The people who can help you see yourself for who you are

Romantic partners and close friends might be more informed, because they’ve observed you more—but they can also have blurrier vision, because they chose you and often share that pesky desire to see you positively. You need people who are motivated to see you accurately. And I’ve come to believe that more often than not, those people are your colleagues. The people you work with closely have a vested interest in making you better (or at least less difficult). The challenge is they’re often reluctant to tell you the stuff you don’t want to hear, but need to hear.

Adam Grant writing in The Atlantic

inevitable surprises

We are too often motivated by a craving to put an end to the inevitable surprises in our lives.  -Oliver Burkeman

virtue

Virtue is never a waste of time. If it was a waste then it never was a virtue.

Articles of Interest - March 5

***TECHNOLOGY

Edible Graphene Is Here, And Electronics In Your Food Are Coming  Fast Company

New Orleans is testing predictive policing technology  The Verge

Determining The Average Apple Device Lifespan  Asymco

The Design Tricks That Make Smartphones Addictive—And How to Fight Them  Mental Floss

Has dopamine got us hooked on tech?  The Guardian

Self-driving cars offer huge benefits—but have a dark side  The Economist 

Robotic labs for high-speed genetic research are on the rise:  The design of synthetic lifeforms could become a new industry  Economist

Driverless vehicles will change the world, just as cars did before them Economist

CRISPR ‘gone wild’ has made stocks swoon, but studies show how to limit off-target editing  Stat News

Thousands of people think that the government is using implanted chips and electronic beams to control their minds  Wired

***FAKE NEWS

Here Come the Fake Videos, Too  New York Times

Digital-age tools and technology give rise to fake videos  ASU

Twitter to explain on Capitol Hill how hoax against Miami Herald was perpetrated  McClatchy Washington Bureau

Facebook to End News Feed Experiment in 6 Countries That Magnified Fake News  The New York Times

Facebook Doesn't Know How Many People Followed Russians on Instagram Wired 

Reddit says Russian propaganda was shared by ‘thousands’ ahead of the 2016 election  Recode

The language that the Russians used were Clues  Wired 

How To Empower Users To Fight Fake News  Fast Company

Facebook working on approach to classifying satirical news pieces  Washington Post

***PRIVACY & SECURITY

Equifax finds its big data breach hit an additional 2.4 million people  LA Times

Covert 'Replay Sessions' Have Been Harvesting Passwords by Mistake  Wired

A 1.3Tbs DDoS Hit GitHub, the Largest Yet Recorded Wired

EFF launches redesigned Surveillance Self-Defense site  Electronic Frontier Foundation

***BIG DATA & AI

Microsoft will let government clients run Azure on their own servers, esp. for on-premise servers (such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad)  CNBC

SCOTUS will decide whether a US warrant extends to digital—the Microsoft Supreme Court case has big implications for data  Wired

Machine learning self defense: how to not shoot yourself in the foot  Naked Security

Why Artificial Intelligence Needs To Learn How To Follow Its Gut  Wired 

A Data Scientist Was Sick of Seeing Spam on His Facebook so He Built a Fake News Detector: Could AI & computer learning could be the key to helping us separate fact from fiction?  Motherboard

Problematic black boxes: what to do about AIs acting without humans grasping why  Economist  

Can you do data science in a graphical user interface? Hadley Wickham says no  Meetup

**THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA 

P&G demands more out of its digital advertising  Reuters

***JOURNALISM

Face recognition: what use is it to newsrooms?  BBC News Labs

Music journalism: 'It's not dying. Actually, it's changing...'  Musically

A journalism educator wonders: How can I teach students how to maintain their credibility?  Poynter

‘They can’t kill us all’: Slovakian journalists defiant after murder  The Guardian

How Broadcasters Are Making Two-Way Experiences with Interactive Content  PBS Media Shift

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Why recent subscribers chose to pay for news  American Press Institute

How Hearst Newspapers changes its paywall to drive reader loyalty  Digiday

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA

The Biggest YouTube Videos of 2018 (So Far)  Thrillist

What You Need To Know About Vero, The Latest Hot Social Network  Refinery29

Evan Spiegel Is Doubling Down on Snapchat’s Biggest Failure  Vanity Fair

Social Media Use 2018: Demographics and Statistics  Pew Research Center

YouTube Doesn't Know Where Its Own Line Is  Wired

More than a third of all US adults use Instagram now  The Verge

Yes the ‘cheerleader effect’ is real – and you can make it work in your favour   The Conversation

***TWITTER

Twitter rolls out private bookmark feature for tweets  CNN

Escaping Twitter’s Self-Consciousness Machine  The New Yorker

Twitter is sick. The prognosis is grim  Washington Post 

Twitter Seeks Health Metrics To Help It Improve Its Platform  Wired

***FACEBOOK

Publishers Are Switching Domain Names To Try And Stay Ahead Of Facebook’s Algorithm Changes  BuzzFeed News

How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads: Why Russia’s Facebook ads were less important to Trump’s victory than his own Facebook ads  Wired

Facebook goes after LinkedIn with job postings expansion  CNN

How to Turn Off Facebook's Face Recognition Features  Wired

How to Ditch the News Feed Algorithm and Take Back Facebook  Motherboard

Facebook Under Fire for Bizarre Child Predator Survey Question  TechNewsWorld

Should satire be flagged on Facebook?  Poynter

***PRODUCING MEDIA

Adobe is Developing Photoshop for Your Voice  Medium

***INTERNET

Rural Communities Take Broadband Into Their Own Hands  NPR

11% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?  Pew Research Center

Google: Only 8% of Chrome users use Flash plugin on a daily basis  Tech Republic

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Your Gift to the World  Becoming (my blog)

***GRAMMAR

The Fictional Possessives-With-Gerunds Rule  Chronicle of Higher Ed

In the court of common usage, an old pronoun is losing its case  Economist

***WRITING & READING

The Tough-Love Approach to Writing  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LANGUAGE

Can the World’s Biggest Dictionary Survive the Internet?  The Guardian

The Language In “Black Panther” Is Totally Real. Here’s How To Speak It  Fast Company

***GENDER  

The distressingly unsurprising story of what happens when prominent (usually male) dissertation advisers fail to do their job  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The 5 most popular programming languages among female developers  Tech Republic 

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

Why Race Should Be Included In The Conversation About Arming Teachers  NPR

Antisemitic incidents in US soar to highest level in two decades  The Guardian

The First Time My White Husband Witnessed Someone Discriminate Against Me for the Color of My Skin  Glamour

***FREE SPEECH

Supreme Court Considers Free Speech Vs. Retaliatory Arrests   Associated Press

Georgia Supreme Court Voids Murder Trial Gag Order  RTNDA 

***LEGAL ISSUES

New Front In Data Privacy At The Supreme Court: Can U.S. Seize Emails Stored Abroad  NPR

Playboy Drops Misguided Copyright Case Against Boing Boing  Electronic Frontier Foundation

The ACLU is suing the US over separation of mother, child seeking asylum  Associated Press

Video News Aggregator Loses Fair Use Defense  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

***RELIGION

Pennsylvania Church Holds 'Blessing' Ceremony Featuring AR-15 Rifles  NBC San Diego

5 facts about U.S. evangelical Protestants  Pew Research Center 

People Like Billy Graham Are Why I Quit Christianity  Vice

Demand for exorcisms is up threefold in Italy, so Vatican is holding conference  USA Today

The Devil in My Dad: The 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980’s  Elle

Some churches drop ‘Baptist’ from names to gain new members  Columbus Dispatch

Battle over religion in public schools waged in one of America's fastest-growing cities  Religious News Service

How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals  FiveThirtyEight

Endeavor Content Invests in Newly Launched Faith-Based Production Company  Hollywood Reporter

***SOCIAL ISSUES

How Different Income Groups Spend Money  Flowing Data

Photojournalist James Nachtwey captures America's opioid epidemic at the personal level  TIME

Born in the Late 70s or Early 80s? Now There’s Finally a Name for Your Generation  My Modern Met

***GOOD NEWS

Chuck Feeney: the billionaire who gave it all away  Irish Times

***ART & DESIGN

Photography Competition 2018: The Winners  National Geographic Traveller

Drone photography is just normal photography now  Quartz

***MUSIC

The Hamilton Soundtrack Gets the “Weird Al” Yankovic Treatment With a New Polka Medley  Slate 

Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online  Open Culture

***STUDENT MEDIA 

Professor grabs student journalist and deletes photos after classroom was photographed  The Vermont Cynic

Sunshine laws, The Sunflower and the student government at WSU’s attempt to smack the student newspaper around  Dynamics of Writing

Wichita State student newspaper faces funding cut  The Wichita Eagle

Critical administrators. Closed meetings. Proposed funding cuts. What the heck is going on at Wichita State University?  Student Press Law Center

***STUDENT LIFE

Millennials projected to overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation  Pew Research Center

The Generation Gap in American Politics: Wide and growing divides in views of racial discrimination  People

Defining generations: Where Millennials end and post-Millennials begin  Pew Research Center

Student newspaper publishes hardcore porn and sexual violence photo spread  The College Fix

Pro-Trump College Group Won’t Tell the Feds What the Hell It’s Doing  The Daily Beast

Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us  New York Times

College Sues Former Student Who Won’t Leave Her Dorm Room  Snopes

Exclusive: Congress requires many unpaid interns to sign nondisclosure agreements  Vox

Millennials lost money to scams more often than their grandparents  USA Today 

Helicopter parents don’t stay at home when the kids go to college — they keep hovering  Washington Post

***JOBS 

Do Resume Typos Matter? Here’s What Hundreds Of LinkedIn Users Say  Fast Company

Edit tests are out of control, say journalists in search of jobs  Columbia Journalism Review

Stop Confusing Your Job Skills With Your Credentials  Fast Company

***BUSINESS

Most Companies Have No Idea Where They Are Going  TechNewsWorld

Most employees waste 32 days of productivity per year on bad enterprise apps  Tech Republic

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

Consent in the Digital Age: Can Apps Solve a Very Human Problem?  New York Times

#UsToo movement targets sexual harassment in science  Chemistry World

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT ON CAMPUS

Here’s how a national database could help colleges fight sexual assault  The Hill

Stanford joins growing list of institutions that publish reports with aggregate data on sexual-assault and sexual-harassment cases and outcomes  Stanford

Campus advocates for sexual-assault prevention at Stanford University met to demand that it use a quotation chosen by Brock Turner’s victim for a memorial plaque  Stanford Daily

Arizona professor with dropped charges not allowed on campus  Arizona Daily Sun

The student who was harassed online when she created a petition not to rehire the coach  406 MT Sports

Lawsuit: Prominent faculty member accused of rape, repeated assaults, and an attempt to involve her boyfriend in murdering the faculty member’s ex-wife  Democrat & Chronicle 

More Women Come Forward to Report Sexual Harassment by Harvard Professor  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Ex-MSU professor, 'renowned' robotics expert accused of $400K fraud  MLive

***HEALTH

Still Thirsty? It's Up To Your Brain, Not Your Body  NPR

Here's How Often You Should Clean Everything In Your House  Mental Floss

20 years ago, research fraud catalyzed the anti-vaccination movement. Let’s not repeat history  Vox

New Study Finds Childhood Obesity Remains On the Rise in America  Fatherly  

People are dying because we misunderstand how addicts think  Vox

Like It Or Not, Personal Health Technology Is Getting Smarter  NPR

Tattoos Can Now Start Monitoring Your Medical Conditions: Harvard and MIT Researchers Innovate at the Intersection of Art & Medicine  Open Culture

***SCIENCE

Remarkable Photo of a Single Atom Wins Science Photography Contest  My Modern Met

How your sense of smell may affect your politics: An ancient trait creates political leanings  Economist

***PSYCHOLOGY

We need new kinds of antidepressants, in addition to pills  Vox

The most neurotic places in the US, according to 1.5 billion tweets  Quartz

The surprisingly weak scientific case for emotional support animals  Vox

***PRODUCTIVITY

The Productivity Paradox—Why Doing More Doesn't Get More Done  Hello Sign

***ENVIRONMENT

North Pole surges above freezing in the dead of winter, stunning scientists  Washington Post

The known unknowns of plastic pollution: So far, it seems less bad than other kinds of pollution (about which less fuss is made)  Economist

***RESEARCH

Barney’s aquatic traits and how pregnant women stay upright: At this annual science conference, even humor has thorough research methods behind it  Arstechnica

Is it time to nationalise academic publishers?  Times Higher Education

How to write a first-class paper  Nature

***HIGHER ED

Amid Fear of Foreign Influence, Colleges’ Confucius Institutes Face Renewed Skepticism  Chronicle of Higher Ed

A former Cornell fraternity house closed over accusations of rape and violations of suspension policies, is being remodeled to provide a space for alternative campus groups  Cornell Sun

There Is No Case for the Humanities  Chronicle of Higher Ed

A Conservative Underground Surfaces at a Christian University as an anonymous newsletter spreads all over campus  Inside Higher Ed

 Students who are openly gay and Christian challenge Ozark Christian College, other religious colleges  Joplin Globe

***TEACHING

The forgetting curve explains why humans struggle to memorize  Quartz

 Tech Devices in the classroom (a student editorial)  Georgia State Signal 

The Case for Inclusive Teaching  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Your Gift to the World

If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act of a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

Steven Pressfield, The Art of War

your grandfather and your baby brother

Treat everyone with the same level of respect you would give to your grandfather and the same level of patience you would have with your baby brother. -Renee Jones

bad weather

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather. He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop. -Alfred Polgar

The real way to build a social network

Picture the consummate networker: a high-energy fast talker who collects as many business cards as he can and attends mixers sporting slicked-back hair. Or the overambitious college kid who frantically e-mails alumni, schmoozes with the board of trustees, and adds anyone he's ever met as an online friend. Such people are drunk on networking Kool-Aid—and are looking at a potentially nasty hangover.

Luckily, building your network doesn't have to be like that. Old-school networkers are transactional. They pursue relationships thinking solely about what other people can do for them. Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help others first. They don't keep score. And they prioritize high-quality relationships over a large number of connections.

Reid Hoffman, The Start-Up of You

Too many people

Too many people die with their music still in them. Oliver Wendell Holmes

Don't Be a Hack

A hack, Robert McKee says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for. The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he’s superior to them.

The truth is, he’s scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of being authentic in front of them, scared of writing what he really feels or believes, what he himself thinks is interesting. He’s afraid it won’t sell. So he tries to anticipate what the market (a telling word) wants, then gives it to them.

In other words, the hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write? What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot, what can I make a deal for?

The hack is like the politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders.

It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a slick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose, because you’ve sold out your Muse, and your Muse is you, the best part of yourself, where your finest and only true work comes from.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

throw your heart

Throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow.

Articles of Interest - Feb 26

***TECHNOLOGY

A chat with author and Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly about the technologies that will inevitably change our future  Motley Fool

Social networks are broken—This man wants to fix them   MIT Technology Review

Robot vs Human Testing  Wired

Driverless cars can operate in California as early as April  Recode

Scientists create optical lens that acts as 'artificial eye' based on the anatomy of human eyeball  Harvard

Children struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors say  The Guardian

***JOURNALISM

Local Reporting Is Dying. This Training Corps Wants to Bring It Back. Pacific Standard  PS Mag

With in-article chat bots, BBC is experimenting with new ways to introduce readers to complex topics  Nieman Lab

Journalism has a catch-22 problem with visuals  Poynter

Journalism is a risky business  Washington Post

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

After years of testing, The Wall Street Journal has built a paywall that bends to the individual reader  Nieman Journalism Lab

***FAKE NEWS

How to Inoculate the Public Against Fake News  Defense One

A viral fake about Sylvester Stallone highlights a major flaw in Facebook’s fact-checking tool  Poynter

Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But The Tech Companies?  BuzzFeed

Strategies on checking for fake news  Union-Tribune

Somebody in the world of fake science publishing has now invented a whole fake university covering 50 fictional city blocks in California  Ottawa Citizen

Can we keep media literacy from becoming a partisan concept like fact checking?  Harvard’s Nieman Lab

***BIG DATA & AI

Quantum computing is now in the equivalent of the days of vacuum tubes running calculations in room-sized computers—but reliability is on the horizon  Economist 

The best books for learning modern statistics (and they’re free)  Quartz

The neural network designer "cannot know, once that network has been trained, exactly how it is doing what it does.. For artificial intelligence to thrive, it must explain itself.."  Economist

Databricks (founded by the creators of Apache Spark) is now offering a premium Apache Spark service integrated with Microsoft Azure   ZDnet

Wanted: Machine Learning experts who think less like a ML scientist and more like  a business user, developing tools to analyze and manage ML power without having to think like an ML scientist  Forbes

The xView Detection Challenge: the Pentagon is offering $100k in prizes to develop algorithms that can interpret high-resolution satellite images  Wired

Evaluating the complex challenges inherent in machine learning and artificial intelligence and the level of human involvement required to take full advantage of  Tech Target 

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA

On Social Media, Lax Enforcement Lets Impostor Accounts Thrive  New York Times

Russian meddling is only one challenge facing the social-media giant: Young Americans are using it less, costs are soaring and regulation looms  Economist

There is no easy fix for Facebook’s reliability problem  Monday Note

***MOBILE

What is Google Reply (and How It Works)  Tom’s Guide

Apple Plans Giant High-End iPhone, Lower-Priced Model  Bloomberg 

***PRODUCING MEDIA

Sitting in on Remote Meetings? Working at a Standing Desk? Follow These Tips Wired 

The Pros & Cons of Scripted vs Unscripted Video  Video Strategist

***INTERNET

The Father Of The Internet Sees His Invention Reflected Back Through A 'Black Mirror'  NPR

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Defeating Procrastination  Becoming (my blog)

***GRAMMAR

The serious implications of poking fun at the grammar of people who speak and write English as a second language  The Chronicle of Higher Education

‘What Is Your Position on Citation?’  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Syntax change: one of the mistakes made by doom-mongers who believe English itself is under threat  The Chronicle of Higher Education

***LANGUAGE

Did humans speak through cave art? New paper links ancient drawings and language’s origins  MIT

In the world of voice-recognition, not all accents are equal  Economist

A Written Language Without an Alphabet  Scholarly Kitchen

***LITERATURE

Petition calls for separating LGBT materials in Iowa library  Washington Post 

Aliens Would Probably Like It If You Gave them Flowers: A Geek’s Guide to Steven Pinker  WIRED

How Do You Launch a New Generation of Native American Writers?   BuzzFeed News 

***GENDER  

Judge gives grandparents custody of Ohio transgender teen  CNN

The world’s largest professional organization for the advancement of technology is allegedly minimizing the work of female historians who—write about bias against women in technology  Inside Higher Ed

Signs defending white privilege appear around Burlington campuses  Burlington Free Press

'You Have Dark Skin And You Are Beautiful': The Long Fight Against Skin Bleaching  NPR

How Girls and Women "Camouflage" Their Autism  The Atlantic

45 music festivals pledge gender-equal lineups by 2022Tess Cagle— February 26Only 2 of the festivals on board are in the U.S.  Daily Dot

Gender Gap at the Olympics  Wall Street Journal

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

U.S. hate groups proliferate in Trump's first year, watchdog says  Reuters

***FREE SPEECH

It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech  Wired

Anti-Trump artwork by a professor at Polk State College, in Florida, was barred from a faculty-art exhibition for being “too controversial”  The FIRE 

California's IMDb Age Censorship Law Declared Unconstitutional  Hollywood Reporter 

***LEGAL ISSUES

John Oliver, HBO Beat Coal Executive's Defamation Lawsuit  Hollywood Reporter

4 of the Most Influential Supreme Court Cases Being Decided in 2018  Study Breaks

Appeals Court Rules The Civil Rights Act Protects Gay Workers  NPR

Lesbian Law Prof Sues Over Rejection as Foster Parent  Law.com

***LEGAL ISSUES: COPYRIGHT 

Judge rejects copyright claim over CG Characters in Blockbuster Movies, but claims for inducing patent infringement and violating trademarks will move forward  Hollywood Reporter

The Big Push To Reform Music Copyright For The Digital Age  Forbes

Disney Misused 'Star Wars,' 'Frozen' Copyrights, Says Judge  Hollywood Reporter

***RELIGION

Why Are These Christian Non-Profits Telling the IRS They’re Churches? (opinion)  Patheos

The Gospel according to Bob Dylan  Boston Globe  

Harvard University Christian group ‘forced out’ Bible study leader because she’s bisexual (College puts Group on ‘Probation)  The Crimson

Protestantism might be good for the wallet, after all: An evangelical charity helps with a randomised controlled trial of religion  Economist

Our Parent Who Art in Heaven  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Citing partial lifting of LGBTQ hiring ban, Texas Baptist group to stop forwarding money to Cooperative Baptist Fellowship  Baptist News

Pope suggests it's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian  CNN 

***BILLY GRAHAM

Remembering Billy Graham, "America's Pastor" & Adviser to Presidents  Biography

The media savvy of Billy Graham  Washington Post

Billy Graham's Record on Race Was Both Ahead and Of His Time  Bloomberg

Today’s evangelicals could learn a lot from Billy Graham (opinion)  Washington Post

Why Billy Graham Was Determined to Globalize Evangelicalism  The Atlantic

Billy Graham was consumed by grace  Washington Post

Billy Graham may have been the last bipartisan evangelical leader  Washington Post

The Making of Billy Graham: Evangelicalism and Anthropology in the 20th-Century United States  Academia.edu

Billy Graham Built a Movement. Now His Son Is Dismantling It  Politico

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

In Donald Trump, Evangelicals Have Found Their President (opinion)  New York Times

Evangelical Explains: We Evangelicals Are The Biggest Suckers in the US  Splinter  

***ART & DESIGN

Instagram is killing the way we experience art in museums  Quartzy

A sumptuous TV tour of the history of art  Economist

The Art of Chinese Propaganda Posters  Atlas Obscura

How do the United States state flags look when data decides their designs?  True Colors

***MUSIC

Is Music a Universal Language?  YouTube 

Public broadcaster music library closing, CD’s to be digitised, destroyed  Radio Canada International

***FILM

'Darkest Hour' Loves Churchill, But Let's Hope It Tanks His Legacy  Digg

***STUDENT MEDIA 

Student journalist interviewed classmates as shooter walked Parkland school halls  CNN

How accessible is Penn State’s campus for students with disabilities?  The Daily Collegian 

FIRE alerts students to due process threats using campus newspapers  The FIRE

***JOBS

How to Make Your LinkedIn Page Less Boring  LifeHacker 

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

A student at a Kansas University complained that a psychology prof had tried to kiss her: The student newspaper reports she was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement  The Bulletin

'New York Magazine': Do You Believe Anita Hill Now?  NPR

How common is sexual misconduct in Hollywood?  USA Today 

Tackling Sexual Harassment On Campus Means Putting Students First (opinion)  University Times 

Survivors of sexual harassment and assault need more independent programs that give institutions and the public a chance to support them (opinion)  New York Times

Sexual harassment pervades science: This scientist is talking to Congress about how to change that  Stat News

***SOCIOLOGY

The Professor of Horrible Deeds: Fred Berlin has done decades of pioneering research on pedophilia — and outraged a lot of people along the way  The Chronicle of Higher Education

***HEALTH

Good science keeps debunking the war on pasta and bread  Vox

Making anaesthesia safer by tracking brain activity  Economist

Single fathers are twice more likely to die early than single mothers or partnered fathers  Quartz

The menace of lead poisoning: Paint laced with lead lingers in rich countries and is still being manufactured in poor ones  Economist

Back Pain May Be The Result Of Bending Over At The Waist Instead Of The Hips  NPR

What does the world die from? (data visualization)  Our World in Data

***HEALTH & TECH

Google’s new AI algorithm predicts heart disease by looking at your eyes  The Verge

DeepMind’s new project aims to prevent hospital deaths  MIT Tech Review

***RELATIONSHIPS

Yep, people are using avocados to propose on Instagram   NBC Today

***NEUROSCIENCE 

Hidden Brain: A Study Of Airline Delays  NPR

New neurons in the adult brain are involved in sensory learning  ScienceDaily

***CRITICAL THINKING

Steven Pinker’s case for optimism“Enlightenment Now” explains why the doom-mongers are wrong  Economist

***PHILOSOPHY

Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things  Big Think 

***RESEARCH

Researchers have finally created a tool to spot duplicated images across thousands of papers  Nature 

In the near future, I also plan to set bug bounties, i.e. sums of money you can earn if you find errors in my published work  The 100% CI

Publisher retracts “conceptual penis” hoax article  Retraction Watch 

Tool which clinical drug trials have missed deadlines for reporting their results  BBC  

A guidebook to measuring research  Nature

***HIGHER ED

A list of colleges that “are committed to defend the #NeverAgain Movement (website created by undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego)  Never Again Colleges

The Great Online School Scam  LongReads

Who's Missing From America's Colleges? Rural High School Graduates  NPR

After 2016 Election, Campus Hate Crimes Seemed to Jump: Here’s What the Data Tell Us  The Chronicle of Higher Education

How to help students avoid the remedial ed trap  Hechinger Report

University of Akron pays more than $620,000 a year to two former presidents to teach  Cleveland.com

College signs contract with Florida sheriff’s office to have instructors and staff members carry guns  Click Orlando

In Times of Scandal, Conflicts With College Lawyers Multiply  The Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’  New York Times

Why Is the Manhattan DA Looking at Newsweek’s Ties to a Christian University?  Newsweek

No, a church isn't trying to sex traffic women on college campuses  NewJersey.com

Jimmy Carter to give commencement speech at Liberty University  The Hill

Louisiana College refused to hire coach because of his 'Jewish blood': Lawsuit  Associated Press

What in the World Is Going On Between Olivet U. and Newsweek?  The Chronicle of Higher Education

Wheaton College Wins 5-Year Religious Freedom Battle Against Birth Control Mandate  Christian Post

***TEACHING

Inclusive Citation: How Diverse Are Your References?  The Chronicle of Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

Millennials Media Consumption  Daily Infographic

Prestigious U.S. colleges won't reject students who protest guns  Reuters

Judge dismisses New York Columbia University student's claims over rape reports  Reuters

Student-run Christian group sues Georgia school saying its campus speech-zone rules are unconstitutional  Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Screen All Teens For Depression, Pediatricians Urge  NPR

***ACADEMIC LIFE

She Wrote a Farewell Letter to Colleagues. Then 80,000 People Read It.  The Chronicle of Higher Education 

resistance to change

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Learn by Doing

Learn by doing. Not sure if you can break into the pharmaceutical industry? Spend six months interning at Pfizer making connections and see what happens. Curious whether marketing or product development is a better fit than what you currently do? If you work in a company where those functions exist, offer to help out for free. Whatever the situation, actions, not plan, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality. Actions help you discover where you want to go and how to get there.

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Startup of You

little steps

There is no giant step that does it. It’s a lot of little steps. -Peter A. Cohen

Managing Your “Mental Tabs”

Have you ever had too many Internet tabs open at once? It is a madhouse of distraction. When I feel like my brain has too many tabs open at once, it’s often the result of trying to mentally juggle too many thoughts at the same time.

Writing gives form to your ideas and gets them out of your head, freeing up bandwidth and preventing you from crashing your browser like a late night downward spiral on Wikipedia.

Gregory Ciotti writing in HelpScout

your future self

Procrastination stems from a failure to “identify sufficiently with your future self”  -Robert Hanks

Articles of Interest - Feb 19

***TECHNOLOGY

Drones that dodge obstacles without guidance can pursue you like paparazzi  MIT Technology Review 

In the future we won’t edit genomes—we’ll just print out new ones  MIT Tech Review

***BIG DATA & AI

Even a moth’s brain is smarter than an AI: a neural network that simulates the way moths recognize odors also shows how they learn so much faster than machines  MIT Tech Review

Buzzwords Just Create Confusion about Data Science  Dark Reading 

The misuse, abuse and traps of “statistical significance”  Christensen Institute

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA

Want the Perfect Instagram Photo? This Park Hires a Photographer for You  Bloomberg

Facebook’s two-factor authentication system auto-posts replies on your profile  The Verge

Snapchat founder says user complaints 'validate' redesign  CNN

Why Facebook’s earliest efforts to kill off Snapchat completely backfired  Recode

***GOOGLE

Carry Around Your Google Account's Backup Two-Step Verification Codes in Case Your Phone is Stolen  Life Hacker

Tired of texting? Google tests robot to chat with friends for you  The Guardian

Google is replacing Facebook’s traffic to publishers  Recode

The ‘Stories’ format is coming to Google search next  The Verge

What Is Google Really Up To With Chrome Ad Blocking?  Popular Mechanics

***PERSONAL GROWTH

The Cult of Convenience  Becoming (my blog) 

The Tyranny of Convenience (opinion)  New York Times

The ABCs of Fake Empathy: what it is, what it isn’t and how to cultivate it  The Polymath Project 

***JOURNALISM

Why ‘Dialogue Journalism’ Is Having a Moment  PBS Media Shift 

When it comes to press freedom, America is no longer a ‘beacon’ for the world  Columbia Journalism Review

The Heartbreak and Frustration of Covering One Mass Shooting After Another  New Yorker

How the non-disclosure agreement became a tool for powerful people to stymie journalists from informing the public  Columbia Journalism Review

John Oliver: Is He a Journalist, Despite His Protests?  Variety

Best practices for reporting through social media during a mass shooting  Poynter 

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement of News Audiences  Columbia Journalism Review

New York Times CEO: Print journalism has maybe another 10 years  CNBC

How much U.S. newspapers charge for digital subscriptions  American Press Institute

***FAKE NEWS

The most common hashtags tweeted by Russian trolls  Quartz

Fake news is an existential crisis for social media  Tech Crunch

***LITERATURE

In 'Freshwater,' A College Student Learns To Live With Separate Selves  NPR

***GENDER  

Education Department says it is no longer investigating transgender bathroom complaints  BuzzFeed

Judge gives grandparents custody of Ohio transgender teen  CNN

Male and female brain rhythms show differences  Science Daily

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

‘Resist White Supremacy’: A sign. A farm. And the fury that followed  Washington Post

NBC Insists On Saying 'Pyeongchang' Incorrectly Because 'It's Cleaner' Huffington Post

How Diverse Casting in Branded Videos Expands Your Audience  Video Strategist

***FREE SPEECH

Provosts are generally confident of free speech rights at their own colleges and universities, but many are worried about the situation more broadly in higher education  Inside Higher Ed

The 10 worst colleges for free speech: 2018  The FIRE

***LEGAL ISSUES

Law School Accreditor Proposes Easing Limits on Online Education  Inside Higher Ed

Supreme Court Tackles Fourth Amendment Case Involving Cellphone Privacy  Law.com

Beyoncé Songs Come to the Olympics. But Who Pays for the Rights?  New York Times

Judge Rules News Publishers Violated Copyright by Embedding Tweets of Tom Brady Photo  Hollywood Reporter

In-Line Linking May Be Copyright Infringement–Goldman v. Breitbart News  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

***RELIGION

Author of “The Faith of Donald J. Trump” is challenged on Morning Joe  MSNBC

Charlotte Mother Jailed For Baptism: Mother Reports To Jail  WSOC-TV

***ART & DESIGN

A landmark 5Pointz case shows the legal reasons why graffiti is art  Quartz

How restaurateur Mr Chow became the unlikely hero of the art world  Dazed

What the 5Pointz ruling means for street artists  The Conversation

***MUSIC

Classical Music Couples Throughout History  NPR

A Town In Mexico Sees Guitar Sales Soar Thanks To The Movie 'Coco'  NPR

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

Bill Would Hold College Presidents Accountable for Sexual Abuse by Employees  Chronicle of Higher Ed 

In The Wake Of Rob Porter Allegations, Mormon Women Say Church Leaders Encouraged Them To Stay With Their Abusers  BuzzFeed

The Moral Responsibility of Restaurant Critics in the Age of #MeToo  The New Yorker

Bill Would Hold College Presidents Accountable for Sexual Abuse by Employees  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Call-In: Knowing Sexual Harassers  NPR

Breaking the Silence: the #MeToo Moment in Scholarly Communication  Scholarly Kitchen

***HEALTH

New malleable 'electronic skin' self-healable, recyclable  University of Colorado Boulder

Google AI can scan your eyes to predict heart disease  Engadget

***RELATIONSHIPS

No, opposites do not attract  The Conversation

8 facts about love and marriage in America  Pew Research Center

How to avoid hugs (video)

***GOOD NEWS

A single dad walked 11 miles to work every day—until his co-workers found out  CNN

How Two Police Drones Saved a Woman's Life  The Atlantic

50 Years Later, Mister Rogers Remains Our Favorite Neighbor NPR

***PSYCHOLOGY

What Color Is a Tennis Ball?  The Atlantic

The Psychology Behind Successful Apps (opinion)  Media Post

***PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy Relies on Those Double Majors  The Splintered Mind

A Celebrity Philosopher Explains the Populist Insurgency  New Yorker

***ETHICS

Tech’s Ethical ‘Dark Side’: Harvard, Stanford and Others Want to Address It  New York Times

***RESEARCH

Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research   Science Mag

***HIGHER ED

How Russian Bots Spread Fear at University in the U.S.  Inside Higher Ed

Students who attend for-profit colleges are outperformed on earnings and employment by other students in nearly every category  Brookings

In a fast-changing world, nearly everything is unsettled in higher education  Inside Higher Ed

What students know that experts don't: School is all about signaling, not skill-building  LA Times

Getting from ‘Hello’ to ‘I Do’ on a Christian College Campus  Christianity Today

Female students at Christian colleges more likely to experience gender discrimination  Christianity Today

 ***TEACHING

Harnessing the Power of the Developing Brain  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Hybrid learning techniques in both online and traditional classes can be better used (opinion)  Hechinger Report

Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most help  New York Times

Future economy demands workers who can learn online  The Hill

The lack of meaningful pedagogical training during graduate school  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Since the mid-1970s, college students have become increasingly less likely to major in education  Market Watch

***STUDENT MEDIA  

College PR offices fight against student media to manipulate narrative  Student Press Law Center

Students hassled by transit authority and local cops for filming on the sidewalk of a public bus station    

Student reporter interviews classmates during shooting  Fort Worth Star-Telegram

***STUDENT LIFE

The 7 Things Students Think About When Choosing a College  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Millennials Are Obsessed With Pets  Media Post

College roommates underestimate each other's distress, new psychology research shows  Science Daily

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Why I Collapsed on the Job: Academics are silent workaholics—so free to work whenever we want that many of us end up working all the time  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Michigan State University Faculty Senate passes no confidence vote in Board of Trustees  Michigan Radio

History in the Face of Catastrophe: After my son died, how could I know anything for certain?  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Cult of Convenience

Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

Tim Wu writing in The New York Times

No one is where they are

"Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in…No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them."