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Walking at Lunchtime Buffers Against Workplace Stress
Taking a lunch hour stroll was shown to have a positive influence on people’s mood, enthusiasm, and perception of performance at work.
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A Professor Forced Her Students to Take Notes by Hand
New York Magazine: A communications professor at the University of Kansas, tired of teaching to a classroom of students whose faces were all bathed in the blue light of their laptop screens, banned technology-enabled note-taking from her classroom for a semester. "I ... had a theory, based on my college experience from the dark ages — the ’70s, a.k.a. before PowerPoint — that students would process lectures more effectively if they took notes on paper," writes Carol E. Holstead in a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, published earlier this month. As it turns out, research published in Psychological Science last year backs up Holstead's theory.
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Learning to See Data
The New York Times: FOR the past year or so genetic scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have been collaborating with a specialist from another universe: Daniel Kohn, a Brooklyn-based painter and conceptual artist. Mr. Kohn has no training in computers or genetics, and he’s not there to conduct art therapy classes. His role is to help the scientists with a signature 21st-century problem: Big Data overload. ... How does this look in the real world? Take learning to fly, a disorienting and sometimes terrifying experience that requires hundreds of hours in the air and in the classroom — many of them devoted to learning how to read an instrument panel.
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Does money make you mean?
BBC News Magazine: The road along the seafront in Los Angeles is lined with palm trees - skateboarders and dog-walkers stroll along, heading for the beach. And social psychologist Prof Paul Piff is spending the afternoon going back and forth over a pedestrian crossing. Thanks to the high number of wealthy locals, there is no shortage of upmarket vehicles gliding past. The four-wheel drives, sleek sports cars and nifty hybrids are an essential part of his demonstration. He's here to illustrate one of his more provocative experiments - who is more likely to stop for pedestrians, the rich or the poor? ...
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The goosebumps test: Science has found the emotion you need to stay healthy
Quartz: A link has long been proven between negative moods and ill health. But how do positive moods affect us physiologically? Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, set out to discover exactly that when they tracked emotions such as compassion, joy, love, and so on versus the levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6)—a secretion which causes inflammation in the body—in the saliva of 119 university students. The researchers found that those who regularly have positive emotions have less IL-6—and they noticed the strongest correlation with one particular emotion. Awe.
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The Healthiest Typeface
The Atlantic: In a New York Times column in July 2012, the filmmaker Errol Morris took a few paragraphs to ponder the likelihood of death by asteroid. “NASA issued reassuring public statements [after an asteroid flew close to Earth in 2011], but I’m not so sure,” he wrote. “It’s about the size of an aircraft carrier. Okay. That seems pretty big to me. Do you mean I shouldn’t worry about being hit by a meteor the size of an aircraft carrier?” He then asked two questions of his readers: Did they agree, as the physicist David Deutsch put it, that—at least asteroid-wise—“we live in an era of unprecedented safety”? And how confident were they in their choice? Read the whole story: The Atlantic
