How does empathy or the lack of empathy impact the capacity for cruelty? Empathy is the ability to feel what another is feeling. Do persons who commit acts of cruelty derive their “enjoyment” from their empathy with their victims? Or do they have damaged brain circuitry that limits or nullifies their capacity for empathy? If one definition of cruelty includes the positive or pleasurable feedback the perpetrator receives from harming another or in watching the other harmed, then that person clearly can feel what the recipient is feeling.
That person does not have a damaged capacity for empathy, just a warped response to what they do feel. Contrary to popular belief, disruption in our wiring for empathy is not the primary cause of cruelty. Empathy, we often forget, is not necessarily bonded to compassion, defined by emotion researchers as “the feeling that arises in witnessing another's suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.”
by Iskra Fileva Ph.D That a complete lack of empathy and, indeed, taking pleasure in the pain of others is problematic is easily seen in the individual case. Schadenfreude – rejoicing at the adversity of those we dislike – is universally recognized as a base and mean streak, and few would admit they feel it, let alone that they seek it out.
Not so in the case of groups, which is partly what makes group divisions more treacherous than personal animosities. Members of groups who see themselves at war with other groups not only tend to experience very little empathy for the members of the opposing tribe but put pressure on each other not to feel any, as though empathy of this sort would show lack of commitment to the group. Relatedly, voicing shame and embarrassment for anything that one’s own side has done is seen as disloyal, too.
SUMS Consulting and the Higher Education Strategic Planners Association (HESPA) have published a report on how UK universities are integrating climate into strategy and planning. Around half of institutions surveyed for the report felt that they were successfully integrating climate as a “strategic driver” of their organisational activity. The publication finds a wide variety of models being implemented across the sector to address the climate crisis – and while no one approach is found to be more effective, good collaboration between sustainability and planning teams comes out as a “stronger factor for progress.”
Recent advances in generative AI and automation have opened many exciting possibilities for boosting the British economy and business efficiency. But it also has the power to dramatically disrupt current ways of working, learning and the professional development of students entering the workforce in today’s world.
Our new paper, supported by the University of London, considers how universities can continue to fulfil their employability function in this context of rapid and radical change.
Author, Richard Brown, sets out a number of recommendations that universities across the UK can adopt to ensure graduates are well-equipped to enter the workforce, and provide equal opportunities for students from every field of expertise.
Welcome to episode 19 of season 5, where we look at German vocabulary and sentences based on a particular topic. Today we're talking about some sentences you might hear in November. We also mentioned my latest online German course 'Beginners' German - the next 30 days' https://angelikasgerman.uteach.io/courses/beginners-german-the-next-steps Here are all the sentences. To find out what they mean, watch the video 😉 Allerheiligen findet am 1. November statt. Allerseelen ist am 2. November. Beide Tage sind katholische Feiertage. Martinstag wird am 11. November gefeiert. Viele Kinder gehen mit selbstgebastelten Laternen von Haus zu Haus. Many children go from house to house with homemade lanterns. Sie singen und bekommen Süßigkeiten. Am 11. November um 11:11 Uhr beginnt die Karnevalssaison. Man nennt es auch die 5. Jahreszeit.
This project was for the cabins back porch. I followed the directions except for the roof. I had plenty of left over metal roof, so that is what I used.
ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence (AI) technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. The language model can answer questions, and help you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code.
ChatGPT takes online writing tools such as QuillBot to the next level—or the next few levels—by leveraging the knowledge stored on the internet to respond to queries and requests.
ChatGPT is designed to simulate human-like responses to text-based communication.
It is built on an architecture that mimics the human brain called the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model. The GPT architecture allows ChatGPT to generate natural language text that is highly coherent and contextually appropriate.
ChatGPT uses a large database of written text, such as books, articles, and websites, that it has been pre-trained on. When a user inputs a message or question, ChatGPT uses this pre-trained knowledge to generate a response that it believes best answers the question or provides a relevant response to the message.
The Concourse A expansion at Salt Lake City International Airport is now complete with the addition of 13 new gates, bringing Delta’s total number of gates to 50 as the airline provides more than 230 peak-day departures at SLC.
This study analyzes gender gaps in Asia and the Pacific’s labor market and shows why removing the barriers preventing women accessing decent work, increasing pay, and improving working conditions can drive inclusive development and economic growth.
The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has been supporting people through conflicts, disasters and emergencies for more than 150 years. Read on to discover 10 inspiring facts about one of the world’s leading humanitarian organisations
How do you avoid getting stuck in the loop of content creation without losing out on branding?
The answer is to leverage content curation. This post is all about how content curation will help you become a trusted authority, boosting traffic, engagement, and sales. Dive in to learn more.
Israelis and Palestinians who’ve lost family members to the conflict find strength in grieving together — and offer hope.
After talking to Rahamim, Ofer, Aramin and others, I’m grateful to them for providing moral leadership that so many presidents and prime ministers have not. I don’t know if they can actually succeed in blazing a path to peace, but we need such champions of nuance and empathy if we are to have any hope of moving forward.
As we Americans increasingly find ourselves caught in toxic or bigoted battles on our own turf, echoing those in the Middle East, we should learn not from the arsonists but from these firefighters who demonstrate the human capacity for conciliation, healing and progress.
No one had ever seen one virus latching onto another virus, until anomalous sequencing results sent a UMBC team down a rabbit hole leading to a first-of-its-kind discovery. It's known that some viruses, called satellites, depend not only on their host organism to complete their life cycle, but also on another virus, known as a "helper," explains Ivan Erill, professor of biological sciences. The satellite virus needs the helper either to build its capsid, a protective shell that encloses the virus's genetic material, or to help it replicate its DNA. These viral relationships require the satellite and the helper to be in proximity to each other at least temporarily, but there were no known cases of a satellite actually attaching itself to a helper—until now. In a paper published in The ISME Journal, a UMBC team and colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) describe the first observation of a satellite bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacterial cells) consistently attaching to a helper bacteriophage at its "neck"—where the capsid joins the tail of the virus. In detailed electron microscopy images taken by Tagide deCarvalho, assistant director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences Core Facilities and first author on the new paper, 80 percent (40 out of 50) helpers had a satellite bound at the neck. Some of those that did not had remnant satellite tendrils present at the neck. Erill, senior author on the paper, describes them as appearing like "bite marks." "When I saw it, I was like, I can't believe this," deCarvalho says. "No one has ever seen a bacteriophage—or any other virus—attach to another virus."
A long-term virus relationship
After the initial observations, Elia Mascolo, a graduate student in Erill 's research group and co-first author on the paper, analyzed the genomes of the satellite, helper, and host, which revealed further clues about this never-before-seen viral relationship. Most satellite viruses contain a gene that allows them to integrate into the host cell's genetic material after they enter the cell. This allows the satellite to reproduce whenever a helper happens to enter the cell from then on. The host cell also copies the satellite's DNA along with its own when it divides. A bacteriophage sample from WashU also contained a helper and a satellite. The WashU satellite has a gene for integration and does not directly attach to its helper, similar to previously observed satellite-helper systems. However, the satellite in UMBC's sample, named MiniFlayer by the students who isolated it, is the first known case of a satellite with no gene for integration. Because it can't integrate into the host cell's DNA, it must be near its helper—named MindFlayer—every time it enters a host cell if it is going to survive. Given that, although the team did not directly prove this explanation, "attaching now made total sense," Erill says, "because otherwise, how are you going to guarantee that you are going to enter into the cell at the same time?" Additional bioinformatics analysis by Mascolo and Julia López-Pérez, another Ph.D. student working with Erill, revealed that MindFlayer and MiniFlayer have been co-evolving for a long time. "This satellite has been tuning in and optimizing its genome to be associated with the helper for, I would say, at least 100 million years," Erill says, which suggests there may be many more cases of this kind of relationship waiting to be discovered.
Original research published in ISME (October 31, 2023):
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