What We’re Reading

A few good pieces the Collab team came across this week …

A for effort

Always remember: When Harvard, Yale & Princeton didn’t top early US News Best Colleges rankings, the statistician was replaced & algorithm adjusted.

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Sound mind

I love this:

Instead of punishing disruptive kids or sending them to the principal’s office, the Baltimore school has something called the Mindful Moment Room instead. The room looks nothing like your standard windowless detention room. Instead, it’s filled with lamps, decorations, and plush purple pillows. Misbehaving kids are encouraged to sit in the room and go through practices like breathing or meditation, helping them calm down and re-center. They are also asked to talk through what happened.

Addiction

This would be big:

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday declared that teenage use of electronic cigarettes has reached “an epidemic proportion,” and it put makers of the most popular devices on notice that they have just 60 days to prove they can keep their devices away from minors …If Juul Labs and four other major manufacturers fail to halt sales to minors, the agency said, it could remove their flavored products from the market.

Taking Credit

Amazing:

It was Bell Burnell who realized she’d detected something important. She had discovered the swiftly spinning cores of collapsed stars, whose powerful magnetic fields produce jets of radiation that flash across the sky like the rotating beam of a lighthouse … In 1974, when a Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of pulsars, Bell Burnell’s adviser Antony Hewish was one of the recipients. Bell Burnell was not. No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics since 1963.

Social connections

Wow:

More than two-thirds of teens say they would rather communicate with their friends online than in person, according to a new study that comes as tech companies are trying to help parents and children monitor the time spent online.

Risk and ruin

Sad:

The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 annually on lottery tickets, which is nearly four times the $105 a year spent by the highest-earning households, according to a study released on Wednesday by Bankrate.com. And almost 3 in 10 Americans in the lowest income bracket play the lottery once a week, compared with nearly 2 in 10 who earn more than that.

Have a good weekend.