Author: Walter Mischel File Type: epub Renowned psychologist Walter Mischel, designer of the famous Marshmallow Test, explains what self-control is and how to master it. A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice Eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later. What will she do? And what are the implications for her behavior later in life? The worlds leading expert on self-control, Walter Mischel has proven that the ability to delay gratification is critical for a successful life, predicting higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, a healthier lifestyle and a greater sense of self-worth. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught? In The Marshmallow Test, Mischel explains how self-control can be mastered and applied to challenges in everyday life--from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement. With profound implications for the choices we make in parenting, education, public policy and self-care, The Marshmallow Test will change the way you think about who we are and what we can be.

Author: Virginia Eubanks File Type: pdf The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In * Digital Dead End*, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression.But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering technology for people, popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement.ReviewA great backgrounder on technology-enhanced hardship...this will appeal to the technological and sociological minded alike. -- Library JournalEubanks offers a critical and constructive agenda for the design of an information society where people matter. -- Leslie Regan Shade, Journal of Information PolicyHighly recommended. -- Y Tao, Choice By presenting the experiences of a population of predominately working-class women whose perspectives are largely ignored in the debates about the impact of technology on our world, Digital Dead End argues that equity-based responses to the digital divide are often misguided themselves. Any person who is working for social justice in the world of technology would benefit from reading this book. Jane Margolis , Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, UCLAs Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and author, Stuck in the Shallow End Education, Race, and ComputingEubanks offers a path-breaking work that challenges the redistributive paradigm associated with many digital divide initiatives. She gets at the heart of how technology contributes to social stratification and how technological designs that are attentive to issues of social relations and power are necessary to enable and empower economically challenged groups. This is a book that all those caught up in digital advocacy should read, in order to better understand the socio-technical dynamics in which they operate. Atsushi Akera , Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteIf were to move forward as a society well need to abandon many of the platitudes and utopian musings that characterize computerization and actually start doing the work that needs doing. This is what Virginia Eubanks lays out in Digital Dead End. Is she the Jane Addams of the digital age? Douglas Schuler , author of Liberating Voices A Pattern Language for Communication RevolutionAbout the AuthorVirginia Eubanks is the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and is Associate Professor in the Department of Womens Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.