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Impactful Distraction
ScienceNews: “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.” The late rock and roll singer Jim Morrison was not a poster boy for public safety — and was no authority on safe driving. After all, later in “Roadhouse Blues,” he has beer for breakfast. But the opening line of that Doors’ song still resonates as sound guidance. ... This distracted state should be familiar to everyone. “That’s why you can drive home and not remember having driven home,” says Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Just because you look at something doesn’t mean you see it.” Read the whole story: ScienceNews
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Is psychology a “real” science? Does it really matter?
Scientific American: Fellow Scientific American blogger Melanie Tannenbaum is flustered by allegations that psychology is not a science and I can see where she is coming from. In this case the stimulus was a piece by Alex Berezow, a microbiologist, who in a short and provocative piece in the LA times argued the case that psychology is not a real science. I think he’s right. I also think that he misses the point. Berezow’s definition of science is not off the mark, but it’s also incomplete and too narrow.
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Two-Faced Facebook: We Like It, but It Doesn’t Make Us Happy
TIME: The more we use Facebook, the worse we feel. That’s what social psychologists at the University of Michigan report after tracking how 82 young adults used their Facebook accounts over a two-week period. When the participants started the study, they rated how satisfied they were with their lives. During the following two weeks, the researchers texted them at two-hour intervals five times a day to ask about how they felt about themselves, as well as how much time they had spent on Facebook since the last time they were texted. The more time people spent on Facebook during a single two-hour period, the worse they reported feeling. ...
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When it comes to weight loss, bad habits die hard
Los Angeles Times: On a recent doctor's visit, a compelling health video was looping in the reception room. It incorporated many of the accepted rules for achieving a healthy weight. The motivational video, tailored to the doctor's clientele, illustrated simple ways to eat more fruits and vegetables and get exercise. It was striking, however, that many of the nursing staff, who must have heard this video a thousand times, didn't seem to have taken it to heart. Nurses, as a national study revealed, are just as likely to overeat as the rest of the population.
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Infused With Faith: Ritual and Conflict
The Huffington Post: Israeli-Palestinian peace talks begin this week, and it's fair to say that attitudes range from guardedly hopeful to sneeringly cynical. After all, this conflict has been going on since the mid-20th century, with a lot of dashed promises along the way. It was just a year ago that missiles from Gaza were raining down daily on Israel. All of the final status issues are on the table, both sides agree -- land, borders, settlements, Jerusalem. It's widely assumed that the animosity and conflict between Palestine and Israel are fueled by these geopolitical issues, rather than by clashing religious values.
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The Confessions of Innocent Men
The Atlantic: Any good criminal-defense attorney will tell you to say four words if you are about to be arrested for murder: I want a lawyer. This is simple advice and should be easy to remember during an interrogation, but not everyone recalls it under the pressure of police questioning. Some people make matters worse for themselves in the face of strong evidence by providing an alibi or identifying another person as the perpetrator. Many succumb to the wiles of homicide detectives and implicate themselves to some lesser degree in the crime, heeding the admonition that a partial loss is better than going down for the whole thing.
