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Cooperation, Trust, and Antagonism: How Public Goods Are Promoted
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Every society has public goods and common-pool resources that can be used by all of its citizens. These include public services, such as national radio or charitable organizations, and natural resources, such as water or fossil fuels. These goods and resources require that citizens contribute to their creation, acquisition, maintenance, or distribution. However, because all citizens benefit regardless of the level of their contribution, it can be difficult to convince people to participate in the provision and maintenance of collective goods. In this report, Craig D.
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Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell
The New York Times: Like dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers, Nordstrom wanted to learn more about its customers -- how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors -- the kind of information that e-commerce sites like Amazon have in spades. So last fall the company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers’ movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones. But when Nordstrom posted a sign telling customers it was tracking them, shoppers were unnerved. ... “The creepy thing isn’t the privacy violation, it’s how much they can infer,” said Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist who had stopped in at Philz Coffee in Berkeley, Calif.
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Inner Speech Speaks Volumes About the Brain
Whether you’re reading the paper or thinking through your schedule for the day, chances are that you’re hearing yourself speak even if you’re not saying words out loud. This internal speech -- the monologue you “hear” inside your head -- is a ubiquitous but largely unexamined phenomenon. A new study looks at a possible brain mechanism that could explain how we hear this inner voice in the absence of actual sound.
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Homeownership, the Key to Happiness?
The New York Times: If trying to buy an apartment in New York City has been making you miserable, consider this: actually getting that home may not make you happy.
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Hearing What We Read
Psychological scientists have discovered new evidence of what goes on in the brain when people read printed words. The scientists, led by Maria Dimitropoulou of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, in Donostia, Spain, used Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes, to investigate how knowledge about the relationship between written language and sound influences our ability to recognize words. The study was published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. In two experiments, the scientists used the masked priming paradigm, a method used to study visual word recognition.
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Early Spatial Reasoning Predicts Later Creativity and Innovation, Especially in STEM Fields
Exceptional spatial ability at age 13 predicts creative and scholarly achievements over 30 years later, according to results from a new longitudinal study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, conducted by psychology researcher David Lubinski and colleagues at Vanderbilt University, provides evidence that early spatial ability -- the skill required to mentally manipulate 2D and 3D objects -- predicts the development of new knowledge, and especially innovation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains, above and beyond more traditional measures of mathematical and verbal ability.