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"The troubling conclusion of a recent study by a team of social psychologists (including one of us, Sara Konrath) is that American college students have been scoring lower and lower on a standardized empathy test over the past three decades. "
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Educators less keen to blame politics for the decrease in student empathy might look to changes in the college-going population's relationship to work, family, and higher education. For example, many students plan to attend graduate or professional school, making their college years more of an extended adolescence than an emergence into early adulthood, and pushing forward the traditional markers of that transition—getting married and having children—by several years. Cultural trends also play a role. The popularization of reality TV shows and the narcissistic exhibitionists who star in them; the focus of primary education on the problem of low self-esteem rather than low empathy; and the relative decline of face-to-face interaction and emotional communication due to increased online socializing may all contribute to the decline of empathy among college students.
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Those who are most critical of the recent study's findings may be college students, who take them as an older generation's predictable complaints about "kids these days." It's true that such studies deal with averages distilled from very large numbers. Luckily, there are many highly empathetic young people who undertake projects like volunteering for altruistic reasons rather than for résumé-padding.
Instructors who wish to impart lessons about the nature of fairness, and its emotional and cognitive roots, must not forget that students are also taking mental notes as we, too, use or set aside our empathy muscles in our relationships with students. After all, it's hardest to empathize with those who don't reciprocate.
If empathy is truly on the decline among college students, then professors who care may be seen as both potential suckers, ripe for manipulation, or as potential sources of emotional connection—sometimes by the very same student. Students should be warned: Empathy doesn't make a person an easy target. When used with skill, empathy can guide us to balance the needs of ourselves, our students, and our larger social contexts with judicious care.
ELSI = ethical, legal, and social implications
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Second, the ELSI framing explicitly focuses on the normative "problems" inherent in scientific and engineering research. This might lead STS scholars to ignore issues in science studies that are less laden with (socially-noteworthy) norms.
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Third, even if STS researchers want to do normative work, ELSI research seems to primarily involve participant-observation, such as attending conferences, conducting interviews, etc. These methods necessitate the continued participation of the the scientists and engineers doing the work. Thus, ELSI-type researchers may be more likely to pull their punches, else they anger or alienate their subjects.
"The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible."
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What has been exceptional about the 2002-2012 decade is not what happened, but our intellectual response to it. The responses go beyond the well-known ones in the timeline above. There appear to be hundreds of people thinking seriously along such lines and taking on significant projects related to such interests.
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Two things are responsible for our exceptional response as a global culture.
The first is simply the slow decline of America’s relative role in global affairs, and the corresponding rise of a chaotic political energy around the globe, at all spatial frequencies from neighborhood block to planet-wide. It feels like there’s nobody in charge. This feels both liberating and scary.
The second is related to Zakaria’s point about information dissemination. The speed and completeness of our knowledge of global affairs has done more than expand our circle of concern. The potential of the Internet to enable new forms of collective action has also convinced us that we can act on those concerns in improved ways.
Unusually visible chaos, plus an authority vacuum, plus a perceived sense of greater control equal a deep restlessness.
It is a popular restlessness, not just elitist hand-wringing. The latter is a permanent feature of world history; it is hard to find a period when the intellectual elites have not been animated by a sense of both crisis and opportunity. This is not true of popular restlessness (which is different from popular unrest).
The popular restlessness has also been amplified by the collapse of traditional publishing. Not only is nobody in charge anymore, there are no official-sounding voices even pretending to be in charge. ”Newspaper of record” sounds almost archaic today.
The restlessness represents a social energy that seeks to do big things and looks for both intellectual and political leadership. It is a social energy that swings wildly between a sense of limitless potential and deep despair, and is hungry for both meaningful perspectives and rallying cries.
In other words, the social energy sloshes violently across the four quadrants, fueling a demand for all four of the emergent narratives.
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"Over the last week, I have encountered three separate (and seemingly unrelated) attacks on democracy, written by residents of the US and Europe from highly-visible spots in the political-economic media system."
"Oil just doesn't fall by 10 percent in the course of a normal day, though. In commodities markets, oil is king, and its daily contract turnover, typically around $200 billion, is usually able to absorb even large inflows or outflows of investment.
The rare moves of $10 a barrel usually are set off by dramatic events -- the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1991, or the collapse in 2008 of Lehman Bros bank, which both led to recessions.
Of course, there was major news last week. But the daring Pakistan raid that killed Osama bin Laden had done little to shift the balance of oil markets on Monday.
In interviews with more than two dozen fund managers, bankers and traders, no clear cause emerged for the plunge in price. Market players were unable to identify any single bank or fund orchestrating a massive sale to liquidate positions, not even an errant trade that triggered panic selling, as seen in the equities flash crash last May."
"The tipping point for digital textbooks is defined as that point on the industry/product continuum at which current financial variables and market factors make the eventual dominance of digital over print an inevitable outcome within 5-7 years. It is our argument in this report that the Higher Education textbook industry in the U.S. is now at that tipping point. In support of this argument, we will discuss both the current status of the Higher Education textbook market as well as the primary market/financial factors influencing its evolution."
"When Ringle opened his Washington Post article with the line, "We have seen the future and it is random," I believe he was making a moral point. The post-World War II "neat" may have been an ignorant oversimplification of the world and its inherent messiness, but the post-9/11 random is an exaggeration of this messiness and an unwillingness to find resolve or connection. There is something unthinking and uncurious and unfeeling in its use. It is defensive. It indicates a lack of empathy.
Random is anathema to synthesis through imagination, a refusal to enter the unknown."
The internet is enabling massive changes in the relationships amongst fans, artists, and industries. On this site, Nancy Baym keeps an eye on trends and provides a space to discuss what works, what doesn’t, and what to make of it all. Sometimes she writes about other social internet issues too.
..the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.
However, there are fewer and fewer biologists who practice traditional taxonomy, or the collection, description, naming and categorization of organisms through intense study of their physical attributes. In general, the field of taxonomy, or systematics as it is often called, has been leaning towards the molecular end of the spectrum since genetic technology matured in the late 1970s and 1980s, and traditional taxonomic skills have been dwindling as older taxonomic experts retire. Many taxonomists blend traditional methods, such as morphological and behavioral study, with modern molecular techniques, such as DNA sequencing, to fully characterize their pet taxa. But taxonomists like Cognato and Hulcr, who rely on fieldwork and morphological study as core aspects of their taxonomic work, appear to be slowly going extinct.
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ames Rodman, a botanist and former NSF program director who was instrumental in creating the PEET program in the mid-1990s, says that the disappearance of traditional taxonomy is only part of a larger problem. "More broadly speaking, organismal biology is dying out," Rodman says, now in semi-retirement as museum research associate at the University of Washington's Burke Museum. He says that colleagues tell him all the time that even in high schools, biology field trips are seldom, if ever, taken—a trend that ripples up through the university level as survey courses in entomology, mycology, and other organismal disciplines cease to exist. "We're no longer interested in knowing about the organisms of the world. That's the sadder tragedy."
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Quentin Wheeler, the Arizona State University entomologist who is also director of the newly-created International Institute for Species Exploration, says that he hopes to create a "cyber-infrastructure," including digital images and virtual networks, that will give researchers around the world access to all of the nearly 3 billion biological specimens currently housed at natural history museums. He says that if modern technologies and more funding are successfully combined with continued taxonomic work, taxonomists have a good chance of describing and naming 8 million new species in the next 50 years.
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