“
Sociologist James House of the University of Michigan declares that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two!
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Sue Johnson (Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (The Dr. Sue Johnson Collection Book 1))
“
The University of Michigan’s Karl Weick advises, “Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.
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Robert I. Sutton (The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't)
“
Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office."
quoting, David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan
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Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)
“
a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study’s authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and “hyper-competitiveness.”)
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Professor O’Leary was Professor of Mediaeval Literature at Ann Arbor University in Michigan, just outside Detroit.
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Nevil Shute (Trustee from the Toolroom)
“
Sol sneered. “The Unabomber was a mathematician.”
“What Ted Kaczynski did can barely be called math,” David said. “Boundary conditions! Totally irrelevant.”
“He had a PhD.”
“From the University of Michigan. I don’t know if that even counts. And don’t think I don’t know that it was his brother who turned him in.”
Sol looked at him closely. “Whose name was David. That’s your name, right?”
“I would never turn you in.”
Sol shrugged. “Of course not,” he said and drove on.
”
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Michael Grigsby (Segment of One)
“
The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives.
As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed.
In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are:
- Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person.
- Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual.
Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish:
- Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day
- Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish
Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves.
The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.
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Malcolm Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
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The majority of my generation decides to move back in with their parents after college. Unemployment, for them, is twice the national average. According to one 2011 study by the University of Michigan, many graduates aren’t even bothering to learn how to drive. The road is blocked, they are saying, so why get a license I won’t be able to use? We whine and complain and mope when things won’t go our way. We’re crushed when what we were “promised” is revoked—as if that’s not allowed to happen. Instead of doing much about it, we sit at home and play video games or travel or worse, pay for more school with more loan debt that will never be forgiven. And then we wonder why it isn’t getting any better.
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
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Hiking connects us to ourselves. A University of Michigan study found that because our senses evolved in nature, by getting back to it we connect more honestly with our sensory reactions. Which connects us with our true selves, and enhances a feeling of “oneness.” Or perhaps we could say, a Something Else.
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Sarah Wilson (First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety)
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Several analyses of the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study have observed a link between a high sense of purpose and decreased mortality in adults over fifty.
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Gladys McGarey (The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age)
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What is the one-sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting” (Larry Page, University of Michigan Commencement Address, May 2009).
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Henry Cloud (The Power of the Other: The startling effect other people have on you, from the boardroom to the bedroom and beyond-and what to do about it)
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In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.
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James Henry Breasted (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary)
“
Functional, moderate guilt,” writes Kochanska, “may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends.” This is an especially important set of attributes at a time when a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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NBC News
"Lead from gasoline blunted the IQ of about half the U.S. population, study says" by Elizabeth Chuck
…on a population basis, shifting the average IQ down even a small amount could have large consequences, said Sung Kyun Park, an associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. The entire bell curve shifts, he explained, with more of the population at what was once the extreme low end of IQ scores.
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Park, Sung Kyun
“
This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls “relentlessly pleasant.”22 This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance.23 Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused … and smile.
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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He had been enthralled with the University of Michigan campus, and he could have stayed there. There’d been enough money left from the stash he’d hidden in jail to pay for a twelve-dollar room at the YMCA, but Michigan nights in January can be unrelentingly icy, and he didn’t have warm clothing.
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Ann Rule (The Stranger Beside Me)
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This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study26 found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study27 which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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Sociologist James House of the University of Michigan declares that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two! Perhaps these findings reflect the time-honored saying “Suffering is a given; suffering alone is intolerable.
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Sue Johnson (Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (The Dr. Sue Johnson Collection Book 1))
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The Effects of Personal Bias and Hiring Urgency There are other types of cognitive biases that affect the hiring process. Another harmful one is personal bias, the basic human instinct to surround yourself with people who are like you. People have a natural desire to hire those with similar characteristics: educational background, professional experience, functional expertise, and similar life experiences. The middle-aged manager who holds a degree from the University of Michigan, worked at McKinsey, lives in the suburbs with a partner and kids, and plays golf will tend to be attracted to candidates with similar attributes.
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
“
2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study’s authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and “hyper-competitiveness.”)
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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It would be the twentieth century before the opening of the British Headquarters Papers at the University of Michigan proved what the eighteenth century refused to believe that a young and beautiful woman was capable of helping Benedict Arnold plot the greatest conspiracy of the American Revolution and then completely fooling the astute warriors around her.
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Willard Sterne Randall (Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor)
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My mom found a couple decent universities in America that accept late applications. The Univeristy of Michigan is one, I’m pretty sure.
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Ann Liang (This Time It's Real)
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graduate of the University of Western Michigan’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School, perhaps the least-prestigious institution in the nation from which to receive a legal education,
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Michael Cohen (Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump)
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March 6, 1961
I remembered a party in a house outside of Ann Arbor. There was a jazz band -- piano, bass, drums, and sax -- playing in one of the large rooms. A heavy odor of marijuana hung in the air. The host appeared now and then looking pleased, as if he liked seeing strangers in every room, the party out of his control. It wasn't wild, but with a constant flow of people, who knows what they're doing. It became late and I was a little drunk, wandering from one part of the house to another. I entered a long hall and was surprised by the silence, as if I had entered another house. A girl at the other end of the hall was walking toward me. I saw large blue eyes and very black hair. She was about average height, doll-like features delicate as cut glass, extremely pretty, maybe the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. When she came up to me I took her in my arms and kissed her. She let it happen. We were like creatures in a dream. Holding her hand, I drew her with me and we passed through rooms where people stood about, and then left the house. As we drove away, she said her name was Margo. She was a freshman at the university, from a town in northern Michigan. I took her home. It was obvious she'd never gone home with a man. She didn't seem fearful, only uncertain, the question in her eyes: "What happens next?" What happened next was nothing much. We fell asleep in our clothes. I wasn't the one to make her no different from everyone.
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Leonard Michaels (Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995)
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For a macro cross-industry view, however, consider the robust methodology used in The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), developed by Claes Fornell in conjunction with the National Quality Research Center (NQRC), Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. ACSI measures consumer satisfaction with goods and services in the United States.
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Robert Thompson (Hooked On Customers: The Five Habits of Legendary Customer-Centric Companies)
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From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn’t returning to New York anytime soon.
You Know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they’ve ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about “going beyond the cordon” when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others.
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Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan)
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We have long known that women (in particular women under fifty-five) have worse outcomes than men following heart surgery. But it wasn’t until a Canadian study came out in 2016 that researchers were able to isolate women’s care burden as one of the factors behind this discrepancy. ‘We have noticed that women who have bypass surgery tend to go right back into their caregiver roles, while men were more likely to have someone to look after them,’ explained lead researcher Colleen Norris.25 This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study26 found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study27 which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)
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Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
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I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan, when this offer to me of an appointment to the United States Military Academy came out of the blue. The offer arrived at a low point in my father’s life, when he needed something to boast about which would impress our simple-minded neighbors. They would think an appointment to West Point was a great prize, like being picked for a professional baseball team.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Hocus Pocus)
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The most remarkable thing in Binder's article may be her reference to a Women's Studies professor at the University of Michigan who, in Binder's words, worries that Fat Studies "may lead to a social proselytizing rather than serious study." In short, identity studies are becoming so far removed from any hint of academic or intellectual legitimacy that even teachers of a more established and only moderately asinine disciplines are reacting to the far more extreme asininity of newer ones.
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Bruce Bawer (The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind)
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Three quotes from the same column:
Self-reliance --"work"-- is intimately connected to human dignity --"purpose."
"Work" and "purpose" are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one's family.
If you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty.
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Mark Steyn
“
Bruce Friedman, who blogs about the use of computers in medicine, has also described how the Internet is altering his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he says.4 A pathologist on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.
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Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
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IGGY POP: The first time I heard the Velvet Underground and Nico record was at a party on the University of Michigan campus. I just hated the sound. You know, “HOW COULD ANYBODY MAKE A RECORD THAT SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT? THIS IS DISGUSTING! ALL THESE PEOPLE MAKE ME FUCKING SICK! FUCKING DISGUSTING HIPPIE VERMIN! FUCKING BEATNIKS, I WANNA KILL THEM ALL! THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE TRASH!” Then about six months later it hit me. “Oh my god! WOW! This is just a fucking great record!” That record became very key for me, not just for what it said, and for how great it was,
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Legs McNeil (Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk)
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Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? Back in 1995 the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health declared healthy sexual development a basic human right. Teen intimacy, it said, ought to be “consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs.” How is it, over two decades later, that we are so shamefully short of that goal?
Sara McClelland, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice,” touching on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough?” Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ early, formative experience. Nonetheless, I was determined to ask them.
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Peggy Orenstein (Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape)
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Keep Plants Nearby Even if it’s just a small pot of green, plants can actually work wonders for your concentration. This has been proven after two studies performed in 2011 and 2013. According to psychologists from the University of Michigan, plants are part of the “attention restoration theory” which basically means it restores your focus on the work with just one quick glimpse. Don’t forget that the green color of plants is also excellent for the eyes so you’re basically “refreshing” your mind and vision through a simple plant. With you practically rejuvenated, your work productivity should increase.
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Rafael Gurkovsky (Life Hacks: Productivity: Bet You didn't Know It could Do That: Life Hacks that'll Blow Your Mind (diy, how to live, living, be more, inspiration, stress))
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Lake Michigan, impossibly blue, the morning light bouncing toward the city.
Lake Michigan frozen in sheets you could walk on but wouldn't dare.
Lake Michigan, gray out a high-rise window, indistinguishable from the sky.
Bread, hot from the oven. Or even stale in the restaurant basket, rescued by salty butter.
The Cubs winning the pendant someday. The Cubs winning the Series. The Cubs continuing to lose.
His favorite song, not yet written. His favorite movie, not yet made.
The depth of an oil brushstroke. Chagall's blue window. Picasso's blue man and his guitar.
...
The sound of an old door creaking open. The sound of garlic cooking. The sound of typing. The sound of commercials from the next room, when you were in the kitchen getting a drink. The sound of someone else finishing a shower.
...
Dancing till the floor was an optional landing place. Dancing elbows out, dancing with arms up, dancing in a pool of sweat.
All the books he hadn't started.
The man at Wax Trax! Records with the beautiful eyelashes. The man who sat every Saturday at Nookies, reading the Economist and eating eggs, his ears always strangely red. The ways his own life might have intersected with theirs, given enough time, enough energy, a better universe.
The love of his life. Wasn't there supposed to be a love of his life?
...
His body, his own stupid, slow, hairy body, its ridiculous desires, its aversions, its fears. The way his left knee cracked in the cold.
The sun, the moon, the sky, the stars.
The end of every story.
Oak trees.
Music.
Breath.
...
”
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Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers)
“
Functional, moderate guilt,” writes Kochanska, “may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends.” This is an especially important set of attributes at a time when a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study’s authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and “hyper-competitiveness.”)
”
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Functional, moderate guilt,” writes Kochanska, “may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends.” This is an especially important set of attributes at a time when a 2010 University of Michigan study shows that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, with much of the drop having occurred since 2000. (The study’s authors speculate that the decline in empathy is related to the prevalence of social media, reality TV, and “hyper-competitiveness.”) Of
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Communication is not just about words. It’s about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheromones, all of which can’t be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes.” And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.
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Nancy Jo Sales (American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers)
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and pulled to a stop. He turned to Candy and kissed her—their first kiss. From then on, Ben and Candy were inseparable. They did their homework together. They encouraged each other. They were in love. * * * During his final year of college, Ben applied to medical schools. Unlike many of his classmates who were worried about which medical school would accept them, Ben was confident that he would go to the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He believed so firmly that God wanted him to be a doctor that he never doubted he would be accepted. One day another student who was agonizing about his own medical school applications turned to Ben and asked, “Carson, aren’t you worried?
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Gregg Lewis (Gifted Hands, Kids Edition: The Ben Carson Story (ZonderKidz Biography))
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Just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant." This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance. Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused... and smile.
No wonder women don't negotiate as much as men. It's like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. So what should we do? Should we play by the rules that others created? Should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty and using "we" language? I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. It is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. So at the very least, women can enter these negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.
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Sheryl Sandberg
“
It was only when professionals believed that reports on errors and near misses would be treated as learning opportunities rather than a pretext to blame that this crucial information started to flow. Managers were initially worried that reducing the penalties for error would lead to an increase in the number of errors. In fact, the opposite happened. Insurance claims fell by a dramatic 74 percent. Similar results have been found elsewhere. Claims and lawsuits made against the University of Michigan Health System, for example, dropped from 262 in August 2001 to 83 following the introduction of an open disclosure policy in 2007. The number of lawsuits against the University of Illinois Medical Center fell by half in two years after creating a system of open reporting.
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
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Conversely, high-reactive children may be more likely to develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar—and intellectually fertile—environment of their own heads. “The university is filled with introverts,” observes the psychologist Jerry Miller, director of the Center for the Child and the Family at the University of Michigan. “The stereotype of the university professor is accurate for so many people on campus. They like to read; for them there’s nothing more exciting than ideas. And some of this has to do with how they spent their time when they were growing up. If you spend a lot of time charging around, then you have less time for reading and learning. There’s only so much time in your life.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
The results of the most recent such study were published in Psychological Science at the end of 2008. A team of University of Michigan researchers, led by psychologist Marc Berman, recruited some three dozen people and subjected them to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy down town streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.
The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at pictures of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. “In sum,” concluded the researchers, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.
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Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains)
“
You must live a very free life."
"Me?" she laughed. "I am not who swoops out of the sky to rain fire on pirates!"
"Yeah, but before this I never did much. I mean I did a lot, but...I lived in a room at a university, and my whole world was in that little room. There was this world inside my head."
De la Fitte studied his head as if she could see through his skull to a little globe inside it somewhere.
”
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Sam Starbuck (The Dead Isle)
“
For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
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Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
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A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.
The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche.
Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks.
Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.
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Edward L. Glaeser (Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier)
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Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. Leaving a note requesting that your family and friends travel to the Ganges or ship your body to a plastination lab in Michigan is a way of exerting influence after you’re gone—of still being there, in a sense. I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be made by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s none of their business what happens to them when they die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to. McCabe’s policy is to honor the wishes of the family over the wishes of the dead. Willed body program coordinators feel similarly. “I’ve had kids object to their dad’s wishes [to donate],” says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “I tell them, ‘Do what’s best for you. You’re the one who has to live with it.
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Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
“
Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,' says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. "Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheremones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes."
And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.
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Nancy Jo Sales
“
I don’t know if I’ll get in at Stanford,” one premed said to me after he had sent in his application. “Or anywhere else,” he added.
Another mentioned a different school, but the students’ worries were essentially the same. I seldom got involved in what I called freaking out, but this kind of talk happened often, especially during our senior year.
One time when this freaking out was going on and I didn’t enter in, one of my friends turned to me, “Carson, aren’t you worried?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to the University of Michigan Medical School.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’s real simple. My father owns the university.”
“Did you hear that?” he yelled at one of the others. “Carson’s old man owns the University of Michigan.” Several students were impressed. And understandably because they came from extremely wealthy homes. Their parents owned great industries. Actually, I had been teasing, and maybe it wasn’t playing fair. As a Chrisitan, I believe that God— my Heavenly Father— not only created the universe, but He controls it. And, by extension, God owns the University of Michigan and everything else.
I never did explain.
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Ben Carson (Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story)
“
The country was becoming increasingly disgusted by Prince Edward, which was making national headlines for its still-closed schools. Dr. Robert L. Green and a team of researchers from Michigan State University, funded by the US Office of Education, came to town, attempting to determine how black schoolchildren had been affected. They would soon learn that the illiteracy rate of black students ages five to twenty-two had jumped from 3 percent when the schools had closed to a staggering 23 percent. They found seven-year-old children who couldn't hold a pencil or make an X. Some didn't know how old they were; others couldn't communicate.
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Kristen Green (Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle)
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University of Michigan psychologist Felix Warneken walks across the room, carrying a tall stack of magazines, toward the doors of a closed wooden cabinet. He bumps into the front of the cabinet, exclaims a startled “Oh!,” and backs away. Staring for a moment at the cabinet, he makes a thoughtful “Hmm,” before shuffling forward and bumping the magazines against the cabinet doors again. Again he backs away, defeated, and says, pitiably, “Hmmm . . .” It’s as if he can’t figure out where he’s gone wrong. From the corner of the room, a toddler comes to the rescue. The child walks somewhat unsteadily toward the cabinet, heaves open the doors one by one, then looks up at Warneken with a searching expression, before backing away. Warneken, making a grateful sound, puts his pile of magazines on the shelf.1 Warneken, along with his collaborator Michael Tomasello of Duke, was the first to systematically show, in 2006, that human infants as young as eighteen months old will reliably identify a fellow human facing a problem, will identify the human’s goal and the obstacle in the way, and will spontaneously help if they can—even if their help is not requested, even if the adult doesn’t so much as make eye contact with them, and even when they expect (and receive) no reward for doing so.2
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Brian Christian (The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values)
“
Dontchev was born in Bulgaria and emigrated to America as a young kid when his father, a mathematician, took a job at the University of Michigan. He got an undergraduate and graduate degree in aerospace engineering, which led to what he thought was his dream opportunity: an internship at Boeing. But he quickly became disenchanted and decided to visit a friend who was working at SpaceX. “I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit. At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.
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Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
“
In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.
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Jonathan Rauch (The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth)
“
Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. "After watching these society. violent video games," he said, "I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them."
This wasn't the first time that America's political and moral estab lishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young. rupter "In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new cors/ of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; AD magazine's publisher, William Gaines. was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanist particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock 'n' roll-dangerous and uncontrolled.
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David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Three-and-a-half-month-old infants already seem to exhibit the other-race effect. In a study at the University of Kentucky, white babies were very good at distinguishing faces with 100 percent Caucasian features from faces that had been graphically morphed to include features that were 70 percent white and 30 percent Asian. They couldn’t do the reverse: They could not tell 100 percent Asian faces from those that were morphed to include 30 percent white features. In other words, they could detect small differences between white and not-quite-white faces, but not the same kinds of differences between Asian and not-quite-Asian faces.
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan did some of the pioneering work on how early in life children begin to understand race. He showed children of ages three, four, and seven, a picture of “Johnny:” a chubby black boy in a police uniform, complete with whistle and toy gun. He then showed them pictures of adults who shared two of Johnny’s three main traits of race, body build, and uniform. Prof. Hirschfeld prepared all combinations—policemen who were fat but were white, thin black policemen, etc.—and asked the children which was Johnny’s daddy or which was Johnny all grown up. Even the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to choose the black man rather than the fat man or the policeman. They knew that weight and occupation can change but race is permanent.
In 1996, after 15 years of studying children and race, Prof. Hirschfeld concluded: “Our minds seem to be organized in a way that makes thinking racially—thinking that the human world can be segmented into discrete racial populations—an almost automatic part of our mental repertoire.”
When white preschoolers are shown racially ambiguous faces that look angry, they tend to say they are faces of blacks, but categorize happy faces as white. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” explained Andrew Baron of Harvard.
Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, studied young children for their first six years. At age three, she showed them photographs of other children and asked them whom they would like to have as friends. Eighty-six percent of white children chose photographs of white children. At age five and six, she gave children pictures of people and told them to sort them into two piles by any criteria they liked. Sixty-eight percent sorted by race and only 16 by sex. Of her entire six-year study Prof. Katz said, “I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
“
We did the dishes and talked--about the cattle business, about my job back in L.A., about his local small town, about family. Then we adjourned to the sofa to watch an action movie, pausing occasionally to remind each other once again of the reason God invented lips. Curiously, though, while sexy and smoldering, Marlboro Man kept his heavy breathing to a minimum. This surprised me. He was not only masculine and manly, he lived in the middle of nowhere--one might expect that because of the dearth of women within a twenty-mile range, he’d be more susceptible than most to getting lost in a heated moment. But he wasn’t. He was a gentleman through and through--a sizzling specimen of a gentleman who was singlehandedly introducing me to a whole new universe of animal attraction, but a gentleman, nonetheless. And though my mercury was rising rapidly, his didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
He walked me to my car as the final credits rolled, offering to follow me all the way home if I wanted. “Oh, no,” I said. “I can get home, no problem.” I’d lived in L.A. for years; it’s not like driving alone at night bothered me. I started my car and watched him walk back toward his front door, admiring every last thing about him. He turned around and waved, and as he walked inside I felt, more than ever, that I was in big trouble. What was I doing? Why was I here? I was getting ready to move to Chicago--home of the Cubs and Michigan Avenue and the Elevated Train. Why had I allowed myself to stick my toe in this water?
And why did the water have to feel so, so good?
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Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
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University, where she is an adjunct professor of education and serves on the Veterans Committee, among about a thousand other things. That’s heroism. I have taken the kernel of her story and do what I do, which is dramatize, romanticize, exaggerate, and open fire. Hence, Game of Snipers. Now, on to apologies, excuses, and evasions. Let me offer the first to Tel Aviv; Dearborn, Michigan; Greenville, Ohio; Wichita, Kansas; Rock Springs, Wyoming; and Anacostia, D.C. I generally go to places I write about to check the lay of streets, the fall of shadows, the color of police cars, and the taste of local beer. At seventy-three, such ordeals-by-airport are no longer fun, not even the beer part; I only go where there’s beaches. For this book, I worked from maps and Google, and any geographical mistakes emerge out of that practice. Is the cathedral three hundred yards from the courthouse in Wichita? Hmm, seems about right, and that’s good enough for me on this. On the other hand, I finally got Bob’s wife’s name correct. It’s Julie, right? I’ve called her Jen more than once, but I’m pretty sure Jen was Bud Pewtie’s wife in Dirty White Boys. For some reason, this mistake seemed to trigger certain Amazon reviewers into psychotic episodes. Folks, calm down, have a drink, hug someone soft. It’ll be all right. As for the shooting, my account of the difficulties of hitting at over a mile is more or less accurate (snipers have done it at least eight times). I have simplified, because it is so arcane it would put all but the most dedicated in a coma. I have also been quite accurate about the ballistics app FirstShot, because I made it up and can make it do anything I want. The other shot, the three hundred, benefits from the wisdom of Craig Boddington, the great hunter and writer, who looked it over and sent me a detailed email, from which I have borrowed much. Naturally, any errors are mine, not Craig’s. I met Craig when shooting something (on film!) for another boon companion, Michael Bane, and his Outdoor Channel Gun Stories crew. For some reason, he finds it amusing when I start jabbering away and likes to turn the camera on. Don’t ask me why. On the same trip, I also met the great firearms historian and all-around movie guy (he knows more than I do) Garry James, who has become
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Stephen Hunter (Game of Snipers (Bob Lee Swagger, #11))
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A Brown University alum, Angell’s vision for Michigan was to create a university that could provide “an uncommon education for the common man.
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John U. Bacon (Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football)
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(...) just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant." (p.48)
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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A University of Michigan study found that college students don’t have as much empathy as they used to. College students are about 40 percent lower in empathy than they were twenty or thirty years ago.5
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Gary Chapman (Growing Up Social: Raising Relational Kids in a Screen-Driven World)
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To use a sports analogy, Putin’s attitude through the fall of 2015 was much like that of a University of Michigan football fan on a weekend the Wolverines don’t have a game—cheering for whoever was playing Ohio State.
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James R. Clapper (Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence)
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A researcher at the university of michigan found that, when asked to talk about good sex, college men are more likely than women to talk about pleasure while the women are more likely to use their partner's satisfaction to measure their own.
It's not suprising that young women feel powerful when they feel 'hot'. It's presented to them over and over as a precondition to success. But the truth is that 'hot' tells girls that appearing sexually confident is more important than actually being confident. And because of that, as often as not, the confidence that hot confers comes off with their clothes.
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Peggy Orenstein (Don't Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life)
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research by my University of Michigan colleague Shirli Kopelman and others indicates that negotiators who make the first offer do better economically but are less satisfied with outcomes because they feel more anxiety. (“Resolving the First-Offer Dilemma,” Negotiation, July 2007)
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George J. Siedel (Negotiating for Success: Essential Strategies and Skills)
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am passionately devoted to the science of motivation. I chose to get my doctorate in the Personality area of the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan because this is where the field of motivation originated. I was eager to develop a deep understanding of how to create sustainable motivation, goal pursuit, and behavior, and I learned many important things during this time.
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Michelle Segar (No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness)
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You said you didn’t know where I came from.” Verity met his gaze. “Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Michigan.
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Adrienne Bell (Jake (The Sinner Saints, #3))
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You are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a Secretary Hillary Clinton Get Out the Vote rally at Grand Valley State University Fieldhouse. It is Monday, November 7, 2016. “LOADING!” a press aide yelled. Hillary had just wrapped up her second and final rally in Michigan since she lost to Bernie back in March.
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Amy Chozick (Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn't)
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Physicists and cosmologists have explored ideas like these. For example, Fred C. Adams, of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, investigated varying the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant determining nuclear reaction rates. He found that about a quarter of all possible triples of these three values led to stars which would sustain nuclear fusion—like the stars in our universe. As he said, “[W]e conclude that universes with stars are not especially rare (contrary to previous claims).”8
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David J. Hand (The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day)
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contacts list. Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of online info about the former pastor turned college professor. A grainy photo on the Eastern Michigan University website, a brief and seemingly outdated bio of Dr. Neal Townsend, and the words “associate professor” underneath. Luke had even pushed the boundaries on crazy and paid for a background check, but the guy was a saint. Not even a traffic ticket. The mystery of Maranatha House was all but over. This Neal still bothered Luke though. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but it did. Luke scanned the sandwich shop for Felicity. They were meeting for dinner and a movie, and he was so nervous he’d ended up getting there early. This was their third official date, not counting the cinnamon rolls in her office. It wasn’t until halfway through their
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Emily Bleeker (When I'm Gone)
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passed in those days for computer terminals. In 1971, this was state of the art. The University of Michigan had one of the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over
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Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
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Estimates are difficult to establish, but a study led by Samuel R. Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, concluded: “If we reviewed prison sentences with the same level of care that we devote to death sentences, there would have been over 28,500 non-death-row exonerations [in the United States] in the past 15 years rather than the 255 that have in fact occurred.”12
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
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There’s one school that has proactively considered arming their classrooms. At Oakland University in Michigan, teachers and students have been armed with . . . hockey pucks. “According to the university’s police chief, the program stemmed from an idea raised during an active shooter training session, in which ‘one attendee asked what staff and students could bring to prepare themselves for a fight.’ The chief recalled once being struck in the head with a puck and said it ‘caused a fair amount of damage to me.’”210
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Jen Lancaster (Welcome to the United States of Anxiety: Observations from a Reforming Neurotic)
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The coach of a college football team can make thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions of people many of them otherwise stable and superficially reasonable adults insanely angry. I experience churning gastrointestinal distress on Saturdays during the season until Michigan has a lead of at least
seventeen points. In my idle moments, when taking showers and driving my three children around northern New Jersey, I spend more time mentally debating self-posed hypotheses such as. "Did Jim Harbaugh corner himself into a no-man's land between the Wisconsin Iowa system development model and the Ohio/Penn State talent acquisition model?" than I do thinking about any other question, including things such as, "Do I have the right career?" and "What are parents' and children's obligations to each other?" and "What happens to our souls when our bodies die?" This kind of fixation, conducive to neither peace of mind nor personal productivity, is very common.
Why are so many people like this?
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Ben Mathis-Lilley (The Hot Seat: A Year of Outrage, Pride, and Occasional Games of College Football)
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I also refused the family tradition of Yale and enrolled instead at Michigan State University and then he knew that he had truly lost me, not that he seemed to care.
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Jim Harrison (True North)
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Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, provides the best current explanation of how lived experiences can become biology. Her concept of weathering explains that high-effort coping from fighting against racism leads to chronic stress that can trigger premature aging and poor health outcomes. It works this way: stress, the body’s response to a perceived threat, prompts the brain to release hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol. This, in turn, causes blood pressure to increase and the heart rate to speed up. Short, infrequent bursts of this fight-or-flight response are normal, but when it happens again and again, it can turn deadly, eroding health and accelerating aging. Also, as the stressors pile up and feed on each other, they can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms—drinking, smoking, poor food choices, and drug use. Those who are economically disadvantaged have added stressors in their day-to-day fight for survival, but even educated, well-off African Americans struggle with
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Linda Villarosa (Under the Skin)
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A 250-pound man will burn three extra calories climbing one flight of stairs, as Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan calculated in 1942. “He will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread!” So why not skip the stairs and skip the bread and call it a day? After all, what are the chances that if a 250-pounder does climb twenty extra flights a day he won’t eat the equivalent of an extra slice of bread before the day is done?
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Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It)
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100%原版制作學历證书【+V信1954 292 140】《密歇根理工大学學位證》Michigan Technological University
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《密歇根理工大学學位證》
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Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, bears this out. Her research has demonstrated that positive emotions during crises do more than just help in the moment; in fact, they lead to superior long-term resilience, and an increased ability to cope and thrive in the future.1 Looking at college students’ responses to 9/11, Fredrickson found that those with negative emotions suffered lingering effects as compared to those who made an effort to concentrate on the positive. Thinking positively had a lasting benefit, helping subjects buffer themselves through future crises in their lives.
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Matt Higgins (Burn the Boats: Toss Plan B Overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential)
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Michigan required that all PhD students in psychology pass a proficiency test in two foreign languages. Weirdly, the university didn’t count Hebrew as a foreign language but accepted mathematics. Though entirely self-taught in mathematics, Amos chose math as one of his languages and passed the test. For his second language he picked French. The test was to translate three pages from a book in the language: The student chose the book, and the tester chose the pages to translate. Amos went to the library and dug out a French math textbook with nothing but equations in it. “It might have had the word donc in it,” said Amos’s roommate Mel Guyer. The University of Michigan declared Amos Tversky proficient in French.
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Michael Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds)
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They gave you, like, an hour of time. That’s all you’d get. But someone figured out that if you put in ‘time equals’ and then a letter, like t equals k, they wouldn’t charge you,” he said, laughing at the memory. “It was a bug in the software. You could put in t equals k and sit there forever.” Just look at the stream of opportunities that came Bill Joy’s way. Because he happened to go to a farsighted school like the University of Michigan,
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Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
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a University of Michigan study which found that husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls “relentlessly pleasant.”22
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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I don't think you understand. I didn't get any pussy in college. Really. I didn't get ANY pussy in college. none. work? Doing stuff? What the fuck is wrong with you? I really didn't get any pussy in college. None.
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Dmitry Dyatlov
“
This observation may go some way to explaining why a Finnish study found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women – particularly when put alongside a University of Michigan study which found that husbands create an extra seven hours o housework a week for women. An Australian study similarly found that housework time is most equal by gender for single men and women; when women start to cohabit, 'their housework time goes up while men's goes down, regardless of their employment status.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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Professor James V. McConnell, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, expressed his feelings about a smile. “People who smile,” he said, “tend to manage, teach, and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children. There’s far more information in a smile than a frown. That’s why encouragement is a much more effective teaching device than punishment.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People: Updated For the Next Generation of Leaders (Dale Carnegie Books))
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Nansook Park is one of the world’s leading experts on optimism and a professor at the University of Michigan. She describes confidence and optimism as closely related but with an important distinction—optimism is a more generalized outlook, and it doesn’t necessarily encourage action. Confidence does. “Optimism is the sense that everything will work out,” she says. “Confidence is, ‘I can make this thing work.
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Katty Kay;Claire Shipman
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Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, recently calculated that his university has nearly 100 diversity administrators, with a total cost of approximately $14 million per year, or $300 per enrolled student.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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One study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed data from almost fourteen thousand college students. What they found was alarming: empathy has been decreasing over the past thirty years, so much so that the college kids in their study measured 40 percent lower in empathy on tests of the trait than their counterparts just a few decades ago. The drop is so startling some researchers have even declared a “narcissism epidemic.
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Jennifer Breheny Wallace (Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It)
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Dr. Alice Parnes of the University of Michigan, one of the founding figures in ADHD diagnosis and treatment, says, “ADHD is a disorder in which the attentional process is seriously disrupted.” She explains, “the ADHD child really can’t pay attention. They are not bad at listening and following directions; they can’t concentrate.” (Reed, 2019)
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Leila Molaie (ADHD DECODED- A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO ADHD IN ADOLESCENTS: Understand ADHD, Break through symptoms, thrive with impulses, regulate emotions, and learn techniques to use your superpower.)
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A survey conducted by the University of Michigan in 2005 identifies a range of barriers to execution, first among which is the “past/habits” of the organization.38 In most cases the underlying problem was attributed to “leadership.” The respondents’ view was that the solution was to focus on alignment. The survey’s author questions this, suggesting that although we put a lot of effort into developing and communicating strategy, “what we do not do is anticipate that things will change.”39
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Stephen Bungay (The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results)
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Moreover, an archetype exists in the nation’s consciousness that connects student loan debt with irresponsibility. This is a result of well-publicized accounts of loan defaults in decades past in which students took out loans with no intention of ever paying them back and simply filed for bankruptcy after graduation. This perception was sufficiently strong that in the 1970s, Congress was convinced to remove bankruptcy protections from student loans. However, according to a March 2007 paper by John A. E. Pottow of the University of Michigan, this perception had a fatal flaw: “The fatal problem is that there are no empirical data to buttress the myth that students defraud creditors any more than other debtors.”1 In fact, it was shown that when student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy, there was a less than 1 percent bankruptcy rate among student debtors.2 Nevertheless, this misconception has been so often repeated that it is now indelibly etched in the public’s mind.
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Alan Collinge (The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History and How We Can Fight Back)
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Arguably the nation’s greatest public university and its greatest college football program can both be found on the same campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Michigan students, lettermen, alumni, faculty, and fans take a great deal of pride in that unique combination—and they watch the source of their pride very closely. They believe it’s not just Michigan’s victories that matter—on and off the field—but the values behind them that are so important, values that place a premium on community, achievement, and integrity. When they feel those values are threatened, they rise to defend them.
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John U. Bacon (Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football)
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Contrary to the rumor mill, which often depicted Sarah Harbaugh as some kind of Las Vegas model attracted to Jim’s money and fame, who refused to leave California for Michigan, the former Sarah Feuerborn (pronounced “Fear-Born”) is not from Las Vegas, but Kansas City, the youngest of 11 children, whose father was an accountant at General Motors. She earned her degree in education from the University of Missouri, then moved to Las Vegas because teaching jobs were easier to get there.
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John U. Bacon (Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football)
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A woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls "relentlessly pleasant
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Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
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Economists explain this behavior using a concept known as the “sunk cost fallacy”: when estimating the value of a future investment, we have trouble ignoring what we’ve already invested in the past. Sunk costs are part of the story, but new research shows that other factors matter more. To figure out why and when escalation of commitment happens, researchers at Michigan State University analyzed 166 different studies. Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t give this another chance? The second is project completion: if I keep investing, I can finish the project. But the single most powerful factor is ego threat: if I don’t keep investing, I’ll look and feel like a fool. In response to ego threat, people invest more, hoping to turn the project into a success so they can prove to others—and themselves—that they were right all along.
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Adam M. Grant (Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success)
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Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch, about half of all families experienced some decline in income. And those downturns were becoming progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By the late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average. Workers who are economically insecure are not in a position to demand higher wages. They are driven more by fear than by opportunity. This is another central reality of American capitalism as organized by those with the political power to make it so.
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Robert B. Reich (Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few)
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They honestly wouldn’t do the operation if you couldn’t find a way to pay for it?” “That’s right. They run a business, Liz, they can’t just be giving it away.” “That’s what you get for going to the University of Michigan Hospital.” “I know the Spartan in you can’t stand it, but you have to admit U of M has one of the best hospitals around.” “Okay, I admit it, grudgingly, but only because State doesn’t have a hospital of their own. If they did, I’m sure it’d be better.
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Mara Jacobs (Worth the Weight (The Worth, #1))
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A professor at the University of Michigan said to me: “As soon as we create life in a test tube, we won’t need God anymore.” I answered: “This happened once before when man ruled God out and proposed the Tower of Babel. It ended in frustration, confusion, and judgment.
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Billy Graham (Billy graham in quotes)
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We live in a more individualistic society. If you humbly believe that you are not individually strong enough to defeat your own weaknesses, then you know you must be dependent on redemptive assistance from outside. But if you proudly believe the truest answers can be found in the real you, the voice inside, then you are less likely to become engaged with others. Sure enough, there has been a steady decline in intimacy. Decades ago, people typically told pollsters that they had four or five close friends, people to whom they could tell everything. Now the common answer is two or three, and the number of people with no confidants has doubled. Thirty-five percent of older adults report being chronically lonely, up from 20 percent a decade ago.21 At the same time, social trust has declined. Surveys ask, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” In the early 1960s, significant majorities said that people can generally be trusted. But in the 1990s the distrusters had a 20-percentage-point margin over the trusters, and those margins have increased in the years since.22 People have become less empathetic—or at least they display less empathy in how they describe themselves. A University of Michigan study found that today’s college students score 40 percent lower than their predecessors in the 1970s in their ability to understand what another person is feeling. The biggest drop came in the years after 2000.23 Public language has also become demoralized. Google ngrams measure word usage across media. Google scans the contents of books and publications going back decades. You can type in a word and see, over the years, which words have been used more frequently and which less frequently. Over the past few decades there has been a sharp rise in the usage of individualist words and phrases like “self” and “personalized,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself,” and a sharp decline in community words like “community,” “share,” “united,” and “common good.”24 The use of words having to do with economics and business has increased, while the language of morality and character building is in decline.25 Usage of words like “character,” “conscience,” and “virtue” all declined over the course of the twentieth century.26Usage of the word “bravery” has declined by 66 percent over the course of the twentieth century. “Gratitude” is down 49 percent. “Humbleness” is down 52 percent and “kindness” is down 56 percent.
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David Brooks (The Road to Character)
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People interested in museums as real educational environments, parents interested in their children's education, and people seeking to find themselves in a positive way could all benefit from reading this book. by Associate Dean Engineering, Michigan State University
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Ronald Rosenberg