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The terms and empathy and sympathy are often confused,
and with good reason. Both of the words deal with the relationship one
has to the feelings and experiences of another. Today we explore the
differences between these terms and how they are most commonly used.
Both sympathy and empathy have roots in the Greek term páthos meaning “suffering, feeling.” The prefix sym- comes from the Greek sýn meaning “with, together with” and the prefix em- derives from the Greek en- meaning “within, in.” Sympathy is the older of the two terms. It entered English in
the mid-1500s with a very broad meaning of “agreement or harmony in
qualities between things or people.” Since then, the term has come to be
used in a more specific way. Nowadays sympathy is largely used
to convey commiseration, pity, or feelings of sorrow for someone who is
experiencing misfortune. This prevailing sense is epitomized in the
category of greeting card most often labeled “sympathy” that specializes
in messages of support and sorrow for those in a time of need.
Consider the following examples:
“There was little sympathy in England for David Beckham … when he received a red card in a 1998 World Cup loss to Argentina.” –New York Times, July 2, 2015
“…the new [Facebook] feature would
automatically replace the existing ‘like’ button with a ‘sympathize’ one
when users tag their statuses with a negative emotion, like ‘sad’ or
‘depressed.’” –New York, December 6, 2013
Empathy entered English a few centuries after sympathy—in the
late 1800s—with a somewhat technical and now obsolete meaning from the
field of psychology, which referred to the physiological manifestation
of feelings. Unlike sympathy, empathy has come to be used
in a more broad way than it was when it was first introduced into the
lexicon; the term is now most often used to refer to the capacity or
ability to imagine oneself in the situation of another, thereby
vicariously experiencing the emotions, ideas, or opinions of that
person.
Consider the following examples:
“…many of us believe that if more lives
are at stake, we will — and should — feel more empathy (i.e.,
vicariously share others’ experiences) and do more to help.” –New York Times, July 10, 2015
To sum up the differences between the most commonly used meanings of these two terms: sympathy is feeling compassion, sorrow, or pity for the hardships that another person encounters, while empathy is putting yourself in the shoes of another.
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Suez| Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry announced this morning that a team
of underwater archaeologists had discovered that remains of a large
Egyptian army from the 14th century BC, at the bottom of the Gulf of
Suez, 1.5 kilometers offshore from the modern city of Ras Gharib.
The team was searching for the remains of ancient ships and artifacts
related to Stone Age and Bronze Age trade in the Red Sea area, when
they stumbled upon a gigantic mass of human bones darkened by age.
The scientists lead by Professor Abdel Muhammad Gader and associated
with Cairo University’s Faculty of Archaeology, have already recovered a
total of more than 400 different skeletons, as well as hundreds of
weapons and pieces of armor, also the remains of two war chariots,
scattered over an area of approximately 200 square meters.
They estimate that more than 5000 other bodies could be dispersed
over a wider area, suggesting that an army of large size who have
perished on the site.
This magnificient blade from an egyptian khopesh, was certainly the
weapon of an important character. It was discovered near the remains of a
richly decorated war chariot, suggesting it could have belonged to a
prince or nobleman.
Many clues on the site have brought Professor Gader and his team to
conclude that the bodies could be linked to the famous episode of the
Exodus. First of all, the ancient soldiers seem to have died on dry
ground, since no traces of boats or ships have been found in the area.
The positions of the bodies and the fact that they were stuck in a
vast quantity of clay and rock, implie that they could have died in a
mudslide or a tidal wave. The shear number of bodies suggests that a
large ancient army perished on the site and the dramatic way by which
they were killed, both seem to corroborate the biblical version of the
Red Sea Crossing, when the army of the Egyptian Pharaoh was destroyed by
the returning waters that Moses had parted.
This
new find certainly proves that there was indeed an Egyptian army of
large size that was destroyed by the waters of the Red Sea during the
reign of King Akhenaten. For centuries, the famous biblical account of
the “Red Sea Crossing” was dismissed by most scholars and historians as
more symbolic than historical.
This astounding discovery brings undeniable scientific proof that one
the most famous episodes of the Old Testament was indeed, based on an
historical event. It brings a brand new perspective on a story that many
historians have been considering for years as a work of fiction, and
suggesting that other themes like the “Plagues of Egypt” could indeed
have an historical base.
A lot more research and many more recovery operations are to be
expected on the site over the next few years, as Professor Gader and his
team have already announced their desire to retrieve the rest of the
bodies and artifacts from was has turned out to be one of the richest
archaeological underwater sites ever discovered ( via
worldnewsdailyreport.com ).” copied. Disclose TV CLICK
The Namanga Border post. Workers without valid work permits have been expelled by the Tanzanian government. PHOTO | FILE
NATION MEDIA GROUP
The
decision by the Tanzanian government to kick out illegal immigrants had
led to the expulsion of more than 5,500 foreign teachers as at the end
of January.
The teachers, mostly from the region, went back to their
countries after the Immigration Department issued a notice to private
school owners requiring them to submit work permits of their foreign
teaching staff.
The decision to expel workers without valid work permits was
made after immigration authorities and the police apprehended foreigners
from the Horn of Africa a few months ago.
A senior immigration officer in Dar es Salaam said there were
hundreds of illegal foreigners working in Tanzania’s business capital,
most of them from Kenya, China, India, Pakistan and Malawi.
“We are tracking them down to verify their presence in Tanzania before taking legal action against them,” he said.
English and science teachers from Kenya and other EAC member
states were the most affected. There are more than 6,000 foreigners
hired by private schools in Tanzania.
Mzinde Mnzava, the chairman of the Tanzania Association of
Managers and Owners of Non-Government Schools and Colleges (TAMONGSCO),
said the country has a shortage of 27,000 science teachers.
“We request the government to relax the working regulations for
foreign teachers to allow us to hire more teachers who are experienced
to fill this gap,” he said. Private schools perform better than public schools in the country.
TAMONGSCO secretary general Benjamin Nkonya said deporting
foreign teachers will affect private schools, many of which hire English
teachers from Kenya and Uganda.
“The decision made by the government will have a major negative
impact on private English-medium schools since many Tanzanian teachers
are not competent in English and science studies,” he said.
He said colleges in Tanzania did not train enough primary school teachers in English; most are trained in history and geography.
Tanzania Teachers Union president Gratian Mukoba said the union
is not against the government’s move to crack down on foreign and
illegal immigrants, but added, “If we want to have children who are well
educated, there is a need to have foreigners who will help us to train
the future generation,” he said.
East African Employers Association chair Rosemary Ssenabulya
faulted Tanzania’s move to “lock out” other East Africans from their job
market.
Kizza Besigye, Uganda's leading opposition leader and presidential
candidate flashes the "V for victory" sign to supporters during an
election rally in Kampala on February 10, 2016. He will challenge
incumbent President Yoweri Museveni for the fourth time when voters go
to the polls on February 18, 2016. PHOTO | AFP
On a cloudy Kampala day last Wednesday, I witnessed an exceedingly rare development.
The
opposition candidate in Uganda’s election was campaigning in the
Makindye neighbourhood of the capital and, when he arrived, people
surged forward.
They didn’t want to shake his hands. They were giving him money. Tens of them had a donation to make to Dr Kizza Besigye.
An old lady, clad in a long blue lesso, thrust a crumpled note in his hands. Several young men followed and gave the leader some money.
Others brought gifts: pawpaws, pineapples and, of course, this being Uganda, bananas.
It
is a scene which has unfolded across the country everywhere the
candidate has gone and one can hardly think of a more eloquent message
to an incumbent than the one these peasants have sent by giving up their
money to support Besigye.
The statement seems to be
that Yoweri Museveni may have all the state resources, the men with guns
may be on his side, but the people feel that 30 years is a little too
long for one man to cling to power and they are eager for change.
So
from Mbale to Gulu, people have come forward to give Besigye a
donation. Some have offered goats, others gave him cows. One cheeky guy
brought him a German Shepherd puppy, the better for him to catch
“corrupt thieves” with.
Besigye will probably not win
when Ugandans go to the polls on Thursday. The opposition in Uganda
relies too much on the charisma of one man and lacks a credible national
grassroots network.
It is not fielding candidates in a fair proportion of parliamentary contests.
Museveni’s NRM has all the money and is outspending the opposition almost totally.
GRASSROOTS NETWORK
Besigye’s
FDC does not quite have the level of grassroots network and financing
that its counterparts in, say, Ghana or Kenya command, partly because in
Ghana and Kenya, major opposition figures have served in government in
the recent past and therefore generally have fairly deep pockets.
The
electoral landscape is additionally tilted in Museveni’s favour by the
overwhelming role of state institutions in campaigning for him,
especially in rural areas, and the ruling party’s propaganda that a loss
for Museveni will result in war.
People have absorbed all that and there is general fatalism that the incumbent will remain in office.
But
Museveni, once one of the continent’s foremost idealists, and a man who
engineered a genuine turnaround and made Uganda a respectable country
after years of war, has totally betrayed his ideals and now joins the
ranks of many other personal rulers around the world. As a friend put it
to me, how can a man go to the same office for 30 years and not grow
tired of it?
Why don’t these fellows realise that they
can enjoy a good life out of power and, with Museveni’s gift for
(occasionally) amusing long lectures, he can be a celebrity on the
retired presidential lecture circuit?
A country yoked to the same leader for decades loses its edge in terms of dynamism and growth as Kenya showed in 2002.
We
will see who will win the election on Thursday. But the peasants of
Uganda, in donating their hard-earned money to Besigye, in giving him
the produce of their farms to fund his campaign for president, have
delivered a ringing verdict on their view of Museveni’s quest to be
president for life.
TAUGHT A VALUABLE LESSON
They
have also taught a valuable lesson to other Africans. It makes little
sense to expect politicians to buy votes with stolen money at election
time then hope they won’t be corrupt once in office.
However,
donating money to a candidate who is genuinely clean and desires real
change offers a powerful incentive for them to stay clean.
The Besigye supporters have handed the FDC chief a moral victory and given other Africans food for thought.
***
As usual, I played the well known foreign correspondents’ game of asking taxi drivers who they think will win the election.
Due
to Kampala’s traffic jams you have to use boda boda constantly to get
anywhere and all the taxi and boda boda guys I spoke to want Besigye to
win (which does not mean he will as I learnt in Dar es Salaam. Views in
the capital often differ from what you might hear in the countryside).
Maybe
the best answer came from one rider, Muhwezi, who replied thus to the
question of what the outcome of the election might be. “Aaaah!” he said. “Only God knows.”
The airline regulator has dived into the price war between Fastjet and
Kenya Airways demanding that the former sets its prices inclusive of all
taxes involved. PHOTO | FILE
The airline regulator has dived into the price war between
Fastjet and Kenya Airways demanding that the former sets its prices
inclusive of all taxes involved.
Budget carrier Fastjet
has prices exempting tax, luggage charges and other levies. The prices
appear low luring consumers as KQ struggles to keep up by cutting its
prices by 30 per cent. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority has now
ordered Fastjet to include ‘taxes, fees and other charges’ on its
pricing, stating that the law requires that passengers are accurately
informed.
“It has come to the notice of the authority
that airlines continue to advertise in the local print media prices that
are exclusive of taxes, fees and other charges,” said the director
general KCAA Gilbert Kibe in a notice in the dailies.
Fastjet
and Kenya Airways are at the peak of prolonged price wars that have
forced the latter to lower its charges for the Dar-Nairobi route with
the hope of retaining customers along the way.
However,
the majority of fliers have fallen prey to Fastjet’s ‘low’ prices whose
offers are Sh5,500 for a one way trip and Sh8,000 for the
Kilimanjaro-Nairobi. KQ’s lowest prices on one way for the same route
are around Sh32,000 inclusive of taxes.
Fastjet East
Africa General Manager Jimmy Kibati says the airline targets first time
flyers. “The travelling public pays prohibitively high fares for
regional air travel.”
“The consumer protection Act
2012 is also clear on this matter. Any further advertising without
adhering to the above provisions shall be dealt with according to
existing legislation,” the KCAA states.
Dr.
Thorne of Caltech and Dr. Weiss of M.I.T. first met in 1975, Dr. Weiss
said, when they had to share a hotel room during a meeting in
Washington. Dr. Thorne was already a renowned black-hole theorist, but
he was looking for new experimental territory to conquer. They stayed up
all night talking about how to test general relativity and debating how
best to search for gravitational waves.
Dr.
Thorne then recruited Dr. Drever, a gifted experimentalist from the
University of Glasgow, to start a gravitational wave program at Caltech.
Dr. Drever wanted to use light — laser beams bouncing between precisely
positioned mirrors — to detect the squeeze and stretch of a passing
wave.
Dr.
Weiss tried to mount a similar effort at M.I.T., also using the laser
approach, but at the time, black holes were not in fashion there.
(Things are better now, he said.)
Every week, we'll bring you stories that capture the wonders of the human body, nature and the cosmos. Coming soon.
The
technological odds were against both efforts. The researchers
calculated that a typical gravitational wave from out in space would
change the distance between a pair of mirrors by an almost imperceptible
amount: one part in a billion trillion. Dr. Weiss recalled that when he
explained the experiment to his potential funders at the National
Science Foundation, “everybody thought we were out of our minds.”
In
1984, to the annoyance of Dr. Drever and the relief of Dr. Weiss, the
National Science Foundation ordered the two teams to merge. Dr. Thorne
found himself in the dual roles of evangelist for the field of
gravitational waves and broker for experimental disagreements.
Progress was slow until the three physicists were replaced in 1987 by a single director as part of the price of going forward.
The
first version of the experiment, known as Initial LIGO, started in 2000
and ran for 10 years, mostly to show that it could work on the scale
needed. There are two detectors: one in Hanford, Wash., the other in
Livingston, La. Hunters once shot up the outside of one of the antenna
arms in Louisiana, and a truck crashed into one of the arms in Hanford.
In neither case was the experiment damaged.
Over
the last five years, the entire system was rebuilt to increase its
sensitivity to the point where the team could realistically expect to
hear something.
LIGO’s
antennas are L-shaped, with perpendicular arms 2.5 miles long. Inside
each arm, cocooned in layers of steel and concrete, runs the world’s
largest bottle of nothing, a vacuum chamber a couple of feet wide
containing 2.5 million gallons of empty space. At the end of each arm
are mirrors hanging by glass threads, isolated from the bumps and
shrieks of the environment better than any Rolls-Royce ever conceived.
Thus
coddled, the lasers in the present incarnation, known as Advanced LIGO,
can detect changes in the length of one of those arms as small as one
ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton — a subatomic particle too small
to be seen by even the most powerful microscopes — as a gravitational
wave sweeps through.
Even
with such extreme sensitivity, only the most massive and violent events
out there would be loud enough to make the detectors ring. LIGO was
designed to catch collisions of neutron stars, which can produce the
violent flashes known as gamma ray bursts.
As
they got closer together, these neutron stars would swing around faster
and faster, hundreds of times a second, vibrating space-time geometry
with a rising tone that would be audible in LIGO’s vacuum-tube “sweet
spot.”
Black
holes, the even-more-extreme remains of dead stars, could be expected
to do the same, but nobody knew if they existed in pairs or how often
they might collide. If they did, however, the waves from the collision
would be far louder and lower pitched than those from neutron stars.
Dr.
Thorne and others long thought these would be the first waves to be
heard by LIGO. But even he did not expect it would happen so quickly.
‘It Was Waving Hello’
On
Sept. 14, the system had barely finished being calibrated and was in
what is called an engineering run at 4 a.m. when a loud signal came
through at the Livingston site. “Data was streaming, and then ‘bam,’ ”
recalled David Reitze, a Caltech professor who is the director of the
LIGO Laboratory, the group that built and runs the detectors.
Seven
milliseconds later, the signal hit the Hanford site. LIGO scientists
later determined that the likelihood of such signals landing
simultaneously by pure chance was vanishingly small. Nobody was awake,
but computers tagged the event.
Dr.
Reitze was on a plane to Louisiana the next day. Dr. Weiss, on vacation
in Maine, found out when he checked in by computer that morning. “It
was waving hello,” he said. “It was amazing. The signal was so big, I
didn’t believe it.”
The
frequency of the chirp was too low for neutron stars, the physicists
knew. Detailed analysis of its form told a tale of Brobdingnagian
activities in a far corner of the universe: the last waltz of a pair of
black holes shockingly larger than astrophysicists had been expecting.
One
of them was 36 times as massive as the sun, the other 29. As they
approached the end, at half the speed of light, they were circling each
other 250 times a second.
And
then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black
hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a
fifth of a second, Earth time.
Dr.
Weiss said you could reproduce the chirp by running your fingernails
across the keys of a piano from the low end to middle C.
Lost
in the transformation was three solar masses’ worth of energy,
vaporized into gravitational waves in an unseen and barely felt
apocalypse. As visible light, that energy would be equivalent to a
billion trillion suns.
A
team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers
announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two
black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that
fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That
faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of
gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that
Einstein predicted a century ago. And it is a ringing (pun intended)
confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational
pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most
foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
More
generally, it means that scientists have finally tapped into the
deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest
implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.
Conveyed
by these gravitational waves, an energy 50 times greater than that of
all the stars in the universe put together vibrated a pair of L-shaped
antennas in Washington State and Louisiana known as LIGO on Sept. 14.
Audio
What Two Black Holes Colliding Sounds Like 0:12
Play
These chirps are gravitational waves
converted to audible sounds. The faint thump matches the gravitational
waves’ frequencies. The louder chirp is a higher frequency better suited
to human ears. LIGO
“We
are all over the moon and back,” said Gabriela González of Louisiana
State University, a spokeswoman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration,
short for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. “Einstein
would be very happy, I think.”
Members
of the LIGO group, a worldwide team of scientists, along with
scientists from a European team known as the Virgo Collaboration,
published a report in Physical Review Letters on Thursday with more than
1,000 authors.
“I
think this will be one of the major breakthroughs in physics for a long
time,” said Szabolcs Marka, a Columbia University professor who is one
of the LIGO scientists.
“Everything
else in astronomy is like the eye,” he said, referring to the panoply
of telescopes that have given stargazers access to more and more of the
electromagnetic spectrum and the ability to peer deeper and deeper into
space and time. “Finally, astronomy grew ears. We never had ears
before.”
Long-Awaited Triumph
The
discovery is a great triumph for three physicists — Kip Thorne of the
California Institute of Technology, Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Ronald Drever, formerly of Caltech and now
retired in Scotland — who bet their careers on the dream of measuring
the most ineffable of Einstein’s notions.
Photo
Important players in the LIGO
project, from left to right: Kip Thorne of the California Institute of
Technology, France A. Córdova of the National Science Foundation, Rainer
Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Reitze of
Caltech and Gabriela González of Louisiana State University.Credit
Lexey Swall for The New York Times
“Until
now, we scientists have only seen warped space-time when it’s calm,”
Dr. Thorne said in an email. “It’s as though we had only seen the
ocean’s surface on a calm day but had never seen it roiled in a storm,
with crashing waves.”
The
black holes that LIGO observed created a storm “in which the flow of
time speeded, then slowed, then speeded,” he said. “A storm with space
bending this way, then that.”
The chirp is also sweet vindication for the National Science Foundation,
which spent about $1.1 billion over more than 40 years to build a new
hotline to nature, facing down criticism that sources of gravitational
waves were not plentiful or loud enough to justify the cost.
“It’s
been decades, through a lot of different technological innovations,”
France Córdova, the foundation’s director, said in an interview,
recalling how, in the early years, the foundation’s advisory board had
“really scratched their heads on this one.”
Word
of LIGO’s success was met by hosannas in the scientific community,
albeit with the requisite admonishments of the need for confirmation or
replication.
“I
was freaking out,” said Janna Levin, a theorist at Barnard College at
Columbia who was not part of LIGO but was granted an early look at the
results for her warts-and-all book about the project, “Black Hole
Blues,” to be published this spring.
Robert Garisto, the editor of Physical Review Letters, said he had gotten goose bumps while reading the LIGO paper.
Photo
A pair of L-shaped antennas,
known as LIGO, in Hanford, Wash., left, and Livingston, La., detected
the gravitational waves on Sept. 14.Credit
Caltech-M.I.T.-LIGO Lab
Elusive Disturbances
When
Einstein announced his theory in 1915, he rewrote the rules for space
and time that had prevailed for more than 200 years, since the time of
Newton, stipulating a static and fixed framework for the universe.
Instead, Einstein said, matter and energy distort the geometry of the
universe in the way a heavy sleeper causes a mattress to sag, producing
the effect we call gravity.
A
disturbance in the cosmos could cause space-time to stretch, collapse
and even jiggle, like a mattress shaking when that sleeper rolls over,
producing ripples of gravity: gravitational waves.
Einstein
was not quite sure about these waves. In 1916, he told Karl
Schwarzschild, the discoverer of black holes, that gravitational waves
did not exist, then said they did. In 1936, he and his assistant Nathan
Rosen set out to publish a paper debunking the idea before doing the
same flip-flop again.
According
to the equations physicists have settled on, gravitational waves would
compress space in one direction and stretch it in another as they
traveled outward.
In 1969, Joseph Weber,
a physicist at the University of Maryland, made headlines when he
claimed to have detected gravitational waves using a six-foot-long
aluminum cylinder as an antenna. Waves of the right frequency would make
the cylinder ring like a tuning fork, he said.
Others
could not duplicate his result, but few doubted that gravitational
waves were real. Dr. Weber’s experiment inspired a generation of
scientists to look harder for Einsteinian marks on the universe.
Photo
An engineer upgrading a
component of the LIGO system. The team had barely finished calibrating
its equipment when a loud signal was first detected.Credit
Caltech-M.I.T.-LIGO Lab
In
1978, the radio astronomers Joseph H. Taylor Jr. and Russell A. Hulse,
then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discovered a pair of
neutron stars, superdense remnants of dead stars, orbiting each other.
One of them was a pulsar, emitting a periodic beam of electromagnetic
radiation. By timing its pulses, the astronomers determined that the
stars were losing energy and falling closer together at precisely the
rate that would be expected if they were radiating gravitational waves.
Another group of astronomers who go by the name Bicep made headlines in 2014
when they claimed to have detected gravitational waves from the
beginning of the Big Bang, using a telescope at the South Pole. They
later acknowledged that their observations had probably been contaminated by interstellar stardust.
The terms and empathy and sympathy are often confused,
and with good reason. Both of the words deal with the relationship one
has to the feelings and experiences of another. Today we explore the
differences between these terms and how they are most commonly used.
