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As part of a class, students read, discussed, and wrote about the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Hochschild. The following essay represents their collective thoughts and answers to three reflective prompts about empathy walls, one of the central themes of the book, and their role and importance in civil conversation.

Small-bodied live-bearing fishes attract broad attention because of their importance in biomedical research and critical conservation status in natural habitats. Artificial insemination is an essential process to establish hybrid lines and for the operation of sperm repositories. The existing mouth-pipetting technique for artificial insemination of live-bearing fishes has not been substantially upgraded since the first implementation in the 1950s. The goal of this work was to develop a standardized artificial inseminator device (SAID) to address issues routinely encountered in insemination by mouth-pipetting, including lack of reproducibility among different users, difficulty in training, and large unreportable variation in sample volume and pressure during insemination. Prototypes of the SAID were designed as relatively inexpensive (r2 > 0.99) between the piston position and volume. Pressure generation from eight mouth-pipetting operators and SAID prototypes were assessed by pressure sensors. The pressure control by SAID was superior to that produced by mouth-pipetting, yielding lower pressures (31–483 Pa) and smaller variations (standard deviation