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Queen bee syndrome: Women are warned to steer clear of female bosses if they want to rise through the ranks
Daily Mail: Powerful businesswomen block the rise of other women in the company due to sexism in the workplace, a new study shows. Psychologists have studied so-called ‘queen bee’ behaviour where top women distance themselves from other women and refuse to help them rise through the ranks. They concluded that when women were aware of gender bias at work, they were more likely to act like men and distance themselves from women. Read more: Daily Mail
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Common courtesy at the coffeehouse
CNN: Ah, cafes -- those coffee-scented cultural nerve centers where creative souls sip espresso and engage in existential thought. At least, that's how we'd like to think of them. Nowadays, many have become havens for 13-year-olds growing hyper on blended sugar bombs and sad scenesters pretending to work on their screenplays while actually clicking around on Facebook. As another heat wave belches its way across the States, cafes are becoming exceptionally attractive as a place to boot up your laptop, hook into the Wi-Fi and get some work done. Here are some top courtesy tips for not offending the staff or fellow worker bees in a packed coffeehouse. Read more: CNN
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Power Makes the Hypocrite Bold, Smug and Brazen
Forbes: We’ve all had the experience of listening to someone in a position of power rail against the moral ineptitude of others. Turn on the news on any given day and you’re likely to see someone moralizing about family values, for example. Most of us listen to these diatribes and wonder if those doing the judging would fare well under judgment—though we strongly suspect they would not. A study published in the journal Psychological Science confirms those suspicions. Researchers investigated whether people in positions of power that hold high standards for others actually live up to those standards themselves.
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Schadenfreude: Why the News Corp Phone Hacking Scandal Makes Some People Smile
Scientific American: Until very recently, even Rupert Murdoch 's sharpest critics might have admitted to envying the 80-year-old arch-conservative News Corporation CEO, who built a far-reaching media empire almost from scratch and made himself outstandingly rich even among billionaires. Now, though, amidst a phone hacking and corruption scandal that threatens to permanently damage his company, Murdoch is struggling to defend himself. Summoned to testify in front of a British Parliament committee investigating the scandal on Tuesday, he called it "the most humble day" of his career—and that was before a protester flung a shaving cream pie at his face. Read more: Scientific American
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Insight From Trouble in Recognizing Objects
The New York Times: Object agnosia is a rare disorder in which an individual cannot visually recognize objects. In the case of a patient known as SM, he mistook a harmonica for a cash register. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Princeton University studied SM’s brain and discovered that it was affected not only in the portion of the right hemisphere that had been damaged in a car accident, but also in his structurally intact left hemisphere. They performed functional M.R.I. brain scans on the patient and report their findings in the journal Neuron. The part of the brain where an image is processed, known as the lower visual cortex, was similar in SM and in normal test subjects.
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The Vitamin Paradox
Last night I had a chocolate milkshake for dinner. I don’t eat like this all the time, but often enough. I eat lots of salads, but I also eat cheeseburgers. And if I’m tired I eat pretzels, or skip eating entirely. In short, I’m far from a nutritional purist. But I take a multi-vitamin every day, and have for as long as I can remember. I figure it’s the least I can do for my personal health, plus it’s easy and fairly cheap. I guess I’m hedging my bets. And I’m not alone. Sales of nutritional supplements have grown dramatically over the past decade or so, and now total more than $20 billion a year. More than half of Americans take some kind of vitamin pill.
