I have asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile.

Science says we're full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song -- loud or soft -- reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains' verbal-processing skills. "As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence," one report dryly concluded. If headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have headphones? That brings us to a psychological answer: There is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and can even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate, and anxiety. What music steals in acute concentration, it returns to us in the form of good vibes.

Email address

Mobile (out and about)

Desktop computer

devices

Back to the previous question. Question 1 of 16

Find out more about what's involved

Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources,

Why is it that Putin has no problem getting his message out? The reason, of course, is that most of what Russians see and hear is Putin’s point of view and Putin’s point of view only.

looped (oder: loopable) research

Even though everyone knows Israel has the bomb, if you have a clearance and want to keep it, stick to discussing Israel's stockpile of strategic kumquats.

DELETE

NSF Advances in Biological Informatics: "Informatics tools for population-level animal movements." with T. Mueller, P. Leimgruber, A. Royle, and J. Calabrese. Thomas Mueller, an Assistant Research Scientist in my lab, leads this project. Also on this grant, postdoc Chris Fleming is investigating theoretical aspects of animal foraging and statistical issues associated with empirical data on animal movements. This project is developing innovative data management and analysis tools that will allow scientists and conservation managers to use animal relocation and tracking data to study movement processes at the population-level, focusing on the interrelationship of multiple moving individuals. We are developing and testing these new tools using datasets on Mongolian gazelles, whooping cranes, and blacktip sharks. More information is available on the Movement Dynamics Homepage.

My project seeks to develop computer models that simulate and link behavioral movement mechanisms which can be either based on memory, perceptual cues or triggered by environmental factors. It explores their efficiency under different scenarios of resource distributions across time and space. Finally it tries to integrate empirical data on resource distributions as well as movements of moving animals, such as satellite data on primary productivity and satellite tracking data of Mongolian gazelles.

We regularly provide scholars with access to content for this purpose. Our Data for Research site (http://dfr.jstor.org)

The academic publisher Elsevier has contributed to many U.S. Congressional representatives, pushing the Elsevier-supported Research Works Act, which among other things would have forbidden any effort by any federal agency to ensure taxpayer access to work financed by the federal government without permission of the publisher.

research by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino has shown that saying thank you not only results in reciprocal generosity — where the thanked person is more likely to help the thanker — but stimulates prosocial behavior in general. In other words, saying “thanks” increases the likelihood your employee will not only help you, but help someone else.

It is a remark constantly made by some that an orator must be skilled in all arts if he is to speak upon all subjects. I might reply to this in the words of Cicero, in whom I find this passage: "In my opinion, no man can become a thoroughly accomplished orator unless he shall have attained a knowledge of every subject of importance and of all the liberal arts," but for my argument, it is sufficient that an orator be acquainted with the subject on which he has to speak.