Feel guilty? You're a boss
"If you're tired of feeling guilty all the time, here's one surprising piece of good news: This tendency might make you an excellent leader," Kevin Lewis writes for The Boston Globe. "Researchers at Stanford found that being more prone to feeling guilty leads people to think you have more leadership potential, and guilt-prone business students were judged by co-workers to be more effective leaders, controlling for other personality traits, sex and test scores. … Feeling shame, on the other hand, was not related to leadership. The authors conclude that guilty feelings promote leadership by promoting a sense of responsibility for others."
When women rob banks
"The latest FBI crime stats show that women are pulling off nearly one in 10 bank heists in the United States, almost double the rate of a decade ago," The Daily Beast reports. " 'Now it's Bonnie without Clyde,' says forensic sociologist Rosemary Erickson. 'They aren't just accomplices any more.'… She reports that female robbers generally maintain several fundamental distinctions from their male counterparts. 'Women have always been more likely to rob for need and not for the thrill,' Erickson says. 'It's more likely they're going to be robbing for diapers for the baby or something.' She adds, 'For females, it tends not to be a profession. It tends not to be what they do.' … Women favour using notes, which have become increasingly popular with bank robbers in general. 'When women enter any vocation, that vocation changes in some way,' Erickson says."
Sky-high art prices
"The obscenity isn't in the astronomical sums art has been fetching," writes Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, "it's in the circumstances that make those prices possible. Two years ago a team of economists at Yale School of Management and Tilburg University in the Netherlands crunched the art market numbers and came to some sobering conclusions. Using mostly British art-market data compiled since 1765, William Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog and Christophe Spaenjers found a variety of factors were involved in today's stratospheric art prices. They include things like the new globalization of the buying pool. More wealthy buyers equals more competitive bidding. However, for the period between 1908 and 2005, one factor edged out all others: Art prices rise – and rise faster – when income inequality goes up. Occupy Wall Street gave visibility to today's stark income inequality. … The study's authors found that a 'one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 per cent triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 per cent.' "
Birds or a nice big lawn?
"The grass does not always need to be greener on the other side of the fence – and that goes for weeds, too," conservation biologist Carole Sevilla Brown writes in Backyard Birding. "A lawn provides very little habitat for birds, and the resources it takes to maintain a state of green perfection remain unsustainable. By reducing the sizes of our lawns, we can greatly help the local birds in our yards. Consider reducing your lawn area by 10 per cent every year, adding more native plants in its place, and you will create habitats that can attract more birds and other wildlife."
Garden hoses? No sipping
"[Earlier this month]the Ecology Center, a non-profit environmental organization based in Ann Arbor, Mich., that reviews consumer products, released a study at the website HealthyStuff.org on potentially hazardous chemicals in gardening tools," The New York Times reports. "… Over all, they found that two-thirds of the products tested contained levels of one or more chemicals in excess of standards set for other consumer products. … 'Hoses and garden tools are obviously not classified as children's products,' said Jeff Gearhart, who led the research for the Ecology Center. 'But kids are still going to be playing with them. I know I drank out of a hose all summer when I was growing up. What kid doesn't?' … Patty Davis, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said that the commission would never recommend that any consumer drink from a garden hose. 'The real health concern here is bacterial contamination,' she said. 'Garden hoses sit outside and bake in the sun. Anything can get in them, and it's a perfect environment for all sorts of microbial communities.' "
Thought du jour
"We evolve into the images we carry in our minds. We become what we see."
– Jerry Mander (1936-), American activist and author