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Are you liberal or conservative? Your parents may be to blame
The Globe and Mail: During Monday night’s U.S. presidential debate, Democrat and Republican operatives were no doubt glued to graphs monitoring approval ratings for various key demographics, trying to figure out if President Barack Obama, for instance, was running off with the women’s vote with all that talk of 1980s foreign policy and battleships. But new research suggests that for many viewers, debates don’t matter as much as we think. The political die may have been cast way back in childhood. Your temperament as a child and your folks’ parenting style may have a lot to do with whether you consider yourself liberal or conservative. Read the whole story: The Globe and Mail
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To Nurture Genius, Improve Gifted Education
Scientific American Mind: In 1957, when Sputnik took the world by storm, the Ford Foundation was several years into a project for talented students based on early college entrance.
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I’m Right! (For Some Reason)
The New York Times: IF we are reminded of anything this election season, it is that America is a house divided against itself. The anger and mistrust between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, often seems as bitter as it is reflexive. Most worrisome of all, we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom. Take the case of two political ads recently shown on television.
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Political strength
The Economist: Male Harris sparrows are pugnacious beasts. They signal their status by the darkness of their plumage, and woe-betide any male whose signal is false—for if an itinerant ethologist blackens a subordinate’s feathers, the dominant birds recognise it as a fraud and beat it up. Normally, though, behaviour and outward appearance are in alignment, having been arranged that way by evolution, and subordinate birds do not push their luck. For female Harris sparrows, however, plumage does not matter in this way.
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Psychologie: rêvasser stimule la créativité (daydreaming stimulates creativity)
Le Huffington Post: Vous culpabilisez parce que vous avez passé l'après-midi à rêvasser? Pas de panique. Sans le savoir, vous étiez peut-être en train de résoudre un problème. D'ailleurs, cela vous est peut-être déjà arrivé. Au volant, en voiture, en train de faire les courses, vous êtes concentré sur quelque chose qui n'a rien à voir avec votre travail lorsque soudain, Eurêka!, une idée ou la solution à un problème vient à vous. Ce qu'il se passe dans ces moments, des chercheurs en psychologie ont cherché à le comprendre un peu plus précisément, grâce à plusieurs études parues dans le dernier numéro de la revue Psychological Science.
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The New Face of Infidelity
The Wall Street Journal: Some 60 years ago, Alfred Kinsey delivered a shock to midcentury sexual sensibilities when he reported that at some point in their marriages, half of the men and a quarter of the women in the U.S. had an extramarital affair. No one puts much stock in Dr. Kinsey's high numbers any more—his sampling methods suffered from a raging case of selection bias—but his results fit the long-standing assumption that men are much more likely to cheat than women. Lately, however, researchers have been raising doubts about this view: They believe that the incidence of unfaithfulness among wives may be approaching that of husbands.
