Category: Uncategorized
-
All About Self-Control
The Boston Globe has an interesting article discussing the noted ‘marshmallow experiment’ of delayed gratification and the future of research in this area. A 4-year-old is left sitting at a table with a marshmallow or other treat on it and given a challenge: Wait to eat it until a grown-up comes back into the room,…
-
The Age Wave: Are Retiring Baby Boomers the Recession Culprits?
Did the American economist Harry Dent correctly predict the recession, and is it really the fault of retiring baby boomers? Dent popularised the ‘age wave’ theory through his research on “the highly predictable nature of consumer spending based on a family formation pattern”. Some experts expect the worst consumer recession since 1980 to occur when…
-
Books of the Left and Right
The results from Valdis Krebs’ analysis of political books bought from Amazon is fascinating. Two groups typically emerge from the data: people who read liberally oriented books and people who read conservatively oriented books with a couple of books that both groups read. He ran his analysis again a few days ago and found not…
-
Green Roofs
Malcolm Gladwell chats with environmentalist Amy Norquist about the real benefits of ‘green roofs’ (what GOOD Magazine calls, “one of the most unsung and low-tech green solutions out there”). MG: So you have this technology, and there are three arguments for it: an aesthetic argument, an economic argument, and an environmental arguments. Which of those…
-
10 Things About Black Holes
Even though some of these would be well-known to someone with a passing interest in astronomy, the passion Phil Plait writes with makes me love everything he produces. This time, Bad Astronomy on ten things you don’t know about black holes. It’s not their mass, it’s their size that makes them so strong They’re not…
-
Attempts to Appear Racially Colour-Blind Begin at 9 Years Old
A recent study has identified the age at which children begin attempting to appear racially unprejudiced. One hundred and one children, predominantly White, half of whom were aged 8 to 9, the other half being aged 9 to 10, participated in a task reminiscent of the board game “Guess Who?” Presented with photos of 40…
-
Attenborough on Creationism
I’m considering treating someone (possibly myself!) to David Attenborough’s The Life Collection: the full set of David Attenborough’s Life series, consisting of over 60 hours of some of the best nature footage in history. As is the norm when I’m intrigued by anything, I head over to Wikipedia and read all I can on a…
-
Why We Can’t Imagine Death
Jesse Bering of Scientific American argues that, due to the very nature of our consciousness, almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body. People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to…
-
A New Dawn for Generation Y?
Something different for this most historic of days: The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born. UNICEF…
-
Top 10 Real Estate Resources
Lifehacker’s list of the top ten real estate search tools is mostly (completely?) US-centric, but useful nonetheless given that I am determined to move across the pond in the near future. Find what a house is really worth at Zillow. Google Maps + Google Base = Google’rific house searching Track housing trends with Trulia. Instantly…