Emotional response to mistake leads to more improvement
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Feeling the pain of failure leads to more effort to correct your mistake than simply thinking about what went wrong, according to a new study. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — An entrepreneur’s backstory plays a critical role in the success or failure of a fledgling venture, says Lianne Lefsrud, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Ross School’s Erb Institute.
“Especially for entrepreneurs with limited financial resources, stories are a way to create resources if you can make sense of the world with your stories,” Lefsrud said. (more…)
Award-winning journalist, activist, and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault told a packed audience at Yale that lessons learned from the civil rights movement still have relevance for current and future generations.
Hunter-Gault delivered a lecture titled “Social Justice, Equity, and Public Health” during a Branford College master’s tea on Feb. 5. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — People setting a goal to lose weight in 2013 may want to first ask themselves if diet or exercise is more important to success.
Whether a person believes obesity is caused by overeating or by a lack of exercise can predict whether he or she will gain or lose weight, according to University of Michigan research to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
With two-thirds of the adult U.S. population classified as overweight or obese and similar numbers in many developed nations, obesity has become an important health concern. (more…)
To Paul Tough, his recent visit to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy was “a nice homecoming.”
During the two years of research for his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough spent time at UChicago and in its surrounding neighborhoods.
“The nerve center of my journalistic enterprise was a small dorm room in International House,” he joked Oct. 18 in a speech at Chicago Harris, saying that many of the ideas in the book drew from work in the Department of Economics, the Economics Research Center, the Crime Lab and from the Consortium on Chicago School Research. (more…)
Jack Turner, UW assistant professor of political science, is the author of “Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America,” published this month by University of Chicago Press. He answered a few questions about his book for UW Today.
What’s the central concept behind “Awakening to Race”?
The book addresses the challenge of racial justice by asking, “What does it mean to be a self-aware human being? What does it mean to be awake to reality?”
In part, it means confronting the worst aspects of ourselves and our lives. Being awake to reality in the United States means confronting the ways America’s history of slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy still shapes the present — the opportunities we have or we lack, the confidence we have in ourselves or fail to have in others, the ways our chances for success are still color coded. (more…)
UD conference highlights diversity and student retention
Freeman Hrabowski and Vincent Tinto both believe that creating a culture of trust and support is a key ingredient in retaining students from underrepresented groups while achieving genuine campuswide diversity.
Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), and Tinto, Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University, shared their expertise on diversity and student retention during the Student Success and Retention Conference, held Wednesday, Oct. 3, in the Trabant University Center on the University of Delaware campus in Newark. (more…)
While the disappearance of Neanderthals remains a mystery, paleoanthropologists have an increasing understanding of what allowed their younger cousins, Homo sapiens, to conquer the planet. According to Ariane Burke, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal, the rapid dispersal of anatomically modern humans was not so much due to superior intelligence or improved hunting or gathering techniques, but rather to the creation of symbolic objects that allowed them to extend their social relations across vast territories.
Symbolism and social exchanges
Homo sapiens arrived in Europe some 45,000 years ago, from Africa. In less than 15,000 years, they managed to occupy the whole of Europe and Eurasia—an extremely rapid expansion. Neanderthals, on the other hand, were born of Europe, appearing on the continent more than 250,000 years ago, after their ancestors, Homo ergaster, had established there 600,000 years earlier. Though physiologically well adapted to the cold climate of the glacial and postglacial periods, why were Neanderthals not as successful as their newly landed rivals in colonizing the continent? (more…)
