When you think of creativity what do you imagine? There are a lot of examples to choose from, like cooking up a new take on a traditional dish, working with a team to reason through a difficult business problem, writing short stories, trouble-shooting an engineering problem that had everyone else stumped, or coming up with […]
All around us during the Christmas season are images of God taking human form. A divine baby boy conceived by the Holy Spirit and a virgin mother, born in a stable in Bethlehem two millennia ago. A boy who grows into a man, who teaches widely, who is brutally killed. In most Christian traditions, God […]
With the increased demand for computer programming skills in industries outside of technology, younger and younger kids are now taught the basics of computer science to prepare for future jobs. For example, when Amazon launched a program aiming to teach 10 million kids a year to code last week, it was because the company was […]
You’ve decided to go to a country you’ve never been to for your next vacation and want to learn some basics of the language to prepare for your trip. You order a book of introductory phrases and grammar basics. When it arrives, you eagerly crack it open, ready to dig in. You start reading the […]
Automatic detection of automatic response generators: How to improve data quality in online research
In recent years, researchers have started using Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services to collect data from online participants. Two big benefits are the speed and ease of data collection. A study that might take a year to run using a participant pool at a small university could now be completed in a day, and […]
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers popularized the idea that mastery requires practice. A lot of practice. According to the book’s often-repeated “ten-thousand-hour rule,” mastering a skill requires at least ten thousand hours of focused, deliberate practice. If you want to become a world-class musician, or chess player, or athlete, you can get there if you […]
In October 2010, an elderly white man boarded an Air Canada flight bound from Hong Kong to Vancouver. During the flight, this passenger visited the bathroom and emerged an Asian man in his early 20s. No, this wasn’t an episode of Scooby Doo, this was an actual case where a hyperrealistic mask was used to […]
If you had to bet on a psychological effect replicating, what effect would you bet on? Though it seems like an unlikely bet to be asked to make, it’s a reality for anyone conducting a psychology class demo. You want an effect that holds up no matter who your students are. You don’t want an […]
Are you feeling 🙂 today? Or perhaps 🙁 ? In the modern digital world, we are all conversant with emoticons and emojis. But when you come across the ? emoji, do you know what it means? According to a new article on the Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED), published in the Psychonomic Society’s journal […]
If you’re still in graduate school, there’s a lot you can do to help prepare for the possibility of a non-academic career down the line. The most frequent piece of advice given by our respondents was to do an internship at some point in your graduate school career. This could be a summer-long experience or […]