Legion of Angels News Archive

Thirty years ago, when James Lubic attended “watching school,” watch repair was still primarily a family business, typically passed on from father to son. But as technology improved, watches stopped breaking so frequently (and became much cheaper), so people often simply replaced a watch when needed.

Those were very bad developments for families in the watch repair business.

“Watchmaker fathers started telling their kids to go to college, because it became tough to make a living in the profession,” says Lubic, a watch repairer since the 1970s and executive director of the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute in Harrison, Ohio.

Obviously, watches still break and still need to get fixed. But not enough to necessitate many rookie watch repairers. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are fewer than 500 job openings in the field annually. That makes it one of the 10 most competitive jobs in America along with prosthodontists, wooden model makers, hunters and trappers, radio operators and astronomers.

To compile our list of America’s most competitive jobs, we looked at projected annual average job openings from 2006 through 2016, as estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. All the jobs on the list have fewer than 500 openings annually.

Some of the fields, like watch repair, are dying. Others, like astronomy, are just such niche professions that the need for new workers is minimal. The same goes for hunters and trappers, “wildlife conservators,” as many in the field prefer to be called. Calling them hunters gives the wrong impression, says one professional.

“Almost everyone in this office has a bachelor’s degree in wildlife or fisheries conservation,” says Kory McLellan, a wildlife conservator in the Vermont office of the United States Department of Agriculture’s animal control unit. “It’s not just, ‘I grew up hunting and I’m going to get a job in this field.’ Yes, we use trapping and forms of hunting as tools for what we do, but it’s not all of what we do.”

So what do they do? That depends on where they work. In Vermont, for instance, Canada geese tend to get sucked into airplane engines if they’re not diverted away from airports. One method for controlling them is a propane-powered cannon–picture a large-scale firecracker–that emits an ear-shattering boom to scare the geese away. Less forceful methods include using Border Collies or hawks to scare them off.

Much of the work is seasonal, keeping the field of professionals small. That’s why many of McLellan’s former classmates didn’t get jobs in the field. “Even more than ever, you need a master’s degree to get a job out of school in this field,” he says. “The pay isn’t great. You don’t get this job for the money. You get it because you enjoy it.”

No one enjoys going to the prosthodontists. They’re the dental specialists who make dentures, bridges and crowns. The need for them is greater than ever, says Gary Goldstein, professor of prosthodontics at New York University, because of the aging population that requires specialized dental treatment. But there aren’t enough schools to train professionals, resulting in a shortage of prosthodontists.

Goldstein says the professional organization has petitioned the American Dental Association to build more schools, to no avail. The bottom line: Take really good care of your teeth.

Source — Forbes

NEW YORK (AP) – The launch of Apple Inc.’s much-anticipated new iPhone turned into an information-technology meltdown on Friday, as customers were unable to get their phones working.

“It’s such grief and aggravation,” said Frederick Smalls, an insurance broker in Whitman, Massachusetts, after spending two hours on the phone with Apple and AT&T Inc., trying to get his new iPhone to work.

In stores, people waited at counters to get the phones activated, as lines built behind them. Many of the customers had already camped out for several hours in line to become among the first with the new phone, which updates the one launched a year ago by speeding Internet access and adding a navigation chip.

A spokesman for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States, said there was a global problem with Apple’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees were telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

However, the iTunes servers were equally hard to reach from home, leaving the phones unusable except for emergency calls.

The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.

“It’s a mess,” said freelance photographer Giovanni Cipriano, who updated his first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.

When the first iPhone went on sale a year ago, customers performed the whole activation procedure at home, freeing store employees to focus on sales. But the new model is subsidized by carriers, and Apple and AT&T therefore planned to activate all phones in-store to get customers on a contract.

The new phone went on sale in 21 countries on Friday, creating a global burden on the iTunes servers.

The iPhone has been widely lauded for its ease of use and rich features, but Apple is a newcomer to the cell-phone business, and it has made some missteps. When it launched the first phone in the United States a year ago, it initially priced the phones high, at $499 and $599, then cut the price by $200 just 10 weeks later, throwing early buyers for a loop.

Rollouts to other countries were slow, as Apple tried to get carriers on board with its unusual pricing scheme, which included monthly fees to Apple. The business model of the new phone follows industry norms, and the price is lower: $199 or $299 in the United States.

On Thursday, Apple had problems with the launch of a new data service, MobileMe. The service is designed to synchronize a user’s personal data across devices, including the iPhone, but many users were denied access to their accounts.

Enthusiasm was high ahead of the Friday morning launch of the phone. Alex Cavallo, 24, was one of hundreds lined up at the Fifth Avenue store in New York, just as he had been a year ago for the original iPhone. He sold that one recently on eBay in anticipation of the new one. In the meantime, he has been using another phone, which felt “uncomfortable.”

“The iPhone is just a superior user experience,” he said. The phone also proved a decent investment for him: He bought the old model for $599 and sold it for $570.

Nick Epperson, a 24-year-old graduate student, spent the night outside an AT&T store in Atlanta, Georgia, keeping his cheer up with bags of Doritos, three games of Scrabble and two packs of cigarettes. Asked why he was waiting in line, he responded simply “Chicks dig the iPhone.”

IPhone fever was strong even in Japan, where consumers are used to tech-heavy phones that do restaurant searches, e-mail, music downloads, reading digital novels and electronic shopping. More than 1,000 people lined up at the Softbank Corp. store in Tokyo and the phone quickly sold out.

“Just look at this obviously innovative design,” Yuki Kurita, 23, said as he emerged from buying his iPhone, carrying bags of clothing and a skateboard he had used as a chair during his wait outside the Tokyo store. “I am so thrilled just thinking about how I get to touch this.”

The phone went on sale first in New Zealand, where hundreds of people lined up outside stores to snap it up right at midnight — 8 a.m. Thursday in New York.

“Steve Jobs knows what people want,” Web developer Lucinda McCullough told the Christchurch Press newspaper, referring to Apple’s chief executive. “And I need a new phone.”

In Germany, sales were brisk at local carrier T-Mobile’s stores, particularly in Munich, Hamburg and Cologne, said spokeswoman Marion Kessing.

Source — CNN

(CNN) – Recently developed “touch DNA” technology has cleared all members of JonBenet Ramsey’s family of her slaying, authorities said Wednesday.

Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said no one in the Ramsey family is considered a suspect and formally apologized in a letter to John Ramsey for the cloud of suspicion his family has lived under for nearly 12 years.

“To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry,” Lacy wrote.

Instead, DNA tests conducted earlier this year point to an “unknown male,” in the 6-year-old child beauty pageant contestant’s December 1996 slaying.

Early on in the case, Boulder police said parents John and Patsy Ramsey, and their son, Burke, were under “an umbrella of suspicion” in JonBenet’s death, although they were never named as suspects.

John Ramsey found his daughter’s body in the basement of the family’s Boulder, Colorado, home on December 26, 1996. She had been strangled and beaten. Testing in 1998 showed that DNA evidence found in the girl’s underwear and beneath her fingernails was from an unidentified man and did not match anyone in the Ramsey family.

Tests conducted in March revealed that new DNA collected from a pair of long johns matched a sample previously taken from the child’s panties.

Genetic material was scraped from the waistband of the long johns, which JonBenet was wearing over her underwear when her body was found. Lacey said in her statement that authorities believe the long johns were either replaced or removed by her killer.

Additional tests were conducted to ensure that the genetic material did not come from law enforcement or medical examiner’s personnel, the statement said.

“The unexplained third-party DNA on the clothing of the victim is very significant and powerful evidence,” Lacey’s statement said. “It is therefore the position of the Boulder District Attorney’s Office that this profile belongs to the perpetrator of the homicide.”

That same DNA also exonerated John Mark Karr, a one-time schoolteacher, after he was arrested in Thailand and confessed to the killing in 2006.

Lacey took pains to state that her office does not consider JonBenet’s father, her mother — now deceased — or older brother to be suspects. She said she released the findings in the interest of justice.

Lacy blamed “evidence reported by the media” rather than “evidence that had been tested in court” for suspicions cast on the Ramseys as the case was investigated, suspicions that she said “created an ongoing living hell for the Ramsey family and their friends.”

She added, “We believe that justice indicates that the Ramseys be treated only as victims of this very serious crime.”

Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June 2006 in Atlanta, Georgia. The family moved there from Boulder, Colorado, after JonBenet’s death.

Atlanta attorney Lin Wood, who represents the Ramseys, told CNN that Patsy Ramsey’s death is “one of the sad notes of today’s news, because she’s not here with us to celebrate the vindication of her family.”

“What’s happened today, though, is irrefutable DNA evidence has now resulted in John and Patsy and their son, Burke, being officially cleared in this case,” he added. “This family suffered too many years, too many heartaches of being falsely accused in the murder of their child.”

Source — CNN