What Google searches Teach us

You may not be a data scientist. You may not know how to code in R or calculate a confidence interval. But you can still take advantage of big data and digital truth serum to put an end to envy — or at least take some of the bite out of it.

Any time you are feeling down about your life after lurking on Facebook, go to Google and start typing stuff into the search box. Google’s autocomplete will tell you the searches other people are making. Type in “I always …” and you may see the suggestion, based on other people’s searches, “I always feel tired” or “I always have diarrhea.” This can offer a stark contrast to social media, where everybody “always” seems to be on a Caribbean vacation.

As our lives increasingly move online, I propose a new self-help mantra for the 21st century, courtesy of big data: Don’t compare your Google searches with other people’s Facebook posts.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writing in the New York Times

Just the Right Amount of Practice

Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out. To succeed, students must “avoid exhaustion” and “limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

How do students marked for greatness make the most of limited practice time? The rhythm of their practice follows a distinctive pattern. They put in more hours per week in the practice room or playing field, but they don’t do it by making each practice longer. Instead, they have more frequent, shorter sessions, each lasting about 80 to 90 minutes, with half-hour breaks in between.

Add these several practices up, and what do you get? About four hours a day. About the same amount of time Darwin spent every day doing his hardest work, Hardy (G.H. Hardy was one of Britain’s leading mathematicians in the first half of the 20th century) and Littlewood (Hardy’s longtime collaborator John Littlewood) spent doing math, Charles Dickens and Stephen King spent writing. Even ambitious young students in one of the world’s best schools, preparing for an notoriously competitive field, could handle only four hours of really focused, serious effort per day.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writing in Nautilus

articles of interest - May 22

***TECHNOLOGY

Pew finds most older Americans using the Internet, but also ‘largely disconnected from the digital revolution’  Talking New Media

How tech created a global village — and put us at each other’s throats  Boston Globe

Digital gap between rural and nonrural America persists  Pew Research

***BIG DATA & STATISTICS

Leverage small datasets to perform well on new tasks by transferring learning by fine-tuning deep nets  KD Nuggets

Google's machine-learning cloud pipeline covers everything from intake of data to deployment of the trained model  InfoWorld

The 5 most common Big Data quality issues.. and how to handle them  KD Nuggets

MIT: protecting privacy with fake data sets to allow 3rd party distribution for development and  education purposes  Smart Data Collective

***SOCIAL MEDIA

How ProPublica Defines Success for Engagement Projects  Media Shift

Twitter Changed Their Privacy Policy, So Update Your Settings  Life Hacker

Facebook is trying yet again to cut clickbait headlines from your News Feed  Recode

How WeChat (China’s most popular messaging app) Spreads Rumors, Reaffirms Bias, and Helped Elect Trump  Back Channel

***PRODUCING MEDIA

The best portable battery chargers  Digital Trends

Shoot 360 Video Like a Pro in 6 Simple Steps  Wired

Americans no longer have to register non-commercial drones with the FAA   Recode

 

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

The Atlantic bucks recent website trends by launching new, more dense home page design  Talking New Media

New York Times will offer buyouts to editors in push to transform editing  Poynter

***JOURNALISM

In a private meeting, President Trump allegedly urged Comey to imprison journalists  Poynter

Murdered journalist Javier Valdez on the risks of reporting in Mexico  BBC

Mexicans stage 'A Day Without Journalism' to protest deadly attacks on the news media  LA Times

The Evolution of Citizen Journalism: How 3 Modern Outlets Are Updating the Model  PBS Media Shift

Voice of San Diego to Spin Off New Organization to Support Good Journalism Everywhere  Voice of San Diego

Politwoops: Explore the Tweets that politicians Didn't Want You to See  ProPublica

Data journalism syllabus: From numeracy to visualization and beyond  Journalism Resources

Quartz’s David Yanofsky on coding as a journalist  Columbia Journalism Review

***FAKE NEWS

7 key reference points for navigating the post-truth era, alternative facts, and fake news Business Insider

The Seth Rich conspiracy shows how fake news still works  Washington Post

Has Fake News Changed Behavior?  Daily Infographic

Why Fact Checking Matters & How to Do It  Video Strategist

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Tech created a global village-and put us at each other’s throats  Becoming (my blog)

Be Yourselves: We behave differently on different social media  1843 magazine

***HIGHER ED

Federal Lawmakers Begin New Push for Student-Outcomes Data  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Why Haven't MOOCs Eliminated Any Professors?  Inside Higher Ed

Mizzou likely to cut hundreds of positions amid expected 7 percent enrollment drop  St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Dealing With Controversial Speakers on Campus  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***HUMANITIES /STEM

Author Interview: What Are the Arts and Sciences? A Guide for the Curious  Inside Higher Ed

***WRITING& READING

Local professors to students: No 'plz,' please in emails  Houston Chronicle

The ‘Realistic’ Research Paper  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Paper About Plagiarism Contains Plagiarism  Neuroskeptic

***GENDER 

Baylor faces another Title IX lawsuit over alleged 2012 gang rape by football players  Sports Illustrated

Many in Orthodox Christian countries have conservative views on gender roles  Pew Research

Fake article sets off Debates over gender studies and open-access journals  Inside Higher Ed

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

The Atlantic's "My Family's Slave" cover story: Filipinos defend Alex Tizon from Western backlash  Quartz

A Creationist Sues the Grand Canyon for Religious Discrimination  The Atlantic

In U.S. metro areas, huge variation in intermarriage rates  Pew Research

How students benefit from having teachers of same race  Journalism Resources

***FREE SPEECH

Reince Priebus admits Trump administration has looked into changing the First Amendment  The Week

Northwestern Students protest ICE representative’s visit to campus  Daily Northwestern

Student group files lawsuit against professor  CNN

How Missouri Used Shared Governance to Preserve Free Speech on Campus  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LEGAL ISSUES

Can You Copyright Your Dumb Joke? And How Can You Prove It's Yours?  NPR

Patent trolls take it on the chin in new Supreme Court ruling  Tech Crunch

Facebook Defeats Lawsuit Over Material Support for Terrorists  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

***RELIGION

Way More Americans May Be Atheists Than We Thought  FiveThirtyEight

The Second Coming Of Televangelist Jim Bakker  BuzzFeed News

Why Trump’s tax plan would mean less money for churches  Washington Post

Pregnant at 18. Hailed by Abortion Foes. Punished by Christian School  New York Times

How “Race Tests” Maintain Evangelical Segregation (opinion)  Religious Dispatches

***ART & DESIGN

Take a Trip Through the History of Modern Art with the Oscar-Winning  Open Culture

How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars  Back Channel

***MUSIC

Inside the Offices Where the Music Never Stops and Everyone Is DJ  Bloomberg

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

Sexual Assaults at Southwestern Community College Prompts Protest  San Diego Free Press

Lawsuit claims Howard University shamed and did not help sexual violence victims  USA Today

***SCIENCE

Physicists Can’t Agree on What Science Even Means Anymore  Wired

What's Wrong with Science?  BBC

The Map of Chemistry: New Animation Summarizes the Entire Field of Chemistry in 12 Minutes  Open Culture

***HEALTH

Training medical students how to teach helps them embrace ambiguity  Stat News

***PSYCHOLOGY           

Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways  National Geographic

***NEUROSCIENCE  

What causes that feeling of being watched  BBC

What’s behind the myth that you only use 10 percent of your brain?  The Verge

Bloomberg story provides clear-eyed view of trendy neurofeedback brain-training clinics  Health News Review

***PHILOSOPHY

Does the philosophy literature have a plagiarism problem?  Retraction Watch

Change in philosophy poses threat to devoted profs at Catholic university  Life Site News

***ETHICS

Society's Moral Fracturing Leads To Dangerous Places  NPR

Teaching robots right from wrong  1843 magazine

Facebook's internal rulebook on sex, terrorism and violence is Leaked  The Guardian

***RESEARCH

Citation Performance Indicators: A Very Short Introduction  The Scholarly Kitchen

Does It Matter Whose Name Appears After the (c) When Using Creative Commons  The Scholarly Kitchen

A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies: The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct  Skeptic

***TEACHING

Digital course materials have gotten only slightly more accessible to students with disabilities Inside Higher Ed

You Can’t Automate Good Teaching  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

Escape to Another World: As video games get better and job prospects worse, more young men are dropping out of the job market to spend their time in an alternate reality  1843 magazine

Baby boomers are actually way more entitled than millennials  New York Post

How Generation Z, Millennials (and the rest of us) consume media: 7 key trends The Media Briefing

Christian high school bans student for her hairstyle   WCTV

Colleges Are Using Price Discrimination—Here's How to Fight It  Life Hacker

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Tenured Prof Fired for asking Why Private Catholic School didn’t notify Minority faculty that they could have been in danger  Inside Higher Ed

Graduate student who is subject of Title IX critic’s new book sues for defamation and invasion of privacy  Inside Higher Ed

 

We're all a Mess

I have spent the past five years peeking into people’s insides. I have been studying aggregate Google search data. Alone with a screen and anonymous, people tend to tell Google things they don’t reveal to social media.

While spending five years staring at a computer screen learning about some of human beings’ strangest and darkest thoughts may not strike most people as a good time, I have found the honest data surprisingly comforting. I have consistently felt less alone in my insecurities, anxieties, struggles and desires.

Once you’ve looked at enough aggregate search data, it’s hard to take the curated selves we see on social media too seriously. Or, as I like to sum up what Google data has taught me: We’re all a mess.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writing in the New York Times

articles of interest - May 15

***JOURNALISM

The secret deal the Associated Press made with the Nazis during WWII  Washington Post

Mobile Journalism Isn’t Just Producing Content. It’s Knowing How Mobile Content Affects Engagement  PBS Media Shift

How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism  Good Men Project

America’s growing news deserts  Columbia Journalism Review

Chicago Tribune wins decision in FOIA case against College (court rules in favor of releasing records in the possession of a public college's fundraising organization)  Chicago Tribune

Facebook downranks News Feed links to crappy sites smothered in ads  TechCrunch

Poynter President resigns for role at Medill School of Journalism  Saint Peters Blog

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Sinclair Requires TV Stations to Air Segments That Tilt to the Right  New York Times

Mixed reality, computer vision, and brain–machine interfaces: Here’s the future The New York Times’ reborn R&D lab sees  Harvard’s Nieman Lab

***FAKE NEWS

Google and Facebook aren't fighting fake news with the right weapons  LA Times

News, False and Fake  Chronicle of Higher Education

Infographic: How ‘Fake News’ and Bogus Content Are Changing the Way Consumers Look at Brands  Ad Week

A Little Bit Of Fake News Could Be Good For You: It turns out that throwing more facts at people isn’t the full answer to alternative facts  Fast Company

Russia Has Weaponized Fake News to Sow Chaos  New Republic

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

Buying spree brings more local TV stations to fewer big companies  Pew Research Center

As Viewers Drift Online, Advertisers Hold Fast to Broadcast TV  New York Times

***GRAMMAR           

The use of Oftentimes Rises  Chronicle of Higher Education

Being a Declarative (or Interrogative, or Imperative, or Exclamative)  Chronicle of Higher Education

***WRITING& READING

An Editor sees Editing Slips in Online News  LA Times

***LANGUAGE

Linguistics Breakthrough Heralds Machine Translation for Thousands of Rare Languages  Technology Review

When American Schools Banned German Classes  Jstor

***LITERATURE

This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Read Poetry  New York Mag

***GENDER  

Testosterone makes men less likely to realize when they're wrong, a new study shows  Science Daily

N.H. Rep. Robert Fisher lambasted by women at hearing about his role in misogynistic online forum  Concord Monitor

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

Professor calls diversity training workshop to which colleagues were invited a “waste,” setting off debate about inclusiveness and civility  Inside Higher Ed

Fenway Incidents Prompt Questions About Hate Speech At The Ballpark  NPR

Faculty and Students Assail Texas A&M President’s Criticism of Professor  Chronicle of Higher Education

As White Supremacists Push Onto Campuses, Schools Wrestle With Response  NPR

***FREE SPEECH

Don't blame millennials for free speech crisis on college campuses  The Hill

Federal court ruling recognizes students' First Amendment right to make recordings on school grounds  Student Press Law Center

Answering a call for speech codes from The Washington Post  The FIRE

The States Where Campus Free-Speech Bills Are Being Born: A Rundown  Chronicle of Higher Education

***LEGAL ISSUES

Fair Use Too Often Goes Unused  Chronicle of Higher Education

Why Do Law Professors Write Law Review Articles? Publish or perish, but is there a point to it?  Above the Law

***BIG DATA & STATISTICS

Reporting the findings: Absolute vs relative risk  Health News Review

Under Trump, inconvenient data is being sidelined  Washington Post

MIT: protecting privacy w/fake data sets to allow 3rd party distribution for development & education purposes  Smart Data Collective

Why a good predictive data analytics model is never finished  Silicon Angle

The 6 biggest decisions an organization must make when deploying big data architecture  Tech Republic

Why it may be better to have fewer predictors in machine learning models?  KD Nuggets

How to tell when you need a better analytics platform   Smart Data Collective

 ***SOCIAL MEDIA

The many risks that academics face in trying to court social-media success  The Atlantic

***PRODUCING MEDIA

Big Ideas From BEA 2017 on Podcasting, Live Streaming, Google Tools  PBS Media Shift

Become an Instagram Influencer With This Mobile Photo Gear  Wired

How to shoot on iPhone 7  Apple

***RELIGION

Church of England investigates appointment of rogue bishop in sign of conservative breakaway  Christian Today

Telling the story of my departure from American evangelicalism (opinion)  Religious News Service

Jakarta's Minority Christian Governor Convicted Of Blasphemy  NPR

Televangelist's planned resort in San Diego gets a major redesign  Union Tribune

Did TBN ministers Paul, Jan Crouch cover up 13-year-old granddaughter’s rape allegation?  Orange County Register

Christian researcher claims feds rejected Grand Canyon study based on his religion  The Arizona Republic

Christian printer doesn’t have to make pro-gay shirts, appeals court rules  Lexington Herald Leader

Christian Teacher Who Said Gay People “Deserve To Die” Resigns After Backlash  San Luis Bispo

Women bloggers spawn an evangelical ‘crisis of authority’  Religious News Service

Record Few Americans Believe Bible Is Literal Word of God  Gallup

Can Cannabis And Christ Coexist? These Devout Southern Christians Think So  Buzz Feed

Operation World Mapmaker Shuts Down Due to Donor Shifts  Christianity Today

The evangelical courtiers who kneel before the president’s feet  Religion News ServiceFacing Global Persecution, Christian Leaders Urge U.S. For More Protection  NPR

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

There’s been a big change in how the news media covers sexual assault  Washington Post

***PSYCHOLOGY           

Why You Shouldn't Tell People about Your Dreams  Scientific American

***NEUROSCIENCE

Neuroscience shows that our gut instincts about only children are right  Quzrtz

These Table Tops Are The Same Shape, But Your Brain Won't Let You See It  Digg

***PHILOSOPHY

A Graphic Novel About 17th-Century Philosophy  The Atlantic

Philosopher who argued for God wins Templeton Prize  The Oakland Press

A Graphic Novel About 17th-Century Philosophy  The Atlantic

René Descartes and Teresa of Ávila: One of Descartes’ most famous ideas was first articulated by a female philosopher  Quartz

***ETHICS

Moral Law: Americans Agree on More Morality, Disagree on Method  Christianity Today

Scientists Raise Concern By Wanting To Create Synthetic Human Genomes  NPR

Crispr Makes It Clear: The US Needs a Biology Strategy, and Fast  Wired

***RESEARCH

China publishes more science research with fabricated peer-review than everyone else put together  Quartz

Science publishers try new tack to combat unauthorized paper sharing  Nature

***PERSONAL GROWTH

10,000 hours of deliberate practice is not enough  Becoming (my blog)

***HIGHER ED

Harvard Library Drops Fines  The Harvard Crimson

Private colleges and universities increase tuition discounting again  Inside Higher Ed

Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wheaton College Would Like to Pretend Its LGBTQ Students Don’t Exist  Religious Dispatches

Receptive Audience At Liberty University Praises Trump's Accomplishments  NPR

***TEACHING

Students Don’t Always Recognize Good Teaching, Study Finds  Chronicle of Higher Education

What Are Students Rating When They Rate Instructors?  Inside Higher Ed

U can’t talk to ur Prof like this (opinion)  New York Times

***STUDENT MEDIA  

Keene State president responds to student journalism dispute  Sentinel Source

Fired from Student Newspaper for Posting Video Clip (opinion)  National Review

***STUDENT LIFE

How Long-Term Adderall Use Affects The Brain  Quora

***CRIME ON CAMPUS

Campus Police Forces Adopt Body Cameras  Inside Higher Ed

Selfishness and Self-love

If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue and not a vice-to love myself since I am a human being too. There is no concept of man in which I myself am not included. A doctrine which proclaims such an exclusion proves itself to be intrinsically contradictory. The idea expressed in the Biblical “Love thy neighbor as thyself!” implies that respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self, can not be separated from respect for and love and understanding of another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other self.

The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he can not love at all.

The selfish person.. can see nothing but himself; he judges everyone and everything from its usefulness to him; he is basically unable to love. Does not this prove that concern for others and concern for oneself are unavoidable alternatives? This would be so if selfishness and self-love were identical. But.. selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites.

Eric Fromm, Man for Himself

Attributes of a high-performing Leader

A decade long study published in Harvard Business Review set out to identify the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs: 

Our findings challenged many widely held assumptions. For example, our analysis revealed that while boards often gravitate toward charismatic extroverts, introverts are slightly more likely to surpass the expectations of their boards and investors.

We were also surprised to learn that virtually all CEO candidates had made material mistakes in the past, and 45% of them had had at least one major career blowup that ended a job or was extremely costly to the business. Yet more than 78% of that subgroup of candidates ultimately won the top job.

We discovered that high-performing CEOs do not necessarily stand out for making great decisions all the time; rather, they stand out for being more decisive. They make decisions earlier, faster, and with greater conviction. They do so consistently—even amid ambiguity, with incomplete information, and in unfamiliar domains. In our data, people who were described as “decisive” were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs.

Read more about the CEO Genome Project in the Harvard Business Review

Twice as Miserable

People hate losses.. Roughly speaking, losing something makes you twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes you happy. In more technical language, people are “loss averse.” How do we know this?

Consider a simple experiment. Half the students in a class are given coffee mugs with the insignia of their home university embossed on it. The students who did not get a mug are asked to examine their neighbor’s mugs. Then, mug owners are invited to sell their mugs and nonowners are invited to buy them. They do so by answering the question “At each of the following prices, indicate whether you would be willing to (give up your mug/buy a mug).”

The results show that those with mugs demand roughly twice as much to give up their mugs as others are willing to pay to get one. Thousands of mugs have been used in dozens of replications of this experiment, but the results are nearly always the same. Once I have a mug, I don’t want to give it up. But if I don’t have one, I don’t feel an urgent need to buy one.

What this means is that people do not assign specific values to objects. When they have to give something up, they are hurt more than they are pleased if they acquire the very same things.

Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, Nudge

articles of interest - May 8

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Why Social Media Isn't Always Very Social  NPR

Business publishers are enjoying traffic spikes from LinkedIn  Digiday

Facebook debuts a Twitter-like ‘Latest Conversations’ feature that shows public posts about buzzing topics  Tech Crunch

7 ‹Title Tag› Hacks for Increased Rankings + Traffic  Moz

Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable  New York Times

Not Your Dad's Keyword Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Use Cases  Moz

***GRAMMAR           

A Deliberate Front-Page Typo? Australia Media Watchers Debate  AdWeek

Grammarly raises $110 million for a better spell check  Tech Crunch

***WRITING & READING

In Praise of the First Person  Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Elements of Style: "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"  BongBong

False Titles  Chronicle of Higher Ed

***LANGUAGE

Translation platforms cannot replace humans: But they are still astonishingly useful  Economist

The Linguistic Trickery of False Friends  Jstor

The 23 Most Common Languages In The World  Daily Infographic

***THE BUSINESS OF MEDIA

Sinclair Broadcasting acquires Tribune Media  Talking New Media

***JOURNALISM

What it's like to report in one of the world's deadliest places for journalists  LA Times

The U of M journalism school renames itself for a Trump donor  City Pages

J-Schools Dump Accreditor  Inside Higher Ed

How We’re Learning To Do Journalism Differently in the Age of Trump  ProPublica

Lapse of Northwestern’s accreditation sheds light on fast-moving world of journalism education  Poynter

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

The New York Times reports higher revenue, income as digital subscriptions surge in Q1  Talking New Media

McClatchy loses $95.6M in Q1, due to falling print advertising and impairment charges  Talking New Media

Gannett newspapers are hiding an important local story  Columbia Journalism Review

How the New York Times saved itself: Subscriptions, not ads  Recode

***FAKE NEWS

6 Ways to Fight the Spread of Fake News, from AP’s Fact Check Team  Associated Press

The Age of Misinformation: How Online Platforms Shape American Discourse  The Atlantic

Google Rewrites Its Powerful Search Rankings to Bury Fake News  Bloomberg

Combating Fake News: An Agenda for Research and Action  Harvard's Shorestein Center

Facebook Drops Accounts in Fake News Fight  Associated Press

***GENDER  

Harvard Business School Moves To Study More Diverse Cases  NPR

Jury Awards $1.4 Million to Former Senior Female Athletics Official in gender and sexual orientation discrimination lawsuit  Press Citizen

Measles sweeps an immigrant community targeted by anti-vaccine activists  Stat News

Overwatch helped pave the way for the first women’s college in esports  Polygon

Does Gender Matter in Workplace Culture?  Daily Infographic

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

American University is dealing with a racist incident on its campus. It is not alone  Washington Post

This ACLU Lawsuit Over A Mississippi County Sheriff's Office Could Be A Sign Of Big Things To Come  BuzzFeed News

***FREE SPEECH

States Consider Legislation To Protect Free Speech On Campus  NPR

How Censorship Works  New York Times

***LEGAL ISSUES

A Photographer Sued a Student Over a School Project. Guess How That Turned Out (hint: fair use wins)  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

Can a pastor legally defame members of his flock from the pulpit?  Charlotte Observer  

Can Your Employer Fire You For Posting Vacation Photos to Facebook?  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

Why More Historians Are Embracing the Amicus Brief  Chronicle of Higher Ed

You Can’t Be Fired For a Facebook Post Calling Your Boss a “LOSER”  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

Teaching Law In An Age Of Anxiety  Huffington Post

How Should a Lawyer Respond to a Yelp Review Calling Him “Worst. Ever.”?  Technology & Marketing Law Blog

***TECHNOLOGY

We Were Warned About Flaws in the Mobile Data Backbone for Years. Now 2FA Is Screwed  Mother Board

***BIG DATA  

Why it may be better to have fewer predictors in machine learning models?  KD Nuggets

NGA now delivers unclassified geospatial intel to verified Gov users via an app for tablets & mobile devices  SIGNAL

Just how accurate are algorithms at spotting fake news?   Data Science Central

Where we stand with automated Machine Learning ..and where it is likely going  KD Nuggets

***RELIGION

Ending Catholicism in England and introducing the Reformation was a messy and conflicted process  Economist

Read the full text of Trump’s executive order on religious freedom  Washington Post

Though still conservative, young evangelicals are more liberal than their elders on some issues  Pew Research Center

Openly Gay Bishop At Center Of Controversy In United Methodist Church  NPR

Evangelicals and the Supreme Court (opinion)  Religion News Service

The IRS rarely targets pastors. But a preacher was once arrested — for saying the word ‘fork’  Washington Post

***ART & DESIGN

With This Interactive Font Map, You Have No Excuse For Defaulting To Helvetica On Everything  Digg

The Weird Words and Phrases Designers Use to Test Their Fonts  Wired

Most popular colors used by most popular sites  Flowing Data

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

Two lawsuits -- one involving accused student’s suicide and another about an attempt -- have added fire to the continued debate over how colleges handle complaints of sexual assault  Inside Higher Ed

It Took Years For A University To Punish This Professor After Harassment Allegations Were First Made   BuzzFeed

Doing the Right Thing in Sexual-Misconduct Cases (opinion)  Chronicle of Higher Ed

Sex assaults in high school sports minimized as 'hazing'  Associated Press

***SCIENCE

Mixing Thermodynamics and the Quantum World to get quantum thermodynamics  Wired

***HEALTH

The remarkable promise of cell-free biology  Economist

***PSYCHOLOGY           

For college students grappling with mental illness, the world can seem colorless  USA Today

***RESEARCH

Integrity starts with the health of research groups: Funders should force universities to support laboratories’ research health  Nature

The Future of Peer Review  The Scholarly Kitchen

Progress toward openness, transparency, and reproducibility in cognitive neuroscience  Wiley Online Library

Steady, strong growth is expected for open-access journals   Physics Today

***PERSONAL GROWTH

The line separating good and evil  Becoming (my blog)

Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times  Open Culture

***HIGHER ED

A Public University Acquires A Big For-Profit, And Raises Big Questions  NPR

Holy Cross VP paints bleak future for college in emails mistakenly sent to students  South Bend Tribune

***HUMANITIES /STEM

John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963)  Open Culture

***TEACHING

Conceptions of Plagiarism and Problems in Academic Writing in a Changing Landscape of External Regulation  Springer

The Hidden Costs of Active Learning  Campus Technology

***STUDENT MEDIA

College papers find one way to adjust to digital: Print less often  USA Today

***STUDENT MEDIA: TROUBLE IN KANSAS

Kansas college ends journalism classes prematurely: Adviser Suspended and copies of newspaper confiscated  KSNT

Student Newspaper to print last edition despite suspension of journalism program  Hutch Post

Community College student journalists say they are being squelched. The journalism professor who advises the paper has been suspended  Inside Higher Ed

***STUDENT LIFE

Forget FOMO. In Digital Minimalism, It’s All About The Fear Of Burning Out  Fast Company

On Campuses Far From China, Still Under Beijing’s Watchful Eye  New York Times

UK student drops from ceiling to steal statistics exam  Kentucky.com

Shifting Incomes for Young People  Flowing Data

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Accreditor’s new rules are forcing a professor who has taught philosophy for 50 years to stop doing so, because her Ph.D. is in English  Inside Higher Ed

Why can writing a paper be such a pain?  Jari Saramäki

Professor says she’s giving up a tenure-track job in the U.S. and taking her family back to Canada over racism directed at her Nicaraguan-born spouse  Inside Higher Ed

Court says Catholic University was justified in punishing a professor for using his blog to criticize a graduate student by name  Inside Higher Ed

Desire and Love

To love is an act. To be in love is a state.

Desire says Fidelity is passive. Love says Fidelity is active.

Eros is a love that sees and then desires. Agape is a love that knows and then grows.

Eros wants to use you. Agape wants to know the person.

Eros seeks love and desire itself. Agape seeks the beloved’s best.

Eros seeks to be in love. Agape seeks to love.

Eros says desire is love. Agape says desire’s place is within the process of love.

 

Stephen Goforth