Protect Your Privacy When Job-hunting Online

    Identity theft and identity fraud are terms used to refer to all types of crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain.
    The numbers associated with identity theft are beginning to add up fast these days. A recent General Accounting Office report estimates that as many as 750,000 Americans are victims of identity theft every year. And that number may be low, as many people choose not to report the crime even if they know they have been victimized.
    Identity theft is “an absolute epidemic,” states Robert Ellis Smith, a respected author and advocate of privacy. “It’s certainly picked up in the last four or five years. It’s worldwide. It affects everybody, and there’s very little you can do to prevent it and, worst of all, you can’t detect it until it’s probably too late.”
    Unlike your fingerprints, which are unique to you and cannot be given to someone else for their use, you personal data, especially your social security number, your bank account or credit card number, your telephone calling card number, and other valuable identifying data, can be used, if they fall into the wrong hands, to personally profit at your expense. In the United States and Canada, for example, many people have reported that unauthorized persons have taken funds out of their bank or financial accounts, or, in the worst cases, taken over their identities altogether, running up vast debts and committing crimes while using the victims’ names. In many cases, a victim’s losses may included not only out-of-pocket financial losses, but substantial additional financial costs associated with trying to restore his reputation in the community and correcting erroneous information for which the criminal is responsible.
    According to the FBI, identity theft is the number one fraud committed on the Internet. So how do job seekers protect themselves while continuing to circulate their resumes online? The key to a successful online job search is learning to manager the risks. Here are some tips for staying safe while conducting a job search on the Internet.
    1) Check for a privacy policy.
    If you are considering posting your resume online, make sure the job search site your are considering has a privacy policy, like CareerBuilder.com. The policy should spell out how your information will be used, stored and whether or not it will be shared. You may want to think twice about posting your resume on a site that automatically shares your information with others. You could be opening yourself up to unwanted calls from solicitors (推销员).
    When reviewing the site’s privacy policy, you’ll be able to delete your resume just as easily as you posted it. You won’t necessarily want your resume to remain out there on the Internet once you land a job. Remember, the longer your resume remains posted on a job board, the more exposure, both positive and not-so-positive, it will receive.
    2) Take advantage of site features.
    Lawful job search sites offer levels of privacy protection. Before posting your resume, carefully consider your job search objective and the level of risk you are willing to assume.
CareerBuilder.com, for example, offers three levels of privacy from which job seekers can choose. The first is standard posting. This option gives job seekers who post their resumes the most visibility to the broadest employer audience possible.
    The second is anonymous (匿名的) posting. This allows job seekers the same visibility as those in the standard posting category without any of their contact information being displayed. Job seekers who wish to remain anonymous but want to share some other information may choose which pieces of contact information to display.
    The third is private posting. This option allows a job seeker to post a resume without having it searched by employers. Private posting allows job seekers to quickly and easily apply for jobs that appear on CareerBuilder.com without retyping their information.
    3) Safeguard your identity.
    Career experts say that one of the ways job seekers can stay safe while using the Internet to search out jobs is to conceal their identities. Replace your name on your resume with a generic (泛指的) identifier, such as “Intranet Developer Candidate,” or “Experienced Marketing Representative.”
    You should also consider eliminating the name and location of your current employer. Depending on your title, it may not be all that difficult to determine who you are once the name of your company is provided. Use a general description of the company such as “Major auto manufacturer,” or “International packaged goods supplier.”
    If your job title is unique, consider using the generic equivalent instead of the exact title assigned by your employer.
    4) Establish and email address for your search.
    Another way to protect your privacy while seeking employment online is to open up an email account specifically for your online job search. This will safeguard your existing email box in the event someone you don’t know gets hold of your email address and shares it with others.
    Using an email address specifically for you job search also eliminates the possibility that you will receive unwelcome emails in your primary mailbox. When naming your new email address, be sure that it doesn’t contain references to your name or other information that will give away your identity. The best solution is an email address that is relevant to the job you are seeking such as salesmgr2004@provider.com.
    5) Protect your reference.
    If your resume contains a section with the names and contact information of your references, take it out. There’s no sense in safeguarding your information while sharing private contact information of your references.
    6) Keep confidential (机密的) information confidential.
    Do not, under any circumstances, share your social security, driver’s license, and bank account numbers or other personal information, such as race or eye color. Honest employers do not need this information with an initial application. Don’t provide this even if they say they need it in order to conduct a background check. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book – don’t fall for it.

    Students’ pressure sometimes comes from their parents. Most parents are well (1) ________, but some of them aren’t very helpful with the problems their sons and daughters have in (2) ________ to college, and a few of them seem to go out of their way to add to their children’s difficulties.
    For one thing, parents are often not (3) ________ of the kinds of problems their children face. They don’t realize that the (4) ________ is keener, that the required (5) ________ of work are higher, and that their children may not be prepared for the change. (6) ________ to seeing A’s and B’s on high school report cards, they may be upset when their children’s first (7) ________ college grades are below that level. At their kindest, they may gently (8) ________ why John or Mary isn’t doing better, whether he or she is trying as hard as he or she should, and so on. (9) ________________________________.
    Sometimes parents regard their children as extensions of themselves and (10) ________________________________. In their involvement and identification with their children, they forget that everyone is different and that each person must develop in his or her own way. They forget that their children, (11) ________________________________.

    Years ago, doctors often said that pain was a normal part of life. In particular, when older patients (1) ________ of pain, they were told it was a natural part of aging and they would have to learn to live with it.
    Times have changed. Today, we take pain (2)________. Indeed, pain is now considered the fifth vital sign, as important as blood pressure, temperature, breathing rate and pulse in (3) ________ a person’s well-being. We know that chronic (慢性的) pain can disrupt (扰乱) a person’s life, causing problems that (4) ________ from missed work to depression.
    That’s why a growing number of hospitals now depend upon physicians who (5) ________ in pain medicine. Not only do we evaluate the cause of the pain, which can help us treat the pain better, but we also help provide comprehensive therapy for depression and other psychological and social (6) ________ related to chronic pain. Such comprehensive therapy often (7) ________ the work of social workers, psychiatrists (心理医生) and psychologists, as well as specialists in pain medicine.
    This modern (8) ________ for pain management has led to a wealth of innovative treatments which are more effective and with fewer side effects than ever before. Decades ago, there were only a (10)________ number of drugs available, and many of them caused (9) ________ side effects in older people, including dizziness and fatigue. This created a double-edged sword: the medications helped relieve the pain but caused other problems that could be worse than the pain itself.

    I’ve been writing for most of my life. The book Writing Without Teachers introduced me to one distinction and one practice that has helped my writing processes tremendously. The distinction is between the creative mind and the critical mind. While you need to employ both to get to a finished result, they cannot work in parallel no matter how much we might like to think so.
    Trying to criticize writing on the fly is possibly the single greatest barrier to writing that most of us encounter. If you are listening to that 5th grade English teacher correct your grammar while you are trying to capture a fleeting (稍纵即逝的) thought, the thought will die. If you capture the fleeting thought and simply share it with the world in raw form, no one is likely to understand. You must learn to create first and then criticize if you want to make writing the tool for thinking that it is.
    The practice that can help you past your learned bad habits of trying to edit as you write is what Elbow calls “free writing.” In free writing, the objective is to get words down on paper non-stop, usually for 15-20 minutes. No stopping, no going back, no criticizing. The goal is to get the words flowing. As the words begin to flow, the ideas will come from the shadows and let themselves be captured on your notepad or your screen.
    Now you have raw materials that you can begin to work with using the critical mind that you’ve persuaded to sit on the side and watch quietly. Most likely, you will believe that this will take more time than you actually have and you will end up staring blankly at the pages as the deadline draws near.
    Instead of staring at a blank start filling it with words no matter how bad. Halfway through you available time, stop and rework your raw writing into something closer to finished product. Move back and forth until you run out of time and  the final result will most likely be far better than your current practices.

    I don’t ever want to talk about being a woman scientist again. There was a time in my life when people asked constantly for stories about what it’s like to work in a field dominated by men. I was never very good at telling those stories because truthfully I never found them interesting. What I do find interesting is the origin of the universe, the shape of space-time and the nature of black holes.
    At 19, when I began studying astrophysics, it  did not bother me in the least to be the only woman in the classroom. But while earning my Ph.D. at MIT and then as a post-doctor doing space research, the issue started to bother me. My every achievement—jobs, research papers, awards—was viewed through the lens of gender (性别) politics. So were my failures. Sometimes, when I was pushed into an argument on left brain versus (相对于) right brain, or nature versus nurture (培育), I would instantly fight fiercely on my behalf and all womankind.
    Then one day a few years ago, out of my mouth came a sentence that would eventually become my reply to any and all provocations: I don’t talk about that anymore. It took me 10 years to get back the confidence I had at 19 and to realize that I didn’t want to deal with gender issues. Why should curing sexism be yet another terrible burden on every female scientist? After all, I don’t study sociology or political theory.
    Today I research and teach at Barnard, a women’s college in New York City. Recently, someone asked me how may of the 45 students in my class were women. You cannot imagine my satisfaction at being able to answer, 45. I know some of my students worry how they will manage their scientific research and a desire for children. And I don’t dismiss those concerns. Still, I don’t tell them “war” stories. Instead, I have given them this: the visual of their physics professor heavily pregnant doing physics experiments. And in turn they have given me the image of 45 women driven by a love of science. And that’s a sight worth talking about.

    An earthquake hit Kashmir on Oct. 8, 2005. it took some 75,000 lives, (1) ________ 130,000 and left nearly 3.5 million without food, jobs or homes. (2) ________ overnight, scores of tent villages bloomed (3) ________ the region, tended by international aid organizations, military (4) ________ and aid groups working day and night to shelter the survivors before winter set (5) ________.
    Mercifully, the season was mild. But with the (6) ________ of spring the refugees will be moved again. Camps that (7) ________ health care, food and shelter for 150,000 survivors have begun to close as they were (8) ________ intended to be permanent.
    For most of the refugees, the thought of going back brings (9) ________ emotions. The past six months have been difficult. Families of (10) ________ many as 10 people have had to shelter (11) ________ a single tent and share cookstoves and bathing (12)________ with neighbors. “They are looking forward to the clean water of their rivers,” officials say. “They are (13) ________ of free fresh fruit. They want to get back to their herds and start (14) ________ again.” But most will be returning to (15) ________ but heaps of ruins. In many villages, electrical (16) ________ have not been repaired, nor have roads. Aid workers (17) ________ that it will take years to rebuild what the earthquake took (18) ________. And for the thousands of survivors, the (19) ________ will never be complete.
    Yet the survivors have to start somewhere. New homes can be built (20) ________ the stones, bricks and beams of old ones. Spring is coming and it is a good time to start again.