Fight Mediocrity: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2015)

 

The School of Life: The Problem With Our Phones (2017)

The dark truth is that it’s become very hard to find anyone (and certainly anything) more interesting than one’s smartphone. This perplexing and troubling realisation has for most of us had huge consequences for our love stories, family lives, work, leisure time and health.

Elizabeth Waters: The left brain vs. right brain myth (2017)

The human brain is visibly split into a left and right side. This structure has inspired one of the most pervasive ideas about the brain: that the left side controls logic and the right side controls creativity. And yet, this is a myth, unsupported by scientific evidence. So how did this idea come about, and what does it get wrong?

Annie Bosler and Don Greene: How to practice effectively…for just about anything (2017)

Mastering any physical skill takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. But what does practice actually do to make us better at things? Annie Bosler and Don Greene explain how practice affects the inner workings of our brains.

David Dunning: Why incompetent people think they’re amazing (2017)

How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. David Dunning describes the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Lea Gaslowitz: How to spot a misleading graph (2017)

When they’re used well, graphs can help us intuitively grasp complex data. But as visual software has enabled more usage of graphs throughout all media, it has also made them easier to use in a careless or dishonest way – and as it turns out, there are plenty of ways graphs can mislead and outright manipulate. Lea Gaslowitz shares some things to look out for.

In a Nutshell: How Small Is An Atom? (2015)

Atoms are very weird. Wrapping your head around exactly how weird, is close to impossible – how can you describe something that is so removed from humans experience?

Dominic Walliman: The Map of Physics (2016)

Everything we know about physics – and a few things we don’t – in a simple map.

Dominic Walliman: The Map of Mathematics (2017)

The entire field of mathematics summarised in a single map. This shows how pure mathematics and applied mathematics relate to each other and all of the sub-topics they are made from.

Wealth Inequality in America (2012)

Wealth Inequality in America

The issue of wealth inequality across the United States is well known, but this video shows you the extent of that imbalance in dramatic and graphic fashion. The reality is often much, much worse than we think.

Originally published in November on Youtube, the video is making the rounds on the Monday after Obama signed into law $85 billion worth of government spending cuts after no deal was reached last week on sequestration. Perhaps more tellingly, it’s also the same day that Forbes magazine released its annual billionaires list, highlighting the 1,426 people who control $5.4 trillion of the world’s wealth.

youtu.be

motherjones.com

alternet.org