-
Essay mills — a coarse lesson on cheating
Los Angeles Times: Sometimes as I decide what kind of papers to assign to my students, I worry about essay mills, companies whose sole purpose is to generate essays for high school and college students (in exchange for a fee, of course). The mills claim that the papers are meant to be used as reference material to help students write their own, original papers. But with names such as echeat.com, it's pretty clear what their real purpose is. Professors in general are concerned about essay mills and their effect on learning, but not knowing exactly what they provide, I wasn't sure how concerned to be. So together with my lab manager Aline Grüneisen, I decided to check the services out.
-
iPhone-Addicted Lego Lover Seeks Same For Fun, Romance, Brand Worship
Fast Company: A few years back, the results of a study conducted to determine if brand exposure motivates behavior was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The researchers determined that when primed with the Apple logo, respondents did indeed think different, and became more creative than when exposed to the IBM logo. Similarly, in a paper published by Psychological Science, Zhong and DeVoe flashed fast-food images in front of one group of participants. The second group was exposed to neutral images. The fast-food group were spurred on, reading a 320-word passage a full 15 seconds faster than the neutral group. Read the whole story:
-
Organic Eaters Might Be Meaner Than Their Counterparts, Study Finds
Huffington Post: Eating organic food may make people develop a holier-than-thou complex, according to a new study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Researchers divided subjects into three different groups. One was shown pictures of organic food, like apples and spinach, and another comfort food, like brownies and cookies. The remaining group, which served as the control, was shown foods that weren't organic or comfort foods, like rice, mustard and oatmeal. Afterward, the subjects were asked to pass judgment on a variety of moral transgressions. The results were stark: People in the organic food group judged the issues much more harshly than the others.
-
Ein Hurrikan macht Mode
ORF Austria: Laut Statistik Austria sind Lukas und Anna die aktuell beliebtesten Vornamen in Österreich. Eine Studie zeigt: Popularität und Klang sind eng verwoben, die Namensmode folgt langfristigen Trends. Diese werden bisweilen sogar von Wirbelstürmen ausgelöst. Man kann es auch übertreiben mit der Originalität. Laut Forschern der Universität Leipzig wandeln Eltern bei der Namenssuche immer häufiger abseits der üblichen Pfade. Rapunzel, Tarzan und Winnetou sind offenbar en vogue, auch Blue, Peaches, Apple, Maddox und Summer gelten nun als etablierte Größen im geburtsurkundlichen Fach. Ob der Trend zum Obskuren anhält, ist ungewiss.
-
A question of judgment
The Economist: A NEVER-ENDING flow of information is the lot of most professionals. Whether it comes in the form of lawyers’ cases, doctors’ patients or even journalists’ stories, this information naturally gets broken up into pieces that can be tackled one at a time during the course of a given day. In theory, a decision made when handling one of these pieces should not have much, if any, impact on similar but unrelated subsequent decisions. Yet Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania and Francesca Gino at Harvard report in Psychological Science that this is not how things work out in practice.
-
Phantom hand mapped for the first time
NewScientist: EVER wanted to know what an invisible hand looks like? Well, it is slightly wider than a real hand, and it has shorter fingers too. For the first time, the perceived shape of a phantom limb has been measured. This should make it possible to learn more about how the brain represents what we look like. The illusion of a phantom limb can kick in after an amputation or in people missing limbs from congenital disease. The result is the sensation that the limb is, in fact, present. One theory suggests people with phantom limbs take cues from those around them to work out what their missing body part looks like.
