majoring in the majors
/Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand-Thomas Carlyle
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Open your mouth
/Open your mouth only when you can improve on the silence
clever or pleasant
/"My mother used to say to me, 'Elwood' -- she always called me Elwood -- 'Elwood, in this world you must be oh-so clever, or oh-so pleasant.' For years I was clever. I'd recommend pleasant -- and you may quote me."
–Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in HARVEY
What sets apart highly successful students
/One of the major differences we found between highly successful students and mediocre ones: average students think they can tell right away if they are going to be good at something. If they don't get it immediately, they throw up their hands and say, "I can't do it." Their more accomplished classmates have a completely different attitude-and it is largely a matter of attitude rather than ability. They stick with assignments much longer and are always reluctant to give it up. "I haven't learned it yet," they might say, while others would cry, "I'm not good at history, music, math, writing, or whatever." Traditional schooling rewards quick answers-the person with the hand up first. But an innovative work of the mind, something that lasts and changes the world, demands slow and steady progress. It requires time and devotion. You can't tell what you can do until you struggle with something over and over again.
Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do
our hearts are restless
/O God, Thou hast made us for thyself, and ours hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee. –Augustine
Focusing on the Bright Spots
/Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”
The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"
There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.
Chip & Dan Heath, Switch
justice
/Nothing is to be preferred before justice – Socrates
feeling understood
/Nothing is more validating and affirming than feeling understood. And the moment a person beings feeling understood, that person becomes far more open to influence and change. -Stephen Convey
wearing a smile
/The nice part about wearing a smile is that one size fits all.
spiritual joy
/No one can live without delight and that is why a man deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures-Thomas Aquinas
never
/Never miss a good chance to shut up
Articles of Interest - April 17
/***SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook plans a free version of its Slack competitor CNBC
Why You Should Always Let Somebody Else Pick Your Profile Picture Co. Design
Facebook is stepping up efforts to automatically identify fake accounts and Likes The Verge
Supermute Twitter Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mastodon.social is an open-source Twitter competitor that’s growing like crazy The Verge
Instagram is going after Pinterest after successfully copying Snapchat Daily Dot
Facebook faces increased publisher resistance to Instant Articles Digiday
Who Has the Best (and Worst) LinkedIn Profile Photos? Priceonomics
***PRODUCING MEDIA
Video is engaging, but video with sound is captivating Medium
WordPress: The smart person's guide Tech Republic
***INTERNET
Selling Your Internet Browsing History NPR
***TECHNOLOGY
How Google Book Search Got Lost Backchannel
The relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse MIT Tech Review
***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA
Bots aren’t just service tools—they’re a whole new form of media Quartz
SEC targets fake stock news on financial websites Reuters
Boston Globe’s plan for digital reinvention: Be ready for constant change Poynter
Do today’s newspapers have the ad expertise to compete, build new ad revenue? Talking New Media
***JOURNALISM
A day in the life of a journalist in 2027: Reporting meets AI Columbia Journalism Review
Introducing the Facebook for Journalists Certificate Facebook
Journalism faces a crisis worldwide – we might be entering a new dark age The Guardian
‘Blasphemy’: Journalism student killed in Pakistan for Facebook posts Al Arabiya
Reporter firing shows real threat to public-media independence Columbia Journalism Review
Are Facebook And Google Finally Making Journalism All Better? Yeah, Right. Tube Filter
***FAKE NEWS
Evaluating sources in a post truth world ideas for teaching and learning about fake news New York Times
Colleges turn ‘fake news’ epidemic into a teachable moment Washington Post
Watch this university lecture on calling bullshit Recode
***BIG DATA & STATISTICS
NGA’s West Coast base looks to set down roots in Valley w/tech industry as it reaches new heights w/satellite data Federal News Radio
A Wall Street test Big Data’s value: Hadoop packager Cloudera preps to go public Tech Crunch
Neural networks were 1st proposed in 1944: Deep learning’s curious past.. and future MIT
Nearly 2/3’s of all big data projects fail according to research from Gartner. Here are 5 ways to improve the odds Tech Republic
Briefly: The fundamental difference and overlap between Machine Learning, Data Science, AI, Deep Learning, and Statistics Data Science Central
A summary of traditional machine learning methods summarized in one picture Data Science Central
Creating fake data sets out of real ones so that data analysis doesn’t compromise sensitive personal information Tech Republic
***PERSONAL GROWTH
The illusion of understanding can be demonstrated with a simple experiment Becoming (my site)
***GRAMMAR
The range of works in play when we tell someone to look up a word to see what it means Chronicle of Higher Ed
***LANGUAGE
***LITERATURE
The fallen woman: prostitution in literature The Guardian
***GENDER
New study suggests female professors outperform men in terms of service -- to their possible professional detriment Inside Higher Ed
Google is accused of underpaying women: The allegation inflames a debate about sexism in Silicon Valley The Economist
Female economists ‘write better but spend longer in peer review’ Times Higher Ed
How Geena Davis became a champion for women on screen The Guardian
***LEGAL ISSUES
Rolling Stone settles with former U-Va. dean in defamation case Washington Post
Melania Trump settles libel lawsuits against London tabloid LA Times
Mercer County judge finds in favor of The Trentonian and freedom of the press The Tentonian
Courts Are Using AI to Sentence Criminals Wired
Could Moderating Your Website Invalidate Your “Safe Harbor”? NSU
Court ruling strengthens journalists' claim of access to emails and other school, college records Student Press Law Center
***RELIGION
‘The Souls Of China' Documents Country's Dramatic Return To Religion NPR
Religious 'nones' projected to decline as share of world population Pew Research Center
Alabama Set To Allow Church To Create Its Own Police Force NPR
How fights over Trump have led evangelicals to leave their churches Washington Post
Supreme Court Scheduled to Hear Important Freedom of Religion Dispute NBC News
Religious restrictions vary in world’s most populous countries Pew Research Center
There may be a lot more atheists than you think Vox
Supreme Court , including Gorsuch, to hear church-state case Washington Post
'The Evangelicals, by Frances FitzGerald (book review) SF Gate
Delaware Republican Lawmaker Walks out on Muslim Prayer NBC 10 Philadelphia
God complex: how religion became the bedrock of modern rap The Guardian
5 facts on how Americans view the Bible and other religious texts Pew Research
***MUSIC
College Apologizes for Trashing Music Majors Inside Higher Ed
American Airlines thought a cello was a safety risk The Week magazine
***FILM
16-Week Crash Course on the History of Movies: From the First Moving Pictures to the Rise of Multiplexes & Netflix Open Culture
***SCIENCE
With new editor Joe Brown, Popular Science is using a “Trojan horse” strategy to take on science skeptics Harvard’s Neiman Lab
***HEALTH
Statistical Thinking: Statistical Errors in the Medical Literature Statistical Thinking
On People Who Take A Small Dose Of Hallucinogens With Their Morning Coffee BBC
How Behavioral Economics Can Produce Better Health Care New York Times
Apple has a secret team working on the holy grail for treating diabetes CNBC
***NEUROSCIENCE
Gut microbes and the brain: Penicillin changes the behaviour of young mice The Economist
Brain scans may reveal mental secret of "Super Agers" CBS News
Neuroscience can now curate music based on your brainwaves, not your music taste Quartz
***PHILOSOPHY
How (And When) To Think Like A Philosopher NPR
Pascal's Wager Explained (video) Susanna Rinard of Harvard University
***PRODUCTIVITY
New to Office 365 in March—co-authoring in Excel and more Office Blogs
***RESEARCH
What Constitutes Peer Review of Data? A Survey of Peer Review Guidelines The Scholarly Kitchen
***HIGHER ED
New York's private colleges and universities don't know what to expect under the state's free tuition program for students attending public colleges Inside Higher Ed
What to Know About New York’s Plan to Offer Free College TIME
Students at Private School Petition to get more Access to Board of Trustees Inside Higher Ed
Taking Stock of FERPA Inside Higher Ed
***TEACHING
English department tackles history, literature and race through the lens of “Hamilton” The Puget Sound Trail
The Distracted Classroom: Is It Getting Worse? Chronicle of Higher Ed
Professor she gave a failing grade to a troublesome student; he told the media he was unfairly singled out for his Christianity: Next Came a Social-Media Storm Chronicle of Higher Ed
***STUDENT MEDIA
Faculty Members Criticize Prosecution of Student Whistle-Blower who shared an internal working document with the campus newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun
***STUDENT LIFE
No foul language allowed at Temple University construction site Fox29
What happened to all those unemployable women’s studies majors? Washington Post
Why BuzzFeed says it’s okay to use the word ‘millennial’ Columbia Journalism Review
How college students are fighting human and sex trafficking | News for College Students USA Today
Millennial Hoarders The New Yorkers
***CRIME ON CAMPUS
Virginia Tech Teachers Remember Students' Response To Shooting Tragedy NPR
***ACADEMIC LIFE
Faculty salaries are up slightly year over year, but institutional budgets continue to be balanced “on the backs” of adjuncts and out-of-state students Inside Higher Ed
MSU professor sues Wal-Mart over fishing license that says he cleans toilets Bozeman Daily Chronicle
University of Central Florida reprimands a long-serving professor of art for allegedly demeaning a student Inside Higher Ed
a silly idea
/No man knows how bad he is until he has tried to be good. There is a silly idea about that good people don't know what temptation means. - C.S. Lewis
People think they know something.. because others know it
/People are individually rather limited thinkers and store little information in their own heads. Much knowledge is instead spread through the community—whose members do not often realise that this is the case.
(Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach) call this the illusion of understanding, and they demonstrate it with a simple experiment. Subjects are asked to rate their understanding of something, then to write a detailed account of it, and finally to rate their understanding again. The self-assessments almost invariably drop. The authors see this effect everywhere, from toilets and bicycles to complex policy issues. The illusion exists, they argue, because humans evolved as part of a hive mind, and are so intuitively adept at co-operation that the lines between minds become blurred. Economists and psychologists talk about the “curse of knowledge”: people who know something have a hard time imagining someone else who does not. The illusion of knowledge works the other way round: people think they know something because others know it.
From a review in the Economist of “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
This is Love
/"This is love: Not that we loved God. It is that he loved us and sent his Son to give his life to pay for our sins." 1 John 4:10
“In this is love..” or another translation could be “In this way is seen the true love."
God didn’t look down and say, “Boy, I see you love me. I think I’ll love you.” Or “You’re a nice guy, I really like that.”
Instead:
You were rebellious, arrogant, self-centered. God said, “I love you.”
You ignored him, fought him, were bored with him. God said, “I love you.”
You spit in his face, yelled at him, shook your fist. God said, “I love you.”
That’s what John means here.
We see what real love is by looking at what God did. He loved us with a desire to restore us, to make us whole.
Stephen Goforth
rushed steps
/No man walks with dignity who’s steps are rushed.
a sense of failure
/Never let the sense of failure corrupt your new action. - Oswald Chambers
dead fish
/Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream -Malcolm Muggeridge
articles of interest - April 10
/***TECHNOLOGY
New technology will automatically send you video if you show up in a crowd shot on an MLB broadcast USA Today
Why everything is hackable Computer security is broken from top to bottom Economist
The Changing Use of American Leisure Time 1843 Magazine
***ART & DESIGN
Why Authoritarians Attack the Arts New York Tunes
This Extraordinary New Museum Doesn't Actually Have Any Art Harpers Bazaar
***MUSIC
Classical music, made easy: How to distinguish Bach from Beethoven Economist
***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA
Record labels could yank their music off U.S. radio under new bill USA Today
Spotify is testing lossless audio. Can you hear the difference? The Verge
***JOURNALISM
Here are the winners of the 2017 Pulitzer Prizes Poynter
Internet ‘Predator’ Scam Targets Local Journalists San Diego Free Press
Teaching Journalism in the Trump Era: Ben Yagoda Chronicle of Higher Ed
What I Learned About Justice Reporting From Inside Prison: A former prison journalist on what’s missing from criminal justice coverage (opinion) The Marshall Project
ProPublica shows Journalists how to tweet Columbia Journalism Review
10 Investigative Reporting Outlets to Follow Bill Moyers & Co.
Tiny, family-run newspaper wins Pulitzer Prize for taking on big business Poynter
***FAKE NEWS
Facebook Pushes News Literacy to Combat a Crisis of Trust Wired
Google rolls out new 'Fact Check' tool worldwide to combat fake news Christian Science Monitor
What does fake news tell us about life in the digital age? Not what you might expect Harvard Nieman Lab
How do you stop fake news? In Germany, with a law Washington Post
For Facebook and Google, the Best Way to Fight Fake News Is You MIT Tech Review
How Misinformation Spreads On The Internet And How To Stop It NPR
***BIG DATA & STATISTICS
Creating fake data sets out of real ones so that data analysis doesn’t compromise sensitive personal information Tech Republic
A series of videos for a course called Neural Networks for Machine Learning Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto) on Coursera
Hadoop 3.0 is round the corner-these are the enhancements over the previous major release ZdNet
4 answers to the question: What is the largest inefficiencies in a data scientist’s workflow? Quora
How to avoid common mistakes when thinking about statistics, probability and risk The Conversation
***SOCIAL MEDIA
Introducing Twitter Lite Twitter
***GENDER
Women authors are underrepresented in top political science journals, and are not benefitting from the growth in co-authorship PS: Political Science & Politics
Why Men Don’t Live as Long as Women Nautil.us
NAU professor gets hate calls after docking a point on student's essay for using 'mankind' 12news
The controversial biology of sexual selection: A new book takes aim at evolutionary determinism Economist
***RACIAL ISSUES
New study suggests that the impostor phenomenon can affect various groups of minority students in different ways Inside Higher Ed
Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk ProPublica
The Data says: Police are more likely to shoot If you’re black Tampa Bay Times
White Supremacists Trying To Recruit On College Campuses NPR
***PERSONAL GROWTH
What does she see in him?! Becoming (my site)
***GRAMMAR
Who do you think you’re apostrophising? The dark side of grammar pedantry The Conversation
English has a traditional solution to gender-neutral pronouns Economist
***WRITING& READING
Automatic Paraphrasing: A Problem for Academia? Plagiarism Today
***LITERATURE
'Hemingway Didn't Say That' (And Neither Did Twain Or Kafka) NPR
How Henry David Thoreau Revolutionized the Pencil Open Culture
Edgar Allan Poe Published a “CliffsNotes” Version of a Science Textbook & It Became His Only Bestseller (1839) Open Culture
***FREE SPEECH
Twitter Sues Homeland Security over Free Speech Issue Wired
The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online Pew Research
***LEGAL ISSUES
In the wake of federal criticism of its accreditation standards, the American Bar Association sanctions another for-profit law school Inside Higher Ed
When Copyright Criticism Is Something Else The Illusion of More
***RELIGION
Texas Baptist children’s home accused of sexual abuse and neglect Star-Telegra
The Changing Global Religious Landscape: Babies born to Muslims will begin to outnumber Christian births by 2035 Pew Research
Christian Music in Trump's America: Two Artists on the Pressure to Keep Quiet Billboard
How religious movies are thriving more than ever before under Trump Business Insider
A resurgence of religious faith is changing China Economist
***STUDENT LIFE
Harvard Students Launch a Free Course on How to Resist Trump Open Culture
QuickTake: Millennials Bloomberg
20 Percent of Millennials Identify as LGBTQ NBC News
***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT
The High (Dollar) Cost of Sexual Assault: Average of $350K Inside Higher Ed
Laura Kipnis Tackles Campus Sexual Politics In 'Unwanted Advances' NPR
***SCIENCE
***HEALTH
How hospitals could be rebuilt, better than before Technology could revolutionise the way they work Economist
Before you send your spit to 23andMe, what you need to know Stat News
Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts To Control His Own Arm And Hand NPR
***PSYCHOLOGY
We behave differently on different social media. Derek Thompson wonders whether we act up online or reveal our true nature 1843 Magazine
Treating depression is guesswork. Psychiatrists are beginning to crack the code Vox
***NEUROSCIENCE
Use it or Lose it: Parts of the brain that are used to navigate and plan routes aren’t active when directions are fed to us MIT Tech Review
***CRITICAL THINKING
An Introduction to Game Theory & Strategic Thinking: A Free Online Course from Yale University Open Culture
***ETHICS
When is it OK to shoot a child soldier? Economist
***RESEARCH
Unreadable Science Abstracts Inside Higher Ed
How a Browser Extension Could Shake Up Academic Publishing Chronicle of Higher Ed
Bad Science and Good: Telling the Difference (video) The Arthur Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University
***HIGHER ED
Keeping Up With the Growing Threat to Data Security at Universities (sub. req'd.) Chronicle of Higher Ed
***TEACHING
Revising How We Teach Revision Skills Chronicle of Higher Ed
before I die
/My life would be complete if, before I die, I…