Thriving at the Survival Calls during Careers in the Digital Age – An AGE like no Other, also known as, DIGITAL
Author and Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
The source for the inspiration to write this curation is described in
Survival Calls during Careers in the Digital Age
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/06/13/survival-calls-during-careers-in-the-digital-age/
In this curation, I present the following concepts in three parts:
- Part 1: Authenticity of Careers in the Digital Age: In Focus, the BioTechnology Sector
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Part 2: Top 10 books to help you survive the Digital Age
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Part 3: A case study on Thriving at the Survival Calls during Careers in the Digital Age: Aviva Lev-Ari, UCB, PhD’83; HUJI, MA’76
Part 1: Authenticity of Careers in the Digital Age:
In Focus, the BioTechnology Sector
Lisa LaMotta, Senior Editor, BioPharma Dive wrote in Conference edition | June 11, 2018
Unlike that little cancer conference in Chicago last week, the BIO International convention is not about data, but about the people who make up the biopharma industry.
The meeting brings together scientists, board members, business development heads and salespeople, from the smallest virtual biotechs to the largest of pharmas. It allows executives at fledgling biotechs to sit at the same tables as major decision-makers in the industry — even if it does look a little bit like speed dating.
But it’s not just a partnering meeting.
This year’s BIO also sought to shine a light on pressing issues facing the industry. Among those tackled included elevating the discussion on gender diversity and how to bring more women to the board level; raising awareness around suicide and the need for more mental health treatments; giving a voice to patient advocacy groups; and highlighting the need for access to treatments in developing nations.
Four days of meetings and panel discussions are unlikely to move the needle for many of these challenges, but debate can be the first step toward progress.
- Reactions to Original Tweets by @Pharma_BI and by @AVIVA1950 from #BIO2018
Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/06/12/reactions-to-original-tweets-by-pharma_bi-and-by-aviva1950-from-bio2018/
Here are 10 of the books that did help me [novelist Julian Gough]: they might also help you understand, and survive, our complicated, stressful, digital age.
- Marshall McLuhan Unbound by Marshall McLuhan (2005)
The visionary Canadian media analyst predicted the internet, and coined the phrase the Global Village, in the early 1960s. His dense, complex, intriguing books explore how changes in technology change us. This book presents his most important essays as 20 slim pamphlets in a handsome, profoundly physical, defiantly non-digital slipcase.
- Ubik by Philip K Dick (1969)
Pure pulp SF pleasure; a deep book disguised as a dumb one. Dick shows us, not a dystopia, but a believably shabby, amusingly human future. The everyman hero, Joe Chip, wakes up and argues with his robot toaster, which refuses to toast until he sticks a coin in the slot. Joe can’t do this, because he’s broke. He then has a stand-up row with his robot front door, which won’t open, because he owes it money too … Technology changes: being human, and broke, doesn’t. Warning: Dick wrote Ubik at speed, on speed. But embedded in the pulpy prose are diamonds of imagery that will stay with you for ever.
- The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)
This book is what Silicon Valley has instead of a bible. It’s a visionary work that predicts a technological transformation of the world in our lifetime. Kurzweil argues that computer intelligence will soon outperform human thought. We will then encode our minds, upload them, and become one with our technology, achieving the Singularity. At which point, the curve of technological progress starts to go straight up. Ultimately – omnipotent, no longer mortal, no longer flesh – we transform all the matter in the universe into consciousness; into us.
- To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (2017)
This response to Kurzweil won this year’s Wellcome prize. It’s a short, punchy tour of transhumanism: the attempt to meld our minds with machines, to transcend biology and escape death. He meets some of the main players, and many on the fringes, and listens to them, quizzically. It is a deliberately, defiantly human book, operating in that very modern zone between sarcasm and irony, where humans thrive and computers crash.
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)
This intricately structured, incredibly clever novel moves from the 60s right through to a future maybe 15 years from now. It steps so lightly into that future you hardly notice the transition. It has sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, solar farms, social media scams and a stunningly moving chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. It’s a masterpiece. Life will be like this.
- What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)
Kelly argues that we scruffy biological humans are no longer driving technological progress. Instead, the technium, “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us”, is now driving its own progress, faster and faster, and we are just caught up in its slipstream. As we accelerate down the technological waterslide, there is no stopping now … Kelly’s vision of the future is scary, but it’s fun, and there is still a place for us in it.
- The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (1999)
Blackmore expands powerfully and convincingly on Richard Dawkins’s original concept of the meme. She makes a forceful case that technology, religion, fashion, art and even our personalities are made of memes – ideas that replicate, mutate and thus evolve over time. We are their replicators (if you buy my novel, you’ve replicated its memes); but memes drive our behaviour just as we drive theirs. It’s a fascinating book that will flip your world upside down.
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
In the early 1980s, Gibson watched kids leaning into the screens as they played arcade games. They wanted to be inside the machines, he realised, and they preferred the games to reality. In this novel, Gibson invented the term cyberspace; sparked the cyberpunk movement (to his chagrin); and vividly imagined the jittery, multi-screened, anxious, technological reality that his book would help call into being.
- You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (2010)
Lanier, an intense, brilliant, dreadlocked artist, musician and computer scientist, helped to develop virtual reality. His influential essay Digital Maoism described early the downsides of online collective action. And he is deeply aware that design choices made by (mainly white, young, male) software engineers can shape human behaviour globally. He argues, urgently, that we need to question those choices, now, because once they are locked in, all of humanity must move along those tracks, and we may not like where they take us. Events since 2010 have proved him right. His manifesto is a passionate argument in favour of the individual voice, the individual gesture.
- All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (2000)
Not, perhaps, an immediately obvious influence on a near-future techno-thriller in which military drones chase a woman and her son through Las Vegas. But hooks’s magnificent exploration and celebration of love, first published 18 years ago, will be far more useful to us, in our alienated digital future, than the 10,000 books of technobabble published this year. All About Love is an intensely practical roadmap, from where we are now to where we could be. When Naomi and Colt find themselves on the run through a militarised American wilderness of spirit, when GPS fails them, bell hooks is their secret guide.
SOURCE
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/top-10-books-to-help-you-survive-the-digital-age?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Bookmarks+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=277690&subid=25658468&CMP=bookmarks_collection
Part 3: A case study on Thriving at the Survival Calls during Careers in the Digital Age: Aviva Lev-Ari, UCB, PhD’83; HUJI, MA’76
On June 10, 2018
Following, is a case study about an alumna of HUJI and UC, Berkeley as an inspirational role model. An alumna’s profile in context of dynamic careers in the digital age. It has great timeliness and relevance to graduate students, PhD level at UC Berkeley and beyond, to all other top tier universities in the US and Europe. As presented in the following curations:
Professional Self Re-Invention: From Academia to Industry – Opportunities for PhDs in the Business Sector of the Economy
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/05/22/professional-self-re-invention-from-academia-to-industry-opportunities-for-phds-in-the-business-sector-of-the-economy/
Pioneering implementations of analytics to business decision making: contributions to domain knowledge conceptualization, research design, methodology development, data modeling and statistical data analysis: Aviva Lev-Ari, UCB, PhD’83; HUJI, MA’76
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/05/28/pioneering-implementations-of-analytics-to-business-decision-making-contributions-to-domain-knowledge-conceptualization-research-design-methodology-development-data-modeling-and-statistical-data-a/
This alumna is Editor-in-Chief of a Journal that has other 173 articles on Scientist: Career Considerations
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/category/scientist-career-considerations/
In a 5/22/2018 article, Ways to Pursue Science Careers in Business After a PhD by Ankita Gurao,
https://bitesizebio.com/38498/ways-to-pursue-the-business-of-science-after-a-ph-d/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare
Unemployment figures of PhDs by field of science are included, Ankita Gurao identifies the following four alternative careers for PhDs in the non-academic world:
- Science Writer/Journalist/Communicator
- Science Management
- Science Administration
- Science Entrepreneurship
My career, as presented in Reflections on a Four-phase Career: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN, March 2018
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/03/06/reflections-on-a-four-phase-career-aviva-lev-ari-phd-rn-march-2018/
has the following phases:
- Phase 1: Research, 1973 – 1983
- Phase 2: Corporate Applied Research in the US, 1985 – 2005
- Phase 3: Career Reinvention in Health Care, 2005 – 2012
- Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to present
These four phases are easily mapped to the four alternative careers for PhDs in the non-academic world. One can draw parallel lines between the four career opportunities A,B,C,D, above, and each one of the four phases in my own career.
Namely, I have identified A,B,C,D as early as 1985, and pursued each of them in several institutional settings, as follows:
A. Science Writer/Journalist/Communicator – see link above for Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to present
B. Science Management – see link above for Phase 2: Corporate Applied Research in the US, 1985 – 2005 and Phase 3: Career Reinvention in Health Care, 2005 – 2012
C. Science Administration – see link above for Phase 2: Corporate Applied Research in the US, 1985 – 2005and Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to present
D. Science Entrepreneurship – see link above for Phase 4: Electronic Scientific Publishing, 4/2012 to present
Impressions of My Days at Berkeley in Recollections: Part 1 and 2, below.
- Recollections: Part 1 – My days at Berkeley, 9/1978 – 12/1983 –About my doctoral advisor, Allan Pred, other professors and other peers
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/03/15/recollections-my-days-at-berkeley-9-1978-12-1983-about-my-doctoral-advisor-allan-pred-other-professors-and-other-peer/
- Recollections: Part 2 – “While Rolling” is preceded by “While Enrolling” Autobiographical Alumna Recollections of Berkeley – Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD’83
https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2018/05/24/recollections-part-2-while-rolling-is-preceded-by-while-enrolling-autobiographical-alumna-recollections-of-berkeley-aviva-lev-ari-phd83/
The topic of Careers in the Digital Age is closely related to my profile, see chiefly: Four-phase Career, Reflections, Recollections Parts 1 & 2 and information from other biographical sources, below.
Other sources for my biography
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