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The Power of Puppies: Looking at Cute Images Can Improve Focus
Pictures of baby animals, including puppies and kittens, can have powerful effects on attention and concentration, a study shows.
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We Know How You Feel
The New Yorker: Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963. Henson had been hired to make the film for a conference that the company was convening to showcase its strengths in machine-to-machine communication. Told to devise a faux robot that believed it functioned better than a person, he came up with a cocky, boxy, jittery, bleeping Muppet on wheels. “This is computer H14,” it proclaims as the film begins.
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Positive thinking? It’s not enough to reach your goals
USA Today: "Dream it. Wish it. Do it" is a popular T-shirt slogan. It is not a very good way to change your life – as countless people who made New Year's resolutions to lose weight, start exercising or improve work habits are learning right about now. Positive thinking has its merits, but it has been seriously oversold as a way to achieve goals, a growing body of research shows. If you want to change, you might want to confront your dreams with some hard, cold, even negative reality, studies show. "It's so pleasant to believe that positive fantasies will work," says Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University.
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How Do We Respond to Parenthood?
Pacific Standard: Yes, men have a harder time than women adjusting to life as new parents. But that blanket statement covers up important differences between individual men and women—specifically how those differences affect couples making the transition to parenthood, according to a new study. Maybe this goes without saying, but men and women respond differently when the stork comes calling, reporting different levels of satisfaction with their relationships depending on their individual childcare responsibilities.
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Transgender Kids Show Consistent Gender Identity Across Measures
A study with children ages 5 to 12 indicates that the gender identity of these children is deeply held and is not the result of confusion about gender identity.
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What a Child Can Teach a Smart Computer
The Wall Street Journal: Every January the intellectual impresario and literary agent John Brockman (who represents me, I should disclose) asks a large group of thinkers a single question on his website, edge.org. This year it is: “What do you think about machines that think?” There are lots of interesting answers, ranging from the skeptical to the apocalyptic. I’m not sure that asking whether machines can think is the right question, though. As someone once said, it’s like asking whether submarines can swim. But we can ask whether machines can learn, and especially, whether they can learn as well as 3-year-olds. Everyone knows that Alan Turing helped to invent the very idea of computation.
