Group items tagged

Ah, the tyranny of read receipts – enough to put you off digital communication for good.

It sounds straightforward enough, even perfunctory, and indeed it is if it’s only a blip in the back-and-forth. But when a message lingers on “seen” without explanation for anything beyond a few minutes, you’ve been “left on read”. It’s enough to make even the most self-assured individuals question their worth.

It works both ways, too: if you’ve read a message that you’re either unable or unwilling to respond to immediately, the countdown has already started.

Until last week, I wasn’t sure I would get the vaccine. Some media reports highlight that mRNA vaccines have never been approved for use in humans outside clinical trials, making it seem like a new technology that has not been tested before. The vaccines were developed at such speed, I couldn’t be sure that major side effects hadn’t been overlooked. I worried about autoimmunity caused by expressing the coronavirus spike proteins on my own cells.

Every day in the emergency department, patients walk away from essential care against medical advice, and we watch them go with a shake of our heads and a rueful smile. Just like them, isolated with my doubts, I was ready to exercise my right to free will and refuse the vaccine.

When my non-medical friends asked me about it, I was torn between telling them my concerns and playacting the doctor who recommends the latest proven therapy.

Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104

Her funny stories about Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the sisters Ramona and Beezus Quimby, and a motorcycling mouse named Ralph never talked down to readers.

Beverly Cleary, who enthralled tens of millions of young readers with the adventures and mishaps of Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the bratty Ramona Quimby and her older sister Beezus, and other residents of Klickitat Street, died on Thursday in Carmel, Calif

Clear Lake found that Rogers could recruit an abnormally high number of muscle fibers. But was this ability because of a freak genetic mutation? Another possibility, which Rogers thinks is more likely, is the way he processes pain when he strains those muscles.

What if, instead of superpowered muscles, Rogers has a normal—though extremely well exercised—body, and his abilities arise because he can withstand more pain than most mere mortals?

Rogers reasons that, unlike in the dentist's office—where he has no control over the pain that is inflicted on him—he has direct executive control over pain that he inflicts on himself. “I know it's coming, I have an idea of what to expect and I can decide to ignore it,” he says. Confronted with severe pain, most people fear that they will damage their body permanently if they persist, so they stop well before they are in real danger, Rogers explains.

Sleep deprivation had disturbed my vestibular system, making me feel drifting or floating, and had especially interfered with my right TPJ and with it my body schema (Chee & Chua 2007, Quarck et al 2006). Nearly four hours of holding out my arm for the Ouija board had confused my body schema even more. My attention kept wandering and my short term memory was reduced by cannabis (Earleywine 2002).

With my hyperexcitable cortex (Braithwaite et al 2013) already disinhibited by the combination of sleep deprivation and cannabis, it went into random firing, producing an illusory central light and the form constants of spirals and tunnels (Cowan 1982). Disinhibited motion detectors produced illusory movement and as the light grew bigger I seemed to move towards it

My auditory cortex was similarly hyperactive, producing random low-frequency repetitive sounds that drowned out the music. It sounded to me like the pounding of horses’ hooves. I was galloping fast down the tunnel towards the light.

The peak of my YouTube career didn’t always match my childhood fantasy of what this sort of fame might look like. Instead, I was constantly terrified of losing my audience and the validation that came with it. My self-worth had become so intertwined with my career that maintaining it genuinely felt life-or-death. I was stuck in a never-ending cycle of constantly trying to top myself to remain relevant.

YouTube soon became a game of, “What’s the craziest thing you’d do for attention?”

there’s an overwhelming guilt I feel when I look back at all those who naïvely participated in my videos. A part of me feels like I took advantage of their own longing to be seen. I gained fame and success from the exploitation of their lives. They didn’t.

he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,”

Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion.

Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing.

It’s the opposite of the problem you have, in other words, if you are a normal, contemporary, non-agrarian 30-something.

Russell's paradox is based on examples like this: Consider a group of barbers who shave only those men who do not shave themselves. Suppose there is a barber in this collection who does not shave himself; then by the definition of the collection, he must shave himself. But no barber in the collection can shave himself.

We write this description of the set formally as x = { n: n is an integer and 3 < n < 7} . The objects in the set don't have to be numbers. We might let y ={x: x is a male resident of the United States }.

What became of the effort to develop a logical foundation for all of mathematics? Mathematicians now recognize that the field can be formalized using so-called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. The formal language contains symbols such as e to express "is a member of," = for equality and to denote the set with no elements.

Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

You had all week to finalize a proposal, but waited to do it until 4:30pm on the Friday.

He found that even a series of simple tasks increased in complexity to fill up the time allotted to it. As the length of time allocated to a task became shorter, the task became simpler and easier to solve.

we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.”

Adderall makes everything easier to understand; it makes you more alert and focused. Some college students scarf them like M&Ms and think they’re more effective at cognitive enhancement than energy drinks and safer than a smoke or a beer.

4.4 percent of the adult U.S. population has ADHD, which if left untreated is associated with significant morbidity, divorce, employment, and substance abuse.

Nonetheless, for untold healthy adults (those whom researchers refer to as “mentally competent”) the cognitive-enhancing drug has led to positive changes in their lives.

subjects — 780 New Haven residents who volunteered — helped make an untenured assistant professor named Stanley Milgram a national celebrity. Over the next five decades, his obedience experiments provided the inspiration for films, fiction, plays, documentaries, pop music, prime-time dramas, and reality television. Today, the Milgram experiments are considered among the most famous and most controversial experiments of all time. They are also often used in expert testimony in cases where situational obedience leads to crime

Perry’s evidence raises larger questions regarding a study that is still firmly entrenched in American scientific and popular culture: if Milgram lied once about his compromised neutrality, to what extent can we trust anything he said? And how could a blatant breach in objectivity in one of the most analyzed experiments in history go undetected for so long?

the debate has never addressed this question: to what extent can we trust his raw data in the first place? In her riveting new book, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, Australian psychologist Gina Perry tackles this very topic, taking nothing for granted

“The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.

The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics

Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas

I am ever more perplexed by why we make students learn to write the classic five-paragraph essay but have so much less interest in developing their spoken argument skills.

As much as I love writing, I wonder if there is something arbitrary in the idea that education must focus more on the written than the spoken word.

Back in the day, people would clear their throat and deliver. They weren’t winging it. They would plan their remarks, without writing them out word for word. They knew their topic and, from that, they spoke.

Now Ms. Hopewell, 37, is ebullient, and full of smiles, hugs and laughs. After spending the last three and a half years studying forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Midtown, it was official: She was a college graduate, the first in her family.

“But at the end of the day I know it’s beneficial for my family and I want bigger and better things, and I have to do it.”

I want to leave a legacy for my kids when I leave this earth, and living paycheck to paycheck is not going to get it.

Ignatius taught the Jesuits to end each day doing something called the Examen. You start by acknowledging that God is there with you; then you give thanks for the good parts of your day (mine usually include food); and finally, you run through the events of the day from morning to the moment you sat down to pray, stopping to consider when you felt consolation, the closeness of God, or desolation, when you ignored God or when you felt like God bailed on you. Then you ask for forgiveness for anything shitty you did, and for guidance tomorrow. I realize I’ve spent most of my life saying “thanks” to people in a perfunctory, whatever kind of way. Now when I say it I really mean it, even if it’s to the guy who makes those lattes I love getting in the morning, because I stopped and appreciated his latte-making skills the night before. If you are lucky and prone to belief, the Examen will also help you start really feeling God in your life.

My church hosts a monthly dinner for the homeless. Serious work is involved; volunteers pull multiple shifts shopping, prepping, cooking, serving food, and cleaning. I show up for the first time and am shuttled into the kitchen by a harried young woman with a pen stuck into her ponytail, who asks me if I can lift heavy weights before putting me in front of two bins of potato salad and handing me an ice cream scoop. For three hours, I scoop potato salad onto plates, heft vats of potato salad, and scrape leftover potato salad into the compost cans. I never want to eat potato salad again, but I learn something about the homeless people I’ve been avoiding for years: some are mentally a mess, many—judging from the smell—are drunk off their asses, but on the whole, they are polite, intelligent, and, more than anything else, grateful. As I walk back to my car, I’m stopped several times by many of them who want to thank me, saying how good the food was, how much they enjoyed it. “I didn’t do anything,” I say in return. “You were there,” one of them replies. It’s enough to make me go back the next month, and the month after that. And in between, when I see people I feed on the street, instead of focusing my eyes in the sidewalk and hoping they go away, we have conversations. It’s those conversations that move me from intellectual distance toward a greater sense of gratitude for the work of God.

Palin's poll ratings are telling a more devastating story.

engage with the process much earlier on – not least with their Sunday morning political talk shows

It currently commands 10 million viewers – a creditable figure for a primetime drama, let alone a late-night sketch show.

What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.

Predictive statistical analysis, harnessed to big data, appears poised to alter the way millions of people are hired and assessed.

By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007.

The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught