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June 08 2011
Lots of Debt Makes Young People Feel Like They’re in Control
Money can’t buy happiness—but debt might just be able to rent you self-esteem, a new study suggests.
Being in the red seems to boost the self-confidence of people in their early-to-mid twenties, the researchers found. Using all sorts of data—financial, psychological, educational, you name it—collected every two years from 3,000 young adults as part of an enormous national survey, they were able to pick out this pattern: The more credit card debt and college loans young adults had, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt in control of their lives.
Even when the researchers took starting self-confidence into account—young people with higher self-esteem might be more willing to take out loans in the first place, for instance—the pattern remained. It’s not clear cause and effect, since the researchers couldn’t make some of the kids go into debt and the others say solvent, but it does suggest that being in debt may actually improve self-esteem.
Um, what? Are these people’s bills somehow way more fun than ours?
Part of the effect is due to the fact that debt, especially school loans, are an investment the future, the researchers hypothesize. You’ve got to spend money ...
September 03 2010
Undergrads Destroy NASA Satellite
On August 30th, after seven years gathering data on ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, a NASA satellite met its fiery end in the Earth’s atmosphere before plunging into the sea. And it was University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates plotted the satellite’s fatal course.
Happily this wasn’t the result of a Hacking 101 class gone awry, or a particularly sophisticated prank. The students’ destructive mission had NASA’s full endorsement.
NASA decommissioned the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat in July, before turning the show over to the students, who worked with experts from the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Students and faculty at the Laboratory control four other satellites for NASA and have also operated ICESat during its life, allowing the satellite to measure polar sea ice thickness, the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the heights of vegetation canopies and clouds. Even if the students were old pros at satellite steering, the chance to crash these multimillion dollar craft is rare–the last NASA satellite reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2002 and NASA did the job themselves.
After seven-day work weeks computing the satellite’s location and predictions for NASA tracking stations, the students transmitted the satellite’s final course and told it burn all remaining fuel. As Popular Science reports, its charred remains safely splashed down in the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia on Monday. Please tell me someone in that control room made an explosion noise.
Related content:
Discoblog: How to White Balance a Satellite: Aim It at Lake Tuz
Discoblog: Dang, What Was That? Astronomers Wonder What Just Whizzed by Earth
Discoblog: Want to Monitor the Earth’s Magnetic Field? There’s an App for That.
DISCOVER: Space Junk: How to Clean Up the Space Age’s Mess (gallery)
Image: Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado
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