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Do you have brain power to make an idea go viral?
The Boston Globe: What distinguishes a hot new idea from one that’s destined to be a dud? University of California, Los Angeles, researchers explored what they called the “buzz effect” by recruiting nearly 100 undergraduate students to serve as either “interns” pitching what they deemed to be the next megahit TV show or “producers” to evaluate the interns’ ideas.
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How to Get Children to Eat Veggies
The Wall Street Journal: To parents, there is no force known to science as powerful as the repulsion between children and vegetables. Of course, just as supercooling fluids can suspend the law of electrical resistance, melting cheese can suspend the law of vegetable resistance. This is sometimes known as the Pizza Paradox. There is also the Edamame Exception, but this is generally considered to be due to the Snack Uncertainty Principle, by which a crunchy soybean is and is not a vegetable simultaneously.
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Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell
The New York Times: Like dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers, Nordstrom wanted to learn more about its customers -- how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors -- the kind of information that e-commerce sites like Amazon have in spades. So last fall the company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers’ movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones. But when Nordstrom posted a sign telling customers it was tracking them, shoppers were unnerved. ... “The creepy thing isn’t the privacy violation, it’s how much they can infer,” said Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist who had stopped in at Philz Coffee in Berkeley, Calif.
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The Psychology of Success: Helping Students Achieve (Op-Ed) –
LiveScience: Timothy Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of "Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change" (Little, Brown and Co., 2011) and he contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Scientific practice is under intense scrutiny these days, including in research psychology. Due to some high-profile cases of scientific fraud, and concern by some about shoddy research practices, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on. This is ironic, because this should be a time for hand clapping, not hand-wringing.
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The Psychology of Exile
When I was in middle school, one of the assigned readings was a story called “The Man Without a Country.” It was written by Edward Everett Hale in 1863, and told the story of a young American army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who is tried for treason along with Aaron Burr. During the trial, he angrily denounces his country, declaring his wish to never hear mention of the United States again, and the shocked judge complies: He sentences Nolan to spend the rest of his life in exile, aboard U.S. warships, where he will hear no word of life in America. I found this story very sad at the time, and still do.
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Inner Speech Speaks Volumes About the Brain
Whether you’re reading the paper or thinking through your schedule for the day, chances are that you’re hearing yourself speak even if you’re not saying words out loud. This internal speech -- the monologue you “hear” inside your head -- is a ubiquitous but largely unexamined phenomenon. A new study looks at a possible brain mechanism that could explain how we hear this inner voice in the absence of actual sound.
