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The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind
The New York Times: People of a certain age (and we know who we are) don’t spend much leisure time reviewing the research into cognitive performance and aging. The story is grim, for one thing: Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping. The story is familiar, too, for anyone who is over 50 and, having finally learned to live fully in the moment, discovers it’s a senior moment. The finding that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology. ... Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing.
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How Warm Is Your Brand?
The world is having a love affair with Costco. Fortune Magazine ranks the warehouse retailer as one of the world’s most admired companies, and only partly because of its commitment to social responsibility. Operating under the philosophy that happy employees deliver effective customer service, the company pays its employees extremely well — a sterling contrast to the way competitors like Wal-Mart and Kmart compensate workers. Costco’s practices even drew a shout out from President Obama during his State of the Union Address on Tuesday. Whether they realize it or not, consumers tend to regard companies the same way they do each other.
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The Great Mom & Dad Experiment
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Couples with babies in tow arrive for dinner one evening at a red brick office building in downtown Oklahoma City. On the menu tonight are pasta and garlic bread, served on Styrofoam plates. The parents file in nervously, not sure what to expect. Seated at one table is a touchingly earnest couple, still in high school, who didn't plan to have a baby but now want to be the best possible parents. Nearby is a 23-year-old in a baseball cap, pulled low over his eyes, who admits he was dragged here by his girlfriend. There are older couples, too, including a forty-something dad who laughs and says he wants to get fatherhood right this time around.
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Besudelter Altruismus (Tainted Altruism)
Suddeutsche Zeitung: Das Leben genießen und gleichzeitig die Welt verbessern, wäre das nicht großartig? Bier trinken und die Umwelt schützen zum Beispiel. Was spricht denn schon dagegen, sich einen Kasten Bier von einer Brauerei zu kaufen, die einen Teil des Erlöses zum Schutz des Regenwaldes weiterreicht? Ein Feierabendbier für den guten Zweck, da ist doch allen geholfen, dem Biertrinker, der Brauerei, dem Regenwald. Und was ist verwerflich daran, bei einer riesigen Bekleidungskette ein paar schöne und günstige Stücke zu erwerben, wenn die Firma die Hälfte des erzielten Gewinnens für soziale Zwecke investiert? Auch von diesem Arrangement profitieren alle Beteiligten.
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Infants Know Plants Provide Food, but Need to See They’re Safe to Eat
Infants as young as six months old tend to expect that plants are food sources, but only after an adult shows them that the food is safe to eat, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings show that, after watching an adult put part of a plant and part of a man-made object in her mouth, infants at 6- and 18-months of age preferentially identify the plant as the food source.
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Your Next Job Application Could Involve a Video Game
The New York Times: Brittni Daron jumped through a lot of hoops before she landed her job as a solution consultant at Oracle. At the tech giant, as at other firms in Silicon Valley to which she applied, she endured weeks — and occasionally months — of phone interviews, in-person interviews, mock presentations, personality tests and technical tests for both the skills she claimed to have and those she didn’t. This might sound a little ridiculous, but it’s not unusual. I’ve met lots of job seekers in the last few years who underwent a similar form of H.R.
