Wait, so why was it you wanted us back in the office?The engineers reminded him of their commutes. The working parents reminded him of school pickup times. Medina replied with arguments he has delineated so often that they have come to feel like personal mantras: Being near each other makes the work better. Medina approached three years of mushy remote-plus-office work as an experiment. His takeaway was that ideas bubble up more organically in the clamor of the office. “You can interrupt each other without being rude when you’re in person,” said Medina, whose company, Outreach, is now in the office on a hybrid basis. “In a Zoom conversation, you have to let somebody finish their thought.”

Seattle

hid     the day

his point,—a trying

The real danger is not to people who are experts in their fields. Super experts in every field will continue to do what they have always done. All of us, however, are novices in almost everything we do. Most of us will never be experts in anything. The vast majority of the human experience of learning about something is done at the novice level. That experience is about to be autotuned.

Starting this year, we’re going to be returned a mishmash of all the information that is available on the Internet, sorted by mysterious practices

In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter. Doing so has never been easy, but lately it’s become harder in new and surprising ways.While we weren’t watching, a next generation threat to human freedom materialized right in front of our noses. We didn’t notice it because it came in forms that were already familiar to us. It came bearing gifts of information, historically a scarce and valuable resource, but delivered them in such abundance, and with such velocity, that these gifts became a mountain of burdens. Most disarming of all, it came to us with the promise that it was on our side: that it was designed to help us navigate our lives in the ways we want them to go.

About 0.3% of our active userbase donate

A concern about how to assess academic texts “written” using LLMs sets an analogous trap. My advice to teachers and examiners is not to fall in it. Automated plagiarism causes harm when used; to oneself, to others, and to the entire scientific enterprise. That is the real issue.

Emily Bender said it more succinctly in this video: “I don’t see the point of writing essays as producing the form of an essay. If students are turning to some fallback (…) GPT or another human, the problem was upstream.”

A ragtag coalition of public-health activists believe that America’s pandemic restrictions are too lax—and they say they have the science to prove it.

Respiratory viruses have rebounded hard after COVID seclusion, and masks are one of the best ways to avoid getting them

Ketamine, an established anesthetic and increasingly popular antidepressant, dramatically reorganizes activity in the brain, as if a switch had been flipped on its active circuits, according to a new study by Penn Medicine researchers. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1450190541376-1'); }); In a Nature Neuroscience paper released this month, the team described starkly changed neuronal activity patterns in the cerebral cortex of animal models after ketamine administration—observing normally active neurons that were silenced and another set that were normally quiet suddenly springing to action.

Results suggest that ketamine treatment might give faster but perhaps less durable antidepressant effects. Side effects differed from ECT, in particular less cognitive impairment was apparent in ketamine treatment.

they were instead producing writing-related simulations, utilizing prescriptive rules and templates (like the five-paragraph essay format), which passed muster on standardized tests, but did not prepare them for the demands of writing in college contexts.

ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

We may have to get used to not rewarding pro forma work that goes through the motions with passing grades, or it may mean finding other elements of the experience to focus on in terms of grading.

If we assume students want to learn - and I do - we should show our interest in their learning, rather than their performance.

Deep down, this is a question about what we value, in what we read, what we write, and unfortunately, we have attached a set of values to student writing that are disconnected from anything we actually value about what we read, and what we write.

Hypothesis is pleased to be able to offer Early Access to our integration with JSTOR. Instructors at participating schools are now able to create Hypothesis assignments in their LMS using documents from JSTOR’s extensive collection of texts and ebooks.

While instructors have been using Hypothesis to teach strategies for reading scholarly writing since we launched our browser extension in 2011, a new integration with JSTOR makes doing so even easier.

But musically they tend to be less carefully crafted — considered, as one might put it — than much older pop. You can hear the change right on the break between then and now. The Rolling Stones’ 1968 song “Sympathy for the Devil” is an extraordinary track, but while the lyric is a big part of why, the melody and harmonies aren’t. The arrangement and the danceability of the cut are epic, but they’re not what you’d play on the piano from its sheet music. A neat study found that recent pop is measurably more musically elementary than older pop.

I’m not prepared to say that no blockchain-based system will ever be useful for anything. But I’m gonna stay negative until I see one actually at work doing something useful, without number-go-up greedheads clamped on its teats.

That has a very simple explanation. The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.

8. Try to join Mastodon. The tweets are called toots, and it looks like you need to know basic programming. Receive a message from someone in Germany asking for donations and explaining that the network discourages viral posts. Yell, “WELL, THEN WHAT’S THE POINT, JURGEN?”

Griffiths, on the other hand, created a legitimately double-blind study published in Psychopharmacology in 2006. He recruited 36 healthy volunteers who regularly participated in spiritual or religious activities to try and prove, in a controlled setting, psilocybin’s ability to induce meaningful, mystical experiences. Over the course of two or three eight-hour individual sessions, participants took either a dose of psilocybin or a stimulant known as Ritalin that is used to treat ADHD—and produced more of an effect than niacin. They were then given eyeshades and headphones playing classical music and directed to lie down on a couch, while study monitors stayed close by in case participants needed them. They were administered the other drug at their next session. At a 14-month follow-up, well over half of the participants reported that their psilocybin experience was “among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.” A single dose led to a sustained increase in well-being and life satisfaction.

Lao Gan Ma, iconic in China, is increasingly appearing in cupboards and fridges in the rest of the world. It is so popular in fact that Tao Huabi is worth far more than three silver coins. Forbes China estimates her fortune at $1.05bn.

This second bingo card is for the open learning assignment “Zines as Open Pedagogy” by Elvis Bakaitis. You can browse all the open learning bingo games I’ve collected to date.

This bingo card (image, Google Slides) is designed to offer a way for people to consider how learning experiences — like activities, assignments, modules, or courses — might be “opened” in various ways. For example, a learning experience might be opened by enabling wider access to more people, more agency for people involved, or more possibilities in its materials, tools, goals, outcomes, and/or design. We offer it as a bingo card in hopes that you can use it to explore the openness of learning experiences — and perhaps generate ideas about how to open them further — rather than merely to judge how open they are like a rubric might.

Example A: English

I’ve shared the “Tiny Social Reading Activities” handout originally used at EDUCAUSE 2019 with CC BY open licensing, so you can copy, modify, and reuse it. There are two versions, the latest with the more informal 3rd step: “We’ll share”.

I’ve shared some example “tiny social reading activities” from the poster session and the Twitter thread where I reintroduced this idea.

Making a new tiny social reading activity is easy, just complete three sentences: I want people to learn…Together we’ll be reading…We’ll share…

I love a dissection of "forgotbuster" culture

In England, throughout the1800s, both scholars and friends wouldregularly exchange their annotated bookswith one another as a cherished socialactivity.

One of the first outcomesof our new relationship with ITHAKA will be a pilot integration that enables our usersto engage with JSTOR’s vast library of scholarly content directly within the Hypothesisinterface. Today, Hypothesis is used by more than 1,200 higher education and secondaryinstitutions throughout North America and the world

The philosopher Galen Strawson believes that some people are simply more “episodic” than others; they’re fine living day to day, without regard to the broader plot arc. “I’m somewhere down towards the episodic end of this spectrum,” Strawson writes in an essay called “The Sense of the Self.” “I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and little interest in my own past.”

Her brother holds the opposite view: he looks back on several distinct epochs in his life, each with its own set of attitudes, circumstances, and friends. “I’ve walked through many doorways,” he’s told me. I feel this way, too, although most people who know me well say that I’ve been the same person forever.

Let us call this an antischolar — someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device — a skeptical empiricist.

Tsudonku: Japanese for leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books.

antilibrary

if it's simply that your book reading in no way keeps pace with your book buying, I have good news for you (and for me; I definitely fall into this category): Your overstuffed library isn't a sign of failure or ignorance, it's a badge of honor.

The instructor welcomes learners to the course and makes clear how to get started

Course assessments align with course-level outcomes

The workload assigned to learners aligns to disciplinary norms and is appropriate to the level of the course

Required synchronous sessions, if they occur, are intentionally designed to advance specific module or unit objectives.

consistent with the course-level outcomes

The instructor articulates measurable course-level learner outcomes.

These Pretendians, as they’re now known, speculate about their “Indian blood” or pass down family stories about a distant Lakota ancestor. They haunt genealogy forums, looking for Indigenous ancestors, and sometimes they even find one. That the ancestor in question lived hundreds of years ago hardly matters; what matters to them is that, like Grey Owl, they feel themselves to be authentically Indigenous.

This sentence belongs in journalism hall of fame. It constructs a vague, false notion (crime is up) by not asserting fact but saying that “critics” are “saying” it. Having constructed false premise, it then passively declares that DA’s policies “have taken the blame.” What? Who? This is like saying that oil production doesn’t impact climate change but “some critics” are blaming Greenpeace for worldwide anxiety about gas prices without noting that the unnamed critics are PR reps for Exxon.

NYT allows corporate-backed SF Mayor with history of lying to say her crackdown was to “counter rampant street crimes” and not to criminalize homelessness and help real estate. The reporter doesn’t note that crime is down in San Francisco and in Tenderloin since before the pandemic.

Finally, something must be said about how the piece continues the NYT’s campaign against “progressive prosecutors.” The NYT goes after the progressive DA in Baltimore (who is a Black woman). The NYT’s portrayal of Mosby is incredible.

The people I work with every day like crime survivors, families of victims, and scientific researchers who study safety don’t oppose more cops only b/c it discriminates. We oppose investments in more police and prisons because it doesn’t make anyone safe.

Consider the picture of reality offered by the New York Times: the media and the powerful have no role manipulating opinion. Policy positions of elites organically spread from the hearts and minds of the most vulnerable people. Then, elites magically adapt to will of the most vulnerable people. Even though science/history shows a policy doesn’t reduce violence, elites do it anyway, not b/c it produces profit and ensures their power, but b/c powerless people demand it. See NYT readers, we have Democracy!

The manufactured “crime wave” but lack of urgent daily attention to existential threats like ecological collapse and rising fascism is a threat to our survival.

I’ve shown before that this is a common forms of copaganda in New York Times: stating the asserted motivations of powerful people as their actual motivations.

In fact, NYT’s claim is actually bolder: it was the Democrats' laudable sensitivity to the concerns of “communities of color” that motivated supposed pro-police shifts. Note right away that the New York Times erases other possible explanations from the public record

NYT does not have a single person who tells reader an alternative viewpoint. All the “ordinary” people were taken from a political rally for a pro-police, centrist. None of the many candidates, organizers, voters, and survivors who work every day on non-police community safety.

Today, the New York Times published one of its most dishonest, biased, and dangerous pro-police articles that I have ever read. What's happening at the NYT is important, so I try my best to explain below why it’s so harmful.

Calling some cases “mild” sounds trivializing. Calling other cases “severe” sounds stigmatizing. Whatever your criteria for a mild case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria, but says the condition ruined their life and you are dismissing their pain. Whatever your criteria for a severe case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria but is thriving and living their best life and accuses you of wanting to imprison them in a hospital 24-7.

Plenty of people hear voices. Some of these people are your typical homeless schizophrenic, but many aren’t. One of my patients was a successful computer programmer who had near-daily auditory hallucinations. He realized they weren’t real, did his best to ignore them, and got on with his successful life - just like he had been doing for the past twenty years.

But if you do insist on unusual experiences as the measure of a valid person, then there will always be a pressure to exaggerate how unusual your experience is.

a better framing might be “in the weird cultural situation of 21st century scientific psychiatry, nobody expects voices to be intelligent and agentic, and they aren’t. In some other weird cultural situation, who knows?”

Alcoholics Anonymous makes an interesting comparison: they’re solving this problem in their own way, by being more conservative and unforgiving than the psychiatric establishment would like. Hearing Voices is more liberal and accepting than the establishment, but the key point is not landing in the exact same place.

If this were true, a maximally compassionate policy would involve both trying to support people who are already transgender, and trying to prevent the switch from being flipped in people who aren’t transgender yet.

It’s for this reason that, while he doesn’t love individuals bypassing community input and had his own questions about the crosswalk’s safety, Greenwood resident Rob Fellows can understand why someone would take matters into their own hands.“It’s impatience,” he said. “It’s a form of activism — let’s get this thing going, let’s change the city’s priorities. It’s well meaning. The people who put it out there were trying to do something good for the neighborhood, I don’t have any question about that.” Advertising Skip AdSkip AdSkip Ad There’s a name for when community members make unsanctioned changes to city-owned streets: “tactical urbanism.”“Tactical urbanism to me is essentially what a fed-up citizenry takes into their own hands when it comes to their own safety on their streets and sidewalks,” said Ben Scott, a Greenwood resident who’s documented the saga of the 83rd Street crosswalk.

[Peer Review] Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?

But no matter the degree one believes there is any real conflict going on at all, it’s still tempting to see DFW as a kind of particularly farsighted scout, who left behind copious, obsessively detailed notes about what loomed on the horizon, and then quietly departed the battlefield before things got really hairy. This humble cruise essay is not only one of the best and most illuminating of his field reports, but also, and I truly believe this, one of those pieces that will be honored, in the way someone like Montaigne or Shakespeare is honored today, by people three-hundred years from now who will look back on and declare DFW’s cruise essay as ‘one of the first truly modern pieces of writing’. Whether or not this is a good thing, is of course determined by our own relationship to pleasure, and to what degree we believe the world should be designed to provide it to us.

This, the early 21st century, is the excruciating moment, and DFW’s work the scream. In dismissal of his work as pretentious, or his fears as misplaced, I detect the same impulse as what is in work in us when we dismiss real concerns over youngsters and their iPhones as stodgy and pointless. Collectively, we are unsure if there is something behind our shoulders, some horrible unforeseen price to be paid for the ever accelerating race towards low-risk, low-investment hedonism, and the universal pampering to our needs not just as consumers of food and drink, but of novelty, insipid social interactions, and status games. 

One of the reasons I liked all these women (except Mona) so much was because they laughed really hard at my jokes, even lame or very obscure jokes; although they all had this curious way of laughing where they sort of screamed before they laughed, I mean really and discernibly screamed, so that for one excruciating second you could never tell whether they were getting ready to laugh or whether they were seeing something hideous and scream-worthy over your shoulder…

To a critic who saw Dante and Shakespeare as the beating heart of all past and future literary achievement, I can see how DFW’s writing could come off as mere hand-wringing, the vain navel-gazing of a virtuosic undergraduate that has gained praise merely because it has been pushed to it’s absolute limit in both verbosity and vulgarity. But that is more the aesthetic of Wallace than the core of him; he aimed to relentlessly entertain and enthrall through complex configurations of plot, character, and form, whilst imparting, or at least suggesting, moral imperatives with the confidence and power of the old Russian greats.

Book Review: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

homes get more valuable because not owning a home gets worse.

today's grid shape was really vanilla. No, wait, I like vanilla. A vanilla malt is the best thing in the world. Let's call it "boilerplate" instead. It looks like a template of some kind.

to say a well-constructed themeless is on par with a “disastrous” themed puzzle is just ridiculous. Sure, for his brand, he gets more mileage taking apart a bad puzzle than discussing a good one, but a good solve and good blog fodder aren’t the same thing at all.

Someone on Twitter complained that boring people go to medical school because if you’re a doctor you don’t need to have a personality. Edward Teach complains that people get into sexual fetishes as a replacement for a personality. I’ve even heard someone complain that boring people take up rock-climbing as a personality substitute: it is (they say) the minimum viable quirky pastime. Nobody wants to be caught admitting that their only hobbies are reading and video games, and maybe rock climbing is enough to avoid being relegated to the great mass of boring people. The complainer was arguing that we shouldn’t let these people get away that easily. They need to be quirkier!A friend read an article once about someone who moved to China for several years to learn to cook rare varieties of tofu. She became insanely jealous; she doesn’t especially like China or tofu, but she felt that if she’d done something like that, she could bank enough quirkiness points that she’d never have to cultivate another hobby again.

In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement

Edmonds passes law criminalizing camping in public spaces — but lacks local homeless shelter options

“Don’t put people who are having problems at the top of the pyramid and ignore the citizens who are here and pay taxes and support the city government,” said Edmonds resident Bill Herzig.

That fiction, reading and writing fiction, is the best technology we have for getting inside another person’s mind and heart. You can’t do that in journalism, you can’t even do that in poetry, but you can do that in fiction. You can give the reader access to somebody else’s deepest thoughts. And I think in Mercy Street, regardless of your own personal convictions about abortion, it’s very illuminating to get inside of the mind of someone who thinks very differently about it.”

If you just skim the news headlines or flip back and forth between pundits – or worse, obsessively scroll through your own algorithmically-curated social media feeds – to reinforce your own views or fuel your indignation against another’s view, you may end up spending a good part of your life just skating along the surface.The value of human life and support for the common good has plummeted in recent years – at home and around the world – and it could be that good fiction has the chance to open up windows to increasing a true “respect life” ethos that other forms cannot. 

Narratives like the one Haigh tells in Mercy Street open new possibilities to see and understand each other across divides in ways that political analysis and advocacy doesn’t. There’s something about the current media and political culture that is zero-sum, cutting off possibility of empathy, or understanding the views of another even if you don’t share them.

The issue affects more than 200 workers who are employed by outsourcing firm Cognizant Technology Solutions, which mandated that they work in an office in Bothell five days a week starting June 6.

Google Maps contract employees who are required to return to their office in Washington state recently circulated a petition to keep working from home since some cannot afford their commutes

The mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday has put the spotlight back on recent data showing that firearm injuries are the No. 1 cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States.

"There are little cubes of the original liquid from which that salt grew. And the surprise for us is that we also saw shapes that are consistent with what we would expect from microorganisms," said Kathy Benison, a geologist at West Virginia University. "And they could be still surviving within that 830-million-year-old preserved microhabitat."

SiriusXM Buys Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco Podcast Company for $150 Million

Racism does not appear to be a mental illness, and you cannot treat it with talk therapy and pills. However, both racism and mental illness thrive in silence and isolation. The next step is to talk, openly and frankly, about both—and then have the guts to actually listen to each other.

Some commentators went further than Graham in trying to disconnect Roof from culture and history. Another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, called the shootings an “accident,” and many have invoked the language of tragedy or natural disaster. Yesterday, in her now-deleted Twitter account, Miami Herald columnist AJ Delgado questioned whether Roof was actually white, and added that white supremacists don’t kill black people in churches (forgetting, for example, the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama). Such disparate efforts to “other” Roof—to repudiate his connections to community, history, culture, or even humanity—add up to one thing: denial.

Linda Tropp, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an expert on prejudice, told me in an email exchange that this is probably an example of “fundamental attribution error” at work—that is, the tendency of humans to credit a person’s action to personality rather than his or her situation or social context. “Relegating the Charleston killing to the cause of ‘mental illness’ may lead us to make a dispositional (personal) attribution for the person’s behavior, and to downplay the situational/structural issues that have brought about such a racist act,” she wrote.

Religious-driven authoritarianism is fundamentalism’s only option. Indeed, it is the mission.

Although fundamentalist Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox agree on very little theologically (God exists, the Bible is true, Jesus is Savior, the church is divine) and vary in details of hierarchical authority, they nevertheless are making common cause to defeat threats to order — “Nazis,” women, LGBTQ people, governments and political systems deemed ungodly. These three groups of militant fundamentalists have coalesced into an uneasy alliance with the overall goal of creating a new global order, based upon Gods’ divine design, with three cooperating spheres of theological influence.

Hierarchical groups that feel persecuted (or threatened with decline) become more rigid, not less, and often retreat further into distinctive subcultures with clearer senses of “us” versus “them” and are deeply unwilling to admit mistakes or abuse within their own institutions and communities.

Fundamentalists move toward harder forms not from anger (“a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is mad about something”) but from threat of chaos.

And fundamentalism is opposed to chaos, or that which is perceived to be disordered.

Fundamentalism is a kind of religious “physics” — a claim on reality to know how the universe was created, how it behaves, and its origin and ends. In effect, it is a rival “science” with a rival polity to other sciences (like actual physics or biology) and other polities (like democracy or socialism). But fundamentalists don’t see it as a rivalry. They are simply right.

fundamentalists trust that God not only created the world but designed it as well. The design is a property of its creation. The structure reveals the character of the Creator, and its design is holy

I’ve come to understand fundamentalism primarily as a structure of reality, an architecture of creation.

If it is anything at all, fundamentalism is a profound commitment to an ordered, hierarchical universe. Fundamentalism isn’t just a world-view of the universe, not as a belief that gives meaning to the universe, but fundamentalism is an order and hierarchy deemed to be the very nature of created existence. To fundamentalists this is credo, a reality that demands utter devotion — that sacred orderliness is essential to the continued existence and well-being of everything, especially to human society.

Marsden treated fundamentalism in the context of intellectual history, analyzing the early twentieth-century movement as a part of a long line of American thought and theology.

there are two major definitions of fundamentalism: a historical-theological one and a social-political one

The more threatened some people feel, the more fundamentalism grows. The more people question the authority of conventional politics and religion, the more authoritarian those same institutions become. And the threats — from every front — are plentiful. The more chaos, the more need for control. We’re in a vicious cycle of victimization and crusade, the very cycle that fuels fundamentalism. There are not only American Protestants fundamentalists now. There are fundamentalists everywhere. And that’s what is. Shall the fundamentalists win? A hundred years ago, Fosdick confidently proclaimed: “I do not believe for one moment that the Fundamentalists are going to succeed.”Shall the fundamentalists win? I confess that I do not share his certainty. I do not know if they will ultimately win, but they are — right now — stronger than ever.

US firearms makers produced over 139 million guns for the commercial market over the two decades from 2000, including 11.3 million in 2020 alone, according to a new government report.

authorities face a surge in unregistered "ghost guns" made at home with parts that can be bought online and produced with 3-D printer, and pistols and short-barrelled rifles that are as powerful and lethal as the semi-automatic assault rifles used in mass shootings

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the number of gun deaths in the United States underwent an "historic" increase in 2020.The US racked up 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, up nearly 35 percent over 2019, and 24,245 gun suicides, up 1.5 percent.The firearm homicide rate stood at 6.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020, the highest for more than 25 years.

SparkToro's tool found that 49.3 percent of accounts following the official @POTUS Twitter account are "fake followers" based on analysis of a number of factors, including location issues, default profile images and new users.

If there is an individual in America who epitomizes one central aspect of our political moment, it might well be Crystal Mason.

When he made that statement, the official rate of alleged election violations reported to his office over the previous decade—allegations, not convictions—was seven for every 1 million votes cast in the state.

Think about the ideals I mentioned above as core to the Responsibility to Listen. Are the other students being charitable and fair to the speaker? No. Are they giving the speaker a chance to make her case? Not really. Are they responding with honest arguments? No; they are simply venting anger.

we need not subscribe to a world view that treats justices as just another group of politicians who happen to wear black robes.

I also find myself isolated when I disagree with conservative partisans who tell me Ketanji Brown Jackson was “lying” when she said she doesn’t know what a woman is.

The claim you see all over Twitter is that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett committed perjury by calling Roe “settled law” and later voting to overturn it. “I don’t think it’s a lie,” I say,

Another danger of rhetorical hyperbole in criticism of our government is that it encourages a fatalistic cynicism within our country, that tears down our own respect for our institutions.

Overly harsh criticism of our own country carries several dangers. One is that it gets thrown back in our face.

The inappropriateness of demonstrating at anyone’s home ought to be obvious to any decent person, but what many non-lawyers don’t realize is that it is especially inappropriate as a way to try to affect judicial proceedings. Judges are not there to make law, folks. They are there to interpret it.

To understand this sudden trans­formation in the $56 billion durable medical equipment market, of which complex rehabilitation technology (CRT) is one part, experts and advocates point to a decade-old decision by Medicare to abandon set prices in favor of ones set by competitive bidding. By one estimate, the move reduced the federal government’s costs by 35 percent. But at the same time, locally owned wheelchair shops quickly began to disappear as large corporations offered rock-bottom bids to Medicare and private insurers.

The sixth season will likely follow the same pattern as the fifth, which reduced the number of episodes down to three but extended them to feature film length

Black Mirror is returning to Netflix for a sixth season, Deadline has confirmed.

Ezra Klein Interviews Patrick Deneen

“Students can feel like, If I can find this on YouTube, then why am I here?” she said. “They are looking for a return on investment, and I don’t blame them at all.”

increasing experiential learning and redesigning courses to connect more closely to students’ lived experiences and prospective careers.

Incorporating field trips, podcasts, “real world” assignments ― and shorter lectures ― are increasingly popular. The more that an assignment, or a course, connects to students’ lives, professors said, the more likely they are to be engaged.

“Quite frankly, I’m annoyed when I see or hear faculty whining about students not showing up or not putting what the instructor thinks is 100-percent effort in,” wrote Sharon Lauricella, a professor of communication and digital-media studies at Ontario Tech University, in Canada. Her approach, she said, is to make sure that her classes are engaging, enjoyable, and essential.

In addition to reaching out more frequently to struggling students, many are changing what or how they teach. They are spending more time in class on community-building exercises and group discussions. They are replacing high-stakes tests and papers with smaller, more frequent assignments to reduce anxiety. Many are maintaining flexible deadlines and asking students for input on creating assignments of interest to them.

Psychologists describe the wear and tear on the body from cumulative stress as its “allostatic load.” That may be what’s happening now, Scofield said, and it’s something that many people are going through.

You might have gone down the rabbit hole on note taking practice nerdery

A sequel is in the works to the 1984 rock mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” with director Rob Reiner returning alongside stars Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. The movie package will launch sales at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It will be released on March, 19 2024, tied to the 40th anniversary of the original. The sequel will be in the style of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,”

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous

The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, but the Fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. Because the Star cannot recognize the Fan, the Fan’s recognition of the Star doesn’t satisfy the core existential desire. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale.

In his lectures, Kojève takes up Hegel’s famous meditation on the master-slave relationship, recasting it in terms of what Kojève sees as the fundamental human drive: the desire for recognition—to be seen, in other words, as human by other humans. “Man can appear on earth only within a herd,” Kojve writes. “That is why the human reality can only be social.”

Being known by strangers, and, even more dangerously, seeking their approval, is an existential trap. And right now, the condition of contemporary life is to shepherd entire generations into this spiritual quicksand.

as the critic Leo Braudy notes, in his 1987 study, “The Frenzy of Renown,” “As each new medium of fame appears, the human image it conveys is intensified and the number of individuals celebrated expands.”

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as intimately close to as kin.

The most radical change to our shared social lives isn’t who gets to speak, it’s what we can hear.

forms of discourse actually shape our conceptual architecture, that the sophistication of our thinking is determined to a large degree by the sophistication of the language we hear used to describe our world.

once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV

I’m going to be taking an extended break from kottke.org, starting today. I’ve been writing here for more than 24 years, nearly half my life — I need a breather.

P.P.P.S. A quick blogroll if you’re looking for sites and newsletters to keep you busy while I’m gone. In no particular order, a non-exhaustive list: The Kid Should See This, The Morning News, Waxy, Colossal, Curious About Everything, Open Culture, Drawing Links, Clive Thompson @ Medium, Cup of Jo, swissmiss, Storythings, things magazine, Present & Correct, Spoon & Tamago, Dense Discovery, Austin Kleon, NextDraft, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Poetry Is Not a Luxury, A Thing or Two, The Honest Broker, Interconnected, The Whippet, Craig Mod, Why is this interesting?, Sidebar, The Prepared, Life Is So Beautiful, Fave 5, Sentiers, The Fox Is Black, and Scrapbook Chronicles. Happy hunting!

For consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but about “difference.”

Since “democracy” means having more consumer choices, and information technology will vastly increase the power of our channel changers, hey presto! More democracy!

Certainly the putatively “conservative” politics of the nation’s powerful Right does not include suspicion of vast cultural upheavals like this one, provided that responsible business interests are safely in charge (one can imagine their outrage were the government to assume comparable powers).

In the United States, where political “change” means further enriching the already wealthy, and where political “dialogue” is an elaborate charade that excludes dangerous and difficult topics from public consideration, one must look to the literature of business to find serious talk about national affairs.

But SST’s actions shocked the indie underground. The label, known for many years as a champion of small artists against the corporate rock establishment, settled with Island and promptly announced its intention to recoup all losses from its own artist. Feverish exchanges followed. Negativland wrote a letter calling SST hypocrites and abandoned the label. Ginn published a press release calling Negativland “paranoid upper-middle class malcontents” and sued them for breach of contract. The national music media picked up the story and uncovered that SST was withholding royalty payments from many of its bands. The label came out looking fabulously unscrupulous.

It’s important for students to reflect each semester: What went well? Where can I improve? Just as faculty have evaluations, students should take some time to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses, and writing out a plan of action for the next semester can help a lot.

Be willing to experiment with tools and systems

Willingness to actively participate.

A self-motivated personality.

Willingness to ask questions.

Willingness to take advantage of available support services.

Knowing when to take breaks.

Commitment

Being a thorough and comprehensive reader.

Ability to self-reflect.

Strong time management skills.

Ability to work independently

10 Traits & Habits of Successful Online Students

it has been my clinical experience and the experience of others that the symptoms of RSD/ED can be significantly relieved with clonidine and guanfacine in about 60% of adolescents and adults. To me, this observation strongly indicates that RSD is neurological and not something that is due to a lack of skills. Skills do not come in pill form.

His recent replication7 of his study of the validity of each diagnostic criterion has led him to now conceptualize ADHD as being divided into only two subtypes: the well-known inattentive type and an emotional dysregulation type.

Sometimes called hysteroid dysphoria in Europe, rejection sensitive dysphoria is characterized by intense mood shifts triggered by a distinct episode, typically one of the following: rejection (the real or perceived withdrawal of love, approval, or respect) teasing criticism, no matter how constructive persistent self-criticism or negative self-talk prompted by a real or perceived failure

But slowly, Driskill accepted Holland’s theories, confessing even as he repeated that he couldn’t remember any of it.

“I don’t have a problem with you teaching our kids about slavery and what our ancestors went through and how they had to pick cotton,” she said. “Our teachers back in the day told us that, but they don’t bring in cotton and make you pick cotton seeds out of cotton.”

So I blatantly stole the idea and the name, then made a web UI for creating readlists. It allows me to enter a collection of URLs, tweak their titles and ordering, then turn them into one big collection of words (currently it exports to a single HTML file or EPUB 3).

@chrisaldrich@mastodon.social @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com @alcinnz your blog is the first place I’ve seen since 2015 that is using hypothes.is I was super passionate about it but when I saw the lack of interest in development by their devs and after few messages with them, I finally let go of my account in 2019. Good to see someone is using it anyways 👍🏼

How are we people to each other, in our (ideally) various networks, offline and online alike?  How are we treated as (how do we treat others as) products?

I have long been wary of organizations or events that claim to “build community.” All we can do is make space, and do things we think might be useful (for ourselves, for each other). Whether a community emerges from any given organization or event or series of events isn’t up to us.

I worry about my students who seem to only have university-based networks, or who are isolated from their non-university networks in some way.  I am more confident for my students who already show up with strong connections to a supportive community, with connections independent of the university. I worry about colleagues who are deeply embedded in one organization, or attached to one conference, who don’t have a different place to go when things go wrong. Things always go wrong, at some point.

Gratefulology is Not a Real Word

1000 Awesome Things

Ludology

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

Let it be: mindful acceptance down-regulates pain and negative emotion,

Brief MindfulnessMeditation Improves Attention in Novices

Think twice before you get a “No Regrets” tattoo, andmaybe consider a “Counter Your Counterfactuals” tattoo instead.

There’s lots of evidence that something called ‘time affluence’, thesubjective sense that you have some free time is much more critical for happiness thanwe realize

the Awesomeology episode

There’s a whole host of things that make us happier that are about connecting withother people. Literally being around other people is considered a necessary conditionfor high happiness in a lot of studies. And that’s true even for introverts.

False choice loophole—"I can't do this, because I'm so busy doing that" Moral licensing loophole—"I've been so good, it's okay for me to do this" Tomorrow loophole—"It's okay to skip today, because I'm going to do this tomorrow" Lack of control loophole—"I can't help myself" Planning to fail loophole, formerly known as the "Apparently irrelevant decision loophole"—"I decided to explore one of my old neighborhoods and...well, look at that! I'm right in front of my favorite bakery. And of course, I couldn't possibly pass up their cookies." "This doesn't count" loophole—"I'm on vacation" "I'm sick" "It's the weekend" Questionable assumption loophole—"It's not possible to quit eating sugar" Concern for others loophole—"I can't do this because it might make other people uncomfortable" Fake self-actualization loophole—"You only live once! Embrace the moment!" One-coin loophole—"What difference does it make if I break my habit this one time?"

“I don’t know on those things,” she added.

“In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law.” the spelling-challenged Greene wrote to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 17, 2021.

“Those are reportedly my text messages,” the Georgia Republican told Ingraham. “I think if people read them for themselves, if those are my text message, they clearly say that I wasn’t calling for that. I actually said that’s something I don’t know about.”

To conserve the reverence it needs and deserves, the Constitution should be amended rarely and reluctantly. There is, however, an amendment that would instantly improve the legislative and executive branches. It would read: “No senator or former senator shall be eligible to be president.”

“You had one job, one job!” he cracked. “It’s your social media platform and you messed up the name? It’s almost like every time Trump speaks, his own mouth stages an insurrection.”

“Musk may wish it were otherwise, but he remains subject to the same enforcement authority - and has the same means to challenge the exercise of that authority - as any other citizen,”

"The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all,"

Truth Social is currently beating Twitter & TikTok on the Apple Store,

By "free speech," I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.

Ms. Tshibaka, a Trump-endorsed former commissioner in the Alaska Department of Administration, has worked to paint Ms. Murkowski as a liberal and to rally the state’s conservative base against her.

For Ms. Murkowski, 64, it amounts to a high-stakes bet that voters in the famously independent state of Alaska will reward a Republican centrist at a time of extreme partisanship.

“The point, for Manchin, is the attention, and the best proof is that after a full year of breathless coverage, nobody really has a handle on what he actually wants to pass,” said Karthik Ganapathy, a liberal strategist. “The only thing consistent about Joe Manchin III throughout this process is that he’s insisted on putting himself at the center of it.”

Manchin was incensed by the administration’s decision to name him in a news release as an obstacle to a deal.

if Elon were to take the company private wouldto make it no longer beholden to these quarterly earnings reports and having togrow each quarter to the public market, you could actually change the newobjective function and those changes could occur if you were actually to able totake it off the public market and do something with a deeper investment butthat might be the opportunity we're presented with here.

Currently, we have a noise and cacophony machine. What would it look like tohave the listening machine? The machine that helps us listen to each other toactually be transformed by each other's ideas. Now, a lot of people are going tolike that because again, on the individual level, people want to expressthemselves, and part of that expression is what we don't like maybe howsociety's going or how our political tribe is going or how the other political tribeis going. And we want to be able to protect those virtues, but I would encourageus to zoom out

if you removed all the metrics so that you didn't see what peoplewanted, so you weren't bound by your audience, that would also be a verydifferent kind of much more nonviolent Twitter

the deep opportunity is to be able to transform Twitter in a more radicalway to be of deep service to humanity extending the light of consciousness andto enabling really constructive speech and back and forth that enabledemocracies

Twitter is a fault-line-finding-for-profit machine.Fault line finding for profit equals doom scrolling for profit equals bad mentalhealth for profit machine

Why does Twitter matter? Well, Twitter is different than Instagram or YouTubebecause Twitter really is the place where politics and journalism live. Journalistsconstruct the world, the media world the rest of us live in. So if you influenceTwitter, you influence the ink that fills the pages of the media more broadly

More than 5,500 Uyghurs outside of China have been targeted by Beijing, hit with cyberattacks and threats to family members who remain in China, and more than 1,500 Uyghurs have been detained or forced to return to China to face imprisonment and torture in police custody, according to the report.

That’s not “fighting.” It’s a tantrum.

To claim that the laws that enable this oddity to work represent a “special break” is akin to claiming that the laws that facilitate special installations such as Cape Canaveral or the World Trade Center are “special breaks”: true, in the narrowest sense, but false when examined more closely.

In a vacuum, these arguments are all defensible, but in context, they represent an extreme form of gaslighting. Until about a month ago, Walt Disney World’s legal status was not even a blip on the GOP’s radar. No Republicans were calling for it to be revisited, nor did they have any reason to. Yes, Disney isn’t “entitled” to its arrangement. But Disney wasn’t “entitled” to it in 2012, 2002, 1992, 1982, or 1972, either, and yet, amazingly enough, the legislature showed zero interest in rescinding it when given the opportunity on those occasions. That it’s doing so now is ugly. That it’s pretending that it’s doing so out of a concern for “good government” is grotesque.