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How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up
The New York Times: ANNIE HOULE, grandmother of seven, holds up a stack of pink dollar bills. “How many of you know about the wage gap?” she asks a roomful of undergraduates, almost all of them women, at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx. A few hands go up. “Now, how many of you worry about being able to afford New York City when you graduate?” The room laughs. That’s a given. Ms. Houle is the national director of a group called the WAGE Project, which aims to close the gender pay gap. She explains that her dollar bills represent the amounts that women will make relative to men, on average, once they enter the work force.
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What Do Aliens, Climate Change And Princess Di Have In Common?
NPR: HIV does not cause AIDS. Smoking does not cause lung cancer. And burning fossil fuels does not contribute to global warming. What do these three statements have in common? They're all rejections of well-established scientific consensus, and recent findings in psychology suggest that people who believe one or more of them are also more likely to believe a number of conspiracy theories: that the New World Order is planning to take over the planet, that the Apollo moon landing was faked in a Hollywood film studio, that the death of Princess Diana was an organized assassination, that an alien spaceship in New Mexico was covered up by the United States' military, and even more.
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Why you need to gauge your human capital
Reuters: The end of the year is a good time to illuminate your personal financial situation in a different way. Instead of focusing exclusively on financial capital - how much money you have accumulated - look at your human capital. This calculus of human capital, which economists wonkily define as "the net present value of your lifetime earnings," matters as much to your lifelong financial situation as the size of your nest egg. When some people gauge their human capital, they find that they are not making enough money and decide to make some changes. That could mean starting a second or third career. A former chemist I know has become a financial planner.
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Are You Truly Having A Senior Moment? Probably Not
The Huffington Post: Creeping into our everyday vocabulary over the past few years, the term "senior moment" is now the chief lament of midlife adults who fear they are losing their memory. You've probably used this term yourself on at least one occasion. Perhaps you forgot where you put your keys, blanked on the name of an acquaintance or couldn't recall whether you turned off the oven after you left the house. "I'm having a senior moment!" you mutter to yourself or complain to your friends. Although you're probably half kidding, that other half secretly fears that you're showing the early signs of serious memory loss.
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PTSD Risk From Combat Linked With Childhood Violence: Study
Scientific American: War is hell. And for many soldiers, the experience leaves lasting scars. And not just physical ones. A subset of veterans develop posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. But it might not be only the horrors of battle that make them susceptible. According to a study in the journal Psychological Science [link to come] echoes of childhood abuse may contribute. Psychologists assessed the mental health of hundreds of Danish soldiers before, during and 8 months after they were shipped to Afghanistan. Turns out the vast majority, some 84%, were resilient, showing no undue signs of stress at any time.
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Ah, Wilderness! Nature Hike Could Unlock Your Imagination
NPR: Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors. That's the word from David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies multitasking at the University of Utah. He knew that every time he went into the southern Utah desert, far from cellular service, he started to think more clearly. But he wanted to know if others had the same experience. To find out, he first sent students out into nature with computers, to test their attention spans. "It was an abysmal failure," Strayer says. "The students didn't want to be anywhere near the computers." Worse still, he says, "the light of the computer screen attracts moths and ants and things.
