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For years, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has claimed that he was offered a full scholarship to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point but turned it down to attend Yale. Carson has repeated this claim on numerous occasions and even includes it in his book Gifted Hands . Although the story is inspirational, there’s a problem—it never happened. When Kyle Cheney of the news site Politico published a story claiming that Carson had fabricated the event , the candidate protested vehemently, insisting that his words had been misrepresented. Cheney had reported that the USMA had no record of an application from Ben Carson, and furthermore that there’s no such thing as a “full scholarship” to West Point since the military academy charges no tuition or fees. As a high school student, Carson had been a member of the ROTC, and West Point would have been a logical next step in a military career . To get into West Point, you need a nomination from a … [Read more...] about Ben Carson and the Mandela Effect

With the rise in popularity of absurd and often dangerous conspiracy theories like those put forward by QAnon, America has gone from a fake news problem to a fake news crisis. To make things worse, those peddling fake news have accused (relatively) legitimate media channels of being the source of false information, confusing vulnerable people who lack the logic and reasoning skills to know better. But what can be done about it? Well, the truth is that it is going to be an extremely tough battle, but the first step is to understand, on a psychological and biological level, why people are susceptible to bogus stories and theories in the first place. According to recent research , belief systems and reasoning processes that develop early in one’s life—often to cope with the stress and anxiety of an unpredictable world—may lie at the root of why some people are more vulnerable than others to fake news. Mark Whitmore, an assistant professor of management and information … [Read more...] about What Makes People Especially Vulnerable to Fake News?

HAWTHORN, Australia: This time, the head of our university department wrapped up the video conference by inviting her nine-year-old son to come and say hello to about a hundred colleagues. It was an acknowledgement of the changes we have all adopted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The responses required to contain the spread of the virus have obliterated the boundaries that conventionally separate work from the rest of our lives. It has left us questioning the old concept of work-life balance. READ: Commentary: COVID-19 is reshaping what work looks like READ: Commentary: The biggest restructuring exercise facing Singapore businesses has just begun THE MYTH OF BALANCE The idea of work-life balance caught on the 1980s, powered to a large extent by the increasing number of women in the paid workforce who also shouldered the bulk of home and family work. While it is a concept somewhat hard to define and based on many assumptions, definitions of work-life balance … [Read more...] about Commentary: Forget work-life balance. It’s all about integration in the age of coronavirus