From The Economist print edition:

It was not the Christmas present that Julie Babikan had been hoping for. In December 2008, soon after buying a house, she was abruptly fired from her job as a graphic designer at an accounting firm in Chicago. “I had no clue that my position was about to be eliminated,” she recalls. Desperate to find work as the economy tipped into chaos, Ms Babikan scoured job ads to no avail. Eventually she decided to advertise for work on a service called Elance, which allows freelancers to bid for corporate piecework. She has since built up a healthy stream of online projects and reckons she will soon be earning more than she did in her previous job.

Like Ms Babikan, millions of workers are embracing freelancing as an alternative to full-time employment or because they cannot find salaried jobs. According to IDC, a market-research firm, there were around 12 million full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in America alone at the end of last year and there will be 14 million by 2015. Experts reckon this number will keep rising for several reasons, including a sluggish jobs market and workers’ growing desire for the flexibility to be able to look after parents or children.

Technology is also driving the trend. Over the past few years a host of fast-growing firms such as Elance, oDesk and LiveOps have begun to take advantage of “the cloud”—tech-speak for the combination of ubiquitous fast internet connections and cheap, plentiful web-based computing power—to deliver sophisticated software that makes it easier to monitor and manage remote workers. Maynard Webb, the boss of LiveOps, which runs virtual call centers with an army of over 20,000 home workers in America, says the company’s revenue exceeded $125m in 2009. He is confidently expecting a sixth year of double-digit growth this year.

Although numerous online exchanges still act primarily as brokers between employers in rich countries and workers in poorer ones, the number of rich-world freelancers is growing. Gary Swart, the boss of oDesk, says the number of freelancers registered with the firm in America has risen from 28,000 at the end of 2008 to 247,000 at the end of April.

That may, in part, be a reflection of American bosses’ ruthless cuts in full-time jobs, forcing those laid off to scramble for whatever work they can find. But it is also a sign of another notable trend: the range of work available on “e-lancing” sites is growing to encompass more complex and better-paid tasks. “We’re starting to see legal and financial work coming online,” notes Mr. Swart, who says he has recently been talking with a big American insurance company that is thinking of farming out claims adjustments via oDesk. Recent projects posted on Freelancer.com, a rival site, include the composition of a rap song to help teach English to Chinese students and a design for a luxury hotel in Barbados. Such work is more likely to be won by educated Western workers, especially if it requires local knowledge.

To boost demand for their services, online employment outfits have developed sophisticated software to screen workers and to manage their relations with employers. LiveOps, for instance, submits people who would like to join its pool of freelancers to a battery of tests to assess their suitability for cloud-mediated work. More controversially, oDesk has developed tools that let employers check on work being done out of their sight. These include a feature that takes a screenshot of a worker’s desktop six times every hour, combining them to form a “work diary”, and another that measures overall time spent using a keyboard and mouse.

Mr. Swart insists oDesk’s approach does not amount to installing “spyware” on workers’ computers and points out that they are free to remove pages from the online diaries if they so wish. Yet employers are likely to outsource important projects only if they can track their progress closely.

Workers may put up with such Big Brother-ish monitoring because oDesk guarantees them payment for any work they complete, saving them the hassle and risk of attempting to collect money from employers. Other sites are also experimenting with payment models. Australia’s 99designs, which matches 70,000 designers—40% of whom are in America—with online tasks, collects money upfront from customers and only pays it out when projects meet agreed targets. It also gives employers a money-back guarantee if they are dissatisfied with the work done, though refund rates, it claims, are very low.

Some in the fledgling industry reckon that the growth of “e-labor” will mirror that of e-commerce, which took longer than expected to catch on. “By 2020 we may represent just one to two percent of the world’s work,” says Mr. Webb, who used to be a senior executive at eBay. “But five years after that it will have taken off.” One reason for this, he explains, is that younger workers will want many jobs during their careers and will be more comfortable with the technology that makes remote working possible.

The industry will have to negotiate several hurdles if it is to realize Mr. Webb’s vision. The first is the natural conservatism of managers who like to see the whites of employees’ eyes. “There are some jobs where you really want a person to yell at,” jokes Lukas Biewald of CrowdFlower, another e-lancing site. That may be one reason why most work in the cloud is still done on behalf of small and medium-sized companies that do not have the luxury of gargantuan budgets. Some large firms have dipped their toes in the water—LiveOps, for instance, has handled specific projects for the likes of Kodak and Coca-Cola—but few have taken a plunge.

The industry also has to overcome frequent criticism that it is running little more than “digital sweatshops” that drive down wages and humiliate workers. The regulatory environment, too, is uncertain. Alek Felstiner of the University of California at Berkeley’s school of law predicts that some governments will draw up rules that make it harder for firms that regularly tap workers in the cloud to label them as independent contractors rather than employees with more rights.

E-lancing sites are confident that their model of work will find a way through the regulatory maze. They fiercely reject claims that they are exploiting online workers. Repeated surveys in rich and poor countries alike, they claim, show that people appreciate both the autonomy and the breadth of opportunity that the model gives them. Ms Babikan admits she was initially nervous about competing with rivals from low-wage nations, but quickly secured enough work to keep her busy from such countries as Canada, France and Thailand as well as America. In fact she now has so much work that she is thinking of hiring an administrative assistant to help her—a virtual one, of course.

www.economist.com/business-finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16116919

What follows is an excerpt from the article Mixed Signals By Sam Gosling, published on September 01, 2009 in Psychology Today

Are You Sending the Wrong Signals?
Many of us have times when we are misunderstood. People perceive us as cold and unfriendly when we’re really just feeling shy, as flirtatious when we’re just trying to be friendly, or as depressed when we’re just tired. Being misunderstood is largely a problem of a lack of information—not communicating effectively with the people around you through your words and body language.
For many years, Randall Colvin of Northeastern University has been studying the attributes of people who are easily judged—people others just “get.” Colvin found that easily judgeable people tend to be extroverted, warm, consistent, and emotionally stable. These traits are known as “amplifiers” because they increase the expression of other traits. It’s easier to judge the creativity of an extrovert than that of an introvert, for example, because the extrovert sends a barrage of thoughts your way, while the introvert might keep them to herself.
Extroversion amplifies other traits because extroverts simply say and do more. The enormous amount of verbal and behavioral information they furnish makes extroverts easier to understand on all aspects of personality, not just their extroversion.
People are also easier to judge if they have a quality called “blirtatiousness,” the tendency to respond to others quickly and effusively. It’s one of the best amplifiers identified to date—blurters are open books.
So if you feel misunderstood, say and do more. Even introverts can train themselves to communicate more through their words—telling people directly what they like and how they feel. But before you can work on making sure you’re sending the right signals, you’ll need to know how others perceive you.
Why are we so hopeless at knowing how we come across? Because we not only fail to consider the information used by observers, but we also actively take into account information observers fail to consider, according to John Chambers, a psychologist at the University of Florida.
You may know you’re less reckless than you used to be, more talkative than your friends, and less productive than you might wish. But such information about your past, your friends, and your wishes is not easily accessible to others. Even so, when guessing what others think of you, you’ll find it almost impossible to disregard all the things you know about yourself to which others don’t have access.
How you’re seen does matter. Social judgment forms the basis for social interaction itself. Almost every decision others make about you, from promotions to friendships to marriages, is based on how people see you. So even if you never learn what you’re really like, learning how others perceive you is a worthwhile goal.
The solution is asking others what they see. The best way to do this is to solicit their opinions directly—though just asking your mom won’t cut it. You’ll need to get feedback from multiple people—your friends, coworkers, family, and, if you can, your enemies. Offer the cloak of anonymity without which they wouldn’t dare share the brutal truth—the Facebook app “Honesty Box,” for instance, allows people to send you anonymous notes. You may also want to videotape yourself to get a more objective perspective.
To provide users with systematic feedback on how their personality traits were viewed by multiple others, my collaborators David Evans and Anthony Carroll and I developed a Facebook application called YouJustGetMe, which helped users understand the signals they were sending with their Facebook profiles. Sure enough, people were surprised by the feedback they got. People were seen as less open-minded and neurotic than they saw themselves—but more dependable, warm, and outgoing.
Getting an outsider’s perspective actually provides you new information. In a classic study, Richard Robins of the University of California at Davis and Oliver John of Berkeley examined how people viewed their own contributions to a group discussion task. First, subjects were asked to rate their own performance. Then they watched a video of the discussion. When asked again what they thought of their performance after seeing the video, people downgraded their evaluations of how well they did—bringing their assessments more in line with those of others.
In Akira Kurosawa’s epic movie Rashomon, four witnesses provide only partially overlapping—and at times contradictory—accounts of the same robbery. In the same way, no single perspective on the self is complete. That’s why we need to augment our self-views with the views of others, not only to overcome our personal biases, but also because other people have access to information we miss.
There’s a lot to be learned about ourselves and others by seeking multiple perspectives. Even Kirsten could learn something about her punctuality issues by supplementing her own views with information provided by others. All she needs to do is set up a meeting to solicit feedback from them. Oh, wait!
Even if you’re clueless about how you’re seen, you may occasionally stumble onto a glimpse of how others see you. An overheard conversation or a carelessly forwarded email may allow us, as the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, “To see oursel’s as ithers see us.” I had my own moment of self-insight recently, accidentally furnished by a group of friends as I was recounting a story. “Now, I see myself as a pretty sensitive guy,” I began—at which point my audience simultaneously did double takes and exchanged stunned looks. Huh. Perhaps I’m not as sensitive as I imagine!

Millions of first impressions are now formed online. So along with Simine Vazire and my student Sam Gaddis, I decided to examine how well people understand the impressions they’re making with their Facebook profiles. We found that people know how extroverted they seem, but are clueless about the other impressions they convey. So Danielle knows she’s seen as an introvert, but doesn’t realize she’s also seen as dependable, laid-back, and creative.

Alhambra, California, is a town named after Washington Irving’s collection of stories and essays, Tales of the Alhambra, which in turn was inspired by his visit to the Moorish castle, the Alhambra,  located in Grenada, Spain. Alhambra, California is the birthplace of Barbara Vinson O’Grady.  Her story is an inspiration, and in turn the decisive turn that her life’s path took was inspired by another’s story.

As a young girl Ms. O’Grady looked up to one of her mother’s friends. It was this woman’s example that led her in the direction toward becoming a nurse. Later, when Barbara was a senior student nurse working at Los Angeles County General Hospital she admitted a 13-month old child with a high fever who was severely dehydrated. The parents asked her if their baby was seriously ill. She informed them that he was indeed very ill, and she and the doctor started him on a water IV as well as attempting to reduce the fever through cool baths. Tragically, in spite of all of their efforts, the child died. As she was charting the infant’s history she noticed the child has been admitted twice before with bacterial gastroenteritis – the condition that had caused the child’s death. Ms. O’Grady told the doctor that it was a crime that the child’s parents weren’t instructed on how to prevent this type of gastroenteritis, which was mainly a matter of the safe handling of food. The doctor informed her that there were public health nurses who went into homes to teach mothers how to avoid infection in their children. The young Ms. O’Grady decided right then that she would spend her career in public health nursing. Throughout her life, prevention has been her main focus, at this moment it came into sharp focus. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Public Health Nursing from the University of California, Los Angeles. Some years later she went on to achieve a Masters of Science in Nursing from the University of Minnesota.

Her readiness to try new approaches in the delivery of healthcare services to vulnerable populations combined with her ability to convince policy makers to support improvements in the system allows her star to shine brightly. Barbara Vinson O’Grady’s ray of light has become a source of inspiration for others.

Ms. O’Grady established the Barbara O’Grady Excellence in Public Health Lecture Fund in the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota. This fund provides an annual award for excellence in practice. The award is presented at an awards banquet with a speaker focusing on innovations in public health nursing. I’ve mentioned the hand that gives, but in the other hand she holds the several awards she has received. These awards are too numerous to list here but among them are: The Innovative State and Local Government Initiatives Award given by The Ford Foundation and Harvard University, Distinguished Leadership Award bestowed by The National League for Nursing, and The Outstanding Achievement Award from the Board of Ramsey County Commissioners. One of her most recent awards was being recognized by the University of Minnesota School of Nursing’s 100 Distinguished Alumni for her multifaceted nursing career including leadership of the Ramsey County Public Health Nursing Service which established care for the immigrant Hmong population and developed close working relationships with public and private organizations to provide comprehensive, safe care for clients in the community.

Prior to her retirement Ms. O’Grady worked as the director of Ramsey County Public Health Nursing Service where she led highly qualified staff of 9 public health nurse clinicians and 53 public health nurses who all made a difference in their client’s health. During her career, she was a frequent speaker at conferences, classes and seminars on the challenges for nursing in the changing health care delivery system.

As rewarding as her profession has been Ms. O’Grady is doubly fortunate to have a rewarding family life. She has made her home in Santa Ynez, California and is currently married to John Prebish. Barbara has five children with her deceased husband, Joseph Putnam O’Grady. Her eldest son, Joseph Putnam O’Grady, Jr. is a physician, son Jeffrey Vinson O’Grady is a minister, son Kent Noble O’Grady is a major with the Minnesota Highway Patrol, daughter Kimberly Simemson is a financial advisor with University Healthcare System and daughter Kathryn Mauer is an emergency room nurse. Ms. O’Grady is the proud grandmother of 13 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. When tending to her own needs, two of her choice interests are traveling and reading.

Barbara Vinson O’Grady can be found on the Madison Who’s Who Directory, where she is looking forward to networking with you.