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Let Students Sleep
New York Times: Efforts to improve educational outcomes through extending the school day may have unintended and counterproductive consequences if longer days are implemented by moving the school bell earlier or by pushing more homework later into the night. Young children are biologically primed for "early to bed and early to rise," but as children pass through middle school and into high school, biological processes keep them up later.
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Teens get smarter as their minds get quicker
Yahoo India: Washington, Sept 28 (ANI): A group of psychologists at University of Texas at San Antonio has found that adolescents become smarter because they become mentally quicker. This is the first time psychologists have been able to confirm this important connection. To find the relationship between these two phenomena, the UTSA psychologists analysed the results of 12 diverse intelligence and mental speed tests administered to 6,969 adolescents (ages 13 to 17) in the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Intelligence was measured by performance on cognitive tests of diverse abilities, such as vocabulary knowledge, math facts, and mechanical comprehension.
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Shocking “prison” study 40 years later: What happened at Stanford?
CBS News: It's considered one of the most notorious psychology experiments ever conducted - and for good reason. The "Stanford prison experiment" - conducted in Palo Alto, Calif. 40 years ago - was conceived by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo as a way to use ordinary college students to explore the often volatile dynamic that exists between prisoners and prison guards - and as a means of encouraging reforms in the way real-life prison guards are trained. But what started out as make-believe quickly devolved into an all-too-real prison situation. Some student "guards" became sadistic overlords who eagerly abused the "prisoners," many of whom began to see themselves as real prisoners.
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How is Spanish soccer like GOP economics?
USA Today: The past year has been a triumphant one for Spanish soccer. The national team won the World Cup. Barcelona, whose players largely stocked the national team, took the Union of European Football Associations Cup, the most prestigious competition in club soccer. The Spanish under-19 team won the 2011 World Cup for the fifth time. And everywhere in the world, Spanish-style soccer was admired for its emphasis on teamwork, passing the ball and talented players working seamlessly together. There's just one problem: This year Spain's professional soccer league almost closed down.
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What Do Infants Remember When They Forget?
Six-month-old babies are severely limited in what they can remember about the objects they see in the world; if you hide several objects from an infant, they will only remember one of those objects with any detail. But a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that when babies “forget” about an object, not all is lost.
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Troy Davis Execution Fuels Eyewitness ID Debate
NPR: Before he was executed in Georgia last week, Troy Davis brought worldwide attention to his case by challenging the trustworthiness of bystanders who said they saw him shoot a police officer. Davis lost the battle to spare his life, but experts say his case adds fuel to an already-simmering debate over how much weight courts should give to eyewitness testimony. Last month, New Jersey's top court made it easier for criminal defendants to challenge the credibility of eyewitnesses, while the U.S. Supreme Court is set in November to hear its first case dealing with eyewitness evidence in 34 years.
