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The Creativity Bias against Women
Scientific American: More than ever, creativity has become a hot commodity in the workplace. Businesses compete ferociously for new ideas, and Silicon Valley — with its extreme focus on innovation — is the current bright spot of the US economy. Companies need employees who can tackle difficult problems, learn new skills fast, and identify opportunities in unexpected places. Top employers are increasingly looking to hire individuals who excel at creative thinking. But whether you are seen as creative or not may depend on whether you’re a man or a woman.
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Superforecasters
BBC Radio 4: Professor Philip Tetlock explains why his newly discovered elite group of so-called Superforecasters are so good at predicting global events. Read the whole story: BBC Radio 4
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The One New Year’s Resolution That Usually Works
TIME: Realistic financial resolutions are relatively easy to achieve. We all know the drill by now: Make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight or reduce spending or finally finish that novel. Fail in miserable fashion. Feel bad about yourself and scarf down a tub of double-chocolate ice cream. ... “If it’s a few seconds to New Year’s and you’re just throwing something up in the wind, then it’s not going to work,” said Dr. John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton who has conducted multiple studies on the subject. “It requires preparation. You have to be serious about the endeavor.” Read the whole story: TIME
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Terrorism May Make Liberals Think More Like Conservatives
Liberals’ attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants became more like those of conservatives following the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, new research shows. Data from two nationally representative surveys of British citizens revealed that feelings of national loyalty increased and endorsement of equality decreased among political liberals following the terrorist attack. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Terrorist attacks on major international capital cities such as Paris, Ankara, or London are rare and dramatic events that undoubtedly shape public and political opinion.
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Pot luck
The Economist: MEN want sex and sex leads to fatherhood. If these two statements were propositions in a syllogism, then the logical conclusion would be that men want fatherhood. Observation, however, indicates that this is not always the case. As the number of women left, literally, holding the baby shows, quite a few men run a mile from fatherhood. Of course, the statements are not part of a syllogism, for the word “fatherhood” has different meanings in the first sentence and the second and third ones—the first meaning is biological and the second social. Moreover, there are quite a few men who do not run a mile from the social form of fatherhood.
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The Spiritual Life of the Long-Distance Runner
The New Yorker: Shortly after sunrise, on June 14, 2015, a Finnish man named Ashprihanal Aalto stood on Eighty-fourth Avenue, in Queens. At 6A.M., he began running around the block. He passed a playground, some houses, and a technical high school. After half a mile, he returned to his starting point. Then he kept going—until, forty days later, he’d run five thousand six hundred and forty-nine laps, for a total of thirty-one hundred miles. Aalto was one of twelve runners attempting the world’s longest certified footrace, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race. Eight of the runners finished the race within the fifty-two-day time limit.
