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Two Ways to Take Better Notes
New York Magazine: If you ask ten people what the best way to take notes is, you'll probably get ten different answers. Ultraorganized note-takers (a group to which I cannot claim membership) come up with all sorts of crazy schemes involving bullet points and different-colored pencils and diagrams connecting ideas and so on. Others, like me, just use a series of dashes followed by semi-coherent summaries of ideas. Which systems work best? It's an open question, but one researchers are making progress on, and a new study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition lends some helpful insights.
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Brains, Schools and a Vicious Cycle of Poverty
The Wall Street Journal: A fifth or more of American children grow up in poverty, with the situation worsening since 2000, according to census data. At the same time, as education researcher Sean Reardon has pointed out, an “income achievement gap” is widening: Low-income children do much worse in school than higher-income children. Since education plays an ever bigger role in how much we earn, a cycle of poverty is trapping more American children. It’s hard to think of a more important project than understanding how this cycle works and trying to end it. Neuroscience can contribute to this project.
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Two Hormones Predict Negotiators’ Success
New research recently published in Psychological Science demonstrates that two hormones can exert a strong influence over a bargainer’s success in a negotiation: testosterone and the stress hormone cortisol. Testosterone is often associated with aggressive behavior, so we might assume that the more testosterone the better when it comes to the bargaining table. However, driving a hard bargain is about more than maximizing your earnings; negotiators also have to worry about how their economic goals might conflict with their social ones. Being too financially aggressive in a negotiation can put a strain on the social relationship between a buyer and seller.
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Advil vs. Tylenol. Which to Use, and When
The Wall Street Journal: When a headache, back pain or other complaint strikes, many people believe Advil, Tylenol and other over-the-counter analgesics are pretty much interchangeable. Far from it. These medications are each at their best when taken for certain ailments, in part because they work differently in the body and can have different side effects. Got a headache? Tylenol, or its generic version acetaminophen, might be your best bet since it comes with fewer side effects, many experts say. Inflamed elbow? Advil, whose active ingredient is ibuprofen, is likely to bring greater relief.
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Water Flowing From Toilet to Tap May Be Hard to Swallow
The New York Times: FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — Water spilled out of a spigot, sparklingly clear, into a plastic cup. Just 45 minutes earlier, it was effluent, piped over from Orange County’s wastewater treatment plant next door. At a specialized plant, it then went through several stages of purification that left it cleaner than anything that flows out of a home faucet or comes in a brand-name bottle. “It’s stripped down to the H, 2 and O,” said Mike Markus, the general manager of the county water district. He was not exaggerating. Without the minerals that give most cities’ supply a distinctive flavor, this water tastes of nothing.
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Four Ways to Tell If an Educational App Will Actually Help Your Child Learn
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center: Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionise childhood and early education. But the downside is that you will have to choose from among 80,000 possible options. This is the problem currently facing many parents. Following the invention of the iPad in 2010, by January 2015 there were 80,000 apps marketed as “educational” in the Apple App Store alone. We recently published a large-scale review of more than 200 articles on the question of how we can put the education back in educational apps.
