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One Company’s New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year
The New York Times: The idea began percolating, said Dan Price, the founder of Gravity Payments, after he read an article on happiness. It showed that, for people who earn less than about $70,000, extra money makes a big difference in their lives. His idea bubbled into reality on Monday afternoon, when Mr. Price surprised his 120-person staff by announcing that he planned over the next three years to raise the salary of even the lowest-paid clerk, customer service representative and salesman to a minimum of $70,000. “Is anyone else freaking out right now?” Mr. Price asked after the clapping and whooping died down into a few moments of stunned silence.
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Getting Women Into Science-Filled Rooms
The Huffington Post: This post is also authored by Lori Holt. Why would three senior professors at Carnegie Mellon University, with responsibilities for research labs, teaching, families, and grand but old houses (this is Pittsburgh), take time to write an article on the distribution of authors by gender in a major journal in their field? It's because we are women, and we saw a pattern that has been all too familiar to us as we made our own way in science -- females were not there. We wrote a discussion piece for the highly regarded international journal Cognition because its special issue highlighting the future of our field, cognitive science, had only one woman author out of 19.
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The worst question you could ask women in a job interview
The Washington Post: During a recent talk in Washington, Google's “people operations” chief Laszlo Bock said something notable about fixing the equal pay conundrum. While he admitted that men tend to negotiate more than women, what he didn't do was suggest — as is so often the case — that solving the gender wage gap is simply a matter of women negotiating more. Rather, he said, “large companies could totally fix this problem.” ...
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Science of Learning Can Help Parents, Developers Grade Educational Apps
A comprehensive research report provides an evidence-based guide that parents, educators, and app designers alike can use to evaluate the quality of so-called “educational” apps.
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Students’ Family Income Linked With Brain Anatomy, Academic Achievement
Many years of research have shown that for students from lower-income families, standardized test scores and other measures of academic success tend to lag behind those of wealthier students. A new study led by researchers at MIT and Harvard University offers another dimension to this so-called “achievement gap”: After imaging the brains of high- and low-income students, they found that the higher-income students had thicker brain cortex in areas associated with visual perception and knowledge accumulation. Furthermore, these differences also correlated with one measure of academic achievement — performance on standardized tests.
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Researchers Found the ‘Bystander Effect’ in 5-Year-Olds
New York Magazine: The 1964 stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in New York City went a long way toward kicking off social psychologists’ interest in the subject: In the story’s initial reporting and subsequent retellings, numerous bystanders heard Genovese’s cries for help but failed to intervene. (This, as The New Yorker pointed out last year, isn’t quite how things actually went down, but the effect has been observed in many other contexts as well.) ... But as a team led by Maria Plötner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology writes in a new article in Psychological Science, we don’t know much about how and when the bystander effect emerges in children.
