Technology Brings “Growth Mindset” to Schools

With funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, New York City-based Mindset Works developed SchoolKit, an app designed to strengthen academic and socialemotional success. Through animations, assessments, and classroom activities, students learn a growth mindset—the understanding that ability develops with effort. Pilot research in nine middle schools found significant increases in students’ growth mindset, which related to increases ...

 Rural Communities "Deserve to Die"

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces... [N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves. [...] If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect a...

 Fox News as a Senior Cognitive Disorder

Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation. They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by t...

 The Evolving View of Science and Evil

Daedalus begins with an artillery bombardment on the Western Front, the shell bursts nonchalantly annihilating the human protagonists who are supposed to be in charge of the battle. This opening scene epitomizes Haldane's hard-headed view of war. And likewise at the end, when the biologist in his laboratory, "just a poor little scrubby underpaid man groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultramicroscopic," is transfigured into the mythical figure of Daedalus, "conscious of his ghastly mission ...

 Risk of Childhood Kidnapping are Very Low

A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a New York Sun column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home A...

 Laura Betzig: Culture

What if the 100,000-odd year-old evidence of human social life—from the arrowheads in South Africa, to the Venus figurines at Dordogne—is the effect of nothing, more or less, but our efforts to become parents? What if the 10,000-odd year-old record of civilization—from the tax accounts at temples in the Near East, to the inscription on a bronze statue in New York Harbor—is the product of nothing, more or less, but our struggle for genetic representation in future generations? [...] ...

 Fortune of Conception

Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existen...

 Computer Metaphors for Biochemistry

The metaphor of the computer represents in some crude fashion the chemistry of life. Nowadays one may assume that the average citizen of an industrialized country is at least as familiar with computers as with rain forests. The idea of using the computer as a metaphor is a natural one. A computer is a device for handling information according to a program which it is able to remember and execute. A living cell, to remain in control of its vital functions in a variable environment, must also p...

 The Northeast Megalopolis

The megalopolis encompasses the District of Columbia and part or all of 11 states: from south to north, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and terminate in Maine at the Canada–United States border, as well as the Northeast Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the count...

 Video Games Reduce Attentional Blink

Our visual processing abilities are by no means hardwired and fixed from birth. There are limits, but the brain's nothing if not plastic. With practice, we can improve the attentional mechanisms that sort and edit visual infor¬ mation. One activity that requires you to practice lots of the skills involved 1 visual attention is playing video games. So, what is the effect of playing lots of video games? Shawn Green anc Daphne Bavelier from the University of Rochester, New York, have research...