Educational psychologist Vivian Hill says parents can help by taking noisy brothers or sisters out and creating a quiet space for the child in the home or encouraging them to study in the school library or another quiet place.

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In a recent study (published in the journal Public Library of Science One) seven pairs of subjects controlled virtual avatars.

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The study, published in 2009 in one of the journals of the Public Library of Science, PLoS Computational Biology, also showed that patients who developed diseases that tend to coincide with many others were more likely to die sooner than people whose diseases were more tangentially connected.

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Those caricatures still exist, as displayed to humorous effect on websites such as asianssleepinginthelibrary.tumblr.com, which consists of photos of Asian students sleeping in the library, usually slumped over their study materials.

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The English literature lecturer discovered the piece in February, after being asked to study a collection of papers bought by a New Zealand library.

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