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Truth-Seeking In The Age Of Speculation
NPR: The marvel-filled Information Age is also turning out to be the muddled-up Epoch of Conjecture. The Era of Error. Seemingly, we know everything. What is not in Wikipedia can be found through Google. And what Google can't scrape up, the National Security Agency — or international hackers — can. Through crowdsourcing, we can solve crimes and answer questions. Just as seemingly, there is an enormous lot that we do not know. For example: Where is Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? Is faster-than-light speed really possible? What exactly is causing colony collapse disorder among bees? Do cellphones cause cancer? Can we on the Internet? And when we don't know for sure, we speculate.
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Principles of Learnings
Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering, and mathematics? Should there be single-sex schooling? What is intelligence? How do people learn? Always evident in her writing about thought and knowledge, cognitive psychologist Diane F. Halpern’s answers to apparently straightforward questions like these are far from simple, yet they are clear. Halpern’s research has yielded many principles of learning, such as the importance of formative assessment to learning, and she has designed and implemented programs for — among other areas — undergraduate education in psychology, critical thinking, spatial thinking, and even automated tutoring.
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Liars and Cheaters Make Better Art
Motherboard: Plenty of the world’s best artists haven’t exactly been stellar people, morally speaking. We pay comedians, novelists, and screenwriters to make stuff up and in exchange, forgive them their transgressions. Turns out, there may be a connection: A new study out of Harvard University suggests that lying actually makes you more creative. Previous studies have found that creative people are generally more dishonest than uncreative people, but the Harvard study, published in Psychological Science, suggests that people who lie or cheat immediately before doing a creative task perform better at it.
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Food Tastes Bland While Multitasking
Scientific American Mind: Eating while distracted is well known to cause overindulgence, as confirmed by a recent review of 24 studies published in April 2013 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The exact mechanism behind such mindless bingeing, however, has been unclear. A recent study in Psychological Science suggests that mentally taxing tasks dampen our perception of taste, causing us to eat more. In four experiments, participants attempted to memorize either a seven-digit number (a heavy load on the brain) or one digit (a light cognitive load) while tasting salty, sweet and sour substances and rating each food's taste intensity. Read the whole story: Scientific American Mind
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The Retirement Fear Factor
If you’re like a majority of American adults, you aren’t putting away enough money to keep your current standard of living when you retire. When you’re young, retirement seems light years away. But most financial advisers have far less patience for middle-aged workers who lack a strong savings plan. But for many workers, fear — rather than complacency — may be the reason certain individuals are not putting enough money away, according to a recently published study. In fact, anxiety about retirement can actually disrupt an individual’s capacity to digest information about retirement planning, Oklahoma State University psychological researchers found.
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Why Gamers Can’t Stop Playing First-Person Shooters
The New Yorker: In the fall of 1992, a twentysomething college dropout and former juvenile offender named John Carmack was hard at work in Mesquite, Texas, on a new concept for a video game. It would merge the first-person perspective of a game like Myst with the direct combat of the shooter game Wolfenstein 3-D and the multi-player capacity of Spectre, and it would do so in a more realistic three-dimensional environment than any game before it. The following year, Carmack and his five colleagues at id Software released the product of that vision: Doom. They knew that they were on to something big.