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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.

Drugs that affect our moral thinking and behaviour already exist, but we tend not to think of them in that way. [Prozac] lowers aggression and bitterness against environment and so could be said to make people more agreeable. Or Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone ... increases feelings of social bonding and empathy while reducing anxiety," he said.

But would pharmacologically-induced altruism, for example, amount to genuine moral behaviour? Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner, said: "We can change people's emotional responses but quite whether that improves their moral behaviour is not something science can answer."

it was unlikely people would "rush to take a pill that would make them morally better."Becoming more trusting, nicer, less aggressive and less violent can make you more vulnerable to exploitation," he said. "On the other hand, it could improve your relationships or help your career."Kahane does not advocate putting morality drugs in the water supply, but he suggests that if administered widely they might help humanity to tackle global issues.

When chicks were exposed to puffs of air, they showed signs of distress that were mirrored by their mothers. The hens' heart rate increased, their eye temperature lowered - a recognised stress sign - and they became increasingly alert. Levels of preening were reduced, and the hens made more clucking noises directed at their chicks.

Researcher Jo Edgar, from the School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: ''The extent to which animals are affected by the distress of others is of high relevance to the welfare of farm and laboratory animals. ''Our research has addressed the fundamental question of whether birds have the capacity to show empathic responses.

One part of Matthew Nisbet's recent report that has received very little attention is its comparative analysis of ideological and partisan perspectives of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nisbet shows that AAAS members are extremely partisan and ideological.  The word "extremely" is mine, and what do I mean by it?  Look at the figure above:  AAAS members are more partisan than MSNBC viewers and even Tea Party members.  AAAS members are more ideological than evangelical churchgoers but less so than Fox News viewers.  In both cases AAAS members are very different than the public as a whole.

Dan Sarewitz has discussed the problems with the ideological and partisan likemindedness of our scientific community, which has been exploited and reenforced in political debates: During the Bush administration, Democrats discovered that they could score political points by accusing Bush of being anti-science. In the process, they seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational. Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals. How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.

It should come as no surprise that the increasing politicization of science has come to make science more political rather than politics more scientific.  At the same time, the more partisan and/or and ideological that you are, the more welcome and comfortable that you will find the politicization of science, as it reenforces your preconceptions.

Open government cannot succeed through technology only.  Open data, ideation platforms, cloud solutions, and social media are great tools but when they are used to deliver government services using existing models they can only deliver partial value, value which can not be measured and value that is unclear to anyone but the technology practitioners that are delivering the services.

It is this thinking that has led a small group of us to launch a new Group on Govloop called Culture Change and Open Government.  Bill Brantley wrote a great overview of the group which notes that “The purpose of this group is to create an international community of practice devoted to discussing how to use cultural change to bring about open government and to use this site to plan and stage unconferences devoted to cultural change“

“Open government is a citizen-centric philosophy and strategy that believes the best results are usually driven by partnerships between citizens and government, at all levels. It is focused entirely on achieving goals through increased efficiency, better management, information transparency, and citizen engagement and most often leverages newer technologies to achieve the desired outcomes. This is bringing business approaches, business technologies, to government“.

The first reductive move made by the writer occurs here: “Singapore is known worldwide for censorship and corporal punishment.” This is the Western media’s favourite trope of our island-nation. A whole political context and dynamic society gets reduced to these two ‘dirty’ words, at least for a ‘Western’ world that prides itself on ‘freedom’ and believes itself to be on a moral high ground because of this veritable self-image. (One could argue that censorship in the ‘West’ exists but in a different form – there, capitalist hegemons control media companies which quite effectively draw the boundaries of public debate.)

The writer first makes the observation that lots of people have started to speak up and speak out against the “clan” that has ruled Singapore for almost 50 years. The People’s Action Party, is for Ms Hodal, not a political party, but a “clan” – which harks back to tribal societies, to tribalism.

Out of all these unsuitable candidates, the writer chose the Arab Spring as the comparative situation of choice for Singapore, despite the fact that the Arab Spring movements did not occur at a time of elections, that much of the physical ‘protesting’ in Singapore was witnessed at political rallies, that there was no bottom-up movement of ‘revolt’. It is the time of the elections; it is a nationally-licensed period of political behaviour and action, for society to perform a cathartic release, for the Bakhtinian carnavalesque to unfold.

But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”

The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.

To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.

it is easy to forget that market forces, if allowed to play out, might eventually exert a stabilizing role. Simply put, the greater the premium for highly skilled workers, the greater the incentive to find ways to economize on employing their talents.

one of the main ways to uncover cheating is by using a computer program to detect whether a player’s moves consistently resemble the favored choices of various top computer programs.

many other examples of activities that were once thought exclusively the domain of intuitive humans, but that computers have come to dominate. Many teachers and schools now use computer programs to scan essays for plagiarism