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There’s one key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t
Quartz: “I’m just not a math person.” We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability. Is math ability genetic? Sure, to some degree. Terence Tao, UCLA’s famous virtuoso mathematician, publishes dozens of papers in top journals every year, and is sought out by researchers around the world to help with the hardest parts of their theories.
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The Heritability of Intelligence: Not What You Think
Scientific American: One of the longest standing assumptions about the nature of human intelligence has just been seriously challenged. According to the traditional “investment” theory, intelligence can be classified into two main categories: fluid and crystallized. Differences in fluid intelligence are thought to reflect novel, on-the-spot reasoning, whereas differences in crystallized intelligence are thought to reflect previously acquired knowledge and skills. According to this theory, crystallized intelligence develops through the investment of fluid intelligence in a particular body of knowledge. ...
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Singles Bar Science: Your Posse Makes You Better Looking
TIME: Say you just walked into a club on a Saturday night. Say you’re hoping you won’t leave alone. Odds are pretty good you’re not the only person there who’s thinking along those lines. That means you agonized at least a little before you left the house: What should you wear? How do you look? Do you do your hair this way (ugh, no) or that (ack, even worse)? Perhaps most important: do you fly solo or bring some chums? And if you do come with friends, who should they be? ... The answer, according to a new study just published in Psychological Science, is that whenever possible, bring your gang with you. Any one person seen in a group just seems better looking than when viewed alone.
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The Psychology of Online Comments
The New Yorker: Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse. “Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story,” wrote the online-content director Suzanne LaBarre, citing a recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as evidence. While it’s tempting to blame the Internet, incendiary rhetoric has long been a mainstay of public discourse.
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Happy People Steal More
Scientific American Mind: Who stole the office stapler? A study in April's Psychological Science argues it's more likely to have been your happiest colleague than your grumpiest. Observing that happier people are more mentally flexible, psychologists at Cornell University wondered whether they might be more morally flexible as well. To find out, the team showed 90 undergraduates either a cheerful video of a cartoon duck showering or a neutral screensaver. Read the whole story: Scientific American Mind
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Are You Okay? You Smell Like Cytokines.
The Huffington Post: Nurses and hospice workers say they can smell the final approach of death. Not with sudden death, but with the slow march toward the grave, the body's systems begin to shut down and metabolism changes, so that breath and skin and fluids give off a distinctive odor that signals the end is near. This is not surprising. In fact it's more perplexing that deadly diseases don't announce their presence earlier. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be more advantageous if we could all detect early warning signals, olfactory cues that the immune system is gearing up to ward off a new and threatening disease.
