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NYTIMES.COM -- The ideological bent of those overseeing collegiate life is having the biggest impact on campus culture. The 12-to-1 ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a 6-to-1 ratio of liberal to conservative professors. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate -- and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators. This warped ideological distribution should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling you. ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic about how student totalitarianism is destroying campuses and higher education in the West. The idea is so obvious that it barely needs mentioning. The Western higher education system has been in a death spiral for at least a decade now. I hesitate to accuse Nichols of being half right. I also teach at a university and therefore observe the rot from within. It is increasingly a fashion to harrumph against the students for everything. It is not the students who are the cause. It is a certain section of professors, academics, and departments that act as Soviet political commissars within campuses. The students are simply pawns in a greater power play. ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- Does the brain house personality, intellect, totally, so that the inescapable "I" is reducible to three pounds of flesh? "Yes" say atheists and mind deniers Coyne, Dennett, and Harris, and college students and media consumers are similarly instructed. The denial of free will, of the soul, require the brain to be just that. If Harris et al. were right, then research should not show that thought can change the brain (mind over matter), as it can. If materialists were right, Benjamin Libet's experiments demonstrating "free won't" should have had different results. But they never tell you that, do they? "Materialists understand that materialism cannot explain the mind. Rather than abandoning materialism, they abandon the mind," says Dr. Egnor. ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: The video is linked in the article.] ARTICLE: What if the way the culture directs us to think about our own biological origins is based on a vast, highly influential myth? The myth is materialism. The idea that only material stuff actually exists, and immaterial or spiritual realities -- the mind, free will, the soul -- aren't real at all but are just fobbed off on us by our brains. The culture that propagates the myth works through the media, popular science spokesmen like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, education, and more than a few genuine scientists. If true, it means the things we care about most, including love, passion, meaning, a sense of right and wrong, and so much else, are illusions. ...

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QUILLETTE.COM -- In the main, religion is a force for good in the families we examined in this report -- from 11 countries ranging from Mexico to Canada, from the United States to Ireland. Partners who attend religious services together tend to do better than their secular peers and their peers in nominally religious, or religiously mixed, relationships. They are more likely to report higher-quality relationships marked by greater satisfaction, commitment, attachment, and stability, for instance. Men and women who share a faith are also significantly more likely to say they are "strongly satisfied" with their sexual relationship. The effects are especially large for women here ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- LIBERATIONIST.ORG -- GM's workplace dress code was 10-pages long, until GM's new head of HR shrank it to two words: "Dress appropriately." The beauty of a simple rule is that it defines the criteria and lets people use their best judgment. Here are 5 ways to enable your people by using rules appropriately. #2. Don't Punish 97% of Your Employees. Most organizations design rules with the wrongdoers in mind. Quoting former Chaparral Steel CEO, "they are managing for the 3%." #4. Trust People and They Will Trust You Back. Control is the opposite of trust. Netflix's travel policy treats people like adults: "Do what's best for Netflix." ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- HBR.ORG -- HARVARD -- Here are [some of] our initial takeaways: Bureaucracy is growing not shrinking. Nearly 2/3 of respondents felt their organization had become more bureaucratic -- more centralized, more rule-bound and more conservative. Bureaucracy is the enemy of speed. Bureaucracy undermines empowerment. Bureaucracy frustrates innovation. Only 20% of respondents said that unconventional ideas were greeted with interest or enthusiasm. 80% said new ideas were likely to encounter indifference, skepticism, or outright resistance. Bureaucracies are petty and political. When asked to identify the most significant barriers to down-sizing bureaucracy, nearly two-thirds of front-line associates viewed power lust as a barrier, only a third of CEOs shared that view. ...

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NEWSWISE.COM -- Previous research suggests that sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is an innate trait associated with greater sensitivity, or responsiveness, to environmental and social stimuli. Highly sensitive people (HSP), those high in SPS, encompass roughly 20% of the population. Humans characterized as HSPs tend to show heightened awareness to subtle stimuli, process information more thoroughly, and be more reactive to both positive and negative stimuli. In contrast, the majority of people have comparatively low SPS and pay less attention to subtle stimuli, approach situations more quickly and are not as emotionally reactive. ...

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FS.BLOG -- The passive mindset is defined by an attitude, an assumption that life happens to you and you're not responsible. People with this mindset also say things like, "Why does this always happen to me?" When the language you use about things going on in your life is passive, you slowly convince yourself that nothing is your responsibility. This makes you feel good because it absolves you from responsibility. It means you don't have to look inside yourself and change anything. It means you're not in control. An active attitude means ownership. You own your failures. An active mindset means you are responsible for things you control. ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- ARTOFMANLINESS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Ismaili Digest provides outstanding RSS feeds and, personally, we also use RSS to browse the internet for all the reasons explained.] ARTICLE: To keep up on the things that interest me, I've wandered back to 2008 technology: RSS and email. My information consumption has escaped the algorithm [telling me what I'd be interested in reading] and let me tell you, it feels amazing. Since ceasing to use social media to get my content my life has improved significantly in several ways: I see the content I want to see. I spend less time online. I'm happier because I'm spending less time online I have more time to do things I enjoy in real life and because I don't see the opinions of the masses, I don't expose myself to all the negativity that plagues social media. I've noticed I'm less pissy the less I'm exposed to the low-grade fever of anger that constantly brews online. ...

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NYTIMES.COM -- A new book, "Uncharitable," seethes with indignation at public expectations that charities be prudent, nonprofit and saintly. Dan Pallotta argues powerfully that the aid world is stunted because groups are discouraged from using such standard business tools as advertising, risk-taking, competitive salaries and profits to lure capital. Yet there's a broad recognition in much of the aid community that a major rethink is necessary, that groups would be more effective if they borrowed more tools from the business world ... It's notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book, and it's certainly becoming more socially acceptable to note that businesses can also play a powerful role in fighting poverty. ...

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[H/T MOHIB EBRAHIM] -- THEFEDERALIST.COM -- In college, I voraciously ingested all the great anti-theist scribes, from Christopher Hitchens to Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris. It enabled me to roll my eyes at anything religious with the best of them. My once-rabid atheism evolved not into belief, but into a calm acceptance of the more faithful people I met, as I gradually came to understand what many non-believers fail to: You're not smarter or stronger than religious people, and you don't know something that they fail to grasp. The notion that you've finally cracked the multi-millennium religious instinct because you angrily read a New York Times bestseller is unlikely. [Consider] Francis Collins, the decoder of the human genome who converted from atheism to Christianity, or Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest who first theorized an expanding universe. Can you confidently look down on them as deluded? ...

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THEGUARDIAN.COM -- It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google - and it was created by one of Britain's most notorious tycoons. It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other's work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a "bizarre" "triple-pay" system, in which "the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product." ...

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THEATLANTIC.COM -- The Social Sciences Replication Project attempted to replicate 21 social-science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science. They ran much bigger versions of the original studies, recruiting around five times as many volunteers, did all their work in the open, and ran their plans past the teams behind the original experiments. Ultimately, they only reproduced 62% of the 21. As it turned out, that finding was entirely predictable. The SSRP team also ran a "prediction market" ... Overall, the traders thought the studies would replicate 63% of the time. Ledgerwood notes that the prediction markets worked because they relied on a crowd of people making judgements as a collective. ...

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