Talking with Strangers

 A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. 

Joe Keohane writing in The Atlantic

'Life is hard'

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard.'  I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?' -Sydney J. Harris

Meaning in Suffering

Having negative events happen to you decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life, according to a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering." 

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Tuesday Tech Tools: 13 Citation Generators

If you are one of the many students getting your school start at the end of this month, here are some tools (apps and online) that will help you edit your writing (or the writing of others) especially when it comes to figuring out how to make citations. Don’t just assume the citations created by these tools are correctly done—double-check them yourself. There are more writing tools at the tech tools site. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

Academic Help
Citation generator for MLA, APA, and Chicago formats. Basic but free.

BibMe
The free version lets you create citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats. It also offers some writing suggestions. Similar to Citation Machine. A paid account for $9.95 a month you get more writing suggestions and a plagiarism checker.

Citation Machine
Popular, user-friendly citations generator. Chicago, MLA, APA, and 13 other styles. Free version, $9.95 gives you grammar and plagiarism checkers. ations, etc.

Cite Fast
Cite sources in APA, MLA, or Chicago styles. Free but create an account to return to your information.

Cite This For Me
Simple layout. Create citations and bibliographies in APA, MLA, and Harvard formats for over 30 types of sources. Premium account for $15 a month gives you a plagiarism checker and Chrome extension.

Easybib
Auto-formatting of citations for research papers but MLA is the only available format from the free version. $4.99 a month for the paid version to get more styles, in-text citations, etc.

EditTeach
Resources for editing professors, students and working professionals to help strengthen the craft of editing and support the work of editors.

Opendemia
Stores notes on sources, helps to create works cited pages and in-text citations as well as auto-generate citations in various formats. There is a free version. $10 a year for no ads and more citations allowed per project.

OttoBib
Chrome extension for citing books using an ISBN. Formats include MLA, APA, AMA, and Chicago. Free.

Paperpile
Chrome extension to search and cite books using Chicago. Automatically creates a citation for a book searched in Amazon. Free.

Purdue Writing Lab
Writing and formatting help.

SuperSummary Academic Citation Resources 
Links to style guides, FAQs, tutorials, quizzes, sample papers, and tools to help students' citation and research processes.

Zotero 
Cite sources directly in a Word or Google document in thousands of formats. Organize your research by tagging sources with keywords and saving them to collections. Free.

A difficult question

When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. -Daniel Kahneman

The Suburb within

You might live in the middle of a big city, but there could still be a white picket fence around your imagination. You can take the subway to work but still park your identity in a two-car garage. This is the inner suburbia, and you probably moved her long ago. You’ve learned to contain your longings and sympathies within a comfortable zone, measures and mediocre. To grow, you must move toward otherness. You must quit the ranch house of your soul and head for the forbidden place—your inner wilderness, inner bohemia, or even your inner inner city. The answer you need lie there, where you are least at home.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

Problems

When I can’t help myself, maybe someone else’s problems can help me. –Andrew Boyd

Feedback

Some professors argue that they don’t want to hear their students talk about a subject because they don’t know enough… But I always think of piano teachers; they would never keep their students away from the keyboard simply because those pupils couldn’t yet play Mozart. Sure they have to endure a lot of bad notes, but they would never push someone off the bench and refuse to let them play until they somehow became better.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

Burning

What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl

Two Things

My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour.  -John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace” born August 4, 1725

Tuesday Tech Tools: 33 Design Tools

Some of the tools available for graphic and UX design.

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

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

Adobe Kuler
Find complementary color palettes using a color wheel.

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

Balsamiq
Design software, a quick starter for wireframing tool. 

Beautiful.ai
Quickly make beautful slides with these graphic tools. Slightly different workflow than PowerPoint so it takes a little time getting used to but more fun. Free.

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

Color Me
Visualize hex colors.

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

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

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

Florish*
A data visualization tool that makes it easy to create both standard charts and a mobile-friendly animated charts. Some customization available. Examples.

Font Feed (no longer available)
A "daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world."

Font dragr (no longer available)
Browser based tool that checks for web-friendly fonts. Just drag and drop.

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

FontPair
Helps you pick font combinations for your resume, website, poster, etc. so your creation stands out from the typical Times New Roman on other material.

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

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

Idea Mag
Japanese design magazine.

Indesign
See Adobe Indesign.

Kartograph
Simple to use data visualization tool if you know some Python or Javascript. Free.

Keynotopia
UI design templates.

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

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

Markup Wand (no longer available)
Photoshop to HTML/CSS converter. Strip down Photoshop files (.psd) and convert them to embeddable HTML or CSS code.

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

MyFonts
Large selection of professional fonts.

OmniGraffle
Design software. Industry standard.

PagePlus (no longer available)
Page layouts for Mac.

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

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

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

SassMe
Colum vizualize color functions by inserting Hex codes.

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

Society of Publication Designers

Scribus
Page layouts. Alternative to Adobe InDesign.

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

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

More Tech Tools here.

People are susceptible to being deceived by the trappings of science

"Although trust in science has important societal benefits, it is not a panacea that will protect people against misinformation. Spreaders of misinformation commonly reference science. Science communication cannot simply urge people to trust anything that references science, and instead should encourage people to learn about scientific methods and ways to critically engage with issues that involve scientific content." - study lead author Thomas O'Brien

From the abstract:

We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not. We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience. 

Press Release 

Read the study is here

The very real danger

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it. 

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them. 

And who knows what might happen to you then? 

Jonathan Franzen 

Data Science articles from July 2021

Honing your machine learning and pattern recognition skills with a simple regression problem 

Once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number

Goodhart’s law haunts artificial-intelligence design: just how do you communicate an objective to your algorithm when the only language you have in common is numbers?

The Pentagon has created a team of hackers to test military AI by probing pretrained models for weaknesses. Another cybersecurity team will review AI code and data for hidden vulnerabilities

Around 90% of machine learning models never make it into production—here’s why

The directional superpower of birds might be based on quantum physics—and new research suggests  idea of a quantum “compass” seem even more likely

Precise measurements of the position of a levitating nanosphere have been used to provide quantum control forces that damp the nanosphere’s motion — potentially opening the way to quantum control of larger objects

DARPA exploring benchmarking possibilities to help quantum computing development move forward

How to tell if you have trained your model with enough data

New functionality in the base R language, in key R packages and in the RStudio IDE have made it easier for native R programmers removing some headaches and aligning better with other programming languages  

GitHub’s new utilitarian time saver tool uses AI to craft code. Some developers are happy about Copilot —others are furious  

How a 70s teacher invented C, the hugely influential coding language

In the midst of a “data deluge” companies are moving data’s center of gravity is “shifting away from the data warehouse and analytics databases, and toward a networked ecosystem of data streams and the edge.”

We’re Facing a Fake Science Crisis, and AI Is Making It Worse

Keep up to date with data science here

frightful things

Obstacles are those frightful things we see when we take our eyes off our goal. -Henry Ford (Born: July 30, 1863)

Availability bias

People give their own memories and experiences more credence than they deserve, making it hard to accept new ideas and theories. Psychologists call this quirk the availability bias. It’s a useful built-in shortcut when you need to make quick decisions and don’t have time to critically analyze lots of data, but it messes with your fact-checking skills.

Marc Zimmer writing in The Conversation

Achieving your goals

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. -Zig Ziglar

Faith in Numbers

When polls have faltered in predicting the outcome of elections, we hear calls for more and better data. But, if more data isn’t always the answer, maybe we need instead to reassess our relationship with predictions—to accept that there are inevitable limits on what numbers can offer, and to stop expecting mathematical models on their own to carry us through times of uncertainty.

To recognize the limitations of a data-driven view of reality is not to downplay its might. It’s possible for two things to be true: for numbers to come up short before the nuances of reality, while also being the most powerful instrument we have when it comes to understanding that reality.

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

legitimate suffering

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.  -Carl Jung (born July 26, 1875)

ideas

What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us. –Lionel Trilling