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Does Money Make You Unhappy?
Wired: David Brooks has an excellent column on the diminishing returns of luxury living: Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability. I once visited a university that had a large, lavishly financed Hillel House to serve as a Jewish center on campus. But the students told me they preferred the Chabad House nearby, which was run by the orthodox Lubavitchers. At the Chabad house, the sofas were tattered and the rooms cramped, but, the students said, it was more haimish. Restaurants and bars can exist on either side of the Haimish Line.
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Measure of success: Study shows width of CEO’s face can predict company’s financial performance
Daily Mail: If you are measuring indications of how well a company will perform, look no further than the shape of the CEO’s face. New research shows male corporate leaders with wider faces, such as Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, and Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, demonstrate better financial performances than their peers with more narrow faces, such as former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. The study, led by Elaine Wong at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, analysed photos of 55 male CEOs of Fortune 500 businesses.
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Coffee Break? Walk in the Park? Why Unwinding Is Hard
The Wall Street Journal: A college student deep into studying for a big exam might do well to give his brain a break. Just what he does during that break will determine how helpful that pause will be, a growing body of research shows. A stroll in the park could do wonders, for instance, while downing coffee could leave him just as stressed and depleted as before the break. And, sometimes, forcing oneself to simply power through mental fatigue can be more effective than pausing.
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Assigning Wikipedia Instead of Term Papers
Positive Psychology News Daily: Are you a professor teaching a class on psychology — or perhaps another discipline that relies on psychology, such as management science? Are you putting the final tweaks on your course syllabus? Then consider this: Wikipedia has been shown to be the most important source of science including psychological science for the public. However, a lot of topics in psychology are presented poorly or have not been presented at all.
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The Cars
The Colbert Report: Stephen: But now there's a modern way to cram all the data into our sense holes, and it brings us to tonight's Word: Head in the Cloud. Folks, to deal with information overload the human brain uses something called transactive memory, relying on friends and family to remember things you don't have space for, like when a husband remembers to pay the electric bill while the wife remembers everything he's done wrong for the past 10 years. (Like criticizing her on TV) Now our brains are applying the same technique online. It seems that Betsy Sparrow, Columbia researcher and Decemberist song lyric recently publishes a report called Memory in the Age of Google.
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CEO face shape linked to company performance
CBS News: The shape of a CEO's face can predict his company's financial performance, according to a new study in which researchers analyzed photos of 55 male chief executive officers of Fortune 500 businesses. The crucial feature: Facial width. Corporate leaders with faces that were wide relative to their length — such as Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines — tended to lead better-performing companies than CEOs with narrower faces, such as Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers, the study found. This finding follows research that has shown that the ratio of facial width to height is correlated with aggression in men.
