A recent study in the UK shows that people in skilled jobs said they were happier than people in other jobs.
Professionals including doctors, solicitors, nurses, teachers and police officers were most satisfied with their lives, scoring 7.6 out of 10 on average.
Read: Health, wealth and a skilled job is the way to happiness - Independent Online Edition > Health
Most people don’t appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.
I used to think that “people crave attention in any way they can get it, and if they can’t get it in a positive way, then they go for the destructive way.” Which, I guess is a very cliche`d movie plot - guy get spurned by beautiful girl, guy turns into psycho.
This study suggests that some people may simply crave other people’s negative emotions, but I guess it could be a “self fulfilling prophecy” type thing where the high testosterone people are more prone to piss people off, which makes them crave that emotion more etc…
Read: High-testosterone people reinforced by others’ anger, new study finds
Quite a bit, actually. Psychologists gathered students to take various personality tests, and then had a separate group of people rate their Facebook personalities against the same dimensions and found that there was a strong correlation between the two.
I wonder what my facebook profile says about me?
Read: Student Facebook Profiles Are a Match - US News and World Report
Matthieu Ricard may be the happiest man on earth. He was born in France & became a biochemist, but left his life & career behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Several years ago, he participated in a study in which his brain was scanned while he meditated on “peace.” They found that activity in his left prefrontal cortex was off the charts - 150% more than anyone they’d scanned before. And he could do it at will. Happiness, they found, is a skill.
Now Matthieu has written a book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, in which he teaches us how to develop the skill of happiness.
Richard Davidson has been doing some some fascinating research in to brain lateralization - when he put a monk in an MRI machine, and asked him to meditate in “peace” he found that activity in the left prefrontal cortex was great than that of anyone he tested previously. Happiness, it seems is in the left hemisphere.
New research shows that this pattern shows up in activity in all sorts of animals, including the way a dog wags its tail.
Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.
At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.
Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).
In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).
Read: If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It’s in His Tail - New York Times
The Gender Genie is an online tool, based on an algorithm, based on a study, that claims to be able to tell whether or not you’re male or female based on just your language patterns. Paste some text into The Gender Genie, click submit and it will tell you (with 80% accuracy) whether or not you’re a man or a woman.
I’ve seen similar question & answer tests that guessed whether or not you were male or female (but it’s unfortunately lost now to the vast sea of sites I visited before I del.icio.us existed).
Play with: The Gender Genie
Computers 
suck air in & blow air out.
Air filters suck air in & blow air out.
Computers get filled with dust & particles.
Why not combine computers with air filters and turn your computer into an air purifier? Not just small filters on those little fans that you see on most computers, but a large fan & air filter outside the main beige box. Many air filters are about the size of a computer case, and it would be easy to make one that simply attaches to a computer case.
It could move much more air than a standard case fan, keeping the computer much cooler and cleaning the air at the same time. It may use a little more electricity than just a computer, but not more than a computer + air filter would already use, and perhaps just a bit less because you won’t also have to run case fans.
Fun logic game. It may seem difficult at first, but there’s a logic to it which makes it very easy if you understand it.
In the 1890s, Vilfredo Pareto noticed a large disparity between the richest citizens of Italy and the rest of the population. This distribution became known as the Pareto Principe, or the 80/20 rule. Recently, scientists have uncovered some interesting facts underlying the Pareto Principle.
“While the distribution of the richest 10% does indeed follow a different behavior (power law) than the rest (Gibbs or log-normal), one need not assume different dynamics at work in the two cases,” Chatterjee explained to PhysOrg.com. “In fact, both types of distributions can arise from the same model. In the case of the random savings model, the agents having the highest savings fractions will have a higher probability of ending up in the richest 10% of the population, while in the random thrift model, the agents with higher thrift value generally tend to be the richest.
“As an agent gets richer, a feedback effect occurs by which the rich are more likely to gain from a transaction than the poorer agents—thereby resulting in an accumulation of assets for the richer players that is manifested as a power law tail.”
Read: World’s economies show similarities in economic inequality
Utterly fascinating article about the use & abuse of power, disproportionate access to resources based on chance, rules, and individual will. All told through the eyes of 3rd graders playing with Lego.
Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought “cool pieces,” and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.
After nearly two months of observing the children’s Legotown construction, we decided to ban the Legos.
Read: Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online
Mark Wieczorek