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Top Learning Apps for Kids May Not Live Up To Their Promise
A new study analyzed some of the most downloaded educational apps for kids, using a set of four criteria designed to evaluate whether an app provides a high-quality educational experience for children. The findings show that most of the apps scored low, with free apps scoring even lower than their paid counterparts on some criteria. The results suggest apps shouldn’t replace human interaction nor do they guarantee learning, says Jennifer Zosh, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Brandywine. “Parents shouldn’t automatically trust that something marked ‘educational’ in an app store is actually educational,” Zosh says.
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Everyone Thinks Americans Are Selfish. They’re Wrong.
The United States is notable for its individualism. The results of several large surveys assessing the values held by the people of various nations consistently rank the United States as the world’s most individualist country. Individualism, as defined by behavioral scientists, means valuing autonomy, self-expression and the pursuit of personal goals rather than prioritizing the interests of the group — be it family, community or country. Whether America’s individualism is a source of pride or concern varies. Some people extol this mind-set as a source of our entrepreneurial spirit, self-reliance and geographic mobility.
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‘Everyone is Touched by This’: Indian Diaspora Feels Collective Grief Over COVID Crisis
... In early May, India registered over 400,000 positive Covid-19 cases in one day and set a record with 3,689 deaths on May 2. Then, weeks later, the country saw 4,529 deaths in one day. To date, the country has reached more than 25 million confirmed cases. The sheer number of infections and deaths in India has spurred fear and worry for many in the South Asian diaspora, Viswanath said. “There is a sense of grief and concern and anxiety among people of South Asian descent,” Viswanath said.
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Meet Virtual Reality, Your New Physical Therapist
... To really push the use of virtual reality for physical and occupational therapy, “we’ll need to build a body of evidence that shows it’s effective, how we pay for it and how we can develop it in a way that’s easy to use,” said Matthew Stoudt, chief executive and a founder of AppliedVR, which supplies therapeutic virtual reality. “We have to be able to demonstrate that we can bring down the cost of care, not just add to the cost paradigm.” While research specifically on V.R. use in physical and occupational therapy is in the early stages, an analysis of 27 studies, conducted by Matt C.
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You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships
The Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar is best known for his namesake “Dunbar’s number,” which he defines as the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. (The proposed number is 150.) But after spending his decades-long career studying the complexities of friendship, he’s discovered many more numbers that shape our close relationships. For instance, Dunbar’s number turns out to be less like an absolute numerical threshold than a series of concentric circles, each standing for qualitatively different kinds of relationships.
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Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Daniel joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the complexity of human nature, studying judgment and decision-making, and his experiments involving loss aversion. Daniel explains that memories can play tricks on our minds when remembering experiences and how to avoid noise and bias in the corporate hiring process. Daniel recounts his childhood growing up in Nazi-occupied France and his encounter with an SS soldier, he breaks down decision hygiene, and how it relates to vaccines. ...
