Friday, July 16, 2010

“Job search is hard work” plus 1 more

“Job search is hard work” plus 1 more

Job search is hard work

Posted: 15 Jul 2010 08:58 PM PDT

NORCROSS — "The job search itself is a job," Jeff Carroll said while waiting for a chance to speak to an employer at a job fair Thursday.

The Duluth resident wasn't alone in voicing that sentiment.

Sharon Dubois sat at a table completing an application for ezprints, a Norcross business looking to fill about 40 temporary or seasonal positions within the next few weeks.

"It's like a job looking for a job," she said. "I'm on the computer like eight hours a day. I'm out doing legwork, networking, I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, but (there's) not a lot of stuff coming through right now."

Dubois, like others attending CareerFest 2010, hopes Thursday's efforts will pay off.

Over the course of four hours, 512 people attended the job fair, which was sponsored by the Georgia Department of Labor's Gwinnett Career Center, the Norcross Cooperative Ministry and Norcross First United Methodist Church. The event brought together employers from Gwinnett and the surrounding area looking to hire as well as organizations that provide services for job seekers and the unemployed.

"Georgia, (unemployment) is pretty high, higher than the national average," said Carolyn Coburn-Allen, an employment marketing representative with the state Department of Labor. "Here in Gwinnett we're a little bit better than the state, below 10 percent, but we still have a lot of gaps to fill."

Carroll, 45, worked in the IT industry doing network support for a Norcross company for 10 years when the company downsized in December and his job was eliminated. He has been living off his severance since and recently started job searching.

"I wanted to come and get my resume out here and see what training programs are available and what companies are hiring," he said Thursday. "I'm doing everything I can to network and attend job fairs, just trying to see what's out there."

Dubois' position as a medical secretary in a pediatrician's office was eliminated in May.

"It got kind of slow," the 47-year-old Norcross resident said. "People lost their jobs, they don't have health care. There's a lot of people not bring their children to the physician's office."

As far as what kind of job she's looking for, "To me, at this point, it doesn't really matter," Dubois said. "I just need a job right now."

For 26-year-old Rakisha Moore, whose position as an accountant with a small accounting firm was eliminated two months ago, the most harrowing aspect of being unemployed in this economic climate is uncertainty.

"You don't know how long you're going to be unemployed, so it's very discouraging to not really know, 'When am I going to get that one opportunity, that one interview, that one job?'" the Grayson resident said. "That's what, for me, is very discouraging."

There was some hope for job seekers Thursday. The Gwinnett County Police Department was on hand recruiting applicants to fill about 40 officer positions likely before then end of the year.

Hi-Hope Center of Lawrenceville is looking to hire staff within the next few weeks, including part-time and on-call positions for individuals to work weekdays in the center's day services program, which serves adults with developmental disabilities, as well an individuals to work in one of the organization's six group homes.

"(We're) looking for people that can actually display that person-centered approach that we have for our clients," said Wilena Barrs, human resources director for the Hi-Hope Center in Lawrenceville, who was pre-screening job applicants during the job fair and planned to set up interview with qualified candidates within the next few weeks.

"We're looking to fill," she said. "We're looking to put people to work."

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Search for eternal life has long, strange history

Posted: 16 Jul 2010 08:25 AM PDT

Grafting ape testicles onto old men was the rage in 1920. Some 300 patients of the Russian doctor Serge Voronoff underwent this costly surgery, looking for "rejuvenation."

Another celebrity physician of the era, Eugen Steinach of Austria, promised to restore youthful vigor by performing vasectomies. Sigmund Freud was reputed to have been one of his patients; poet William Butler Yeats got "Steinached" in 1934 and, by all accounts, was a changed man.

Such fascinating tidbits abound in Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner. Weiner takes us on an extraordinary ride through the ages, touching on science, philosophy, literature and mythology, to explore the centuries-old human quest for longevity.

Dominating the tale is a brilliant, fringy Brit, Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, a Cambridge-educated researcher who sports a beard as long as his name and lubricates his theories on curing the disease of aging with many pints of ale.

Baby boomer de Grey plans to have his own head frozen, just in case the advances he envisions that will enable us all to live longer than Methuselah, the Bible's oldest man at 969, don't arrive within his own lifetime.

During the Stone Age, the average life expectancy was probably around 20, Weiner writes. By the Renaissance, people were living to the ripe old age of 33, and by 1900, they were reaching 47 in the most developed countries.

Babies born in such regions at the end of the 20th century could expect to live about 76 years, gaining almost 30 years — "or about as much time as our species had gained before in the whole struggle of existence."

The oldest humans are now living to about 120, and most gerontologists think another major breakthrough is needed to extend our life spans dramatically.

While Weiner doesn't focus on the booming anti-aging business or give hot stock tips, he does touch on some promising new research that may result in new drugs and therapies to prolong human life without severe calorie restriction, a proven method to extend life spans. Resveratrol, a compound found in grape skins — and red wine — switches on a class of proteins called sirtuins that may prevent gene mutations that normally occur in the messy process of living and may also repair DNA damage that does occur.

Rapamycin, an antibiotic discovered in soil-dwelling microbes from Easter Island, is making lab mice friskier. Females who got the drug lived 38 percent longer than those who did not, Weiner reports.

The author is as adept at parsing the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian hero who sought the secret of immortality, as he is at explaining the inner workings of mitochondria, the cell's tiny energy powerhouses.

And he raises the right questions — at least some of them. Why do humans age? Is the 1,000-year life span, even immortality, a real possibility, and if so, is that a good thing? Wouldn't we get really bored?

While I wish he addressed the question of what it would mean to have 500-year-olds bankrupting the Social Security system or delved further into whether anyone would have children anymore, I'm glad Weiner touches briefly on the issue of social equity.

"How would our world of haves and have-nots go on spinning if the haves lived on for a thousand years while the children of have-nots went right on dying hungry at the age of five?" he asks. "And what would happen to the rest of the living world?"

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