Wow, who would have thought the blonde bombshell would stop worrying about Ken and her hot pink Corvette and take a day job like the rest of us (well most of the rest of us). Barbie is becoming a computer engineer, surprising cause I thought most of that work got outsourced to Dubai, ah but I digress, continue reading to hear about all the bells and technological whistles this new Barbie comes with…
“Barbie, whose various careers have taken her from aerobics instructor to supermodel to business executive, will next be a computer engineer, a career chosen by half a million Barbie fans.
Computer Engineer Barbie still has her trademark cascade of blond hair, impossibly small waist, feet frozen on tiptoes to slide into her high heels and a whole lot of hot pink.
She also wears a neon-colored T-shirt with a binary code pattern and carries a smartphone and a Bluetooth headset. Her hot pink glasses will come in handy during late nights coding on her hot pink laptop. Before any one begins complaining, Mattel points out that her accessories were chosen with the help of the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering.
Computer engineer will be the 126th career for Barbie, who turned 50 last year. For the first time, Mattel, which makes the doll, asked people to vote for her career, choosing among computer engineer, architect, environmentalist, news anchor and surgeon.”
It seems like I do the same thing every week and I’m tired of it. The mornings are a great example of that. Everyday when I wake up I head to the library to update my blog and check my e-mail. I’m tired of it. What can I do though? I am tired of this so much. That’s why a job is so important to me. I’m tired of living like this. It’s time to change my schedule so things will become exciting again.
The American Red Crosshelps vulnerable people around the world to prevent, prepare for and respond to disasters, complex humanitarian emergencies and life-threatening health conditions. As a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and one of more than 20 National Societies working with PMI in Indonesia, the American Red Cross is currently implementing its development programs in Banda Aceh, Aceh Utara, Lamno and Calang with a liaison office in Jakarta.
The American Red Cross (ARC) carried out a large water and sanitation (WatSan) program in approximately 70 tsunami affected villages in the province of Aceh. The program consists of hygiene promotion education, construction of water supplies, construction of sanitation systems and training of communities and their representatives in how to operate and maintain the constructed systems.
American Red Cross is hiring an international Team Leader to evaluate the program. The evaluation will start on May 31, 2010 and will run for approximately 5 weeks.
Due to the size and geographical spread of the program the ARC wishes will be hiring an Indonesian Hygiene Promotion and Communicty Mobilization expert and an Indonesian engineering expert to assist the Team Leader. This Terms of Reference is for the Indonesian Hygiene Promotion and Community Mobiliziation Consultant, referred to below as the Consultant.
Practical Arrangements
· The base location for the assignment will be Banda Aceh, Indonesia
· The Consultant will be paid for each day worked based on the IFRC salary scale for a grade K staff member.
· The Consultant will be paid a per diem in line with IFRC regulations for each day worked outside the base location of Banda Aceh.
· The ARC will reimburse the consultants costs for travelling to Banda Aceh from the Consultant’s home to Banda Aceh and returning.
· ARC will provide 1millionRp worth of phone credit to the consultant for the duration of the evaluation
· The ARC will provide transportation and accommodation for the consultant
· Reports shall be provided in the English language.
Requirements
The Consultant shall have
· A degree in engineering related to public health, hygiene promotion or education
· A minimum of 10 years of experience of hygiene promotion and/or community mobilization
· A minimum of 2 years of experience working with disaster or relief projects with international NGOs
· Experience working in rural villages and small towns in Indonesia
· Knowledge and demonstrable experience of conducting hygiene promotion and education related to water and sanitation issues
· Knowledge and demonstrable experience of mobilization and organization of communities in rural Indonesian around specific issues
· Good skills at interviewing and documenting
· Fluent English
· Fluent Bahasa Indonesia
· Acehnese language is preferential but not required
Tasks
The objectives of the evaluation are to determine
· How well the WatSan projects were planned and implemented with respect to the Program objectives
· Determine the appropriateness and adequacy of the operation and maintenance aspects of the WatSan program in the local circumstances and to what degree sustainability of the program can be expected
· The degree to which the Program objectives were met
More detail on particular aspects of these questions will be provided to the consultant by the Team Leader and by ARC management.
The Consultant will accompany the Team Leader during the initial phase of understanding the project and planning how the evaluation will be carried out in the field. Following this the Consultant will initially accompany the Team Leader on the evaluation of the program in one of the ten geographic areas where the program operates to conduct a joint evaluation with the Team Leader. Following this the Consultant will travel independently to other geographic areas and conduct evaluations of projects in those areas independently. The Consultant will pay particular interest to his/her areas of expertise as previously planned with the Team Leader. The Team Leader may choose to send the engineering expert with the Constant and should that be the case the Consultant will work closely with that individual. At all times the Consultant shall keep close communication with the Team Leader and will regularly debrief the Team Leader and ARC management of information
that has been found. Following field work the Consultant will meet the Team Leader again and will work with the Team Leader to produce the draft report for the evaluation.
Outputs
For each individual project that the Consultant evaluates independently the Consultant shall provide to the Team Leader a short report with a length of less than two page. The report shall describe the project and the findings under the three main questions of the evaluation (listed above). The report shall also include conclusions, lessons learned, and a list of persons met and documents consulted.
The Consultant will also be responsible with the Team Leader for the production of the draft report for the evaluation.
Please submit your application and curriculum vitae in English to hr@amredcross.org, placing the job title in the subject line and label your CV with your name (CV max. 500KB size). Only short listed candidates will be notified. Applications submitted after February 18, 2010will be not considered. Female candidates are encouraged to apply.
I often talk to clients and when they say they need to hire a candidate they inevitably tell me they need a candidate who can hit the ground running. With the limit on money and resources they need someone who can do the required tasks with minimal supervision.
I often say the that the perfect candidate is the one that just left. That is the candidate that can perform the tasks at 100%.
Over the years I have started to see that getting the person that closest resembles the job description may not always be the best choice. The best choice maybe a technically strong, great communicator with initiative that has to something to gain by choosing the company.
I know that may sound backwards. The benefit needs to be mutually beneficial. A win for both employee and employer. what happens in 12-18 months passes and the person does not feel that they have a place to grow and flourish. They start looking for another opportunity.
I had a candidate yesterday that turned down the job because it was a lateral move. He was looking to improve his skills. He was looking for the opportunity to stretch his technical skills.
He did not want to lose the technical skills he had so hard to gain. His technical skills would start to dwindle.
I like to work out but I do not like to work out on “Legs” day. I know that since I do not squat, lunge, or leg press that often that when I do my muscles have started to lose some of their strength. My muscles have started shrink or have gone into a basis muscle atrophy.
Per Wikipedia when you muscles go into atrophy it “decreases quality of life as the sufferer becomes unable to do certain tasks or worsen the risks of accidents while performing those”. Those things you do not use you lose.
We have all heard the saying “use it or lose it”.
That saying applies in muscles and knowledge. When looking for that right candidate you can think about today but make sure the long-term benefit will be a good fit as well.
I plan to graduate this summer (July, 2010). Therefore, I am actively searching for a job. My long term goal is to understand the unsupervised learning process in the brain. So far, my training defines me as a computational neuroscientist; I have studied neuroscience, computation theory, signal processing, machine learning, dynamical systems, information theory and spike train analysis. Working with collaborators, I have done experiments on (rat cortical) neural cultures, analyzed lobster olfactory population coding, and studied discriminability of noise stimulation in rat auditory system. To continue my career, I am looking for opportunities to work with systems neuroscientists. With my strong theoretical background, I would like to analyze data, develop robust methods, design experiments for in vivo experiments, and formulate neural coding and learning principles.
Brain is intrinsically noisy, yet robust. How information is coded is strongly limited by what kinds of noise is present in the system. In the neuron’s point of view, if two incoming signals cannot be discriminated well due to noise, they must be treated as being similar. If the brain is highly optimized to process signals, a good signal similarity measure and noise model would coincide. My short term goal is to extend and apply the statistical analysis methods for spike trains to multivariate in vivo data. This will be a stepping stone for understanding neural code, and deriving plausible unsupervised learning algorithms.
Another aspect of neural coding in the brain that is not widely studied currently is the context dependence. It has been observed that individual neurons are not tuned for just one task, but participate in multiple tasks in a non-stationary manner. It seems that the neural ensemble is formed depending on the dynamic state. Compared to the widely used static neural tuning analysis, a dynamic neural code analysis is a much more challenging and data demanding task due to the higher degree of freedom in modeling. Using dynamic modeling techniques from machine learning, and signal processing, I propose to analyze context dependent population neural code, and decode using Bayesian filter like techniques. The similarity that can be induced from the variability of neural signals can be used to induce a Hilbert space such that kernel based algorithms can be efficiently implemented for modeling.
I’m open to both faculty and postdoc opportunities in US and Europe. Please contact via email |memming|at|cnel|.|ufl|.|edu| for more information.
I was going through a pretty tough time after school was over… trying to find a job during a recession is not the easiest. And when people are constantly telling you that you aren’t trying hard enough or doing it the ‘right way‘, when you’ve just handed out numerous amount of resumes and have done loads of call backs… all you get is ‘Thanks for coming by, but we’re not hiring at the moment’. It can be stressful and feel very defeating… and then those lucky people with jobs start complaining about their work, I ask them if they want to trade places with me and suddenly they keep quiet.
Here I am, five months later, I have the greatest job I could ask for, with the greatest co-workers there could be, and the best manager I could ever imagine. I could really see myself there in years time. All this waiting for what I want, and not just taking any job, or what others say I should take, and here I am at the work place that I really wanted.
Good things DO happen. It just takes time, hard work and patience.
Having a job doesn’t stop parenthood for me. Why would the job search be any different? Kids don’t need less when you’re unemployed, actually it seems they need more. So when I write a blog, read an article or answer questions for people in the job search, I always want to know about their family situation.
A mid 30’s woman with no kids, living alone in the job search is much different and a mid 30’s mother of two, married with a mortgage.
I see the balance as the most important issue. You have to make sure your family is balanced. Not to much time in any one spot so that their energy is even spread out. Especially the kids. Try taking a long drive, let alone write a resume with your child playing in the same room. It’s impossible.
So I suggest aligning the job search with time the kids are at daycare, dance lessons & especially school. If your kids are young and only have half days, it’s even more important to align that time.
But enough from me, what do you think? How do you balance parenthood and the job search?
