As the Holiday Season comes into full swing, take some time for yourself to sit back, relax and curl up with a good book by the fire. Make sure a full cup of hot chocolate is next to you.
Your credit card was declined. Not sure why – you paid your bill and you got the expiration date correct. So, what gives? This tiny scare makes you think about your personal safety. Find out what you can do to keep safe by reading “Identity Theft Alert” by Steve Weisman. “Identity theft is one of the most pervasive and insidious crimes of today,” Weisman says; in fact, more than 12 million people became victims last year. So what can you do to avoid joining them? Weisman lists the ways…Online, use strong passwords and encryption and beware of sites you visit. Never open a link in an email unless you’re certain it’s “legitimate,” and have your antivirus program up-to-date at all times. By the way, Mac users shouldn’t feel safe anymore; hackers are purposefully creating Mac viruses now. We think this is a book to read and refer to often. Buy “Identity Theft Alert,” highlight it, flag it, heed it, and you may avoid the worst this season. Why would you decline? Available for purchase here
For much of your employed life, you dreamed about not having to work. Retirement would be great. It would stretch out for years, a horizon with no alarm clock and no deadlines. What will you do with it? Chances are, says author Chris Farrell, believe it or not, you’ll go to work. And in his new book “Unretirement: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Think about Work, Community, and the Good Life” he says you’ll do it because youwant to, not because you have to. He says that Boomers’ “last third of life is being reimagined and reinvented into ‘unretirement.’” They’re seeing work in a whole different way: the rate of senior entrepreneurship is up, and so is gradual retirement. They’re staying on the job longer, are finding second (or even third) careers, or are volunteering. A very interesting read and could be a great holiday gift. Available for purchase here.
There are hundreds of activities you do without thinking: driving, riding a bike, buttering your toast, reading this review. Psychologists call that tacit knowledge; they’re things you had to learn, but now do automatically. For these type of activities, if you could describe step-by-step directions to complete these acts, that’s called explicit knowledge. Author Nicholas Carr states in “The Glass Cage,” that computers are starting to complete daily mundane human acts that have become automatic to us. However, more and more professionals are relying on to much on the accuracy of these devices and that could lead to “automation complacency… when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security.” Available for purchase here.
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Contributions: Terri Schlichenmeyer / The Bookworm Sez, LLC
