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Why There’s a Sassy Wombat on Your Phone
The Wall Street Journal: Text messages just don't convey thoughts and emotions well enough for 2013. When Tanya Sichynsky wants to tell friends she's tired, the 19-year-old University of Georgia student doesn't text anymore. She sends an image from her smartphone of a sleepy cartoon bunny holding a coffee mug with a smiley face. When Kylin Brown messes up dinner, the 23-year-old Indianapolis work-at-home mother uses her smartphone to send her mother a fingernail-size cartoon of a girl running away from an oven in flames. "We barely use words anymore, except when we talk on the phone," says Ms. Brown. ...
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Beliefs About Causes of Obesity May Impact Weight, Eating Behavior
People who indicated that diet was the primary cause of obesity actually had lower BMIs than those who implicated lack of exercise.
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Hunger and Hoarding in the Welfare State
The Huffington Post: Suzanne Collins' futuristic trilogy, The Hunger Games, takes place in Panem, a totalitarian nation of obscene wealth and pervasive poverty. Its twelve districts are all impoverished, but District 12, the coal-mining region formerly called Appalachia, is the poorest of the poor. Citizens struggle to eke out a living in the mines, but hunger is the norm and the unfortunate routinely die of starvation. Panem is the opposite of a welfare state. There is no dole, no safety net -- certainly no 47 percent. Indeed, there is no institutional sharing at all.
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Perfect pitch may not be so ‘perfect’
BBC: Played a long piece of music, a study group failed to notice when scientists turned the tones ever so slightly flat. They then misidentified in-tune sounds as being sharp. Researchers say it demonstrates the adaptability of the mind even for those skills thought to be fixed at birth. They have published the work in the journal Psychological Science. Only around one in 10,000 people has the ability to correctly classify a note simply by hearing it. This phenomenon is called perfect, or absolute, pitch, and has been made famous by the well-known composers who are believed to have possessed such talents, such as Mozart and Beethoven. Read the whole story: BBC
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What Darkness Does to the Mind
The Atlantic: In the summer of 2008, I moved from Pittsburgh to Chapel Hill to start my new position as a faculty member at the business school at the University of North Carolina. Although I was sad to leave Carnegie Mellon and my colleagues there, I was excited to meet new ones and to move into our new home. A few months earlier, my husband Greg and I had bought a lovely house surrounded by quiet, leafy streets just a few blocks away from the center of town.
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Why Humans Are Bad at Multitasking
LiveScience: It may not be uncommon to see someone typing out an email on their phone as they walk down the street, listen to music as they read the newspaper on the subway, or stare at a computer screen with multiple windows and tabs open. But despite constantly juggling different activities, humans are not very good at multitasking, experts say. Dividing attention across multiple activities is taxing on the brain, and can often come at the expense of real productivity, said Arthur Markman, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
