Glassdoor Releases Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance 2013 List

Glassdoor Releases Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance 2013 List Glassdoor Releases Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance 2013 List The top five companies includedSAS InstituteNational InstrumentsSlalom ConsultingMITREOrbitz WorldwideThis years rankings mark the first time Yahoo, Mastercard and NetApp appeared in the top 25 for work-life balance. Seven companies have appeared on the list for three consecutive years, including SAS Institute, MITRE and Agilent Technologies.Glassdoor also revealed what these companies employees had to say about their employer concerning work-life balance. A few responses includeAOLCompany sincerely cares about employee welfare as well as helping out in the community wherever possible. Flexibility with schedules/time off. AOL Senior Systems Administrator (Dulles, VA)TietoGreat networks for professionals, especially for young talents. Flexibility. Work-life balance. Every place is a workplace = office is only one place to work. Tieto Project Manag er (Espoo, Finland)Morningstar Work-life balance ratio is amazing you can take a vacation almost whenever you want, for how long you want, and its not uncommon to work 7-hour days. Morningstar Client Manager (Chicago, IL)SAS InstituteAmazing workplace culture, flexible work environment, challenging/stimulating work, customer-focused. SAS Institute Marketing Employee (Cary, NC)ratgeber GraphicsFor a person with a family, the work-life balance and on-site childcare are absolutely stellar. Mentor Graphics Employee (Wilsonville, OR)

Why your brain never runs out of problems to find

Why yur brain never runs out of problems to findWhy your brain never runs out of problems to findWhy do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in mora places than ever.Think of a neighborhood watch made up of volunteers who call the police when they see anything suspicious. Imagine a new volunteer who joins the watch to help lower crime in the area. When they first start volunteering, they raise the alarm when they see signs of serious crimes, like assault or burglary.Lets assume these efforts help and, over time, assaults and burglaries become rarer in the neighborhood. What would the volunteer do next? One possibility is that they would relax and stop calling the police. After all, the serious crimes they used to worry about are a thing of the past.But you may share the intuition my research gro up had that many volunteers in this situation wouldnt relax just because crime went down. Instead, theyd start calling things suspicious that they would never have cared about back when crime was high, like jaywalking or loitering at night.You can probably think of many similar situations in which problems never seem to go away, because people keep changing how they define them. This is sometimes called concept creep, or moving the goalposts, and it can be a frustrating experience. How can you know if youre making progress solving a problem, when you keep redefining what it means to solve it? My colleagues and I wanted to understand when this kind of behavior happens, why, and if it can be prevented.After violent crime starts going down, loiterers and jaywalkers may start to seem more threatening.Marc Bruxelle/Shutterstock.comLooking for troubleTo study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task to look a t a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem threatening. The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless.As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of threatening to include a wider range of faces. In other words, when they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered threats depended on how many threats they had seen lately.This kind of inconsistency isnt limited to judgments about threat. In another experiment, we asked people to make an even simpler decision whether colored dots on a screen were blue or purple.As the context changes, so do the boundaries of your categories.David Levari, CC BY-NDAs blue dots became rare, people started calling slightly purple dots blue. They even did this when we told them blue do ts were going to become rare, or offered them cash prizes to stay consistent over time. These results suggest that this behavior isnt entirely under conscious control otherwise, people would have been able to be consistent to earn a cash prize.Expanding what counts as immoralAfter looking at the results of our experiments on facial threat and color judgments, our research group wondered if maybe this was just a funny property of the visual system. Would this kind of concept change also happen with non-visual judgments?To test this, we ran a final experiment in which we asked volunteers to read about different scientific studies, and decide which were ethical and which were unethical. We were skeptical that we would find the same inconsistencies in these kind of judgments that we did with colors and threat.Why? Because moral judgments, we suspected, would be more consistent across time than other kinds of judgments. After all, if you think violence is wrong today, you should still t hink it is wrong tomorrow, regardless of how much or how little violence you see that day.But surprisingly, we found the same pattern. As we showed people fewer and fewer unethical studies over time, they started calling a wider range of studies unethical. In other words, just because they were reading about fewer unethical studies, they became harsher judges of what counted as ethical.The brain likes to make comparisonsWhy cant people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context.Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threa tening faces it has seen. This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.It turns out that for your brain, relative comparisons often use less energy than absolute measurements. To get a sense for why this is, just think about how its easier to remember which of your cousins is the tallest than exactly how tall each cousin is. Human brains have likely evolved to use relative comparisons in many situations, because these comparisons often provide enough information to safely navigate our environments and make decisions, all while expending as little effort as possible.Being consistent when it countsSometimes, relative judgments work just fine. If you are looking for a fancy restaurant, what you count as fancy in Paris, Texas, should be different than in Paris , France.What once seemed banal can be recategorized as a threat in a new context.louis amal on Unsplash, CC BYBut a neighborhood watcher who makes relative judgments will keep expanding their concept of crime to include milder and milder transgressions, long after serious crimes have become rare. As a result, they may never fully appreciate their success in helping to reduce the problem they are worried about. From medical diagnoses to financial investments, modern humans have to make many complicated judgments where being consistent matters.How can people make more consistent decisions when necessary? My research group is currently doing follow-up research in the lab to develop more effective interventions to help counter the strange consequences of relative judgment.One potential strategy When youre making decisions where consistency is important, define your categories as clearly as you can. So if you do join a neighborhood watch, think about writing down a list of what kinds of transgressions to worry about when you start. Otherwise, before you know it, you may find yourself calling the cops on dogs being walked without leashes.David Levari, Postdoctoral Researcher in Psychology, Harvard UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Role of a Litigation Support Professional

The Role of a Litigation Support ProfessionalThe Role of a Litigation Support ProfessionalWhat is a litigation rckendeckung professional? Is this the career for you? Litigation support professionals assist attorneys in managing large-scale litigation. They design and implement databases for managing, sorting, indexing,abstracting and coordinating the large volumes of data produced in major litigationparticularly in preparation for trial. Litigation support professionals might also develop data management strategies, assist with technology in the courtroom, provide user support and training on both off-the-shelf and proprietary software, and coordinate with technology vendors. Some litigation support professionals are paralegal/IT hybrids who perform traditional paralegal tasks while assuming information technology roles. Educational Requirements Litigation support professionals typically possess a four-year bachelors degreein a related field, as well as advanced technical skills and training on database and litigation support applications. Some litigation support professionals possess advanced degrees, and some have even earned law degrees. Its not unheard of for a practicing attorney to shift his efforts to this side of a practice. An understanding of the discovery process is critical, so anyone with previous experience in this area, such as a paralegal, would have a leg up. In many law firms, educational requirements may be less important than acquired skills. Related legal experience in the range of four to seven years is preferable. Necessary Skills Solid IT knowledge and a familiarity with document management systems and trial presentation software, hardware, and graphics applications are important. Litigation support professionals must have strong communication skills because the position involves a great deal of interaction with attorneys, staff and vendors. It also requires exceptional organizational abilities, critical thinking skills and keen attention to detail. Practice Environments Litigation support professionals are largely employed in law firms, corporations, and legal consulting firms. Salary Ranges The median annual salary for litigation support professionals is just shy of $84,000 as of June 2017. This is somewhere in the middle of national salary levels for this position ranging from a low of about $69,000 to a high of approximately $95,000 a year. This can vary by firm and the area of law in which the firm predominantly practices, as well as by location. Salaries are typically higher with large firms in metropolitan areas. Litigation support professionals often work in management roles, supervising IT staff, vendors, litigation support staff, paralegals, junior attorneys and teams of document coders, abstractors, and data entry personnel. Some litigation support directors and managers earn salaries in the six figures. Job Outlook With recent changes in federal laws prompting a proliferation of elec tronically-stored information, litigation support professionals are in high demand. As the industry evolves and litigation support technology becomes increasingly complex, the need for professionals with specialized legal and technological skills is expected to continually grow. Additional Resources This new industry has recently established the Association of Litigation Support Professionals (ALSP), dedicated to advancing the profession and to contribute to the career development of practitioners around the world.Litigation Support Today is a magazine dedicated to the litigation support industry.