New UMaine minor in professional skills for the liberal arts starts this fall

The University of Maine College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will offer a new minor in professional skills for the liberal arts beginning in fall 2021. The program, designed for students in the UMaine College of Liberal Arts and Sciences pursuing a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree, focuses on developing professional skills that enhance early career employment opportunities

Birth Timing for Mountain Lions (Puma concolor); Testing the Prey Availability Hypothesis

We investigated potential advantages in birth timing for mountain lion (Puma concolor) cubs. We examined cub body mass, survival, and age of natal dispersal in relation to specific timing of birth. We also investigated the role of maternal age relative to timing of births. We captured mountain lion cubs while in the natal den to determine birth date, which allowed for precise estimates of the population birth pulse and age of natal dispersal. A birth pulse occurred during June–August. Body mass of cubs was related to litter size and timing of birth; heaviest cubs occurred in litters of 2, and those born after 1 July. Cubs born within pulse months exhibited similar survival to those born out of the pulse. We found that cubs born April–June dispersed at younger ages than those born after 1 July. There was less variation in birth timing for 1st litters of females than older females. We hypothesize that cubs born after the peak in births of neonate prey are advantaged by the abundance of vulnerable prey and those cubs and mothers realize an evolutionary advantage

The Streisand effect and censorship backfire

Barbra Streisand\u27s attempt to restrict online views of her residence on a public website had the paradoxical effect of leading to many more views than if she had done nothing. Subsequently, attempts at censorship that end up being counterproductive have been dubbed the Streisand effect. To better understand the dynamics of the Streisand effect, we examine five tactics used by censors to reduce outrage from their actions: (1) hiding the existence of censorship; (2) devaluing targets of censorship; (3) reinterpreting actions by lying, minimizing consequences, blaming others, and using benign framing; (4) using official channels to give an appearance of justice; and (5) intimidating opponents. Within this framework, the Streisand effect can be understood as a special outcome of censorship attempts, one in which the methods used to reduce outrage did not succeed

Looming struggles over technology for border control

New technologies under development, capable of inflicting pain on masses of people, could be used for border control against asylum seekers. Implementation might be rationalized by the threat of mass migration due to climate change, nuclear disaster or exaggerated fears of refugees created by governments. We focus on taser anti-personnel mines, suggesting both technological countermeasures and ways of making the use of such technology politically counterproductive. We also outline several other types of ‘non-lethal’ technology that could be used for border control and raise human rights concerns: high-powered microwaves, armed robots, wireless tasers, acoustic devices/vortex rings, ionizing and pulsed energy lasers, chemical calmatives, convulsants, bioregulators and malodurants. Whether all these possible border technologies will be implemented is a matter for speculation, but their serious human rights implications warrant advance scrutiny

Lists Of All You Left Behind

Lists Of All You Left Behind is a novella and an accompanying critical essay that together attempt to understand the relationship in contemporaneity between what people consume, culturally speaking, and who they are. The novel\u27s narrative details a central character\u27s growth toward an experience of the world that--while remaining open to the possibility that mass culture may still assist us in constructing some kind of valid contemporary meaning--is authentic and direct. The work proposes, in short, an interdependent relationship between cultural consumption and personal identity: culture both constructs our subjectivity in the world and reflects it

“Betch you’ bootsh!”: Jewish Humour, Jewish Identity, and Yiddish Literary Traditions in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl

Contrairement aux idées qu’avancent notamment Susan K. Harris et Sabine Haenni, le réalisme littéraire américain est un genre tout à fait approprié pour décrire la vie d’immigrants au tournant du vingtième siècle dans toutes ses subjectivités – parce qu’il recourt à des dialectes qui ne permettent pas de donner accès à l’intériorité des personnages ou parce qu’il s’orientait toujours vers des normes propres aux classes moyennes reléguant les immigrants à la marge. Cet article propose une autre manière de lire la littérature émanant de l’immigration à partir de Yekl, l’histoire du New York Yiddish d’Abraham Cahan. Yekl est lu comme un récit dont la dimension réaliste et le désir d’interpréter la culture yiddish américaine pour un public large se complètent – et se compliquent – car il prend en compte et s’engage dans une réflexion avec les traditions littéraires yiddishs qui ne relèvent pas du réalisme : le conte populaire, les figures populaires comme le schlemiel (le pauvre maladroit) et l’humour que l’on trouve dans les formes verbales, le recours à l’anecdote et à la dérision. La technique narrative qu’emploie Cahan et plus particulièrement son utilisation du dialecte yiddish et de l’humour font plus que de recréer des stéréotypes. La novella tourne ses personnages en ridicule et ce dans le but plus large de célébrer l’identité yiddish et son héritage

Paradoxical Behaviour in Social Media Usage

The Privacy Paradox is a recently emerged phenomenon. It looks at a person’s intention to disclose information and the actual disclosure of information. In this research, we look at the extent of the relationship between the social media behaviour of a student and their attitude towards privacy. With these results, we can conclude whether they show paradoxical behaviour. These results are derived from a questionnaire among information technology students (n=126) and analyzed to extract the extent of the relationships between certain variables. The data analysis showed significant relationships between several variables, none of which indicated paradoxical behaviour among the population. However, it did give way to various interesting relationships. The results indicate paradoxical behaviour to a certain extent, specifically with regards to social media use self-disclosure and information and privacy concerns and privacy settings. Additionally, the research indicates that the higher the educational background of the participant, the less likely they are to exhibit paradoxical behaviour

Do you know if I\u27m real? An experiment to benchmark human recognition of AI-generated faces

With the development of advanced machine learning techniques, it is now possible to generate fake images that may appear authentic to the naked eye. Realistic faces generated using Generative Adversarial Networks have been the focus of discussion in the media for exactly this reason. This study examined how well people can distinguish between real and generated images. 30 real and 60 generated were gathered and put into a survey. Subjects were shown a random 30 of these faces in random sequence and asked to specify whether or not they thought the faces were real. Based on a statistical analysis, the participants were not able to reliably distinguish between all real and generated images, but real images were correctly distinguished in 81% of cases, where generated images were correctly distinguished in 61% of cases. Some generated images did receive very high scores, with one generated image being classified as real in 100% of the cases

Good Work and Good Works: Work and the Postsecular in George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Drawing on what American short story writer and novelist George Saunders has described as the urge toward kindness in his work, as well as its myriad allusions to Christian symbology and religiosity, this paper explores the intersection of languages of labour or “work” and religious tensions in Saunders’ oeuvre. Reading the stories of Saunders’s first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, through the lens of postsecular literary theory and Saunders’s own comments on Catholicism, we suggest that Christianity, for Saunders, is a double-edged sword: crucial to his social critique of the power structures of post-industrial, postmodern life, and yet ultimately prone, in its institutionalized forms, to cooptation by those very same power structures. Saunders’s “Center for Wayward Nuns” is a potent metaphor in the sense that it suggests that doubt and lack of agency endemic to a fragmented postmodern world do not absolve us of our ethical responsibility, and thus the Christian overtones of Saunders’ work are engaged in a compelling kind of double-critique: both of the “un-Christian” social realities of the world in which Saunders’ working poor toil, but also of the kind of extremist, fundamentalist—even corporatized—Christianity that may emerge out of those social realities

The cognitive costs of managing emotions:A systematic review of the impact of emotional requirements on cognitive performance

In our increasingly service-based world, employees are now, more than ever before, required to manage the emotional demands inherent to client interactions. These emotional demands can be fuelled by emotional display rules that are part of an organisational policy. However, what differentiates client interactions from other circumstances is that not only emotional performance standards should be met but also concurrent cognitive performance standards. In some professions, lives may even depend on the interplay between both kinds of performance. This systematic review is the first to offer a systematic synthesis of the surprisingly limited number of studies on this emotion–cognition relationship (N = 18). This synthesis clearly demonstrates that cognitive performance reduces when individuals are instructed to also modify their emotional expressions (expression focused emotion regulation) concurrently. However, although combinations of emotional and cognitive requirements most likely occur during professional events, only two studies used service simulations and none used real client interactions. Other outcomes of the systematic synthesis make it even more astonishing that the cognitive-emotional performance relationship has escaped the notice of the professional field. The most striking outcome is that emotion regulation is not only getting in the way of parallel but also of subsequent cognitive tasks