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Girls asking, ‘Am I pretty?’ in online videos face thousands of vitriolic responses
The Washington Post: NEW YORK — The young girl shows off her big, comfy koala hat and forms playful hearts with her fingers as she drops the question on YouTube: “Am I pretty or ugly?” “A lot of people call me ugly, and I think I am ugly. I think I’m ugly, and fat,” she confesses in a tiny voice as she invites the world to decide. And the world did. The video, posted Dec. 17, 2010, has more than 4 million views and more than 107,000 anonymous, often hateful responses in a troubling phenomenon that has girls as young as 10 — and some boys — asking the same question on YouTube with similar results. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Still hungry? More Americans are having a ‘second breakfast’
USA Today: Sometimes one breakfast isn't enough. So why not sneak in a second or a third? On-the-go Americans increasingly are consuming their morning calories over several hours instead of sitting down to devour a plate of pancakes, bacon and eggs in one sitting. The case of the morning munchies is being fueled by the belief that it's healthier to eat several smaller meals instead of three squares a day. What qualifies as a snack or a meal is a matter of perspective, of course. But food companies are rolling out smaller bites that feed the growing appetite for morning snacks. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Does Preschool Matter?
Wired: For many kids, the most important years of schooling come before they can even read. Consider the groundbreaking work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, who has repeatedly documented the power of early childhood education. One of his best case studies is the Perry Preschool Experiment, which looked at 123 low-income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan.
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Study of the Day: Why That Last Piece of Chocolate Tastes the Best
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: Our fondest memories usually involve the last of something, be it a farewell kiss or the final day of school. Does this last-is-best bias extend to more trivial events in everyday life? METHODOLOGY: University of Michigan psychologists Ed O'Brien and Phoebe C. Ellsworth recruited 52 students for a taste test of Hershey's Kisses to see if even the smallest of endings have a "positivity effect." The experimenters drew five chocolates -- milk, dark, crème, caramel, and almond -- in random order from a hidden pocket inside a bag without sharing to the participants how many chocolates there would be.
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Lefties vs. Righties: How we decide differently
Yahoo: We like to think that we make decisions based on our ideas of right and wrong -- and we do, to an extent. But according to recent research, our choices may also be influenced by something as simple as whether we're right or left handed. That's because right-handed people are more drawn to things on the right side of a screen or page, while left-handed people look to the left. Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto of The New School for Social Research says it's part of the "body-specificity hypothesis" -- the idea that our physical bodies affect the decisions we make and the way we communicate with one another. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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Thinking Outside The Box, With Our Bodies And Our Brains
NPR: Most of us have probably felt the rightness of a decision in our bodies as much as we have thought through the decision in our brains. Now, researchers report that bodily experience may create new ideas and new knowledge. Sitting inside a big box made of cardboard and plastic pipe, college students were assigned to complete a word task designed to measure creativity. Sitting outside an identical box, a second group of students completed the same task. Read the whole story: NPR
