Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It. | Live Music Is a Time Machine | We now have more info on what Sam Altman did that was so bad he got fired from OpenAI | Foreign students are pouring back into Australia

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Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It. -

We’re often told to focus on the positive. But new research shows a healthy dose of anger can be motivating.

According to research published this week in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” anger is more helpful at motivating people to overcome obstacles and meet their goals than a neutral emotional state.

In a series of seven experiments, researchers recruited undergraduate students at Texas A&M University and, in some cases, elicited anger by showing the students images that insulted their school, like people in Aggie shirts wearing diapers and carrying baby bottles.

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Live Music Is a Time Machine -

From Phish concerts to Alanis Morissette shows, throwback tours can take us back to our teen years.

In September, I went to see Counting Crows, a band whose music formed the soundtrack of my adolescence. The people alongside me at the Greek Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, were mainly in their 40s and 50s; people who might have had a babysitter waiting at home, or a slightly achy back. (I had both.)

As we belted out the lyrics of “Mr. Jones” together — a sea of fans singing a decades-old song — I could’ve sworn I was a teenager again. I forgot that I had a mortgage, two kids and a favorite brand of tea bag. I turned to my husband (it was a shock to remember that I had one), and said, “Did we just travel back in time?”

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We now have more info on what Sam Altman did that was so bad he got fired from OpenAI - Business Insider

In the days that followed Sam Altman's ousting from OpenAI on November 17, employees inside the company and several members of the broader tech community likened the move to a coup.

The narrative in the immediate aftermath of his firing was that broad ranks of OpenAI liked Altman and that his sudden dismissal was shocking — an erratic move by a board that was prioritizing ideology over the demands of its stakeholders and the wishes of its employees.But over the past few weeks, new details have emerged that shed more light on the board's decision — which was ultimately reversed by a circuitous route — to fire Altman.

These new details suggest that Altman is a skilled corporate schemer who manipulated people and perceptions within OpenAI to maintain his own standing and that his tactics rubbed more than a few people at the organization the wrong way.

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Foreign students are pouring back into Australia - The Economist

THE first international student, from China, enrolled at the University of Sydney a century ago. Now its sandstone buildings hum with foreign languages: almost half the university’s students are from overseas. “For Asian kids, we value the rankings a lot,” says one of its Chinese students, who asks not to be named. Australian universities perform well in them; the University of Sydney is one of nine ranked among the world’s top 100 institutions. Australia also has better weather than Britain or Canada, and less gun crime than America. When the student enrolled in 2015, it “seemed like one of the friendliest countries in the Western world.”

Over the past two decades the number of international students in Australia has risen nearly fourfold, to 440,000 in 2019. Its universities now attract more foreign talent than those of any country except America and Britain. Education is Australia’s fourth-biggest export, worth around 3% of GDP. This has made its universities dependent on the higher fees foreigners pay—a worry when Australia closed its borders in 2020 and again later that year when a trade war erupted with China, which supplies about a third of the incomers. Yet most of the universities have managed these shocks fairly easily. And this year foreign students have returned in droves, with 425,000 now in Australia.

The universities were largely unaffected by the trade spat. While slapping curbs on Australia’s exports from wine to coal, China did not deter its citizens from attending the country’s universities. When the pandemic struck, Chinese students were also more willing than others to stick with online learning, notes Peter Varghese, chancellor of the University of Queensland. “One of the ironies was that the universities which were least impacted financially were those that had the highest concentrations of Chinese students,” he says. Mark Scott, vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, agrees: “A point of vulnerability emerged as a point of strength.”

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