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CAROL DWECK’S RESEARCH has made the Stanford psychologist a household name among parents and teachers. Since the 2006 publication of her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success(and Stanford’s March/April 2007 cover story), countless articles and books have featured her ideas about helping children and adults learn. The video of Dweck’s 2014 TEDx talk on “growth…

Each time DeepMind has announced an amazing accomplishment in game-playing computers in recent months, people have taken notice. First, the Google-owned, London-based artificial intelligence (AI) research center wowed the world with a computer program that had taught itself to play nearly 50 different 1980s-era Atari games—from Pong and Breakout to Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Boxing, and more—using…

Back in 1995, when Netscape was the hottest company in the Valley and Bill Gates a fearsome force in software, eggheads and cranks alike predicted that the “World Wide Web” connecting us would soon do away with middlemen. Gates foresaw a world of “friction-free capitalism,” one in which the Internet itself would become the only…

“I can’t pay you a cent more,” Boris tells Sophie, who’s trying to sell him a car. But Sophie stands firm. “You’ll just have to match my price,” she tells him. Around the corner, Ethan and Vickie are haggling over the price of her car. “I really can’t pay you any more,” Ethan says, but Vickie won’t…

Have you already abandoned your New Year’s resolution? No need to feel ashamed. Fully a quarter of the people who make resolutions give up by the end of the first week, with many others falling off the wagon in the months to come. It seems to be human nature to aim high and fall short.…

Last February, for $19.95 each, the Gorilla Foundation was selling a limited stock of “Koko Plush.” The 12-inch-tall stuffies were inspired by the way Koko the Gorilla looked in 1972. That’s when Penny Patterson, a graduate student in developmental psychology, began teaching Koko sign language, an unprecedented project that drew international attention. Born in the…

Despite India’s economic boom, more than a third of the country remains impoverished, with 456 million people subsisting on less than $1.25 per day, according to the most recent World Bank figures. Government subsidies on everything from food to fuel have tried to spread the nation’s wealth, but rampant corruption has made the redistribution pipeline…

Nothing demonstrates the wildfire spread of online social networks such as MySpace and Facebook better than the experience 73 Stanford students had last fall. They were enrolled in the computer science course Creating Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook—and did they ever engage. At a public session held at the Arrillaga Alumni…