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The Wages of Eco-Angst
The New York Times: Even today, when media warnings about the latest health or safety risk are commonplace, the incessant drumbeat of reported environmental hazards can be truly alarming, leaving us worried, like the followers of Chicken Little, that the sky really is falling. But while plenty of these threats are serious, some of the most frightening eco-bogeymen are not nearly the dangers that many presume. Nuclear radiation, for example, still tangled in many minds with images of atomic blasts, mutant Godzillas and rampant cancer, is nowhere near as harmful to human health as most believe.
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A Gesture of Authority: What’s the Point?
The Huffington Post: My very first classroom teacher had a long wooden pointer, and she wielded it like a weapon. At least that's my gauzy recollection. Many of the lessons were written on the blackboard, and she would use her pointer to direct our attention to this or that bit of information. She was an absolute and unquestioned authority in my small world, and her ubiquitous pointer served to reinforce that perception. Pointing remains a basic tool of instruction, both in the classroom and beyond. Elementary school teachers still use pointers, though these days most of them are plastic and colorful, with clownish hands attached. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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The Ever-Expanding Definition of “Diversity”
Diversity has become a goal for all sorts of institutions—but what it means may depend on who you ask. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people’s ideologies help determine what they count as “diverse.” Miguel Unzueta, the study’s lead author, notes that “diversity” historically meant inclusiveness toward historically disadvantaged groups. Now, however, the term is commonly used to refer to people who are different in any way (even personality traits and food preferences)—and that, Dr. Unzueta argues, may be making the concept useless. Dr.
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Broken Hearts Are Truly Painful, Research Shows
The Huffington Post: If you've ever gone through extreme grief, a rough divorce or a break-up, you'll know this to be true: that aching feeling in your heart truly hurts, and now research backs it up. New research, published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, examines a number of studies to find that social pain and rejection are quite real. One study showed that brain activity is similar in people when they talk about both moments of social rejection and physical pain. "We were sitting next to each other and noticed how similar the two brain images looked," study researcher Naomi Eisenberger of the University of Califiornia-Los Angeles said in a statement.
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Girls beat boys at arithmetic because they have better language skills
The Daily Mail: While boys generally do better than girls in science and maths, some studies have found that girls do better in arithmetic – and this is down to girls’ superior verbal skills, according to new research. Scientists at Beijing Normal University did a series of tests on young children that showed that girls did indeed outperform boys at arithmetic and they believe it’s because it involves lots of verbal processing. The researchers did a series of tests with children ages 8 to 11 at 12 primary schools in and around Beijing. Read the whole story:
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How lefties, righties see the world differently
msnbc: Be careful next time you cast a vote. Your “handedness” might make you choose the wrong candidate, according to a research review published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research sheds light on the so-called “body-specificity hypothesis” which simply means that how we make decisions and how we communicate with each other is influenced not only by our minds, but by our physical bodies.
