January 24, 2019

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. -Winston Churchill, died Jan. 24, 1965

January 24, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

January 23, 2019

Intensive Parenting

January 23, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

Some social scientists have theorized, the tilt toward intensive parenting originated at least in part from parents’ anxieties about their children competing for education and jobs. Many children surely benefit from being raised like this—concerted cultivation can serve them well later in life, teaching them how to manage their time and assert their individuality. But heavily involved parenting can at the same time stunt kids’ sense of self-reliance, and overcommitted after-school schedules can leave them exhausted. Also, there is some evidence that parents who overdo it increase the risk that their children will grow up to be depressed and less satisfied with life. And on the parents’ side, the intensive ideal can lead parents—particularly mothers—to fear that they aren’t doing enough to give their child the best future possible.

Joe Pinsker writing in The Atlantic

January 22, 2019

Tuesday Tech Tools: Design

January 22, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

Some of the tools available for graphic design and UX design.

Adobe Indesign
Adobe product that is the industry standard for page layouts and design (posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books). For professionals and high end projects but for personal or smaller projects, there are other programs with a lower learning curve.

Adobe Pagemaker
While not on the level of Adobe InDesign, it is an effective page layout program for the non-professional. Includes predesigned templates that can be modified.

Adobe Kuler
Find complementary color palettes using a color wheel.

Axure
For UX design. A wireframing prototyping software tool. No coding needed. Aimed at web and desktop applications.

Balsamiq
Design software, a quick starter for wireframing tool.

Butterick's Practical Typography
Everything font-related including kerning, spacing, formatting, and more.

Color Me
Visualize hex colors.

Commarts
"Inspiration for graphic designers, art directors, design firms, corporate design departments, advertising agencies, interactive designers, illustrators and photographers—everyone involved in visual communication."

Design Thinking
Blog by Tim Brown about Design issues. Brown is author of Change by Design.

DesignEvo
Create logos. Easy to use but the free version allows only limited sizes and only paid accounts get trademark options. The paid accounts are somewhat expensive.

Font Feed
A "daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world."

FontJoy
This site will generates font pairings for your design project whether you are aiming to create balance, tension or set off content. Free.

Font Shop
This link takes you to the design section of the website where you can "improve your design skills with typography tips and tutorials. FontShop Education docs are formatted for easy downloading and printing, perfect for the classroom or studio." There's also a healthy glossary section, among other things.

How Design
This site seeks to meet the "business, creativity and technology needs of graphic designers."

Idea Mag
Japanese design magazine.

Keynotopia
UI design templates.

QuarkXpress
Page layouts for Mac or PC.Alternative to Adobe InDesign.

Lucid Press
Page layouts for the non-professional to design flyers, newsletters, etc.

MockPlus
Prototyping tool for Mobile app design. Drop and drag. No coding needed.

MyFonts
Large selection of professional fonts.

OmniGraffle
Design software. Industry standard.

Page Stream
Page layouts for the non-professional to design flyers, newsletters, etc.

Principle
Popular UI prototyping tools for designing mobile apps. Especially useful for creating animation. No coding skill needed. $129.

Print Mag
Design tips, education, resources from Print Magazine, a bimonthly magazine about visual culture and design.

SassMe
Colum vizualize color functions by inserting Hex codes.

Society for News Design
Columns and tips on design, workshop schedule, membership database and more.

Society of Publication Designers

Scribus
Page layouts. Alternative to Adobe InDesign.

UXPin
Prototyping tool for Mobile app design. Simple setup with drop and drag.

What the Font
Figures out what font you are looking at.

More Tech Tools here.

January 21, 2019

Articles of Interest - Jan 21

January 21, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

***JOURNALISM

Google is Partnering With WordPress to Develop a News Publishing Platform Search Engine Journal

Journalists Press for Shield Law Broadcasting & Cable

NYT had journalists swim across border for podcast, NAHJ slams program iMediaEthics

Nearly three-quarters of Republicans say the news media don’t understand people like them Pew Research Center

The Rise of Populism and the Damages to Journalism Monday Note

The differences in how CNN MSNBC & FOX cover the News Pudding

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

No, tech companies shouldn’t fund journalism Columbia Journalism Review

***FAKE NEWS

How an elaborate international scam is making the rounds among Instagrammers & photographers This Life of Travel

How to Inoculate Against Anti-Vaxxers New York Times

President Trump Posts Altered Photos to Facebook and Instagram That Make Him Look Thinner (and his fingers longer) Gizmodo

A nude-photo hoax was supposed to silence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Instead, she turned up the volume Washington Post

***TECHNOLOGY

Move over, coders—physicists will soon rule silicon valley Wired

Japan’s robot hotel lays off half the robots after they created more work for humans The Verge

The Limitations of your Voice Assistant Wired

CRISPR babies are real and the scientist who made them sought “personal fame and fortune” MIT Tech Review

***BIG DATA & AI

Move over, coders—physicists will soon rule silicon valley Wired

AI is better at bluffing than professional gamblers (and turning the professional gambling on its head) Engadget

“I am excited that I will be interning next summer in the artificial intelligence division of one of the largest technology companies in the world” write NINE YEAR OLD Huffington Post

How to make great-looking, fully-interactive plots with a single line of Python Towards Data Science

A new breed of AI intelligent video surveillance is being installed in schools around the country Axios

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Kylie Jenner Responds To The New Most-Liked Instagram With Her Own Egg Post Delish

Report: WhatsApp surpasses Facebook as the social network's most popular app The Next Web

Facebook launches petition feature Tech Crunch

Facebook Limits WhatsApp Message Forwards Media Post

The Impact Of Facebook Fundraisers On Charitable Giving (infographic) Daily Infographic

***PRIVACY & SECURITY

Mother of All Breaches Exposes 773 Million Emails, 21 Million Passwords Gizmodo

Millions of Chinese CVs exposed on cloud server BBC

ACLU sues 7 government agencies over social media surveillance Axios

Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? Wired

The government shutdown has severely weakened cybersecurity in the US MIT Technology Review

NSA Puts Phone Charging Booth at SchmooCon in Plot to Go Viral Gizmodo

Malware can now evade cloud security tools, as cybercriminals target public cloud users Tech Republic

***PRODUCING MEDIA

Top 3 compact cameras for the photo enthusiast Wired

***THE INTERNET

The Internet is Facing a Catastrophe For Free Expression and Competition Electronic Freedom Foundation

***PERSONAL GROWTH

I Want Your Life (the draw of social media) Becoming (my blog)

Finally, A Personality Quiz Backed By Science FiveThirtyEight

How to become a better conversationalist Fast Company

The best way I’ve found to keep digital monsters at bay: Meditation Every Day (opinion) New York Times

Nearly Half of American Adults Don't Know Their Own Blood Type (and other things about themselves) Mental Floss

Disturbing the silence: Thomas Merton embodied a paradox, chasing both the purity of silence and the need to break it Aeon

***LANGUAGE

Expats often struggle to pass on their languages: The trick is to engage children’s hearts as well as their minds Economist

Grammar Girl" on the biggest changes in language Quartz

Some words go out of fashion Economist

***LITERATURE

How Curses Function in Literature New York Times

Mary Oliver, Who Believed Poetry 'Mustn't Be Fancy,' Dies At 83 NPR

***GENDER

The Gillette Effect: What a Single Ad Reveals About American Men (opinion) Medium

Woman Didn’t Know Progress On Toxic Masculinity Would Turn Boyfriend Into Such A Weepy Little Pansy The Onion

University Seeks Dismissal of Lawsuit filed by Professor after disciplinary action was taken against over a transgendered student Irinton Tribune

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

AeroMexico offers discounts based on Mexican (video)

Videos show Kentucky high schoolers in DC for right Life March mocking Native American marchers WHAS-TV

Kentucky diocese apologizes after videos show students in ‘MAGA’ hats mocking Native Americans AL.com

***FREE SPEECH

India’s plan to curb hate speech could mean more censorship Wired

***LEGAL ISSUES

Disney files copyright claim on YouTuber’s Darth Vader film—and the creator is devastated Daily Dot

The Mars Argo copyright infringement dispute The 1709 Blog

Court: Cops Can't Compel the Use of Body Parts to Unlock Phones Tech News World

***CRIME

The FBI Says Its Photo Analysis Is Scientific Evidence: Scientists Disagree Propublica

National Some U.S. police departments dump body-camera programs amid high costs Washington Post

***RELIGION

'McJesus' Sculpture To Be Pulled From Israeli Museum After Violent Protests NPR

LifeWay to close stores in shift to digital strategy Baptist News

Pat Boone's wife Dies USA Today

SBC leader says APA guidelines on ‘toxic masculinity’ do not square with Scripture Baptist News

Why Christian Movies Are So Terrible (opinion) For the Church

The Top Reasons Young People Drop Out of Church Christianity Today

History shows the folly of China’s paranoia about Islam Economist

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

U.S. Evangelicals Push Back Against Trump's Syria Pullout Plan NPR

Top Democrats Press Trump on Plans to Seize Historic Church Land for Border Wall The Daily Beast

Lady Gaga Slams Mike Pence: He’s ‘The Worst Representation’ Of Christianity Huffington Post

***GOOD NEWS

Plea for birthday cards draws 50,000 well-wishes for Fullerton World War II vet Orange County Register

Salon Welcomes Their Rival Business With Open Arms, After Disaster Closed Their Doors CBS New York

Couple divorces then she gives him her kidney Twin Cities

Along with shave and a haircut, this dementia-friendly barber offers 'a bit of dignity’ Washington Post

***GOOD NEWS ABOUT KIDS

I’m Only 9, And I’m Already In College: Here’s What Life Is Like For Me Huffington Post

A 10-year-old boy had an idea to help poor people: 14 years and 8,000 bikes later, he's still at it Washington Post

11 year old is globally renowned crochet prodigy LaCrosse Tribune

***ART & DESIGN

Should designers learn to code? UX Design

Why designers shouldn’t bother learning to code The Next Web

The Best Prototyping Tools for 2018 Awwwards

A fraudster tried to forge documents: His font choice gave him away Ars Technica

Download Vincent van Gogh's Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create "the Art of the Future" Open Culture

***MUSIC

Toto’s ‘Africa’ Will Play Forever—Or at Least Until the Next Windstorm—in the Namib Desert Smithsonian Mag

The economics of streaming is making songs shorter Quartz

Hip Hop uses a more diverse vocabulary than Rock and Country Pudding

***FILM

How Movie Genres Have Changed In Popularity Since 1910, Visualized Digg

X-Men, Mad Max star Nicholas Hoult to play Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien in biopic Winter is Coming

How They Filmed the First El Capitan Climb With No Ropes (video) Vanity Fair

Jodie Foster Teaches Filmmaking in Her First Online Course Open Culture

45 classic movies you can watch for free on YouTube right now Daily Dot

“Roma” reflects on Mexico’s past, and its present Economist

***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT

He used the journal he edited to rebut allegations of sexual harassment: Now Two Universities Have Found Against Him BuzzFeed News

UN survey finds more than one third of workers experiences sexual harassment in last two years Fox News

***SOCIAL ISSUES

$11 toothpaste: Immigrants pay big for basics at private ICE lock-ups Reuters

Trump administration separated thousands more migrants than previously known Politico

Photos: Built to Separate—Border Barriers Around the World The Atlantic

Pharma spending on doctors is correlated with opioid deaths Wired

The rise of a global class-driven trust divide Axios

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

The Psychology Behind Kids' L.O.L. Surprise! Doll Obsession Mental Floss

The Weakness of Company Wellness Programs Economist

the 10 Hottest Affordable Neighborhoods of 2019 Redfin

Immigrant Entrepreneurs Founded 44 of Fortune 100 Firms Fortune

Lab Rats: Why Modern Work Makes People Miserable (book review) Economist

***ENVIRONMENT

Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s, new research finds Washington Post

Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’ The Guardian

Teenage Diver Finds Tons Of Golf Balls Rotting Off California NPR

The world's most popular coffee species are going extinct. And scientists say we are to blame MSNBC

A genetically modified house-plant can purify the atmosphere in buildings Economist

***HEALTH

What It's Like to Be Allergic to Corn The Atlantic

Anti-vax Movement Listed by World Health Organization as One of the Top 10 Health Threats for 2019 Newsweek

Hospitals Must Now Post Prices But It May Take a Brain Surgeon to Decipher Them New York Times

15 articles that challenge the prevailing wisdom, or dogma, from 2018 Medscape

Woman with Rare Condition Couldn’t Hear Male Voices Live Science

Stuck and Stressed: The Health Costs of Traffic New York Times

***MEDICAL RESEARCH

Adding new DNA letters make novel proteins possible: One such, a cancer drug, is now in development Economist

Scientists discover hidden blood networks that cross through bone STAT News

What Marijuana Science Says, and Doesn’t Say Undark

***TRAVEL

Orkin's Top 50 Bed Bug Cities List Orkin

11 Travel Predictions For 2019 Forbes

***FOOD

This Is How to Drink Bubble Tea Without Finishing the Tea First World of Buzz

A brie(f) history of cheese (video)

***FAMILY

Calculating the average effective salary of a stay-at-home mom Salary

Mom sent to hospital by sippy cup explosion Idaho News

The continuing importance of the family Smaller, more heterogeneous, but still indispensable Economist

***PARENTING

Forget Screen Time Rules — Lean In To Parenting Your Wired Child, Author Says NPR

The early years are getting increasing attention Economist

‘Intensive’ Parenting takes a lot of time and money, and many families can’t pull it off The Atlantic

Childhood has changed out of all recognition, says Barbara Beck. What does that mean for children, parents and society at large? Economist

How children interact with digital media Economist

The art and science of parenting: Fewer kids can be a lot more work Economist

Parenting methods are exacerbating social divisions Economist

***SCIENCE

The butterfly effect: It’s not what you think it is Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Science funding is a mess. Could grant lotteries make it better? Vox

***PSYCHOLOGY

How Do People Communicate Before Death? The Atlantic

How to Conquer Perfectionism Before it Beats You Medium

Postpartum Psychosis Often Mishandled NPR

Real-Life Expanding Brain Technique Is Blowing Some Minds Gizmodo

***PRODUCTIVITY

Does Multitasking Really Tire Out My Brain? Medium

***HISTORY

A brief history of the past 100 YEARS as told through the New York Times archives Pudding

In the Middle Ages there was no such thing as childhood How perceptions of children have changed through history Economist

***ETHICS

Trump’s interpreters for Putin meetings face ethical dilemma The Conversation

NYT faced hard choice over graphic photo selection Poynter

***RESEARCH

Websites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu “pit scientists against each Nature

Publishers ‘taking funders for a ride’ with mirror journals Duplicate titles are being set up to get around new open-access requirements Time Higher Ed

Mixed Realities, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality in Scholarly Publishing The Scholarly Kitchen

A Beginner’s Guide to the Peer Review System Inside Higher Ed

Journal websites often do not contain basic info about reviewer selection, review criteria, the use of digital tools, policies on corrections and retractions, etc Science Institute for Science in Society

A common and important statistical mistake: How post-hoc power calculation is like a shit sandwich Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

***HIGHER ED

Michigan State President Steps Down After Insulting Comments About Abuse Survivors NPR

Must Universities Shut Down Constitutionally Protected Speech Forums That Also Enable Student Harassment? Technology & Marketing Law Blog

The rise in American high-school graduation rates looks puffed-up Economist

Liberty U. Senior Official Accepted Bag of Money for Helping Trump in Online Polls, Report Says The Chronicle of Higher Education

Federal judge blocks Trump's religious exemption to birth control Reuters

***STUDENT LIFE

Pew Research decides where Millennials end and Generation Z Pew Research Center

These high school valedictorians set off to change the world: But good grades only got them so far Boston Globe

Professor sends letter to students: 'Please use deodorant' Houston.com

***TEACHING

Colleges Are Getting Smarter About Student Evaluations: Here’s How The Chronicle of Higher Education

No, Rate My Professors Probably Won’t Remove Your Profile The Chronicle of Higher Education

How One Instructor Stopped Himself From Lecturing Too Much Chronicle of Higher Education

MOOCs in Decline: Insights into multi-year data from MIT and Harvard e-Literate

January 21, 2019

I Want Your Life

January 21, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it. I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children, the landscapes inhabited and the food consumed seems not just desirable, but balanced, satisfied, and unafflicted by burnout.

Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.

“Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations.

Anne Helen Petersen writing in BuzzFeed News

January 19, 2019

When you’re facing an iceberg, a kayak is safer than the Titanic. -Lisa Williams

January 19, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

January 16, 2019

What shall we do? Write bravely and live interesting lives.

January 16, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

January 15, 2019

Articles of Interest - Week of Jan 14

January 15, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

***2018

Our Favorite Facts of 2018 New York Times

Top 18 Data Visualizations of 2018 How Much

2018's top 7 libraries and packages for data science and AI Heartbeat

The 2018 Storyhunter Staff Pick Awards Story Hunter

The biggest science stories of 2018: From the edge of the solar system to crises on Earth Washington Post

List of visualization best-of-year lists, 2018 FlowingData

The best and worst of 2018, in 85 lists Inside Hook

***2019

50 Things Turning 50 in 2019 Mental Floss

Tech trends 2019: 'The end of truth as we know it?' BBC

***BIG DATA & AI

60 minutes looks at how one man is advancing artificial intelligence CBS News

Understanding Generative Adversarial Networks and what makes them interesting Toward Data Science

Scenarios have been discovered in which it is impossible to prove whether or not a machine-learning algorithm could solve a particular problem Nature Magazine

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Is having the most popular photo on Instagram worth anything? Will someone cash in on the payout potential of that Kardashian-smashing egg? Recode

Inside Facebook's 'cult-like' workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time CNBC

***SOCIAL MEDIA & POLITICS

Newly elected congressmember AOC offers older colleagues a master class in social media Wired

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has more Twitter power than media, establishment Axios

***JOURNALISM

Facebook says it will invest $300 Million in Local News TechCrunch

Reporter Attacked While Broadcasting Live CBS Sacramento

The newspaper that #MeToo missed At Las Vegas Review-Journal, allegations of misconduct were met with little change Columbia Journalism Review

***FAKE NEWS

Democrats Targeted Roy Moore With Fake Campaign US News

'Fake News' Results In Real Jail Time For Ohio Woman Tech Dirt

Who was most likely to share fake news in 2016? Seniors Washington Post

Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news turns out to be…fake news Retraction Watch

Scarlett Johansson says fighting deepfake porn is 'fruitless': new form of harassment with little legal recourse Engadget

***PRIVACY & SECURITY

Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data Motherboard

America’s Electric Grid Has a Vulnerable Back Door—and Russia Walked Through It (sub. req’ed) Wall Street Journal

Hacks Are Getting So Common That Companies Are Turning To 'Cyber Insurance' NPR

Previously secret CIA report documents spear attack against surveillance plane ArsTechnica

***INTERNET

Google Reveals How It Approaches SEO Media Post

Numerous Government Sites' HTTPS Certificates Expire Amid Shutdown DailyDot

The Rise and Demise of RSS Motherboard

***WRITING & READING

Indie bookstores flourish in an Amazon world Axios

How To Start Reading Poetry If You Have No Idea Where To Begin Bustle

Is Skim Reading the New Normal? Psychology Today

***LANGUAGE

YouGov survey: British sarcasm 'lost on Americans' BBC

Learn Spanish Through Pop Music Using This App Life Hacker

***LITERATURE

Physiological essay on Gulliver’s Travels: a correction after three centuries Springer

Long-lost Jane Austen family photo album discovered on eBay Fox News

***GENDER

Men in the US have More daily leisure Time than Women The Atlantic

An analysis of dental plaque illuminates the forgotten history of female scribes The Atlantic

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

What A Case Of Mistaken Identity Tells Us About Race In America NPR

The father of DNA says he still believes in a link between race, intelligence. His lab just stripped him of his titles Washington Post

***LEGAL ISSUES

Despite Losing Its Copyright Case, The State Of Georgia Still Trying To Stop People From Posting Its Laws Tech Dirt

Families of Sandy Hook shooting victims win legal victory against InfoWars, Alex Jones ABC News

New York Times Moves To Dismiss Joe Arpaio's Defamation Lawsuit By Pointing Out It's Impossible To Defame Him Tech Dirt

Cops Can't Force People to Unlock Their Phones With Biometrics, Court Rules Gizomdo

***CRIME

How true-crime podcasts find clues the police miss BBC

Groveland Four pardoned by Florida clemency board Miami Herald

***PERSONAL GROWTH

Adulting Burnout Becoming (my blog)

'Affective Presence': How You Make Other People Feel The Atlantic

Physics explains why time passes faster as you age Quartz

***RELIGION

Conservative Evangelicals Attempt to Disentangle Their Faith from Trumpism New Yorker

One year after the American Bible Society issued an ultimatum, almost 20 percent of its staff has quit Philadelphia Inquirer

Did the U.S. Supreme Court Rule That Oaths Not Taken on the Bible Are ‘Illegal’? Snopes

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

Texas Republicans Will Vote on Whether to Remove Muslim-American From GOP Position Because of His Religion Newsweek

Evangelical group wants gays removed from anti-lynching bill NBC News

Megachurch pastor with ties to George W. Bush indicted on $3.5 million fraud ABC News

***GOOD NEWS

11-year-old saves man almost twice his size from drowning KARE TV

The 90-Year-Old Doper Is Not A Doper At All: The Carl Grove Case FloBikes

Lost teddy bear gets luxury five-star hotel break in Hawaii CNN

***GOOD NEWS WITH ANIMALS

Through her lemonade stand, Texas girl raises thousands for animal rescues The Week

Stranger drives 2,300 miles to reunite boy recovering from surgery with his dog CBS News

Stray Dog Adopted By Gas Station Rushes To The Rescue During Armed Robbery The Dodo

***ART & DESIGN

Panoramic Photographs by Peter Li Bring an Otherworldly Perspective to the Architectural Symmetry of Churches This is Colossal

Graphic designer recreates vintage maps, adding stunning 3-D elevation Scott Reinhard

The Getty Digital Archive Expands to 135,000 Free Images: Download High Resolution Scans of Paintings, Sculptures, Photographs & Much Much More Open Culture

How science and tech left an imprint on 3 iconic paintings Wired

***MUSIC

Nina Simone's 'Lovely, Precious Dream' For Black Children NPR

Independent Music Publicists Grapple With a Shrinking Media Landscape Billboard

Old, meet new: Sony introduces a wireless turntable for vinyl records Ars Technica

***FILM

Scientists Have Determined the Most Influential Film of All Time Curiosity

***SOCIAL ISSUES

How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor New York Times

The Weight I Carry What it’s like to be too big in America The Atlantic

Pet opioid prescriptions have soared, Penn study finds. But who’s really using the meds? Philadelphia Inquirer

Report: Americans Are Now More Likely To Die Of An Opioid Overdose Than On The Road NPR

***SOCIAL ISSUES: THE WALL

The Wall – Interactive map exploring U.S.-Mexico border USA Today

How Americans see illegal immigration, the border wall and political compromise Pew Research Center

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

Over 300 small-business loans a day aren’t happening because of the shutdown Washington Post

***ENVIRONMENT

The Era Of Easy Recycling May Be Coming To An End FiveThirtyEight

5 key environmental impacts of the government shutdown National Geographic

***HEALTH

Hopkins Researchers ID New Biomarker for Colorectal Cancers Hopkins Medicine

Health Rankings by State America’s Health Rankings

Excessive body fat around the middle linked to smaller brain, study says CNN

Biggest jump in drug overdoses was among middle-aged women NBC News

Most Health and Wellness Advice From Instagram Influencers Is Wrong The Atlantic

Artificial Sweeteners, Not Good, Not Bad New York Times

***TRAVEL

52 Places to Go in 2019 New York Times

University of California tells students not to use WeChat, WhatsApp in China CNN

***FOOD

Nutella Quartz

One in 10 Adults Have a Food Allergy: Many More Say They Have One New York Times

Vietnamese restaurant 'Pho Keene Great' under fire for name KWCH

FDA says most food inspections halted amid shutdown The Hill

***FAMILY

Dad makes app that forces teens to reply to text news.com.au

***PSYCHOLOGY

The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces Quantam Magazine

Denver passes conversion therapy ban The Denver Channel

The Science of Dreaming Long Reads

Our obsession with taking photos is changing how we remember the past The Conversation

***PHILOSOPHY

Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy Open Culture

***PRODUCTIVITY & EMAIL

Why I Didn’t Answer Your Email Because my inbox will always be waiting for me, but my children will not New York Times

Don’t Reply to Your Emails The case for inbox infinity The Atlantic

Dread Opening Your Inbox? There's A New Approach To Embracing All Those Emails NPR

***RESEARCH

U.S. Officials Warn Health Researchers: China May Be Trying to Steal Your Data New York Times

China censors British academic publisher Ekklesia

Taiwanese biochemist cleared of corruption Nature

***HIGHER ED

Small-college presidents work to adapt to a changing market Inside Higher Ed

Why U.S. universities are shutting down China-funded Confucius Institutes Washington Post

The Resilience of Religion in American Higher Education’ Inside Higher Ed

Religious Colleges Praise Proposed Protections for Their Mission Bloomberg

Lawsuit goes to trial over whether retired president is owed by a Baptist school Inside Higher Ed

***HUMANITIES & STEM

Don’t Teach Your Kid to Code: Teach Them to Communicate Medium

Why We Need the Humanities in the Sciences Patheos

***TEACHING

Professors Worry About the Cost of Textbooks, but Free Alternatives Pose Their Own Problems Chronicle of Higher Education

Learning Styles: Educators v Scientists Inside Higher Ed

Empathetic Syllabi Review Exercise Faculty Focus

***STUDENT LIFE

Millions of College Students Are Going Hungry The Atlantic

Renting College Textbooks Can Be An Even Bigger Ripoff Than Buying Them Huffington Post

Managing Teenage Acne New York Times

A Northwestern Student Took Her Own Life. Is a Sorority to Blame? The Atlantic

Why some colleges don't rely on SAT or ACT scores Springfield

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Chicago State to pay $650K in faculty blog lawsuit Associated Press

Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor Chronicle of Higher Ed

Printing Delays Present ‘New Normal’ for Academic Inside Higher Ed

UW-Oshkosh professor sues to prevent records about plagiarism investigation from being released to newspaper Wisconsin State Journal

64 lecturers at Ugandan University miss research grants over plagiarism Daily Monitor

January 14, 2019

Adulting Burnout

January 14, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,” an article in Elite Daily explains. “Adulting therefore becomes a verb.” “To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.

That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance.

To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.

Anne Helen Petersen writing in BuzzFeed News

January 12, 2019

your brand

January 12, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. -Jeff Bezos (born January 12, 1964)

January 12, 2019

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also. –Julius Caesar

January 12, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

January 10, 2019

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. –Anais Nin

January 10, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

January 07, 2019

Articles of Interest - Jan 7

January 07, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

***TECHNOLOGY

An introduction to Quantum Computing IBM

Ranking the Top 100 Technological Advances Gizmodo

Physicists’ measurement is first of its kind and could provide a stepping stone to practical quantum computing MIT

***BIG DATA & AI

Artificial intelligence turns brain activity into speech Science Mag

A brief explanation of automated machine learning, why it’s needed and where it’s going KD Nuggets

This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task Tech Crunch

The Most Amazing Artificial Intelligence Milestones So Far Forbes

Never mind killer robots—here are six real AI dangers to watch out for in 2019 MIT Tech Review

***SOCIAL MEDIA

What Facebook knows about you Axios

Detecting depression: Phone apps could monitor teen angst Associated Press

The Bird Box Effect: How Memes Drive Users to Netflix The Ringer

Link between social media and depression stronger in teen girls than boys, study says CNN

How to Delete Your Online Accounts but Keep Your Data Life Hacker

How Facebook is Fueling The French Populist Rage Monday Note

***JOURNALISM

7 tips on health care reporting from POLITICO’s Joanne Kenen Journalists Resource

A journalist exposes the systemic failures that led to his wife’s death Columbia Journalism Review

How Google-backed MediaWise is teaching teens media literacy Digiday

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press receives $1 million grant from the Hollywood Foreign Press Assoc Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Dallas Morning News lays off 20 newsroom employees Poynter

A fresh look at the rise of nonprofit journalism — and the issues that remain Poynter

***FAKE NEWS

How to recognize fake AI-generated images Medium

Inside Trump’s fake news recidivism Axios

2019: A year when fake news gets intimate and everyone disagrees on everything Harvard’s Nieman Lab

***PRIVACY & SECURITY

L.A. is suing IBM for illegally gathering and selling user data through its Weather Channel app Los Angeles Times

DNA Testing? You Might Want to Wait for More Legal Protection Bloomberg

***PRODUCING MEDIA

9 Types of Visual Storytelling on Mobile Global Investigative Journalism Network

***INTERNET

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? New York Magazine

Half the world will be online in 2019: But getting people connected is not an unalloyed blessing Economist

***PERSONAL GROWTH

The people inside the machine Becoming (my blog)

The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success The Week

Are you a Digital Hoarder? BBC

***WRITING & READING

The Rise of the Exclamation point Quartz

Ways schools and colleges could do a better job of teaching writing Inside Higher Ed

11,000 Digitized Books From 1923 Are Now Available Online at the Internet Archive Open Culture

Does It Pay to Be a Writer? A new study found that most authors’ incomes are below the poverty line New York Times

***LANGUAGE

The Most Searched Words Of 2018 Dictionary.com

Top words teens use to describe 2018: exhausting, chaotic, meh Survey Monkey

Children Are Using Emoji for Digital-Age Language Learning Wired

How a Word Enters the Dictionary: A Quick Primer Open Culture

***LITERATURE

Getting Students to Study Literature Inside Higher Ed

How Hollywood Gets the Publishing Industry Wrong New York Times

An Illustrated and Interactive Dante's Inferno: Explore a New Digital Companion to the Great 14th-Century Epic Poem Open Culture

***GENDER

Women are being honored for their excellent journalism Tampa Bay

7 Ways to Improve Coverage of Women’s Sports Harvard’s Nieman Reports

***RACE & ETHNICITY ISSUES

Landmark settlement requires harasser to denounce white supremacy and apologize to the first black female student body president at American University Inside Higher Ed

***LEGAL ISSUES

How copyright law is often used to squash free expression on the internet: The legal issues behind the AOC Dancing Video Wired

Content Just Entered The Public Domain Kotaku

Ed Sheeran Going To Trial Over 'Thinking Out Loud' Plagiarism Allegations Forbes

F-Bombs Coming to Supreme Court for Review of Government Ban on Scandalous Trademarks Hollywood Reporter

2018 Advertising Lawsuits Technology & Marketing Law Blog

2018 Trademark Lawsuits Technology & Marketing Law Blog

2018 Copyright Lawsuits Technology & Marketing Law Blog

***CRIME

5 facts about crime in the U.S. Pew Research Center

***RELIGION

Thomas Keating died on October 25th: The pioneer of modern contemplative prayer was 95 Economist

Evangelicals Seek Detente With Mideast Muslim Leaders As Critics Doubt Motives NPR

The 7 People Christians Trust More Than Their Pastors Christianity Today

Teen self-injects verses from the Bible and the Koran that have been transposed into DNA BongBong

***RELIGION AND POLITICS

Jerry Falwell Jr. can’t imagine Trump ‘doing anything that’s not good for the country’ Washington Post

The New Congress: Fewer Christians But Still Religious NPR

***GOOD NEWS

Granddaughter Records A Song Her Grandpa Wrote Decades Earlier (video)

Minnesota doctor makes a blanket for every baby he delivers Star Tribune

A Pop-Up Japanese Cafe With Robot Servers Remotely Controlled by People With Disabilities (video)

This choir features singers with dementia Washington Post

11-year-old boy pulls a drowning man from the bottom of a pool and saves his life CNN

The tattoo artist who erases racist and gang-related ink for free PS Mag

***ART & DESIGN

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2018 FlowingData

Design Ethics and the Limits of the Ethical Designer Viget

How Does Photography Affect You? We Tried to Find Out Wired

***MUSIC

Sacred choral music touches on deep religious, moral and political questions Economist

Mongolian Heavy Metal Band Gets Millions Of YouTube Views NPR

Star Spangled Banner sounds Russian when played in a minor key (video)

***BUSINESS & FINANCE

How to Document Your Personal Possessions in Case of Emergency LifeHacker

What a Student Loan 'Bubble' Bursting Might Look Like Vice

***ENVIRONMENT

Humanity Has Managed to Change Places We’ve Barely Even Visited Atlas Obscura

5 New Year's resolutions that can help the environment in 2019 Mashable

***HEALTH

The growth of yoga and meditation in the US since 2012 is remarkable Vox

The Dangerous Allure of Breech Birth at Home – and a Problematic New Paper PLOS

Is It A Nasty Cold Or The Flu? NPR

2019 Health Trends Axios

Artificial intelligence can detect Alzheimer’s in brain scans six years before a diagnosis Fast Company

***TRAVEL

Why It Makes Sense That Airlines Overbook (video) Cheddar

State Department warns Americans traveling in China to use 'increased caution' Politico

***FOOD

Cops grieve 'Krispy Kreme Doughnuts' lost in NYE truck fire: 'No words' Fox News

The Big Food Trends In 2019 Forbes

***PARENTING

The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting New York Times

The art and science of parenting The Economist

Cultivating empathy in my children, from a neuroscience perspective Washington Post

***ANIMALS

Gradually, nervously, courts are granting rights to animals Economist

How one boy has helped save over a thousand shelter dogs NBC News

Shelter volunteer's family secretly adopts her favorite dog Stillwater News Press

***SCIENCE

Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' In Search Of More Productive Crops NPR

Space and time could be a quantum error-correcting code Wired

The Year in Physics: The field of fundamental physics is experiencing both a period of confusion and an openness to new ideas Quantam Magazine

***PSYCHOLOGY

Can Alexa and Facebook predict the end of your relationship? Vox

Your Ideal Therapist Might Not Be Human Outside Online

Psychologists reluctant to own up to research mistakes Times Higher Ed

Freud versus Jung: a bitter feud over the meaning of sex Big Think

***NEUROSCIENCE

What the subjects covered in high and medium impact factor journals in neuroscience tell us Biorxiv

Exploring How Neuroscience Can Affect a Marketing Strategy AdWeek

***PHILOSOPHY

The Problem of Free Will (video) Wireless Philosophy

Philosopher Bertrand Russell’s Indispensable Advice on ‘How (Not) to Grow Old’ My Modern Met

Wittgenstein and religion Aeon

***PRODUCTIVITY

Best Productivity Apps for Mac Software How

12 expert tips to make 2019 your most productive year yet Fast Company

***RESEARCH

The quest to topple science-stymying academic paywalls Wired

A worrisome source of Research Bias: Researchers seeking to fund and publish their work, and advance their academic careers New York Times

Scams using fake reviews to facilitate publications The Asian Journal of Andrology

Amateurism still flourishing in scientific journals BMJ

The Costs of Reproducibility Science Direct

The methodological flaws that have roiled psychology were also lurking in sports science FiveThirtyEight

What to do when you read a paper and it’s full of errors and the author won’t share the data or be open about the analysis? Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Questionable authorship practices are endemic to biomedical research Springer

The Double-bind Theory of Scholarly Publishing Scholarly Kitchen

***RESEARCH RETRACTIONS

No retraction for a Fifth of 200 publications with misconduct Sage

Citation of Retracted Articles in Engineering: A Study of the Web of Science Database Taylor & Francis Online

***HIGHER ED

Overhauling Rules for Higher Ed Inside Higher Ed

Bennett College Needs To Raise $5 Million Or It May Lose Accreditation NPR

Why does it feel good to see someone fail? The Conversation

Does It Matter Where You Go To College? The Answer: It Depends NPR

Some Calif. community colleges skip free college because of required participation in federal loan program Inside Higher Ed

That Video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Actually Has a Lot to Do With Higher Ed Chronicle of Higher Ed

Christian College President Gets Impromptu Selfie with Newlyweds Justin and Hailey Bieber CBN

***HUMANITIES

Machine learning can offer new tools, fresh insights for the humanities ArsTechnica

What the Numbers Can Tell Us About Humanities Ph.D. Careers Chronicle of Higher Ed

***TEACHING

How One College Made Its Gen-Ed Program Feel More Relevant Chronicle of Higher Ed

It's time to teach kids how to read charts Quartz

***STUDENT LIFE

Students at Notre Dame have launched a campaign that has inspired others around the country to ask their institutions to block explicit content Inside Higher Ed

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation BuzzFeed News

Teen vaping: Is it really a gateway to cigarette smoking? Journalist’s Resources

***ACADEMIC LIFE

Marquette Law School professor suspended over student relationship JS Online

How 'Rule Makers, Rule Breakers' Might Explain the Academic / IT Divide Inside Higher Ed

January 07, 2019

The people inside the machine

January 07, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

In 1770 a chess-playing robot, built by a Hungarian inventor, caused a sensation across Europe. The Mechanical Turk was capable of beating even the best players at chess.

It eventually transpired that there was a human chess player cleverly concealed in its innards. The apparently intelligent machine depended on a person hidden inside.

It turns out that something very similar is happening today. Just like the Turk, modern artificial-intelligence (AI) systems rely on help from unseen humans.

Pretty much everything you do online creates a trail of data that can be used for making systems smarter. As Google, Facebook and others operate their enormous smart machines, we are all helping to power them. A clockwork chess robot from the 1770s thus foreshadowed both the modern debate about artificial intelligence – and a key aspect of making the technology work. The internet is a giant Mechanical Turk: whether we know it or not, we have all become the people inside the machine

Tom Standage writing in 1843 Magazine

January 06, 2019

heroic imagination

January 06, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

The very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds. -Philip Zimbardo

January 04, 2019

Why We All Take the Same Travel Photos

January 04, 2019/ Stephen Goforth

I knew it was silly to join the crowd of tourists clicking away at the Mona Lisa when I visited the Louvre a couple years ago—geotagging has made it all too clear how unoriginal those photos are. But I did it anyway, elbowing through a sea of smartphones and selfie sticks for a tourist-free shot at the front. The visit just didn’t feel complete without it. But why?

Photographing something is a way of possessing it—at least, that's what the critic Susan Sontag argued in her 1977 classic, On Photography. “To collect photographs is to collect the world," she wrote. It confirms your connection to places and objects once distant and remote, making the world slightly smaller and less alienating.

Ironically, though, "collecting the world" might mean also losing it. “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir,” Sontag wrote.

Laura Mallonee writing in Wired