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POPSQuiz: Does Your Work Matter to You? Click on the article for the multiple choice answers... "I decided to leave my full-time publishing job last fall, in part to rediscover teaching. As I wrestled with the decision, I obviously had to ask myself many questions, ranging from the practical to the existential. A large subset of the questions had to do with the greater impact of my work and the effect that my awareness of that impact was having on me. I share those questions with you here, in the form of a quiz. "
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POPSWhat Makes Us Happy? Great article on the Grant Study, one of the most fascinating longitudinal studies. Based on 268 men who entered college in the 1930's.
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POPSThe Social Magic of Mirror Neurons The researchers located mirror neurons in the brains of two monkeys, which fired when the monkeys grabbed a small metal object and when they watched the experimenter do the same. Unexpectedly many of these neurons actually had a preference for where the experimenter was grabbing the object — about a fourth of the cells fired more rapidly when the action took place within arm's reach of the monkey (its "peripersonal" space), while another fourth were more excited when the action was out reach (its "extrapersonal space"). Over a range of distances, the closer the motion was to the monkey, the faster its peripersonal mirror neurons fired; the extrapersonal mirror neurons had the opposite response.
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POPSGlobal Post - For Profit Journalism From the New York Times: Passport subscribers, who pay as much as $199 a year, can suggest article ideas. “If you are a member, you have a voice at the editorial meeting,” although the site will decide which stories to pursue, said Charles Sennott, a GlobalPost founder and its executive editor. He said Passport is meant to “create a feeling of community” for subscribers who might otherwise see newsrooms as “impenetrable and fortresslike.” GlobalPost correspondents, who include the former Washington Post writer Caryle Murphy in Saudi Arabia and a Time magazine correspondent turned novelist, Matt Beynon Rees, in Jerusalem, are paid extra for Passport work. Their basic compensation is $1,000 a month for four articles, plus shares in the venture. The site had 500 applicants for the jobs, Mr. Sennott said.
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POPSHard Sciene to Increase Your "Luck"
Dr. Richard Wiseman: It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success: Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free." Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life -- get out there and do things -- and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking -- or grocery shopping, for that matter -- somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you. Re
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POPSDo you Clerihew? Let the Clerihewing begin! Examples: The enemy of Harry Potter Was a scheming plotter. I can't tell you what he's called; I'd be ashamed To name "he who must not be named." Tom Hanks Has accounts in fifty banks. His earnings took a jump When he said, "People call me Forrest Gump." If Tonya Harding played tennis She'd be quite a menace. We'd have to warn Monica Seles To protect her patellas! N'Sync Stink. Their music hurts my ears. I much prefer Britney Spears.
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POPSCNN story helps surgeon perform 'lifesaving' op "I wish I could demonstrate the firmness of the tumor that we were dealing with but it really was the case that after trying to dissect the tumor just five minutes with each scalpel, the scalpel would be dull and I would have to move on to use another scalpel. "I went through at least a half-dozen of them, and even after many, many hours of operating on this tumor with multiple scalpels with multiple micro-surgical-dissecting tools, I couldn't remove very much of this tumor." "As I do every night, I read CNN online and immediately saw on the front page that there was an article in the health section entitled, From military device to life-saving surgical tool..." "I finished the rest of the story and my first thought was - I would have given anything to have this tool available six or seven hours ago - based on the description in the story. The following day, on Christmas Eve, Dr. Ellis along with Dr. Tamir Wolf, a physician Omni Guide sent to assist, brought Brandon back
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POPSDo you have time for beauty? This is a real story based on an experiment organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The Washington Post won a Pulitzer in the feature writing category for Gene Weingaten's April 2007 story about this experiment. See source for more information.
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POPSTop Ten Humanitarian Crisis of 2008 With all the focus on what's going on in the Middle East it's easy to loose sight of what is happening in the rest of the world. Click the stories to read more about each. From Doctor's Without Boarders/Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF).
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