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SBE Advisory Committee Holds Meeting
COSSA Washington Update: Mumpower New SES Division Director Myron Gutmann, the current AD for SBE, updated the Committee on the directorate's activities. He announced the appointment of Jeryl Mumpower, currently at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, as the new director of the Social and Economic Sciences (SES) division. Mumpower, a former program officer for Decision, Risk, and Management Science, will replace Rachel Croson, who will return to the University of Texas at Dallas in September after two years at NSF. Mumpower previously taught and served in administrative positions at Albany University, State University of New York. He has a Ph.D.
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When Do Kids Become Adults?
The New York Times: It’s that time of year: “senioritis” has set in. All that remains between childhood and adulthood is the prom and graduation. Many of these high school students have been driving since they were 16, and those who have turned 18 are no longer minors: they can vote, join the military and marry their sweethearts. But they can’t buy a beer. Is it time to rethink the age of adulthood? Do the age requirements for certain rights need to be lowered or raised? Shouldn’t they at least be consistent? Read the discussion: The New York Times
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Music: It’s in your head, changing your brain
CNN: Michael Jackson was on to something when he sang that "A-B-C" is "simple as 'Do Re Mi.'" Music helps kids remember basic facts such as the order of letters in the alphabet, partly because songs tap into fundamental systems in our brains that are sensitive to melody and beat. That's not all: when you play music, you are exercising your brain in a unique way. "I think there's enough evidence to say that musical experience, musical exposure, musical training, all of those things change your brain," says Dr. Charles Limb, associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins University.
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Dreadful Deaths: Cycling Through Fear
Huffington Post: Almost 3,000 people died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That includes the victims in or near the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and all the passengers in the four commandeered jets, including the flight that went down in rural Pennsylvania. But it does not include the many hidden victims of lingering terror -- an additional 1,500 whose dread of another attack led, indirectly and much later, to their deaths. This is the gist of the so-called "dread risk effect" -- first hypothesized in 2004 in the journal Psychological Science. The idea is that terrorist acts indeed create terror.
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Understand Uncertainty in Program Effects
Education Week: In education research, there's a drive to cut to the chase: What's the effect on the classroom? How much better will students perform on the state math test using this curriculum? How many months of classroom time can students progress by using that tutoring system? Usually education watchers make that interpretation based on a study's effect size, often called the p-value.
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Seeing black and white makes people more judgmental
msnbc: Black-and-white judgments may be more literal than you might expect. A new study finds that people who view information on a black-and-white background are less likely to see gray areas in moral dilemmas than those who get the information alongside other colors. The background, which participants weren't aware was of interest in the experiment, did not push people to become either more lenient or more severe, researchers reported Friday (May 25) here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Instead, it took people's natural tendencies toward leniency or severity and intensified them — in other words, their judgments became more black-and-white.
