I was tipped off to this article by a friend.  It discusses the difference between praising your children for being smart, vs. praising them for working hard and how that alters some of the choices they make.

It's a long read, but an interesting read - especially if you were one of the smart kids that didn't really work too hard.  Do you think it made a difference in school?  Do you still think it makes a difference in what you choose to take on? 

How about the hard workers...were you jealous of the smart kids, because they just got it and didn't have to work at it? 

"A Class Divided" is a Frontline documentary about a small-town teacher, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., teaching her 3rd grade class a daring lesson in discrimination.

On the first day, Jane Elliott divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and expressed the superiority of the blue-eyed group as well as giving them special privileges.  On the second day, she reversed the exercise and the brown-eyed group was superior. 

The result? 

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a classic study that every psychology major hears about in their Psych 101 class. 

What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

If you haven't heard of this study, I strongly urge you to visit The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment website and watch this video [via digg].

I was digging around for some information on tweaking my Actiontec GT701 DSL router when I came across a hacker zine called K-line.  Inside, was this interesting article, titled Wetware hacking: Sound and Smell, by Cybur Netiks (K-line Issue 45):

I simulated anger.

I looked through my collection of old mp3's that I no longer listen to. Unfortunately, these were numbered and I cannot tell you what song I was using, but that doesn't really matter. I picked out a song that wasn't calm but that didn't currently inspire anger either, a kind of high-energy techno music I used. Then to recreate the appropriate conditions, I set the mp3 on repeat and recalled in as much detail as possible, times that I was extremely angry.

Bringing back these memories gave me an energy rush simular to anger, but not as impacting. I repeated this at small intervals at least once every two days. I don't know how long I did this for, I think about two months, but I soon found I would immediately get the rush of energy associated with anger when I started the music, even before I began to simulate the conditions.

For quite awhile afterwards, the simulated emotions triggered from this song were strong and unfaltering (I don't know about now, those old MP3's are gone) so it appeared to be a success.

I never did try it with another emotion, unfortunately.  I chose anger because it seemed to be the easiest to simulate.

Anyone interested in trying this with, say, joy or confidence?  Log your own wetware hacks in the comments.

Some time around March, I started receiving a number of random instant messages from people I've never met before. Apparantly, my AIM alias had been added to at least two online lists and people all over the world were busy importing me as a buddy.

I say "at least two" because the people who contacted me fell into one of two camps: people who thought they were contacting a celebrity and people who thought they were contacting a robot. As I talked to more and more of these folks, I began to discover something really disturbing about myself:

I consistently fail to be perceived as human.

You've got all of these experts helping people through their days. Dr. Phil... Dr. Laura... Dr. Drew... Dr. Ruth... Imagine what would happen if you joined all of these profound forces together.. know what you would get? No not Voltron. You would get DOCTOR FRUITCAKE.