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Where We Are Shapes Who We Are
The New York Times: IN the early 1970s, a team of researchers dropped hundreds of stamped, addressed letters near college dorms along the East Coast and recorded how many lost letters found their way to a mailbox. The researchers counted each posted letter as a small act of charity and discovered that students in some of the dorms were more generous than others. Nearly all of the letters dropped near uncrowded dorms — residences where comparatively few students lived on each floor — reached their intended recipients. In contrast, only about 6 in 10 of the letters dropped near crowded dorms completed the journey.
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The Bad Habits of Good Negotiators
LinkedIn: For a good part of the past decade, I’ve taught negotiation skills to diverse audiences—Fortune 500 executives, generals in the U.S. Army and Air Force, and professional athletes in the NFL and NHL. They tend to excel at preparing, analyzing options, and establishing a strong position. Yet some of their communication choices fly in the face of the best data on what actually works at the bargaining table. Negotiations start with the exchange of information. Many people view this process like playing a poker game. Why should I tip my hand before I’ve seen yours?
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Why There’s a Sassy Wombat on Your Phone
The Wall Street Journal: Text messages just don't convey thoughts and emotions well enough for 2013. When Tanya Sichynsky wants to tell friends she's tired, the 19-year-old University of Georgia student doesn't text anymore. She sends an image from her smartphone of a sleepy cartoon bunny holding a coffee mug with a smiley face. When Kylin Brown messes up dinner, the 23-year-old Indianapolis work-at-home mother uses her smartphone to send her mother a fingernail-size cartoon of a girl running away from an oven in flames. "We barely use words anymore, except when we talk on the phone," says Ms. Brown. ...
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Beliefs About Causes of Obesity May Impact Weight, Eating Behavior
People who indicated that diet was the primary cause of obesity actually had lower BMIs than those who implicated lack of exercise.
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Hunger and Hoarding in the Welfare State
The Huffington Post: Suzanne Collins' futuristic trilogy, The Hunger Games, takes place in Panem, a totalitarian nation of obscene wealth and pervasive poverty. Its twelve districts are all impoverished, but District 12, the coal-mining region formerly called Appalachia, is the poorest of the poor. Citizens struggle to eke out a living in the mines, but hunger is the norm and the unfortunate routinely die of starvation. Panem is the opposite of a welfare state. There is no dole, no safety net -- certainly no 47 percent. Indeed, there is no institutional sharing at all.
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Perfect pitch may not be so ‘perfect’
BBC: Played a long piece of music, a study group failed to notice when scientists turned the tones ever so slightly flat. They then misidentified in-tune sounds as being sharp. Researchers say it demonstrates the adaptability of the mind even for those skills thought to be fixed at birth. They have published the work in the journal Psychological Science. Only around one in 10,000 people has the ability to correctly classify a note simply by hearing it. This phenomenon is called perfect, or absolute, pitch, and has been made famous by the well-known composers who are believed to have possessed such talents, such as Mozart and Beethoven. Read the whole story: BBC
