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The article focuses on Kyle MacDonald, the young resident of Montreal, Canada who became an Internet and media sensation in 2005 by parlaying a series of trades beginning with one paper clip into ownership of a home in Kipling, Saskatchewan. The community regards MacDonald as a hero, and has placed a sculpture of the original paper clip in his front yard.

One of psychology's most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events. The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the act of writing, the frequent failures thereof, and techniques developed by the author to combat her despair while writing. The virtue of the physical process of writing by hand; Her use of special notebooks and specially colored pens to write; Her notebooks color-coded geographically.

The article reports on the argument that the effort to understand how people recover from depression is stunted by the kind of evidence available, based on the paper by Jonathan Rottenberg and his colleagues published in an issue of "Perspectives on Psychological Science." Topics include the treatment of depression, duration of treatment trials and the ideal approach in studying depression.

The article describes the growth of disliking among the Israelis for the local newspaper Haaretz due to the paper's wrongful depiction of the political scenario in Israel.

The article focuses on a research paper in the journal "Cognition" which reveals that people combines their sense of what is typical with their sense of what is ideal to decide whether something is normal or not.

The article states that according to a paper that appeared in the October 2006 issue of the "Journal of Consumer Research," people who get a bad deal on an hotel room are more reluctant to go shopping than those paying the same price for a good room. Professor Robert J. Meyer, of the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the paper, said that when one sees a price is unexpectedly low they have this positive prime of feeling flush.

Reports that the Bush administration has announced that it has completed one of the biggest changes in the history of the food stamp program, replacing paper coupons with electronic benefits and debit cards. Request for suggestions for renaming the program; Replacement of food stamp coupons with electronic benefits in all states; Avoidance of the stigma associated with the use of paper coupons; Appeal of the new technology for grocers and state officials.

The article reports on the paper "Worry Less Report," released by insurance company Liberty Mutual Insurance which shows the belief that somehow problems can be solved by worrying.

The article reports on a paper presented by economics professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna to the 2008 meeting of the American Economic Association. The study found that contrary to popular belief, violent motion pictures reduce real violent crime rather than increasing it. The researchers conclude that watching violent movies keeps criminals in a cloistered, alcohol-free environment for hours, reducing the time left for commission of violent acts.

The article examines U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton's experience as president of the Wellesley College student government during 1968. Papers in the college archives written by Clinton show her transformation from a Republican to a liberal activist. They also show that unlike many young people in that turbulent era, Clinton was wholly committed to working inside the U.S. political system.

Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do ''sophisticated'' consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and ''fair trade'' coffee from Starbucks? If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between ''rational'' and ''emotional'' buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like ''hedonic'' or ''utilitarian'' or ''positional.'' But Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For every congenial character who can warm a room, there's another who can bring a draft from the north, a whiff of dead winter. And even if the thermometer doesn't register the difference, people do: social iciness feels so cold to those on the receiving end that they will crave a hot drink, a new study has found. The paper, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, is the latest finding from the field of embodied cognition, in which researchers have shown that the language of metaphor can activate physical sensations, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reports that 12 scholars presented papers on psychology research at the workshop entitled `Making People: The Normal and Abnormal in Constructions of Personhood,' at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Sponsor of the workshop; Observations made by sociologist Christine Leuenberger who interviewed therapists in Germany; Information on the workshop.