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Lisa's Job Requirements

The other day on the show I itemized my list of must- have job skills. If you don't know these basic essentials, then go out right now and take a continuing education course at your local high school. These are the list of things you MUST be PROFICIENT in for any basic office job today:

1. Microsoft Office Package- including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Picture Manager. You need to know how to create and save a file in Word. You need to know how to do a basic spreadsheet in Excel, and a basic powerpoint (slide show) presentation in Powerpoint. You need to know how to open, crop and save a photo in Picture Manager. Nothing fancy, just the basics.
2. Google. You must know how to ACCESS any information in the world in two seconds.
3. The entire Google system, meaning Google Chrome (browser), Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs.
4. Facebook, Twitter, Linked In. Your employer expects you to be BETTER at this than he or she is. You should be the teacher. Add any other apps to this that are already essential that I haven't heard about yet.
5. Mac AND PC. Today's boss expects you to know both and not be afraid of either. Include with this Ipad, Iphone, Blackberry (becoming extinct) and Droids.
6. Typing. Not with two fingers, but with all ten. Fast is good, accurate is better.
7. Spelling. Spell check won't get you out of a homonym you do not know.
8. Basic Percentages. It is shocking to me how many people cannot do 15 percent in their heads. Learn how.
9. How to Address an Envelope. Don't laugh. I had a 22 year old college student intern who did not know how to do this.
10. How to Look Someone in the Eye, Shake his or her Hand, say Hello & Goodbye.
11. How to Take Notes. If the boss is talking, and you aren't taking notes, you aren't doing your job. So figure out ahead of time what your most efficient way to do this is.

Good Luck, feel free to add your essentials to this list.

Walker Survives Wisconsin Recall Vote

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WAUKESHA, Wis. — Gov. Scott Walker, whose decision to cut collective bargaining rights for most public workers set off a firestorm in a state usually known for its political civility, easily held on to his job on Tuesday, becoming the first governor in the country to survive a recall election and dealing a painful blow to Democrats and labor unions.

Mr. Walker soundly defeated Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, the Democrats’ nominee in the recall attempt, with most precincts across the state reporting results. The victory by Mr. Walker, a Republican who was forced into an election to save his job less than two years into his first term, ensures that Republicans largely retain control of this state’s capital, and his fast-rising political profile is likely to soar still higher among conservatives.

Here in Waukesha, some Republican voters said the result ended the most volatile partisan fight in memory, one that boiled over 16 months ago in the collective bargaining battle and expanded into scuffles about spending, jobs, taxes, the role and size of government, and more. Democrats, some of whom are already pledging to mount strong challenges for state lawmakers’ seats in November, seemed less sure about the meaning of Mr. Walker’s victory.

“Tonight, we tell Wisconsin, we tell our country and we tell people all across the globe that voters really do want leaders who stand up and make the tough decisions,” Mr. Walker said, delivering a victory speech to supporters here. “But now it is time to move on and move forward in Wisconsin.”

In his concession speech in Milwaukee, Mr. Barrett said: “We are a state that has been deeply divided. It is up to all of us — our side and their side — to listen, to listen to each other.”

The result raised broader questions about the strength of labor groups, who had called hundreds of thousands of voters and knocked on thousands of doors. The outcome also seemed likely to embolden leaders in other states who have considered limits to unions as a way to solve budget problems, but had watched the backlash against Mr. Walker with worry.

Some Republicans said they considered Mr. Walker’s victory one indication that Wisconsin, which President Obama won easily in 2008 and which Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1988, may be worth battling for this time.

“Obviously, Scott Walker winning tonight means that the Republicans are here for real,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Conservatives are here for real.” Mr. Priebus was attending Mr. Walker’s victory party at the Waukesha County Exposition Center, where “We Stand With Walker” signs were all around.

But even with the Republican victory on Tuesday, it remained an open question whether Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential nominee, can assume the momentum of Mr. Walker’s campaign. In exit polling of voters, 18 percent of Walker supporters said they favored Mr. Obama, and the president led in a matchup against Mr. Romney. Voters in the exit surveys also said they saw Mr. Obama as better equipped to improve the economy and help the middle class.

Republicans prevailed in at least four recall elections on Tuesday for other offices, including a race for lieutenant governor, which the incumbent, Rebecca Kleefisch, won. Scott Fitzgerald, the State Senate’s majority leader, who had ushered much of Mr. Walker’s agenda through the Legislature, also survived. Late Tuesday, votes were still being counted in one State Senate race in Racine, an outcome that will determine which party narrowly controls the chamber, at least until November.

Mr. Walker, who raised millions of dollars from conservative donors outside the state, had a strong financial advantage, in part because a quirk in state law allowed him months of unlimited fund-raising, from the time the recall challenge was mounted to when the election was officially called. As of late last month, about $45.6 million had been spent on behalf of Mr. Walker, compared with about $17.9 million for Mr. Barrett, according to data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan group that tracks spending.

“What it shows is the peril of corporate dollars in an election and the dangers of Citizens United,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, a school workers’ union, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court decision that barred the federal government from restricting political expenditures from corporations, unions and other groups.

Voters went to the polls in droves, and some polling places needed extra ballots brought in as long lines of people waited. One polling location was so swamped, state officials said, that it found itself using photocopied ballots, which later had to be hand-counted. The final flurry of television advertising — with Mr. Walker outspending Mr. Barrett seven to one — seemed to have little impact on the outcome. Nearly 9 in 10 people said they had made up their minds before May, according to exit poll interviews.

The recall race carried implications well beyond Wisconsin, particularly in the escalating fight between wealthy conservative donors and labor unions. Many Republican contributors from across the country who have invested millions in the presidential race also sent checks to Mr. Walker, hoping to inflict deep wounds on organized labor, a key constituency for Democrats.

The outcome was also being closely monitored in Boston by Mr. Romney’s campaign and in Chicago at Mr. Obama’s re-election headquarters for a signal of how the electorate is viewing the big issues in the race for the White House. The president kept his distance from Wisconsin, to the dismay of many Democrats in the state, in an effort to avoid alienating independent voters he hopes to win over in the fall.

A snapshot of the Wisconsin electorate, gleaned through surveys with voters as they left the polls, found that a majority of men had supported Mr. Walker, while most women had voted for Mr. Barrett. Almost a fifth of the electorate was 65 or older, with only about one in 10 voters of college age. The recall race unfolded against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, with only 2 in 10 voters saying their family’s finances have improved in the two years since Mr. Walker was elected. About a third said their financial situation had grown worse, and more than 4 in 10 said their finances had stayed the same.

The political war in Wisconsin began in February 2011 when Governor Walker, only weeks into his first term, announced that he needed to cut benefits and collective bargaining rights for most public workers as a way to solve an expected state budget deficit of $3.6 billion.

Tens of thousands of union supporters and Democrats protested in Madison, the capital, and the State Senate’s Democrats — who were a minority in the chamber but had enough members to prevent a quorum — went into hiding in hotels and houses in Illinois to try, unsuccessfully, to prevent a vote on the measure.

By January, critics of Mr. Walker delivered more than 900,000 signatures on petitions to recall him, far more than the one-quarter of voters from the last election that state law requires.

The election, which cost local governments as much as $18 million to carry out, has raised another debate over the appropriateness of using a recall vote to remove officials.

“Recall was never meant to be used just because you don’t like the way the other side is governing,” said Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, which made tens of thousands of calls to voters in recent days in support of Mr. Walker.

Around the nation, numerous efforts have been made over the years to recall governors, but only three, including the push to remove Mr. Walker, met the requirements to place the matter on the ballot. In California, Gov. Gray Davis was removed in 2003, and in North Dakota, Gov. Lynn Frazier was recalled in 1921.
NYTimes By MONICA DAVEY and JEFF ZELENY

Does Facebook Wreck Marriages?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his status to “married” Saturday and received over one million “likes” from his followers. But the site he founded isn’t always so marriage-friendly. In fact, lawyers say the social network contributes to an increasing number of marriage breakups.

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a U.K. survey by Divorce Online, a legal services firm. And over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “I see Facebook issues breaking up marriages all the time,” says Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn. Of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60% exclusively involve Facebook.

“Affairs happen with a lightning speed on Facebook,” says K. Jason Krafsky, who authored the book “Facebook and Your Marriage” with his wife Kelli. In the real world, he says, office romances and out-of-town trysts can take months or even years to develop. “On Facebook,” he says, “they happen in just a few clicks.” The social network is different from most social networks or dating sites in that it both re-connects old flames and allows people to “friend” someone they may only met once in passing. “It puts temptation in the path of people who would never in a million years risk having an affair,” he says. Facebook declined to comment.

Even when extra-marital affairs develop with no help from Facebook, experts say the site provides a deceptively comfortable forum for people to let off steam about their lives and inadvertently arouse the suspicions of spouses. “The difference with Facebook is it feels safe, innocent and private,” says Randy Kessler, an Atlanta, Ga.-based lawyer and current chair of the family law section of the American Bar Association. (See Facebook and Divorce Discussed in WSJ.) “People put an enormous amount of incriminating stuff out there voluntarily.” It could be something as innocuous as a check-in at a restaurant, he says, or a photograph posted online.

When couples do end up in divorce court, lawyers say Facebook posts are used to determine alimony and child custody. Last year, a superior district court judge in Connecticut ordered a divorcing couple to hand over the passwords of their respective Facebook to the other’s lawyers. Kessler says it’s an extremely useful vehicle to gather evidence. “It helps me cross-examine a witness,” he says. Any pattern of behavior that’s recorded on Facebook relating to parenting skills, excessive partying or even disparaging remarks about a spouse that violates a court order could be admissible in court. Of course, it’s not Facebook’s fault it’s being dragged through divorce court, he says, “It’s the people who use it.”
smartmoney.com

JPMorgan's Whale Trade Reportedly Sinks By Another $1 Billion

The trading debacle at JPMorgan Chase, the nation's biggest bank, appears to be getting worse.

The New York Times reported late Wednesday that the trading losses associated with the operations of JPMorgan's chief investment office have increased by at least $1 billion, citing people with knowledge of the losses.

On the one hand, the additional losses are not a surprise since Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's CEO, warned that the situation was volatile and that the $2 billion of trading losses originally suffered could balloon and get worse before they get better. But the New York Times report will likely cause even more uncertainty in the market because of the speed with which the trading losses appear to have increased. These concerns will have to do with things like whether the bank will need to cut its divided.

On the surface, it seems like disclosure of the trading losses, which were partly the result of a strategy executed by a JPMorgan trader known as the London Whale, has undermined the bank's bet even further.

-Forbes-

When Children See Internet Pornography

PARENTS-So How Do We Talk About This?

PARENTS have learned to expect, and often dread, two sex talks with their children: the early lesson about the “birds and the bees” and the more delicate discussion of how to navigate a healthy sexual life as a young adult.

But now they are wrestling with a third: the pornography talk.

There is no set script, and no predictable moment for the conversation. It can happen at as early an age as 6 or 7, when a child may not yet understand the basic mechanics of sex. It is typically set off by a child’s accidental wanderings online or the deliberate searches of a curious teenager on a smartphone, laptop, tablet or one of the other devices that have made it nearly impossible to grow up without encountering sexually explicit material. Even a quick Twitter or Facebook search reveals that older students report seeing pornography on others’ laptops or phones in class, usually with an “OMG” attached.

As Elizabeth Schroeder, the executive director of Answer, a national sex-education organization based at Rutgers University, said: “Your child is going to look at porn at some point. It’s inevitable.”

Parents, then, are faced with a new digital-era quandary: is it better to try to shield children from explicit content, or to accept that it is so ubiquitous that it has become a fact of life, requiring its own conversation?

Conventional wisdom has held that strict rules about screen time and installing filtering software will solve the problem. But given the number of screens, large and small, that fill the average American home, those strategies may be as effective as building a bunker in the sand while the tide rolls in.

Some parents coach their children to click away from explicit material as soon as it pops up, while others try to be as open as possible, filtering content when children are younger and relying on looser controls for teenagers coupled with frank conversations.

“I know how I reacted when my parents were kind of like, ‘Oh, no, this is bad!’ ” said Chaz, a software consultant and father of two who lives near Minneapolis. (Like many parents interviewed for this article, he asked that his last name not be used to protect his children’s privacy.)

He recalled vividly how, as a 14-year-old boy, he was desperate for a glimpse of Playboy magazine. “It is the height of foolishness to assume my son is not like that,” he said.

The pornography talk he had not long ago with his 12-year-old son was prompted by an iTunes receipt for an app showing 1,001 pictures of breasts.

Rather than lashing out or calling attention to the purchase, he sat his son down, asked if he and his friends were interested in that kind of content and then explained that he had just set up a blocking filter, OpenDNS, on their home network to keep out the worst kinds of content.

It’s natural to be curious, he told his son, adding that if he planned to look for explicit content, he should stick to one particular site he had allowed his son access to, which had pictures of naked women that were not much racier than what might appear in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

Others who assumed their children would eventually search for pornography said that they had tried to teach them to be, in effect, responsible consumers: they showed them how to be discreet, erase browsing histories and avoid malware, and they instructed them never to share pictures of themselves or explicit content with others, especially younger children. (Experts caution that showing minors sexually explicit material could, in some states, violate “harmful to minors” laws.)

But many parents take a different approach. Patti Thomson, for example, said she believed that her duty as a mother was to shield her five children, ages 7 to 15, from explicit content, even if it meant hours spent poring over user manuals and access controls for the computers at her home in Reading, Mass.

“Nowadays, it’s insane,” she said, horrified at the range of pornographic material available online. “I want to really protect them until they’re at an age when they can take it in.”

When she discovered that the iPod Touch devices she gave her children for Christmas could be used to surf the Web, she was so upset that she took them back until she could figure out how to deactivate the Internet connection. She also called Apple to argue for a warning label on the box.

Months later, she was delighted to discover a mobile Web browser, Mobicip — designed for devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and Android OS-based devices like the Kindle Fire — that is easy to set up quickly and blocks content either by age or by categories like pornography, chat or games.

Sometimes danger lurks where parents don’t expect it. Jeanne Sager, a blogger, assumed it was safe to let her 6-year-old daughter, Jillian, watch “My Little Pony” videos. But when she left the room for a moment, she heard something that didn’t sound anything like a cartoon.

Her daughter had stumbled upon a graphic video by clicking on a related link listed to the right of the video player. It is one of the most common complaints of parents who discover that their children have been exposed to sexually explicit material online — that a few clicks on YouTube can land a child in unexpected territory, like a subgenre of pornography where popular cartoon characters, like Batman or Mario Bros., are dubbed over with alternate soundtracks and editing to show the characters engaging in explicit acts.

In this case, Ms. Sager simply told her daughter, “There are some videos we shouldn’t be watching,” and made sure she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong. Later, she set up a separate computer login for her daughter, with bookmarks to her favorite sites, and no YouTube allowed.

For J. Carlos, a writer from Pasadena, Calif., who also asked that his last name not be used, the need for the pornography conversation emerged when he and his 14-year-old son were hiking in the mountains of Virginia. While borrowing his son’s smartphone to look for a restaurant, he noticed the search history, he said, and immediately realized, “Oh, O.K., it’s time to have that conversation.”

He wished they’d had it earlier, he said. The search terms that popped up seemed both naïve and potentially troublesome, and he worried that his son might unintentionally violate child-pornography laws by looking for images of girls his own age.

But the conversation that followed was, according to sex educators to whom it was recounted, an ideal response.

Rather than angrily confronting his son on the mountaintop, J. Carlos waited for a calm moment when they could have a casual conversation. He emphasized that it was natural to be interested in sex, but that pornographic images are not representative of relationships and that his son should feel comfortable asking him about anything he had seen.

“He asked me what things were like when I was younger,” J. Carlos said. “He felt really safe talking to me about it, so that felt really great.”

Many parents don’t react so calmly, said Ms. Schroeder, of the Answer organization.

They may wonder what is wrong with their child or if what the child has seen will forever traumatize him or her. Neither assumption is correct, she said. The greater potential harm — and shame — can come from a parent’s reaction.

“If we flip out, freak out or go crazy about it, we’re giving a very set message,” she said, one that may prevent children from feeling they can ask their parents questions without being judged or punished.

But the most common mistake parents make, experts said, is to wait to have the conversation until some incident precipitates it.

“All of this is so much easier if it’s taking place not as the first conversation parents have about sex, but the 10th or the 20th,” said Marty Klein, a family and sex therapist in Palo Alto, Calif., who encourages parents to be frank and direct in conversations with children.

Richard Esplin, a Mormon and father of four in Lindon, Utah, said he has had regular conversations with his children, unlike his own parents, who talked to him about sex rarely — once when he was a teenager, and again before his wedding.

“That’s not the way my wife and I do things,” he said, “because it’s always coming up.”

From an actor in a bathing suit to videos of kissing, he added, the culture creates many opportunities for his family to discuss questions of modesty and sexuality within the context of their religious beliefs.

“They know they don’t go to YouTube without me, because there are videos on YouTube where people don’t wear clothes,” he said. He explained to his children, who range in age from 2 to 8, that the people in the videos are actors who are “pretending to be married.”

GIVEN that most parents don’t devote much advance thought to this particular conversation, however, the words they choose often don’t reflect what they wish they had said after the fact.

One family’s improvised conversation raised questions in hindsight about how boys and girls are treated differently.

Bonnie, a university administrator in North Carolina with a teenage son and two stepdaughters, realized only after discussing the matter that she and her husband had been sending unintended messages by emphasizing safety and self-protection with the girls and limits with her son.

“Later, we realized how terribly, albeit unconsciously, sexist that was,” she said.

Dana, a divorced mother of three in Massachusetts, assumed her sons would seek out pornography and thought it was normal for her 9-year-old to want to look at pictures of naked women. But when he was 13, he asked why women liked to be choked. She then realized she needed to explain to him that pornography isn’t real and that the people are paid actors. She compared it to WWE wrestling matches, which her son knows are fake.

Unlike many parents, Dana had an opportunity to help her son understand what had upset him, which is why therapists like Mr. Klein say that keeping the lines of conversation open is the best safeguard against any potential harm. “We’re not going back to 1950 here,” he added, “to a world where there are no mobile devices, no apps.”

Even Chaz, the father in Minnesota who was careful to block his home network, said he had accepted that he could not protect his child from everything.

Not long ago, he decided to disable Internet access to his son’s laptop and phone for a few hours a day, hoping it would nudge his son to play outdoors instead. He didn’t anticipate the alternative. One day, when he got home from work, his son informed him that the Internet had been erratic lately, but that it was no problem — he had just logged onto a neighbor’s unfiltered Wi-Fi connection, where the entire Web awaited.
NYTimes By AMY O’LEARY

The Lisa Wexler Show