Group items tagged

Educational psychologists recognize two main kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation takes over when we have a deep and genuine interest in a task or topic and derive satisfaction from the work or learning itself.

Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, gets us to work by putting the outcome — like a paycheck or a good grade — in mind.

Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

The elephant seal (genus Mirounga) is the world's largest seal. There are two species of elephant seals, named according to the hemisphere in which they are found. Northern elephant seals (M. angustirostris) are found in coastal waters around Canada and Mexico, while southern elephant seals (M. leonina) are found off the coast of New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina.

At sea, elephant seals range solo. They return to established breeding colonies each winter. Females become mature around 3 to 6 years of age, while males mature at 5 to 6 years.However, males need to achieve alpha status to mate, which is normally between the ages of 9 and 12. Males battle each other using body weight and teeth. While deaths are rare, scarring is common. An alpha male's harem ranges from 30 to 100 females. Other males wait on the edges of the colony, sometimes mating with females before the alpha male chases them away. Males remain on land over the winter to defend territory, meaning they don't leave to hunt.

Elephant seals have been hunted for their meat, fur, and blubber. Both northern and southern elephant seals were hunted to the brink of extinction. By 1892, most people believed the northern seals to be extinct. But in 1910, a single breeding colony was found around Guadalupe Island off Mexico's Baja California coast. At the end of the 19th century, new marine conservation legislation was put in place to protect the

Situated around 2,400 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Islands are about as remote as it’s possible for islands to be. In the last 5 million years, they’ve been repeatedly colonized by far-traveling animals, which then diversified into dozens of new species. Honeycreeper birds, fruit flies, carnivorous caterpillars ... all of these creatures reached Hawaii, and evolved into wondrous arrays of unique forms.

The most spectacular of these spider dynasties, Gillespie says, are the stick spiders. They’re so-named because some of them have long, distended abdomens that make them look like twigs. “You only see them at night, walking around the understory very slowly,” Gillespie says. “They’re kind of like sloths.” Murderous sloths, though: Their sluggish movements allow them to sneak up on other spiders and kill them.

Gillespie has shown that the gold spiders on Oahu belong to a different species from those on Kauai or Molokai. In fact, they’re more closely related to their brown and white neighbors from Oahu. Time and again, these spiders have arrived on new islands and evolved into new species—but always in one of three basic ways. A gold spider arrives on Oahu, and diversified into gold, brown, and white species. Another gold spider hops across to Maui and again diversified into gold, brown, and white species. “They repeatedly evolve the same forms,” says Gillespie.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a little pride. It can propel you forward in tough situations and demonstrates a level of self-assuredness that we all strive for in our personal and professional lives. But there’s a narrow line dividing healthy confidence and stubborn ego, and one of the primary indicators you’ve landed on the wrong side is not being able to admit when you’re wrong.

Struggling to admit our own fault, though — whether it was a major breach or a minor mess-up — doesn’t really serve us well. Not only can it sour some of our closest relationships, but it can even be detrimental to our own personal growth.

In other cases, though, it’s possible to be aware that you’re wrong — whether mildly or outright — but still struggle to wave the guilty flag due to our precious egos.

Bangladesh is one of dozens of countries on the frontline of the climate emergency. Here global heating is no theoretical calamity of the future, but a very real, present danger.By 2050, it is predicted that one in seven people in the country will be displaced by climate breakdown. The sea level is projected to rise by 50cm over this time period and Bangladesh may lose approximately 11% of its land. Deadly storms are usually a question of when, not if.

For example, Mondal says that where once his peers would farm mainly rice, now they have taken to fishing. They use floating cages, allowing fish to breed in a secure area. Also, if water levels rise, the cages will too, so flooding is less of an issue.“About 20 to 30 years ago there would be a minimum of two crops per farming family but now because of waterlogging we have no more than one,” he says. Each cage is owned by one home and yields about 15,000 taka (£135) in additional income for the families a year. It’s also a consistent source of food, which could be vital if natural disaster hits. “In the last two years there was not too much rain but two years ago we were flooded,” Mondal says. “We worry about the future. If there is heavy rainfall the water could remain logged for a long period of time and we would have to take shelter on main road. We would stay there with our remaining belongings.”

First impressions are powerful. We all remember being instantly drawn to or put off by someone we’ve just met.

imagine you see a video of a skateboarder landing an especially impressive trick. If she’s the first of a group of competitors, you’ll probably assume the rest of the group is equally skilled. But if you know this skater standout was the third to compete, it’s less likely to influence your impression of the rest of the group.

“The sequence, no matter how arbitrary, is going to have some influence on your judgment,” Touré-Tillery says. “And this happens without you knowing that it’s having that kind of influence on your judgment.”

You probably know the broad outline of the story: 66 million years ago, a giant meteorite landed in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, and ended the dinosaurs. This year, various teams of scientists, working independently, helped fill in the picture of exactly what happened on that fateful day.

An exhaustive analysis of hundreds of bird species in the United States and Canada contained a warning: The majority of bird species are in decline, many by huge numbers. The likely culprits? Habitat loss and pesticides

Quantum computing had a big year. Google claimed to have reached a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” allowing computers to perform calculations at inconceivable speeds.

Hungarians tend to speak softly and in something of a monotone. This could reflect their language, every word of which is accented on its first syllable. Furthermore, Hungarians must know that theirs is a strange language. Well, aren`t they all, to everyone who does not understand them? And isn`t calling a language ''strange'' a sign of cultural imperialism?

we have one reasonable excuse and one bad one. The bad one is that education in America seems interested in almost everything except passing on detailed information at the cost of arduous application. The acceptable excuse is that it really is less important for Americans to learn languages. Most of us live far from places where people don`t speak English.

The other cause of awkwardness is that the foreign language almost everyone learns these days is English. This is convenient, but it enhances the likelihood that the rest of the world will consider Americans arrogant.

A marine laboratory 85 miles southwest of New Orleans was designed to be a fortress against extreme weather. But it might be defeated by climate change.

It stands 18 feet above the ground on pillars with pilings that extend more than 100 feet underground. Its walls can withstand winds of up to 250 miles per hour.But the water is coming.

The assault from climate change is slower but more relentless than any storm, and will ultimately do more damage. It threatens researchers’ ability to study marine environments up close at a time when it’s more vital than ever to understand them.

Fake news existed long before the internet. In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."

MIT researchers recently studied more than 10 years' worth of data on the most shared stories on Facebook. Their study covered conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings, misleading reports on natural disasters, unfounded business rumors and incorrect scientific claims. There is an inundation of false medical advice online, for example, that encourages people to avoid life-saving treatments such as vaccines and promotes unproven therapies. (Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is just one example.)

The psychological research does, however, offer us a silver lining to this storm cloud, with various experiments demonstrating that people can learn to be better lie detectors with a little training in critical thinking.

"I am fine, I'm not scared," he tells CNN Travel via the mobile phone that is his link to the outside world. "I feel safe here. This island offers total protection. No risks at all. Nobody lands, not even a single boat can be seen sailing by."

Little has changed for Morandi since Italy's virus outbreak, except that he must now wait longer for people to bring him food from the mainland due to harsh restrictions imposed by Rome's government.

As odds of a global recession rise, governments and central banks around the world are racing to fend off the economic damage from the spread of the coronavirus. The toll has already landed hard on jittery financial markets. Stocks continued to sell off on Thursday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 969 points, or about 3.6%, as investors fled stocks. Companies have shut factories, canceled conferences and drastically scaled back employee travel.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate on Thursday gave final passage to a roughly $8 billion spending package to provide medical supplies in hard-hit areas and pay for vaccine research. President Trump has said he will sign the bill. Despite such measures, many economists now say growth is likely to slow considerably this year — if not contract altogether.

Goldman Sachs projected on Sunday that because of the coronavirus, the U.S. economy would grow by an anemic 0.9% during the first three months of 2020 and would flatline during the second quarter.

Once, Mars was a warm planet that could potentially support life and water on its surface. But something changed about 3.5 billion years ago and it lost most of its atmosphere.

A new study published this week in the journal Science reveals that more water vapor is accumulating in the upper atmosphere of Mars, allowing more of it to escape into space. This means that Mars is losing water more quickly than anticipated.

The accumulation of unprecedented amounts of water vapor is occurring about 50 miles up from the Martian surface. The orbiter revealed that parts of the atmosphere actually act like pockets, reaching supersaturated level. These pockets contain anywhere between 10 to a hundred times more water vapor than the atmospheric temperature should allow.