Conversations On Careers and Professional Life

In addition to my work as a Career Coach and Business Communications Advisor at the Foster School of Business, I host the podcast Conversations On Careers and Professional Life. To better serve my listeners, I recently launched a website for the podcast specifically. You can visit ConversationsOnCareers.com to learn more about the podcast, find episode show notes and linked to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or listen on...
How to change text to all caps/UPPERCASE in Google slides

How to change text to all caps/UPPERCASE in Google slides

Have you ever wanted to change text to all caps or UPPERCASE in Google slides? I did, and couldn’t quickly figure it out. I googled it, and only got answers that related to google docs at first. But then I figured it out, so you don’t have to. Select the “Format” menu, then “Text”, then “Capitalization”, then “UPPERCASE” Screenshot showing how to change text to ALL CAPS or UPPERCASE in Google Slides (or Title Case, or...

Announcing my podcast: Conversations on Careers and Professional Life

Earlier this year, I was awarded a Compassion and Resilience Seed Grant from the UW Resilience Lab so support creating a new podcast for the Foster School of Business, MBA Career Management Office. The grant is supporting four episodes on topics including and relating to resilience, self-compassion and mindfulness.  Additional episodes will feature interviews with UW Faculty and Staff, Foster students and alumni, and business leaders. The first 4 episodes are out now featuring interviews with: Naomi Sanchez, Assistant Dean for MBA Career Management at the Foster School of BusinessColette Vogel, Sr. Associate Director of Career Management and Corporate Relations at the Foster School of BusinessDr. Polo DeCano, lecturer at the UW School of Psychology and College of Education,Dr. Jane Compson, Associate Professor at UW Tacoma “Conversations on Careers and Professional Life.” Can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or listen...

My Podcast Recommendations #trypod

In the spirit of #trypod, the industry promotion to get more people to listen to podcasts, here are my recommendations.  I will group them into two loose categories, 1) news and information, 2) entertainment News & Information Planet Money (NPR) – I’ve been listening since the beginning. About the economy and business. NPR Politics (NPR) Freakonomic Radio (NPR/WNYC) Entertainment Think again from Big Think – thought leaders James Altuscher Show – interesting guests and he is a good interviewer Startup (Gimlet) – deep info-tainment reporting on startups  (not a “news” program, they go deep into a startupeach season while also chronicling their own startup experience) Reply All (Gimlet) funny, a show “about the internet” Hidden Brain (NPR) – you’ve probably heard segments on NPR, interesting stories about human nature and brain science Pivot Podcast – the author of Pivot, Jenny Blake. Some good episodes, but sometimes they are a bit long winded How I built this (NPR) feature length interviews with people who have created things (like companies, just listened to the episode about the founder of southwest) Twice Removed (gimlet) a show by AJ Jacobs that delves into geneology The Eater Upsell – about the food/restaurant industry Invisibilia   The podcasts I listen to fall into two other categories: 1) those i listen to every episode of, and 2) those I listen to sporadically. I listen to nearly every episode of Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Reply All, StartUp.  All the others, I pick and choose, or used to listen to each episode and am now more selective, or have just started listening to and am not sure that I will listen...

Quadrennial Exercise in Criticizing Election Maps

Every four years, it seems, after an election the coverage of which is dominated by red/blue maps and warnings about how divided our country is, a series of news stories or blog posts will start to emerge on social media proclaiming, “no, its not a big red map with some blue islands, its a really purple map with some red and blue islands” or something like that. Actually, something like this post on Gizmodo. But there are still problems with a purple map, and they are detailed in a post from 2014 on medium about the work of an MIT student even earlier. it is based on color theory. TL;DR: human perception of color is affected by adjacent colors. The same purple is perceived differently depending on whether there is red or blue adjacent to it. The solution: use green to neutralize. Red and blue then desaturated toward gray to indicate the margin of victory. There is still a problem with a map colored in this way, not that you will find any on popular news sites. That problem is population density.  The map still is a geographically accurate map of the US, as most electoral maps are presented, so vast unpopulated areas are unfairly weighted in the mind of the observer. The map on Gizmodo tries to deal with that by desaturating red, blue, purple by population density, however, then we run into the color perception problem. Enter the cartogram. A cartogram uses something that is map-like, but then skews the areas so that they reflect some other measure, like population density (2012) and  2016, or in some other cases, electoral vote density, in fact, a number of...