Your Brain on Facebook
If surfing the web increases workplace productivity, what does spending time on Facebook do to college students? According to a study by Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein, college students who use Facebook have lower GPA’s and devote less time to studying than other students. While the study didn’t prove causality — do low-GPA, anti-study students Read More »
The True Cause of College-Tuition Inflation?
For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What’s behind these huge tuition bills: Massive legacy costs? Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate? While none of those Read More »
Greening the Brain
In the Times Magazine, Jon Gertner takes a look at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which is dedicated to analyzing how people make environmental decisions. CRED has discovered, for instance, that if a carbon tax is framed as an “offset” instead of a “tax,” it makes a substantial difference in how people, Read More »
No Sympathy for Would-Be Retirees
A 60 Minutes segment on Sunday presented sad stories about people in their 50′s and early 60′s who had counted on their 401K plans to provide a comfortable retirement income by age 65 or even earlier, but who have had their dreams destroyed by the stock market bust. Anyone born in the 1940′s or 1950′s Read More »
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