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Dagnabit, This Town Is Fed Up With Cursing
The Wall Street Journal: MIDDLEBOROUGH, Mass.—Mimi Duphily was hanging baskets of pink geraniums on antique street lamps downtown for the Middleborough Beautification and Activities Group when she noticed something else that needed cleaning up—citizens' mouths. "The cursing has gotten very, very bad. I find it appalling and I won't tolerate it," said Ms. Duphily, a civic leader in the otherwise quiet New England community, which calls itself the Cranberry Capital of the World. "No person should be allowed to talk in that manner." Soon, Middleborough residents who do could risk a $20 fine. Ms.
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Control Yourself! Inhibiting Physical Action Cuts Risky Gambling and Drinking
TIME: Want to gamble smarter, make less risky financial decisions or cut down on your drinking? Practice stopping yourself midway through a simple physical movement, new research suggests. Although controlling risky impulses may seem unrelated to inhibiting physical movements, research increasingly finds that the brain processes both situations similarly. That means that getting better at one type of choice is associated with improvements in the other. The connection could have important implications for the treatment of all types of addictive behaviors — and perhaps for decision-makers on Wall Street as well.
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Respect Matters More Than Money for Happiness in Life
New research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you, not to the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in your bank account. Psychological scientist Cameron Anderson of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and his co-authors explore the relationship between different types of status and well-being in a new article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Legacy in Mind: Why Bother Saving the Planet?
It’s supposed to hit 97 degrees this week in Washington, DC, my home town. My plan is to stay indoors and crank up the AC, for as long as the heat wave lasts. I know that the price tag for my comfort will show up in my next utility bill, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. I also know that my choice has other, hidden costs—costs that will be paid by future generations, including my children and their children. Global warming is an undisputed scientific fact now, and there is little doubt that this ominous trend is related to human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels. I completely accept the science of climate warming, yet I don’t always do the right thing by my heirs.
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‘Color Blind’ Policies Could Make Diversity Harder to Achieve
Whether it be growing concerns about bias or recognition of the value of diversity, many organizations and institutions have elected to deemphasize race or remove it entirely from their decision-making processes. Yet new evidence from psychological science research suggests that this color-blind approach may not be as effective as people believe it is. Color blindness offers a seemingly simple way to deal with race: If individuals and institutions do not even notice race, then they cannot act in a biased manner on that basis. But according to a new article published by Evan Apfelbaum of the MIT Sloan School of Management and colleagues, efforts to ignore race can backfire.
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America Needs to Study Fractions
Scientific American: What part of math was most intimidating when you were in grade school? Maybe it was fractions. Or even worse, long-form division. Somehow splitting numbers really seemed complicated. And the U.S. might be paying for kids’ inability to overcome those early challenges: a new study finds that Americans are falling significantly behind in math aptitude compared with China, Finland, the Netherlands and Canada. And the root cause is deficiencies in knowledge of fractions and division. Nearly 600 children were tested once when they were 10 to 12 years old and again five years later.
