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The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don't worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That's the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.

These efforts raise the question: What if professors aren't that good at grading? What if the model of giving instructors full control over grades is fundamentally flawed? As more observers call for evidence of college value in an era of ever-rising tuition costs, game-changing models like these are getting serious consideration.

Professors do score poorly when it comes to fair grading, according to a study published in July in the journal Teachers College Record. After crunching the numbers on decades' worth of grade reports from about 135 colleges, the researchers found that average grades have risen for 30 years, and that A is now the most common grade given at most colleges. The authors, Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, argue that a "consumer-based approach" to higher education has created subtle incentives for professors to give higher marks than deserved. "The standard practice of allowing professors free rein in grading has resulted in grades that bear little relation to actual performance," the two professors concluded.

In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a “disease of affluence,” a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world. People who live in poorer countries have a lower risk of depression than those in industrialized nations. In general, countries with lifestyles that are furthest removed from modern standards have the lowest rates of depression.

there seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression.”

Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.

Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information.

ere’s another kind of influence, not typically associated with writing, that works in a different fashion. Here, you don’t try to make people think or feel in any particular way. Instead, you try to get them to be themselves.

Could a writer have an indirect influence of this kind, getting readers to think about themselves anew?

in several studies over the past few years, we have found evidence that such influence is characteristic of literary art.

One of America’s leading political scientists, Robert Putnam, has just come out with a book called “Our Kids” about the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high-school-educated America

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.

When you whack yourself with a hammer, it feels like the pain is in your thumb. But really it's in your brain.

perception of pain is shaped by brain circuits that are constantly filtering the information coming from our sensory nerves,

In 2003, Turner was unloading supplies when his unit came under attack. He was wounded by a grenade. "He took shrapnel in his leg, in his side — and he didn't even notice that he had been hit,"

a better way to commemorate the day is by trying to grasp what pi truly is, and why it remains so significant.

Pi is irrational, meaning it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. There is no way to write it down exactly: Its decimals continue endlessly without ever settling into a repeating pattern

pi, being the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is manifested all around us. For instance, the meandering length of a gently sloping river between source and mouth approaches, on average, pi times its straight-line distance. Pi reminds us that the universe is what it is, that it doesn’t subscribe to our ideas of mathematical convenience.

In the end, though, Litman concluded, the findings were complicated: these factors could largely tell a dog from a general success, but they couldn’t predict the true runaway sensations.

few things continued to stand out: story and social influence. The most important figure in determining ultimate creative success, Simonton found, was the writer. “We can learn a great deal about what makes a successful film just by focusing on the quality of the screenplay,” he declared. Still, as he’d found earlier, quality did not always translate to quantity

And the thing that could potentially be even more, or at least equally, predictive wasn’t easy to quantify: so-called information cascades (basically, a snowball effect) that result from word-of-mouth dynamics.

The rich really are different — and, apparently more self-absorbed, according to the latest research.

Recent studies show, for example, that wealthier people are more likely to cut people off in traffic and to behave unethically in simulated business and charity scenarios.

Earlier this year, statistics on charitable giving revealed that while the wealthy donate about 1.3% of their income to charity, the poorest actually give more than twice as much as a proportion of their earnings — 3.2%.

A 2010 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that the percentage of college students exhibiting narcissistic personality traits, based on their scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, a widely used diagnostic test, has increased by more than half since the early 1980s, to 30 percent. In their book “Narcissism Epidemic,” the psychology professors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell show that narcissism has increased as quickly as obesity has since the 1980s. Even our egos are getting fat.

This is a costly problem. While full-blown narcissists often report high levels of personal satisfaction, they create havoc and misery around them. There is overwhelming evidence linking narcissism with lower honesty and raised aggression.

narcissism isn’t an either-or characteristic. It’s more of a set of progressive symptoms (like alcoholism) than an identifiable state (like diabetes). Millions of Americans exhibit symptoms, but still have a conscience and a hunger for moral improvement. At the very least, they really don’t want to be terrible people.

All of us want to be normal, yet none of us want to be average.

We march through life measuring ourselves on one scale after another

Must the tyranny of the group rule us from cradle to grave? Absolutely not, says Todd Rose in a subversive and readable introduction to what has been called the new science of the individual.

smile

But does it belong to an entirely different woman?

The hidden picture shows a woman looking into the distance, with no trace of the characteristic smile.

IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?

“A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”Chekhov’s chemist is a naturalist — someone who sees reality for what it is, rather than what it should be. In that sense, the starting point of the psychologist and the writer is the same: a curiosity that leads you to observe life in all its dimensions.

Without verification, we can’t always trust what we see — or rather, what we think we see. Whether we’re psychologists or writers (or anything else), our eyes are never the impartial eyes of Chekhov’s chemist. Our expectations, our wants and shoulds, get in the way. Take, once again, lying. Why do we think we know how liars behave? Liars should divert their eyes. They should feel ashamed and guilty and show the signs of discomfort that such feelings engender. And because they should, we think they do.

that neat separation is not just unwarranted; it’s destructive

Although it’s often presented as a dichotomy (the apparent subjectivity of the writer versus the seeming objectivity of the psychologist), it need not be.

IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer?

Older siblings play an important role in the lives of their younger siblings. Like parents, older brothers and sisters act as role models and teachers, helping their younger siblings learn about the world. This positive influence is thought to extend to younger siblings' capacity to feel care and sympathy for those in need: Children whose older siblings are kind, warm, and supportive are more empathic than children whose siblings lack these characteristics. A new longitudinal study looked at whether younger siblings also contribute to their older sisters' and brothers' empathy in early childhood, when empathic tendencies begin to develop. The research found that beyond the influence of parents, both older and younger siblings positively influence each other's empathic concern over time.

Researchers studied an ethnically diverse group of 452 Canadian sibling pairs and their mothers who were part of the Kids, Families, and Places project and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. They wanted to determine whether levels of empathy in 18- and 48-month-old siblings at the start of the study predicted changes in the other siblings' empathy 18 months later. The researchers videotaped interactions in the families' homes and mothers completed questionnaires. Children's empathy was measured by observing each sibling's behavioral and facial responses to an adult researcher who pretended to be distressed (e.g., after breaking a cherished object) and hurt (e.g., after hitting her knee and catching her finger in a briefcase).

"Our findings emphasize the importance of considering how all members of the family, not just parents and older siblings, contribute to children's development," suggests Sheri Madigan, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, who coauthored the study. "The influence of younger siblings has been found during adolescence, but our study indicates that this process may begin much earlier than previously thought."

New data from American, Canadian and British college students indicates that perfectionism, especially when influenced by social media, has increased by 33 percent since 1989.

Thinking that others in their social network expect a lot of them is even more important to young adults than the expectations of parents and professors.

“Meritocracy places a strong need for young people to strive, perform and achieve,” he said. They have “increasingly unrealistic educational and professional expectations for themselves.”

For some of us, this was a concern from the beginning of President Trump’s rise — not just the policies he would adopt but also the attitudes he would encourage and the passions he would provoke.

The problem is one of social psychology. Human beings are wired to favor their ingroup and to view people in outgroups as interchangeable and dispensable. We are willing to form ingroups at the drop of a hat, based even on minor characteristics.

We tend to believe that bad things that happen to people in our ingroup are bum luck, while bad things that happen to people in outgroups are evidence of a just universe. Because we are inherently predisposed toward stereotyping, we are particularly vulnerable to propaganda.

A report published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday found that 78% of Americans believed such rhetoric from elected officials makes violence against targeted groups more likely. A similar majority, 73% of those surveyed, believed elected officials should avoid heated language because it encourages violence.

Among those surveyed, 55% said Trump had changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse. Given a list of positive and negative sentiments, ranging from “hopeful” to “concerned”, a large majority said the president’s statements often or sometimes made them “concerned”, “confused” and “embarrassed”.

The most popular positive reaction, from 54% of those polled, was “entertained”.

“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.

the neuroscientific analogy: that the areas in the brain associated with the pleasures of drug use are the same as those associated with the pleasures of playing video games. This is true but not illuminating. These areas of the brain — those that produce and respond to the neurotransmitter dopamine — are involved in just about any pleasurable activity: having sex, enjoying a nice conversation, eating good food, reading a book, using methamphetamines.

A large-scale study of internet-based games recently published in the American Journal of Psychiatry bears out our skepticism about this “addiction.” Using the American Psychiatric Association’s own metrics for ascertaining psychiatric disorder, the study’s researchers found that at most 1 percent of video game players might exhibit characteristics of an addiction and that the games were significantly less addictive than, say, gambling.

More damning, the study found that almost none of those classified as being possibly addicted to video games experienced negative outcomes from this addiction. That is, the mental, physical and social health of these potential “addicts” was not different from that of individuals who were not addicted to video games. This suggests that the diagnosis of addiction doesn’t make much sense to begin with