If you are a business owner or an architect or most of the public, graffiti is just a vain effort by amateur artists to have an impact they won't get in the real world of art - but a sociologist wants to rehabilitate that image.
Michigan State University sociologist Toby Ten Eyck argues that graffiti, which is commonly perceived as disenfranchised or troublemaking kids engaging in visual pollution, is instead art. And media needs to start portraying it that way.
In 1961, with memories of Holocaust atrocities and the prosecution of Nazi officials at Nuremburg still fresh, psychologist Stanley Milgram undertook a series of now infamous experiments on obedience and reprehensible behavior.
About two-thirds of Milgram's nearly 800 study subjects, pressed by an authoritative experimenter, were willing to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to an unseen stranger despite cries of agony and pleas to stop.
Gine Roll Skjaervoe at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology has studied church records from the period 1750-1900 and looked at life history variables: how old were women when they had their first child, and their last? How many years passed between the birth of each child, and how many of these children survived? How many of these children were in turn married and had children?
All told, she studied information from more than 9,000 people listed in the church records she examined.
Research published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggests that circumcised boys are more likely than intact boys to develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD) before the age of 10. Risk is particularly high for infantile autism before the age of five. The research was carried out in Denmark among a cohort of all children born between 1994 and 2003. During the study over 340,000 boys were followed up to the age of nine between 1994 and 2013 and almost 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed.
More communication among individuals is occurring online, and often between individuals who do not know each other offline. Researchers at York University are looking to understand the potential impressions and their limitations of those we meet in a digital context. In a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the researchers specifically looked at what personality traits are conveyed by a user's avatar.
Design of the study
The World Health Organization (WHO) has opened the door to routine immunization of infants in sub-Saharan Africa by endorsing an affordable vaccine that has all but rid the meningitis belt of a major cause of deadly epidemics.
Cell phone use has become a common part of life as mobile devices have become one of the most popular ways to communicate. Even so, very little research exists on the impact of cell phone usage and specifically what happens when people are separated from their phones. Now, a paper from the University of Missouri has found that cell phone separation can have serious psychological and physiological effects on iPhone users, including poor performance on cognitive tests.
Results of a survey suggest that while teachers are well-tuned to student psychological distress following a crisis, support varies considerably. The study, led by researchers in the School of Education at Boston University and involving 72 schools, details the complex supportive role of teachers, and the importance of working with them to improve school response plans.
Eliminating government subsidies for low- and moderate-income people who purchased coverage through federally run health insurance marketplaces would sharply boost costs and reduce enrollment in the individual market by more than 9.6 million, according to a new RAND Corporation study. If that sounds like more people than signed up for it, it is. But that is because some people switched to get better insurance using the subsidies and if the subsidies were eliminated they would lose it altogether and not be able to go back to their old plans, which are all older.
A new report released today by the National Research Council offers guidance to district and school leaders and teachers on necessary steps for putting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) into practice over the next decade and beyond. The committee that wrote the report drew on A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas, a 2011 Research Council report that served as the foundation for the Next Generation Science Standards.
The past 15 years have seen an exciting run of creative scientific advances in fabricating three-dimensional (3-D) structures by self-folding of 2-D sheets, but the complexity of structures achieved to date falls far short of what can easily be folded by hand using paper - yes, origami still beats your 3-D printer.
When you have a conflict with your spouse or significant other, do you withdraw or perhaps you expect your partner to be a mind reader about what ticks you off?
Those are two of the most common types of disengagement in relationships, and both can be harmful, but in different ways and for different reasons, says researcher Keith Sanford, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Baylor University.
America's youngest scientists, increasingly losing research dollars, are leaving the academic biomedical workforce, a brain drain that poses grave risks for the future of science, according to an article published this week by Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels.
The article, which appears in the online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, illustrates how for more than a generation, grants for young scientists have declined.
Black people in America may think they are over-represented in American corporate news media crime stories, but they are third. Instead, if you hear about a Muslim, it's invariably terrorism, and if you hear about Latinos, it is illegal immigration.
While an educated public is undoubtedly a crucial element to a democratic society, a new study by two University of Kansas professors has found that partisanship appears to be highest among the most educated Americans.