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India, which has a literacy level well below the global average, has intensified its efforts in the field of education. In 2012 the country passed the Right to Education act which guarantees free and compulsory education for all children until the age of 14.However, some of the "facts" that have been found in textbooks around the country have given rise to speculation over what exactly passes for "education" in India.Glaring mistakes, downright lies and embellishments in textbooks are often featured in local media. A trend that is all the more worrying, given that India's education system promotes rote learning at the cost of analytical thinking.

n the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.

Computers are very, very fast at making calculations. Moreover, they can be counted on to calculate faithfully—without getting tired or emotional or changing their mode of analysis in midstream. But this does not mean that computers produce perfect forecasts, or even necessarily good ones. The acronym GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”) sums up this problem. If you give a computer bad data, or devise a foolish set of instructions for it to analyze, it won’t spin straw into gold. Meanwhile, computers are not very good at tasks that require creativity and imagination, like devising strategies or developing theories about the way the world works. Computers are most useful to forecasters, therefore, in fields like weather forecasting and chess where the system abides by relatively simple and well-understood laws, but where the equations that govern the system must be solved many times over in order to produce a good forecast. They seem to have helped very little in fields like economic or earthquake forecasting where our understanding of root causes is blurrier and the data is noisier. In each of those fields, there were high hopes for computer-driven forecasting in the 1970s and 1980s when computers became more accessible to everyday academics and scientists, but little progress has been made since then.

Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences? How do we learn to translate abstract symbols into meaningful sounds in the first place, and why are some children better at it than others?

People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.

And, the basic unit of taxonomy – ‘the species’ – remains an elusive and controversial concept despite its fundamental importance to science. Yet, few people outside of biology and philosophy realise that ‘the species’ has been at the centre of a major controversy in science for much of the last 50 years.

Taxonomy is a fundamental or ‘enabling’ science that underpins all of biology and its many related fields including medical research.

• How does the species category compare with other scientific groups or types of things like say the chemical elements? • Does it play the same kind of role in science – conveying the same sorts of information and allowing us to make predictions about nature? • What’s the best, most objective, way to recognise a species?

"The idea was to look more at the more moral and ethical implications of how alcohol might affect decision-making," said Aaron Duke, one of the researchers.* His team found a correlation between each subject's level of intoxication and his or her willingness to flip the switch or push the person—the drunker the subject, the more willing he or she was to kill one hypothetical person for the sake of the hypothetical many. This choice follows the logic of utilitarianism: More good is done by saving five people than harm is done by killing one. This "really undermines the notion that utilitarian preferences are merely the result of more deliberation," said Duke, who also co-authored a paper on the study, charmingly titled, "The drunk utilitarian: Blood alcohol concentration predicts utilitarian responses in moral dilemmas." There's a fabulous irony in the idea that drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives. But Duke and his research partner, Laurent Bègue, aren't necessarily arguing that drunk people are ace philosophers and logicians; it's more that their findings challenge common assumptions about how people make decisions.