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You Still Need Your Brain
The New York Times: Most adults recall memorizing the names of rivers or the Pythagorean theorem in school and wondering, “When am I ever gonna use this stuff?” Kids today have a high-profile spokesman. Jonathan Rochelle, the director of Google’s education apps group, said last year at an industry conference that he “cannot answer” why his children should learn the quadratic equation. He wonders why they cannot “ask Google.” If Mr. Rochelle cannot answer his children, I can. Google is good at finding information, but the brain beats it in two essential ways. Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. Consider vocabulary.
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Research transparency: 5 questions about open science answered
The Conversation: What is “open science”? Open science is a set of practices designed to make scientific processes and results more transparent and accessible to people outside the research team. It includes making complete research materials, data and lab procedures freely available online to anyone. Many scientists are also proponents of open access, a parallel movement involving making research articles available to read without a subscription or access fee. Why are researchers interested in open science? What problems does it aim to address? Recent research finds that many published scientific findings might not be reliable.
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The Power of Office Rituals
Discover: Anthropologists have long studied how rituals bind practitioners together. From African tribes moving rhythmically around a fire to the scripted kneeling and standing by Catholics during Sunday mass, participants deepen group identity through ritual. But ritual also spills over into business and social situations. “The great thing about ritual is that anywhere humans are, a ritual will be there,” says Nicholas Hobson, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at the University of Toronto. A new study in the journal Psychological Science has found that even when ritual is stripped of its cultural and social context, its power to bind groups remains. Read the whole story: Discover
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How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering
The Atlantic: For some women, enrolling in an engineering course is like running a psychological gauntlet. If they dodge overt problems like sexual harassment, sexist jokes, or poor treatment from professors, they often still have to evade subtler obstacles like the implicit tendency to see engineering as a male discipline. It’s no wonder women in the U.S. hold just 13 to 22 percent of the doctorates in engineering, compared to an already-low 33 percent in the sciences as a whole.
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Barnard Chooses a Leader Whose Research Focuses on Women
The New York Times: Barnard College announced on Monday that it had hired Sian Beilock to be its next president, the eighth person to hold the position. Ms. Beilock comes from the University of Chicago, where she is executive vice provost overseeing a range of functions and projects, including the University of Chicago Press, the school’s engagement with its surrounding community and several significant building projects. A cognitive scientist by training, Dr. Beilock studies how people crumble or do well under pressure, and what psychological tools help them perform at their best. She has a particular focus on how women and girls perform in math and science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring time order as a psychological bias and how people interpret errors in statements made by nonnative speakers.
