NewsTrust - Psychology - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Howard Rheingold - May. 13 (Opinion) - Use the following methods and tools to protect yourself from toxic bad info. Use them and then pass them along to others. Promote the notion that more info literacy is a practical answer to the growing info pollution. Be the change you want to see. Although the Web undermines authority (by enabling anybody to publish), authority is still useful as one clue to credibility in a detective hunt that accounts for many other clues. Claims to authority, however, need to be questioned. I might add credibility to my assessment if a source is a verified professor at a known institution of higher learning, an authentic MD or PhD, but I would not subtract it from people without credentials whose expertise seems authentic. If you are going to grant credibility to people whose expertise is based on being a professor of something, make sure that assertion is accurate. Don't stop at simply verifying that the claim to be a professor is valid if you are looking for scientific credibility. The next step is to use the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index that derives a score from the scholar's publications, citations by other scholars, grants, honors, and awards. If you want to get even more serious, download a free copy of Publish or Perish software, which analyzes scientific citations from Google Scholar according to multiple criteria. Or use the h-index to calculate how many times other scientists have cited a particular source. Again, don't trust just one source; triangulate.

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Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By William Deresiewicz - May. 12 (Opinion) - is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

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The Art of Getting Net Smart

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Shel Israel, Howard Rheingold - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - Howard Rheingold is a teacher, thinker, futurist and grower of the tallest sunflowers I have ever seen. He’s one the most profound thinkers of what happens online and how it changes the world. Just about every ten years, he checks in with a new book that seems to chart the course for the next decade or so. In 1993, he wrote The Virtual Community , which portended a world where people would share friendship and information with each other online, just as the first browser for the worldwide web was being popularized.

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Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Danah Boyd - Apr. 22 (Opinion) - Social media in particular has inexorably changed the world, driving openness and fear – but it is not beyond our control Most technology designers engage in their trade to make the world a better place. Technologists love to celebrate the amazing things that people can do with technology – bridge geography, connect communities and transform societies. Meanwhile, plenty of naysayers bemoan the changes brought on by technology, highlighting issues of distraction and attention for example. Unfortunately, this results in a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where's the middle ground? One of my favourite maxims about the role of technology in society is called Kranzberg's first law . He argues that "technology is neither good nor bad – nor is it neutral". It's irresponsible to assume that the tools being built just wander out into the world with only positive effects. Technology doesn't determine practice, ...

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Stop Panicking About Bullies

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Nick Gillespie, Wall Street Journal - Mar. 31 (Opinion) - Childhood is safer than ever before, but today's parents need to worry about something. Nick Gillespie on why busybodies and bureaucrats have zeroed in on bullying.

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Howard Rheingold: Knowing How to Collaborate Is Essential

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Roland Legrand - Mar. 17 (Interview) - I just read the Kindle edition of "Net Smart," written by writer and critic Howard Rheingold. The book provides a thoughtful analysis of some major theories and discourses about the "always on" era, while at the same time giving new insights and practical advice about the literacies we need to thrive in this environment. I've followed Rheingold's posts and videos for some time now, attended presentations, and participated in some of his courses. He's not only an expert in virtual communities (a term he coined himself) and social media, but also teaches digital journalism. I had the opportunity to interview him recently about the implications of his thinking on media, journalism and journalism education.

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Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - Being bilingual makes you smarter and can have a profound effect on your brain. Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

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Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Feb. 25 (Opinion) - What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster. Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

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The Rise of the New Groupthink

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Susan Cain - Jan. 15 (Opinion) - Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

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The New York Times Discovers It’s Virtually Impossible To Keep Weight Off

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By L. V. Anderson - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - With New Year’s and its attendant resolutions just around the corner, articles about weight loss are cropping up in all the usual places (i.e., everywhere you look). One of the most comprehensive and personal essays on the topic can be found in this week

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The Limits of Magical Thinking

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Maureen Dowd - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare. He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality

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The Republicans are now the anti-science party

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Sep. 04 (Opinion) - Jon Huntsman Jr, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn't a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that's too bad, because Mr Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the Republican party in the United States, namely, that it is becoming the "anti-science party". This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us. To see what Mr Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the Republican nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

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What Happened to Obama?

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Drew Westen - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

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Argument, Truth and the Social Side of Reasoning

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Gary Gutting - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - In a recent discussion about reasoning, one point was overlooked: Knowledge of the truth is a social process. Philosophers rightly think of themselves as experts on reasoning. After all, it was a philosopher, Aristotle, who developed the science of logic. But psychologists have also had some interesting things to say about the subject. A fascinating paper by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier has recently generated a lot of discussion.

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Why Do We Fight? Blame It on Our Brains.

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Katherine Rosma - Jun. 19 (Opinion) - My husband is smart. Super smart. Like, not only does he devour fat history books, but he can talk about them in an engaging manner that's neither stuffy nor oversimplified. He's good with numbers, too. And he knows the meaning of Latin root words -- a big turn-on to a crossword-puzzle addict like me. (He had me at salve.) love his brain. It's Joe's dominant quadrants I could do without. Recently, I got absolutely walloped by his lower left.

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Waiting for death

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Liz O. Baylen - Feb. 05 (Opinion) - A beautiful, thoughtful, poetic rumination on being 90-years-old

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The online sub-life

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Bidisha - Jan. 15 (Opinion) - I call it the Glaze. It's the sudden slack-faced gape of a normal person who's been chatting and joking, when suddenly they get an email on their iPhone. They have to look. Then they have to reply, open-mouthed, dabbing at the glass like toddlers at the aquarium. Online activity instantly renders any mammal, even a mouse, clinically dead for the duration of the session. Fact. High-level studies prove, furthermore, that the internet was created by evil quantum physicists to negate all time, space and frontal lobe activity. That's why you can spend hours online and come away not remembering anything. MySpace has been sucked into its own black hole recently, cutting 500 employees and admitting that they're no longer battling binary codes with Facebook, who have won the social networking war. Alas, having good social networks is not the same as having good social skills. MySpace is now a "social entertainment destination". But downloading nobodies' dreadful music videos alone is neither social nor entertaining.

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Obama Dementia — get well soon, Glenn and Sarah

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Leonard Pitts Jr. - Dec. 11 (Opinion) - Obama Dementia, the onset of acute cognitive dissonance in otherwise normal people upon exposure to the policies of President Barack Obama, is rampant. If it's fatal, he adds, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are not long for this world.

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Obama Underappreciation Syndrome

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Charles Krauthammer - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - President Obama has come up with something new, something less common, something more befitting his stature and intellect. He's now offering a scientific, indeed neurological, explanation for his current political troubles. The electorate apparently is deranged by its anxieties and fears to the point where it can't think straight.

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Preventing the Youngest Suicides

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

CBS News - By Jim Axelrod - Oct. 03 (Interview) - Few things are sadder, or more bewildering, than stories of young people dying before their time - by their own hand. Trying to PREVENT such deaths is the business of very dedicated people, some of whom possess the most chilling qualification for the job you could imagine.

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Have You Left No Sense Of Decency?

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Sep. 21 (Opinion) - 30 years ago people with high but not super-high incomes generally felt ashamed of themselves for griping — or at least, felt that they would be ridiculed if they gave voice to their gripes. Today, all restraints are off. The fuss over Messrs. Henderson and Stein is the exception that proves the rule: they wouldn’t be providing this spectacle if they didn’t normally swim in social circles where complaining that you only have 9 or 10 times median family income is considered totally acceptable.

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Screening Out the Empathy: The Impact of Screen Culture on Our Brains

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Age - Sep. 03 (Opinion) - by Bridie Smith As the online world continues to expand, Oxford University?s Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield has warned excessive screen culture may be changing the way our brains are wired. The effect of screen culture on the brain is not dissimilar to symptoms associated with attention deficit disorder, such as a shorter attention span and decline in empathy. read ...

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Yoga in America: Five things: "The Subtle Body"

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - By Prospero - Aug. 20 (Review) - Why do Americans love yoga so much? According to a 2008 market study in Yoga Journal, some 16m currently practice, spending $5.7 billion a year in the process on gear (Lululemon bootie shorts and the like). The question is psychological as well as financial: the quasi-religious tinges of the ancient Indian art form have become so normalised that many people feel more comfortable uttering om and namaste in a sweaty class then they would entering a house of worship. Stefanie Syman, a journalist and yoga aficionado, seeks to answer these questions in her book “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America”. "Yoga has been the aspect of Asian culture most widely and readily assimilated (outside of food),” she writes. It "has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot country.” Ms Syman takes a guru-centric approach, charting the path of the thinkers, spiritual leaders, celebrities and quacks that brought yoga into the mainstream. The result is well-researched and rich in character studies, even if Ms Syman never quite gets at the strange crux of exercise, spirituality and faddish consumerism that defines today’s yoga industry. Ultimately, the book is a cultural study of America, and the country's ability to assimilate just about anything. More Intelligent Life compiles five unique facts about the folks that introduced Americans to this bendy pastime

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Psychology Studies Biased Toward Western Undergrads

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:38:19 -0700

Scientific American - Aug. 07 - Anyone familiar with psychology has probably heard a statement like this: A significant percentage of male & female undergraduates displayed X when prompted by Y. And typically the conclusion of the study is something like: So humans display X in

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Science Weekly podcast: Why you should distrust your senses

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Jul. 26 (Interview) - Daniel Simons joins us from a studio in Illinois to discuss his new book The Invisible Gorilla. We look at how our intuition deceives us and the problems this causes for the judicial system. Daniel also reveals why criminals and chess players are more alike than they'd like to believe. More than 40 years on, film footage of Nasa mission control during the Apollo 11 moon landing has only just been synchronised with the audio. We listen in to that. Cian O'Luanaigh attends the first ever academic conference on the subject Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels at the University of London. He reports on why doctors and nurses are turning to a different medium to get their message across. Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

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