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ost of us do it, but few of us will admit to it. If we get caught red-handed, we experience shame and regret. And we tend to frown upon others when they do it in public.

Is nose-picking really all that bad? How prevalent or bad is it, really?

Andrade and Srihari compiled data from 200 teenagers. Nearly all of them admitted to picking their noses, on average four times per day. That's not all that enlightening; we knew this. But what are interesting are the patterns. Only 7.6% of students reported sticking their fingers into their noses more than 20 times each day, but nearly 20% thought they had a “serious nose-picking problem”. Most of them said they did it to relieve an itch or to clear out nasal debris, but 24 of them, i.e. 12%, admitted that they picked their nose because it felt good.

We think of computers as emotionless automatons and artificial intelligence as stoic, zen-like programs, mirroring Mr. Spock, devoid of prejudice and unable to be swayed by emotion.

They say that AI picks up our innate biases about sex and race, even when we ourselves may be unaware of them. The results of this study were published in the journal Science.

After interacting with certain users, she began spouting racist remarks.

A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.

Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.

Prosecutors say he was a violent vigilante who illegally possessed the rifle and whose actions resulted in chaos and bloodshed.

Why It Pays to Think Outside the Box on Coronavirus Tests

Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.

Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing

It now seems a near-certainty that he will (and should) name a black woman as his vice presidential running mate.

Floyd's death has sparked (mostly) peaceful protests around the country, not just about police brutality but also about the deep and abiding racial inequalities present in American society.

the former vice president said

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s — or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.

Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.

Political science research suggests that Americans’ optimism can be influenced by whether their political party is in the White House. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats feel better than Republicans about current circumstances.

I never allowed myself to be vulnerable with my husband because I didn’t realize that it was a requirement for an intimate, connected relationship. Back then, I didn’t even know what an intimate, connected relationship was. I only thought in terms of tasks and achievements.

Surely, I had thought, my firefighter boyfriend would wait an hour or two for me without complaint. But if he had, would we still be together today?

It has been said that we teach people how to treat us.

Jay Clayton, on Thursday defended his ability to regulate Wall Street despite spending decades helping big banks weather government scrutiny

Clayton said, he would make sure “our markets are fair, open, orderly, and efficient and . . . that investors are protected

New York lawyer's deep connections to Wall Street, particularly Goldman Sachs, and inexperience with corporate prosecutions drew skepticism from Democrats

editor Jocelyn Glei and her team at Behance’s 99U pull together another package of practical wisdom from 21 celebrated creative entrepreneurs. Despite the somewhat self-helpy, SEO-skewing title, this compendium of advice is anything but contrived. Rather, it’s a no-nonsense, experience-tested, life-approved cookbook for creative intelligence, exploring everything from harnessing the power of habit to cultivating meaningful relationships that enrich your work to overcoming the fear of failure.

If the twentieth-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one predictable rung to the next, the twenty-first-century career is more like a broad rock face that we are all free-climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make our own luck.

Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation… Lucky people are also open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences. They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar destinations, and to interact with people who are different than themselves.

“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,”

Brain Pickings — a filtration mechanism that lets into your life things that are interesting, meaningful, creatively and intellectually stimulating, memorable.

just like we know we’re products of the food we eat, we must understand just how much we’re products of the information we consume — and consume accordingly.

In the two years since Tinder was released, the smartphone app has exploded, processing more than a billion swipes left and right each day

it is fast approaching 50 million active users.

Tinder’s engagement is staggering. The company said that, on average, people log into the app 11 times a day. Women spend as much as 8.5 minutes swiping left and right during a single session; men spend 7.2 minutes. All of this can add up to 90 minutes each day.While conventional online dating sites have been around lo

it’s not just organized religions that are insisting on their own alternate truths. On one front after another, the hard-won consensus of science is also expected to accommodate personal beliefs, religious or otherwise, about the safety of vaccines, G.M.O. crops, fluoridation or cellphone radio waves, along with the validity of global climate change.

But presenting people with the best available science doesn’t seem to change many minds. In a kind of psychological immune response, they reject ideas they consider harmful.

Viewed from afar, the world seems almost on the brink of conceding that there are no truths, only competing ideologies — narratives fighting narratives. In this epistemological warfare, those with the most power are accused of imposing their version of reality — the “dominant paradigm” — on the rest, leaving the weaker to fight back with formulations of their own. Everything becomes a version.

For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth.

Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another.

the argumentative theory of reasoning

corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired.

Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.

Psychologists call stories like these narrative scripts, stories that tell you what you want to hear, stories which confirm your beliefs and give you permission to continue feeling as you already do. If believing in welfare queens protects your ideology, you accept it and move on.

The 'supermarket shoppers' were brain-scanned to test their reactions to promotions and special offers in a major cutting-edge project by UK-based SBXL, one of Europe's leading shopping behaviour specialists and Bangor University's respected School of Psychology.

We know from other research that people are not as good at making rational decisions as they might expect, often using "rules of thumb" and educated guesses to evaluate decisions. Using brain imaging techniques we hope to get a better understanding of how the brain responds to special offers and how this may influence the decisions we make. This also gives us the chance to do some research on how we make decisions in a real world context."

Our data also agrees with previous research suggesting that as offers, or decisions get more complex, instead of working things out, our brains take shortcuts, and may guess that an offer is good. Interestingly, in our study people were just as good at selecting good complex offers from bad as they were for less complex ones, suggesting this guessing method may be as good in some cases as "working it out"."

like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

its “hot” filter automatically lightened people’s skin.

“It is an unfortunate side-effect of the underlying neural network caused by the training set bias, not intended behaviour.”

which he said was a side-effect of the “neural network”.