The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails.

And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News.

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work,” he said.

“They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

[…]

A 2015 study from the Center for Creative Leadership, an executive education firm, Center for Creative Leadershipfound that employees who use smartphones end up working as much as 13.5 hours every day — and as many as 72 hours every week when you include weekends.

The research also found that people are only spending about three hours every day on activities such as working out and family time.

But subjects in that study didn’t blame technology for their extra work hours — they blamed their employers’ lousy time and people management.

“While technology may be a logical scapegoat, it is actually just a new-age mask for an age-old problem: poor management and poor leadership,” the report said.

Source: France Is Getting Closer To Banning After-Work Emails

Heatmap News gives you a quick overview of what is happening in the world right now. It provides a unique perspective by presenting the most important news stories from around the world on a map.

Source: Heatmap News

Here we show that intracortically recorded signals can be linked in real-time to muscle activation to restore movement in a paralysed human. We used a chronically implanted intracortical microelectrode array to record multiunit activity from the motor cortex in a study participant with quadriplegia from cervical spinal cord injury. We applied machine-learning algorithms to decode the neuronal activity and control activation of the participant’s forearm muscles through a custom-built high-resolution neuromuscular electrical stimulation system. The system provided isolated finger movements and the participant achieved continuous cortical control of six different wrist and hand motions. Furthermore, he was able to use the system to complete functional tasks relevant to daily living.

Source: Restoring cortical control of functional movement in a human with quadriplegia : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

The man managed to pour drinks, play guitar hero, swipe credit cards. Good stuff.

The answer to our world’s plastic pollution problem is here.[…]To show Ari doesn’t just talk a big game, he started studying the strengths and weaknesses of certain substances, eventually landing on a solution to our plastic problem made from algae.[…]If the bottle remains full of water it will keep its shape, as soon as it’s empty it starts to decompose – you couldn’t ask for a better alternative.

Source: A Student In Iceland May Have Just Saved The Planet

Charts of the 10 leading causes of death and injury by age group for the US

An interesting one is when you look at the unintentional injury chart you can see firearm related deaths high on the list at all ages. And people keep claiming it’s not guns that kill people!

We present a new human-computer interface that is based on decoding of attention through pupillometry. Our method builds on the recent finding that covert visual attention affects the pupillary light response: Your pupil constricts when you covertly (without looking at it) attend to a bright, compared to a dark, stimulus. In our method, participants covertly attend to one of several letters with oscillating brightness. Pupil size reflects the brightness of the selected letter, which allows us–with high accuracy and in real time–to determine which letter the participant intends to select. The performance of our method is comparable to the best covert-attention brain-computer interfaces to date, and has several advantages: no movement other than pupil-size change is required; no physical contact is required (i.e. no electrodes); it is easy to use; and it is reliable. Potential applications include: communication with totally locked-in patients, training of sustained attention, and ultra-secure password input.

Source: The Mind-Writing Pupil: A Human-Computer Interface Based on Decoding of Covert Attention through Pupillometry

When practicing and learning a new skill, making slight changes during repeat practice sessions may help people master the skill faster than practicing the task in precisely the same way, Johns Hopkins researchers report.

Source: Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions – 01/28/2016

Winning a competition engenders subsequent unrelated unethical behavior. Five studies reveal that after a competition has taken place winners behave more dishonestly than competition losers. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that winning a competition increases the likelihood of winners to steal money from their counterparts in a subsequent unrelated task. Studies 3a and 3b demonstrate that the effect holds only when winning means performing better than others (i.e., determined in reference to others) but not when success is determined by chance or in reference to a personal goal. Finally, study 4 demonstrates that a possible mechanism underlying the effect is an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners.

Source: Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior

The precise reasons that people see profundity in vague buzzwords or syntactic but completely random sentences are unknown. Some people might not realize the reason they don’t understand something is simply because there is nothing to understand. Or they might just approach things they hear and read less skeptically.

There are also a few characteristics that seem to correlate with those who are more prone to pseudo-profound language. Specifically, the researchers tested willingness to accept pseudo profound statements along with a host of other personality characteristics. As they describe:

Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.

Source: Why people think total nonsense is really deep – The Washington Post

Beliefs about honesty seem to be driven by psychological features, such as self-projection. Surprisingly, people were more pessimistic about the honesty of people in their own country than of people in other countries. One explanation for this could be that people are more exposed to news stories about dishonesty taking place in their own country than in others

Source: Study finds honesty varies significantly between countries

Stanford sociologist Robb Willer finds that an effective way to persuade people in politics is to reframe arguments to appeal to the moral values of those holding opposing positions.[…]Conservative participants were ultimately persuaded by a patriotism-based argument that “same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans … [who] contribute to the American economy and society.”[…]”Moral reframing is not intuitive to people,” Willer said. “When asked to make moral political arguments, people tend to make the ones they believe in and not that of an opposing audience – but the research finds this type of argument unpersuasive.”

Source: New research shows how to make effective political arguments, Stanford sociologist says

In comparison with those who read the transcripts, the evaluators who heard pitches judged the candidates to have greater intellect (to be more rational, thoughtful, and intelligent), on average. They also liked the individuals more, had a more positive overall impression, and — perhaps most important — were more interested in hiring the candidates. Evaluators who saw the videos appeared to be even more favorably impressed, but there was no statistically significant difference between the evaluations of video and audio.

Source: The Science of Sounding Smart

his is a prediction of your psycho-demographic profile based on your Facebook Likes. It uses a snapshot of your digital footprint to visualise how others perceive you online and therefore may not be an entirely accurate picture of who you really are. You could take more psychometric tests as well and compare the results!

Source: Apply Magic Sauce – Prediction API – Test

A team of university eggheads have counted up the number of medical cockups in America reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2000 to 2013, and found there were 144 deaths during robot-assisted surgery, 1,391 injuries, and 8,061 counts of device malfunctions.

If that sounds terrible, consider that 1.7 million robo-operations were carried out between 2007 and 2013. Whether you’re impressed or appalled, the number of errors has the experts mildly concerned, and they want better safety mechanisms.

Taking Blue Screen of Death to another level

Source: Robot surgeons kill 144 patients, hurt 1,391, malfunction 8,061 times • The Register

It’s tricky to compare these robo-op figures to the error rate of pure-human surgeries for various dull reasons; one being that when mistakes are made, they’re often settled out of court and are never admitted. With a machine involved, someone can blame the hardware.

A study of people born in the same year has uncovered a huge difference in the speed at which their bodies age.

Source: Ageing rates vary widely, says study – BBC News

it seems fair to say that this technique is successful in it claims for low light amplification in the human eye. These findings are subjective experiences. Subject experienced no adverse effects following administration. Preliminary testing seems to indicate this increase in dim light vision to be occurring

via A Review on Night Enhancement Eyedrops Using Chlorin e6 | Science for the Masses.

After a years-long review of hundreds of studies, Australia’s top medical research agency has concluded that homeopathy is essentially useless for treating any medical condition.

Researchers with the National Health and Medical Research Council conducted a review of published studies on homeopathy and report that they could not find any good quality evidence to support the claim that homeopathy works any better than a placebo or sugar pill.

Homeopathy is a centuries-old form of alternative medicine that has been dismissed as pseudoscience by many skeptics. It’s based on a premise that "like cures like." Practitioners believe that herbs and extracts that cause symptoms such as headaches in healthy people will also cure headaches if they are given in highly diluted forms.

via Homeopathy not effective for any medical condition: review | CTV News.

All other things being equal, the south, parts of the west, and upper midwest are the happiest places in the United States according to a recent study.

Researchers from Harvard University and the University of British Columbia took data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which asked 300,000 individuals to report on their life satisfaction each year between 2005 and 2009. The analysts took this data and other demographic variables to compare differences in happiness across regions, while controlling for things like employment status and income.

via This Map Shows Where the Happiest and Unhappiest People Live in the US.

http://antranik.org/comprehensive-handstand-tutorial/

Riot games uses League of Legends data to try to get people to be less arseholes.

Inside the Largest Virtual Psychology Lab in the World — Backchannel — Medium.