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What’s a GPA? When College Campus Is a Strange Land
My grandfather entered the Pennsylvania coal mines as a child, and was out of work much of his adult life. Neither he nor my grandmother got much in the way of formal education, and they eked out a precarious living on the poverty line. I can’t know what they dreamed, but the idea of a college education was as distant as the moon. So when my father, a World War II veteran, decided to take advantage of the GI Bill and attend teachers’ college, he was hopelessly lost. He was academically unprepared, but even more troubling, he was culturally unprepared. He had nobody to guide his first steps into this strange new culture, with its unfamiliar institutions and arcane rules.
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Breathing In vs. Spacing Out
The New York Times: Two and a half millenniums ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama traveled to Bodh Gaya, India, and began to meditate beneath a tree. Forty-nine days of continuous meditation later, tradition tells us, he became the Buddha — the enlightened one. More recently, a psychologist named Amishi Jha traveled to Hawaii to train United States Marines to use the same technique for shorter sessions to achieve a much different purpose: mental resilience in a war zone.
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Can Having a Foreign Accent Hurt Your Career?
English is increasingly considered to be the global language of business. But people who speak it as a second language are generally passed over for top managerial jobs and executive positions, studies have shown. New psychological research reveals the factors underlying this glass ceiling. A trio of researchers led by Laura Huang, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, hypothesized that non-native speakers of English are perceived as having weak political skills — which is considered essential for career success.
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How to Keep Your Resolutions
The New York Times: IT’S that time of year again. Maybe it’s your waistline you’re worried about, or maybe it’s the smoking habit you just can’t seem to kick. To improve your chances of keeping your New Year’s resolutions, we offer four tips inspired by recent research on behavioral economics and health. We focus on health, but our suggestions should help with other goals, too. First, make a concrete plan. When you do so, you both embed your intentions firmly in memory (which reduces forgetting) and make it harder to postpone good behavior, since doing so requires breaking an explicit commitment to yourself.
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Want to Stop Arguing and Change Spouse’s Behavior? Start With Mirror
The Wall Street Journal: Ever want to change something about your partner? Get him or her to eat better or work less? Exercise more? Stop nagging or yelling? Start with a mirror. Your best chance of transforming someone else—and the dynamic in your relationship—is to demonstrate your willingness to alter your own actions, experts say. The good news, this kind of change isn't as hard as you think. Studies show that when a person is motivated to be in a relationship and wants it to work, he or she will readily change to be more like their partner. Often, they don't even know they are adjusting their own behavior.
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Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again
The New Yorker: According to the Times, true artificial intelligence is just around the corner. A year ago, the paper ran a front-page story about the wonders of new technologies, including deep learning, a neurally-inspired A.I. technique for statistical analysis. Then, among others, came an article about how I.B.M.’s Watson had been repurposed into a chef, followed by an upbeat post about quantum computation. On Sunday, the paper ran a front-page story about “biologically inspired processors,” “brainlike computers” that learn from experience.
