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Good news, nice guys
"It turns out nice guys can finish first, according to a Harvard researcher," Psych Central reports. "Dr. David Rand found that dynamic, complex social networks encourage their members to be friendlier and more co-operative, with the possible payoff coming in an expanded social sphere; selfish behaviour can lead to an individual being shunned from the group and left – literally – on his or her own. As described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the research is among the first studies to examine social interaction as a fluid, ever-changing process. Previous studies of complex social networks largely used static snapshots of groups to examine how members were or were not connected."
The coming age of big data
"[A]tificial intelligence, it turns out, is so 20th century," says The New Zealand Herald. "The latest buzzword is 'augmented intelligence,' the difference being that instead of leaving it up to computers to draw their own conclusions, augmented intelligence uses human analysts as well. The trend has spawned a new occupation: data scientist. The first summit for data scientists was held in Las Vegas in May and if you're thinking of retraining, or looking for a new career, you could do a lot worse. A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) forecasts that by 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of up to 190,000 data scientists and up to 1.5 million data-savvy managers and analysts. MGI describes 'big data' as the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, and suggests huge potential savings in sectors such as electronics, finance and insurance, and government."
Ban paper textbooks?
"Recent news that South Korea plans to digitize its entire elementary- and secondary-school curriculum by 2015, combined with the declining cost of e-readers and Amazon's announcement earlier this year that it is selling more e-books than print books, prompts an interesting question: Which traditional campus will be the first to go entirely bookless?" Marc Prensky writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Not, of course, bookless in the sense of using no book content, but bookless in the sense of allowing no physical books. My guess is that this will make some institution famous.… Some colleges are already heading in this direction by requiring or handing out iPod Touches, iPads, Kindles or Nooks, often preloaded with textbooks or other curricular materials, or by disallowing paper texts for online courses."
Naked marriages
"Even to the most modern of young Beijing couples, some traditions are sacred: Real estate consultant Zhu Heng and his lawyer bride, Jia Zhiwei, are postponing their wedding banquet until Mr. Zhu's parents' feng shui adviser chooses an auspicious date for it," The Christian Science Monitor reports. "But helpless in the face of astronomical housing prices in the capital, Zhu had to marry the woman he loves without being able to offer her a home of their own – a standard requirement of Chinese brides down the ages. 'I feel pretty guilty about it, but it's a question of reality,' says Zhu, shrugging his shoulders. 'A lot of my generation understands that it's just not possible.' … After years of waiting fruitlessly for the housing market to cool, Zhu and Jia decided to get married this year, prodded by their friends and parents and conscious of passing time. … 'More and more people are getting married without a car or a house,' adds Zhu. 'There are so many doing it; it even has a name: naked marriage.' Naked marriage is a rising phenomenon, especially in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai where property prices have risen nearly fivefold in the past decade."
Grumpy old finches
"In August, neuroscientists Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University announced that they had devised … a systematic test of birds' grammatical prowess," reports Discover magazine. "The results suggest that Bengalese finches have strict rules of syntax: The order of their chirps matters. … Finches cry out whenever they hear a new tune, so Abe and Watanabe started by having individual birds listen to an unfamiliar finch's song. At first the listeners called out in reply, but after 200 playbacks, their responses died down. Then the researchers created three remixes by changing the order of the song's component syllables. The birds reacted indifferently to two of the revised tunes; apparently the gist of the message remained the same. But one remix elicited a burst of calls, as if the birds had detected something wrong. Abe and Watanabe concluded that the birds were reacting like grumpy middle-school English teachers to a violation of their rules of syntax."
Thought du jour
"Silence is the true friend that never betrays."
- Confucius (551-479 BC), Chinese thinker and educator