Sandwalk: Get a Job at CFI

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Get a Job at CFI

The Center for Inquiry (Toronto) is looking for someone to help out with their various activities. This is a part-time job. It's a wonderful opportunity for a student.

CFI ONTARIO IS HIRING A LONG-TERM PART-TIME
CENTRE & FIELD ORGANIZER!

Please spread the word to anyone interested in taking on a decisive leadership position in the expanding freethought movement in Canada. Position starts mid July.

Deadline to apply: Monday, July 7.
Full info and updates will be provided online.
Visit Center for Inquiry.

The Centre for Inquiry is an international education and outreach organization dedicated to promoting and advancing reason, science, secular ethics and freedom of inquiry in all areas of human endeavour. We engage in educational lectures, debates and conferences, coordinate 30 campus freethought groups across Canada, run a robust series of secular humanist social and community services, and undertake advocacy defending church-state separation, the integrity of science and equality rights for non-believers. The new CFI Ontario is CFI's first location in Canada and our nation’s premiere venue for secular humanists, skeptics and freethinkers.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

This position is two-fold:
The successful candidate will act as an assistant director at CFI Canada headquarters in Toronto. He/she will lead CFI Ontario’s in-house and ongoing programming, event planning and hosting, promotions, newsletter publishing, social services, campus outreach and membership committees. There will be numerous leadership opportunities through support staff and volunteer recruitment, training, supervision and delegation.
CFI's Canadian operations have recently expanded with the launching of new Communities in Montreal and Calgary and the anticipated launch of a Community of Vancouver in the next few months. The successful candidate will provide organizing assistance to our new CFI Communities in Canada.

HOW TO APPLY

If you are interested in applying, please email a cover letter, resume/CV and writing sample as a text, Word or PDF attachment, to Justin Trottier at jtrottier@centerforinquiry.net. Include a brief statement of your academic background, interests, your activities with the skeptic or humanist movements and/or other extracurricular, community, work or voluntary experience of relevance, and why interning at CFI is something you want to do. You are also encouraged to include any documentation or samples of your relevant experiences (eg. media coverage of your event, political policy statement you wrote, poster you created, etc).

This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the overall growth of the secular community in Canada and to strengthen your relationship with CFI. We hope you will consider joining us.

Position starts mid July. Deadline to apply: Monday, July 7

TIMING/DURATION:

This position will last one year with the possibility of renewal. The daily and weekly time commitment are flexible but would work out to ~ 15-20 hours/week. Please indicate your daily and weekly availability as well as the duration of your commitment.

JOB REQUIREMENTS:

An understanding of the freethought/humanist/skeptic community and/or some demonstration of commitment to the values of free and critical inquiry is essential.

To perform this job successfully an individual must possess excellent skills in organization, promoting and leading. The individual must also have the ability to exercise independent judgment and manage multiple priorities, the ability to organize and lead volunteers, strong verbal and written communication skills, and the ability to represent CFI via public speaking and media appearances. The job frequently involves speaking in front of crowds and other PR activities for which the successful candidate must be comfortable, experienced and proficient. Knowledge of the non-profit sector and community development strategies is ideal.

Since there is some travel access to own car is very helpful. In addition, because the computer resources at CFI Ontario are limited, access to own laptop is also ideal.

Since the successful candidate will be involved in setting up our Community of Montreal, he/she must be very comfortable conversing and writing in the French language. In addition, some knowledge of Montreal and Quebec culture is ideal.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE

To assist in specific projects, the following technical background is helpful, though not completely required. Candidates without such background should still apply. Candidates with such technical knowledge should highlight it in application:
Web development experience
Basic image editing skills in Adobe Photoshop or similar program
Experience using and maintaining SQL databases (eg. MySQL) or similar technology
Basic understanding of video technology and video editing, uploading and embedding (e.g. through youtube or google video)
Proficiency in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Microsoft Publisher or similar program for poster and ad creation

No comments :

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)

Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Peter Atkins

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake. Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

I once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000

It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick

There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod

The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.

Richard Lewontin

More Recent Comments

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Get a Job at CFI

No comments :