The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare,” has and will affect millions of Americans. The ACA was signed into law on March 23, 2010, and is being implemented gradually over four years. The ACA is big and does many things, but there are resources online to help Americans understand the law and how it affects individuals, families and businesses. This quiz introduces you to some of the ACA’s key provisions, with links to more information online.
Note: Special thanks to Learning Life intern, Kane Boynton, for conducting the research for this quiz, and drafting the questions and answers.
Need a job, or want to find a better job? The economy may be recovering, but for too many people this question remains all too pertinent.
One of the most cited contemporary sociologists, Mark Granovetter, has found that people more often get jobs through personal contacts than through formal channels, like job ads, employment agencies, or interviews sponsored by professional associations.
Furthermore, as Granovetter explains in his book, Getting a Job (1995), contrary to what one might believe, among one’s personal contacts, “strong ties” of friends and family are often less helpful in getting a job than one’s “weak ties,” that is, people we know less well, like acquaintances from work or school, or friends of friends.
Information – about where the job openings are, how to apply, who to contact, how to distinguish oneself, etc. – matters greatly. However, our strong ties are less likely to know information we don’t know because they tend to be more like us (the adage “birds of a feather flock together” is far truer than “opposites attract”). Our weak ties, however, are more likely to know information we don’t know – information that could lead to a job – precisely because they are less like us.
Granovetter called this “the strength of weak ties” in the title of an earlier and now classic sociological article (Granovetter 1973).
There are two important connections here between Granovetter’s incisive findings and Learning Life’s approach to learning.
First, we share Granovetter’s – and many other scholars’ – conviction that information matters. Getting the right information can mean the difference between getting and losing a job, between success and failure, even life and death (example: safety and health information).
Second, printing big bits – small, useful pieces of information that can have big, beneficial consequences, like information about how to find work, fund a college education, or recognize the signs of a stroke – on the surfaces of everyday life where more people can see them turns public places into information environments that can be as or even more useful than weak ties, especially for those with fewer weak ties.
The future is not just about weak ties and social media. It’s also about big bits and information environments.
In this post, we want to thank Zee Loevner for her volunteer work with Learning Life recently, and tell you more about her.
Zee helped build a database of relevant local and national journalists and bloggers with whom we can share Learning Life’s activities and accomplishments. She also built a database of relevant local businesses we can contact as we move forward with several pilot projects in Alexandria, Virginia this year. Zee carried out both these database projects with admirable clarity and organization.
Professionally, Zee was co-founder and for seventeen years President of T-Med Behavioral, Inc. (formerly Counseling and Rehab Services, Inc.), a company that managed mental health programs for over seventy adult health facilities throughout Maryland, Virginia and several other states. Prior, she worked as, among other things, a classified documents librarian dealing with military research and abstracting. Currently, Zee is doing business planning consulting and assisting a theater group in organizing and marketing college tours while she looks for full-time work in administration.
Zee also actively volunteers. Besides her recent work with Learning Life, Zee has volunteered for many years with her synagogue’s Sisterhood Gift Shop, for which she does sales, product display, and inventory design and updating. She also volunteers with food banks, shelters, the homeless, and a theater group.
We thank Zee for her valuable volunteer work with Learning Life, and wish her the best in her pursuit of full-time employment!
Want to learn more about volunteering with Learning Life? Contact us at email@learninglife.info.
