Seth’s blog

A new study has found that older people with less omega-3 in their blood are more likely to suffer from dementia. The study involved about 1000 persons 65 or older randomly sampled from two Italian towns. They were given mental tests and divided into three groups: no cognitive impairment; cognitive impairment but not demented; and demented. In addition, their blood was measured. Worse mental function was more strongly associated with total omega-3 fatty acids (p = .01) than any of the other fatty acid measures.

One more reason to think that consuming more omega-3 might improve your brain function.

A 1924 magazine article called “Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men” contains this:

Every year I picked up a half-dozen live young fellows who seemed to have a capacity for hard work, and shoved them in at the bottom of the pile, letting them make their way up to the better air and sunlight at the top — if they had it in them to do it. For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative.

The notion of not hiring college grads now seems absurd, perhaps because the fraction of people who go to college has gone way up. But it’s hard to believe that the selection pressures operating within colleges have changed. College professors are still a tiny fraction of the population.

I came across this magazine article randomly browsing but this quote is another way of saying what two of my recent posts — my student’s term project about overcoming stage fright, and about jobbook.org – were about. If most people must spend four years in a place (college) where those in charge (professors) value only a small fraction of their abilities, a lot is lost.

jobbook.org, a website to help students choose careers, is up. Aaron Swartz and I have been working on it for several months. We hope that it will eventually contain lots of first-hand information about jobs so that students (and anyone else) can learn what the jobs they are interested in are really like. Aaron has called it an “encyclopedia of jobs.”

To decide what to do, Aaron and I visited several schools around the Bay Area. At San Francisco State, a nursing student said, “I’m a nursing major, but I barely know what nurses do.” When I was in school, I could have said the same thing: By deciding to go to graduate school in experimental psychology I was choosing to become a “professor major” but I knew little about what professors did. Even as a graduate student I barely knew what they did. This reflects a truth about modern life: It is hard to learn what jobs are like. You can do an internship, but schools like UC Berkeley don’t make that easy. And internships take a lot of time. The goal of jobbook.org is to provide the same information much more easily.

jobbook.org is a wiki — a Wikipedia-llke website than anyone can edit. We hope that people on both sides — people with job knowledge and people who want job knowledge — will contribute.

If you have a job (any job!), we hope that you will offer to be interviewed about it. (To make that offer, just add your job, location, and contact info to the home page.) You don’t need to wait to be interviewed: You can simply describe an actual day of your job and add that description to the site.

If you are interested in learning about any job, we hope that you will request an interview. (To make that request, just add the job and your contact info to the home page.)

We hope that these offers and requests will produce interview transcripts that will be added to the site. If you know of a helpful link (such as a book or magazine article), we hope you will add it.

Last night, there was a meeting for interested students in the Channing-Bowditch (a Cal dorm) lounge. I expected no one to show up. Four people did. Next meeting: next Monday (Nov 5), same place, see home page for details.

Sabine Alam, Khoi Lam, and Michelle Nguyen are the Advisory Board who have been giving Aaron and me sage advice. Thanks to them.

Gary Taubes responds to Gina Kolata’s review of Good Calories, Bad Calories. The scientific article by Leibel et al. that Taubes and Kolata refer to.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

From a review of The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center by Charles Morris:

For better or for worse, the quality of health care is driven by what Morris calls an “artisanal” value system, one that has little to do with institutional allegiances or administrative management objectives, but rather with “internalized systems of ethics and the expectations of other professionals.”

My theory of human evolution says it started with hobbies. Hobbyists became artisans. It hadn’t occurred to me that an “artisanal” value system exists but what Morris says makes sense. Such a value system should be powerful, easy to spread, and hard to eliminate.