treated well is a lot of work. In the end it’s worth it, as it’s better for the animals, the planet, and the consumer. It would be a shame, and a bit of a backward path, if the animals were raised so particularly only to be shipped off to a slaughterhouse and a market hundreds of miles away. It’s better to do all that work for yourself and your neighbors.

The phrase “meat school” is still weird. Meat school meat school meat school meat school. I’ve thought it too many times. The phrase has lost all meaning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

We’re all in agreement that economic recessions bite, yes? Since reading this article, I’ve read nothing but articles and sound bites and commentary that all state basically the same thing: The Baby Boomers are getting old(er). Anyone working in the healthcare industry will have an excellent chance to maintain their jobs, careers, and mortgage payments despite the economic downturn. Let the healthcare-ing of the aging process begin!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Sports psychologists and what they do for athletes used to be something of a deep dark secret in the world of athletics. Increasingly they are being viewed as necessary, secondary only to coaches and practice.

Athletes are viewed as the strongest, sleekest, fastest humans on the planet. They are also supposed to maintain an inhuman level of cool calm through the thousands of intense fight-or-flight moments they encounter in their athletic careers. Coolly composed and bizarrely perfect, they perform their made-for-slow-motion moves with an amazing combination of pure instinct and well-planned execution.

They are also supposed to win. Every time. No slacking, not even at practice. All available asses must be annihilated at every waking moment of every day or the fame/prestige/money/contract goes away. Don’t fuck it up, kid. Don’t get hurt. Never ever, even for a second, can you be second best. You’re either a winner or you’re a loser. Win at all costs or we take it all away.

Stunning: an athlete in mid-motion, all body and a quiet mind. Totally focused on making his/her body move with immaculate perfection. Heartbreaking: an athlete frozen in place, a loud mind and an unmovable body. Drowning under pressure from all sides.

Help them get out of their heads. Like all people perceived to be superheroes, athletes have dark sides. Sports psychologists can pull them up and out.

Further Reading:

Ron Artest Thanks Psychiatrist After Lakers Win
Ron Artest Did Not Shrink From Psychotherapy
Wired for Draft Success: Scouting Players with Computer Models and Psychoanalysis
Mind Games: The Psychology of Champions
Western Washington Univ: MS Sport Psychology
Oregon State University: Graduate Studies in Sport and Exercise Psychology
UT Knoxville: Graduate Program in Sport Psychology
Sports Psychology Information

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s a marvelous sign when institutions of higher learning join forces to make the world a better place.

From the UMN press release:

– New partnership links IonE with Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund –

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/30/2010) —The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment today announced a new partnership with the Natural Capital Project, a worldwide effort to align economic forces with conservation. The other partners include Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.

Founded in 2006, the Natural Capital Project aims to mainstream the values of nature into major resource decisions. Working with public, private and nonprofit partners around the world, “NatCap” is developing practical, science-based software for mapping and valuing societal benefits provided by healthy ecosystems. The Natural Capital Project is using this software in major policy decisions now underway in Canada, China, Hawaii, Indonesia, South America and Tanzania.

The Natural Capital Project is led by an interdisciplinary team of scientists and project leaders from Stanford, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund. U of M applied economics professor Steve Polasky, an IonE resident fellow, is one of the leaders of the project’s ecosystem service mapping and valuation effort. This new partnership will increase opportunities for collaboration between IonE and other Natural Capital researchers and collaborators.

“We would be nowhere without the world-class expertise and experience from U of M, and we’re thrilled to recognize that formally now by teaming up as full partners,” said Gretchen Daily, Stanford-based co-founder and chair of the project.

“The Natural Capital Project is one of the most important environmental projects in the world,” said Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment. “It’s answering one of the really big questions: How much is nature worth, and how do we start to include ecosystem goods and services into our economic system? By joining this project, the Institute on the Environment will be working with world-class ecologists, economists and practitioners, and in return, we will be contributing our expertise in ecological economics, land use and agriculture, and environmental systems modeling. It’s a fabulous partnership for everyone involved.”

You can learn more about the Natural Capital Project here: http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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ConstructionManagementDegree.org has a list of 100 Awesome Business Blogs That Are Better Than an MBA. It’s like a goldmine of information for MBA do-it-yourselfers.

The list is broken down into the following categories:

Small Business and Entrepreneur Blogs and Resources
Marketing Blogs and Solutions
General Business Blogs
Human Resources and Ethics Blogs
MBA Survival Guides and Business Career Blogs
Economy Trends and News
Investing News and Financial Blogs
Resources for Business Women
Online Business Blogs and Tools
Management Resources and Information
Harvard Business Heavy Hitters

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Morbidly funny in a tragic, effed-up sort of way: watching patients in busy, understaffed medical facilities croak so someone can save some money. Don’t even get me started. Let’s move right along to the positive angle: studies have shown (really? They needed studies?) that improving nurse-patient ratios keeps more patients alive. Who could have predicted those results?! My mind has been blown. Dude.

You can read the whole NY Times op-ed here. I feel confident it will blow your mind, too.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Any current or prospective MBA students out there looking for advice? Aswini Anburajan is currently working on her MBA at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge in the UK. In her post she explains what she’d been hoping for when she embarked on her current education adventure, and what she’s figured out along the way.

It’s not what she thought it would be; some bits are better, some aren’t, but all of it has helped her make solid realizations about the business world, the real world, and the interactions among humans that thread through everything.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Researchers analyzed 30,000 teens and the relationship between screen time (tv, video games, surfing the net, etc.) and the teens’ tendency toward experiencing routine backache and headaches. The study was just released, and the findings boil down to this: cumulative screen time, even in young, healthy bodies, causes headaches and back pain.

I’m pretty sure this can easily be applied to college students and full-fledged adults as well. Ergonomics, massage therapy, and a reduction in screen time: Know it. Live it. Love it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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