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America Needs to Study Fractions
Scientific American: What part of math was most intimidating when you were in grade school? Maybe it was fractions. Or even worse, long-form division. Somehow splitting numbers really seemed complicated. And the U.S. might be paying for kids’ inability to overcome those early challenges: a new study finds that Americans are falling significantly behind in math aptitude compared with China, Finland, the Netherlands and Canada. And the root cause is deficiencies in knowledge of fractions and division. Nearly 600 children were tested once when they were 10 to 12 years old and again five years later.
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Parents Especially Dads Are Happier than their Childless Pals. (Happy Father’s Day.)
TIME: Consider it an early Father’s Day present, guys: your kids — yes, the ones who wake you up in the middle of the night and demand to be fed three meals a day — are actually making you really happy. Really. Being a parent, especially a dad, appears to confer greater levels of happiness, positive emotion and meaning than being childless, according to new research to be published in Psychological Science. “If you have a dinner party, are parents at that party happier than non-parents at that dinner party?” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, and the paper’s senior author.
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Männer mit harten Gesichtszügen sind Softies
Bild: Von wegen gefühlsarmer Macho! Männer mit herben, breiten Gesichtszügen haben oft ein weiches Wesen, viele sind sogar fürsorgliche Softies. Zu diesem Ergebnis kamen jetzt Psychologen der schottischen Universität St. Andrews. Demnach sind Männer mit einem groben, harten Erscheinungsbild eher bereit, ihre eigenen Bedürfnisse in den Hintergrund zu stellen, um Freunden und Kollegen zu helfen. Bisher wurde Männern mit breiten Gesichtern oft unterstellt, sie seien aggressiv und unehrlich. Außerdem galten sie als unkooperativ und kalt. So lief die Untersuchung: Die Wissenschaftler gaben Probanden Geld für ein Spiel.
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The New Neuroscience of Choking
The New Yorker: Last Sunday, at the Memorial golf tournament in Dublin, Ohio, Rickie Fowler looked like the man to beat. He entered the tournament with momentum: Fowler had recently gained his first ever P.G.A. tour victory, and he had finished in the top ten in his last four starts. On the first hole of the final round, Fowler sank a fourteen-foot birdie putt, placing him within two shots of the lead. And that’s when things fell apart. Fowler pulled a shot on the second hole and never recovered. On the next hole, he hit his approach into a greenside bunker and ended up three-putting for a double bogey. He finished with an eighty-four, his worst round on the tour by five shots.
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Anticipating baby name trends
Today's Parent: Everyone loves looking up baby name lists, right? Whether or not you are expecting, it's always fun to see what trends baby name experts are predicting for the coming year. But did you know that natural disasters and other cultural factors play a role in how we choose our child's name? According to Wharton marketing professors Jonah Berger and Eric Bradlow — from their upcoming article "From Karen to Katie: Using Baby Names to Understand Cultural Evolution" to be published in the Psychological Science journal — we are more inclined to choose a name that sounds similar to natural disasters than we may want to readily admit.
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The Moral Diet
The New York Times: In the 1970s, the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was an informal affair. It was staffed by about 300 mostly elderly volunteers, and there were cash drawers instead of registers. The problem was that of the shop’s $400,000 in annual revenue, somebody was stealing $150,000. Dan Weiss, the gift shop manager at the time who is now the president of Lafayette College, investigated. He discovered that there wasn’t one big embezzler. Bunches of people were stealing. Dozens of elderly art lovers were each pilfering a little.
