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Ein Hurrikan macht Mode
ORF Austria: Laut Statistik Austria sind Lukas und Anna die aktuell beliebtesten Vornamen in Österreich. Eine Studie zeigt: Popularität und Klang sind eng verwoben, die Namensmode folgt langfristigen Trends. Diese werden bisweilen sogar von Wirbelstürmen ausgelöst. Man kann es auch übertreiben mit der Originalität. Laut Forschern der Universität Leipzig wandeln Eltern bei der Namenssuche immer häufiger abseits der üblichen Pfade. Rapunzel, Tarzan und Winnetou sind offenbar en vogue, auch Blue, Peaches, Apple, Maddox und Summer gelten nun als etablierte Größen im geburtsurkundlichen Fach. Ob der Trend zum Obskuren anhält, ist ungewiss.
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A question of judgment
The Economist: A NEVER-ENDING flow of information is the lot of most professionals. Whether it comes in the form of lawyers’ cases, doctors’ patients or even journalists’ stories, this information naturally gets broken up into pieces that can be tackled one at a time during the course of a given day. In theory, a decision made when handling one of these pieces should not have much, if any, impact on similar but unrelated subsequent decisions. Yet Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania and Francesca Gino at Harvard report in Psychological Science that this is not how things work out in practice.
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Phantom hand mapped for the first time
NewScientist: EVER wanted to know what an invisible hand looks like? Well, it is slightly wider than a real hand, and it has shorter fingers too. For the first time, the perceived shape of a phantom limb has been measured. This should make it possible to learn more about how the brain represents what we look like. The illusion of a phantom limb can kick in after an amputation or in people missing limbs from congenital disease. The result is the sensation that the limb is, in fact, present. One theory suggests people with phantom limbs take cues from those around them to work out what their missing body part looks like.
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Dagnabit, This Town Is Fed Up With Cursing
The Wall Street Journal: MIDDLEBOROUGH, Mass.—Mimi Duphily was hanging baskets of pink geraniums on antique street lamps downtown for the Middleborough Beautification and Activities Group when she noticed something else that needed cleaning up—citizens' mouths. "The cursing has gotten very, very bad. I find it appalling and I won't tolerate it," said Ms. Duphily, a civic leader in the otherwise quiet New England community, which calls itself the Cranberry Capital of the World. "No person should be allowed to talk in that manner." Soon, Middleborough residents who do could risk a $20 fine. Ms.
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Control Yourself! Inhibiting Physical Action Cuts Risky Gambling and Drinking
TIME: Want to gamble smarter, make less risky financial decisions or cut down on your drinking? Practice stopping yourself midway through a simple physical movement, new research suggests. Although controlling risky impulses may seem unrelated to inhibiting physical movements, research increasingly finds that the brain processes both situations similarly. That means that getting better at one type of choice is associated with improvements in the other. The connection could have important implications for the treatment of all types of addictive behaviors — and perhaps for decision-makers on Wall Street as well.
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Respect Matters More Than Money for Happiness in Life
New research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you, not to the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in your bank account. Psychological scientist Cameron Anderson of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and his co-authors explore the relationship between different types of status and well-being in a new article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
