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Many Children Under 5 Are Left to Their Mobile Devices, Survey Finds
The New York Times: A small survey of parents in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of their children had been given tablets, smartphones or iPods of their own by age 4 and had used the devices without supervision, researchers reported on Monday. The survey was not nationally representative and relied on self-reported data from parents. But experts say the surprising result adds to growing evidence that the use of electronic devices has become deeply woven into the experience of childhood. ... It was not clear how often the parents had bequeathed old devices as digital hand-me-downs or had bought new ones.
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Job crafting and creating meaning in your work
re:Work: Rarely are jobs designed to match the talents, preferences, and aspirations of the individual. Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, discusses the art and science of job crafting. Read the whole story: re: Work
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The Leadership Style That Can Make Men Look Inferior
Asking for help can improve decision-making, but also prompt others to question your competence, especially if you’re a man.
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Selective Media Coverage May Cause Us to Forget Certain Health Facts
The health facts presented by mass media in the midst of a disease outbreak are likely to influence what we remember about the disease -- new research suggests that the same mass media coverage may also influence the facts that we forget. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that personal anxiety and mass media coverage interact to determine what people remember about a disease. “The starting point for our study was the exaggerated coverage of Ebola in 2014 despite the absence of any serious consequences in the United States,” says psychological scientist Alin Coman of Princeton University.
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The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing
The Atlantic: “Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs,” says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language. Cheek, an anthropologist by training who left academia in the early 1980s to work for the Federal Aviation Commission, is responsible for something few people realize exists: the 2010 Plain Writing Act. In fact, Cheek was among the first government employees to champion the use of clear, concise language. Once she retired in 2007 from the FAA and gained the freedom to lobby, she leveraged her hatred for gobbledygook to create an actual law.
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Exposure to Nature Promotes Cooperation
Pacific Standard: The philosopher Bertrand Russell famously remarked that “the only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” New research finds that one way to encourage mutually beneficial behavior is to shift our focus from mankind to Mother Earth. In the Journal of Environmental Psychology, a team led by Carleton University’s John Zelenski describes three studies in which participants who watched short nature videos (some as brief as two minutes) were subsequently more likely to act in cooperative ways, such as harvesting virtual fish in a way that promotes sustainability. Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
