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How Do I Avoid Being A Micromanager?
Fast Company: The micromanager might be one of the most common "bad boss" stereotypes, but it's a tricky situation when you are on the other side. This week's reader question comes from a newly minted supervisor, unsure of how to manage her entry-level employees without becoming a micromanager. For advice on how to deal with this tricky situation we turned to leadership coach Lolly Daskal and psychologist Art Markman Read the whole story: Fast Company
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Why all babies love peekaboo
BBC: One of us hides our eyes and then slowly reveals them. This causes peals of laughter from a baby, which causes us to laugh in turn. Then we do it again. And again. Peekaboo never gets old. Not only does my own infant daughter seem happy to do it for hours, but when I was young I played it with my mum ("you chuckled a lot!" she confirms by text message) and so on back through the generations. We are all born with unique personalities, in unique situations and with unique genes. So why is it that babies across the world are constantly rediscovering peekaboo for themselves?
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Spoilers Can Make a Joke Funnier
Scientific American Mind: Hearing a punch line before the setup will predictably spoil a joke. But what of running gags and callbacks? Often a joke is funnier when it is familiar. An article published online in December 2013 in Cognition and Emotion resolves this paradox by applying research on insight. Sascha Topolinski, a psychologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, studies processing fluency: when information is absorbed easily, it feels more true and beautiful. Repetition can increase fluency, which is why we prefer familiar music and art. Research also shows that “spoilers” do not always spoil.
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Take Notes by Hand for Better Long-Term Comprehension
Data suggest that taking notes by hand beats typing notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over time.
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Fathers, Daughters and the Second Shift
The Huffington Post: The phrase "the second shift" entered the popular lexicon a quarter century ago, when sociologist Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung published a popular book by that name. Based on in-depth interviews and in-home observations of working couples, the book revealed that, despite entering the labor market and pursuing careers in record numbers, women were still taking care of most of the routine household and childcare responsibilities. The authors documented the toll that balancing career and unpaid domestic labor was taking on families, and women in particular -- in stress, marital tension, exhaustion and guilt.
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The new SAT: Aptitude testing for college admissions falls out of favor
The Washington Post: There’s a reason the College Board scrubbed “aptitude” from the name of its big admission test two decades ago. The idea of a Scholastic Aptitude Test left the organization open to criticism that it believed some people were born to go to college and some weren’t. The latest version of what is now simply called the SAT drops questions about arcane vocabulary, continuing a long move away from testing for aptitude as the College Board seeks to tie the exam more closely to what students learn in the classroom. Previous revisions had dropped antonym, analogy and quantitative-comparison questions that were also seen as detached from the nation’s school curriculum. ...
