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Common Core Reading: The Struggle Over Struggle
NPR: Every set of academic standards has a soul. Yes, a soul. It's made of varied stuff: part research, part practice, part conviction of its authors. To find the soul, follow the words that turn up again and again in the winding backwaters and byways of the standards themselves. A search of the Common Core English Language Arts Standards turns up one remarkable word 105 times. It is "complex" (or "complexity"). Here's an early appearance: "Rather than focusing solely on the skills of reading and writing, the ELA/literacy standards highlight the growing complexity of the texts students must read to be ready for the demands of college, career, and life." Read the whole story: NPR
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Feeling — Not Being — Wealthy Drives Opposition to Wealth Redistribution
People’s views on income inequality and wealth distribution may have little to do with how much money they have in the bank and a lot to do with how wealthy they feel in comparison to
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The Science of Laughing Through the Tears
The Atlantic: Oriana Aragón was watching Conan O’Brien’s late night show on TBS when she noticed something strange: The fashion model and actress Leslie Bibb—O’Brien’s guest for the evening—began describing “a thing where if people have babies, I’m like, ‘Oh, that baby’s so cute, I just want to punch it in the face. Like, ‘That dog is cute, I’m gonna kick it in the head.’ I don’t know, I just want tosqueeze something.” Aragón, a psychology researcher at Yale University, was intrigued, so she called her father the next day. “I told him about this actress that wanted to kick puppies, and he said, ‘Well, it’s not that different from grandma pinching your cheeks,’” Aragón explains.
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How to Be Efficient: Dan Ariely’s 6 New Secrets to Managing Your Time
Time: It’s hard to be efficient. Sometimes it feels like the world doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes you don’t make any sense. And sometimes it feels like it’s all a conspiracy. As we’ll see shortly, these are all, in a way, true. Dan Ariely is the king of irrational behavior. Not that he’s more irrational than you or I, but he’s studied an impressive amount of it. Dan is a behavioral economist at Duke University and the New York Times bestselling author of three wonderful books. Most recently he’s turned his attention to the irrationality of how we use our time and has helped create a new smart-calendar app, Timeful. Read the whole story: Time
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Gifted men earn more than gifted women, and they value time differently. But both report being happy.
The Washington Post: What is the stuff that defines success for the most intellectually gifted? Money? Working long hours? Making time for close relationships? The answer varies, depending on whether such people are men or women. At least that’s what Vanderbilt University researchers found in their latest batch of research from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, a decades-long project that began in the 1970s with two groups of mathematically gifted 13-year-olds. The new report was published in Psychological Science this month. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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How Humans Learn to Communicate With Their Eyes
The Wall Street Journal: The eyes are windows to the soul. What could be more obvious? I look through my eyes onto the world, and I look through the eyes of others into their minds. We immediately see the tenderness and passion in a loving gaze, the fear and malice in a hostile glance. In a lecture room, with hundreds of students, I can pick out exactly who is, and isn’t, paying attention. And, of course, there is the electricity of meeting a stranger’s glance across a crowded room. But wait a minute, eyes aren’t windows at all. They’re inch-long white and black and colored balls of jelly set in holes at the top of a skull.
