396 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2020
    1. People are usually pretty willing to help when they are in a secure position. But when you start assuming a lot of risk to help someone, outright foolishness is harder to stomach.You might say when offering help saddles you with risk, it accelerates compassion fatigue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue)
  2. May 2020
    1. The element dem in epidemic, endemic, and pandemic comes from the ancient Greek word demos, which meant people or district:

      Interesting how a word (pandemic) that literally means "all people" has ended up (only) meaning a disease that effects all people. Yet nowhere in the word does it say anything about a disease.

    1. Taxonomy, in a broad sense the science of classification, but more strictly the classification of living and extinct organisms—i.e., biological classification.

      I don't think the "but more strictly" part is strictly accurate.

      Wikipedia authors confirm what I already believed to be true: that the general sense of the word is just as valid/extant/used/common as the sense that is specific to biology:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(general) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)

    1. "linked data" can and should be a very general term referring to any structured data that is interlinked/interconnected.

      It looks like most of this article describes it in that general sense, but sometimes it talks about URIs and such as if they are a necessary attribute of linked data, when that would only apply to Web-connected linked data. What about, for example, linked data that links to each other through some other convention such as just a "type" and "ID"? Maybe that shouldn't be considered linked data if it is too locally scoped? But that topic and distinction should be explored/discussed further...

      I love its application to web technologies, but I wish there were a distinct term for that application ("linked web data"?) so it could be clearer from reading the word whether you meant general case or not. May not be a problem in practice. We shall see.

      Granted/hopefully most use of linked data is in the context of the Web, so that the links are universal / globally scoped, etc.

    1. generic-sounding term may be interpreted as something more specific than intended: I want to be able to use "data interchange" in the most general sense. But if people interpret it to mean this specific standard/protocol/whatever, I may be misunderstood.

      The definition given here

      is the concept of businesses electronically communicating information that was traditionally communicated on paper, such as purchase orders and invoices.

      limits it to things that were previously communicated on paper. But what about things for which paper was never used, like the interchange of consent and consent receipts for GDPR/privacy law compliance, etc.?

      The term should be allowed to be used just as well for newer technologies/processes that had no previous roots in paper technologies.

  3. Apr 2020
  4. Mar 2020
  5. Jan 2020
    1. The plural for the small rodent is always "mice" in modern usage. The plural of a computer mouse is either "mouses" or "mice" according to most dictionaries, with "mice" being more common.[4] The first recorded plural usage is "mice"; the online Oxford Dictionaries cites a 1984 use, and earlier uses include J. C. R. Licklider's "The Computer as a Communication Device" of 1968.[5] The term computer mouses may be used informally in some cases. Although the plural of a mouse (small rodent) is mice, the two words have undergone a differentiation through usage.
  6. Nov 2019
  7. Oct 2019
    1. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change.
  8. Sep 2019
  9. grazing-lands-files-dev.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com grazing-lands-files-dev.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com
    1. Forage production
    2. forage production
    3. he first step is to determine the forage production of your pasture, or the number of AUMs in the pasture. The second step is to determine the number of animals allowed to graze and/or the grazing time. How are these AUMs going to be used? Forage production is usually referred to in lbs. of forage per acre or AUMs per acre.
  10. grazing-lands-files-dev.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com grazing-lands-files-dev.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com
    1. grazing does not permanently damage soil and vegetation resources, animal numbers and/or grazing time must be controlled.
    1. These measurements are related to wind and water erosion, water infiltra-tion, and the ability of the site to resist and recover from disturbance.

      This is an outdated method. Lorem ipsum.

    1. hyperterroir”

      The authors use the term "Hyperterroir" to refer to the combined ecological and cultural aspects of an area of land. The value of indigenous Israeli and Palestinian wines is not solely derived from the environmental conditions in which they are grown. Their value also comes from the cultural and political narratives that surround the grapes and winemaking.

    2. cospecies

      Two or more closely related/similar species. The author used this term to say that a grapevine resembles other grapevines that are similar to it.

  11. Jul 2019
    1. Project Life Cycle

      the most basic structure of project management. If you're really informal, you'd probably start by establishing a life cycle strategy of some kind

    2. Management by Objectives (MBO)

      Similar to KPI process - almost identical

    3. A portfolio is a grouping of related and unrelated projects and programs that are grouped for

      ...visibility and control purposes

    4. A program is a group of related projects managed in a coordinated way.

      The projects involved in the program are connected in some way that justifies adding the management expense and effort required to coordinate them.

    5. Operations manage the existing processes, products, services, or

      Operations Definition

    Tags

    Annotators

  12. Jun 2019
    1. This problem is called overfitting—it's like memorizing the answers instead of understanding how to solve a problem.

      Simple and clear explanation of overfitting

  13. May 2019
  14. Mar 2019
  15. Jan 2019
    1. density

      I'm already thinking about what network density looks like in a very real sense. Is it a very tight-knit group of friends? A person who makes lots of connections between ideas?

    2. computational models

      A computational model is a mathematical model in computational science that requires extensive computational resources to study the behavior of a complex system by computer simulation.

  16. Jul 2018
    1. corticosteroid

      Corticosteroids: Drug Facts, Side Effects and Dosing: "Corticosteroids are steroid hormones that are either produced by the body or are man-made."

    2. ß2-agonists

      see: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Beta2-adrenergic_agonist

      Aside: "beta agonists to treat asthma symptoms can excite the nervous system and prompt migraine, Cady says. Conversely, beta blockers to prevent migraine can worsen asthma." Asthma, Migraines, Sinus Headaches, and Their Connection

    3. FEV1

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirometry?oldformat=true#Forced_expiratory_volume_in_1_second_(FEV1) :

      "the volume of air that can forcibly be blown out in one second, after full inspiration."

    4. Turbuhaler

      Turbuhaler® is a type of inhaler.

    5. PEF

      "the maximal flow (or speed) achieved during the maximally forced expiration initiated at full inspiration, measured in liters per minute or in liters per second." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirometry?oldformat=true#Peak_expiratory_flow_(PEF)

  17. Feb 2018
    1. Landlord reserves an easement in, over and through the area occupied by the storefront of the Premises, and an easement above Tenant's furnished ceiling to the roof, or to the bottom of the floor deck above the Premises, for general access purposes and in connection with the exercise of Landlord's other rights under this Lease.
    2. l)e Common Areas, will at all times be subject to Landlord's exclusive control and management
  18. Oct 2017
  19. Sep 2017
  20. spring2018.robinwharton.net spring2018.robinwharton.net
    1. Prownian analysis

      Prownian analysis is the first part of what has been named the "Prownian method," a method that is used to identify, analyze and categorize objects in historical archaeology. Prownian method consists of three steps: obsessively describe, guess at uses, and treat the object as fiction.

      source: (https://mnmalone.wordpress.com/prownian-analysis/)

  21. May 2017
  22. Apr 2017
    1. ERGMs are the primary building blocks of statistically testing network structural effects. Increasingly, researchers are not only interested in describing an ego or complete network but rather in whether an observed network property is significant. ERGMs [Page 179]generate (random) networks derived from features of the observed network, which provide a way to compare the observed and simulated networks. Statistical analysis is then conducted to test whether the ties in the simulated network match those generated by the simulations.

      They provide a base for comparison similar to a control group?

    2. artifacts

      Maybe I missed something in our previous readings/videos, but can someone explain to me what is meant by the term "artifacts"?

  23. Mar 2017
    1. Brokerage

      This whole concept is a huge part of what I want to get out of my data set! This is exciting and also terrifying because I will have to figure out how to actually get these measurements....

    2. Ego actors can be individual persons, groups, or even some larger entity

      I had not thought of that until they spelled this out. that actually makes a lot of sense.

    3. “agent” in relations across groups

      I think this also applies in financial sectors, right? good explanantion linking centrality and structural holes; I also like the breakdown in the bottom paragraph with five specific roles shown in fig. 7.7

    4. constraint, extends the egocentric network density measure to include more information about the structural pattern of relations among ego's alters.

      density + pattern of relations among alters = constraints

    5. eigenvector centrality (Bonacich, 1972), entropy (Tutzauer, 2007), power (Bonacich, 1987), Katz centrality (1953), and random-walk centrality

      wow. entropy sounds awesome. I want to be able to use this in my analysis just because it sounds so cool and I think it was one of the few concepts that really made sense when I was introduced to entropy in physics and chemistry!

    6. (1) the topography of an ego's network and (2) the composition of that network, including the attributes of the alters to whom ego is connected.

      focus of questions that try to examine individual entities across different networks and/or patterns of interaction within groups.

    7. an individual's (ego) connections with others (alters) provides access to some instrumental (e.g., advice) or expressive (e.g., support) resource that may, in turn, be beneficia

      ego's social capital in the hood

    1. How centralized is the network?To what extent is there a small number of highly central nodes?

      It is easy to see why node level centrality and network-level centralization are mistakenly treated as the same. This is my third or fourth time through this and I'm still not completely clear.

    1. must

      must ... must ... must

      Wenn schon die Rhetorik auf Flugblatt macht...

    2. slyly

      "smartly" - das passt doch hier wie die Faust aufs Auge.

    3. producing

      Die Daten werden im Alltag von Menschen und Maschinen produziert. Was hier gemeint ist, ist "accumulating": Wer in der Lage ist, die meisten Daten zu sammeln, zusammenzukaufen oder eben produzieren zu lassen, der ...

      In dieser anderen Sichtweise fällt dann nämlich die Möglichkeit des "Datenstreiks" auf: Wenn wir uns der Arbeit des Daten-Produzierens entziehen, dann haben die Datenkonzerne auch kein Futter mehr für ihre AI. Wir müssen zwar - so ist die Realität beschaffen -, um zu überleben, bestimmte Datenspuren legen, aber wir können uns darin organisieren, streiken und unsere Position so verbessern.

      Nicht anders hat es die alte Arbeiterbewegung mit ihrer Arbeit auch gemacht, obwohl sie "von ihr" auch leben musste. Datenproduktion ist Arbeit. Die Smart City ist die Fabrik der Datenindustrie, das Smarte Home die Produktionseinheit und das Smarte Self ist der/die Arbeiter*in. Hat nur noch kaum wer realisiert...

    4. neoliberalism-the-process

      Da hatten wir auch schon mal tiefgründigere Analysen - im Sinne von capitalism-the-mode-of-production...

      Ist ja nicht völlig falsch. Aber die Textstelle zeigt so richtig schön, dass wir hier bestenfalls einen mittelgelungenen Essay vor uns haben, aber keine Studie.

    5. Big Data

      Begriffshülse, verschleiert mehr als sie erklärt. Solche Schlagworte sollten wir nicht auch noch promoten. Mehr dazu

    6. blockchain

      erklären!

    1. Egocentric analysis shifts the analytical lens onto a sole ego actor and concentrateson the local pattern of relations in which that ego is embedded as well as the types ofresources to which those relations provide access

      The purpose of egocentric analysis.

    1. top-down” and “bottom-up

      These are two terms that are commonly used in literacy in regards to acquisition of emerging readers and two different theories as to which is the best way to help young readers become successful in reading. Spoiler - bottom-up won...

    2. cut-off value

      Although I already determined I needed to add a cut-off value to my data in order to make some of it meaningful it's reassuring to read about here.

    3. Equivalence, in general, refers to actors who occupy the same position.

      Nice definition

    4. equivalence

      I'm interested to learn more about this.

    5. top-down

      In ELT, "Top Down" refers to getting learners to make predictions about reading/listening activities before they actually do them. For example showing students a magazine article and asking to predict what they the article might be about, based on pictures or titles. This seems to be similar here, looking at readily available information without getting into the details first.

  24. Feb 2017
    1. “keep things together.”

      so is this directly correlated to structural cohesiveness?

    2. connected subgraph in which [Page 114]there is a path between all pairs of nodes

      component definition; the graphic from Bodong's video clip is helpful in getting a (mental) picture of this definition.

    1. Which structural properties of the complete network might be of interest to you?
      1. Would it be right to say that a decentralized network would mean that more actors have a say in the evaluation process?
      2. Could a measure like high transitivity indicate more equitable practices in evaluation?
      3. Would high reciprocity mean that there was healthier communication (not just directed "at" the new teachers, but feedback loops and supportive avenues of communication)?
      4. And finally, what would high density scores indicate -- that resources are more accessible and basically better connections overall - so a more well-connected network, with fewer actors in isolated or peripheral positions?
    2. relations are focused on one or a small set of actors

      centralization: power in the hands of a few

    3. “Small worlds” are those that paradoxically have a low average path length but high clustering.

      small world phenomenon

    4. “group together” into pockets of dense connectivity

      clustering: tendency towards shared interactions based on homophily

    5. hierarchy, equality, and exclusivity

      examples of forms of relationships (16 dif kinds according to Holland&Linehardt, 1979)

    6. reciprocity is reported as the proportion of reciprocated ties in the network. Therefore, values closer to 1.0 indicate higher reciprocity

      reciprocity: appears in many studies and seems highly relevant in educational fields

    7. conceptual level, it influences the structure of relations

      size: affects structure of relations, reflects network's boundary, and measure of number of nodes in network

    8. dichotomized

      How were the data changed from 1,2,3 to 1,0?

    9. structural holes (one actor connected to two others who, in turn, are not connected to each other)

      From my understanding of this, structural holes differ from triads since triads generally indicate that all three actors are connected in some way. Is this correct?

    10. effective density,

      I like the explanation of effective density. I think it will be useful for my own "potential" research

    11. network's topography
    1. Because rhetoric tries to orient the audience toward a worldview, it is imperative for the study of rhetoric to identify and evaluate the controlling ideas (or "god-terms") on which the ethics of any discourse is based.

      Ah ha! So I guess this answers my question about the Burke reading. I had a hard time following the Burke, but Weaver's connection to Plato is obviously much clearer. (And Weaver in general is also much clearer.)

    1. For Burke, every epistemology has a key term, a "God-term," that names the fundamental ground of human action, as the name God does for religious epistemologies.

      This sort of sounds like the Platonic forms, but for human actions rather than objects. Are these ideas sort of analogous?

    1. snowball sampling

      Interesting. I am unfamiliar with this type of sampling. I have heard of it before, but I have not seen many studies that utilize this sampling approach.

    2. K-core, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is a subset of actors that has ties with at least K other actors

      useful in "empirically locating network boundaries" but not used widely

    3. positional approach generates a set of actors that occupy a similar position in some social structure. Each actor, however, need not be directly connected to every other actor

      positional different from relational because there could be structural holes

    1. franchise

      franchise

      It's most often used in reference to the right to vote, but the term carries the larger meaning of just a right or privilege in general. It can also be "freedom or immunity from some burden or restriction vested in a person or group."

      I think the broader political and social meanings of "franchise" and its derivations -- most commonly "enfranchise" and "disenfranchise" -- make it a key term for rhetoric, particularly as we continue to ask questions like “What is Rhetoric?” or “What was Rhetoric?” or “Whatever Rhetoric?” or “Which Rhetorics?” or “When Rhetoric?” or “Whenever Rhetoric?” or “What will be Rhetoric?” or “What will have been Rhetoric?” or “What isn’t Rhetoric?”

    1. mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, Web sites, and other information/knowledge processing entities

      I like this definition of SNA

    1. Literacy

      literacy is a complex web of skills and knowledge related to engaging and expressing ideas—a web that, as mentioned in the introduction, serves as a foundation for all learning.

    1. To their social and educational detriment, however, Mexican American students appear to be less engaged in unorganized academic endeavors and formally sponsored extracurricular activities than are white students. Consequently, these students do not reap the benefits of social capital's upside.

      As a third culture adult, with bi-cultural kids, I have to notice and react to the statement that Mexican American students appear to be less engaged in unorganized academic endeavors ... than white students." Is social capital less important, not noticed or simply not addressed within Mexican American culture?

    2. Cultural capital theory

      This is my first time learning about cultural capital. It makes sense so I am surprised that I have not come across it before.

    3. human capital theory

      Human Capital is a big deal in the field of Human Resource Development. Supporters of the human capital theory argue that humans are the best asset of any organization. It's nice to see the theory mentioned in literature outside of business and HR fields.

    4. social closure vs. structural holes

      While I can make an educated guess as to what these terms mean, I am not very familiar with them.

    5. “Social capital [Page 218]is defined by its function. It is not a single entity, but a variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: They all consist of some aspect of social structure, and they facilitate certain actions of the individuals who are within the structure” (Coleman, 1990, p. 302).

      This is the easiest definition to work with, in my opinion!

    6. this classical theory of capital consists of two distinct elements: value that is generated and pocketed by the capitalists and investment on the part of capitalists with expected returns in the marketplace. Therefore, capital is a surplus value and represents an investment in expected returns (Lin, 2001a).

      I find this interesting because it is being described as "classical theory of capital"... even though it is still used to this day as the dominant definition of capital, and fits well within contemporary applications of capital theory, including social capital theory.

    1. These structural relations—unlike “fixed” attributes such as gender, race, and age that do not vary in different contexts—exist only at a specific time–place and either disappear or recede when actors are elsewhere.

      Patterned social relations are structural relations that exist only at a specific time-place and either disappear or recede when actors are elsewhere. Relations vary significantly across contexts and condition the social actors apart from their attributes.

  25. Jan 2017
    1. directed graph. Conversely, an undirected graph

      These graphs are powerful tools, very similar to concept maps.

    2. Multiplex data, discussed later in this chapter, are those network data that measure more than one kind of relation, which most contemporary network studies incorporate.
    3. core-periphery structure:

      Interesting

    4. arcs or edges

      Here is a better explanation of the SNA terms Arcs and Edges. Arcs represent those relations that are directed from one student to another, meaning that the friendship nomination has not necessarily been reciprocated. Edges, on the other hand, are those lines that do not have arrowheads (since friendships are directed, there are no edges in Figure 3.1), which are appropriate when the relation is by definition reciprocated (e.g., “studies with”).

    5. arcs.

      I am unfamiliar with the term "arc" in this context since I am unsure what is meant by "directed lines".

    6. sociometry

      This has come up a couple times now with no definition (that I've seen), so I looked it up on dictionary.com: the measurement of attitudes of social acceptance or rejection through expressed preferences among members of a social grouping

    1. relational thinking

      I think this will occur a lot in SNA

    2. nductive modeling strategies

      This is a really great SNA term/phrase. Generating big ideas from small observations is a nice description of SNA. It reminds me of the grounded theory approach in qualitative research.

    3. Diffusion

      I really appreciate how the term diffusion is used in SNA to describe the natural spread of knowledge through a network.

    4. Finally, how will your study exhibit an integration of theory and method?

      Important question that I have been struggling with.

    5. structural holes hypothesis

      Both generate "social capital" , albeit differently. "Social closure hypothesis" and "Structural holes hypothesis refer to social networks that often operate within social castes to protect the members. It would be great if someone could come up with an authentic/real life example of their own.

    6. analysis has evolved in a way that marries both theory and method, what Marin and Wellman (2011) refer to as the “social network perspective.”

      "Social network perspective" is social network analysis that layers or intertwines theory and method and contains qualitative and quantitative characteristics. The observable: the people demonstrate social relationships that become interesting when their social links are examined.

    7. sociometry, the graphical mapping of individuals’ feelings about one another

      This is a term that is new to me. I find it interesting in the abstract as well as the specific.

    8. CONCOR (for CONvergence of iterated CORrelations)

      I'm curious about this concept, as I suspect it's been the basis for other technologies we use today.

    9. therapeutic techniques

      I think the idea of research as therapy is really interesting. Beyond that, though, a major concept within LT is the idea of bringing theory into practice; this seems like a different application of that process.

    10. phenomenological individualism

      Is this ontology inherently incompatible with relational realism? If different educational researchers operate under each ontological paradigm and describe the same scenario in unique ways, what value would each bring to our understanding of the world? Is one inherently more valuable than the other?

    11. It is a comprehensive paradigmatic way of taking social structure seriously by studying directly how patterns of ties allocate resources in a social system”

      SNA is not just a methodology, rather an informed perspective that should affect every area of research.

    12. Fourth, relational realism is the doctrine that interactions and social ties constitute the central existence of social life

      This seems to somewhat reflect a similar evolution in education theory (not directly, but somewhat), tying into the newer theory of connectivism, as I see it. Though this doesn't necessary indicate a progression (maybe though?)

    1. Groups

      A collection of actors on which ties are to be measured.

    2. Relation

      The collection of the ties between actors, taken as a whole.

    3. Ties

      Ties are connections between actors

    4. Finally, also consider that the chance of any given teacher enforcing the policy increases with the number of others who enforce it. Under what conditions will [Page 15]enforcement of the policy spread to a nontrivial portion of the network? What percentage of teachers will ultimately enforce this policy? How does this depend on the network's structure and the individual's position in that structure as well as one's own individual attributes?

      Diffusion--as I understand it--is tracking how a particular phenomenon moves through a social network. This reminds me of a TEDTalk on how to start a movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXMnDG3QzxE

    1. understanding the antecedents and consequences of network phenomena

      I am curious about a few things packed in this sentence: network phenomena, and their antecedents and consequences.

  26. Sep 2016
    1. online realms

      Is paper a realm? Have never thought of it that way. Every medium is a realm? Is it helpful analytically to make this distinction? Similarly, it is helpful to make the same distinction between digital and not digital?

  27. Dec 2015
    1. facts, which are simply “path equivalences” in an olog. It isthe notion of path equivalences that make category theory so powerful.Apathin an olog is a head-to-tail sequence of arrows
    2. An aspect of a thingxis a way of viewing it, a particular way in whichxcan be regardedor measured. For example, a woman can be regarded as a person; hence “being a person”is an aspect of a woman. A molecule has a molecular mass (say in daltons), so “havinga molecular mass” is an aspect of a molecule. In other words, byaspectwe simply meana function. The domainAof the functionf:A—Bis the thing we are measuring, andthe codomain is the set of possible “answers” or results of the measurement.

      Naïvely (since my understanding of type theory is naïve), this seems to mesh with the concepts of inheritance for the "is" relationships, and also with type-theory more generally for "has" relationships, since I believe we can view any object or "compound type", as defined here, as being a subtype of another type 'o' if one of its elements is of type 'o'. Though we have to be careful for functional mapping when thinking of aspects: we can't just say Int is an aspect of Pair(Int, Int), since this is ambiguous (there are two ints) --- we must denote which Int we mean.

    3. We represent eachtype as a box containing asingular indefinite noun phrase.
    4. I will use a mathematical tool calledologs, or ontology logs, to givesome structure to the kinds of ideas that are often communicated in pictures like theone on the cover. Each olog inherently offers a framework in which to record data aboutthe subject. More precisely it encompasses adatabase schema, which means a system ofinterconnected tables that are initially empty but into which data can be entered.
  28. Nov 2015
    1. Once a story has sustained our attention long enough, we may begin to emotionally resonate with story’s characters. Narratologists call this “transportation,” and you experience this when your palms sweat as James Bond trades blows with a villain on top of a speeding train.
    1. the scientific literature awe is defined as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and greater than the self, that exceeds current knowledge structures"--meaning that you need to adjust your understanding of the world, and your place within it, in order to make sense of an awe-inspiring event, feat, or behavior. 
    2. awe is best describedas a feeling that we have typically when we’re in the presence of something much greaterthan ourselves. So maybe we’re in a very high, expansive vantage point looking outat something huge and overwhelming or inspiring.
  29. Oct 2015
    1. by beginning with the definition from Bob Emmons' really nicebook called Thanks from 2007. Gratitude, Emmons writes, is the feeling of reverence for thingsthat are given, and I think there's a real emphasis here on "given," which is the thingsthat we're grateful for are really beyond our own agency, beyond our own volition.
    1. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are focused on attaining rewards and/or praise from others--they are a means to an end, not inherently rewarding in and of themselves. Examples include financial wealth, fame, or popularity. People often pursue extrinsic goals under the assumption that these goals will bring them happiness, but evidence suggests otherwise. Researchers speculate that intrinsic goals lead to greater happiness because, in the pursuit of these goals, people have positive experiences along the way that support their happiness.
    2. Intrinsic goals: According to positive psychologist Tim Kasser and colleagues, intrinsic goals "are those that are inherently satisfying to pursue because they are likely to satisfy innate psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, competence, and growth"; they depend on satisfying one's own basic psychological needs rather than relying upon the judgments or approval of others. Examples of these goals include self-acceptance, forming social connections, and physical fitness.
    3. Have you ever been so engaged in an activity that you lost all sense of time? Hours passed, but you didn't notice; you felt calm, focused, deeply satisfied, even meditative? Psychologists have a word for that mental state: flow.
    4. But what happens when a challenge ramps up and we don't have the skills to meet it? We're at risk of experiencing "frazzle," as Daniel Goleman explains in the next video.
    1. self-compassion entails three core components. First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental. Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering. Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it. We must achieve and combine these three essential elements in order to be truly self-compassionate.
    1. Dacher just introduced the distinction between "maximizers" and "satisficers" made by Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. Maximizers try to squeeze the greatest amount of benefit and pleasure out of every choice or opportunity, while satisficers find contentment with choices as long as they pass a basic threshold of acceptability.
    2. People who maintain some kind of regular meditative practice actually have measurably thicker brains in certain key regions. One of those regions is the insula, which is involved in what’s called “interoception”—tuning into the state of your body, as well as your deep feelings. This should be no surprise: A lot of what they’re doing is practicing mindfulness of breathing, staying really present with what’s going on inside themselves; no wonder they’re using, and therefore building, the insula.
    1. Awareness: Self-awareness points to the ability to attain insight into one's own attitudes, motives, reactions, strengths and vulnerabilities.
    2. Attention: According to psychologist and philosopher William James, attention "is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." Many compare attention to a spotlight, which makes certain information from the inside or outside world more available to conscious awareness, while filtering out less useful information. Attention is limited, in that it can only hold a finite quantity of information in mind for a limited period of time, and selective, in that it orients to information that is deemed important in a given moment.
    3. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): Though it has its roots in Buddhist meditation, a secular practice of mindfulness has entered the mainstream in recent years largely through the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which he launched at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. The MBSR program usually has students meet for two to three hours per week for eight weeks, practicing at home between classes. They learn practices such as the "body scan," in which they focus their attention along each part of the body, trying to be aware and accepting of whatever they sense in these body parts, and the "raisin meditation," where they slowly use all of their senses, one after another, to observe a raisin in great detail, from the way it feels in their hand to the way its taste bursts on the tongue.
    4. Meditation: Though mindfulness and meditation are closely related, they are not synonymous. As Jon Kabat-Zinn describes in his video, one can practice mindfulness while not doing a formal meditation practice, and there are many different kinds of meditation that go beyond mindfulness meditation. The term "meditation" refers to a wide range of practices that simply involve training the mind to achieve a particular state of consciousness, especially for relaxation. That said, mindfulness meditation, based on a technique adapted from Buddhist Vipassana meditation, is a basic and commonly practiced form of meditation.
    1. A particularly generative field is contemplative neuroscience, which involves collaborations between scientists and expert authorities in the traditions that have informed the concept of mindfulness.
    2. mindfulness is about dedicating our awareness to the present moment, in a kind, non-judging manner
    1. My graduate student Dan Yoshimoto has discovered that the basis for building trust is really the idea of attunement. He has broken this down with the acronym ATTUNE, which stands for: Awareness of your partner’s emotion; Turning toward the emotion; Tolerance of two different viewpoints; trying to Understand your partner; Non-defensive responses to your partner; and responding with Empathy.
    1. the simple definition that I work with now is that forgiveness is the ability to makepeacewith the word “no.”
    2. researchers differ about what actually constitutes forgiveness. I’ve come to believe that how we define forgiveness usually depends on context. In cases where we hope to forgive a person with whom we do not want a continuing relationship, we usually define forgiveness as reducing or eliminating resentment and motivations toward revenge. My colleagues Michael McCullough, Kenneth Rachal, and I have defined forgiveness in close relationships to include more than merely getting rid of the negative. The forgiving person becomes less motivated to retaliate against someone who offended him or her and less motivated to remain estranged from that person. Instead, he or she becomes more motivated by feelings of goodwill, despite the offender’s hurtful actions. In a close relationship, we hope, forgiveness will not only move us past negative emotions, but move us toward a net positive feeling. It doesn’t mean forgetting or pardoning an offense.
  30. Sep 2015
    1. A second line of research is about "elevation," which refers to the warm, uplifting feeling we get when we witness someone else's good deed. Research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as well as by Simone Schnall, has found that elevation systematically motivates people to perform altruistic acts themselves.
    1. In ongoing work with Barbara Fredrickson, I am exploring how levels of mindfulness predict helping behavior as well as the emotions associated with helping. Mindfulness has two important sub-components: the ability to attend to the present moment and the ability to accept experiences without judging them. I found that both aspects of mindfulness predicted helping behavior.
    2. But when you measure people’s emotional experiences in real time—rather than their predictions—a very different pattern emerges. Rather than feeling more compassion when more people are suffering, people ironically feel less—a phenomenon my colleague Keith Payne and I call “the collapse of compassion.”
    1. Dacher spoke about the Vagus nerve and its role in social connection and, in turn, happiness. In the essay below, Emiliana summarizes very recent research showing that Vagal tone, an index of the general strength of influence that a person's Vagus nerve has on their heart, predicts the emergence of sympathetic behavior over development--and further, that in college students, experiencing compassion actually engages the Vagus nerve. 
    2. Pity: Feeling sorry for the suffering or misfortune of someone else. Pity is similar to compassion, but it suggests a power imbalance, whereby the observer occupies a place of superiority and looks down upon the person who is suffering.
    3. Sympathy: Sympathy, which means "to feel together," is sometimes used synonymously with compassion. However, while sympathy does refer to feelings of sorrow or sadness about another person's suffering, it does not typically involve the urge or motivation to help, or do anything about the situation. In other words, a person may feel sympathetic towards another person's difficulties, but not feel inclined to help. 
    4.  research by Daniel Batson and others suggests that empathy is much more likely to lead to altruism when it elicits the specific feeling of empathic concern, which is when we observe someone in need and truly "feel for" that person--a state similiar to compassion--rather than wanting to escape the situation or feeling overwhelmed by distress.
    5. Some evolutionary biologists argue that organisms may sometimes put themselves at risk in order to help another because they expect that the other organism will return the favor down the line, a concept known as reciprocal altruism.
    6. Compassion: Literally means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you witness another’s suffering and feel motivated to help relieve that suffering.
    7. Altruism: Altruism is when we act to promote someone else’s welfare, even at a risk or cost to ourselves
    8. Kindness is a general, everyday term describing behaviors that involve being friendly, generous, or considerate. Pro-social is the term favored by scientists to refer to kind, helpful behaviors or states, but it is also quite broad.
    1. Consolation is defined as friendly or reassuring behavior by a bystander toward a victim of aggression. For example, chimpanzee A attacks chimpanzee B, after which bystander C comes over and embraces or grooms B. Based on hundreds of such observations, we know that consolation occurs regularly and exceeds baseline levels of contact. In other words, it is a demonstrable tendency that probably reflects empathy, since the objective of the consoler seems to be to alleviate the distress of the other. In fact, the usual effect of this kind of behavior is that it stops screaming, yelping, and other signs of distress.
    2. differentiate something called empathic concern from something called empathicdistress and what it turns out is that empathic concern is associated with all kindsof benefits people who experience empathic concern are more likely to help, they’rebetter at regulating their own emotions they’re more stable and socially functionalin life whereas people who experience empathic distress have other issues andstruggles that we can flesh out in later weeks. The interesting thing about thisbody of work is that it anticipates are next week of material which will be aboutcompassion and compassion is really what elevates empathy from the potential forempathic distress

      Terms:

      • empathic concern
      • empathic distress

      I had a bit of trouble parsing the last bit but I think she is saying compassion is a higher form of empathy which has "walled off" empathic distress.

    3. many scientists often identify two types of empathy: "affective empathy," which refers to the sensations and feelings we have in response to others’ expressions, and "cognitive empathy," which refers to our ability to label and understand other people's emotions--and even take their perspective on things.

      Terms:

      • affective empathy
      • cognitive empathy
    4. Think of taking a yoga class or a dance class. If you had to do this with the teachersimply explaining step by step verbally what to do it would be much morechallenging than it is when the teacher actually demonstrates it physically andthat’s precisely because of your mirror neurons that are helping you simulate andrepresent that motion prior to actually trying to do it.

      Term: mirror neurons

    1. I’ve concluded that love, as your body sees it, is the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: A sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; A synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; A reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. My shorthand for this trio is positivity resonance. This back-and-forth reverberation of positive energy sustains itself—and can even grow stronger—until the momentary connection wanes—which is of course inevitable, because that’s how emotions work.
    2. Support in times of need is one of the major benefits of what researchers call bonding capital. Bonding capital may not give us the breadth and diversity of looser bridging-focused ties, but it gives us the closeness and intimacy that even 10,000 Twitter followers might not provide.
    3. For many people, there is one special person to whom they feel closest—often a romantic partner, but sometimes a best friend or family member. Significant others are the first people we turn to when we’re suffering, and their support can benefit not only our mental health but also our physical health:
    4. What are they good for? Friendship helps us meet our needs for belonging and our need to feel known and appreciated for who we are. It also allows us to know and understand others more deeply than we can know strangers: Research suggests that our friends bring out the best in us when it comes to empathic accuracy, or the ability to know and understand another person’s thoughts and feelings.
    5. Professional contacts can play an integral role in helping us launch or advance our careers. You might learn that your dream employer is hiring through a post from a seemingly random LinkedIn contact, or meet your future business partner through a colleague at a conference. Researchers have referred to these kinds of ties, as well as other types of looser connections such as neighborhood acquaintances, as bridging capital. Bridging capital may involve weaker ties, but the breadth and diversity of these ties can expose us to new ideas and opportunities beyond what is available in our narrower inner circles.
    1. A lifelong friendship usually feels different than a casual acquaintance you make at a networking event or a friend you acquire on Facebook. Yet according to research, we need both weak ties and strong ties in order to build “social capital,” which researchers define as the web of relationships in our life and the tangible and intangible benefits we derive from them.
    1. Prioritizing positivity: Deliberately organizing your day-to-day life so that it contains situations that naturally give rise to positive emotional experiences. Laura Catalino, Sara Algoe and Barbara Fredrickson's study compares pursuing happiness to prioritizing positivity, and their results suggest that prioritizing positivity is a more promising approach to boosting happiness. 
    2. Hedonic adaptation (aka the "hedonic treadmill"): Our ability to adapt to changes in our life circumstances or sensory experiences. Research suggests many of us have a remarkable ability to get used to things that might initially bring us pleasure, such as getting married or winning the lottery, and even to eventually return to our happiness set point after a traumatic accident.
    3. Set point theory: The theory that we each have a relatively stable level of happiness that is largely determined by our genes and personality. Though we might experience some fluctuations in happiness due to events big and small, this theory holds that we eventually return to our basic set point of happiness.
    4. Impact bias: The tendency to overestimate how an event or experience in the future will affect our emotional well-being, for better or worse. For instance, we often underestimate our ability to recover from difficult experiences
    5. Affective forecasting: The process of making predictions about how you will feel in the future. According to Daniel Gilbert, who coined the term "affective forecasting" with his colleague Timothy Wilson, affective forecasting is simply "the process by which people look into their future and make predictions about what they’ll like and what they won’t like." However, as Emiliana explained in the previous video, we are often poor judges in the present of what will bring us happiness in the future, causing us to look for happiness in the wrong places.
  31. Feb 2014
    1. Finally, as we think about the relationship between the structure of information and cultural production and liberal society, there is the question of how the transition to more commons-based production will affect social justice, or equality. Here in particular it is important to retain a cautious perspective as to how much can be changed by reorganizing our information production system. Raw poverty and social or racial stratification will not be substantially affected by these changes. Education will do much more than a laptop and a high speed Internet connection in every home, though these might contribute in some measure to avoiding increasing inequality in the advanced economies, where opportunities for both production and consump- tion may increasingly be known only to those connected.
    2. Autonomy, or individual freedom, is the second value that I sug- gest can be substantially served by increasing the portion of our in- formation environment that is a commons and by facilitating non- market production. Autonomy means many things to many people, and some of these conceptions are quite significantly opposed to oth- ers. Nonetheless, from an autonomy perspective the role of the indi- vidual in commons-based production is superior to property-based production almost regardless of the conception one has of that value.