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Loneliness Can Be Deadly for Elders; Friends Are the Antidote
The New York Times: The circle shrinks. As the years pass, older people attend too many funerals. Friendships that sustained them for decades lapse when companions and confidants retire or move away or grow ill. These days Sylvia Frank, who moved into an independent living residence in Lower Manhattan in 2014, can email or call one longtime friend in Florida. Another, in Queens, is slipping into dementia and will most likely exclaim, “I haven’t spoken to you in months!” when, in fact, they talked the day before. ... The way we prioritize friendships may evolve.
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Why It Pays to Be Vague When Negotiating Prices
LiveScience: In negotiating, is a more precise opening offer always better? It might be — but it depends on the experience level of the person with whom you're negotiating, a recent study from Germany found. In the study, researchers showed that increasing the precision of an opening offer improved a person's negotiations with amateurs, but could actually backfire on negotiations with experts. In most situations, precision can influence social perceptions during a negotiation, suggesting more confidence and competence, the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in October in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Keep Your Eye on the Balls to Become a Better Athlete
The New York Times: MONTREAL — The acid-yellow spheres on the screen don’t look anything like the linebackers that the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan tries to avoid each week. Nor do they resemble an English Premier League soccer player streaking down the field, or a puck hurtling across the ice in a National Hockey League game. If anything, they look like finely sheared tennis balls. The beauty in the design of NeuroTracker — the video game aimed at heightening cognitive agility the way lifting dumbbells develops muscles — is allegedly its simplicity.
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In Today’s Supreme Court Case, Freedom Of Speech Meets Your Wallet
FiveThirtyEight: Every time we buy something with our credit cards, whether at a high-end restaurant or a local bodega, merchants pay a percentage of the transaction to companies like Visa and MasterCard. These “swipe fees” are the subject of a long-simmering feud between retailers, which have profit margins to protect, and credit card companies, which say the fees are just the (invisible) cost of doing business. Some businesses prefer to steer customers toward using cash by tacking a surcharge onto credit card purchases to cover the cost of the fee, but credit card companies have successfully lobbied legislatures in 10 states to prohibit this practice. ...
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Teens Unlikely to Be Harmed by Moderate Digital Screen Use
New findings from over 120,000 adolescents in the UK indicate that the relationship between screen time and well-being is weak at best, even at high levels of digital engagement.
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Children Gain More Weight When Parents See Them as ‘Overweight’
Children whose parents considered them to be ‘overweight’ gained more weight over the following decade compared with those whose parents thought they were ‘normal weight,’ according to data from two nationally representative studies.
