The Top 10 Psychology Studies of 2010 The end of 2010 fast approaches, and I'm thrilled to have been asked by the editors of Psychology Today to write about the Top 10 psychology studies of the year. I've focused on studies that I personally feel stand out, not only as examples of great science, but even more importantly, as examples of how the science of psychology can improve our lives. Each study has a clear "take home" message, offering the reader an insight or a simple strategy they can use to reach their goals , strengthen their relationships, make better decisions, or become happier. If you extract the wisdom from these ten studies and apply them in your own life, 2011 just might be a very good year. 1) How to Break Bad Habits If you are trying to stop smoking , swearing, or chewing your nails, you have probably tried the strategy of distracting yourself - taking your mind off whatever it is you are trying not to do - to break the habit. J. 2) How to Make Everything Seem Easier J. 3) How To Manage Your Time Better M. J.
Why Some People Are Evil Just after the sun rose on July 7, 2008, Hans Reiser led police and prosecutors to Nina's shallow grave. Reiser was about to be convicted of strangling his estranged wife to death when he agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and reveal where he dumped Nina's body. In exchange, he would dodge the death penalty. Reiser was a moderately wealthy Internet entrepreneur who started college at age 15. I became familiar with Reiser's case because he hand-wrote a four-page appeal from his cell at San Quentin requesting a new trial. But here's the rub: Reiser didn't request an appeal because he believed he was oxytocin-deficit and wasn't responsible for his actions. So how do human beings go from good, to bad, to evil ? Knowing the chemistry of morality gives us keen insights into why most of us are good most of the time, and why some people like Hans Reiser are evil. And then there is petty evil. My field experiments have even taken me to some of the farthest reaches of the earth.
40 Google+ Tips and Tricks for Power Users | PCWorld July 27, 2011, 8:24 AM — Google+ is all the rage right now. Even under its limited-invite "field trial" phase, the social sharing service is growing in leaps and bounds, with oodles of new users joining every day and even more champing at the bit to get in. Most of us, however, are only beginning to scratch the surface of what Google+ can do; like many Google products, G+ is brimming with advanced features and untapped tweaks. That's why I decided to put together this massive list of Google+ tips and tricks. It includes some of the best power-user pointers I've found both from my own experimentation and from following some really smart folks in the Google+ universe. For more G+ tips and general tech talk, be sure to join me on Google+ as well. Google+ Tips Part 1: The Stream 1. 2. 3. 4.
Emotional Story-Telling after Stressful Experiences: A Way to Find Meaning Nght by Elie Wiesel book cover Dr Elie Wiesel, an American Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor of Eastern European descent is an internationally recognized writer, teacher, and scholar, who dedicated his life to raising awareness about the Holocaust and about the importance of actively speaking up against human rights violations and genocide, wherever in the world these may occur. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to human rights, and he has been an inspiration to other leading humanitarian figures, including Oprah Winfrey, whose moving visit with Dr. Wiesel to Auschwitz was broadcast on her program in 2006. Dr Wiesel's novel , which was translated into English in 1960, is an autobiographical account of his deportation in 1 944 as a young boy to the concentration camp, Auschwitz-Berkenau, along with his whole family. Holocaust Memorial Statue Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Visit Dr.
Spectacle: The lynching of Claude Neal Allie Mae Neal pushed through the screen door and found a shady spot on her porch where the summer sun didn't bite. Kittens purred at her feet and wasps flitted in and out of holes in the roof. The few neighbors who passed by saw an old woman in a wheelchair, blue eyes lazy and unfocused behind thick glasses. "I never blamed nobody," she said. She never knew because nobody was ever charged with a crime, and because no man spent a single second in a cell for the things they did to her father, with knives and rope and hate. Seventy-seven years have passed. The story of her father's death ran in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles, detailing how a small band of men killed him, and how a mob mutilated his corpse. Claude Neal. But America moved on, all except for Allie Mae, who is still jolted awake by nightmares, and the other descendants of Claude Neal, who are still scattered and broken, and a few historians, who have never told the story whole. "I promise," he whispered. Gov. JOHN P.
Resistance Is Futile We won’t stop the rising tide of infections until we develop a new business model to fight them. Julian Stratenschulte/EPA/Corbis On Christmas Eve 1947, George Orwell was admitted to a Scottish hospital with a case of galloping consumption. Orwell had first been diagnosed with tuberculosis almost 10 years earlier, but nonetheless, in what a biographer called “one of the many ill-judged decisions in a life littered with misjudgements,” he had recently moved to a remote and primitive Scottish cottage, where he began work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. There, he developed the night sweats, fever, and weight loss that are hallmarks of active TB. By the time he was admitted to the hospital, Mycobacterium tuberculosis had husked nearly 30 pounds off his already slender frame. When I was younger and more romantic, I imagined that tuberculosis made you a good writer. Victory arrived just barely too late for Orwell. It seems a medieval end for a very modern man. Antibiotics are an exhaustible resource.
What You Don't Know Can Kill You | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions The strategy persists even today. In the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear crisis, many nuclear-energy boosters were quick to cite a study commissioned by the Boston-based nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. The study showed that pollution from coal plants is responsible for 13,000 premature deaths and 20,000 heart attacks in the United States each year, while nuclear power has never been implicated in a single death in this country. True as that may be, numbers alone cannot explain away the cold dread caused by the specter of radiation. Just think of all those alarming images of workers clad in radiation suits waving Geiger counters over the anxious citizens of Japan. Seaweed, anyone? At least a few technology promoters have become much more savvy in understanding the way the public perceives risk. The odds of nanotechnology’s killing off humanity are extremely remote, but the science is obviously not without real risks. The nanotech community is eager to put such risks in perspective.
Scott of the Antarctic: the lies that doomed his race to the pole | UK news | The Observer On 12 November 1912, a party of British explorers was crossing the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica when one of the team, Charles Wright, noticed "a small object projecting above the surface". He halted and discovered the tip of a tent. "It was a great shock," he recalled. With his companions, Wright had been searching for Captain Robert Falcon Scott who, with four colleagues, had set off to reach the South Pole the previous year. The team, from the Scott expedition base camp, knew their comrades were dead: their provisions would have run out long ago. But how and where had Scott perished? Wright had found the answer. The cold had turned the skin of Scott, Wilson and Bowers yellow and glassy. It took three more months for the expedition's survivors to reach New Zealand and to cable Britain. Amundsen's victory and Scott's defeat have acquired a mythic status over the years: a battle between cold, Scandinavian efficiency and British have-a-go pluck and cheery amateurishness. Oates was next.
The fine art of medical diagnosis | Art and design | The Observer At the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery, in Room 58, a painting by the 15th-century Italian artist Piero di Cosimo of a woman lying on her side has been hung opposite Botticelli's Venus and Mars. The fame of the latter makes it a significant attraction for visitors. Yet those who shuffle past Cosimo's canvas miss an intriguing work, not just for its enigmatic content but for the unexpected way it shows how art can be opened up through scientific scrutiny. The painting shows a young woman, half-clothed, lying on the ground as a satyr crouches over her corpse. According to the gallery's guidebook, the work – A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph – depicts the death of Procris, daughter of the king of Athens, who was accidentally killed by her husband Cephalus during a deer hunt. Put "death of Procris" into Google and the search throws up countless versions of Cosimo's painting. Now Baum, visiting professor of medical humanities at University College London, is widening his audience. c.
Doubling in the Middle Discussed: Epic Struggles, The Distance Between Masters and Hacks,Palindromic Taxonomy, A Convenient Ampersand, Cutting-Edge Work in Reversibility, Some Limitations of an Untrained Audience, A Strange Kind of Amazing, The Relationship Killer, Disproportionate Responses, A Surfeit of Calendars, A Deficit of Wool and Illusions In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet. He was totally absorbed in the completion of a commissioned piece. You know palindromes—words or phrases that read the same forward or backward. For Duncan, though, they’re much more than that. Duncan’s in his early fifties, fit, with receding salt-and-pepper hair and a short beard that he trims three times a week. It was actually while working at Encore Books in Philadelphia in 1981 that he started playing with palindromes, after a volume of wordplay caught his eye. Even before actually meeting Duncan, I’d been told about his palindromes. Miss apt A-W on oud?
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif. We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I didn’t know much about computers. I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco. Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. Dr.