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See Jane Evolve: Picture Books Explain Darwin
The Wall Street Journal: Evolution by natural selection is one of the best ideas in all of science. It predicts and explains an incredibly wide range of biological facts. But only 60% of Americans believe evolution is true. This may partly be due to religious ideology, of course, but studies show that many secular people who say they believe in evolution still don't really understand it. Why is natural selection so hard to understand and accept? What can we do to make it easier? A new study in Psychological Science by Deborah Kelemen of Boston University and colleagues helps to explain why evolution is hard to grasp.
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Gratitude Is the New Willpower
Harvard Business Review: Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to building capital. But as with most virtues, it’s not always easy to muster, since it usually requires resisting temptations for gratification on the sooner side. Should you put the extra $1,000 earned this month in your retirement savings or use it to buy a new suit? Should you approve money from the firm’s “rainy-day” fund to cover travel for senior executives (yourself included) to a lavish conference this summer or let it continue to accrue as a buffer for future challenges?
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Reading Pain in a Human Face
The New York Times: How well can computers interact with humans? Certainly computers play a mean game of chess, which requires strategy and logic, and “Jeopardy!,” in which they must process language to understand the clues read by Alex Trebek (and buzz in with the correct question). But in recent years, scientists have striven for an even more complex goal: programming computers to read human facial expressions. ...
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Why Many Workers are Playing It Safe — Unhappily
The US economic recovery remains on a slow trajectory, as evidenced by the latest Commerce Department report. Due in part to a brutal winter throughout the country, growth in the first quarter of this year practically stopped. And while employers are hiring aggressively after the winter cold snap, the Labor Department says job growth still lags behind the millions of people just now entering the workforce or looking to get off unemployment rolls. The shaky economy and rocky job market have left many people underemployed—working in part-time jobs or occupations that are simply far below their capabilities and credentials.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Don't Do It Again: Directed Forgetting of Habits Gesine Dreisbach and Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml Can directed forgetting be used to eliminate habits? Participants completed a directed-forgetting task where they associated words with either a left or a right button press. Participants were told to remember or to forget the original associations before being reshown the words. In the new presentation, half of the word/button-press associations were compatible with those in the original presentation and half were not.
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How to Tell When Someone Is Lying
The New Yorker: On January 27, 2008, Penny Boudreau’s twelve-year-old daughter, Karissa, went missing in her hometown of Bridgewater, Canada. That afternoon, mother and daughter had had a fight in a grocery-store parking lot. They’d been having a “heart-to-heart” about “typical teen-age things,” Boudreau said. At 7:30 P.M., Boudreau, worried, called a few friends and teachers—none had heard a thing—and notified the police. By the following day, Karissa was still unaccounted for and the Bridgewater police began notifying other precincts. They issued a media alert and began a full search effort. On January 29th, the police station held a press conference.
