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Introducing ‘Letters to Young Scientists,’ a new column from Science Careers
Pursuing a scientific career can be a daunting journey. Yet many of us are not taught how to navigate the tasks and challenges—giving a high-quality presentation, surviving the academic job market, and becoming a mentor, to name just a few—as part of our standard scientific training. And even the best mentor can’t provide advice to everyone or cover everything when it comes to succeeding in science and academia. So where can young scientists go for practical, reliable advice? In a tradition that dates back nearly a century, prominent scientists used to dispatch “letters” of advice and guidance to the next generation.
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Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies
Psychologists are in the midst of an ongoing, difficult reckoning. Many believe that their field is experiencing a “reproducibility crisis,” because they’ve tried and failed to repeat experiments done by their peers. Even classic results—the stuff of textbooks and TED talks—have proven surprisingly hard to replicate, perhaps because they’re the results of poor methods and statistical tomfoolery. These problems have spawned a community of researchers dedicated to improving the practices of their field and forging a more reliable way of doing science. These attempts at reform have met resistance.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest findings published in Psychological Science: How Endogenous Crowd Formation Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Online Ratings Gaël Le Mens, Balázs Kovács, Judith Avrahami, and Yaakov Kareev People often rely on ratings from online recommendation platforms before making decisions about purchases or other kinds of consumption. These ratings typically are averaged and accordingly are thought to reflect the wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomenon and thus provide unbiased quality estimates. But what if the way the crowd forms biases the average ratings?
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Videogame Developers Are Making It Harder to Stop Playing
Videogames have gotten harder to turn off, mental-health experts and parents say, raising concerns about the impact of seemingly endless gaming sessions on players’ lives. Game developers for years have tweaked the dials not only on how games look and sound but how they operate under the hood, and such changes have made videogames more pervasive and enthralling, industry observers say. The World Health Organization in June added “gaming disorder” to an updated version of its International Classification of Diseases, warning about a condition in which people give up interests and activities to overly indulge in gaming despite negative consequences.
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What Twins Can Teach Us About Nature vs. Nurture
The day my identical twin boys were delivered by an emergency cesarean, I noticed a behavioral difference. Twin A, who had been pushed against an unyielding pelvis for several hours, spent most of his first day alert and looking around, while Twin B, who had been spared this pre-birth stress, slept calmly like a typical newborn. My husband and I did our best to treat them equally, but Twin A was more of a challenge to hold — we called him “our lobster baby” — while Twin B was easily cuddled. As the boys developed, we saw other differences. Twin B rehearsed all the ambulatory milestones — crawling, walking, cycling, skating, etc.
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Why It Feels So Terrible to Drop Your Kid at College
For an adult who is no longer young but not yet old, there is perhaps no better preparation for death than sending a child to college. That’s not because it’s a reminder of the ceaseless march of age, though it is. It’s not because it unleashes a stampede of wild memories, though it does. And it’s not because it’s a moment that marks multiple beginnings and endings, although those fires do ignite and extinguish. It’s because adulthood distances you from the experience of dreading things that are certain to come about eventually. It’s not that you dread more things, or graver things, when you’re a kid—time seems to lurch slowly, death seems long off, bills don’t stack up, and all the rest.
