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People tend to think of memories as deeply personal, ephemeral possessions — snippets of emotions, words, colors and smells stitched into our unique neural tapestries as life goes on. But a strange series of experiments conducted decades ago offered a different, more tangible perspective. The mind-bending results have gained unexpected support from recent studies.

The “vice of conformism” is a temptation for all faculty and students, they argue, due to a climate rife with group think, where it is “all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion” on a campus or in academia generally.

It leads them to suppose dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them. Since no one wants to be, or be thought of, as a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Because in their view, “the central point of a college education is to seek truth and to learn the skills and acquire the virtues necessary to be a lifelong truth-seeker,” and “open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate are essential to discovering the truth.”

United States Postal Service workers, who are still delivering and sorting mail at distribution centers around the country even as millions of Americans telecommute, are worried that they may not have the protection -- or even the funding -- they will need to keep delivering mail for months longer.

Reports have popped up across the country where postal workers say they don't have hand sanitizer, gloves or masks, and are being told to work despite illnesses and are looking to community donations to address supply shortfalls.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said postal workers in her region have said they don't have hand sanitizer or materials needed to keep post offices disinfected.

Several states are reporting spikes in coronavirus cases, raising fears more hot spots will emerge in the US beyond New York as soon as next week.

The state's health care system is already overwhelmed. One hospital was forced to create a makeshift morgue, and another reported 13 patient deaths in 24 hours. New York and its National Guard are now assembling four 1,000-bed temporary, overflow hospitals in existing buildings.

In Los Angeles County, cases more than tripled in six days, and one official says numbers will keep going up. Health Director Barbara Ferrer says she expects to see case counts in Los Angeles double every four days for the next two to three weeks.

Each individual has his or her own perception of reality. The implication is that because each of us perceives the world through our own eyes, reality itself changes from person to person.

When it comes to your company’s costs, perception is reality. About 72% of people say that the reputation of a company or product can impact their decision to buy or not to buy.

Reality is fact. Reality is truth. Reality, however, is not always a known

Facebook released a statement on Wednesday stating that regrettably it was abandoning its plans to “significantly increase our investments with local publishers” and instead pulled the plug. Google meanwhile has managed to sidestep the proposition of a “link tax” by delivering the government’s objective of lucrative deals with Australian media companies from News Corp down to the smallest publishers. By flexing a little Google has for now avoided mandatory payment arbitration.

Governments have arguably not paid nearly enough attention to producing alternative digital solutions to giant centralised advertising companies that provide an increasing number of communication services for their citizens. Facebook’s petulance has inadvertently made a case in Australia for more regulation rather than less.

News organisations need to develop alternative platforms, and governments need to provide more regulated certainty. Highly digital newsrooms that have resources and strong relationships with their audiences started moving away from Facebook a long time ago, and are less affected by its volatility.

In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.

Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.

“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.

I’m a Woody Allen person, not because I disbelieve Dylan—in fact, I believe her. I’m a Woody Allen person because his movies helped shape me, and I can’t unsee them, the way I can’t un-read The Great Gatsby or un-hear “Gimme Shelter.” These are things that informed my sensibilities. All of them are part of me.

As to our opinion about his past, one thing is for sure: He couldn’t care less about it. “Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public,” he says in the final lines of the book, “I prefer to live on in my apartment.”Exit laughing.

the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which the Woody Allen character, distraught by his realization that there is no God and considering suicide, stumbles into a revival house to find the movie playing. He says in voice-over: The movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel,  How can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. They’re real funny—and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? I did.I do.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.

“Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”

Ms. Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science with no obvious qualifications in epidemiology, came out against the C.D.C. recommendation in a March 1 tweetstorm before expanding on her criticism in a March 17 Op-Ed article for The New York Times.

It may well be the case that some amount of community protection kicks in below 60 percent exposure, and possibly quite a bit below that threshold, and that those who exhibit a cross-reactive T-cell immune response, while still susceptible to infection, may also have some meaningful amount of protection against severe disease.

early returns suggest that while the maximalist interpretation of each hypothesis is not very credible — herd immunity has probably not been reached in many places, and cross-reactive T-cell response almost certainly does not functionally immunize those who have it — more modest interpretations appear quite plausible.

Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”

a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions.

Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States.

Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired

Cassirer was responding to the same crisis that animated the other three of Eilenberger’s magicians — a sense that the old ways of philosophizing had failed to keep up with the reality of lived experience.

Eilenberger quotes Max Scheler, another German philosopher, who put it this way: “Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”

Language was implicated in this plight, and the responses among the figures in this book were varied and often strange

In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.

The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’ Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.

“We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic,”

Short of a vaccine, mass testing is among the most plausible paths back to some kind of normalcy.

Imagine a world where you could stop at a drive-through testing center, get a result in 20 minutes or so, and then motor onward to your dinner party with a “negative” certificate in hand. Imagine outdoor kiosks at airports, with a negative test result required to get inside. Imagine offices, even restaurants or bars, with a nurse stationed in the parking lot.

Would this be annoying and cumbersome? Yes. Would it be a vast improvement on what we are doing now? Also yes. It even seems plausible since Abbott Labs has won emergency approval for a test that costs $5, returns an answer in 15 minutes, requires no specialized equipment and can be produced in bulk. Mass deployment of this test, or others like it, could fundamentally change how we approach covid-19.

I knew I was different and I had always been told I was “too sensitive”. But I don’t fit the dated Rain Man stereotype. I’m a CEO, I’m married, I have two children. Autism is often a hidden disability.

I always operated with some level of confusion.

My mind is always going a million miles an hour and I don’t really have an off switch. I need to finish what I start at any cost. Now I understand that is part of being autistic.

If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.

Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.

Personality traits that are shaped by genetics and early life experiences strongly influence our Covid-19-related decisions, studies from the U.S. and Japan have found.

In a study of more than 400 U.S. adults, Dr. Byrne and her colleagues found that how people perceive risks, whether they make risky decisions, and their preference for immediate or delayed rewards were the largest predictors of whether they followed public-health guidelines when it came to wearing masks and social distancing.

These factors accounted for 55% of the difference in people’s behaviors—more than people’s political affiliation, level of education or age.

Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources.

The study compared Twitter’s “Home” timeline – the default way its 200 million users are served tweets, in which an algorithm tailors what users see – with the traditional chronological timeline where the most recent tweets are ranked first.

The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.

At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.

The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.

the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event

Lulu Cheng Meservey from Substack says the company calls this a “pro deal”, with advances on a sliding scale depending on a writer’s profile. She says: “We do have several authors in our sights who are currently traditionally published, and are proactively approaching writers we think would do well at Substack. Over the next couple of years you will see some very recognisable names.”

On his blog, Tynion wrote: “DC had presented me with a three-year renewal of my exclusive contract, with the intent of me working on Batman for the bulk of that time … And then I received another contract. The best I’ve ever been given in a decade as a professional comic book writer. A grant from Substack to create a new slate of original comic book properties directly on their platform, that my co-creators and I would own completely, with Substack taking none of the intellectual property rights, or even the publishing rights.”

The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee