Monday, October 21, 2013

Why College Freshmen May Feel Like Impostors On Campus


Psychologist Greg Walton has found that a simple intervention can help many students get the most out of college. The trick is in helping students see that setbacks are temporary, and often don't have larger implications.



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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:


Tens of thousands of freshman have just finished their first month in college. They've signed up for classes, met a bunch of other people and, if history is any guide, asked themselves a question: What am I doing here? Everyone else is smarter and better adjusted than I am. And for some, that question totally changes the college experience, may even cause them to drop out, which is why a researcher was determined to intervene. He told his story to NPR's Shankar Vedantam, who's here to tell it to us. Hi, Shankar.


SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.


INSKEEP: OK. So, what did he do?


VEDANTAM: Well, Greg Walton was looking at this fact that all students go through difficulties when they get to college, Steve. But some students look at the problems that they're facing and they draw global conclusions from them. They say this is not just a professor giving me a bad grade or someone not sitting next to me in the cafeteria. This reflects that fact that I am not ready for college, or I shouldn't be in this college at all.


INSKEEP: Because they're in this sensitive moment, and they're judging themselves.


VEDANTAM: And they feel like impostors. So, Greg Walton - who, by the way, is a psychologist at Stanford - here's how he explained it to me.


GREG WALTON: If you're walking around in an environment, asking yourself whether you belong, when something bad happens - if you get criticized, if you feel excluded or lonely - to you, in your head, you might think that it means that you don't belong, in general, in that school.


INSKEEP: And that is the moment at which you might, I suppose, socially withdraw, or just withdraw from school.


VEDANTAM: That's right. And Walton said that some minority students and some women were especially affected by this. You already feel like you don't quite belong or you stick out in class, and now you get negative feedback. And you connect the two things together, and now you feel like you really don't belong.


INSKEEP: And that's interesting, because you're suggesting that women or minorities might feel more like outsiders. There's a lot of different kinds of people that might feel like outsiders. I went to a university in eastern Kentucky, and there were a lot of people from small towns that just seemed overwhelmed by that experience in the same way you're describing.


VEDANTAM: That's exactly right, Steve. Because I think what Walton is talking about is that some students are just going to be more vulnerable than others. And he conducted an intervention to see if he could actually reverse this. He brought a bunch of freshmen in. He told them this is what earlier students who've been to this college have experienced. They went through difficult periods of time and then things got better over time, and they heard ostensibly from these earlier students who said when I first got to college, I didn't have any friends, but I realized it takes some time to make friends. And in the long run, everything worked out great. And then he had the freshmen themselves tell stories about how their own experiences matched this pattern.


INSKEEP: OK. So, all they really did was find out they're not the only people in the world who are having these feelings. How much of an effect did that have on them?


VEDANTAM: It had a remarkable effect. It improved the academic performance and well-being of students who went through the intervention compared to students who didn't go through the intervention. And what was most remarkable, Steve, is that the effects of this one-time intervention lasted the next three years of these college students' lives.


INSKEEP: Just from having, what, one brief session?


VEDANTAM: It seems remarkable, Steve. And I asked Walton this, because I said it's hard to imagine that this one session could have had such a big effect. He explained to me that he didn't think, actually, it was the intervention that made the difference. The reason these students did well in college is because they studied hard, they worked hard and they did well. That's why they did well. All the intervention was doing was it was removing a barrier inside their heads, this barrier that made them see a local setback as some kind of a global statement on themselves.


WALTON: What the intervention did was it prevented students from feeling that they didn't belong in general when they had negative experiences. You can then imagine how if you're feeling less vulnerable to threats, you are better able to connect with other people, to peers, to teachers and build the kinds of relationships that actually sustain performance over a long period of time.


VEDANTAM: You know, Walton gave me another analogy, Steve. He said this intervention might be like engine oil in a car. The engine oil doesn't actually make the car go forward, but it removes some of the friction inside the car and helps the engine run more smoothly, and that's what helps the car move forward.


INSKEEP: OK. So, did the young people who had the engine oil applied, did they themselves sense the difference after this intervention?


VEDANTAM: Here's the interesting thing, Steve. When Walton went back and talked with these students later on, they didn't even remember that they had done this three years ago. And Walton was very careful, when he brought them in in the first place, not to signal that he was actually doing an intervention. He dressed up the intervention as saying you're going to be helping future freshmen deal with coming to college. So, he placed them in a role where they were seeming like they were helping others rather than being in need of help themselves.


INSKEEP: Oh, because if you just went directly at them, it's one more adult giving you one more homily. But this way, the message just sneaked up on them.


VEDANTAM: Yeah, and not just that. When you bring students in and say we're doing an intervention to help you, what's the message you're sending those students?


INSKEEP: You're messed up.


VEDANTAM: You're messed up, and you need help. And I think Walton's point is if schools want to apply this intervention, it needs to be done with some subtlety, or it could backfire.


INSKEEP: Shankar, thanks very much.


VEDANTAM: Thank you, Steve.


INSKEEP: That's NPR's Shankar Vedantam. You can follow him on Twitter @HiddenBrain. You can follow this program, as always @MorningEdition and @NPRInskeep, as well as NPRGreene.


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Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/235188760/why-college-freshman-may-feel-like-imposters-on-campus?ft=1&f=1013
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Aviate isn't 'spying' on anyone, it's just being sloppy with your data

Aviate

Storing your location and installed apps in plain text is at issue here, not collecting that data in the first place

A lot of fuss is being made about the Aviate launcher the past couple days, with things hitting a fever pitch today. Besides the endless requests for invite codes on every social media site known to modern man, it's come to light that the launcher is sharing the data it collects on you with the world. Sort of.

Let's back up a tad. Aviate is a launcher that reconfigures itself — the apps it thinks you need to see right this second — depending on where you are. It's been in private beta for a while, and opened up to more users this week.

The to-do is that your location and list of installed apps are available via a publicly accessible API — but only if you know your unique device identifier. That's not good, but it's not necessarily the end of the world, either.

The good news is that Aviate has said this is something they are fixing, and have made it a top priority. (Update: Looks like the web access has been killed, as promised.) In the meantime, here's what you need to know if you're going to use the app.

Source: +Arvid Gerstmann (1), (2)

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/G5Rp3rfE7cM/story01.htm
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Nigeria's military killing thousands of detainees

(AP) — Shedding stark light on Nigeria's escalating war with Islamic militants, mortuary records from a single Nigerian hospital show the number of detainees who died in military custody more than tripled in June, the first month of a state of emergency in the troubled northeast region.

Overall, the records obtained by The Associated Press for the nine months from Oct. 5 to July 5 indicate that the military is killing thousands in its crackdown on the uprising in northeast Nigeria.

The records cover just one hospital, Sani Abacha Specialist Teaching Hospital in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram, the movement fighting to uproot Western cultural influences from a country shared almost equally by Muslims and Christians. In the 30 days before the state of emergency was declared on May 14, 380 bodies were delivered to the hospital by the military. In the 30 days after, the number was 1,321.

For the whole of June, the number was 1,795, making it the worst month in the records seen by the AP, which has also witnessed many of the bodies being delivered to the hospital in military ambulances, escorted by armored cars.

The figure is much larger than the estimated number of Boko Haram fighters.

Nigerian government and military officials have refused to comment, and it's impossible to know how many of the dead had Boko Haram connections. But Nigerian law stipulates that even under a state of emergency, detainees are supposed to be brought before a magistrate within 48 hours and to have access to lawyers and family members.

A pastor said he was held at Maiduguri's Giwa Military Barracks after he and four other people were arrested because weapons were found hidden in the shoe factory where he works.

He described hundreds of naked people crammed into a cell meant for a couple of dozen. Once a day, he said, a soldier would throw a loaf of moistened bread into the cell to be brawled over. Some died of torture, he said.

He told the AP he was freed with the intervention of a Christian group, and his jailers' recognizing his prayers for salvation as Christian. He requested anonymity fearing military retaliation.

Amnesty International reported this week that hundreds are dying in detention: some taken from the cells and shot, some dying of suffocation or starvation.

The London-based human rights group said "credible information" from a senior Nigerian army officer indicated more than 950 people have been killed in the first six months of this year. The mortuary records seen by the AP list 3,335 bodies in that period, in just one hospital.

That figure alone is about nine times greater than the 400 civilians killed in Boko Haram attacks in the same period, according to an AP count of reported incidents.

However, Boko Haram has also done much to alienate public opinion. Fighters suspected of belonging to it have gunned down dozens of schoolchildren, some as they sat at their desks writing exams, and burned alive boarding school students locked into dormitories that were set ablaze.

The name Boko Haram roughly means "Western education is forbidden."

The group has also killed many more Muslims than Christians. In August, it gunned down 47 worshippers in a mosque. Last month it captured a muezzin, made him issue the pre-dawn summons to prayer and then killed at least seven elderly men who answered the call.

Local and international human rights groups say the troops deployed to combat Boko Haram are notorious for their excesses and have draconian powers to raid homes and detain people. They see a danger of a backlash from a poor population that feels marginalized and remote from the political center of Nigeria and its Christian president, Goodluck Jonathan.

The religions co-exist peacefully in the rest of Nigeria although fundamentalism, fueled by poverty and marginalization, has been growing among Christians and Muslims in the north.

Just days after the emergency was declared, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry noted "deep concern over credible allegations of gross human rights violations by Nigerian security forces." And in September, when he met Jonathan at the U.N., President Barack Obama "underscored the importance of countering terrorism via a comprehensive approach that creates economic opportunity and protects human rights," according to a State Department official.

On Thursday Nigeria was elected to a two-year seat on the U.N. Security Council. According to presidential spokesman Reuben Abati, President Jonathan believes it is "a glowing expression of support and encouragement for Nigeria's active participation in the promotion of peace, security and political stability in Africa and other parts of the world."

___

Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-18-Nigeria-Killings/id-e0b51e0bc9874e40abdb1c6fccfed9c5
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Box Office Preview: Can 'Carrie' Scare 'Gravity' Off Top Spot?


Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity has a strong shot of staying at No. 1 in its third weekend, but with the horror genre thriving, newcomer Carrie has the potential to unseat the blockbuster space epic.



Director Kimberly Pierce's Carrie remake, starring Chloe Grace Moretz in the title role opposite Julianne Moore, opens nearly four decades after Brian De Palma's big screen adaptation of Stephen King's novel Carrie turned into a sensation, helping to launch the careers of Sissy Spacek and John Travolta.


MGM and Sony's Screen Gems produced the updated Carrie for under $30 million. The horror pic has a chance of hitting $30 million in its debut, although Sony is being far more conservative, suggesting it could open in the $18 million to $20 million range.


PHOTOS: 25 of Fall's Most Anticipated Movies


Gravity is a formidable opponent, and could easily earn $30 million or more. The Warner Bros. film has earned $204 million globally through Wednesday and could approach $300 million by the end of the weekend.


Prospects are grim for the weekend's two other wide releases, DreamWorks' WikiLeaks movie The Fifth Estate and action pic Escape Plan, which teams Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.


Directed by Bill Condon and distributed in North America by Disney, Fifth Estate may only open in the $5 million to $6 million range, a blow for the filmmakers. The movie, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has received decidedly mixed reviews and faces fierce competition for adults from Gravity and Tom Hanks-starrer Captain Phillips. (Sony's Captain Phillips opened to a better than expected $25.7 million last weekend.)


DreamWorks has limited financial exposure, since Fifth Estate was made for $26 million. Participant Media co-financed the film.


PHOTOS: Iconic Horror Movies


Summit Entertainment and Emmett/Furla films have much more at stake financially with Escape Plan, which cost at least $70 million to produce and may not cross $10 million in its opening. The male-skewing film is another critical test for Schwarzenegger as he tries to resurrect his acting career after his film The Last Stand bombed.


High-profile films opening at the specialty box office include Fox Searchlight's 12 Years a Slave and Roadside Attraction's All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford. Both movies are critical hits and considered award contenders. (Ditto for Gravity and Captain Phillips).


From filmmaker Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave opens in 18 theaters in select top cities, including New York and Los Angeles. New Regency partnered with Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner's Plan B Entertainment in producing the harrowing slavery drama.


The ocean-set All Is Lost, directed by Margin Call filmmaker J.C. Chandor, opens in six theaters in Los Angeles and New York.


Sony Pictures Classics also launches biographical drama Kill Your Darlings in New York and Los Angeles (the film opened mid-week). Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan and Michael C. Hall, the film, set against a murder, brings together beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/news/~3/bdX1qvVA3oQ/box-office-preview-can-carrie-649378
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Sunday, October 20, 2013

Despite debt drama, U.S. still outshining Europe


By Alan Wheatley


LONDON (Reuters) - If Wall Street's record high is a signpost, the U.S. economy has every chance of pulling further ahead of a stuttering Europe despite new battles to come in Washington over the government's budget and debt ceiling.


Far from sapping animal spirits, the last-gasp pact to avert an unprecedented U.S. default has raised hopes that politicians will learn from the public's hostile reaction to the standoff. The S&P 500 closed on Friday at an all-time peak of 1,744.50.


"There's probably more confidence now that next time around there won't be this kind of brinkmanship, that there won't be another shutdown and that there certainly won't be a default," said Ira Kalish, chief global economist for Deloitte, the professional services organization.


"So my expectations would be for a return of consumer confidence and of business willingness to invest and employ," he said.


The ‘next time around' is not far away. Congress has approved funding for the government until January 15 and has authorized it to keep issuing debt until February 7.


David Folkerts-Landau, group chief economist at Deutsche Bank, said the episode had inflicted deep wounds on the Republican party, which wanted changes in Democratic President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms, and on Congress.


"As a result, chances for meaningful progress in the upcoming budget negotiations have improved. Another government shutdown and debt ceiling showdown next year seem less likely," he said in a note.


FED ON HOLD FOR NOW


Folkerts-Landau said sentiment indicators were likely to rebound now that a deal in place, helped in part by expectations in financial markets that the impact of the budget standoff will cause the Federal Reserve to delay winding down its bond buying, now running at $85 billion a month.


September's employment report will be issued on Tuesday, and normally the 180,000 rise in non-farm jobs that economists expect would revive talk of an early start to Fed 'tapering'.


Instead, economists suspect the Fed will not act until December or January at the earliest because economic data for October will be clouded by the government shutdown.


Peering through the fog, Kalish said declining weekly jobless insurance claims suggested the labor market was in good shape. He also took heart from rising output of capital goods.


"I'm cautiously optimistic that things are getting better and that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are gradually improving," he said.


The same cannot be said with much confidence about the euro zone. The bloc's purchasing managers' index is likely to edge up to 52.5 in October from 52.2 in September, but bank lending to the private sector is expected to shrink further.


Indeed, the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London said on Saturday that it was too soon to conclude that the 17-nation single currency area had emerged from the recession that began in the third quarter of 2011.


NO CATALYST, NO IMPETUS


Mark Cliffe, chief economist with ING Group, said he saw no obvious catalyst for a spontaneous improvement in the euro zone.


Monetary policy was on hold, fiscal policy was exerting less of a drag but was not providing a positive impetus, and many issues remained to be resolved about the future of the euro.


A two-day European Union summit will tackle some of these questions, including how to provide backstop funds to close any failing euro zone banks - a critical component of the ‘banking union' slowly being forged to underpin the currency.


No breakthrough is expected, not least because Germany has yet to form a coalition government after September's elections.


"Companies are still sitting on a lot of cash and are reluctant to invest because of the uncertainties that exist in Europe and around the world," Cliffe said.


"They're not in a hurry to hire people either, so you have a recipe for a fairly lackluster recovery at best," he added.


Any positive impetus would have to come from the global economy, Cliffe said. Here, too, the news is likely to be mixed this week.


BOOMING BRITAIN


Britain is expected to confirm continued robust growth for the third quarter, propelled by a housing recovery in southeast England that is generating something of a feel-good factor.


Economists polled by Reuters expect 0.8 percent quarterly growth after expansion of 0.7 percent in the April-June period.


Japan is likely to report that exports grew at their fastest pace in three years but that progress towards its goal of 2 percent inflation is slow despite massive monetary stimulus.


Core consumer prices, excluding fresh food but including oil, probably rose 0.7 percent in the year to September, below the near five-year high of 0.8 percent in the 12 months to August.


The HSBC/Markit purchasing managers' index for China is forecast to post only a small rise.


Anthony Chan, Asian sovereign bond strategist with AllianceBernstein in Hong Kong, said China's economy was likely to lose some momentum after inventory accumulation helped to lift the pace of GDP growth to 7.8 percent pace last quarter.


He said it was far more important to track the Communist Party's core policies rather than worry about marginal changes in the GDP growth rate or the central bank's monetary stance.


On this score, Chan said he was encouraged that Beijing had not resorted to ‘panic stimulus' earlier this year to ensure its 7 percent floor for 2013 growth was met.


"China should continue to be a source of stability in a world of still very volatile and uneven growth," he said.


(Editing by Jane Merriman)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/despite-debt-drama-u-still-outshining-europe-180751730--business.html
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Wildfires In Australia Destroy 200 Homes, May Get Worse





The charred headland at Catherine Hill Bay near Wyong on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia.



Dean Lewins/EPA /LANDOV


The charred headland at Catherine Hill Bay near Wyong on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia.


Dean Lewins/EPA /LANDOV


Authorities in Australia say major wildfires that have already scorched about 200 homes and 269,000 acres, could get worse.


CNN reports:




"'These conditions that we are looking at are a whole new ballgame and in a league of their own,' said the commissioner of rural fire services, Shane Fitzsimmons. 'The predictive charts indicate that there will be a significant impact on populated areas should all these forecasts materialize.'


"The situation is so bad that New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell declared a state of emergency for the state, which includes Sydney. The declaration gives firefighters special authority as conditions worsen.


'These powers include the right to order the public to leave or to enter an area, the right to shore up or demolish a building, and of course it also prevents people from disobeying an order given under these powers,' O'Farrell said Sunday."




The BBC reports that for one of the worst hit areas, The Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, this is the most dangerous fire in 40 years.


The big fear, however, is that the two fires in that area could combine with one burning near Lithgow and threaten the Sydney suburbs.


"The foot of the Blue Mountains lies just across the Nepean River from the suburbs of Sydney. Some embers jumped its banks last Thursday, starting a fire at Castlereagh near Penrith," the BBC reports. "After several cooler days, forecasters are predicting the return of unseasonably hot weather - with temperatures reaching 30C (86F) and higher."


Australia's ABC reports that some residents in the area have been told to leave, because the worst conditions are not expected until Wednesday.


The country's Rural Fire Service (RFS) has a map of the fires, which very clearly shows the danger Sydney is facing.


"It is in my view uncharted territory," RFS' Fitzsimmons told the ABC. "We are dealing with unparalleled conditions, which is why we're taking this extremely seriously."


Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/20/238355903/wildfires-in-australia-destroy-200-homes-may-get-worse?ft=1&f=
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You Can Actually Buy This Electric Flame-Throwing Batpod (Updated)

You Can Actually Buy This Electric Flame-Throwing Batpod (Updated)

This isn't the motorcycle you need. It's the motorcycle you deserve. You'll be able to conquer Bane and the morning rush hour commute aboard this insane Harley V-Rod mod. And yes, those are dual flamethrowers and shotguns up front.

Read more...

Source: http://gizmodo.com/you-can-actually-buy-this-electric-flame-throwing-batpo-1447232459
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