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Career Advice From an Oldish Not-Quite Geezer
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Over the course of my career, I’ve given and received a lot of advice. Much of it was wrong. Sometimes it lacked the perspective that comes with age and experience. So now, as an official "oldster" at 65 (proof: thanks to my age, I just got $25 off upon joining a botanical society), I offer the following advice, from someone who has thought and written about academic careers for 40 years. Put your family first. Academics often have trouble doing that. I know I did.
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Impossible Knowledge: Are You an Expert?
The Huffington Post: I grew up with a habitual overclaimer. He wildly exaggerated his expertise, at times claiming knowledge of things he couldn't possibly know -- people, events, ideas that simply do not exist. Being unfamiliar with overclaiming, I just called him a liar. I couldn't have known the word "overclaimer," nor the concept. The word didn't exist and is only used today in the world of psychological science. Even so, we're all familiar with these people who feel the need to overestimate what they know about the world. What underlies such assertions of impossible knowledge?
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Study: ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ distracts you from real life
USA Today: “Who curls their hair and takes a selfie stick to go for a hike in the park?” one of my friends incredulously asked me this weekend. Apparently, one of our mutual acquaintances was so committed to “pics or it didn’t happen” that she decided that lugging a selfie stick on a nature walk was worth the photo op. This pressure to photograph everything we do (and post those photos to social media) is common among young adults, especially college students. After all, Instagram is the third most popular social network among college students after Facebook and Twitter. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Child advocacy groups say YouTube Kids rife with ‘inappropriate’ videos
NBC News: The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy on Tuesday stepped up their criticism of the site, saying it is "rife" with content unsuitable for children.
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A question of etiquette: do you hold the door for others?
The Guardian: Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it. Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception and calculation. Their study, Etiquette and Effort: Holding Doors for Others, was published in 2011 in the journal Psychological Science. It is, one way or another, a gripping read. Santamaria and Rosenbaum selected a door that gets heavy use by people entering or exiting a building.
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Humblebrags Aren’t Making People Happy For You
Futurity: The “humblebrag” and other forms of self-promotion often backfire, a new study finds. The researchers wanted to find out why so many people frequently get the trade-off between self-promotion and modesty wrong. They found that self-promoters overestimate how much their self-promotion elicits positive emotions and underestimate how much it elicits negative emotions. As a consequence, when people try to increase the favorability of the opinion others have of them, they excessively self-promote, which has the opposite of the intended effect. Read the whole story: Futurity
