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A Solution for Bad Teaching
The New York Times: IT’S no secret that tenured professors cause problems in universities. Some choose to rest on their laurels, allowing their productivity to dwindle. Others develop tunnel vision about research, inflicting misery on students who suffer through their classes. Despite these costs, tenure may be a necessary evil: It offers job security and intellectual freedom in exchange for lower pay than other occupations that require advanced degrees. Instead of abolishing tenure, what if we restructured it? The heart of the problem is that we’ve combined two separate skill sets into a single job.
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Be Happier: Spend More Money on Others
Pacific Standard: If you want to feel happier—and who doesn’t—what should you do with that $20 you have in your pocket? The evidence is clear, according to a new research paper: You should use it to help someone in need. Psychologists Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin, along with Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, report that the benefits of helping others “are evident in givers old and young in countries around the world, and extend to not only subjective well-being, but also objective health.” Writing in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, they demonstrate this counter-intuitive thesis by describing a series of studies, many of which they conducted themselves.
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Watch This Baby Video, It’s Good For Your Creativity
Fast Company: It takes us an average of 25 minutes to get to work every morning. We bump bumpers on the freeway, shoulder shoulders on the subway. By the time you get to your desk, you'll feel fried--and unable to think creatively. Which is precisely why you need to watch this baby laugh. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, a team led by researcher Ruby Nadler found the hilarious trumps the tragic in cases of creativity. Her team gave subjects audio and video inputs, each on a range of negative, neutral, or positive emotional impact.
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Why Are We Still on Facebook?
The New Yorker: I joined Facebook fifteen days after it launched, becoming the five-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth user. I remember the early Facebook well. Back then, it was still called thefacebook.com, and you had to have a Harvard e-mail address to join. You could browse profiles. You could request friendships. You could “poke” people. But you couldn’t do much of anything else. At the time, Facebook event invitations hadn’t yet been invented. Still, students browsed profiles to determine whom they wanted at their dorm-room bashes. One evening, one of my old college roommates was invited to a party by someone she had never met; he’d liked her profile picture.
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Go ahead and gossip. It’s good for society.
The Washington Post: An experiment to study the nature of gossip and ostracism suggests both serve important roles in society: reforming bullies and encouraging cooperation. “Groups that allow their members to gossip,” says Matthew Feinberg, a Stanford University postdoctoral researcher, “sustain cooperation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t. And groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracize untrustworthy members.
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Virtual Avatars May Impact Real-World Behavior
How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers,” says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
