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How Humans Learn to Communicate With Their Eyes
The Wall Street Journal: The eyes are windows to the soul. What could be more obvious? I look through my eyes onto the world, and I look through the eyes of others into their minds. We immediately see the tenderness and passion in a loving gaze, the fear and malice in a hostile glance. In a lecture room, with hundreds of students, I can pick out exactly who is, and isn’t, paying attention. And, of course, there is the electricity of meeting a stranger’s glance across a crowded room. But wait a minute, eyes aren’t windows at all. They’re inch-long white and black and colored balls of jelly set in holes at the top of a skull.
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Zen and the Art of Cubicle Living
The Atlantic: One day recently I worked out of, quite possibly, the best office I have ever been in. Granted, this is not a high bar for a cubicle drone like me. Still, the design touches were lovely: It was a glass cube with an ergonomic green chair and mahogany desk. There was a frosted-glass door, so theoretically, I could have worked pants-less. (I was fully clothed.) The lighting was straight out of an ABC primetime family drama: a bright reading lamp to my left, a copper light above me, and another, softer light that glowed behind my laptop screen.
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Short Course in Obesity Research
A 5-day short course on "Strengthening Causal Inference in Behavioral Obesity Research" will be hosted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham from July 20, 2015–July 24, 2015. Identifying causal relations among variables is fundamental to science. Obesity is a major problem for which much progress in understanding, treatment, and prevention remains to be made. Understanding which social and behavioral factors cause variations in adiposity and which other factors cause variations is vital to producing, evaluating, and selecting intervention and prevention strategies.
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ARPA-E New Funding Opportunity Announcement
ARPA-E has released a Funding Opportunity Announcement for its newest program, Traveler Response Architecture using Novel Signaling for Network Efficiency in Transportation (TRANSNET). The program aims to optimize energy efficiency in multimodal, urban transportation networks (e.g., personal vehicles, buses, light rail, etc.). Transportation systems are responsible for more than 25% of domestic energy use, but currently no one is exploring holistic solutions to optimizing energy use throughout the entire network.
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The Sound of Status: People Know High-Power Voices When They Hear Them
Being in a position of power can fundamentally change the way you speak, altering basic acoustic properties of the voice, and other people are able to pick up on these vocal cues to know who is really in charge, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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<em>Perspectives</em> Provides Strategies for Maximizing Informational Value of Research
It’s an exhilarating time in psychological science, as momentum continues to build toward improving research standards and practices across the field. A special section in the November issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science is part of an ongoing effort to involve researchers in this movement by providing a set of cutting-edge strategies that can be used to improve the way research is conducted and evaluated.