Even Rats Are Taking Selfies Now (and Enjoying It) - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mr. Lignier built his own version of a Skinner box — a tall, transparent tower with an attached camera — and released two pet-store rats inside. Whenever the rats pressed the button inside the box, they got a small dose of sugar and the camera snapped their photo. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a screen, where the rats could see them. (“But honestly I don’t think they understood it,” Mr. Lignier said.)
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The rodents quickly became enthusiastic button pushers. “They are very clever,”
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after this training phase, the rewards became more unpredictable. Although the rats were still photographed every time they hit the button, the sweet treats came only once in a while, by design. These kinds of intermittent rewards can be especially powerful, scientists have found, keeping animals glued to their experimental slot machines as they await their next jackpot.
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Eric Trump deletes illegal "ballot selfie" - 0 views
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Eric Trump, the second eldest son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, briefly posted a photo of his Election Day ballot to Twitter Tuesday, showing off his vote for his father. But in New York, where Trump voted, it's illegal to take a picture in a polling station or to share a completed ballot with other potential voters.
Eyebrow Shapes Throughout History and the Women Who Started Each Trend - 0 views
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Ancient Egyptians used carbon and black oxide to form thick and black eyebrows to honor their god Horus. Some eyebrow styles dominated ancient China such as the Daimei, black brows, Emei, fine brows, and Guangmei, short and thick brows. The Olmecs painted humans with flamboyant eyebrows. This emulated a jaguar in which they believed is where their society descended from.
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As proved by history, eyebrow shapes have been one of the most important beauty aspects for women. Their styles have evolved as much as hair removal products, especially during the past 100 years. The twentieth century has been particularly incredible thanks to the advent of film, mass advertising, computers, and social media.
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After World War I, the success of silent films gave rise a new trend: pencil-thin eyebrows. While Charlie Chaplin's eyebrows were not particularly thin, the eyebrows of the actresses who appeared in his films were
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Congress Will Investigate Capitol Police Failures, Selfies - 0 views
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Lawmakers are planning a “minute-by-minute” investigation into law enforcement failures during the attempted coup at the Capitol on Wednesday, Rep. Tim Ryan, the chair of the subcommittee that funds the Capitol Police, said Thursday.
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“I’m livid about the whole thing because I had conversations with the sergeant-at-arms and the chief of the Capitol Police [and got] assurances that every precaution was being taken and we had enough manpower, that we were going to keep people completely away from the Capitol,” Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, said during a press call.
Opinion | A Doctor's Covid Vaccine Won't Save Her Dying Patients - The New York Times - 0 views
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My news feed is full of jubilant photos of doctors and nurses announcing their vaccinations. I consider taking my own photo, but then hesitate. Because just a few floors up, there are dozens of patients who cannot breathe, who are scared and alone, who might die simply because they shared a holiday dinner. I find myself, nine months into this pandemic, vaccinated and yet still on a pendulum swinging between hope and despair.
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I recently cared for a man who loved Boston sports, whose wife had decided to have a quick meal with a friend. By the time she learned that her friend had symptoms of Covid-19, she had already passed the virus on to her husband. He died after weeks on a ventilator. There is a grandmother whose family took false comfort in a negative test. A father who welcomed a dozen people into his home for the holidays. Each casualty is made even more poignant by the celebratory vaccine selfies on my phone and the knowledge that had they waited, my patients might have lived.
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watching people refuse to wear masks, assuming that youth or good health would keep them safe — I believed that fear was the only way to change behavior. If only you could see what it is to be intubated, if you could conceive of being suctioned through a tracheostomy tube while learning to walk again, you might make different choices.
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Sam Altman, the ChatGPT King, Is Pretty Sure It's All Going to Be OK - The New York Times - 0 views
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He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.
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“I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”
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In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.
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Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views
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he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
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He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
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Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
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Orbiting, Another Thing for Online Daters to Worry About - The New York Times - 0 views
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chances are you’ve been watched, liked and followed by a crush, a lover or an ex.
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Prying eyes on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter can be exciting when they come from a prospective romantic partner, confusing when unrequited and infuriating when the looker is an ex
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this 21st-century phenomenon, which has joined ghosting, Netflix and chill, breadcrumbing and other recent entries to the dating lexicon.
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How the Trump Era Is Molding the Next Generation of Voters - The New York Times - 0 views
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“Republicans are in trouble,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster who has written a book on millennial voters. Election results show millennials holding onto their Democratic views as they age, she said. “It would not surprise me if the problem is worse, not better, with Gen Z, given the moment we’re in.”
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Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia, and Yair Ghitza, the chief scientist at Catalist, have found that impressions about events from ages 14 to 24 are about three times as powerful in shaping political beliefs as events that happen when people are 40
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President Trump’s low approval rating does not bode well for the Republican Party with young people who’ve been exposed to little else, Mr. Gelman said. But he cautioned that the Democratic brand isn’t particularly popular today either.
Russian soldiers face ban on selfies and blog posts - BBC News - 0 views
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The Russian defence ministry has drafted a law to ban social media posts by professional soldiers and other military personnel on security grounds
Opinion | The Age of Decadence - The New York Times - 0 views
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Following in the footsteps of the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, we can say that decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development
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Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.” He added, “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.” And crucially, the stagnation is often a consequence of previous development: The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success.
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“What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of that endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”
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Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
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For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
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“I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”
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To Vaccinate Younger Teens, States and Cities Look to Schools, Camps, Even Beaches - Th... - 0 views
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Hundreds of high school seniors rode in bus caravans recently to a mass vaccination site outside Hartford, Conn., where they got Covid-19 shots as a D.J. played Lady Gaga and a selfie backdrop awaited.
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The F.D.A.’s decision, announced Monday afternoon, presents a bright new opportunity in the push for broad immunity against the coronavirus in the United States, but the challenges are more daunting than for immunizing older, more independent teenagers.
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But with the school year ending soon, many health officials are racing against the academic clock to schedule both recommended doses, seeing schools as the best place to reach many students at once.
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Pink Dolphins in Hong Kong Find Respite Thanks to the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views
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The most popular reward for hiking to the top of Fu Shan, a hill near Hong Kong’s westernmost point, is a selfie backed by the setting sun, the gleaming new bridge across the Pearl River or a flight landing at the nearby airport.But for those who look more closely, there is the chance of a rarer prize: a glimpse of Chinese white dolphins swimming among fishing boats and cargo ships in the milky jade water.
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The species, also known as the pink dolphin for the flush coloration it gets while swimming actively in warm waters, is found through much of coastal south China and Southeast Asia.
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The marine mammals have maintained a precarious existence in the Pearl River Delta, which has the world’s second-highest volume of freight shipments, several cities with populations in the millions and an unrelenting pace of development in and along its waters.
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What We Know About Security Response At Capitol on January 6 : NPR - 0 views
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The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a security failure, an intelligence failure — or both. How could security forces in the nation's capital be so swiftly and completely overwhelmed by rioters who stated their plans openly on a range of social media sites? President Trump had even tweeted on Dec. 19: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"
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In a letter to the Justice Department, Bowser says "we are mindful" of events in 2020 — likely referencing the June 1 clearing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square by Park Police and other federal law enforcement that not answerable to the city.
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And then there is the National Guard. In the 50 states and Puerto Rico, the Guard is under the command of the governor. In Washington, D.C., however, the Guard is under the command of the president, though orders to deploy are typically issued by the secretary of the Army at the request of the mayor.
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Capitol riots: Police describe a 'medieval battle' - BBC News - 0 views
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Michael Fanone, a 40-year-old DC plainclothes narcotics detective who was told to wear his uniform that day, rushed to the West Terrace of the Capitol where he took turns holding back the crowd, and resting to rinse his face of the the chemical irritants that that crowd was spraying on police.
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"We weren't battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel," the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department of District of Columbia) veteran told the Washington Post. "We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene."
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Robert Glover, the commander on scene for MPD, declared a riot at 13:50 local time, nearly two hours after Trump's speech at the White House where he instructed his followers to go to the Capitol.He quickly told officers to retake the inauguration bleachers, to stop the crowd from raining down heavy objects on officers from above.
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Far-right activist is among the latest Capitol rioters to be arrested. - The New York T... - 0 views
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Anthime Joseph Gionet, a far-right media personality nicknamed “Baked Alaska” who is known for livestreaming himself participating in illegal activity, was arrested by the F.B.I. on Friday and accused of illegally storming the Capitol during the attack on the building by President Trump’s supporters last week.
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He posted a video that showed supporters of Mr. Trump taking selfies with officers in the Capitol who calmly asked them to leave the premises. The video showed the Trump supporters talking among themselves, laughing, and telling the officers and each other: “This is only the beginning.”
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charged with two federal crimes
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Capitol Police Faces Public Scrutiny After Riot - The New York Times - 0 views
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As old as the Capitol itself, the Capitol Police began in 1801 with the appointment of a single guard to oversee the move of Congress from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. His task, according to a court filing, was to “take as much care as possible with the property of the United States.”
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Today, it is in crisis once again, with calls for a full investigation into what lawmakers have called a “severe systemic failure” that allowed an angry mob of Trump loyalists to storm the Capitol last week, an episode that left five people dead, including one Capitol Police officer.
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The department is accustomed to being shielded from the type of public disclosure that is routine for ordinary police agencies. But since last week’s rampage, the department’s chief and two other top security officials have resigned, and its congressional overseers have pressed for answers.
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