-
This audacious study will track 10,000 New Yorkers’ every move for 20 years
Vox: Paul Glimcher is on the verge of launching an absurdly ambitious project in social science. The concept is simple, but the scope is spectacularly broad. Over the next few years, he and his team are going to recruit 10,000 New Yorkers and track everything about them for decades. By everything, I mean full genome data, medical records, diet, credit card transactions, physical activity, personality test scores, intelligence test scores, social interactions, neighborhood characteristics, loan records, time spent on email, educational achievement, employment status, sleep, GPS location data, blood work, and stool samples. And there's so much more.
-
Your Screen-Time Rules or Mine?
The Wall Street Journal: It can be a sticky situation for parents: Your 8-year-old’s new friend plays videogames for several hours every day, but you set tight limits on your own child’s screen time. Or your 9-year-old’s friends all use Instagram on their cellphones, years before you intend to even let your daughter have a phone. Can you control what happens on a play date? While families’ rules differ in many areas, they often seem especially divergent when it comes to children’s media use. What’s available for children, and what’s popular, changes all the time. And parents have differing levels of comfort and familiarity with new platforms. ...
-
Motivating Eco-Friendly Behaviors Depends on Cultural Values
The specific cultural values of a country may determine whether concern about environmental issues actually leads individuals to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors.
-
White Coat
NPR: Lulu Miller introduces us to a scientist who is trying to figure out if clothes can change us in concrete, measurable ways. In a Northwestern University study by Adam Galinsky and Hajo Adam, the mere act of wearing a doctor's coat made participants perform better on an attention task than participants who wore the same exact coat... but believed it was a painter's coat. Read the whole story: NPR
-
When to Let Children Quit
The Wall Street Journal: Your son hates the flute. He says he has and always will hate the flute. You are a strong and resolute parent. You wheedle, cajole, bribe and threaten him into practicing every day. He gets pretty good. He does a recital; he’s in the band. Many years later, on the brink of adolescence, your son comes to you and says: “I want to quit the flute.” What’s a parent to do? Quitting isn’t a notion that sits well with most people. The emphasis on achievement and hard work, not to mention countless hours spent ferrying little ones to expensive practices, has made it particularly loathsome to parents.
-
‘Belonging’ can help keep talented female students in STEM classes
National Science Foundation: Many women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have faced a common experience at some point during their college days -- they walked into a classroom and found that they were among a small handful of women in the class, or even the only one. That kind of experience has the potential to make a talented, motivated student feel out-of-place, and compel her to search for more inclusive academic environments, according to Nilanjana Dasgupta, a psychology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
