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The authors of the new paper point out just how hard it is to study languages. We're aware of over 7,000 of them, and they vary significantly in complexity. There are a number of large language families that are likely derived from a single root, but a large number of languages don't slot easily into one of the major groups. Against that backdrop, even a set of simple structural decisions—does the noun or verb come first? where does the preposition go?—become dizzyingly complex, with different patterns apparent even within a single language tree.

Linguists, however, have been attempting to find order within the chaos. Noam Chomsky helped establish the Generative school of thought, which suggests that there must be some constraints to this madness, some rules that help make a language easier for children to pick up, and hence more likely to persist. Others have approached this issue via a statistical approach (the authors credit those inspired by Joseph Greenberg for this), looking for word-order rules that consistently correlate across language families. This approach has identified a handful of what may be language universals, but our uncertainty about language relationships can make it challenging to know when some of these are correlations are simply derived from a common inheritance.

For anyone with a biology background, having traits shared through common inheritance should ring a bell. Evolutionary biologists have long been able to build family trees of related species, called phylogenetic trees. By figuring out what species have the most traits in common and grouping them together, it's possible to identify when certain features have evolved in the past. In recent years, the increase in computing power and DNA sequences to align has led to some very sophisticated phylogenetic software, which can analyze every possible tree and perform a Bayesian statistical analysis to figure out which trees are most likely to represent reality. By treating language features like subject-verb order as a trait, the authors were able to perform this sort of analysis on four different language families: 79 Indo-European languages, 130 Austronesian languages, 66 Bantu languages, and 26 Uto-Aztecan languages. Although we don't have a complete roster of the languages in those families, they include over 2,400 languages that have been evolving for a minimum of 4,000 years.

It even suggests the existence of a tipping point, where Internet use takes off at a certain income level.

even among groups that own the necessary technology, less wealth equates to less (and less varied) Internet usage.

The report, an umbrella analysis of three Pew surveys conducted in 2009 and 2010, compares Internet use among American households in four different income brackets: less than $30,000 a year; $30,000-50,000; $50,000-75,000; and greater than $75,000. Respondents--more than 3,000 people participated--were asked a variety of questions about how often they used the Internet, and what sorts of services they took advantage of (such as email, online news, booking travel online, or health research).

Governments often fall down on all three: they have a particular ideology and so push a single-minded policy; they bet big; and they don’t bother to evaluate the results too carefully, perhaps through overconfidence. But markets can fail badly too, and for much the same reason. Just think about the subprime crisis. It failed the same three tests. First, many big banks and insurance companies were taking similar bets at similar times, so that when subprime loans started to go bad, much of Wall Street started struggling simultaneously. Second, the bets were gigantic. Fancy derivatives such as credit default swaps and complex mortgage-backed securities were new, rapidly growing, and largely untested. And third, many investment bankers were being paid large bonuses on the assumption that their performance could be measured properly – and it couldn’t, because profitable-seeming bets concealed large risks.

a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. The relationship even seems causal: churn today is correlated with fast economic growth tomorrow. The real benefit of this creative destruction, say Fogel and her colleagues, is not the appearance of “rising stars” but the disappearance of old, inefficient companies. Failure is not only common and unpredictable, it’s healthy.

But in the context of the Open Government Partnership and the 70 or so countries that have already committed themselves to this or are in the process I’m not sure that the world can afford to wait to see whether this correlation is direct, indirect or spurious especially if we can recognize that in the world of OGP, the currency of accumulation and concentration is not raw economic wealth but rather raw political power.

I am struck by the fact that while the OGP over and over talks about the importance and value and need for Open Government there is no similar or even partial call for Inclusive Government.  I’ve argued elsewhere how “Open”, in the absence of attention being paid to ensuring that the pre-conditions for the broadest base of participation will almost inevitably lead to the empowerment of the powerful. What I fear with the OGP is that by not paying even a modicum of attention to the issue of inclusion or inclusive development and participation that all of the idealism and energy that is displayed today in Brasilia is being directed towards the creation of the Governance equivalents of the Internet billionaires whatever that might look like.

Mr Lee Seck Kay believes that"... doctors need to care about their looks; never mind if they are not handsome, but at least they should not give the impression that they are lackadaisical. It is a moral responsibility that many doctors tend to neglect, much to their detriment." (emphasis mine)Mr Anthony Goh's contribution is:"The doctor's personality and the way he conducts himself speak better than looks."Mr Javern Sim shares his experience and wisdom thus:"I have occasionally come across doctors who are more interested in getting thediagnosis and prescription of medicine over and done with, rather thancommunicating properly with their patients.It is imperative for doctors to be skilful not only on the treatment table, but also in terms of patient management and communication."

I would have thought that making the correct diagnosis and prescribing the appropriate medicine and letting the patient know the two constituted patient management and communication.

Why do the writers seem more hung up on how the doctors look or conduct themselves than on the quality of the medical care or advice, as if the clinical encounter was more a date than a consultation? My suspicion is that lacking the means or inclination to assess the quality of care, patients instead base their judgement of a doctor on things they can assess. It's a natural thing to do - it makes us feel we have control over the situation - but then how a doctor looks or behaves towards you may have very little correlation with the quality of care he provides. If patients choose to judge doctors on style than substance, then perhaps that what they will get.The irony, of course, is that doctors too sometimes judge patients by their appearances...

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults.

The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

a journal's impact factor for a given year is the average number of citations received by papers published in the journal during the two preceding years. Letters to the editor, editorials, book reviews, and other non-papers are excluded from the impact factor calculation.

Review papers that don't necessarily contain new scientific knowledge yet provide useful overviews garner lots of citations. Five of the top 10 perennially highest-impact-factor journals, including the top four, are review journals.

Now suppose you're a journal editor or publisher. In these tough financial times, cash-strapped libraries use impact factors to determine which subscriptions to keep and which to cancel. How would you raise your journal's impact factor? Publishing fewer and better papers is one method. Or you could run more review articles. But, as a paper posted recently on arXiv describes, there's another option: You can manipulate the impact factor by publishing your own papers that cite your own journal.

It’s undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return — at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled.

Contemporary discussions of altruism quickly turn to evolutionary explanations. Reciprocal altruism and kin selection are the two main theories. According to reciprocal altruism, evolution favors organisms that sacrifice their good for others in order to gain a favor in return. Kin selection — the famous “selfish gene” theory popularized by Richard Dawkins — says that an individual who behaves altruistically towards others who share its genes will tend to reproduce those genes. Organisms may be altruistic; genes are selfish. The feeling that loving your children more than yourself is hard-wired lends plausibility to the theory of kin selection.

The defect of reciprocal altruism is clear. If a person acts to benefit another in the expectation that the favor will be returned, the natural response is: “That’s not altruism!”  Pure altruism, we think, requires a person to sacrifice for another without consideration of personal gain. Doing good for another person because something’s in it for the do-er is the very opposite of what we have in mind. Kin selection does better by allowing that organisms may genuinely sacrifice their interests for another, but it fails to explain why they sometimes do so for those with whom they share no genes

THE Saturday Special report last week ('God wants youth') stated that religious groups were determined not to lose a generation to godlessness, especially now with youth gangs in the news.It also noted that what is at stake is the potential of losing the youth to cynicism, violence and even fanaticism.These remarks suggest a prejudice against those without any religious affiliation.

As a society for non-believers, the Humanist Society (Singapore) disagrees.The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'.As for cynicism, there is certainly no correlation between non-belief and a cynical attitude. Many non-believers are involved in the world around them, trying to make it a more humane, compassionate place.

"The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'."were contradictory

most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize.

In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.

when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.

what is climate change? From a scientific point of view, it is simply a statistical change in atmospheric variables (temperature, precipitation, humidity etc). It has been occurring ever since the Earth came into existence, far before humans even set foot on the planet: our climate has been fluctuating between warm periods and ice ages, with further variations within. In fact, we are living in a warm interglacial period in the middle of an ice age.

Global warming has often been portrayed in apocalyptic tones, whether from the mouth of the media or environmental groups: the daily news tell of natural disasters happening at a frightening pace, of crop failures due to strange weather, of mass extinctions and coral die-outs. When the devastating tsunami struck Southeast Asia years ago, some said it was the wrath of God against human mistreatment of the environment; when hurricane Katrina dealt out a catastrophe, others said it was because of (America’s) failure to deal with climate change. Science gives the figures and trends, and people take these to extremes.

One immediate problem with blaming climate change for every weather-related disaster or phenomenon is that it reduces humans’ responsibility of mitigating or preventing it. If natural disasters are already, as their name suggests, natural, adding the tag ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ emphasizes the dominance of natural forces, and our inability to do anything about it. Surely, humans cannot undo climate change? Even at Cancun, amid the carbon cuts that have been promised, questions are being brought up on whether they are sufficient to reverse our actions and ‘save’ the planet.  Yet the talk about this remote, omnipotent force known as climate change obscures the fact that, we can, and have always been, thinking of ways to reduce the impact of natural hazards. Forecasting, building better infrastructure and coordinating more efficient responses – all these are far more desirable to wading in woe. For example, we will do better at preventing floods in Singapore at tackling the problems rather than singing in praise of God.

Joshua Greene from Harvard, known for his research on "neuroethics," the neurological underpinnings of ethical decision making in humans. The title of Greene's talk was "Beyond point-and-shoot morality: why cognitive neuroscience matters for ethics."

What Greene is interested in is to find out to what factors moral judgment is sensitive to, and whether it is sensitive to the relevant factors. He presented his dual process theory of morality. In this respect, he proposed an analogy with a camera. Cameras have automatic (point and shoot) settings as well as manual controls. The first mode is good enough for most purposes, the second allows the user to fine tune the settings more carefully. The two modes allow for a nice combination of efficiency and flexibility.

The idea is that the human brain also has two modes, a set of efficient automatic responses and a manual mode that makes us more flexible in response to non standard situations. The non moral example is our response to potential threats. Here the amygdala is very fast and efficient at focusing on potential threats (e.g., the outline of eyes in the dark), even when there actually is no threat (it's a controlled experiment in a lab, no lurking predator around).

no real evidence is ever offered for the original assumption that ordinary moral thought and talk has this objective character. Instead, philosophers tend simply to assert that people’s ordinary practice is objectivist and then begin arguing from there.

If we really want to go after these issues in a rigorous way, it seems that we should adopt a different approach. The first step is to engage in systematic empirical research to figure out how the ordinary practice actually works. Then, once we have the relevant data in hand, we can begin looking more deeply into the philosophical implications – secure in the knowledge that we are not just engaging in a philosophical fiction but rather looking into the philosophical implications of people’s actual practices.

in the past few years, experimental philosophers have been gathering a wealth of new data on these issues, and we now have at least the first glimmerings of a real empirical research program here

The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?

With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.

If you know only one language, you live only once. A man who knows two languages is worth two men. He who loses his language loses his world. (Czech, French and Gaelic proverbs.)

The hypothesis first put forward fifty years ago by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf—that our language significantly affects our experience of the world—is making a comeback in various forms, and with it no shortage of debate.

The idea that language shapes thought was taboo for a long time, said Dan Slobin, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now the ice is breaking.” The taboo, according to Slobin, was largely due to the widespread acceptance of the ideas of Noam Chomsky, one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. Chomsky proposed that the human brain comes equipped at birth with a set of rules—or universal grammar—that organizes language. As he likes to say, a visiting Martian would conclude that everyone on Earth speaks mutually unintelligible dialects of a single language.

in the magazine article Joshua mentions several studies of “folk morality,” i.e. of how ordinary people think about moral problems. The results are fascinating. It turns out that people’s views are correlated with personality traits, with subjects who score high on “openness to experience” being reliably more relativists than objectivists about morality (I am not using the latter term in the infamous Randyan meaning here, but as Knobe does, to indicate the idea that morality has objective bases).

Other studies show that people who are capable of considering multiple options in solving mathematical puzzles also tend to be moral relativists, and — in a study co-authored by Knobe himself — the very same situation (infanticide) was judged along a sliding scale from objectivism to relativism depending on whether the hypothetical scenario involved a fellow American (presumably sharing our same general moral values), the member of an imaginary Amazonian tribe (for which infanticide was acceptable), and an alien from the planet Pentar (belonging to a race whose only goal in life is to turn everything into equilateral pentagons, and killing individuals that might get in the way of that lofty objective is a duty). Oh, and related research also shows that young children tend to be objectivists, while young adults are usually relativists — but that later in life one’s primordial objectivism apparently experiences a comeback.

This is all very interesting social science, but is it philosophy? Granted, the differences between various disciplines are often not clear cut, and of course whenever people engage in truly inter-disciplinary work we should simply applaud the effort and encourage further work. But I do wonder in what sense, if any, the kinds of results that Joshua and his colleagues find have much to do with moral philosophy.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.