Not only that, but presenting people with facts can entrench them further in their beliefs. People willfully ignore facts that don’t correspond to their opinions.

“This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.”

A very good article

How facts backfire – The Boston Globe.

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.

via Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions — Ackerman et al. 328 (5986): 1712 — Science.

Very good ideas, as well as links to noise cancelling headphones, earplugs and a site that has seat maps of all airlines so you can choose the right seat during online checkin

John Graham-Cumming: How to sleep on a long haul flight.

Children who returned hostility with hostility appeared to be the most mature, the researchers found.

Boys who stood up to bullies and schoolyard enemies were judged more socially competent by their teachers.

Girls who did the same were more popular and more admired by teachers and peers, the researchers found.

via Bullying ‘can be good for children’: Study finds those who fight back are more popular | Mail Online.

This guy started stealing at 6 and never looked back. Banks, jewelry, skimming, scamming, he’s done it all. Using high-tech gadgets and doing parachuting in or using air ducts, he got in anywhere. A gripping read of a real life Pink Panther style master thief, who made a few too many mistakes and got caught.

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief | Magazine.

A school that has allowed its pupils to start the day an hour later says it has seen absenteeism decline.At Monkseaton High School, in North Tyneside, 800 pupils aged 13-19 have started lessons at 10am since October.Early results indicates that general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.

via BBC News – Lie-in for teenagers has positive results.

Whether they’re plus sized, normal sized or skinny, women will feel bad about themselves whenever they see a model.

There really is no pleasing them!

Plus Size Models Don’t Raise Self Esteem | The Frisky.

This article is a general primer on how to get players to continuously play your game, which in the world of the MMPORG is a very important element, using a behavioural model.

Gamasutra – Features – Behavioral Game Design.

This article is a bit more cynical and compares the above techniques to addiction creation and illustrates the theory with specific examples from World of Warcraft.

Cracked – 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

This guy will dump your girlfriend or boyfriend for a small fee  by phone. He records the call and then puts it on YouTube for the world to hear.

IDUMP4U the website where we do all the dirty work for you!.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out I created a “luck school” – a simple experiment that examined whether people s luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities listen to their intuition expect to be lucky and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic 80 per cent of people were now happier more satisfied with their lives and perhaps most important of all luckier. While lucky people became luckier the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from “luck school” she has passed her driving test after three years of trying was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

via Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn – Telegraph.

Aside from vegetarians killing more animals than meat eaters (sounds strange? Consider how much random killing a combine harvester does), they are also worse for the environment as they require more arable land and the processing of  the foods creates way more greenhouse gasses.

Being vegetarian does more harm to the environment than eating meat | Mail Online.

It turns out that it is ok to brag, but only if the subject you are bragging about is brought up by another party in the conversation.

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: How to brag.

BA has implemented a policy whereby children are not allowed to sit next to men they don’t know. Flight attendants patrol the aisles and if they find a strange man they start shouting if he doesn’t want to change places. Not only is it sexist, it’s also extremely rude and embarrasing for the passenger.

Mirko Fischer had this happen to him when he was sitting next to his pregnant wife and has had enough, so he’s suing BA.

Bizarrely, BA can’t see the idiocy in their policy and won’t issue statements.

Businessman Mirko Fischer sues British Airwars ‘for treating men like perverts’ | Mail Online.

This court is legal and runs entirely through the internet, meaning it’s cheaper, fixed price and can dispense justice a whole lot faster than the regular courts.

e-Court – De Eerste Nederlandse Online Rechtbank.

It turns out that you can use Google Earth to find whole civilisations in places that people have always thought could never be inhabited by large groups of people. The City of Z or El Dorado has been found this way, it will take archaologists decades to clear it and view it all.

Google Earth helps find El Dorado – Times Online.

But only if you lightly smack them, and you really should stop smacking them after the age of 6 – 11.

Smacked children more successful later in life, study finds – Telegraph.

A female scientist was fed up of hearing comments on the parking abilities of women and found that not only do they take 20 seconds longer on average to park, they’re 5% worse at it than men.

Men really ARE better at parking… and that’s a woman professor talking | Mail Online.

Using ECoG (electrocorticography) and overlaying electrodes directly on the surface of the brain, scientists can record reactions when letters are flashed on a screen and then play back the letters when that thought pattern is brought up. It’s around 8 letters per minute, but it’s something.

There’s also a piece where they translate thought patterns into music. An interesting article.

By Thought Alone: Mind Over Keyboard | h+ Magazine.

It turns out that there is a universal human method for doing insurgency, when it comes down to the number of casualties and the timing of events. This pattern is distinct and is based on an approximate power law.

Slashdot Science Story | Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern.

First this story: a guy has been sentenced to probation, where the officer gets to spend the next three years deciding if and who he’s allowed to date

Wis. teen will need legal permission to date girls – wtop.com.

And then we have this story where US soldiers are threatened with jail time if they impregnate or are impregnated.

WTF?

Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.

Around 90 per cent of consumption was on the internet, while 10 per cent of material came from video stores.

Single men watched pornography for an average of 40 minutes, three times a week, while those in relationships watched it 1.7 times a week for around 20 minutes.

The study found that men watched pornography that matched their own image of sexuality, and quickly discarded material they found offensive or distasteful.

Prof Lajeunesse said pornography did not have a negative effect on men’s sexuality.

“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality,” he said. “In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional.

“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship, which they all want to be as harmonious and fulfilling as possible,” he added.

via All men watch porn, scientists find – Telegraph.

After many years, book deals and a ITV series, Belle de Jour reveals her identity,

Her name is Dr Brooke Magnanti. Her specialist areas are developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. She has a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science and is now working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. She is part of a team researching the effects of exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos on foetuses and infants.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6917495.ece

Finally an alternative for the crutch! The freedom leg (crummy name) offloads your weight onto its’ structure allowing you to walk vaguely like a normal human whilst not having to kill off the use of an arm.

Freedom Leg In Action.

These guys put some people through some basic trust experiments and it turns out that people who are in a recently windex-ed room behave far more morally and are much less likely to exploit other people.

Clean Smells Promote Moral Behavior, Study Suggests.

The Lausanne university in Switserland has moved from the software to the reality: they’ve managed to get robots to evolve and learn behaviours, as well as the behaviour to decieve and cooperate through communication (flashing lights) and movement. It’ s a very interesting experiment, showing that robots are getting smarter every day and are now showing some very very lifelike traits.

Darwin’s Robots | h+ Magazine.