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Visualizing Vastness
The New York Times: In the funky, crunchy, slightly gritty college town where I live, we have a pedestrian mall called the Ithaca Commons. You can probably picture it: A gem store. A hemp shop. Lots of places to buy hand-made candles. And a scale model of the solar system … five billion times smaller than the real thing. Built in honor of Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer, author and science communicator, the Sagan Planet Walk offers lessons that reach far beyond astronomy. It’s a case study in visualizing vastness. Admit it. You have no real feeling for the size of the solar system. That’s O.K. Nobody else does either. Even knowing the numbers doesn’t help much.
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Behavioral economics taps power of persuasion for tax compliance
Chicago Tribune: Can peer pressure make delinquent taxpayers pony up what they owe the government? Behavioral economists say it can, and some tax agencies in both the United States and Britain are taking their advice to heart -- and finding that they are reaping rewards. Behavioral economics has already upended investing and finance with new theories on why and how people make decisions about their money. From the simple re-wording of late notices to changing the structure of back-tax payment plans, tax collectors are getting results by tapping into basic human tendencies.
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People May Be Just a Bit Psychic, Even If They Don’t Know It
The Wall Street Journal: Scientists understandably don’t have much patience for the notion of extrasensory perception. Yet evidence persists in the psychological literature that people’s bodies sometimes unconsciously “predict” unpredictable future events. These visceral responses don’t appear to be the result of sheer chance. That’s the result of a meta-analysis of earlier papers on this subject conducted by a trio of researchers led by Julia Mossbridge of Northwestern University. They started with 49 articles but, in bending over backwards to take the most conservative possible approach, tossed out 23 that, for various reasons, didn’t meet their standards. The effect remained.
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Inside the Minds of the Perfectionists
The Wall Street Journal: Christine Tsien Silvers says perfectionism runs in her family. Her mother, a detail-oriented computer scientist, emigrated from China to Minnesota and was "always taking classes to get a better job." She earned a Ph.D. from MIT and an M.D. from Harvard. "But I also wanted to be the best mother possible," says Dr. Silvers, so she worked part-time, not full-time, emergency-room shifts to maximize her time with her children, ages 3, 5 and 8. Dr. Silvers, 42, now works from home in Marshfield, Mass., as the chief medical officer of a start-up company using her MIT dissertation to create mobile health monitors.
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With hindsight (bias), everyone is a brilliant political pundit
MinnPost: The New York Times ran a fun and politically timely article this week on hindsight bias — our personal belief after an event (like, say, a presidential election) that we had known and predicted with remarkably detailed precision (“295 electoral college votes!”) before the event how it would turn out. Even if we hadn’t actually believed — much less said — anything of the kind. As Times reporter Benedict Carey points out, there’s going to be a lot of evidence of hindsight bias — on cable TV and off — after Tuesday’s election results are tallied. “Many people will feel in their gut that they knew the result all along,” he writes.
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Act powerful, be powerful
CNN: Open, expansive postures reflect and signal power (picture Wonder Woman). They are expressed by individuals who already feel powerful. Powerless people do the opposite -- contracting, hunching, and making themselves smaller. When it comes to power, the mind shapes the body, a finding supported by extensive peer-reviewed science. This, to most of us, is not so surprising. But what is surprising, when it comes to power, is that the body also shapes the mind.
