BouncingBabyBoomer.com

On becoming an "Encore" worker

My hub and I have just become "micro" workers at a large university. I say "micro" since we are each committing small amounts of time for what amounts to micro pay. In his case, it is a 1/4 time position at a pay grade miles below his last full-time salary. In brief, he will be netting less than 1/10th of his former pay to give them 1/4 of his time during the coming year -- all of course with no benefits.

But hey, it's a job. A nice job, in fact, doing something he finds truly neat, bringing business world methods to academic R&D. So it will keep his resume current while doing some good on both sides.

In my case, the pay is more psychic. I have a nice title, a tiny stipend, and a lot of leeway to shape my flex-time role in a campus lab doing brain science. Technically, I am not a real employee; I have a time-limited fellowship sponsored by an outside entity. In business, we would call me a consultant. But "senior fellow" will sound nice on my resume too; and like the hub, I have a smalll quixotic hope it might aid in some way with some real pay some day. If not, at least I will learn some interesting things about current-day research while helping them to communicate.

That may be as win-win as it gets in this frozen economy.

 

We each got our gigs on the same campus at the same time via different routes. He was recruited after his second year judging in a national science fair that put him on the radar at the School of Engineering. I applied for my mine in response to a flyer found on a table after a lecture, and wound up being one of four people picked for a cross-disciplinary program in Psych.

That our offers came around the same time seemed completely coincidental. We did not know when we accepted these posts that we were joining a movement with a name. But, in fact, we are part of a new wave of "Encore" workers filled with Boomers extending careers with new kinds of employment. 

New Feature: BBWZ (Weekly Zeitgeist)

Beginning this week we are starting an experiment.. the Bouncing Boomer Weekly Zeitgeist (BBWZ). It gathers all on one page some especially interesting tidbits and links that bounced on to our radar this week, each of which could have launched a blog post of their own had time and space been sufficient. It will be a quick handy way to share links, quotes, books and sites that made a recent impression before they scroll away.

Click here to read the first edition, then follow the topic "BBWZ."

The Nebulous Gray of Swirling Fog

From the tell us something we didn't know department.. Reuters reported this week on a new Harris poll about how we spend our days. The time we spent working rose by an hour this year  (you already knew you were pedaling harder just to stay in place, didn't you?). Meanwhile, time spent at leisure or play dropped four hours (ditto).

And what are we doing with this 'missing' five hours? The pollsters weren't so sure. They said the time fell into a "nebulous gray area" that the respondents could not easily tag as either work or play.

"As the American economic situation worsened, people who were worried about their jobs spent more time 'just checking in' via computer or wireless device," the folks at Harris observed. I take that to mean time spent commiserating with friends or surfing the web with nothing much to show for it.

 Queasy Worry
" Nebulous gray" is a perfect phrase for the zeitgeist of the moment. We are cloaked in a cloudy haze of queasy worry with an anxious ear cocked for the sound of another shoe dropping.

As I observed on the phone to a friend, it feels like "nothing but frozen tundra out there" even if you are sitting in a sunshine state. Instead it seems all the old signposts are getting lost in a swirling fog.

It used to be you could re-position, or re-invent, or resurrect a dormant part of yourself to adapt, and after decades of life in a roller coaster economy, Boomers got good at bouncing back from setbacks.

But today all the old fallbacks seem to be falling away, and they have yet to be replaced by new beacons of hope.

Health Care Change Gaining Traction?

I don't know about you, but I had the impression that full boat universal health care was going to unfold in phases under Obama. Perhaps I was wrong about that. Syndicated columnist David Sirota reports on Open.Salon that recent developments coming forth from the Democrats and the Obama camp suggest sweeping change is already brewing. Sample: Apparently Rahm Emmanuel told business leaders recently that "incremental increases in coverage won't be acceptable." Even the health care trade group is already telling its members that the industry needs to be making some "real concessions." Link to full article.

How Would You Do in 21st Century Med School?

There is a lot of talk these days about empowering patients to observe their own treatments and be their own advocates. This is supposed to give us a safety net and and reality check in a health care system that is increasingly stressed and error prone.

Somehow I doubt that Joe Doe Patient feels so empowered yet.

Since long before Drs. Kildare and Welby, there has been a mystical veil around matters medical. Doctors belonged to a rarefied order with its own language and rituals that only the most robust of minds could enter. It all left a lasting impression in the minds of many observers that mere mortals should not aspire to become physicians.

 

So what would you think here in 2008 if I told you that I was going to take a group of high school frosh and sophs with no prior training in science, and run them through a first year med school course in the pathology of disease?

What would you predict? Would you expect them all to flunk, or perhaps a few to at least earn a C, or maybe an eager beaver or two to earn an A or B? 

Keep on reading to see.

My First Thought for Today (11/5/08)

Happy New Era to US all!!!! (she said while tagging this post to every category on this blog where I now feel more optimistic than I did yesterday)

Is a "Singularity" Near? Learning more about Ray K., part 1

 As mentioned last post, there will be a "Singularity Summit" this weekend in San Jose (at The Tech Museum on Friday and the Montgomery Theatre on Saturday with discounts on tickets here.)

The summit is the brainchild of inventor-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, in partnership with IEEE, the engineering society. But the conference is not all and only about the visions of Kurzweil; it is a convening of several big thinkers and scientists sharing updates on everything from nanotech to artificial intelligence.

For those not already familiar with Ray, this might be an apt time to share from a couple presentations I myself gave about his ideas last year. Whatever you think about his specific predictions, his understanding of history is compelling and his sense of the future is fascinating.

For the next few days I will be folding in snips from my own speaking notes as a preface to what I will later report from the conference itself.

In his book, The Singularity, Ray Kurzweil makes the case that life as we know it is about to radically change. Within a scant few decades, perhaps as soon as 2030, he predicts we will see a "Big Bang" when exponential growth in our understanding of the brain converges with explosive growth in machine intelligence plus nanotech, and the boundaries between man and machine become blurred. How much of this prediction is likely how soon has been a topic of dispute, so much so that IEEE devoted a special issue to this topic last year.

What follows is some detail from the Kurzweil book, interspersed with my own reflections.