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How Long Does It Take to Get to Tatooine?
The New Yorker: On an early autumn morning in 2009, Randall Munroe, a NASA physicist turned full-time cartoonist, was teaching a weekend physics class to high-school students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The course was part of an M.I.T. program designed to introduce students to topics ranging from sculpture and ancient Greek to geoengineering. Though Munroe’s lecture that day had the lively title “Solar Panels, Hand Grenades, and Blowing Up the Moon: How to Think About Energy,” for the first hour and a half he adhered to a fairly standard lecture format. What is energy? What can it do? How do you know how much you have? The students reacted as, well, typical students.
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Book Review: ‘The Marshmallow Test’ by Walter Mischel
The Wall Street Journal: When video of Adm. William H. McRaven's 2014 commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin was posted online, the speech went viral. Millions of viewers will remember the core message summed up in his memorable line: "If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed." The Navy SEAL veteran recalled that "if you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.
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Many young people are not in a position to splurge
Marketplace: The recession deprived many young people of a launching pad into career jobs and financial adulthood. And that means they also aren’t launching into some of the major investments that have traditionally been part of the American Dream; such as purchasing a first car or a first home, or starting a first retirement account. “Because the economy has hurt them so badly, they’ve had a delayed adulthood,” says Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding in New York, which conducts market research on the workplace and consumer expectations of this age cohort.
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How To Get Children To Behave Without Hitting Them
NPR: There's plenty of evidence that spanking, paddling or hitting children doesn't improve their behavior in the long run and actually makes it worse. But the science never trumps emotion, according to Alan Kazdin, head of the Yale Parenting Center and author of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit. After NFL star Adrian Peterson was indicted for child abuse after disciplining his 4-year-old son by hitting him with a switch, there's been a lot of conversation about how race and culture affect parents' approach to discipline. OK, what about the science?
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: White Matter Morphometric Changes Uniquely Predict Children's Reading Acquisition Chelsea A. Myers, Maaike Vandermosten, Emily A. Farris, Roeland Hancock, Paul Gimenez, Jessica M. Black, Brandi Casto, Miroslav Draho, Mandeep Tumber, Robert L. Hendren, Charles Hulme, and Fumiko Hoeft Researchers have found several predictors of early reading ability, including family history and phonological awareness. In this study, the researchers examined whether variations in structural brain development could also serve as an early predictor of reading ability.
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Let’s Watch the Video—and Confirm Our Prejudices
Pacific Standard: “Let’s look at the tape” has become our go-to response for determining the truth of an ambiguous situation. With video recorders tracking everything from baseball games to riots, it seems natural to take a second, closer look before determining precisely what happened, and who was at fault. However, new research suggests this process doesn’t necessarily lend itself to impartial fact-finding. On the contrary, it finds close viewing of videos often leads people to conclusions that confirm their biases.
