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1.7 Million Unspoken Words
Have you noticed? Compared to prior decades, we’re spending more time alone. American Time Use Surveys from 2003 to 2024 found that 15- to 25-year-olds’ in-person socializing plummeted—from 60 to 36 minutes daily, with parallel, but lesser, declines among older folks. We’re working more from home. We’re less often dining out with others and more often eating take-out food. We’re shopping more online. We’re more often living alone—with U.S. single-person households having doubled since 1960. We’re also spending much more time online. For some people, online time includes chatbot friends, which are available 24/7 to offer comfort, support, and encouragement.
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Stressing Over Something? These 3 Questions Can Help
... One method I use to corral my spiraling thoughts was developed by Martin Seligman, the director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center and a leading authority on happiness. He studies how people build resilience and has found that how we describe our hardships to ourselves can influence how we view them. In his decades of research, Dr. Seligman has developed a three-part framework people can use to interpret life’s challenges: permanence, pervasiveness and agency. I find it helpful to pose a question about each one when I’m feeling out of control.
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APS issues statement on the Proposed Elimination of the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
APS issued a statement urging Congress and the White House to work together to ensure the sustained continuity of research, education, and training.
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APS Statement on Disruptions to NSF Leadership
In April, the Administration dismissed all 22 seated National Science Board members—the independent, Congressionally mandated oversight body—leaving the National Science Foundation without its Board and a confirmed Director. APS sent a letter urging the Senate
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Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?
In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announced that its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with a Catholic priest and consulting with other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.
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Harvard Caps A’s as Selective Colleges Attack Grade Inflation
Faculty members at Harvard University voted in recent days to cap the number of top grades they are permitted to award to undergraduate students, in an attempt to reduce grade inflation at one of America’s most prestigious colleges. ... Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor who has been outspoken about the problem of grade inflation, cheered the results. “Grade inflation forced a race to the bottom in which any professors who held the line with challenging material and standards would see their enrollments plummet,” Dr. Pinker said in an email.
