Upcoming web video chat thingamabob
Here are some details on a live web chat I’m having on Friday. Feel free to send in some fun questions.
Here are some details on a live web chat I’m having on Friday. Feel free to send in some fun questions.
Would you rather work in a stimulating, challenging job or a routine one filled with mundane repetition? Almost everyone would say they prefer the former. But a new study finds that people typically contradict themselves once salaries enter the decision. If the two jobs pay the same, people often opt to put out less effort, not more….
NPR recently covered my research with David Comerford on effort aversion. Our research gives some insight into how people wind up in boring jobs. You can listen to the NPR Morning Edition segment here.
I recently quoted a couple sentences from Mann’s provocative article on the energy industry. Here is another gem I thought I’d pass on: To ask utilities to take in large amounts of solar power–electricity generated by hundreds or thousands of small installations, many on neighborhood roofs and lawns, whose output is affected by clouds–is like…
I could go on quoting Abraham Lincoln all day long, for he was one of the finest writers of his or any time. Here’s one very special quote, where Lincoln uses the metaphor of a snake to make distinctions between slavery itself being bad, versus policies to limit slavery to the south, versus policies to…
Most of us have at least one cranky old relative who not only has stronger opinions than the rest of us, but is also convinced that those opinions are superior to ours. Not just content to believe that, say, voter ID laws are a good idea, this relative is also derisive of anyone with a…
In an article from the Atlantic last January, Joshua Lang wrote a wonderful article about the challenge of deciding whether surgical anesthesia actually makes people unconscious, or whether people remember parts of their surgery and are traumatized by them later. In the article, he quotes George Wilson, a Scottish chemist who had his foot amputated…