Dear students,

The Covid-19 situation is still fluctuating. In order to sustain the satisfactory results of our anti-pandemic measures and keep the situation under control, our College has made the following arrangements for your safe return to the campus for the second semester of the academic year 2021-22. The opening of the College for the second semester of the academic year 2021-22 has been postponed to 14 February 2022.

Registering the date of your return to the campus

To ensure an orderly and safe return to the campus, all students, in principle, are required to make a staggered(错开的) return to UIC during the period of 12-14 February 2022. Starting from 2 February 2022, students are invited to log on MIS Survey (https://mis.uic.edu.cn/survey/login.jsp), selecting the item on "registration of returning students" to register their date of return. Students who fail to complete the registration will be unable to enter the College premises. If for any reason, students need to bring forth or postpone the date of their return to the College, please report this on MIS Survey. Student hostels will be opened as of 9 February.

Daily Health Report

During the winter holidays, students are required to submit their daily health report by logging on to MIS Survey (https://mis.uic.edu.cn/survey/login.jsp), proactively and factually reporting their health condition and their location or travel plans to the College. Students who fail to submit the required health reports for 14 consecutive days will be unable to enter the College premises.

Different requirements for students returning from areas of different risk-levels.

According to the directives of the local Pandemic Control and Prevention agency, we have different requirements for students returning from areas of different risk-levels. Students are asked to avoid going to high or medium risk areas or hot spots, with a heightened alert for the protection of their personal health. The following are guidelines for reporting your travel history 14 days prior to their return to the College:

Note

After a careful study of the distribution of students in medium to high areas, the College will, without delay, reach out to students who fall into categories 4 to 6 on the above chart and will lose no time in contacting students in category 3 above regarding arrangements for returning to the campus. Please be patient and await instructions from the College. If you have any queries, you may dial 0756-3620491/3620224 during office hours.

The above arrangements may be adjusted in accordance with ongoing instructions from the local Pandemic Prevention and Control Agency. Rest assured that we will notify you of any changes without delay.

While Disney animations are successful in moving their audiences, their subsidiary (子公司) Pixar is expert at creating tear-jerking movies as well.

At first sight, it is remarkable that these movies make us cry—the main characters are cartoon characters, in most cases not even human beings, who do things that could evidently never happen in the real world: toys come to life, monsters are to scare sleeping children, and helium-balloon-powered houses travel the world. How can a story so unrealistic make us care so much about their animated main characters?

The Pixar creators explained that their stories often reflect their own personal lives. Whereas the animated characters are far from real, their lives are relatable. The magical ingredient is the realistic portrayal of the complex emotional lives of the characters.

As Pixar director Pete Doctor explains: "What you're trying to do, when you tell a story, is to write about an event in your life that made you feel a particular way. And what you're trying to do, when you tell a story, is to get the audience to have that same feeling. While this is true for storytelling in general, it is especially important in Pixar movies, given that the basic plots of their movies cannot happen in real life."

What makes Pixar's highly unrealistic stories believable is the fact that they address problems that are central to our own lives. Pixar addresses real human matters such as family, friendship, death, loss, and the highly realistic emotions that such events evoke in our life.

The effect of the story thus depends on the human capacity to empathize with others: to recognize which emotions others experience, and to understand why others feel how they feel. The fact that empathy is learned and developed through life may well be the reason why these movies are entertaining for kids but rather devastating and heart-crushing for adults.

Every Pixar movie has the moment when we cry. We learn and feel with the characters through the realistic portrayal of their emotional lives. The stories appeal to our deepest emotions and, thus, make us cry. Because, essentially, Pixar stories are about us.

Applied Ethics

Although ethics classes are common around the world, scientists are unsure if their lessons can actually change behavior; evidence either way is weak, relying on contrived laboratory tests or sometimes unreliable self-reports. But a new study published in Cognition found that, in at least one real-world situation, a single ethics lesson may have had lasting effects.

The researchers investigated one class session's impact on eating meat. According to study co-author Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside: students' attitudes on the topic are variable and unstable, behavior is easily measurable, and ethics literature largely agrees that eating less meat is good because it reduces environmental harm and animal suffering. Half of the students in four large philosophy classes read an article on the ethics of factory-farmed meat, optionally watched an 11-minute video on the topic and joined a 50-minute discussion. The other half focused on charitable giving instead. Then, unbeknownst to the students, the researchers studied their anonymized meal-card purchases for that semester — nearly 14,000 receipts for almost 500 students. "It's an awesome data set," says Nina Strohminger, a psychologist who teaches business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and was not involved in the study.

Schwitzgebel predicted the intervention would have no effect; he had previously found that ethics professors do not differ from other professors on a range of behaviors, including voting rates, blood donation and returning library books. But among student subjects who discussed meat ethics, meal purchases containing meat decreased from 52 to 45 percent — and this effect held steady for the study's duration of several weeks. Purchases from the other group remained at 52 percent.

"That's actually a pretty large effect for a pretty small intervention." Schwitzgebel says. Strohminger agrees: "The thing that still blows my mind is that the only thing that's different between these two cases is just that one day in class." She says she wants the effect to be real but cannot rule out some unknown confounding variable. And if real. Strohminger notes, it might be reversible by another nudge: "Easy come, easy go."

Schwitzgebel suspects the greatest impact came from social influence — classmates or teaching assistants leading the discussions may have shared their own vegetarianism, showing it as achievable or more common. Second, the video may have had an emotional impact. Least rousing, he thinks, was rational argument, although his co-authors say reason might play a bigger role. Now the researchers are probing the specific effects of teaching style, teaching assistants' eating habits and students' video exposure. Meanwhile Schwitzgebel who had predicted no effect — will be eating his words.