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For the Love of Stuff
The Atlantic: “If your house was burning, what would you take with you?” This is the question Foster Huntington asks in his Tumblr (turned book) The Burning House. More than 5000 people from around the world have answered his question in photo form, neatly lining up their most treasured possessions into aesthetically pleasing arrangements. “At the time when I started the Burning House project, I was living in New York and working as a concept designer for men’s fashion,” says Huntington, now a 26-year-old freelance photographer living in Skamania, Washington. “I was inundated by this culture that was based around the idea that you define who you are by the cool shit that you own.
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Saving Computer Files Makes Your Human Memory Work Better
The Huffington Post: Saving a computer file appears to improve your human memory, a scientific study suggests. The act of recording something artificially appears to "free up space" in the brain, and make it easier to recall different information. Whatever way you do it, the result is a fundamentally better ability to recall new information, the study published in Psychological Science by Benjamin Storm of the University of California, Santa Cruz says. The study looked again at older evidence that saving information makes it more difficult to remember that specific information.
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Pizza or Brussels sprouts? How we process food choices
Los Angeles Times: Do you lack self-control when it comes to food? If so, maybe you need to slow down a bit. At least that's the suggestion of researchers who recently exposed a group of 28 hungry college students to a series of computer images of food and asked them to mouse click on the grub they preferred. Their conclusion? It takes longer for people to mentally process the health value of food than it does for them to process its anticipated taste. The findings were published Monday in the journal Psychological Science.
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Here Are the Things Introverts Say on Facebook
New York Magazine: The things you say on Facebook apparently reveal a lot about your personality, according to a large new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that finds an association between words used in Facebook posts and personality traits. The results are pretty fascinating, not because they're surprising but because they're so spot-on, exactly what you'd expect from introverts, extroverts, and the like. Introverts, for example, tend to mention stereotypical introvert-y things in their status updates: computer, internet, read, anime — to an extent, these are words suggesting that they were posted while the writer was holed up at home.
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Handwriting vs typing: is the pen still mightier than the keyboard?
The Guardian: In the past few days you may well have scribbled out a shopping list on the back of an envelope or stuck a Post-it on your desk. Perhaps you added a comment to your child’s report book or made a few quick notes during a meeting. But when did you last draft a long text by hand? How long ago did you write your last “proper” letter, using a pen and a sheet of writing paper? Are you among the increasing number of people, at work, who are switching completely from writing to typing?
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The High Costs of Status Seeking
The Huffington Post: It's well known that income inequality leads to all sorts of social problems. The bigger the gap between the affluent and the poor, the higher the rates of homicide, teenage pregnancy and infant mortality, to name just a few of the negative outcomes. Unequal societies are also more polarized politically, and their economies are not as robust. Despite all this evidence of untoward consequences, it's not really known why this is the case. What is the psychosocial link between income gaps and societal dysfunction?
