During Pandemic, Conditions and Information Constantly Change, Making Decision-Making Stressful and Exhausting

(p. A14) What should you wear today? What to eat for lunch? If life’s daily questions are getting harder to answer nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, you aren’t alone, according to a new survey.

The survey, conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of the American Psychological Association, found that 32% of American adults were sometimes so stressed about the pandemic that making basic decisions was tough.

. . .

“For many, the pandemic has imposed the need for constant risk assessment, with routines upended and once trivial tasks recast,” the study said. “When the factors influencing a person’s decisions are constantly changing, no decision is routine. And this is proving to be exhausting.”

For the full story, see:

Allison Prang. “Can’t Decide? It Could Be Pandemic Stress.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Oct. 27, 2021): A14.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 26, 2021, and has the title “Can’t Decide What to Wear? It May Be Pandemic Stress.”)

The survey mentioned above is reported in detail in:

Association, American Psychological. “Stress in America™ 2021: Stress and Decision-Making During the Pandemic.” Washington, D.C., 2021.

UNO Center Study Finds “Vast Majority” of Jan. 6th Rioters “Were Not Affiliated with Organized Groups”

Nice photo of Gina Ligon, director of NCITE, in Mammel Hall blocking our view of Jun Kaneko’s “Mr. Papercliphead” sculpture (my name for it, not Kaneko’s). (Source of photo: Omaha World-Herald article quoted below.)

(p. A3) UNO’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (known by the acronym NCITE) was less than a year old when rioters bearing banners of then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol as Congress certified Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. But it has given new focus to the work of NCITE, which was established in 2020 with a 10-year, $36.5 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security to be the agency’s research hub.

“I’ve never seen so many resources and such consistent energy toward understanding the domestic terror threat,” said Gina Ligon, the center’s director. “(The Jan. 6 attack) has made what we’re doing more urgent.”

. . .

“My first thought was that it was this organized, top-down militia that got everyone spun up,” Ligon said.

That’s not the way it turned out.

A study released last week by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism — part of the NCITE consortium — showed that just 11% of those arrested so far were members of known extremist organizations.

“The vast majority were not affiliated with organized groups,” said Seamus Hughes, the program’s deputy director.

The study also dismissed any notion that large numbers of rioters were down-and-out “skinheads” associated with past far-right groups.

Instead, the analysts found a diverse group ranging in age from 18 to 80, representing 350 counties in 45 states. Most (87%) are male, and most had jobs. There were business owners, real estate agents, a yoga instructor, a state legislator and even a musical theater actor.

Although some press attention has focused on the arrest of current or former military service members, only 11% had ties to the military.

For the full story, see:

Steve Liewer. “UNO Experts Find Surprises in Capitol Riot Arrest Data.” Omaha World-Herald (Monday, Jan. 10, 2022): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 13, 2022, and has the title “UNO Counterterrorism Experts Find Surprises in Capitol Riot Arrest Data.”)

China’s “Surveillance State” Is “the Perfect Rendition of George Orwell’s 1984”

(p. C13) Kai Strittmatter, the author of “We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State,” lived in China first as a student and then as a journalist. Full of interesting anecdotes, his book vividly depicts China as the perfect rendition of George Orwell’s “1984” via its implementation of “Smart Cities,” where surveillance cameras and AI algorithms watch and modify every citizen’s every action.  . . .   If we let China run the world, we may all be harmonized.

For the full review, see:

Desmond Shum. “12 Months of Reading; Desmond Shum.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021): C13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 10, 2021, and has the title “Who Read What: Business Leaders Share Their Favorite Books of 2021.”)

The book praised by Shum is:

Strittmatter, Kai. We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State. New York: Custom House, 2020.

At the University of Austin, the Intellectually Diverse Will Discuss, Rather Than Censor, “Provocative Questions”

(p. A16) A group of scholars and activists are planning to establish a new university dedicated to free speech, alarmed, they said, “by the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s most prestigious universities.”

The university, to be known as the University of Austin, or UATX for short, will have a soft start next summer with “Forbidden Courses,” a noncredit program that its founders say will offer a “spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”

The university then plans to expand to master’s programs and, in several years, to undergraduate courses.

. . .

The prospective university’s board of advisers features some of the most prominent iconoclasts in the country, including Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president; Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist and psychologist; David Mamet, the playwright; and Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown.

. . .

“I think new models for a university are important,” Dr. Pinker said, “because current universities are locked into a strange business model: exorbitant tuition, a mushrooming bureaucracy, and obscure admissions policies that are neither meritocratic nor egalitarian, combined with plummeting intellectual diversity and tolerance for open inquiry (which is, after all, a university’s raison d’être).”

For the full story, see:

Anemona Hartocollis. “Organizers Plan New University They Say Will Defend Free Speech.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 9, 2021): A16.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 8, 2021, and has the title “They Say Colleges Are Censorious. So They Are Starting a New One.”)

Louise Slade Was “Well Compensated” for Her Role in 47 Kraft Patents

(p. B7) Louise Slade, a groundbreaking food scientist whose work you can thank for soft-from-the-freezer ice cream, extra-chewy cookies and potato chips that retain their satisfying crunch despite being baked and not fried, died on Oct. 7 [2021] in Morristown, N.J.

. . .

It has been said that cooking is an art but baking is a science, and perhaps no one understood that adage better than Dr. Slade, whose research focused on how to keep dough, bread, cookies and crackers tasting delicious even after weeks on a grocery store shelf.

. . .

Dr. Slade’s great insight, which she developed over some 25 years as a scientist at General Foods and Kraft, was to consider food not as a combination of discrete ingredients but as a system of interacting molecules. By understanding those interactions, one could build predictive models for how, for example, to tweak a bread recipe to make it stay fresh longer without chemical preservatives.

“She was the only person I knew who could swim among the molecules and understand them at their most fundamental level,” Hamed Faridi, the executive director of the McCormick Science Institute, said in an interview. “Her strength was her impressive knowledge of how those molecules interact to create flavor and texture.”

. . .

“A lot of what Louise established was how to make products consistent and stable without putting in a lot of additives consumers don’t want,” Todd Abraham, who worked with Dr. Slade at Kraft, said in an interview.

Dr. Slade provided not just a framework for answering those challenges but also a voluminous amount of research: She and Dr. Levine, who worked together for much of their professional careers, published some 260 papers and received 47 patents. She once estimated that the patents she received for her corporate employers were worth more than $1 billion.

. . .

She also began to work with the Monell Chemical Senses Center, an independent research institution in Philadelphia that studies taste and smell; she eventually joined its board.

Personally frugal and well compensated for her corporate work, Dr. Slade became one of Monell’s chief donors, giving more than $2 million in her lifetime, Dr. Gary Beauchamp, the center’s emeritus director, said.

For the full obituary, see:

Clay Risen. “Louise Slade, Scientist Who Ensured Your Goodies Stay Good, Is Dead at 74.” The New York Times (Monday, November 1, 2021): B7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Nov. 1, 2021, and has the title “Louise Slade, Scientist Who Studied the Molecules in Food, Dies at 74.”)