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Power Makes the Hypocrite Bold, Smug and Brazen
Forbes: We’ve all had the experience of listening to someone in a position of power rail against the moral ineptitude of others. Turn on the news on any given day and you’re likely to see someone moralizing about family values, for example. Most of us listen to these diatribes and wonder if those doing the judging would fare well under judgment—though we strongly suspect they would not. A study published in the journal Psychological Science confirms those suspicions. Researchers investigated whether people in positions of power that hold high standards for others actually live up to those standards themselves.
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Schadenfreude: Why the News Corp Phone Hacking Scandal Makes Some People Smile
Scientific American: Until very recently, even Rupert Murdoch 's sharpest critics might have admitted to envying the 80-year-old arch-conservative News Corporation CEO, who built a far-reaching media empire almost from scratch and made himself outstandingly rich even among billionaires. Now, though, amidst a phone hacking and corruption scandal that threatens to permanently damage his company, Murdoch is struggling to defend himself. Summoned to testify in front of a British Parliament committee investigating the scandal on Tuesday, he called it "the most humble day" of his career—and that was before a protester flung a shaving cream pie at his face. Read more: Scientific American
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Insight From Trouble in Recognizing Objects
The New York Times: Object agnosia is a rare disorder in which an individual cannot visually recognize objects. In the case of a patient known as SM, he mistook a harmonica for a cash register. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Princeton University studied SM’s brain and discovered that it was affected not only in the portion of the right hemisphere that had been damaged in a car accident, but also in his structurally intact left hemisphere. They performed functional M.R.I. brain scans on the patient and report their findings in the journal Neuron. The part of the brain where an image is processed, known as the lower visual cortex, was similar in SM and in normal test subjects.
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The Vitamin Paradox
Last night I had a chocolate milkshake for dinner. I don’t eat like this all the time, but often enough. I eat lots of salads, but I also eat cheeseburgers. And if I’m tired I eat pretzels, or skip eating entirely. In short, I’m far from a nutritional purist. But I take a multi-vitamin every day, and have for as long as I can remember. I figure it’s the least I can do for my personal health, plus it’s easy and fairly cheap. I guess I’m hedging my bets. And I’m not alone. Sales of nutritional supplements have grown dramatically over the past decade or so, and now total more than $20 billion a year. More than half of Americans take some kind of vitamin pill.
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The Joy of a Sun Bath, a Snuggle, a Bite of Pâté
The New York Times: Two ring-tailed lemurs, perhaps a pair, perhaps just two guys out to catch a few rays, sit side by side tilted back as if in beach chairs, their white bellies exposed, knees apart, feet splayed to catch every last drop of the Madagascar sun. All they need are cigars to complete the picture. There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for this posture. Scientists use the term “behavioral thermoregulation” to describe how an animal maintains a core body temperature. But as the animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe points out in his exuberant look at animal pleasure, “The Exultant Ark,” they are also clearly enjoying themselves. A scientist through and through, Dr.
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The Willful Blindness of Rupert Murdoch
The Huffington Post: After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A few rogue, or over-zealous employees just went off piste. Then the full scale of the debacle emerges and another face-saving fiction emerges: no one could possibly have seen this coming. Both arguments were wrong in Abu Ghraib, at Enron, WorldCom, BP, Countrywide and Lehman Brothers and both are wrong today at News International. The phone hacking scandal, and the enormous price paid for it by News Corporation, isn't the unfortunate byproduct of a few naughty freelancers. Nor was it an unpredictable, unforeseeable event.
