Brain scans show Ugly

About one or two out of a hundred people has a psychological problem called body dysmorphic disorder. They become preoccupied with what they perceive as physical defects in their face. This can lead to numerous plastic surgeries or even suicide. Most people never get diagnosed. They just think they are ugly.

Scientists at UCLA used brain scans to get a better understanding of how the minds of people with this disorder work. Details of their finding are in the Achives of General Psychiatry.

Researchers scanned the brains of people with body dysmorphic disorder as they looked at photos of their own face and then that of a familiar celebrity – along with altered versions of each. One version obscured the details and another version showed only the details.

It turns out the brain of someone with this disorder doesn’t some parts of their brains that the rest of us use whenever we are looking at the shape and size of faces. They see a distorted, twisted version and fail to grasp how the parts fit into the whole. They're not able to contextualize the information.

The problem for them is really not on the outside at all.

In the same way, people with twisted, distorted views of the world have an inside problem. They’ll never bring the world in focus by making outside changes. The change has to happen on the inside.

Step back and get the big picture. See the painting created by the tapestry of life’s details. By themselves, those details can appear quite ugly. But that’s not the whole picture.

Stephen Goforth

4 Steps When Addressing Inappropriate Behavior

When someone keeps repeating inappropriate behavior, try the DESC approach.  The four steps are describe, express, specify, and consequences.

1. Describe the objectionable behavior.

Poor: You’re ignoring me! You insensitive, spiteful, stubborn bore.

Better: You are not looking at me when I ask a question and you are not answering me.

2. Express your feelings.

Poor: You make me so angry I could wring your neck. I really hate you! Better: When you do this, I feel hurt. I feel insignificant and unimportant here.

3. Specify what action you want to see.

Poor: Notice I’m alive!

Better: Would you please look at me and give me a quick answer?

4. Tell the person the consequences if there is no change in behavior.

Poor: I’ll give the children up to the orphanage and leave!

Better: I’ll let you know I appreciate you looking and answering with a hug and a kiss!!

Articles of Interest - Sept 5

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Almost no one really knows how Facebook’s Trending algorithm works, but here’s an idea  Harvard’s Nieman Lab

12 Rules for Winning at Snapchat Like a Boss—a Teen Boss  Wired

Groups Worry About Impact Of Police Moves To Block Social Media  NPR

How an online forum catches censors unawares  Economist

The Teenager’s Definitive Guide to Social Media Don’ts  Wired

Study: Social Media Overtakes TV as Main Source of News for 18-24  AdWeek

***ART AND DESIGN

Why Facebook Is Blue: The Science of Colors in Marketing  Medium

***IMAGES

Stanford Professor puts his entire digital photography course online for free  DIY Photography

***PRODUCING MEDIA

The Curse of a Phoenix Weatherman: Finding New Ways to Say ‘It’s Hot’  New York Times

Why Recent Grads Are Breaking Up With Blogs in Favor of Podcasts: Millennials shift to audio to build their personal brand  Adweek

In the Digital Age Billboards are far from Dead  New York Times 

***FREE SPEECH

Free Speech, Political Correctness And Higher Education  Huffington Post

Welcome to Campus! And Freedom of Speech!  The FIRE

***LEGAL ISSUES

ADA Taken to Task by Feds and Critics on Law School Student Outcomes  Inside Higher Ed

Judge: Glenn Beck must disclose his marathon bombing sources  Associated Press

Warner Bros. issues so many DMCAs that some of its own websites are included  Daily Dot

Copyright’s Digital/Analog Divide  InfoJustice

***TECHNOLOGY

This program can mimic your handwriting with shocking accuracy—what could go wrong?  Daily Dot

***FILM

The first AI-made film trailer  Wired

5 Hours of Free Alfred Hitchcock Interviews: Discover His Theories of Film Editing, Creating Suspense & More  Open Culture

***BIG DATA / STATS  

I’ve lost track of the number of meetings where government contractors and Data Scientists have left me gasping at the lack of experience  Forbes

What is the right mix of competences for Data Scientists? First partial survey findings  Alessandro Piva

Free A/B Split Test Calculator Online  Answer Miner

The 10 algorithms machine-learning engineers need to know  Lab41

***MUSIC AND ART  

Malcolm Gladwell on Why Genius Takes Time: A Look at the Making of Elvis Costello’s “Deportee” & Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”   Open Culture

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

Making The eSport Leap  NPR

***JOURNALISM

Shield laws and journalist’s privilege: The basics every reporter should know  Columbia Journalism Review

The Newspaper Association of America is dropping ‘paper’ from its name  Poynter

***TEACHING JOURNALISM

Remix: 5 Tips for Managing a Year-Long Student Journalism Project  Media Shift

What Can Journalism Educators Do to Help End Sexist Language in Sports Coverage?  Media Shift

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Vice shows how not to treat freelancers  Columbia Journalism Review

Why Radio Stations keep playing the same songs over and over again  Life Hacker

***STUDENT MEDIA

What happened after 6 college newspapers cut their print schedules  Poynter

Student paper’s traffic spikes with coverage of dean’s controversial note  Columbia Journalism Review

***HEALTH

Machine predicts heart attacks 4 hours before doctors  New Scientist

Test Of Experimental Alzheimer's Drug Finds Progress Against Brain Plaques  NPR

A row over Mylan’s EpiPen allergy medicine raises fresh questions about how drugs are priced  Economist

How to anticipate epidemics  Economist

5 ways hospitals are improving the workplace on Labor Day and beyond  Stat News

Calcium Supplements Linked to Higher Risk of Dementia in Some Women  Live Science

***HEALTH/ ZEKA

Mosquitoes carrying Zika can hand down virus to offspring, study shows  Stat News

POLL: Most Americans Want Congress To Make Zika Funding A High Priority  NPR

Quicktake: Zika Virus basics  Bloomberg

***PSYCHOLOGY           

People can get addicted to almost any product. Do manufacturers have a responsibility to stop them?  The Atlantic

Another classic finding in psychology—that you can smile your way to happiness—just blew up  Slate

The delicate balance of disclosing mental illness on social media  Daily Dot

***NEUROSCIENCE

How A Baseball Batter's Brain Reacts To A Fast Pitch  NPR

You’re not a jerk if you can’t remember faces: Facial blindness is a spectrum, neuroscientists say  Quartz

Cognitive scientist puts profanity in its place  Science News

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Letting go of The Inner Rhythm  Becoming (my blog)

***WRITING& READING

Map: Which US states are the most well read?  Quartz

Book Reading 2016: A growing share of Americans are reading e-books on tablets and smartphones rather than dedicated e-readers, but print books remain much more popular than books in digital formats  Pew Research Center

***LANGUAGE

The class with 20/20 vision!  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LITERATURE

Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature  Washington Post

3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Neatly Presented in a New Digital Archive  Open Culture

How Hip-Hop Can Bring Shakespeare to Life  KQED

The History of Literature Podcast Takes You on a Literary Journey: From Ancient Epics to Contemporary Classics  Open Culture

***PHILOSOPHY

Philosopher of the month: Aristotle  Oxford University Press

A well-documented account of the second golden age of Western philosophy  Economist

An Animated Introduction to French Philosopher Jacques Derrida  Open Culture

***ETHICS

A two-year-old's solution to the trolley problem (video)  YouTube

***RESEARCH

Stupid Patent of the Month: Elsevier Patents Online Peer Review  Electronic Fronteir Foundation

We’ve seen computer-generated fake papers get published. Now we have computer-generated fake peer reviews  Retraction Watch

***HIGHER ED

Colleges Brace for Impact of Overtime Rule  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The debate over trigger warnings and safe spaces on college campuses. (podcast)  WNYC

What the Savviest School Administrators Know About Education Technology  EdSurge

***TEACHING

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2020  Beloit

How to Think Like Shakespeare  Chronicle of Higher Ed

MIT experiments with instructor grading in massive open online courses  Inside Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

One of the biggest ways college students are ripped off is getting out of control  Business Insider

Millennials respond excellently to #HowToConfuseAMillennial hashtag  Mashable

Surprised? College students are drinking more, smoking less  USA Today

***GENDER ISSUES

Colleges work on gender inclusivity with pins, pronouns  USA Today

Researchers Find That Female CEOs and Senators Are Disproportionately Blond  Slate

***SEXUAL ASSAULT

She Was Raped During Study Abroad. Then Her School Said She Couldn’t Talk About It  Huffington Post

Articles of Interest - August 29

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA

Inside Facebook’s Totally Insane Unintentionally Gigantic Hyperpartisan Political Media Machine  New York Times Magazine

FB predicts your political pref  The Wrap

Social Network Nextdoor Moves To Block Racial Profiling Online  NPR

Pinterest Buys Instapaper, the Popular ‘Read Later’ App  Wired

Facebook is trying to get rid of bias in Trending news by getting rid of humans  Quartz

Sent From My iPhone: how a humblebrag became a key piece of net etiquette  The Guardian

Facebook suspends Domain Insights, changing rules of the road for new publishers  Digiday

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Emotional Blackmail Becoming (my blog)

5 Ways to Steal Like An Artist  Medium

***RACE

Big data and hidden cameras are emerging as dangerous weapons in the gentrification wars  Quartz

***LEGAL ISSUES

The Difference between Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism—and Why It Matters  Library Journal  

Quackwatch.org Survives Defamation Case As Judge Rejects Claims of Two Anti-Aging Doctors  Pathos  

Chipotle's social media policy violated federal labor  Law360

***TECHNOLOGY

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet  Quartz

Voice Recognition Software Finally Beats Humans At Typing, Study Finds  NPR

***BIG DATA

The CIA working to monitor you from Space  Vocativ

How Big Data has Changed Decision Making  Harvard Business Review

50 Useful Machine Learning and Prediction  APIs

Data Scientists face an Existential Crisis every day: How do you Distinguish Signal from noisy illusion  Info World

A look at Three Big Data Trends This year  Fine Extra

***FILM

The best 100 films of the 21st century, according to 177 film critics around the world   Quartz

***GRAMMAR           

The argument for writing "a historian”  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***WRITING& READING

Copy Edit This!  New York Times

***LITERATURE

12 Sexting Ideas From Classic Literature That Book Nerds Will Blush Over  Bustle

Why ‘medalling’ and ‘summering’ are so annoyingPeople have been turning nouns into verbs for centuries – so why does it grate so much?  BBC

***RESEARCH

An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors  Washington Post

Excel Created Major Typos in 20 Percent of Scientific Papers on Genes  Slate

New leader of NIH’s research watchdog faces staff revolt  Science Mag

How to Review a Paper  The Genome’s Take

NASA's new online archive is a treasure trove of free research articles  The Verge

***RELIGION

What do Americans look for in a church, and how do they find one? It depends in part on their age  Pew Research

Why Church Hymns Are Best Sung in Bars  The Atlantic

Why America’s ‘nones’ left religion behind  Pew Research

A Preacher's Kid Finds His Own Sanctuary In Music  NPR

The feel-good gospel of the pastor made famous by Kimye and Bieber  Esquire

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

How Netflix does A/B testing  Medium

Five Reasons Not to Trust Your Analytics Data  Mind the Product

***JOURNALISM            

FBI investigating Russian hack of New York Times reporters, others  CNN

Why I Force My Students to Learn AP Style  Prof KRG

How Does the Language of Headlines Work?  Jstor

How Journalists Can Protect Themselves (And Keep Their Apple Devices) In Wake of iOS Vulnerability  Media Shift

How to use open source information to investigate stories online  International Journalists’ Network

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

It’s hard to giveaway small newspapers  New York Times

Survey Finds Newsrooms Are Monitoring Metrics, Not Acting on Them  Media Shift

***STUDENT MEDIA

University Will Sue Its Own Student Newspaper For Reporting On Sexual Assault Case  BuzzFeed News

The University of Kentucky prof facing sexual harassment allegations also faced accusations of research misconduct  Kentucky Kernel

***STUDENT LIFE

Graduate Students Can Unionize at Private Colleges, U.S. Labor Panel Rules  Wall Street Journal

‘Stacking the Deck’ Against Due Process at UCSD  The FIRE

Blame millennials for the vanishing bar of soap  CBS News

This may be the last presidential election dominated by Boomers and prior generations  Pew Research

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Judge: Academic Freedom Doesn't Bar Campus Carry  Inside Higher Ed

***SCIENCE

Must Science be Testable: Why Science needs philosophy  Aeon

***HEALTH

The right to die: What is unbearable?  Economist

Doctors Who Sexually Abuse Patients  NPR

Zika: The Millennials’ S.T.D.?  New York Times

Friendships Might Not Help You Live Longer, But Family Does  New York Mag

Who Let The Dogs In? More Companies Welcome Pets At Work  NPR

Superbug resistant to two last-resort antibiotics found in US for first time  Stat News

The Life-Changing Magic of Choosing the Right Hospital  New York Times

***PSYCHOLOGY           

Instagram Probably Can’t Predict Depression. GPS, Though…  Wired

***NEUROSCIENCE

The low replication success in psychology is realistic and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience  bioRxiv

Narrowing the gap between biological brains and electronic ones  The Economist

***ETHICS

Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas  The Guardian

Many Americans are wary of using gene editing for human enhancement  Pew Research

***HIGHER ED

The New Cheating Economy  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The university's note to new students sets off national debate on safe spaces, trigger warnings and more  Inside Higher Ed

A Brief Guide to the Battle Over Trigger Warnings  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Does Religious Liberty Include the Right to Harass and Harm  Newsweek

The California Christian Colleges/LGBT Bill  NPR

Oklahoma Wesleyan Joins Lawsuit Challenging 2011 ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter  The FIRE  

***HUMANITIES /STEM

Study finds Students Benefit from Waiting to Declare a Major  Inside Higher Ed

What Doctors Can Learn from the Arts  Jstor

How Performing in Theater Can Help Build Empathy in Students  KQED

***TEACHING

It’s Time to Ditch Our Deadlines: Why you should stop penalizing your students for submitting work late  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Why Cold-Calling on Students Works  Chronicle of Higher Ed

 

10 Things to do when people bring you their problems

1. Empathize with hurt feelings.

2. Reflect a genuine concern.

3. Offer a summary of the problem as you see it.

4. Be slow to give advice. Let the other person come to the best decisions themselves whenever possible.

5. Distinguish between causes and symptoms.

6. Keep confidences.

7. Wisely use questions. Especially open-ended and indirect questions. Use “why” sparingly.

8. Watch your body language.

9. Be willing to refer the person to someone else more qualified when the problem is beyond your abilities or knowledge.

10. Ask the person how he or she is doing a few days later. Let the person know you haven’t forgotten about them and you care. Their situation is important to you.

Stephen Goforth

Articles of Interest - August 22

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Live-streaming  Economist

What you need to know to get started with Facebook Live  International Journalists' Network

98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you  Washington Post

Is 'FaceBragging' the quickest route to divorce?  Stuff

Twitter ‘quality filter’ works because it’s about news, not social  The Next Web

***PRODUCING MEDIA

A GIF-by-GIF guide to GIFing everything you see  Daily Dot

Everything you ever wanted to know about WeChat  Medium

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Chronic procrastination? Rather than lamenting your lack of will power, you can just blame your parents  Becoming (my blog)

Patience Is the Secret to Wealth and Health, Economists Suggest in a New Study  Wall Street Journal

***GRAMMAR           

What’s the Matter With ‘Me’?  Resistance to the personal object pronoun continues to rise Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Linguistics of Assassination Threats: What exactly did Donald Trump mean about 'the Second Amendment people"?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Reflections on the origin of the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid"  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***WRITING& READING

8 Writers on How to Face Writer’s Block and the Blank Page: Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates & More  Open Culture

Learning to Write All Over Again  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Thank Heavens for Email Clichés  The Atlantic

***LANGUAGE

Is repeating your toddler’s cute speech mistakes bad for her development?  Slate

Machine-to-Human Communication: Nobody Cares   Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LITERATURE

Will Reading Romance Novels Make Artificial Intelligence More Human?   Jstor  

Literature of the Forever War  New York Times

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker  Jstor

Better To Reign In Hell: Literature's Unpunished Villains  NPR

***GENDER ISSUES

Women are judged by the way they speak  Economist

***RACE

Study Finds More Faculty Diversity at Public Institutions Than at Private Ones Chronicle of Higher Ed

Are black Americans more likely to be shot or roughed up by police?  Economist

***LEGAL ISSUES

If computers wrote laws: Decisions handed down by data  Economist

Confusion over legality of republishing Data Sets  Nature

***BIG DATA / STATS  

 The 7 Steps of a Data Project  Data Science

DARPA wants AI with the capacity to help humans trace the conclusions, decisions and reasoning  Next Big Future

Will reading romance novels make artificial intelligence more human?  Jstor

The hardest work in data analysis lies in the data munging-an unglamorous yet critical part of data science  Analytic Bridge

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

P&G to Scale Back Targeted Facebook Ads citing limited effectiveness  Wall Street Journal

Facebook Profit Nearly Triples on Mobile Ad Sales and New Users  New York Times

Television is at last having its digital-revolution moment  Economist

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Buyouts hit GateHouse newspapers across the United States  Poynter

Facebook Traffic to U.S. News Sites Has Fallen by Double Digits, Report Says  Fortune

NYT decides to shutter its mobile app NYT Now, will rely on Facebook to drive new traffic  Talking New Media

News Apps Are Dying Off. But in a Way, They’ll Live On  Wired

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Law Professor to Students: Stop Calling Me by My First Name  Wall Street Journal

***SCIENCE

The Changing Face of Scientific Collaboration: A spirit of collective enterprise in research is being replaced by a rush to assign precise credit for who did what  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***HEALTH

Menopause Makes Your Body Age Faster  TIME

***PSYCHOLOGY           

Bayesian reasoning may help to explain some mental disorders where processing flaws confuse prior expectations  Science News

***NEUROSCIENCE

Researchers just doubled what we know about the map of the human brain  Washington Post

Sting's Brain Scan Reveals Clues About How The Musical Mind Works  NPR

***HIGHER ED

UC Berkeley chancellor to resign following widespread criticism by faculty  LA Times

As College Costs Soar, Critics Question Open Curriculum Courses  NPR

California bill to ban grant students from religious colleges stymied   Washington Times

Oklahoma Wesleyan University Joins Lawsuit Over 'Dear Colleague' Letter  KOTV

***TEACHING

Do perceptions of the utility of ethics affect academic cheating?  Science Direct

***RESEARCH

Two Cheers for the Retraction Boom  The New Atlantis

‘Does This Have to Go through the IRB?’ Chronicle of Higher Ed

Two studies, one on neuroscience and one on palaeoclimatology, cast doubt on established results  Economist

Science editor-in-chief sounds alarm over falling public trust  Times Higher Ed

***RELIGION

Bible commentaries pulped after New Testament scholar admits plagiarism  Christian Today

Despite his popularity, the pontiff’s efforts to reshape his church face stiff resistance  Economist

Evangelical Lutherans Overwhelmingly Vote to Approve Declaration of Unity With Roman Catholics  Christian News

The Obsession With Biblical Literalism: A Christian theme park in Kentucky brings the ancient to life through a life-sized reconstruction of Noah’s Ark—but not without dipping into fiction (opinion)  The Atlantic

arguments worth having

Parents who browbeat their kids into being obedient and agreeable may not be giving them the best preparation for the real world. A new study shows that encouraging teens to argue calmly and effectively against parental orders makes them much more likely to resist peer pressure.

University of Virginia researchers observed more than 150 13-year-olds as they disputed issues like grades, chores, and friends with their mothers. When researchers checked back in with the teens two and three years later, they found that those who had argued the longest and most convincingly—without yelling, whining, or throwing insults—were also 40 percent less likely to have accepted offers of drugs and alcohol than the teens who had caved quickly.

“We found that what a teen learned in handling these kinds of disagreements with their parents was exactly what they took into their peer world,” study author Joseph P. Allen tells NPR.org. The key to having a constructive debate with your kids, experts say, is listening to them attentively and rewarding them when they make a good point—even if you don’t end up reaching a mutual agreement. “Think of those arguments not as a nuisance,” Allen says, “but as a critical training ground” for wise, independent decision-making.

The Week Magazine

Articles of Interest - August 15

***TECHNOLOGY

MIT and Microsoft Research made a 'smart' tattoo that remotely controls your phone  The Verge

***ART AND DESIGN

Google Chrome is officially killing Flash starting next month  The Next Web

Optical Adjustment – Logic vs. Designers (opinion)  Marvel

Zara Comes Under Fire for Copying Indie Artists Designs  The Fashion Law Blog

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Researchers Study Effects Of Social Media On Young Minds  NPR

Stop Chasing Clicks … It’s About Community  AdWeek

Facebook to give 'informative' posts more weight  USA Today

***PRODUCING MEDIA

A blueprint for planning audio projects  NPR

***BIG DATA / STATS  

Big data: digging a little deeper into millennials on social media.. they aren’t all cut from the same cloth  Data Science Central

Just bec algorithms inspired by Bayes’ theorem can mimic cognition doesn’t mean our brains employ similar algorithms  Scientific American

Meaningful relationships (in data)... "predictions may be more prone to failure in the era of Big Data"   Becoming

 An attempt to explain Gaussian processes (an alternative approach to regression problems) in Machine Learning GitHub

What the lack of transparency means for black-box difficult-to-interpret statistical models  CIO Review

Data integration changes enormously with IoT. How the internet of things changes Big Data  Data-Informed

A Big Data and Data Science newsletter list of good resources for all things data  Data Science Central

***GENDER ISSUES

He's Brilliant, She's Lovely: Teaching Computers To Be Less Sexist  NPR

***RACE

IS Pokemon Go a Racist App?  USA Today

Newspaper Covers Simone Manuel's Historic Gold in Olympically Offensive Way  Huffington Post

The 4.3 million Americans whose race could change when they die  Quartz

Want To Address Teachers' Biases? First, Talk About Race  NPR

The Racist Chinese Washing Powder ad and the Truth about Afrophobia in China  Quartz

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

Dear old media: Get over yourselves  Columbia Journalism Review

***JOURNALISM

TV Anchor Has Had It Up To *Here* With NBC's Ridiculous Restrictions On Olympics Coverage  Digg

How to avoid 10 common mistakes in data reporting  American Press Institute

A Front-Row Look at State-Sanctioned Terrorism: Journalism students studying abroad in Uruguay and Argentina witness the aftermath of an attack on freedom of the press (opinion)  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Warren Buffett changes his mind about newspapers: ‘Newspapers are going to go downhill’  Talking New Media

Study looks at the performance of three media spin-offs and sees the newspaper side lagging  Talking New Media

***JOBS

Five Signs Your Interview Is Fake Because They've Already Hired Someone  Forbes

***HEALTH

Which Percentage of People Is Older and Younger Than You  Public Health Intelligence

The Sad State of Product Design and Innovation in Healthcare  Medium

Muslim doctor: My patient refused to let me treat her because of my Religion Washington Post

 Cocaine Vaccine Approved For Testing In Humans  CBS NY

Zika Moves Quickly, and Scientists Fear That Journals Aren't Keeping Pace  The Chronicle of Higher Education

***WRITING & READING

In the Only Surviving Recording of Her Voice, Virginia Woolf Explains Why Writing Isn’t a “Craft” (1937)  Open Culture

***LANGUAGE

Partisan Political Speech  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LITERATURE

What’s Old Is New Again.. Lewis Carroll  Chronicle of Higher Ed

How Did Children’s Literature Evolve From Prim Morality Tales to the Likes of Captain Underpants?  Slate

James Joyce: An Animated Introduction to His Life and Literary Works Open Culture

The 10 worst endings in all of literature  Business Insider

***PSYCHOLOGY           

Most Common Family Types in America  Flowing Data

The Replication Game: How Well Do Psychology Studies Hold Up?   Science Friday

Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why (education policy in rich countries has emphasised academic skills while neglecting emotional and psychological development)  Economist

5 science-backed tips for getting rid of guilt  The Week

***NEUROSCIENCE

Can This Brain Exercise Put Off Dementia? A new study is believed to be the first to show that speed training can reduce the risk for the condition  Wall Street Journal

***ETHICS

Augmented Reality Games Like Pokémon Go Need a Code of Ethics—Now  Wired

***FREE SPEECH

The Story Behind The New Documentary ‘Can We Take a Joke?’ (It started with a comment from a comedian about playing on college campuses)  Huffington Post

***LEGAL ISSUES

Judge: Ohio State didn't defame fired marching band director Associated Press

***RELIGION

A Hillary Clinton speech on improving the plight of women and girls worldwide has been cited as a demand that American Christians deny their faith  Snopes

Thirty years ago, progressives embraced religious exemptions. No longer  Economist

As U.S. Politicians Shun Syrian Refugees, Religious Groups Embrace Them  NPR

Is God Transgendered? (opinion)  New York Times

Why a stout theological creed is not saving evangelical churches  Religious News Service

Most states allow religious exemptions from child abuse and neglect laws  Pew Research

White Christian America is dying Washington Post

***HIGHER ED

Head of University of California campus resigns after probe  Associated Press

Data From the 2016 Higher Ed Almanac  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Keeping Faith without Hurting LGBT Students at Christian Colleges  The Atlantic

State senator drops proposal that angered religious universities in California  LA Times

A coalition of 25 LGBT rights groups are urging the Big 12 not to admit Brigham Young University as a new member, citing the school's policies against homosexual behavior  Christian Science Monitor

***TEACHING

Does Your Teaching Encourage Epistemological Pluralism?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Why Today's MOOCs Are Not Innovative  Campus Technology

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Institutes, Grading, and the Nine Circles of Adjunct Hell: ‘McSweeney’s’ Regards Academe  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

19 signs you're a functioning adult — even if it doesn't feel like it  Business Insider

***RESEARCH            

8  Rejected Papers That Won the Nobel Prize  Authorea

Do declarative titles affect readers’ perceptions of research findings? A randomized trial   Research Integrity & Peer Review

***SEXUAL ASSAULT

Federal investigation launched into BYU’s handling of sex-assault reports  Salt Lake Tribune

How Technology Could Change Reporting of Campus Sexual Assault (sub. req.’ed)  Chronicle of Higher Ed

 

stomping of the foot (before storming out of class)

I'll never forget the student who charged out of one of my first philosophy classes. The professor had challenged the student's view of religion and the young man stomped his foot, turned red, yelled, and left the room.

Why such an emotional outburst? Perhaps his beliefs were built on a weak foundation. A little rhetoric from an authority figure threatened to topple the structure. When we accept the conclusions of other people, never figuring out the "why" for ourselves, weak lay a weak foundation. Should we intentionally avoid opposing view points? It turns out we naturally steer clear of conflict.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found the less certain you are about what you believe, the more likely you’ll stay away from opposing viewpoints (and freak out when you run across opposing opinion). After reviewing nearly 100 studies, they came to the conclusion that people tend minimize their exposure when they are less certain and less confident in their own position. In fact, we're nearly twice as likely to completely avoid differing opinions than we are to give consideration to different ideas. For those who are close-minded the percentage jumps even higher. Three-out-of-four times the close-minded person will stick to what supports their own conclusions. Details of the study are in the Psychological Bulletin by Researchers.

Stephen Goforth

Clothed with Happiness

In Bermuda, Johnny Barnes decided to put on a prodigal display in 1986. He would stand at the Crow Lane roundabout in Hamilton, where most of the rush-hour traffic came past, and tell each passing motorist how sweet life was and how much he loved them. His days had long overflowed with happiness, in his garden and in his jobs as a railway electrician and a bus-driver, where he had taken up the habit of waving and smiling to anyone who passed as he ate his lunchtime sandwiches. He had lavished joy on his wife Belvina, “covering her with honey”, as he put it. But there was plenty left over.

For 30 years he went to the roundabout every weekday morning. He would rise at around 3am, walk two miles to his post, stay for six hours shouting “I love you!”, smiling and blowing kisses, and then walk home again. He was there in the heat, his wide-brimmed straw hat keeping off the sun, and there in the rain with his umbrella. Only storms deterred him and eventually, the creakings of old age… Over the years, he transmitted his radiant happiness to drivers hundreds of thousands of times.

Johnny Barnes, Bermuda’s “greeter” died on July 9th at the age of aged 93. Read more in The Economist.

Articles of Interest - August 8

***PSYCHOLOGY                       

The clearest proof yet that your job is killing you  Washington Post

Who You Hate Depends on How Smart You Are, Study Finds  Vice

What do Lisa Kudrow, aka Phoebe from Friends, Colin Firth and Natalie Portman have in common? They’ve published psychology papers  Discover Magazine

What if Addiction Is Not a Disease?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Carl Jung Explains Why His Famous Friendship with Sigmund Freud Fell Apart in Rare 1959 Audio  Open Culture

Spotify’s incredibly addictive playlists are based on simple behavioral psychology  Quartz

***SCIENCE

After another stumble, is fMRI brain scanning learning from its mistakes?  Stat News

A Unified Theory of Randomness: Researchers have uncovered deep connections among different types of random objects, illuminating hidden geometric structures  Quanta Magazine

Should science fraudsters have to serve jail time?  Stat News

***MEDICAL

When Pregnant Women Need Medicine they encounter a Void  NPR

Turning Surgical Sutures into Sensors  Economist

Why Don't Doctors Recognize Cardiac Arrest?  The Atlantic

I'm an OB-GYN treating women with Zika: This is what it's like  The Conversation

***NEUROSCIENCE

The Brain that Couldn’t Remember  New York Times

How Hackers could get inside your head with brain malware  MotherBoard

After another stumble, is fMRI brain scanning learning from its mistakes?   Stat News

***TECHNOLOGY

Watch out, ladies: Your period-tracking app could be leaking personal data Washington Post

Your.MD chatbot could save your life (or misdiagnose a mosquito bite)  Venture Beat

Turning surgical sutures into sensors  Economist

***ART AND DESIGN

How To Make Your Not-So-Great Visual Design Better  Medium

Spend 50% less time thinking about pixels and 50% more time thinking about the experience Medium

Introducing BuzzFeed’s Design Process  Medium

How Tools Have Shaped the Role of the Designer ux Design

91-year-old woman fills in crossword at museum - only to discover it was a £60,000 artwork  Telegraph

***SOCIAL MEDIA

The IOC is cracking down on Olympic GIFs  Washington Post

Can Candid Conversations Happen Online Without The Trolls?  NPR

Meet the Internet’s ‘greatest liar,’ whose Twitter death hoaxes have fooled millions  Washington Post

Professors Assign Students to Post to BuzzFeed. You’ll Never Believe What Happens Next  Chronicle of Higher Ed

What Is a ‘Serious Academic’? Social-Media Critique Provokes a Backlash  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Snapchat's biggest threat is its own design: Why Snapchat needs to start stealing from Instagram  The Verge

What Instagram Stories say about the state of social media  Washington Post

***BIG DATA / STATS  

Why my fellow students aren’t interested in doing data science for you (and how to get them interested)  Venture Beat

A list of automated Data Science and Data Mining platforms  KD Nuggets

Spend 50% less time thinking about pixels and 50% more time thinking about the experience  Medium

***PERSONAL GROWTH

The Difference between a change and a Transition  Becoming (my blog)

What do you want your obituary to say? Here are two amazingly different stories  Economist

Do Your Friends Actually Like You?  New York Times

New research shows that even severe stress can have an upside  Economist

***GENDER ISSUES

Convincing the VC Bro-nopoly to Fund Female-First Companies  Wired

Mansplaining Is Real! But Male Self-Citation in Academic Work Isn’t So Simple  Slate

‘The man responsible': NBC broadcaster draws ire after crediting world record to swimmer’s husband  Washington Post

The Media Is Saying And Doing A Bunch Of Sexist Stuff During The Olympics   Huffington Post

Gender Self-Identification: M or W?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Supreme Court Blocks Order In Favor Of Trans Student Seeking Bathroom Access  Huffington Post

A closer look at the gender gap in presidential voting  Pew Research

***LEGAL ISSUES

The Supreme Court Will Consider a Case About Copyrighting Cheerleading Uniforms  Mother Board

Who owns your tattoo? Maybe not you  The Conversation

***GRAMMAR           

Diagramming Trump  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***WRITING& READING

Why Your Texts Sound Angry When You Add A Period  The Conversation

Scholars Talk Writing: Steven Pinker  Chronicle of Higher Ed

4 Places Writers Leave Money on the Table  Copyblogger

Maya Angelou Reads Her Poem, “The Human Family,” in New iPhone Ad Released for the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony  Open Culture

***LANGUAGE

A Word for Parents who’ve lost children in War  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LITERATURE

The Blurred Line Between Propaganda and Literature  Truth Dig

The Last Bookstore: A Short Documentary on Perseverance & the Love of Books Open Culture

Of Thee I Read: The United States in Literature  New York Times

Book Readers Live Longer Lives, According to New Study from Yale University  Open Culture

***RESEARCH

Why That “Drug That Halts Alzheimer’s” Story Is Probably Not True  BuzzFeed

A statistical definition for reproducibility and replicability  Bioorxiv           

‘Kudos’ promises to help scientists promote their papers to new audiences: Increasingly popular social-media tool says it can maximize reach and impact of research  Nature

How much is scientific research being led by narcissists?   Times Higher Ed

***JOURNALISM

 

SPJ is Not Behind a Mass Media Conspiracy to Skew Coverage of Terrorism  Spinetwork

Can mythbusters like Snopes.com keep up in a post-truth era?  The Guardian

The Octagon on New York City's Roosevelt Island named Historic Site in Journalism  SPJ News

A Food Critic’s Plagiarism Roils Richmond Journalism  Washingtonian

How journalists can do their crucial job in the next 100 days (opinion)  Washington Post

New York Times launches text-message journalism for Rio Olympics  CNN

Should a journalist should look at a journal’s impact factor while covering a study? (opinion)  Health Journalism

CHORP, the future of news (video)  John Oliver

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Famous Headlines, Rewritten For Facebook's New Clickbait Policy  The Atlantic

***RELIGION

Israel accuses World Vision's Gaza director of diverting cash to Hamas  The Guardian

Chinese students are flocking to Christian high schools in the US  Business Insider

The Anti-Human-Trafficking Crusader: Agnes Igoye is building a law-enforcement system to protect Uganda’s girls  The Atlantic

Ibtihaj Muhammad: First US Olympian to compete in hijab  Religious News Service

Which countries still outlaw apostasy and blasphemy?  Pew Research

***RELIGION & POLITICS

Donald Trump And A Church Steeped In 'Positive Thinking'  NPR

How the polls inflate Trump’s evangelical vote (opinion)  Religious News Service

Mike Pence’s Double-Bind on Persecuted Christians:The Republican is advocating a country-based ban on refugees from the Middle East, Does that include the people who practice his own faith?  The Atlantic

***STUDENT MEDIA  

Journalism Teachers Now Protected From Retaliation Under Law  Ed Week

Student newspaper at the University of Central Florida closes after 48 years  Student Press Law Center

***STUDENT LIFE

College Meal Plans: What to Do With All Those Leftover Swipes  New York Times

College Student Killed While Playing ‘Pokemon Go’  Huffington Post

***JOBS & INTERNSHIPS

When a recruiter emails you, don't jump to these 3 conclusions too quickly  USA Today

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Should a Professor lose his job over Refusing to put is Learning Outcomes on his Course Syllabus  Inside Higher Ed

I'm a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer  The Guardian

I’m a non-serious academic. I make no apologies for this  The Guardian

***ETHICS

How A Child's Gender May Affect Parents' Willingness To Bend The Truth  NPR

***HUMANITIES /STEM

The Liberal Arts in the Real World  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***HIGHER ED

Calif. Bill Would Give New Bias Protections to Gay Students at Religious Colleges (lawmakers appear poised to pass the groundbreaking measure) Chronicle of Higher Ed

***TEACHING

Mastering logic, grammar, and rhetoric  Chronicle of Higher Ed

In China Some Schools are Playing with more Creativity, less Cramming  NPR

Estimating Student Workload for Your Courses  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***SEXUAL ASSAULT

Why Isn’t Baylor Under Title IX Investigation? A Records Request Yields Laughably Little  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Law Professors Defend Use Of Preponderance Standard In Campus Rape Cases  Huffington Post

A Journalist Says Rape Culture Is Systemic in College Football  Chronicle of Higher Ed

How Can We Stop Sexual Assault At Music Festivals?  NPR

 

 

arguments worth having

Parents who browbeat their kids into being obedient and agreeable may not be giving them the best preparation for the real world. A new study shows that encouraging teens to argue calmly and effectively against parental orders makes them much more likely to resist peer pressure.

University of Virginia researchers observed more than 150 13-year-olds as they disputed issues like grades, chores, and friends with their mothers. When researchers checked back in with the teens two and three years later, they found that those who had argued the longest and most convincingly—without yelling, whining, or throwing insults—were also 40 percent less likely to have accepted offers of drugs and alcohol than the teens who had caved quickly.

“We found that what a teen learned in handling these kinds of disagreements with their parents was exactly what they took into their peer world,” study author Joseph P. Allen tells NPR.org. The key to having a constructive debate with your kids, experts say, is listening to them attentively and rewarding them when they make a good point—even if you don’t end up reaching a mutual agreement. “Think of those arguments not as a nuisance,” Allen says, “but as a critical training ground” for wise, independent decision-making.

The Week Magazine

Articles of Interest August 1

***TECHNOLOGY

Wearables in the Workplace: Promise and Pitfalls  National Law Review

***ART AND DESIGN

How to Design a Google Font  Format

Great Products Don’t Happen By Accident: Using playbooks for designing and building products  Medium

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Vine’s top stars are fleeing, despite the app’s best attempts to keep them  Washington Post

***BIG DATA / STATS  

Clearing up confusion about data science by imagining it in terms of the simplifying framework of an avocado  Data Science Central   

Which Big Data languages are losing traction & which data sources are contributing the most to the shifts?  Spectrum

40 Techniques Used by Data Scientists including clustering, pattern recognition,  Bayesian stats and more  Data Science Central

***GENDER ISSUES

Hillary Clinton’s husband wore a fetching pantsuit to honor her nomination for US president  Quartz

***RACE

Investigative journalism org finds racial bias in secret crime algorithm that was supposedly filled false positives  Chronicle of Social Change

***SEXUAL ASSAULT

Title IX Victory for Man Suing Over Sex Assault Finding  Inside Higher Ed

College Is Accused of Inaction After Anonymous Report of Gang Rape  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Court: Adjunct may not use Title VII to sue a college for bias  Inside Higher Ed

***PERSONAL GROWTH

30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself (1-Stop spending time with the wrong people)  Becoming (my blog)

***WRITING& READING

A writing handbook that doesn't just repeat the standard just-say-no dictat about the passive voice  Chronicle of Higher Ed

5 ways for PR pros to sharpen their writing  PR Daily

***LITERATURE

Dentist Protagonists In Literature  NPR

What College Freshmen Are Reading  NPR

***RESEARCH

Managing your research data to make it reusable: Experts weigh in on good data management, why it’s important and how to achieve it  Elsevier

***LEGAL ISSUES

Judge Tosses Out Defamation Lawsuit Filed Against ProPublica, CIR  Propublica

***FREE SPEECH

Fighting for Free Speech on America's Campuses  New York Times

***RELIGION

A 'religious' organization called the Satanic Temple seeks to establish After School Satan Clubs in public schools: Is it an effort to teach Satan worship to kids?  Snopes

Another reason contemporary Christian music sounds ‘cliched and over-produced’  Washington Post

Died: Tim LaHaye, Author Who 'Left Behind' a Long Legacy  Christianity Today

On Wikipedia, Pokémon Go Is a Bigger Deal Than the Bible  Gizmodo

10 Donald Trump Quotes That Should Horrify His Evangelical Supporters  Huffington Post

***JOURNALISM

Delayed, Denied, Dismissed: Failures on the FOIA Front  Propublica

When Newspaper Paywalls Come Tumbling Down: Six Motivations  Forbes

Despite acquisitions, earnings at Gannett fall as print advertising remains weak  Talking New Media

***PSYCHOLOGY           

Is Hypnosis All in Your Head? Brain Scans Suggest Otherwise  New York Times  

Constant Multitasking Is Damaging Millennial Brains, Research Shows  Inc

***PHILOSOPHY

The basics of the thorny relationship between science and philosophy  ArsTechnia

Philosopher of the month: René Descartes  Oxford University Press

***HIGHER ED

A University Makes a Rare Call to Ditch Its Title IX Exemption  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Thirteen lessons I wish someone had taught me before I became an academic administrator  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***TEACHING

More Professors Know About Free Textbook Options, but Adoption Remains Low  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Syllabus as a Contract: How do you deal with clever students who find loopholes you didn’t intend?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

A Platform to Monitor Learning  Inside Higher Ed

 

Articles of Interest - July 25

***SOCIAL MEDIA

The Reason Your Feed Became An Echo Chamber — And What To Do About It  NPR

Twitter opens account verification to all   PR Daily

***BIG DATA / STATS

How the Gurus behind Google Earth Created the Geomapping Mobile Game 'Pokemon Go'  Mashable

Silicon Valley's new Religion (and next shiny new thing)- AI and Robots  New York Times

How Bayesian Probability can be incorporated into Machine Learning  Fast ML

Data Science Tips from Reddit's r/datascience users Data Dependence

40 Techniques Used by Data Scientists including clustering pattern recognition and Bayesian Stats  Data Science Central

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

Facebook Live Grew Up Quickly. Here’s How Broadcasters Are Jumping In  Media Shift

***JOURNALISM

The Case Against the Media. By the Media  New York Mag

Report: Outsourcing copy editing doesn’t mean more corrections  Poynter

Pentagon revises manual to clarify protections of journalism   Associated Press

What 'selfie journalism' can bring to digital reporting  International Journalists Network

Student newspaper publishes string of articles critical of the administration, School retaliates by firing adviser  Inside Higher Ed

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith on What’s Wrong (and Right) With the Media  NY Mag

The New York Times is trying to narrow the distance between reporters and analytics data  Harvard's Nieman Lab

***PSYCHOLOGY    

Machine Learning Algorithm Spots Depression in Speech Patterns  Motherboard

The Stroop test: how colourful is your language?   The Guardian

‘Anatomy of Malice,’ by Joel E. Dimsdale  New York Times

***NEUROSCIENCE

Play on! In a first, brain training cuts risk of dementia 10 years later  Stat

The neuroscience of “cool”  Quartz

***PHILOSOPHY

Why You Don’t Know Your Own Mind  New York Times

***ETHICS

Frankenstein’s paperclips: The ethics of AI  Economist

Do CRISPR enthusiasts have their head in the sand about the safety of gene editing?  STAT

***PERSONAL GROWTH

What you knew, understood and trusted about everything is OVER. That’s the first truth   Becoming (my blog) 

***WRITING& READING

Everybody's Talking About Plagiarism. What Is It, Exactly?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LANGUAGE

English encroaches in Italy  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Can’t quit saying ‘um’ and ‘ah’? Just learn how to use them better  Quartz

***LITERATURE

How Ernest Hemingway Taught the World to Drink  The Daily Beast                             

***GENDER ISSUES

Sexism In Newsroom Culture Not Unique To Allegations Against Roger Ailes  NPR

Why some young evangelical women are increasingly drawn to feminism — and to Hillary Clinton  Washington Post

***SEXUAL ASSAULT

‘I Want to Get This Right’: Scenes From a Conference on Campus Sex Assault (sub req'ed)  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Former UAF hockey player acquitted of rape says the university won't give him his degree  Alaska News

***LEGAL ISSUES

University accessing of a student's health records ends with settlement: $425K for whistleblowers  Oregon Live

EFF sues US government, saying copyright rules on DRM are unconstitutional   Ars Technica

***ART AND DESIGN

Trump/Pence logo replaced after online ridicule  PR Daily

The Fonts of Star Trek  Fontshop

***RELIGION

Megachurch pastor’s firing illustrates challenges posed by addiction  Baptist News

Poll: Evangelicals differ from most Americans on transgender morality  LifeWay

Police brutality not a reality according to most white evangelicals  Christianity Today

***RELIGION & POLITICS

What If God Doesn’t Want To Make America Great Again? (written by a MidAmerica Naz alum who is an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene)  Huffington Post

Liberty’s Falwell Takes the Stage at Republican convention to support Trump  Inside Higher Ed

Polls show evangelicals support Trump. But the term ‘evangelical’ has become meaningless  Washington Post

***STUDENT MEDIA  

Gannet closes Student-run newspaper years  Orlando Sentinel

Student newspaper publishes string of articles critical of the administration, School retaliates by firing adviser  Inside Higher Ed

***SCIENCE

We need to talk about the bad science being funded  The Conversation

Lying scientists and the lying lies they tell  ZDnet

***HIGHER ED

Microsoft announces professional degree program to fill the skills gap  Tech Crunch

The student loan debt crisis is overblown, The real problem is college completion rates  VOX

Malcolm Gladwell Is Making Enemies In Higher Education. That’s A Good Thing  Huffington Post

***HUMANITIES /STEM

Why Social Science Risks Irrelevance  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***TEACHING

Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?  The Atlantic

How One English Professor Plans to Turn Melania Trump Into a Teachable Moment  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Cheating Behaviors among Undergraduate College Students   Journal of Criminal Justice Education (sub req’d)

Education Dept. Proposes Rules to Clarify State Oversight of Online Courses  Dept. of Ed

Students and teachers detail pervasive cheating in a program owned by test giant ACT  Reuters

***STUDENT LIFE

Grad Students Treated Like Secretaries in Chinese Science  Sixth Tone

Co's Turning to 'reverse mentoring' to tap millennials' knowledge  Star Tribune

Study: Gap between Expectations of Personal Attitudes and Religious Diversity among Students  Inside Higher Ed

***JOBS & INTERNSHIPS

The 1 Thing I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before Starting My First Job (Written by a Millennial) Nobody mentioned this in college  Inc

3 Reasons Unpaid Internships Are Seriously Not Worth Your Time  Huffington Post

There is one type of internship that's more beneficial than others

***ACADEMIC LIFE

 Author Discusses How Academics should use social media  Inside Higher Ed

***RESEARCH

Does expertise matter in replication? An examination of the reproducibility project: Psychology  Science Direct

An 'Epidemic' of Academic Fraud  Inside Higher Ed