Articles of Interest - Jan 15

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Here’s how to make sure Facebook shows you the content you want: You can beat the algorithm  Recode

Facebook chooses friends over publishers  Axios

How to post a still frame of a video to Instagram  cNet

This Is the Data Snapchat Doesn’t Want You to See  The Daily Beast

***SOCIAL MEDIA: ADDICTION

Study finds narcissists like fellow narcissists on Instagram  PsyPost

I deleted Facebook off my phone and you should too  Mashable

Are we raising digital monsters?  Union Tribune

Cutting adolescents’ use of social media will not solve their problems  Economist

Parents’ Biggest Dilemma: When to Give Children Smartphones  WSJ (sub req’d)

When will social media companies get serious about their effect on young kids? (opinion)  Quartz

***MOBILE

The Joy of Predictive Text  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***THE INTERNET

The Supreme Court could soon clear the way for states to impose new online sales taxes  Recode

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA 

Digital media companies are headed for a crash, Hearst Magazines president David Carey says  Recode

Media Organizations Grapple With the New Facebook  The New York Times

Facebook feed change sacrifices time spent and news outlets for ‘well-being’  Tech Crunch

Axios Media Trends  Axios

 

***JOURNALISM

After Donald Trump Said It, How News Outlets Handled It  New York Times

Terry Gross, In Conversation  Vulture

A Crash Course in Breitbart’s Conspiracy Journalism (video)  The Opposition w/ Jordan Klepper  

Why NPR Decided To Spell Out And Say Vulgar Word Used By President Trump  NPR

Trying to decide if you should publish that dirty word? Here's a step-by-step guide  Poynter

It’s not “citizen journalism,” but it is “citizens taking notes at public meetings with no reporters around”  Harvard’s Nieman Lab

Five Tips For Creating A Reporter Reel  Newsroom Notes

After Donald Trump Said It, How News Outlets Handled It  New York Times

10 resolutions for newsroom managers in 2018  Columbia Journalism Review

'The Post' reminds us of journalism's responsibility, legacy  Chicago Tribune

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

WaPo hits 2nd year of profitability, plans expansion  Axios

The top 10 newspaper publications in the US Muck Rack

Among U.S. Latinos, the internet now rivals television as a source for news  Pew Research

How virtual reality could change the journalism industry  PBS

***FAKE NEWS

Trump’s ‘Fake News Awards’ could violate ethics rules  Politco

***TECHNOLOGY

CRISPR hits a snag: Our immune systems may attack the treatment  Stat News

Robotic Implants Could Help Remedy a Rare Birth Defect  Discover Magazine

Meet the Woman Using CRISPR to Breed All-Male “Terminator Cattle”Gene editing can change an animal’s sex  MIT Tech Review

Artificial intelligence dominated the Consumer Electronics Show  Economist

One in six Americans owns a smart speaker, according to study  Engadget

***BIG DATA & AI

Supersymmetry, dark matter, GUTs—“some researchers are becoming open to the possibility that the truth-is-beauty argument is a trap, and that the universe is, in fact, fundamentally messy”  Economist

Visualizing the Uncertainty in Data  Flowing Data

Since we are all digital laborers, a new paper suggests data’s role in the economy might include a data-labor union to protect personal data  Economist

AI system sorts news articles by whether or not they contain actual information  Motherboard

Questions mount over fate of SpaceX launched secret satellite—did the satellite suffer some sort of failure or is it “indeed, in orbit”  Washington Post

Survey considers what’s ahead in 2018 for geospatial intelligence as tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence drive next gen capabilities and influence operating decisions  Geospatial World

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Within Arms Reach   Becoming (my blog)

Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person  The New York Times

Why Boys Are Mean To Those They Like (video)  Digg

Improving Ourselves to Death  The New Yorker

The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Narrative as the Pillar of Identity  Brain Pickings

***WRITING & READING

How Reading Increases Your Emotional Intelligence & Brain Function: The Findings of Recent Scientific Studies  Open Culture

Redundancy in writing  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Be like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible  Quartz

***LANGUAGE

New Words of 1990  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LITERATURE

Martin Luther King Jr. in His Own Words  Jstor

Haiti’s Resilience as Seen Through Literature  New York Times

A Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season  Brain Pickings

Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir  Jstor

Protesting Through Poetry  NPR

How the written word shaped the written world: Literature is a fundamental part of human history  Economist

W.H. Auden on the Political Power of Art and the Crucial Difference Between Party Issues and Revolutionary Issues  Brain Pickings

Why we still love Henry David Thoreau  New Yorker

***GENDER  

Women in economics must be “significantly clearer writers than men” to get published in major journals and must wait longer, too  New York Times

A Scientist's Gender Can Skew Research Results  NPR

A Political Scientist Says #MeToo: A professor shares her experience of harassment and sees support as well as backlash, enabled in part by a controversial anonymous online forum for political scientists  Inside Higher Ed

'Dancing Backwards in High Heels' - Study finds female professors experience more work demands and special favor requests, particularly from academically "entitled" students  Inside Higher Ed

Google Memo Author Sues Company For Discrimination Against White Males  BuzzFeed

Am I a bad feminist? (Margaret Atwood)  Globe & Mail

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

North Carolina's Racial Gerrymandering Was Unconstitutional  The Atlantic

H&M's Apology for Tone-Deaf 'Monkey' Sweatshirt Misstep 'Not Enough'  Billboard

The gap between the number of blacks and whites in prison is shrinking  Pew Research

***FREE SPEECH

Medical Charity Brings First Amendment Challenge against U.S. Department of Health and Human Services  Washington Post   

Student Group Sues UMass Over Speech and Rally Policies  US News

Richard Spencer supporter sues university, calling security fee for campus speech unconstitutional  Washington Post  

Germany is silencing “hate speech”, but cannot define it  Economist

Trump calls for review of libel laws (again) in his latest salvo against free press CNN

***LEGAL ISSUES

No Level of Copyright Enforcement Will Ever Be Enough For Big Media TorrentFreak 

Legal Footnote: You Have to Look Hard to See the Supreme…  ProPublica

Army challenges Golden Knights trademark; Vegas responds  ProHockeyTalk

***RELIGION

Report Shows It's Increasingly Dangerous To Be A Christian In Many Countries  NPR

Meet the theologian who helped MLK see the value of nonviolence  The Conversation

Secret Documents Reveal Sex Abuse Scandal in Jehovah's Witnesses Church  Newsweek

An evangelical Catholic movement inspires commitment, stirs controversy  Philly.com

Bonhoeffer at the End of Life: Bonhoeffer, Evangelicals and Pastor Mike Hayes  Patheos

Latino Churches Fear Impact of Homeland Security Decisions  Christianity Today

Arson suspects sought in Pasadena church fire   LA Times

Evangelical Chaplain’s Suspension Intensifies Denomination’s Gay Marriage Debate  Religious News Service

A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More  Open Culture

Edwin Hawkins, gospel star known for 'Oh Happy Day' dies at 74  LA Times

***MEGACHURCHES

Megachurch Pastor admits to assaulting a teen 20 years ago, gets standing ovation  CBS News

Andy Savage’s Standing Ovation Was Heard Round the World. Because It Was Wrong (opinion)   Christianity Today

How California’s Megachurches Changed Christian Culture  KQED

Former pastor says Angley abused him  Akron Beacon Journal

Publisher cancels book by Tennessee pastor accused of sexual assault  USA Today

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

Trump’s ‘s---hole’ remark rattles evangelicals, other Christians  The Wichita Eagle

Trump’s ‘shithole’ comments have enraged many. But some evangelical leaders still back him  Washington Post 

First Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress says sentiment of Trump's vulgar immigration remarks 'on target'  Dallas News

Evangelical rift intensifies over Trump immigration remarks  Associated Press

***ART & DESIGN

Mapbreaking  Prototypr

Russia's Underground Art Finds A Home In The U.S.  NPR

Meet your match: Google app finds famous art you look like  CNET

What’s Up With the Helvetica Font in ‘The Post’?  The Ringer

***MUSIC

Having rescued recorded music, Spotify may upend the industry again  Economist

***BUSINESS

Why Economists Make Terrible Fortunetellers  Jstor

The Real Future of Work: Forget automation. The workplace is already cracking up in profound ways, and Washington is sorely behind on dealing with it  Politico 

The 7 Percent Rule: Why a small fraction of visitors drive most online traffic — and profit  Traffic

***STUDENT MEDIA 

Removal of John Carroll's newspaper adviser upsets former students  Baltimore Sun

***STUDENT LIFE

FIRE files lawsuit on behalf of Illinois student detained by police for ‘Shut Down Capitalism’ flyers  The FIRE

Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic nowadays: But they are also lonelier and more isolated  Economist

Millennials may be terrible, but they get arrested far less often than their parents did  SFGate

It’s Hard To Study If You’re Hungry: Half of all college students struggle with food insecurity, which is closely linked to lower graduation rates  New York Times

***JOBS & INTERNSHIPS

The 10 best places to find a job in 2018  CNBC

Internship opportunities, Summer 2018  NBC, Los Angeles

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

Time For Harassers To Be Held Accountable, Female Gamer Says  NPR

The Paradox of Protecting Students: In shielding students from sexual harassers, professors support a broken system  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Are men accused of harassment denied due process? Or are the victims?  Vox

U. of Rochester’s President Resigns as Report Supports Handling of Harassment Case  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Studies of sexual violence on campus don't suffer from a self-selection bias according to a new study  Dignity

Why Psychologist John Pryor Created The Likelihood To Sexually Harass Scale  NPR

***FAMILY

Most dads say they spend too little time with their children; about a quarter live apart from them  Pew Research

The Grandparenting Generation  New Republic

***HEALTH

The economy affects health in an unexpected way  NPR

Severe obesity linked to newly identified gene mutations  Imperial College of London

Researchers find identical twins share molecular similarity  Baylor College of Medicine

How neural stem cells turn into brain cells, may allow treatment of neurological disorders early on  UCLA

A severe flu season is stretching hospitals thin. That is a very bad omen  Stat News

Trump's new assistant Drug Czar: a 24-year-old campaign volunteer with no experience, in charge of billions to end the opioid epidemic  Washington Post

The New Health Care Still Not Convinced You Need a Flu Shot? First, It’s Not All About You  New York Times

***SCIENCE

Scientists Continue to Use Outdated Methods  The Scientist Magazine

Particle Physics hits a wall  Economist

An Oath for Scientists  Sometimes I’m Wrong Blog

***2017

2017’s Best and Worst Brand Names—And 3 Naming Trends For 2018  Fast Company

Star Wars, Meghan Markle, total eclipse drove sales on eBay in 2017  CNBC

***CREATIVITY 

Two new books probe the evolutionary roots of creativity   Economist

***HISTORY

How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience (a graphic portrayal)  The Nib

Slow Burn: A Podcast About Watergate  Slate

50 Years Ago in Photos: A Look Back at 1968  The Atlantic

Watch the History of the World Unfold on an Animated Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today  Open Culture

***RESEARCH 

The statistical methods used to analyze the data can influence the interpretation of the results  Elife Sciences

Funders should mandate open citations  Nature

We Used Broadband Data We Shouldn’t Have — Here’s What Went Wrong  FiveThirtyEight

That positive p-value we reported yesterday? Um, we screwed that up too  Axovant

A New Citation Database Launches Today: Digital Science’s Dimensions  Scholarly Kitchen

***HIGHER ED

An Insider’s Take on Assessment: It May Be Worse Than You Thought (“assessors have known for sometime now that assessment does not work”)   Chronicle of Higher Ed

How to Survive the Robot Takeover: AI is coming for your job — and only a humanities degree can save you  Traffic

Are Prospective Students About to Disappear? New book says most colleges -- and the vast majority of nonelite institutions -- are about to face severe shortage of potential students  Inside Higher Ed

Higher Education Is Drowning in BS  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Educators must help undocumented students feel safe, supported (opinion)  Atlanta Journal Constitution  Get Schooled

Is there still a place for Christian colleges in American higher ed?  Education Dive

Moody Bible President and COO Both Resign, Provost Retires  Christianity Today

***TEACHING

A School's Way To Fight Phones In Class: Lock 'Em Up  NPR 

***ACADEMIC LIFE 

A Scholar, But Not a Professor  Chronicle of Higher Ed

FIRE sues college for ignoring records requests about its firing of Black Lives Matter advocate  The FIRE

Judge Dismisses Suit of LSU Professor Who Was Fired for Obscenities  The Advocate

 

Not Enough

To me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn't get enough sleep.” And the next one is “I don't have enough time.” Whether true or not, the thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even set up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that revelry of lack... This internal condition of scarcity, this mindset of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudices, and our arguments with life…

Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

Articles of Interest - Jan 8

***SOCIAL MEDIA 

Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can't you put it down  The Globe & Mail

There’s a reason using a period in a text message makes you sound angry  Quartz

New Documents Underscore Problems of ‘Social Media Vetting’ of Immigrants  ACLU 

***PRODUCING MEDIA

The 50 Best Podcasts of 2017  The Atlantic 

***INTERNET

Google's New Search Console Gives Up More Data -- 16 Months Worth  Media Post

How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw  Reuters 

***JOURNALISM

Targeted for Death, Journalists Take US to Court on Kill List  Courthouse News

The Rising Wave of Nonprofit Journalism  Nonprofit Quarterly

Reading List: Data Journalism  Open Corporates

Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism  Press Think

Study: Competition between TV stations spurs investigative journalism  CRJ

One year in, Facebook Journalism Project gets mixed reviews from publishers  Digiday

Top 10 research studies on digital news, social media in 2017  Journalism Resources

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Fewer Americans rely on TV news; what type they watch varies by who they are  Pew Research Center 

How reader funding is helping save independent media across the world   The Guardian

Peter Thiel Is Exploring The Creation Of A Conservative Cable News Network  BuzzFeed

Three reasons why journalism paywalls still don’t work  Quartz

***JOURNALISM: THE POST MOVIE

The Post' Is A Crackling Newsroom Thriller With Electrifying Relevance  NPR

As Trump Targets the Press, His White House Is Screening a Journalism Tribute  The New York Times 

Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham in 'The Post' can help fix #MeToo media damage  USA Today

The Post Is an Urgent Reminder of How Much Journalism Matters. Especially Now  TIME

***FAKE NEWS

Emmanuel Macron: French president announces 'fake news' law   BBC

How Average People Fall For The Flat-Earth Conspiracy  YouTube

How fake news plagued 2017  BBC

Some Real Data on Fake News  Chronicle of Higher Ed

We’ve been told that facts have lost their power, that debunking lies only makes them stronger. Don’t believe it  Slate

Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests  The New York Times

This new guide is like a cookbook for investigating fake news  Poynter

***TECHNOLOGY

Suspicious Spouses Monitor Partners Digitally, Divorce Lawyers Say  NPR

Chess’s New Best Player Is A Fearless, Swashbuckling Algorithm  FiveThirtyEight

***BIG DATA & AI

4 must have skills every data scientist should learn  Hackernoon

IARPA Throws Down an AI Challenge for Spy Satellite Images: $100,000 in prizes in a competition designed to spawn breakthroughs in imagery analysis  Meritalk

Operationalizing data science—that is, hardening the ops behind data science platforms  Inside Data Science

How the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has been researching  machine learning from the beginning  GCN

Google’s new option cloud computing users: discount processing (with a couple of limitations)  ZdNet

Digital Twins isn't completely new but it is a useful major enabler of event processing  Data Science Central

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA 

Farewell To AM Radio, In The U.K.   RBR

***PERSONAL GROWTH

We Seek Familiarity Becoming (my blog)

***WRITING & READING

10 Common Grant-Writing Mistakes  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LANGUAGE

Word(s) of the Year 2017  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Language classes in the US are finally useful  Quartz

***LITERATURE

Introducing the Librarian Action Figure: The Caped Crusader Who Fights Against Anti-Intellectualism, Ignorance & Censorship Everywhere  Open Culture

***GENDER  

Disequilibrium in Gender Ratios among Authors who Contributed Equally  BioRxiv

Female professors are asked for favors more often than male professors  Science Daily

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

Lecturer’s Critique of Whiteness Crossed the Line Into Harassment, State Investigation Finds  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Supreme Court sides with death row inmate over racist juror claim  Reuters

***LEGAL ISSUES

Arrest of "citizen journalist" raises larger questions about free speech and press freedoms  Texas Monthly

Lawyer Who Orchestrated Citizen Journalist's Arrest Appointed to Superior Court Bench  National Law Review

Woman who accused Roy Moore of unwanted sexual contact sues him for defamation  The Washington Post

Disney's 1998 copyright term extension expires this year and Big Content's lobbyists say they're not going to try for another one  BongBong

***RELIGION

The Unlikely Crackup of Evangelicalism: The problems are real—but exaggerated  Christian Today

Thomas Monson, President of the Mormon Church, Dies at 90  Reuters

Nearly one-third of ‘evangelicals’ don’t follow generally held beliefs  The Alabama Baptist 

FEMA allows churches to apply retroactively for disaster aid  Reuters

Biggest Mennonite Conference Leaves Denomination  Christianity Today

Unraveling the Mysteries of Heaven's Gate  Voice of San Diego

Deep Differences Remain Between Mormon And Evangelical Communities  NPR

Memphis mega-church Pastor Accused of sexual assault  Fox 13

Evangelicalism is spreading among the Chinese of South-East Asia  Economist

How Jim and Tammy Bakker's religious Ponzi scheme collapsed (book review)  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

***ART & DESIGN

High Museum Of Art In Atlanta Promotes Diversity, Increases Nonwhite Visitors  NPR

Personal Data Safety: The Biggest Breaches In the Last Decade  Daily Infographic

***STUDENT MEDIA  

UWM Profs, Staff Accused of Sexual Assault & Harassment But Details Hidden  Media Milwaukee

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

Will anyone employ media heavyweights canned for sexual harassment?  Poynter

Anniston Star's ex-publisher spanked female employees in the 1970s, reports say  AL.com

NPR Investigation Finds Hidden Epidemic Of Sexual Assault  NPR

***ENVIRONMENT 

Explore lightly': Palau makes all visitors sign pledge to respect environment The Guardian

***HEALTH

Fiber Is Good for You. Now Scientists May Know Why  The New York Times

Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row  Economist 

***SCIENCE

Violence against scientists is rare in the United States, but occurred at least three times in 2016  AAPL 

The Replication Crisis in Science  The Wire

***NEUROSCIENCE 

Brain-computer interfaces: How brains and machines can be made to work together  Economist

Reading the brain from the outside: Can brain activity be deciphered without opening up the skull?  Economist

The best way of looking at the brain is from within: The hunt for smaller, safer and smarter brain implants  Economist

Turning brain signals into useful information: Once data have been extracted from the brain, how can they be employed to best effect?  Economist

How obstacles to workable brain-computer interfaces may be overcome  Economist

***ETHICS

Integrity goes beyond avoiding misconduct, and scientific integrity has a wider domain than research integrity  Taylor & Francis Online 

***RESEARCH

Why scientists need to do more about research fraud  The Guardian

Research abstracts are commonly inconsistent with their corresponding full reports and thus misleading readers  BMC Medical Research Methodology

Librarians offer a guide to understanding retractions  College & Research Libraries News

The UK’s Research Excellence Framework “forces academics to produce scholarship in greater quantity but of poorer quality”  Times Higher Ed  

An analysis of a paper’s revision history and turnaround time, and the effect on citation  Springer

***HIGHER ED

Most big public colleges don't track suicides, AP finds  Associated Press

Gay Wedding Costs College Pastor Her Job  Inside Higher Ed 

University Will Again Try to Become a Nonprofit  Chronicle of Higher Ed

University announces plans to sell radio station  Andersonian

Moody Bible Institute Lays off one-third of Faculty, Faces Low Student Enrollment  Christian Post

Moody Bible Institute Facing Unprecedented Crisis  Julie Roys Blog

***TEACHING

Teaching Newsletter: Don’t Run From Emotions in the Classroom  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Teaching the Literature Survey Course  Inside Higher Ed

The Chronicle’s Best Ideas for Teaching, 2017  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Desktop Automation  Chronicle of Higher Ed

How to Reach Out to First-Generation Students  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Yes, We Should Teach Character (opinion)  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

Students Identify With 50-Year-Old Supreme Court Case  NPR

President Trump Throws College Republicans Into Disarray  The Atlantic

Berkeley student arrested by Border Patrol while visiting girlfriend in Chula Vista  Union-Tribune

The Future of Trumpism Is on Campus: At colleges across the country, young supporters of the president are demanding that College Republicans fall into line  The Atlantic 

Millennials And The Economy  NPR

***ACADEMIC LIFE

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sues School over Prof’s firing after she defended Black Lives Matter  MSN

When is it appropriate for a professor to talk about a former student  Washington Post

UCLA lecturer who lost his job has gained another wrinkle: A graduate student who argued on his behalf also lost his position and is claiming retaliation by administrators  Chronicle of Higher Ed

 

We Seek Familiarity

We believe we seek happiness in love, but it’s not quite as simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity – which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness.

We recreate in adult relationships some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what love meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The love we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating.

As adults, we may then reject certain healthy candidates whom we encounter, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced (too mature, too understanding, too reliable), and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to candidates whom our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.

We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we have no experience of health, because we don’t ultimately associate being loved with feeling satisfied.

The Philosophers’ Mail

The Vulnerability Myth

The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous. When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism. 

Our rejections of vulnerability often stems from associating it with dark emotions like fear, shame, grief, sadness, and disappointment—emotions that we don't want to discuss, even when they profoundly affect the way we live, love, work, and even lead. What most of us fail to understand and what took me a decade of research to learn is the vulnerability is also the cradle of the emotions experiences that we crave. Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual eyes, vulnerability is the path.

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Our Difficult Side

Knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of.  Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

The Philosophers’ Mail

Articles of Interest - Jan 1

***TECHNOLOGY

The Biggest Technology Failures of 2017  MIT’s Technology Review

Key trends shaping technology in 2017  Pew Research

This VR Exhibit Lets You Connect with the Human Side of War  MIT’s Technology Review 

***BIG DATA & AI

Military robots are getting smaller and more capable: Soon, they will travel in swarms  Economist

Machine learning is creating never before heard sounds as neural networks begins to take the simple to create the complex (video)  Google Inhouse vlogger

Why scientists (especially in physics and astronomy) embrace Bayesian statistics  Bloomberg

Neural networks go back to the 1950s. So what’s new? The hardware we can run them on is faster, more efficient, and more powerful. Plus-the data sizes have gotten so much bigger  Logic Mag

Are computers intelligent, or just pattern detectors? Exploring the “Beautiful Mind” of neural networks  ieee Spectrum

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter’s No. 1 Topic Of 2017? You Guessed It  Deadline

Snapchat Copies Facebook Feature For Once With 'A Look Back at 2017'  MacRumors

How To Find Your 2017 Snapchat Memories So You Can Relive Your Best Snaps Of The Year  Bustle

***MOBILE 

Los Angeles is opening a selfie museum  New York Post

How to Stop Apps From Listening in on Your TV Habits  Life Hacker

***INTERNET

How Hotmail changed Microsoft (and email) forever  Arstechnica

Forward your spam to sp@mnesty.com and a bot will waste the spammer's time  Boing Boing

***JOURNALISM

Santa Barbara News-Press paper byline sparks controversy  KEYT-TV

A day in the life of a print journalism reporter  Pueblo Chieftain

Polls show Americans distrust the media. But talk to them, and it’s a very different story  Washington Post

MSNBC reporter video-bombed by T-rexes  UPI

Spielberg’s ‘The Post,’ with Streep and Hanks, an inspiring journalism saga  San Francisco Gate

***JOURNALISM IN 2017

What national news networks were talking about during 2017  Washington Post

Why I started saying ‘reality-based press’ in 2017, instead of ‘mainstream media’  Washington Post

2017 journalism report card  HealthNewsReview

***JOURNALISM OUTSIDE THE U.S.

81 reporters were killed in 2017 as threats soared, global journalism group says  CBC News

Mexico: Latest murder highlights blurred lines in journalism   Associated Press

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

How the Era of the Big-Name News Anchor Crashed to an End  The Daily Beast

***FAKE NEWS

Yale University Hackathon Takes Aim At Fake News  NPR

Fake news. It's complicated. First Draft  Medium

Efforts grow to help students evaluate what they see online  Associated Press 

Outsmarting Fake News and Dubious Data  Harvard Business Review

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Three Goals for 2018  Becoming (my blog)

The Only Way to Keep Your Resolutions  New York Times

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel  Brainpickings 

What Is Procrastination & How Can We Solve It? An Introduction by One of the World’s Leading Procrastination Experts  Open Culture

The Best of Brain Pickings 2017  Brainpickings 

Ditch These Seven Bad Habits Before 2018 Start   Fast Company

***WRITING & READING

The difficulty is the point': teaching spoon-fed students how to really read  The Guardian

To Your Brain, Audiobooks Are Not ‘Cheating’  The Cut

How to Get Your Mind to Read  New York Times

***LITERATURE

The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude  BrainPickings

The best science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels of 2017  The Verge  

Why Should We Read Charles Dickens? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case  Open Culture

The Top Tech Books of 2017: Part I  Wired

The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map  Open Culture

The Best Fiction Books of 2017  Booktalk

Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand  Open Culture

***GENDER 

How Mary Tyler Moore's Career-Woman Role Inspired A Generation  NPR

10 things we learned about gender issues in the U.S. in 2017  Pew Research

***FREE SPEECH

Germany starts enforcing hate speech law  BBC

***RELIGION

The Net Worth of The10 Richest US Pastors   Cheat Sheet

The Museum of the Bible  National Law Review

Atheist Flag Will Be Raised Over Ten Commandments Monument  NPR

Trump Scorns Mainstream News, But Not The Christian Broadcasting Network  NPR

***RELIGION IN 2017

2017 Has Been A Rough Year For Evangelicals  NPR

Biblical Archaeology’s Top 10 Discoveries of 2017  Christianity Today

***ART & DESIGN

The Year in Visual and Interactive Storytelling  ProPublica

Fast Company’s Favorite Illustrations Of 2017  Fast Company

Teacher Fired for Showing Students Classical Painting Postcards Containing Nudity  Associated Press

20 best album covers 2017  Creative Bloq

10 Best Data Visualization Projects of 2017  Flowing Data

***FILM

The 2017 Storyhunter Staff Picks Awards  Video Strategist

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA 

2017: Traditional Media Stocks Underperform, Digital Media Soars  Media Post

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

How do you define sexual harassment?  Reuters

Who's More Dangerous - the Sexual Predator or the Enabler? (opinion)  TechNewsWorld

***HEALTH

Why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work: The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half  Vox

LA Times provides strong overview on study showing vitamin D and calcium supplements don’t prevent fractures  HealthNewsReview

The uninsured are overusing emergency rooms — and other health-care myths  Washington Post

The Haunting Effects Of Going Days Without Sleep  NPR

How to fix the American diet, according to the man who coined the term ‘junk food’  Washington Post

Eat more fish for higher IQ? Announcement skips limitations of an observational study  HealthNewsReview

***SCIENCE

'Vast Majority' of Online Anti-Vaxxers Are Women  Live Science

How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches  New York Times

Longreads Best of 2017: Science, Technology, and Business Writing  Longreads

Secret Link Uncovered Between Pure Math and Physics  Quanta Mag

***PSYCHOLOGY

Depression treatment: 30 years after Prozac arrived, we still buy the lie that chemical imbalances cause depression  Quartz

World Health Organization Thinks Video Games Are Causing a Mental Health Disorder  Newsweek

***PHILOSOPHY

God's Answer to Nietzsche, the Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard  BigThink  

***PRODUCTIVITY

Why Calendars are More Effective Than To Do Lists  Medium

5 Books To Buy This Holiday To Boost Your Work In 2018  PSFK

***RESEARCH

Reproducible research: The consequences are somewhat overstated (research opinion)  Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 

Fallibility in science: Responding to errors in the work of oneself and others (opinion)  Peer J

Authorship disputes: How do we avoid “cutting the baby in half”?  Hindawi

City University of New York Looking into why some of faculty published in predatory journals  New York Post

Simply contributing data to a study or serving as a representative of a research consortium does not fulfill criteria for authorship  JAMA Forum

The president of the Swiss Association for Science Journalism interviews Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch (audio)   swissnex San Francisco 

Must Good Science Proselytize?  The Grumpy Geophysicist 

***HIGHER ED

Only half of all Latino students graduate from college. So what are Texas schools doing to help?  Dallas News

No place for 'snowflakes': Conservative Christian college poised to open in 2018   Fox News

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Death threats are forcing professors off campus  CNN 

Czech university urged to bar new dean over ‘junk journal’ papers  Times Higher Ed

Professor who tweeted, ‘All I want for Christmas is white genocide,’ resigns after year of threats  Washington Post

Three Goals for 2018

“Kierkegaard cries out for us to live passionately, and worry more about the problem of living life than trying to fit the social order. His philosophy is all about living this way, even to the point where an outside viewer will be unable to understand your motivation,” writes Scotty Hendricks at BigThink.

1. Be passionate,

2. Focus on living not fitting into some predetermined social role,

3. You will know you are on the right track when people have trouble grasping what motivates you.

Three worthy goals for 2018.

Stephen Goforth

Figuring out What’s Wrong with our Prospective Mate

Other people are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong with them.

Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go and visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We look at photos, we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.

We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, authority, humiliation, introspection, sexual intimacy, projection, money, children, aging, fidelity and a hundred things besides. This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat.

In the absence of all this, we are led – in large part – by what they look like. There seems to be so much information to be gleaned from their eyes, nose, shape of forehead, distribution of freckles, smiles… But this is about as wise as thinking that a photograph of the outside of a power station can tell us everything we need to know about nuclear fission.

The Philosophers’ Mail

Articles of Interest - Dec. 25

***JOURNALISM 2017

From ISIS to taxes: The AP's top 10 stories of 2017  Morning Joe  MSNBC

2017 Top Stories  Chartbeat

The Best Journalism of 2017  Sports Illustrated

Predictions for Journalism 2018  Nieman Journalism Lab 

Charting the news of 2017: The year's events that most grabbed the world's attention  Economist

The media today: What’s coming for journalism in 2018?  Columbia Journalism Review

***THE JOURNALISM FILM “THE POST”

'The Post': Pentagon Papers Put The Press Under Pressure  NPR

Steven Spielberg's The Post Is the Journalism Movie We Need Today  TIME

Fact checking ‘The Post’: The incredible Pentagon Papers drama Spielberg left out  Washington Post

Steven Spielberg’s The Post makes an entertaining, timely case for the First Amendment  Vox

***FAKE NEWS

Facebook admits its original attempt to end fake news failed  Daily Dot

How blockchain technology could prevent fake news from spreading  Tech Republic  

***TECHNOLOGY

Ready Player One and the Troubled Future of VR  Technews World

Meet the robot that passed a college class on philosophy and love  CNBC 

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA  

How talk radio stays relevant in the digital age  Tech Republic 

Tempers flare at FCC over record Sinclair fine  CNN

Is Radio Headed For a Digital Cliff?  Musicomics

A U.S. Station Switched From Bluegrass to Radio Sputnik—and Got Threats From the Feds  Bloomberg

The Return of Vinyl Records  Daily Infographic

***JOURNALISM

'Journalism is evolving and so is my thinking on it'  Poynter

Mexican journalist shot dead at primary school holiday party  Associated Press

The rich tried to save alt-weeklies: They haven't helped  Mashable

Russian hackers hunted journalists in years-long campaign  Associated Press

Journalism branding: Impact on reporters’ personal identities  Journalism Resources

***BIG DATA & AI

Some expect AR to deliver flashy, exciting cultural creations.. but it may be more mundane—and thus more powerful  Wired

AI Predictions have a patchy record. So what to make of these? Truck drivers will be obsolete within a decade or so, retail workers have about 15 years left, and machines will be writing best-selling books within three decades   The World In

Six areas where artificial neural networks prove they can surpass human intelligence  Venture Beat

Will Artificial Intelligence Become Conscious?  Live Science

A look at what happened at machine learning’s big event  Economist

8 game-changing data trends that will impact businesses in 2018  Tech Republic

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Instagram now lets you share live videos through direct messages  Tech Crunch

The Best of Reddit in 2017The top posts, communities, AMAs, and other highlights from the past year  Reddit

CNN is killing its Snapchat news show only four months after its debut  Tech Crunch

***SOCIAL MEDIA: FACEBOOK

Facebook uses age-targeted job advertisements, but is that discriminatory?   Daily Dot

Facebook drops 'disputed' tags for news stories  The Hill

Facebook ‘Messenger Kids’ lets under-13s chat with whom parents approve  Tech Crunch

Who’s Watching Facebook TV?  Bloomberg

***PRODUCING MEDIA

The World's Best Film School Is Free on YouTube  Wired 

There will be an explosion of streaming-video services in 2018. A shakeout is inevitable  The World In

The 50 Best Podcasts of 2017  The Atlantic

***INTERNET

You Give Up a Lot of Privacy Just Opening Emails. Here's How to Stop It  Wired

Google's Year in Search  Google Trends

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Missing the Miracle in the Mundane  Becoming (my blog)

***LANGUAGE

Whatever! Marist Poll reveals list of most annoying words  Poughkeepsie Journal

Tongue tried: Can the internet breathe new life into a dying language? Jonathan Beckman learns a smattering of Ainu  1843

The importance of pauses in conversation  Economist

Vulnerable Words and the CDC  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The strange reinvention of Icelandic: A language both ancient and modern  Economist

Merriam-Webster's Word Of The Year Is Feminism  NPR

***LITERATURE

The Best Books Atlantic Staffers Read in 2017  The Atlantic

Longreads Best of 2017: Essays  Long Reads

Why Juan Rulfo’s fiction of fear is still revered in Latin America: The arbitrary violence of his short stories rings true in modern Mexico  Economist

Derivative Sport: The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace  Long Reads

Books of the Year 2017  Economist

J.R.R. Tolkien Is Our Favorite Father Christmas: For 23 years he role-played in holiday letters to his children  Atlas Obscura

Apparently, people who steal books from indie bookstores have pretentious taste: And the rest of the week’s best writing on books and related subjects  Vox

***GENDER  

Gender Gap in Academic Seminar Questions: Men are far more likely to ask, study finds  Inside Higher Ed

The battle to make French a “gender-neutral language” is emphasizing the country’s inherent sexism  Quartz

Women Are Invited to Give Fewer Talks Than Men at Top U.S. Universities  The Atlantic

Jezebel's Annual, Unscientific List of Best Women, According to Us  Jezebel

Women and economics: The profession’s problem with women could be a problem with economics itself  Economist

Sinclair Broadcast Group Sued for Sexual Harassment and Retaliation  Hollywood Reporter

***FREE SPEECH

Report: Campus speech codes decline for 10th straight year  The Fire

College Students Clash Repeatedly Over Free Speech Issues  NPR

***RELIGION

Santa Claus Converts To Calvinism, Moves Everybody To Naughty List  Babyonbee

Will the Museum of the Bible become a star DC attraction for tour groups?  Washington Post

Cardinal Bernard Law, symbol of church sex abuse scandal, dead at 86  CNN

Texas Rangers pitcher and wife donate mansion and 100 acres of land to a Christian charity that provides camps for children with special needs and chronic illnesses  ESPN

John Legend cast as Jesus Christ in upcoming NBC live musical  CNN

Christianity Today’s 2018 Book Awards  Christianity Today

Calif. Megachurch Accused of Practicing Occult in Use of 'Destiny Cards'  Christian Post

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore? (opinion)  The New Yorker

Sam Bee: Trump’s devout evangelical following is “an Aryan death cult” (opinion)  Salon

***ART & DESIGN

A Strict Olympic Crackdown on Russian Logos and Typography  New York Times

California artist weaves faith into acclaimed works, show  Religion News Service

***IMAGES

The Most 2017 Photos Ever  The Atlantic 

Ye Olde Photoshoppe: The manipulation of photographs goes back a surprisingly long way  1843

***MUSIC & AUDIO

Feel the noise: Tech companies are working out how to re-create the immediacy of live performance in your own home  1843

Bob Dylan's Gospel Period Sidemen Share Memories of His Most Divisive Era  Billboard 

How bands display their history on the stage  Economist

***FILM

The Next Bechdel Test: We pitted 50 movies against 12 new ways of measuring Hollywood’s gender imbalance  FiveThirtyEight

Cult Hit 'The Room' Set for Wide Theatrical Release (Exclusive)  Hollywood Reporter

Film remakes that should stay on the storyboard  Economist

Every Steven Spielberg Movie, Ranked  Vulture

Not even “The Last Jedi” will reverse Americans’ retreat from cinemas  Economist

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT 

This year has seen an explosion of rage about sexual harassment: Will it lead to lasting change?  Economist

At Vice, Cutting-Edge Media and Allegations of Old-School Sexual Harassment  The New York Times

***RELATIONSHIPS

The Weaponization of Awkwardness  Don't make a scene. Look the other way. Social discomfort has long been used to maintain the status quo The Atlantic

The rise of long-distance marriage: Financial necessity is encouraging more couples to live apart  Economist

***HEALTH

U.S. life expectancy declines for a second straight year and it’s fueled by the drug crisis  Washington Post 

Silencing is golden: A new era of medicine will come into view  The World In

***SCIENCE

The High School Student's Simple Explanation Of Relativity Will Boggle Your Mind  Digg

An age of discovery is in prospect for biology, predicts neuroscience professor at MIT and co-inventor of CRISPR  Economist 

Why Is M-Theory the Leading Candidate for Theory of Everything?  Quantam Magazine

***PSYCHOLOGY

Tasks for My Psychological Task Rabbit  McSweeneys

Can you really be addicted to sex?  1843

The holiday-suicide myth and the intractability of popular falsehoods  The Conversation

***PHILOSOPHY

10 Schools of Philosophy and Why You Should Know Them  Big Think

Slippery Slope (video)

***RESEARCH

Politics Moves Fast. Peer Review Moves Slow. What’s A Political Scientist To Do?   FiveThirtyEight

Want to Win a Nobel Prize? Retract a Paper: This advice is both hyperbolic and not nearly as crazy as it sounds  Slate

Online tools enable unprecedented access to science research  Physics Today

How Badly Can Cherry-Picking and Question Trolling Produce Bias in Published Results?   Springer

***RESEARCH & GENDER

Women are held to a higher standard in peer review  VOX

Female grant applicants are equally successful when peer reviewers assess the science, but not when they assess the scientist  Biorxiv

***HIGHER ED

Legal Pot? Doesn’t Matter, Colleges Say  Inside Higher Ed

Higher Ed New Media Consortium Suddenly Ceases Operations  Campus Technology 

How much did hacker who taunted Rutgers cost the school?   NewJersey.com

What Colleges Need to Know About the Tax Overhaul Poised to Become Law  Chronicle of Higher Ed

A Nonprofit Funneling thousands of dollars to student-government campaigns across the country  The New Yorker

***TEACHING

Don’t cede the online-education terrain to people whose courses are nowhere nearly as good as your own  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Authors of statistics textbook proudly declared, in a footnote, that no one reads footnotes. Photos of the footnote keep going viral  Inside Higher Ed

Use of Free Textbooks Is Rising, but Barriers Remain  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Controversial question spotted on UCCS final exam  KOAA

A Brief History of Students Secretly Recording Their Professors  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

E-sports come of age: Why the e-sports industry will boom  The World In

Dreamers’ Make Desperate Plea on Capitol Hill  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***JOBS & INTERNSHIPS

Want to freelance? Join SPJ's freelancer directory  Society of Professional Journalists 

Now Accepting Student Applications for intensive 10-day program designed for college students interested in covering government and politics  Politico

Internship  Photo Department Patagonia, Ventura, California

2018 Summer Producer Intern  National Football League Culver City, California

***ACADEMIC LIFE

On Faculty and Mental Illness  Chronicle of Higher Ed

 

Answers to Christmas Quiz

1. What did the angels sing to the shepherds?

Nothing. Luke 2:13,14 tells us, "Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel praising God and SAYING, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to men on whom his favor rests." No where in the Bible does it say that angels sing. Of course, Scripture never says they don't either.

2. In what direction did the Wise Men look to see the star in the sky?

The West. Matthew 2:1,2 reads, "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him." The Wise Men were in the East and they saw the star in the Western sky. Had they been traveling toward a star in the East, they would have started from somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea.

3. Where did the wise men go to see the baby?

The house--not the stable. Matthew 2:9-11 says, "After (the Wise Men) had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the HOUSE, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him…" By the time the Wise Men would have arrived, Mary and Joseph would have left the stable. It would have taken a while for the Wise Men to arrive. Perhaps a couple of years, since Herod killed children in Bethlehem under the age of two.

4. How many wise men were there?

We don't know. Three is the traditional number, but Scripture only tells us of three gifts.

5. In which season of the year was Jesus born?

Probably Spring. Luke 2:8 tells us, "And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night." It is unlikely they would have been living in the fields during Winter. Spring is the most likely time.

6. What did Mary ride on to Bethlehem?

We don't know. Christmas cards may favor a donkey, but Scripture doesn't tell us.

7. What did the wise men ride on?

We don't know. Christmas cards may favor a camels, but Scripture doesn't tell us.

8. In what country did the Christmas tree originate?

Germany

9. In what century did Christmas celebrations begin?

The 4th century. Christmas carols began in the 14th and 15th centuries. Christmas cards were first sent in the early 19th century.

10. Was there ever an original, real Santa Claus?

Yes. In the 4th Century AD, Nicholas showed acts of kindness and charity early in his life. He served as bishop of Myra (now in Turkey) and was considered a saint since the 6th century.

11. What Christmas tradition commemorating the birth of Jesus did St. Francis of Assisi begin?

The nativity scene.

12. What is frankincense?

    a. a precious metal

    b. a precious fabric

    c. a precious perfume

    d. an Eastern monster story

Answer:  c. a precious perfume

 13. What is Myrrh?

    a. an easily shaped metal

    b. a spice used for burying people

    c. a drink

    d. aftershave lotion

Answer:  b. a spice used for burying people

14. Did Jesus tell us to remember his birth?

 No.

15. What did Jesus tell us to remember?

He told us to remember his death.  "…Do this in remembrance of me" Luke 22:19.

Note: All verses from the New International Version