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What Do Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Warren and Tim Duncan Have in Common?
The New York Times: The study was almost laughably arcane: Air Force cadets’ pupils tended to dilate more when they read cartoons they thought were funny than for ones they didn’t think were funny. But the real punch line of this 1978 experiment — “Pupillary size as an indicator of preference in humor,” published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills — is what became of one of the authors, listed as Sullenberger, C. B. Chesley B.
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Wanted: Mars Explorers. Must Be Able To Tolerate Boredom And Play Nice With Others.
FiveThirtyEight: In December, NASA put out a call for adventurers interested in interplanetary exploration. “NASA is on an ambitious journey to Mars and we’re looking for talented men and women from diverse backgrounds and every walk of life to help get us there,” Charles Bolden, NASA administrator and a former astronaut, said in the announcement. More than 18,000 people answered the call, and between now and mid-2017, that vast pool of applications will be cut to 120 finalists, who will vie to become part of NASA’s next class of eight to 12 astronauts. ... Researchers involved in HI-SEAS are working on ways to defuse conflicts, and the first step is spotting them before anyone blows up.
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Framing Spatial Tasks as Social Eliminates Gender Differences
Women underperform on spatial tests when they don’t expect to do as well as men, but framing the tests as social tasks eliminates the gender gap in performance, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results show that women performed just as well as their male peers when the spatial tests included human-like figures. “Our research suggests that we may be underestimating the abilities of women in how we measure spatial thinking,” says postdoctoral researcher Margaret Tarampi of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Brain Exercises Don’t Live Up to the Hype, Researchers Say
The Wall Street Journal: Computerized brain-training exercises and games, touted for their ability to improve overall cognitive function, may actually only help you get better at the specific game you’re playing. That’s the conclusion of a wide-ranging review of nearly 400 studies of brain training published last week in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The review found that none of the studies followed scientific best practices for comparing a group of people practicing an intervention against a control group not getting the intervention.
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How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School’
The Atlantic: Chelsea Clinton made headlines recently as she campaigned for her mother—not for the policy proposals she defended, but for the fact that she did not accompany her not-quite-2-year-old daughter Charlotte to the first day of her Manhattan "school." While detractors were quick to berate her for missing this defining event in her child's life, supporters rushed to her defense by noting that the child’s father, who took Charlotte to school together with the family nanny, is perfectly capable of taking the lead. But what's missing from the discussion is an objection to the controversy’s premise—since when has "school" started at age 2? ...
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Using the Wisdom of Crowds to Improve Hiring
The British statistician Francis Galton applied statistical methods to many different subjects during the 1800s, including the use of fingerprinting for identification, correlational calculus, twins, blood transfusions, criminality, meteorology and, perhaps most famously, human intelligence. Galton, who was an ardent eugenicist, believed that intelligence was a trait that only a minority of elite individuals possessed. The majority of common people, he believed, were not very competent decision-makers. To put his theories to the test, Galton ran a famous experiment designed to analyze whether groups of common people were capable of making accurate choices.
