Last week I got a job offer, and a few days later, after discussing things with my wife and family, I accepted it! It is a good position as a test developer for a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that makes board certification tests for medical doctors. The tests are written by committees of physicians, and I will work with them as an editor and assessment specialist, shepherding several tests through their various stages of development. Thus I will continue my work in assessment, a field that I’ve been in for over 11 years now. I look forward to learning more about medicine and a new area of assessment.

We are sad about leaving our family and friends here in Minnesota but excited by new prospects and being back on the East Coast. Since my wife and I both lived in New Jersey before, we’ve spent time in Philadelphia in the past and like it. I will be working in downtown, or “Center City,” Philadelphia, so our options for places to live are many. We may choose to live in City Center, or we may choose a suburb that is on one of the many rail lines. We may buy or rent. We will have to sell our place here in Northfield.

My long absence form the blog is due to preoccupation with the tasks around my job search and the move that will result. My apologies.

I was recently reading an excellent book, Physical Activity and Obesity (2000), edited by Claude Bouchard of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisians State University, and wanted to include some excerpts here. The book is a collection of essays by experts in exercise science and sports medicine. From it I’ve gathered that as a society we’ve underestimated the role that lack of physical activity plays in our current obesity epidemic. Instead, we’ve tended to focus on our food intake.

“The war on muscular work has been a remarkable success,” Bouchard comments (p. 14). But that success comes at with significant costs. Here is an excerpt from Mr. Bouchard’s introduction:

Even though individuals bear responsibility for maintaing healthy weights, national surveys in developed countries and the compendium of data around the world by the International Obesity Task Force indicate that programs with a focus on individuals are not enough…. What is needed is a series of major policies aimed at transforming our environment and the way we live. Indeed, nothing short of a paradigm shift has any chance of success in the efforts to curtail the increase in the number of people who are chronically in positive energy balance. City planning, building codes, mass transit systems, car use, safe footpaths and cycling paths, pedestrian-only city centers, school schedules and programs, and the media are among the areas that will require transformations if we are to attenuate the impact of the current “obesogenic” environment.

The challenge is enormous. Evolution has endowed humans with complex regulatory systems of appetite and satiety as well as with physiological and metabolic characteristics determining basal metabolic rates and food- or cold-induced thermogenesis. The recent past in affluent societies reveals that these biological systems cannot cope well in an environment in which palatable foods are abundant and energy expenditure of activity is low. In particular, the lesson from the last decades is that it seems to be extremely difficult and perhaps impossible for a large fraction of sedentary individuals to regulate food and caloric intake to be in balance at low levels of daily energy expenditure. The energy expenditure from physical activity is thus too low for most people to be able to eat normally without having to be on caloric restriction diets from time to time or having to be constantly restraining their food intake. It has been estimated that the current deficit of energy expenditure from physical activity compared to that of the recent past ranges from about 300 to 800 kcal/day. If this range of estimates is close to the true values, it implies that adults would have to add one to three hours of brisk walking every day to their current daily regimen to be in energy balance at a normal body weight level. This is a major public health challenge indeed! (15-16)

Another essay in the book – “The Cost of Obesity and Sedentarism in the United States,” by Graham A. Colditz and Anna Mariani, addresses the tremendous health-related costs associated with lack of physical activity:

The sum of obesity (7% of health care costs) and of inactivity (2.4% of health care costs) is here used to estimate the total direct costs of inactivity. Overall, a minimum of 9.4% of all direct costs incurred in delivering health care in the U.S. is attributable to insufficient energy expenditure…. Note that these are conservative estimates. (60-61)

Note also that these latter numbers do not include indirect costs such as lowered worker productivity

Here, finally, are photos from Northfield’s Walk to School Day, October 8, 2009. The first features Austen Chytracek, who was the first walker I encountered at Woodley and Division Street early in the morning. He had walked from Greenvale Avenue on the other side of town, near where I live. The second photo shows the lack of crosswalk markings at the same intersection.

The third photo shows all the bikes parked at the Middle School and the fourth is a sidewalk scene near Greenvale Elementary. Notice how much space pedestrians can occupy, which makes it more apparent that they deserve to have the separate space that the sidewalk provides.

I’m the lead organizer for Walk to School Day here in Northfield, Minnesota, again. It promises to be a fun event, as usual!

Here is our press release for this year:

Students at Northfield Middle School and the three public elementary schools will celebrate Walk to School Day again this year on Thursday, October 8.

It promises to be a fun event for many students who have a safe route available from their homes. Not only will they get to walk with their friends, but there will be prizes and recognition as well.

The event is part of the district’s Safe Routes to Schools program, which is designed to help students and communities gain the benefits from increased walking and biking. Those benefits include improved health, a stronger sense of community, and reduced traffic congestion and air pollution.

The event also helps to illustrate the benefits of “complete streets”–streets that are built to accommodate all users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and the handicapped. Unfortunately, all too often streets in our society are incomplete.

Students will receive maps of recommended routes, and adult volunteers will be stationed along the routes during the morning and afternoon travel times. A Northfield police officer will be located at the intersection of Jefferson Parkway and Division St./Highway 246 during both the Middle School and Bridgewater travel times. Bridgewater students who live east and northeast of the school are asked to ride the bus as usual due to concerns with that intersection.

Again this year Walk to School Day is funded through the Safe Routes to Schools grant that the school district and city won in 2008. The $30,000 grant includes money for “encouragement” programs such as Walk to School Day.

The grant has also funded an engineering study of walking and biking routes to the district’s K-8 schools. The study has been completed and will be released soon to the public.

The Northfield Safe Routes to Schools Task Force and Northfield Public Schools are organizing the local Walk to School Day in cooperation with the City of Northfield. Many schools around the world will be celebrating Walk to School Day a day earlier. Here in Northfield, the Safe Routes to Schools Task Force decided that the local school schedule makes October 8 a better day for the event.

Forty years ago nearly half of all kids walked or bicycled to school. Today less than fifteen percent get to school that way, and many are driven to school in motor vehicles. Public health experts believe that reductions in physical activity are partly to blame for dramatic increases in rates of diabetes and obesity in children.

Since 1997, communities around the U.S. have been celebrating Walk to School Day. Around the globe, International Walk to School Month brings together more than 40 countries in recognition of the common interest in walking to school.

In its twelfth year, U.S. participation reached a record high with more than 2,800 events from all fifty states and the District of Columbia registering in 2008. Many more communities held events but did not register. For more information visit the National Walk to School and International Walk to School web sites.

…we watch a football game on TV and see a commercial for a bicycle.

Next step in my job search: speaking more effectively about my talents and skills. My friend Dean Sorenmann has urged me to write up and practice a “30-second elevator speech” – a concise statement about myself. He says that the more I practice it and internalize it, the more effective I will be as I speak with people.

I’ve already noticed how easy it is to speak in ways that fall flat or don’t elicit much of a response. I can improve much in this area.

I’ve been putting a considerable amount of energy into my job search lately, and at the recommendation of my friend Griff Wigley I’ve used the book What Color Is Your Parachute 2009 by Richard N. Bolles as my guide.

After a few months of unsuccessful job searching, I took some of Bolles’ advice to heart. He says that rather than spending all their time researching the market, networking, and applying for advertised jobs, people should look inward and do some self-examination to make sure they are finding the job that will make them happiest.

Bolles has some exercises that are designed to help with this self-assessment. The goal of these exercises is to come up with a one-page visual aid that is a guide to your ideal job. This is called the “The Flower,” because the diagram he’s created for it looks like a flower.

At the core of the flower are what Bolles calls “transferable skills.” These are the skills that you both enjoy and have experience using. His recommended method for identifying these skills is to write out seven stories about times when you accomplished something, overcame obstacles, and enjoyed yourself in the process. Once the skills are identified, he recommends making them more concrete by putting them in a sentence and adding adverbs and objects.

Below are the skill sentences that I came up with for myself; all follow the phrase “I’m good at….”

I’m good at

• researching complex topics thoroughly and finding useful information and solutions.
• reading a wide variety of sources and staying informed on the issues.
• writing effectively and eloquently for many different purposes.
• promoting new ideas in a way that will open up minds and bring down barriers between people.
• promoting change that will benefit communities.
• being physically active in ways that support my own health and vitality and inspire others

This list of skills has already helped me to focus my job search and think about what I most enjoy doing. Now we’ll see where it takes me. Next task: informational interviews with people working in careers and organizations that interest me.

If you have ideas for where I can put most or all of these skills to work, please leave a comment. Or if you know me and want to recommend changes and make other comments, please feel free to do so.

Historian Joseph J. Ellis recently wrote an excellent opinion piece for the L.A. Times stating the need for government to address some of our most significant problems. In doing so, he captured thoughts I’ve had over the last several years.

Ellis traces anti-government rhetoric back to Thomas Jefferson and pro-government rhetoric to Alexander Hamilton. He eventually makes the following vital points:

For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” has become utterly essential. All the major problems now befuddling us — the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based healthcare system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere — are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation.

I recommend reading Ellis’s piece in its entirety to get a better sense of his argument.

I wrote the article below for the recent “Progress” section of the Northfield News. I can’t find the article online, so I’m posting it in its entirety here. It summarizes progress we have made on nonmotorized transportation issues here in Northfield, Minnesota:

Over four years ago several of us Northfielders started working to make our area safer and more inviting for walking, biking, and otherwise getting around under our own power. In part we were building on others’ work, but in other ways we were breaking from the recent past—a past in which sidewalks often were not considered an important part of the street system and transportation plans made scant reference to nonmotorized modes of travel.

Since then, the collective efforts of the entire community—including elected leaders, city staff, interested citizens, and various boards, commissions, task forces, and community groups—have led to many improvements. Here are some examples: Read the rest of this entry »

My friend and fellow church member Dean Sorenmann and I are organizing a job search group at Northfield United Methodist Church, 1401 South Maple Street, Northfield. It starts tonight, and anyone is welcome to attend. I know Dean is planning to share some useful information, and I will share what I have learned from sources such as the book What Color is Your Parachute?

Here is the description that Dean created:

The Re-Employment ministries is a weekly job club to support anyone look for work, preparing for a layoff, or looking to change careers. We will have our first meeting at the church on August 4th at 7:00 pm. Be prepared to introduce yourself to the group. All are welcome to attend. Future meetings this month are August 11 and 18.