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Negotiating your next deal: It’s okay to, literally, sweat it
Fortune: We negotiate nearly every day. While the term "negotiation" often brings to mind larger-stake deals, such as the purchase of a new home or car, more often these negotiations are smaller and involve project deadlines at work or divvying up of household responsibilities. Many of us, myself included, can't stand negotiations whether big or small -- so much so that it comes as a surprise that others actually relish each chance they get to negotiate. Regardless of which camp you're in, most of us can relate to the feeling of pounding hearts and sweaty palms when we negotiate. Do these visceral responses -- also known as physiological arousal -- hurt or help us?
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An Hour Makes a Difference
Inside Higher Ed: For years, studies have found that first-generation college students -- those who do not have a parent with a college degree -- lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them.
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The best (and worst) times to do things at work
The Washington Post: Plenty of well-worn time-management advice tells us how we should plan our day. Do the most important thing first. Never check email in the morning. Make a to-do list the night before. Don’t schedule meetings right after lunch when everyone will be half-asleep. But what if we organized tasks by when research shows it’s actually most optimal to get them done? That’s a question we started asking at On Leadership after coming across a recent study that shows the ideal time of day to make moral or ethical decisions is in the morning. And so, we pored over additional research (some academic, some perhaps less so) on tasks and timing.
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When to Make the First Move
When Michael Jordan’s agent set out to negotiate a new contract with the Chicago Bulls for his client back in the mid 90s, he anticipated that the team’s managing partner would lowball the salary offer. So the agent opted to move first and requested an ambitious $52 million per year for Jordan. After a series of back and forth talks, the parties settled for an annual paycheck just above $30 million. By making the first offer — and doing so aggressively, at that — Jordan’s agent landed his client the single highest annual salary in the history of the National Basketball Association.
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Here’s One More Reason To Play Video Games: Beating Dyslexia
NPR: Most parents prefer that their children pick up a book rather than a game controller. But for kids with dyslexia, action video games may be just what the doctor ordered. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the world's population. Many approaches to help struggling readers focus on words and phonetics, but researchers at Oxford University say dyslexia is more of an attention issue. So programs should emphasize training the brain's attention system, they say, something that video games do.
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Loneliness twice as unhealthy as obesity for older people, study finds
The Guardian: Loneliness can be twice as unhealthy as obesity, according to researchers who found that feelings of isolation can have a devastating impact on older people. The scientists tracked more than 2,000 people aged 50 and over and found that the loneliest were nearly twice as likely to die during the six-year study than the least lonely. Compared with the average person in the study, those who reported being lonely had a 14% greater risk of dying. The figure means that loneliness has around twice the impact on an early death as obesity. Poverty increased the risk of an early death by 19%.