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Study finds drunken people aware of poor decisions
Toronto Star: A new study says that people who commit blunders while under the influence of alcohol know they’re doing it; they just don’t care. This means buzzed or drunken people who engage in embarrassing or harmful behaviour can’t blame it on not having control, said researcher Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. While this isn’t the first study that shows alcohol alters the behaviour of those who consume it, “it’s the first to show they don’t care that they’re making mistakes,” said Bartholow, chief researcher on the study. Read the full story: Toronto Star
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Wealth School: A Blessing of Wealth and Well-Being
The Huffington Post: Wealth is a difficult word these days because it seems we have been witnessing an abuse of our financial resources. Nevertheless, our experience of wealth goes way beyond money alone. What does wealth mean for you, deep down? What is your intention for wealth now? Yes, you have basic needs to cover, possibly fewer than you think. Wealth speaks to me of expansion, and not just in financial terms. Does more money translate to greater happiness and fulfilment? Does security in life come from having a good pension entitlement? What is the more, the expansion that truly counts for you? Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Online dating 2.0
KPCC: The mistletoe may be tucked away for another year, but Valentine's Day tchotchkes already are overflowing on store shelves. And in these weeks between Christmas day and Cupid's night, Internet dating sites reportedly see a surge in traffic. Social psychologists say that's true now more than ever. In years past, people were more skeptical about putting personal information online and didn't know which sites to trust. Has that changed? Social networking sites are a daily, if not hourly, habit for millions of Americans. So why not put your Facebook profile on OkCupid, too? Read the whole story: KPCC
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Hand Washing: A Deadly Dilemma
The Huffington Post: New Yorker essayist Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a prestigious teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. A couple years ago, he wrote a profile of his hospital's infection control team, whose full-time job is to control the spread of infectious disease in the hospital. The focus of the piece was hand washing -- or more accurately, the team's failed efforts to get doctors, nurses and others in patient care to adequately disinfect their hands. They tried everything. They repositioned sinks and had new, automated ones installed.
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Publication Bias (or, Why You Can’t Trust Any of the Research You Read)
Forbes: Researchers in Management and Strategy worry a lot about bias – statistical bias. In case you’re not such an academic researcher, let me briefly explain. Suppose you want to find out how many members of a rugby club have their nipples pierced (to pick a random example). The problem is, the club has 200 members and you don’t want to ask them all to take their shirts off. Therefore, you select a sample of 20 of them guys and ask them to bare their chests.
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Fleeing the Brain’s Fear Center
Scientific “facts” often take on a life of their own. Scientists make legitimate and exciting new discoveries, with the best tools available to them in their time, and these findings get verified and modified and cited and, eventually, repeated without question. Over time, insights get simplified for non-scientists, and translated into the plain language of introductory textbooks. If they get repeated often enough, for long enough, some of these facts even seep into the popular culture.
