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Preschool Push Moving Ahead in Many States
The New York Times: Preschool is having its moment, as a favored cause for politicians and interest groups who ordinarily have trouble agreeing on the time of day. President Obama devoted part of his State of the Union address to it, while the deeply red states of Oklahoma and Georgia are being hailed as national models of preschool access and quality, with other states and cities also forging ahead on their own. ... But researchers say the quality of Head Start programs vary widely, and that studies often compare Head Start participants with children in other, potentially better, preschool programs. James J.
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How Color Shapes Our Lives
The Atlantic: Jay Neitz has cured colorblindness. At least he thinks he could cure colorblindness, if the FDA would let him operate on humans. What Neitz, a vision expert at the University of Washington, has done for sure is given monkeys the ability to see red. Like most mammals, squirrel monkeys have only two types of cone cells in their eyes—blue and green—and can, therefore, only see those colors. But by doing some genetic kung fu, Neitz, along with his lab partner (and wife), the neuroscientist Maureen Neitz, was able to convert some of the monkeys’ green cones to red, giving them the same trichromatic vision that humans have. Well, most humans.
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Little Authoritarians: The Closing of Young Minds
John Dean, former Nixon crony, White House lawyer and Watergate co-conspirator, turned on the Republican Party a few years ago. The reason for his turnabout, he writes in his book Conservatives Without Conscience, is that true conservatism has been perverted by politicians and thinkers—primarily the religious right—who embrace an extreme version of authoritarianism, in both philosophy and policy. This authoritarian mentality, as Dean sees it, celebrates obedience, intolerance, and government intrusion into citizens’ choices and personal values.
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How the Brain Made Room for Complex Social Ties
When APS Fellow and Janet Taylor Spence Award recipient Naomi Eisenberger was a graduate student, she ran an experiment in which study participants felt socially excluded: Participants situated in an fMRI machine played a virtual game of catch with two other players — or so they thought. In truth, they were playing catch with a computer, and no other human player was participating in the game. At some point, the other “players” quit passing the ball to the study participants, which led to feelings of exclusion.
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Wider-Faced Dates More Attractive as Short-Term Mates
Women may perceive men with wider faces as more dominant and more attractive for short-term relationships, according to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our study shows that within three minutes of meeting in real life, women find more dominant, wider-faced men attractive for short-term relationships, and want to go on another date with them,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Katherine Valentine of Singapore Management University. According to Valentine, there’s considerable academic debate about whether physical dominance is advantageous in mating – that is, actually attractive to women.
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Mwahahaha…
The Economist: FROM James Moriarty to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the idea of the evil genius has been a staple of storytelling. But is it true? Or, to put the matter less starkly, is there a connection between creativity and dishonesty in real people who are not bent on world domination, as well as in fictional supervillains? Writing in Psychological Science, Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California suggest that there is—and that cheating actually increases creativity.
