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Meet Facebook’s Mr. Nice
The New York Times: Of Facebook’s 7,185 employees, Arturo Bejar may have the most difficult job. No, he is not responsible for increasing advertising revenue or keeping the website alive 24 hours a day. Mr. Bejar has a much more inscrutable task: teaching the site’s 1.3 billion users, especially its tens of millions of teenagers, how to be nice and respectful to one another. Respectful? Online? Ha! That’s never going to happen. Everyone knows that social media is an unwinnable game of who can be meaner. If Mr. Bejar thinks he can make Facebook users nice, he is — to borrow a popular Facebook comment — just stupid! Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Risky Drivers More Likely to Ignore Road Rules Even as Pedestrians
We’ve all seen it before -- distracted pedestrians who dart across the street without thinking and drivers who speed through intersections and stoplights as if they owned the road. Depending on how you typically get around, it may be tempting to generalize about the other camp and conclude that either pedestrians or drivers are more prone to unwise behavior. But new research shows that unsafe road behavior is more about the individual person than it is about the particular mode of transport: Some people are just more likely to take risks on the road, whether they’re behind the wheel or not.
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Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class
The Washington Post: Clay Shirky is, as he explains below, a “pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor.” Shirky is a professor of media studies at New York University, holding a joint appointment as an arts professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the journalism institute. He is a leading voice on the effect technology has had on society — and vice versa — and has been writing extensively about the Internet for nearly a decade. For years Shirky has allowed his students to bring laptops, tablets and phones into class and use them at will. But he just told students to put them away.
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High School Athletes Gain Lifetime Benefits
The New York Times: Ask a group of healthy college students in their 20s if they know what they had for lunch three days ago and you’re not likely to see many hands go up. But ask them for memories of competitive sports they played when they were younger and suddenly you’ll hear stories about when they pitched for their school baseball or softball team. Sports offer formative and life-long lessons that stick with people who play.
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Study: If Your Team Has Too Many Superstars, Performance Will Suffer
Entrepreneur: When hiring employees, conventional wisdom dictates that one should always try and select the superstars, those men and women who excel at their job so thoroughly they put the average human to shame. After all, the assumption that a corporate team packed with ten peak performers will outperform a unit that consists of five excellent achievers and five merely good ones seems like a safe bet. But while top-tier talent is clearly a must-have for any business, a recent study published in Psychological Science adds a shade of nuance to the talent equation by suggesting that when it comes to team performance, there may be a talent-saturation point. Read the whole story: Entrepreneur
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Meglio investire in esperienze che in beni di consumo (Better to invest in experiences than consumer goods)
La Stampa: E’ molto più conveniente spendere i nostri soldi in qualcosa bello da ricordare, piuttosto che in acquisti di beni concreti; questo ci farà di sicuro più felici. Da una decina d’anni una corrente di psicologi sta cercando di dimostrare che vivere un’esperienza provoca maggiore benessere alla nostra mente del possesso di oggetti. Sembrerebbe quasi una corrente mistica della psicologia quella che vorrebbe convincerci ad abbracciare pratiche di vita che sembrano affini a esercizi spirituali, il concetto è che investire in bei ricordi ci appaghi assai più di una lussuriosa orgia di shopping compulsivo.
