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The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments
The Atlantic: At Christmastime, my brother, my father, and our chocolate Labrador pile into the car to drive across the state of Washington to see my grandparents. We’ve been doing it since I was born. The three of us—before my brother and I put our headphones in to tune everything out—try to have meaningful conversations. Soon I’ll go back to school in England, my brother will go back to school in California, and Dad will go back to work in Washington, a transatlantic triangle keeping us apart. The three of us are together twice a year, at best, but on our car trip there’s rarely anything new exchanged.
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Tweets can better predict heart disease rates than income, smoking and diabetes, study finds
The Washington Post: Is Twitter becoming a new public health database? The latest evidence: A group of researchers has found that analyzing tweets can accurately predict the prevalence of heart disease. In fact, the researchers say, Twitter can serve as a better predictor of coronary heart-disease rates than factors such as smoking, diabetes, income and education, obesity -- combined. The findings from the University of Pennsylvania were published this week in the journal Psychological Science. The research is part of a larger effort to incorporate big data into science, rather than relying on the time- and cost-intensive process of collecting representative samples and conducting surveys.
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How the Brain Stores Trivial Memories, Just in Case
The New York Times: The surge of emotion that makes memories of embarrassment, triumph and disappointment so vivid can also reach back in time, strengthening recall of seemingly mundane things that happened just beforehand and that, in retrospect, are relevant, a new study has found. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the television detective’s standard query — “Do you remember any unusual behavior in the days before the murder?” — is based on solid brain science, at least in some circumstances.
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Babies Can Follow Complex Social Situations
Infants can make sense of complex social situations, taking into account who knows what about whom, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our findings show that 13-month-olds can make sense of social situations using their understanding about others’ minds and social evaluation skills,” says psychological scientists and study authors You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri.
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The Power of Puppies: Looking at Cute Images Can Improve Focus
Pictures of baby animals, including puppies and kittens, can have powerful effects on attention and concentration, a study shows.
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We Know How You Feel
The New Yorker: Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963. Henson had been hired to make the film for a conference that the company was convening to showcase its strengths in machine-to-machine communication. Told to devise a faux robot that believed it functioned better than a person, he came up with a cocky, boxy, jittery, bleeping Muppet on wheels. “This is computer H14,” it proclaims as the film begins.
