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Why That Video Went Viral
The New York Times: There it was, virtual gold: a video of a firefighter resuscitating a kitten trapped in a smoky home. Neetzan Zimmerman, then an editor at Gawker, a news and gossip site, knew it was destined for viral magic. But before he could publish a post about it, his editor made a request. Mr. Zimmerman was to include the epilogue omitted by most every other outlet: The kitten died of smoke inhalation soon after being saved. For telling the whole story, Mr. Zimmerman paid a price. “That video did tremendously well for practically everyone who posted it,” he recalled, “except Gawker.” Why should one sad detail mean the difference between an online megahit and a dud?
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Steering Through Curves: The Eyes Have It
When we encounter curves in the road when we’re driving, our ability to handle the wheel isn’t the fundamental key to navigating through the bend. Recent research provided key insights on the critical role that our eyes play when we steer through road curves. The study by psychological scientist Otto Lappi of the University of Helsinki shows that tiny eye movements allow drivers to predict a vehicle’s trajectory in a curve. Lappi and his research group used new and innovative methods to analyze the small and subtle eye movements that drivers make when driving through a curve. These optokinetic eye movements take only fractions of a second, and the driver is not aware of them.
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Same Face, Many First Impressions
Slight variations in how an individual face is viewed can lead people to develop significantly different first impressions of that individual, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our findings suggest that impressions from still photos of individuals could be deeply misleading,” says psychological scientist and study author Alexander Todorov of Princeton University. Previous research has shown that people form first impressions about someone's personality after viewing their face only briefly.
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Mining the Minds of Multitaskers
We multitask all the time — organizing to-do lists while answering emails, at the same time we’re checking in with colleagues, for example. The emerging consensus from scientific research tells us that this multitasking is really an illusion, and that productivity decreases every time we switch tasks because our memory for task-related information fades. But in almost all of this research, task switching has been forced — despite the fact that most multitasking in everyday life is self-initiated. This raises the question of what prompts choices to multitask in everyday life. Do people multitask to maximize efficiency — switching tasks in order to get more done in the least amount of time?
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Nine Scientists Are Awarded Kavli Prizes
The New York Times: Beaming in from Oslo via the web, officials of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters invaded the World Science Festival in New York on Thursday to announce that nine scientists had won this year’s Kavli prizes. The winners will split million-dollar prizes awarded in three categories: astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. The prize is named for Fred Kavli, the Norwegian-born inventor, businessman and philanthropist, who died last year. He spent the last decade of his life handing out money to establish Kavli research institutes at universities around the world and the prizes, which are awarded every two years and which he hoped would someday rival the Nobels.
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Why We Feel Others’ Pain — or Don’t
The Huffington Post: When the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 teenage girls from a schoolhouse last month, the world responded with an outpouring of undiluted emotion -- shock, outrage, fear, and most of all deep sympathy for the victims and their families. It was impossible not to feel the suffering of these innocent, helpless girls in the hands of their cruel jihadist captors. Well, maybe not impossible. Right-wing commentator Ann Coulter showed not a trace of empathy, as she chose instead to poke fun at a Twitter campaign to raise awareness of the victims' plight.
