Culture

olitical conservatives in the United States are somewhat like East Asians in the way they think, categorize and perceive. Liberals in the U.S. could be categorized as extreme Americans in thought, categorization and perception. That is the gist of a new University of Virginia cultural psychology study, published recently in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Additionally, the study indicates that thought styles - whether analytical or holistic - can be changed through training, enough so to temporarily change political thought and the way a person might vote.

A marketing study has raised concerns over the ethics of the marketing of skin-whitening products widely available in Australia.

Regardless, demand for the product is growing, with more than 60 percent of Indian women reportedly using one of the more than 240 brands of skin lightener available in that country.

Professor Lynne Eagle of James Cook University says skin whiteners are also easy to find in Australia. "I brought it from two different shops in Townsville within ten minutes' drive of my office," she said.

The amount of time children spend using screens, such as televisions and computers, on a daily basis exceeds recommended guidelines but those guidelines were drawn up at a time when tablets, cell phones and other mobile devices were not as present in everyday life. Unless you are Amish or a doomsday prepper, it is unlikely that the future will mean current screen time guidelines.

Over the past 100 years, licensing and accrediting bodies have raised the quality of medical education and efforts have been made to ensure that medical schools meet a minimum standard for the curricula and clinical training they offer to students. However, comparing institutions and identifying which ones produce the physicians who provide the best patient care and conduct the best biomedical research remains challenging for prospective students. A popular method for comparing medical schools, the analysis performed by U.S.

Optimization algorithms, which try to find the minimum values of mathematical functions, are everywhere in engineering. Among other things, they're used to evaluate design tradeoffs, to assess control systems, and to find patterns in data.

One way to solve a difficult optimization problem is to first reduce it to a related but much simpler problem, then gradually add complexity back in, solving each new problem in turn and using its solution as a guide to solving the next one. This approach seems to work well in practice, but it's never been characterized theoretically.

Product bundling is a common marketing strategy but retailers need to draw attention to the value of a package deal since consumers prefer products that are packaged individually.

Though American president Barack Obama talked about how he made fossil fuels cheaper and Wall Street executives richer in his State of the Union address, the lingering recession pushed an additional three million children into poverty, the highest rate in 50 years.