A New Tool to Spot Deepfakes
/Intel says its new deepfake detection tool is accurate 96% at catching videos of computer generated faces. The company claims FakeCatcher can operate in real-time by analyzing blood flow from video pixels.
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Before you say anything
/Before you say anything, ask yourself three questions:
Does this need to be said?
Does it need to be said by me?
Does this need to be said by me, now?
Comedian Craig Ferguson
Experience or Things?
/There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.
"One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation," says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. "We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them."
It's counterintuitive that something like a physical object that you can keep for a long time doesn't keep you as happy as long as a once-and-done experience does.
"Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods," says Gilovich. "You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences."
Jay Cassano writing in Fast Company
A Person needs 3 Things
/They say a person needs 3 things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for. - Tom Bodett
Hybrid Entrepreneurship
/“There’s this myth that you have to go all in on a project or initiative to be successful, when it’s actually better to do a personal real options approach,” says Nathan Furr.
Nathan and Susannah Furr, authors of The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown, were introduced to the concept after interviewing Ben Feringa, recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on molecular machines. The Furrs asked Feringa if he faced uncertainty on his road to a scientific breakthrough.
“He laughed and said, ‘It was all uncertainty,'” recalls Nathan Furr.
Feringa told the Furrs that he encourages his students to have at least two projects going, one certain and one uncertain. “Striving for certainty will lead you down false paths or lead you to commit too long to projects that won’t work, or to uninteresting projects that will work,” he explained.
Stephenie Vozza writing in Fast Company
The best
/The best things in life aren't things.
The Case for Embracing Uncertainty
/Many of our best achievements and meaningful experiences come from a trying time of ambiguity. Instead professor Nathan Furr and entrepreneur Susannah Harmon Furr argue that uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin. By learning to welcome and cope with the gray area, an individual can reach better outcomes.
Curt Nickisch writing in the Harvard Business Review
The Price
/Change is the price of survival.
To love someone
/To love someone means to see him as God intended him. -Fyodor Dostoevsky (born Nov. 11, 1821)
A Season of Resilience
/Psychologists say that the feelings that often crop up in autumn stem from our discomfort with change, and an anxiety and uncertainty about what that change will bring. The melancholy we feel is a form of grief, mourning the lost sunlight, the ease of summertime, and the greenery that abounds in the warm weather.
But it’s not all bad. Fall also brings with it bright, brisk days, pumpkin patches and cozy sweaters. Somewhere in the crunching leaves, crackling fires and chilly air, you might locate a feeling of possibility, even electricity.
And all of these things — the anxiety, the promise and even the rumination — make it the ideal season to build resilience and practice mindfulness.
Erik Vance writing in the New York Times
Carpe diem!
/Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think. – Horace
Don’t do the job that you want to tell other people you do
/Work is not a series of words on a LinkedIn profile. It’s a series of moments in the world. And if you don’t enjoy those moments, no sequence of honorifics will dispel your misery.
Some people take jobs with long commutes not fully considering what it will do to their health. Or they take jobs that require lots of travel not fully intuiting what it will mean for their family life. Or they’ll take horribly difficult jobs for money they don’t need, or take high-status jobs for a dopamine rush with a half-life of about three days. If you want to be smarter about your beingness in time, either you can read a lot of impenetrable philosophy or you can listen to Jim. Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties for a couple of minutes a month. Take the job you want to do for hundreds of hours a year.
Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic
7 Webinars about Media in the Next Two Weeks
/SEO for Nonprofits, Mobile Marketing, Student Press, Women in the Newsroom, Running a Newsroom during Wartime, & more
Wed, Nov 9 - Lobbying for the Student Press
What: Press censorship on college campuses is unfortunately alive and well—hear about how to advocate for increased statutory protections for college journalists.
Who: FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) Legislative and Policy Director Joe Cohn
When: 4 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Student Press Freedom Initiative
Thu, Nov 10 - Truth-Telling under Siege: The Perils of Journalists in Palestine and Mexico
What: This event explores this worldwide phenomenon of violence against journalists by focusing on two cases – Palestine and Mexico. The event aims to promote a far-reaching and free ranging exploration of the forces working to suppress truth-telling in these two regions and beyond while situating the issue within a larger problem of free expression and the right to free speech.
Who: Nancy Postero, Moderator, UCSD Human Rights and Migration Program
Amanda Batarseh, UCSD, Department of Literature
Farid Abdel Nour, SDSU, Dept of Political Science
Celeste González de Bustamante, University of Texas, School of Journalism & Media
Marco Werman, Host of PRI’s The World
When: 5 pm, Pacific
Where: Zoom and in person
Cost: Free
Sponsor: UC San Diego Democracy Lab
More info
Thu, Nov 10 - Mobile Marketing Tips for Every Generation
What: 4 reasons why your website needs to look great on a smartphone. How each generation responds to marketing (and how to optimize your efforts). 5 tips for planning your mobile marketing strategy. Discover why mobile marketing is so important and get valuable tips on how to market to each generation.
Who: Molly Coke, chief client experience officer of Firespring
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Firespring
Tue, Nov 15 - Phenomenal Women: Newsroom confidential with journalists Margaret Sullivan and Eileen McNamara
What: Two legendary journalists talk about their decades in journalism, where they have battled sexism, broken glass ceilings and witnessed the decline of trust in the news media. They will offer their thoughts on how to regain that trust.
Who: Moderator: Radio Boston host Tiziana Dearing;
Eileen McNamara is a Boston Globe columnist who has won many national awards
Margaret Sullivan is a former media columnist for the Washington Post and author of the new book “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-stained Life.”
When: 6:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom and in-person
Cost: $5
Sponsor: WBUR radio Boston
Wed, Nov 16 - Be Found: The Secrets of SEO for Nonprofits
What: In this session, learn from nonprofits who are experts at search engine optimization and driving traffic to their websites, plus review the SEO tools and techniques that maximize your findability. We’ll cover what SEO is and how it works, why search engines like Google matter and outline the six steps to mastering SEO: Keyword research Website optimization Link building Fresh content Landing pages Analytics.
Who: Jay Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Firespring
When: 2 pm, Central
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Firespring
Fri, Nov 18 - Leading An Investigative Newsroom in Wartime
What: In this webinar, our guests will talk about how they are adapting their follow-the-money techniques to document crimes and illuminate overlooked angles of the war in Ukraine; how they are making the editorial, humanitarian, and ethical decisions they face daily as the war unfolds; and how they are supporting their teams as Russian and Ukrainian journalists confront personal and societal trauma.
Who: Roman Anin, founder of the independent Russian outlet iStories, and Anna Babinets, editor-in-chief of Ukrainian investigative newsroom Slidstvo.info
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Pulitzer Center
Wed, Nov 23 - Marshalling the troops: how Ukraine's biggest newsroom stayed afloat in the war
Who: Sevgil Musaieva is a Ukrainian journalist from Crimea, editor-in-chief of Ukranian newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda, recipient of 2022 International Press Freedom Award, and featured in TIME’s Top 100 people of 2022.
When: 1 pm, London
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Reuter’s Institute
Coping strategies
/Psychologists like to group coping strategies into two main types: emotion-focused and problem-focused. Emotion-focused strategies change the way we feel, like distracting ourselves, getting support from friends, or looking at the situation from a different perspective. Problem-focused strategies, on the other hand, involve taking action to solve the problem directly. No one strategy works all the time, and you’ll often see people get stuck in their favorite way of coping. If you tend toward distraction and denial, you might avoid dealing with a problem that you actually could have solved; if you’re an inveterate problem-solver, you might feel helpless and angry when confronting a problem—or a loved one’s—that has no solution, when all that’s really needed is support and connection.
Kira M. Newman writing for Greater Good Magazine
Futurity
/Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory
The Cost
/The cost of a thing is the amount of life that must be exchanged for it. -Henry David Thoreau
Powerful Words
/Words have profound suggestive power, and there is healing in the very saying of them. Utter a series of panicky words and your mind will immediately go into a mild state of nervousness. You will perhaps feel a sinking in the pit of your stomach that will affect your entire physical mechanism. If, on the contrary, you speak peaceful, quieting words, you mind will react in a peaceful manner.
Use such a word as “tranquility.” Repeat that word slowly several times. Tranquility is one of the most beautiful and melodic of all English words, and the mere saying of it tends to induce a tranquil state.
Another healing word is “serenity.” Picturize serenity as you say it. Repeat it slowly and in the mood of which the word is a symbol. Words such as these have a healing potency when used in this manner.
It is also helpful to use lines from poetry or passages from the Scriptures. The words of the Bible have a particularly strong therapeutic value. Drop them into your mind, allowing them to “dissolve” in consciousness, and they will spread a healing balm over your entire mental structure. This is one of the simplest processes to perform and also one of the most effective in attaining peace of mind.
Norman Vincent Peale
The Power of Positive Thinking
Digital Distractions
/Our brains are designed to pick up on what’s new or changing around us. In the digital world, things are changing and being posted every few seconds. News sites and social media are also – and purposefully – designed in an easily digestible way that draws us in. It’s no wonder so many of us have butterfly brains.
A well functioning brain should wander every few minutes. It makes us more creative and stops our brain from burning out. So don’t resist it. However, the mistake many of us are now making is when we take a break from ‘work information’ we replace it with an endless stream of information from social media or the news or whatever else is online. Digital breaks don’t have an end point – you can spend hours flitting around and then you feel overloaded. Or you can stay up late, mindlessly browsing, even when you’re exhausted.
Think about it. If you click on a news story about a war that’s heartbreaking, then a political leader you feel frustrated by, then a social media photo that makes you feel inadequate, no wonder you feel spent and stressed.
Josh Davis, director of research at the NeuroLeadership Institute in New York and author of new book Two Awesome Hours, quoted in the Telegraph