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An Honest Wage: Dollars, Hours, And Ethics
The Huffington Post: In the nation's capital this month, Mayor Vincent Gray vetoed legislation that would have forced large retailers to pay more than the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour. Gray was under pressure from Wal-Mart, which threatened not to expand operations in Washington if the so-called "living wage" bill were passed. Passionate debate on the issue has dominated the local news for months. This debate took me back to when I was a young man, working in a thread factory for $1.60 an hour. That was the minimum wage at the time, just raised from $1.40 the year before. I was a student, living on nothing, so I didn't need a living wage.
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To Help a Shy Child, Listen
The New York Times: Toward the end of the summer, I was seeing a middle-school girl for a physical. The notes from a clinic visit last spring said she was a good student but didn’t talk enough in class. So I asked her: Is this still a problem for you? I’m shy, she said. I’m just shy. Should I have turned to her mother and suggested — a counselor? An academic evaluation? Should I have probed further? How do you feel in school, do you have some friends, is anybody bullying you? Or should I have said: Lots of people are shy. It’s one of the healthy, normal styles of being human. ...
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Why Paying Kids to Do Homework Can Backfire
TIME: Money talks, right? So why should kids be any less susceptible to what the dollars are telling them? They aren’t, and that’s the problem. Enticing kids with monetary rewards for reading books or performing well on tests is certainly tempting for parents, especially if their children are game. But the latest studies on paying kids to do academic tasks like reading more books, or to improve test scores found a negligible to zero positive effect on their standardized test results, and other measures of academic performance. ...
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The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience and the Science of Persuasion
Scientific American: On the heels of the decade of the brain and the development of neuroimaging, it is nearly impossible to open a science magazine or walk through a bookstore without encountering images of the human brain. As prominent neuroscientist, Martha Farah, remarked “Brain images are the scientific icon of our age, replacing Bohr’s planetary atom as the symbol of science”. The rapid rise to prominence of cognitive neuroscience has been accompanied by an equally swift rise in practitioners and snake oil salesmen who make promises that neuroimaging cannot yet deliver.
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Disaster Relief Donations Track Number of People Killed, Not Survivors
People pay more attention to the number of people killed in a natural disaster than to the number of survivors when deciding how much money to donate to disaster relief efforts, according to new research
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‘Everyday sadists’ receive emotional boost from seeing others suffer, studies show
National Post: Two new studies show that people who score high on a measure of sadism seem to enjoy pleasure from behaviours that hurt others, and are even willing to spend extra effort to make someone else suffer. New research led by psychological scientist Erin Buckels of the University of British Columbia suggests that everyday sadism is real and more common than previously thought. The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
