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.
A Crush on God | Commonweal magazine - 0 views
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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.
Deconstructing the Creepiness of the 'Girls Around Me' App-and What Facebook Could Do A... - 0 views
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Cult of Mac had a fascinating, stomach-churning story about an application called Girls Around Me that scraped public Foursquare and Facebook checkins onto a map that showed people in your vicinity. Its branding was crass -- "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control!" -- but, as the developers of the app argued, they had technically done nothing wrong aside from being piggish and crude.
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They took publicly available data and put it on a map. The sexysexy frame they put around it made it *seem* creepier, but in terms of the data they accessed and presented, everything was within the rules of the game. They had done nothing that couldn't be done by another app developer.
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This is basically how app ecosystems working with data from Foursquare and Facebook and Twitter are supposed to work. Some people out there get an idea for something that the main services had never thought of and they build it out of whatever data is available.
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I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets | Techn... - 0 views
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I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for. Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.
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“You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”
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What will happen if this treasure trove of data gets hacked, is made public or simply bought by another company? I can almost feel the shame I would experience. The thought that, before sending me these 800 pages, someone at Tinder might have read them already makes me cringe.
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Column: African Americans aren't fooled by Donald Trump's fake love. - Chicago Tribune - 0 views
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Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a master of trickery. His latest fraud was to pretend during his State of the Union address Tuesday that he is a friend to African Americans. “We are advancing with unbridled optimism and lifting our citizens of every race, color, religion and creed very, very high,” Trump said.
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They divert money from urban schools, leaving many promising students behind without sufficient financial resources to meet their educational needs. The voucher system picks and chooses which kids are worth saving and leaves the others scraping for leftover pieces too sparse to go around.
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We were grateful that Trump, whatever his reason, bestowed upon him the honorary promotion to brigadier general in a private ceremony earlier that day. Some of us teared up at the sight of this distinguished black man adorned with badges of honor, standing next to his great-grandson, who wants to follow in his footsteps.
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Children and consciousness | Mental Floss - 0 views
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kids have to scrape by on their imaginations
Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore - WSJ - 1 views
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Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.
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Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.
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exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake.
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For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies' Guinea Pigs - WSJ - 0 views
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The companies touting new chat-based artificial-intelligence systems are running a massive experiment—and we are the test subjects.
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In this experiment, Microsoft, MSFT -2.18% OpenAI and others are rolling out on the internet an alien intelligence that no one really understands, which has been granted the ability to influence our assessment of what’s true in the world.
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Companies have been cautious in the past about unleashing this technology on the world. In 2019, OpenAI decided not to release an earlier version of the underlying model that powers both ChatGPT and the new Bing because the company’s leaders deemed it too dangerous to do so, they said at the time.
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