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Why Jane Austen would approve of online dating
USA Today: David Merkur is suddenly the poster boy for everything that's wrong with the crass world of online dating. Merkur, a New York investment banker, created a spreadsheet to keep track of the women he was dating, most of whom he had met on Match.com. Then he e-mailed it to one of his dates, who forwarded it on to her friends, and it went viral. Naturally, some of the 11 other women Merkur dated — and rated, and tabulated — are angry. When singles who have found matches by computer algorithm start using Excel to keep track of their relationships, perhaps it's time to take a critical look at online dating. Have we allowed the tools of the market to intrude where they don't belong?
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5 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams
LiveScience: When your head hits the pillow, for many it's lights out for the conscious part of you. But the cells firing in your brain are very much awake, sparking enough energy to produce the sometimes vivid and sometimes downright haunted dreams that take place during the rapid-eye-movement stage of your sleep. Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss? Like sleep, dreams are mysterious phenomena. But as scientists are able to probe deeper into our minds, they are finding some of those answers. Here's some of what we know about what goes on in dreamland. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Four APS Fellows Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Yesterday, the National Academy of Sciences announced the election of 84 new members and 21 new foreign associates. APS Fellow Uta Frith, University College, London, UK and University of Aarhus, Denmark, was honored as a foreign associate. Among the new members were three APS Fellows: Randolph Blake, Vanderbilt University, Carol S. Dweck, Stanford University, and Susan A. Gelman, University of Michigan. Randolph Blake is Centennnial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. He is best known for his work on vision, including his work on motion perception, perceptual organization, and visual cognition.
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A Psychological Twist in Getting Something for Nothing
The Wall Street Journal: When consumers are offered something for nothing, they generally want to pay anyway. That’s according to a new study and a handful of businesses that say “pay-what-you-want” options for products often drive customers to pay a full price or just skip buying. Why would people act against their own economic interest? To protect self image, researchers say. Consumers “feel bad when they pay less than the ‘appropriate’ price, causing them to pass on the opportunity to purchase the product altogether,” says the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Rapid Thinkers Take Greater Risks
The Atlantic: Pop quiz: do you consider yourself a fast thinker or a slow thinker? Time's up! If you took less than a second to answer that, you might be more of a risk-taker. That's according to new research (via Psychology Today) from a team of Princeton scientists who thought there might be a causal relationship between the speed of a person's thought and their willingness to embrace dangerous behavior, such as illegal drug use and unprotected sex. The researchers, Emily Pronin and Jesse Chandler, ran two tests in a study that appeared this month in Psychological Science. Participants were divided into two groups.
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Busy bodies, healthy minds
Chicago Tribune: Carol Adamitis had a stroke when she was 5 years old. Now, at 65, she is participating in research that annually tests her physical and mental health, examining her dexterity as she places pegs in a board and her memory as she repeats a series of numbers backward and forward. The study, led by professors at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, has found that people who are active are sharper and experience lower rates of Alzheimer's disease. Although Adamitis' arthritis makes exercise more difficult, and the stroke hurt her math skills and memory, her exam results show consistency from year to year. "I'm always glad to know how I did on these tests.
