EMPATHY DEFICIT  October 27, 2010  Young Americans today live in a world of endless connections and up-to-the-minute information on one another, constantly updating friends, loved ones, and total strangers—“Quiz tomorrow...gotta study!”—about the minutiae of their young, wired lives.  And there are signs that Generation Wi-Fi is also interested in connecting with people, like, face-to-face, in person.  The percentage of high school seniors who volunteer has been rising for two decades.  But new research suggests that behind all this communication and connectedness, something is missing.  The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with the steepest decline coming in the last 10 years.  According to the findings, today’s students are generally less likely to describe themselves as “soft-hearted” or to have “tender, concerned feelings” for others.  They are more likely, meanwhile, to admit that “other people’s misfortunes” usually don’t disturb them.  In other words, they might be constantly aware of their friends’ whereabouts, but all that connectedness doesn’t seem to be translating to genuine concern for the world and one another.  Keith O'Brien  http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/10/17/the_empathy_deficit/ 

July 10, 2015  Traditionally, empathy has been seen as a force for moral good, motivating virtuous deeds.  Yet a growing chorus of critics, inspired by findings like those above, depict empathy as a source of moral failure.  In the words of the psychologist Paul Bloom, empathy is a “parochial, narrow-minded” emotion—one that “will have to yield to reason if humanity is to survive.”   Likewise, in another recent study, the psychologists Karina Schumann, Jamil Zaki and Carol S. Dweck found that when people learned that empathy was a skill that could be improved—as opposed to a fixed personality trait—they engaged in more effort to experience empathy for racial groups other than their own.  Empathy for people unlike us can be expanded, it seems, just by modifying our views about empathy.  Some kinds of people seem generally less likely to feel empathy for others—for instance, powerful people.  An experiment conducted by one of us, Michael Inzlicht, along with the researchers Jeremy Hogeveen and Sukhvinder Obhi, found that even people temporarily assigned to high-power roles showed brain activity consistent with lower empathy.  But such experimental manipulations surely cannot change a person’s underlying empathic capacity; something else must be to blame.  And other research suggests that the blame lies with a simple change in motivation:  People with a higher sense of power exhibit less empathy because they have less incentive to interact with others.  Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht and William A, Cunningham     http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html?_r=0

"Elephant in the room" or "Elephant in the living room" is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed.  The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.  It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook.  In 1814, Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist, the Russian La Fontaine (whom he translated), wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant.  The phrase became proverbial.  Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel 'Demons' wrote, 'Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum....'  The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, as The New York Times on June 20, 1959:  "Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room.  It's so big you just can't ignore it."  This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959.  For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of a British journal in 1915.  The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of a question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class-room?"  The first widely disseminated conceptual reference was a story written by Mark Twain in 1882, "The Stolen White Elephant", which slyly dissects the inept, far-ranging activities of detectives trying to find an elephant that was right on the spot after all.  This may have been the reference in the legal opinion of United States v. Leviton, 193 F. 2d 848 (2nd Circuit, 1951), makes reference in its opinion, "As I have elsewhere observed, it is like the Mark Twain story of the little boy who was told to stand in a corner and not to think of a white elephant."  A slightly different version of the phrase was used before this, with George Berkeley talking of whether or not there is "an invisible elephant in the room" in his debates with scientists.  In 1935, comedian Jimmy Durante starred on Broadway in the Billy Rose Broadway musical Jumbo, in which a police officer stops him while leading a live elephant and asks, "What are you doing with that elephant?"  Durante's reply, "What elephant?" was a regular show-stopper.  Durante reprises the piece in the 1962 film version of the play, Billy Rose's Jumbo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_the_room  See also Animal Idioms at http://www.idiomconnection.com/animal.html

litmus  noun  blue coloring matter obtained from certain lichens, especially Roccella tinctoria. In alkaline solution litmus turns blue, in acid solution, red:  widely used as a chemical indicator.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/litmus

litmus test  noun  something (such as an opinion about a political or moral issue) that is used to make a judgment about whether someone or something is acceptable.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/litmus%20test

The Melton Mowbray pork pie is named after Melton Mowbray, a town in Leicestershire.  Melton pies became popular among fox hunters in the area during the late eighteenth century.  The uncured meat of a Melton pie is grey in colour when cooked; the meat is chopped, rather than minced.  The pie is made with a hand-formed crust, giving the pie a slightly irregular shape after baking.  As the pies are baked free-standing, the sides bow outwards, rather than being vertical as with mould-baked pies.  In light of the premium price of the Melton Mowbray pie, the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association applied for protection under the European "Protected designation of origin" laws as a result of the increasing production of Melton Mowbray-style pies by large commercial companies in factories far from Melton Mowbray, and recipes that deviated from the original uncured pork form.  Protection was granted on 4 April 2008, with the result that only pies made within a designated zone around Melton, and using the traditional recipe including uncured pork, are allowed to carry the Melton Mowbray name on their packaging.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_pie

A safe room or panic room is a fortified room that is installed in a private residence or business to provide a safe shelter, or hiding place, for the inhabitants in the event of a break in, home invasion, tornado, terror attack or other threat.  Safe rooms usually contain communications equipment, so that law enforcement authorities can be contacted.  The simplest safe room is simply a closet with the hollow-core door replaced with an exterior-grade solid-core door that has a deadbolt and longer hinge screws and strike-plate screws to resist battering.  Sometimes, the ceiling is reinforced, or gated, to prevent easy access from the attic or from an overhead crawl space.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_room  Panic Room is also the title of a 2002 American film, and the name of a Welsh band.

2015 ART BOOK SALE  Art Reference Library in the UT Center for the Visual Arts,

Toledo Museum of Art   FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6 | 1–6 p.m.  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7 | NOON–3 p.m.  NEW & USED Art Books, Exhibition and other Catalogues, Posters, Magazines, Book Covers, Cookbooks  LIBRARY LEAGUE MEMBER PREVIEW:  NOVEMBER 6 FROM NOON – 1 p.m.  Not a Library League member?  Join for as little as $10/year!  Visit: www.toledomuseum.org/learn/library/mll  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1371  November 2, 2015  On this date in 1920, KDKA of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania started broadcasting as the first commercial radio station.  On this date in 1920, Adam Martin Wyant became the first former professional American football player to be elected to the United States Congress.