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Surprise!
Slate: If I could ensure that kids come away from science class with one thing only, it wouldn’t be a set of facts. It would be an attitude—something that the late physicist Richard Feynman called “scientific integrity,” the willingness to bend over backward to examine reasons your pet theories about the world might be wrong. “That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school,” Feynman said in a 1974 commencement speech. “We never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.” ... In other words, we need to actively look for signs that our assumptions are wrong, because we won’t do so unprompted.
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Benjamin Voyer on the psychology of teamwork
The Economist: How would you describe the psychology of teamwork? The study of teamwork began with the emergence of social psychology and an interest in how groups behave, particularly as against another group. This is the idea of having an “in group” that you’re a member of and that becomes part of your social identity, and then the “out group” against which you discriminate and define yourself. It has developed into its own field of organisational psychology. We’ve looked at how groups form against each other and what happens to an individual voice in the team. We wonder how we make a team more efficient and also what the risks are of having teams.
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Same-Sex Couples May Have More Egalitarian Relationships
NPR: A little more than 10 years ago gay marriage was not an option for same-sex couples anywhere in the U.S. Now it's legal in the majority of the country, and so we wondered what research can tell us about these couples and their marriages. Robert-Jay Green is the founder of the Rockway Institute for Research in LGBT Psychology, and he's been studying same-sex couples since 1975. Welcome to the program. ROBERT-JAY GREEN: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So first of all, tell us who did you track in your study, and what you find out? GREEN: Well, this was a study of 976 couples who, in 2008, were registered domestic partners in California.
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Ces aveugles qui voient avec leurs oreilles (The blind who see with their ears)
Le Monde: La vidéo paraît presque banale. De jeunes hommes parcourent des chemins de campagne à vélo. Un autre descend la rue en skateboard. Un garçonnet lance un ballon dans un panier de basket. Douces images du sport. Sauf que des images, ces jeunes n’en voient jamais : ils sont aveugles. L’association qui produit ce clip s’appelle World Access to the Blind. Comme son nom l’indique, elle souhaite ouvrir le monde aux aveugles. Avec un outil privilégié : l’écholocation. Eclairer la scène en faisant claquer ses doigts ou sa langue… Depuis les années 1940, les scientifiques ont décrit comment certains humains perçoivent l’écho des sons qu’ils produisent.
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Ebola lapses show lab safety protocols should factor in human error
Los Angeles Times: Christmas Eve brought the unwelcome news that a lab worker at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have been exposed to the Ebola virus. It was the latest in a series of similar lapses. Citing such problems, the Obama administration in October suspended some government-funded research projects involving genetic modification of viruses that have the potential to set off a worldwide epidemic. The lapses reported so far have not involved serious injuries or fatalities. But is the lack of serious harm evidence that current safety measures are effective, or are the lapses early warning signs of systemic problems?
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The Liberation of Growing Old
The New York Times: LONDON — WHY do we have such punitive attitudes toward old people? Granted, the ancients did hideous things to elders who were unable to work but still needed food and care, but in more recent times, that had changed: In 18th-century New England, it was common for people to make themselves seem older by adding years to their real age, rather than subtracting them. Once upon a time, “senile” just meant old, without being pejorative. Even “geriatric” was originally a value-free term, rather than part of the lexicon of contempt toward old people. Yet today, the language used to describe the changing age composition of the population is little short of apocalyptic.
