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The Tyranny of the Exclamation Point Is Causing Email and Text Anxiety
John Witkowski was trying to make some progress on a work project one day this summer when he fired off more than two dozen emails. The 30-year-old tax accountant from Cleveland ended each message with: “Thanks in advance for your help with this project.” The notes caught the attention of his manager, who instant-messaged him: “She was like, ‘You’re not your normal, cheery, bubbly self,’ ” Mr. Witkowski said. “ ‘You’re not using exclamation points.’ ” She told him she felt his emails came off as more demanding than usual. “I didn’t really know how to react,” he said. Exclamation points are stressing people out.
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Singing With My Grandbaby
I can’t explain the first song I crooned to my sleeping granddaughter, just hours old and bundled like a burrito in a hospital blanket and striped cap. Not Brahms, which would have been classy. Not a Yiddish folk tune, though I’d claimed the name Bubbe, Yiddish for grandmother. No, it was a ballad I probably hadn’t deliberately listened to or thought much about in decades: “Surfer Girl,” by the Beach Boys. Maybe it welled up because of the lyrics (“made my heart come all undone”). --- Some folks planned what to sing, but for many of us this music simply emerged, unbidden and unexpected.
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Introducing ‘Letters to Young Scientists,’ a new column from Science Careers
Pursuing a scientific career can be a daunting journey. Yet many of us are not taught how to navigate the tasks and challenges—giving a high-quality presentation, surviving the academic job market, and becoming a mentor, to name just a few—as part of our standard scientific training. And even the best mentor can’t provide advice to everyone or cover everything when it comes to succeeding in science and academia. So where can young scientists go for practical, reliable advice? In a tradition that dates back nearly a century, prominent scientists used to dispatch “letters” of advice and guidance to the next generation.
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Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies
Psychologists are in the midst of an ongoing, difficult reckoning. Many believe that their field is experiencing a “reproducibility crisis,” because they’ve tried and failed to repeat experiments done by their peers. Even classic results—the stuff of textbooks and TED talks—have proven surprisingly hard to replicate, perhaps because they’re the results of poor methods and statistical tomfoolery. These problems have spawned a community of researchers dedicated to improving the practices of their field and forging a more reliable way of doing science. These attempts at reform have met resistance.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest findings published in Psychological Science: How Endogenous Crowd Formation Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Online Ratings Gaël Le Mens, Balázs Kovács, Judith Avrahami, and Yaakov Kareev People often rely on ratings from online recommendation platforms before making decisions about purchases or other kinds of consumption. These ratings typically are averaged and accordingly are thought to reflect the wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomenon and thus provide unbiased quality estimates. But what if the way the crowd forms biases the average ratings?
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Videogame Developers Are Making It Harder to Stop Playing
Videogames have gotten harder to turn off, mental-health experts and parents say, raising concerns about the impact of seemingly endless gaming sessions on players’ lives. Game developers for years have tweaked the dials not only on how games look and sound but how they operate under the hood, and such changes have made videogames more pervasive and enthralling, industry observers say. The World Health Organization in June added “gaming disorder” to an updated version of its International Classification of Diseases, warning about a condition in which people give up interests and activities to overly indulge in gaming despite negative consequences.
