【推荐1】The psychology of innovation

Why are so few companies truly innovation?

Innovation is key to business survival, and companies put substantial resources into inspiring employees to develop new ideas. There are, nevertheless, people working in luxurious, state-of-the-art centres designed to stimulate innovation who find that their environment doesn’t make them feel at all creative. And there are those who don’t have a budget, or much space, but who innovate successfully.

For Robert B. Cialdini, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, one reason that companies don’t succeed as often as they should is that innovation starts with recruitment. Research shows that the fit between an employee’s values and a company’s values makes a difference to what contribution they make and whether, two years after they join, they’re still at the company.

One of the most famous photographs in the story of rock’ n’ roll emphasizes Ciaidini’s views. The 1956 picture of singers Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis jamming at a piano in Sun Studios in Memphis tells a hidden story. Sun’s ‘million-dollar quartet’ could have been a quintet. Missing from the picture is Roy Orbison, a greater natural singer than Lewis, Perkins or Cash. Sam Phillips, who owned Sun, wanted to revolutionize popular music with songs that fused black and white music, and country and blues. Presley, Cash, Perkins and Lewis instinctively understood Phillips’s ambition and believed in it. Orbison wasn’t inspired by the goal, and only ever achieved one hit with the Sun label.

Managing innovation is a delicate art. It’s easy for a company to be pulled in conflicting directions as the marketing, product development, and finance departments each get different feedback from different sets of people. And without a system which ensures collaborative exchanges within the company, it’s also easy for small ‘pockets of innovation’ to disappear. Innovation is a contact sport. You can’t brief people just by saying, ‘We’re going in this direction and I’m going to take you with me.’

Cialdini believes that this ‘follow-the-leader syndrome is dangerous, not least because it encourages bosses to go it alone. ‘It’s been scientifically proven that three people will be better than one at solving problems, even if that one person is the smartest person in the field.’ To prove his point, Cialdini cites an interview with molecular biologist James Watson. Watson, together with Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA, the genetic information carrier of all living organisms. ‘When asked how they had cracked the code ahead of an array of highly accomplished rival investigators, he said something that stunned me. He said he and Crick had succeeded because they were aware that they weren’t the most intelligent of the scientists pursuing the answer. The smartest scientist was called Rosalind Franklin who, Watson said, “was so intelligent she rarely sought advice”.’

Writing, visualizing and prototyping can stimulate the flow of new ideas. Cialdini cites scores of research papers and historical events that prove that even something as simple as writing deepens every individual’s engagement in the project. It is, he says, the reason why all those competitions on breakfast cereal packets encouraged us to write in saying, in no more than 10 words: ‘I like Kellogg’s Com Flakes because… .’ The very act of writing makes us more likely to believe it.

Authority doesn’t have to inhibit innovation but it often does. Many theorists believe the ideal boss should lead from behind, taking pride in collective accomplishment and giving credit where it is due. Cialdini says: ‘Leaders should encourage everyone to contribute and simultaneously assure all concerned that every recommendation is important to making the right decision and will be given full attention.’ The frustrating thing about innovation is that there are many approaches, but no magic formula. However, a manager who wants to create a truly innovative culture can make their job a lot easier by recognizing these psychological realities.

【推荐2】How Female Farmers Are Feeding the World

The exact data on women in agriculture is difficult to pin down. There are variations between countries and agriculture data is challenging to collect. What is clear, however, is that most small-scale farmers are women, making up 60-80 percent of farmers in developing countries. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) estimates that between 43 percent to even 70 percent of agricultural labor in some countries comes from women.

But women still don’t have the same rights as men when it comes to farming, making food production harder for women because of gender inequality. For female farmers, it is unquestionably a challenging job to engage in food production.

In the first place, purchasing land, farming equipment and hiring labor can be expensive. These costs are even harder on women because many of them lack access to credit. In nearly 48 economies women face legal restrictions to having control of their own finances.

Getting to the bank is hard too. Mobility for women in rural parts of developing countries is a big concern. Better transportation and infrastructure could help make access to credit more practicable for women. Credit and finance should be equal for everyone, especially women who are held back by gender restrictions.

Sadly, women may run the world, but they do not own it. Women are virtually denied property rights. Traditional customs in place can pass down land through the male side of the family, leaving women out of land rights completely. Other times, women need permission from a male relative or husband to own land.

It has been apparent that women are not as productive farmers as men and work longer hours in some countries like Indonesia. This is largely due to a lack of education. When education is considered more valuable for men (and thus mainly given to men), women farmers are less informed about the best production methods, thus producing less yield in crops and becoming “less productive”. This can all be changed through providing education for women. Removing gender inequality can help feed 130 million people who are currently undernourished.

Despite these barriers, women are definitely not leaving the “field”. In countries experiencing urban growth, men are migrating to urban areas for other jobs while women stay in rural areas, taking on jobs in farming and agriculture. Healthier children, education, and investment into the community are all benefits that female farmers are shown to have on their communities.

Let’s close the gender gap and give women the tools they need to succeed. If women farmers in developing countries have the same rights and opportunities, they will be just as productive. With increasing population, and the need for better food security, supporting women in agriculture is something that cannot afford not to be invested in.

【推荐3】Did you ever have to say “no” to somebody? Such as a classmate who asks to go to lunch with you? New research suggests that, at least socially, a rejection (拒绝) should not include an apology. In other words, saying you are sorry does not make the person being rejected feel any better. In fact, it might make the rejected person feel worse. That is surprising. Many people consider it to be good manners to say they are sorry when they turn down a request.

Gili Freedman is doing some related research at Dartmouth College. For her research, she asked over 1,000 people to respond to different examples of social rejection. In one example, the researchers asked people for their reaction (反应）after a person named Taylor asked to join a co-worker who went out to lunch every Friday. And Taylor was told “no”. But in some cases, the person rejecting Taylor offered an apology. In other cases, the people doing the rejection did not say they were sorry. People were asked how they would feel if they were being turned down, just as Taylor was. Most said they would be more hurt by a rejection with an apology than a rejection without an apology.

Freedman said the reason is that apologies make people feel like they need to say that the rejection was okay— even when they felt like it was not okay. Rejection without an apology lets them express their feelings of disappointment, hurt or anger more easily. Freedman also said that an apology often makes the person doing the rejection feel better—even as it makes the person being rejected feel worse.

Her research deals only with social communication. A business situation might be very different. “If a manager rejects a job interviewee or a boss must tell an employee that he or she is being fired from a job,” Freedman said, “reactions to apologies may be different.”

【推荐2】Food is energy for the body. Digestive enzymes （酶） in the mouth, stomach and intestines （肠） break up complex food molecules into simpler structures that travel through the bloodstream to all our tissues. We calculate the available energy in all foods with a unit known as the food calorie. Fats provide approximately nine calories per gram, while carbohydrates and proteins deliver just four.

Every calorie count on every food label you have ever seen is based on these estimates. Yet these approximations assume that the 19th-century laboratory experiments on which they are based accurately reflect how much energy different people with different bodies get from many different kinds of food. New research has revealed that this assumption is, at best, far too simplistic. To accurately calculate the total calories that someone gets out of a given food, you would have to take into account more factors, including whether that food has evolved to survive digestion; how boiling, baking or microwaving a food changes its structure and chemistry; how much energy the body consumes to break down different kinds of food; and the extent to which the billions of bacteria aid human digestion and, conversely, steal some calories for themselves.

Nutrition scientists are beginning to learn enough to improve calorie labels, but digestion turns out to be such a fantastically complex and messy affair that we will probably never find a formula for an infallible calorie count.

Consider how vegetables vary in their digestibility. We eat the stems, leaves and roots of hundreds of different plants. The walls of plant cells in the stems and leaves of some species are much tougher than those in other species. Even within a single plant, the durability of cell walls can differ. Generally speaking, the weaker or more degraded the cell walls in the plant material we eat, the more calories we get from it.

Some plant parts have evolved adaptations either to make themselves more appetizing to animals or to escape digestion altogether. Fruits and nuts first evolved between 145 and 65 million years ago. Evolution favored fruits that were both tasty and easy to digest to better attract animals that could help plants scatter seeds. It also favored nuts and seeds that were hard to digest, however.

Finally, some foods make the immune system to identify and deal with any hitchhiking pathogens （病原体）. No one has seriously evaluated just how many calories this process involves, but it is probably quite a few. Even if our immune system does not attack any of the pathogens in our food, it still uses up energy to take the first step of distinguishing friend from foe. This is not to mention the potentially enormous calorie loss if a pathogen in uncooked meat leads to illness.

【推荐1】What makes a human being? Is it our thoughts? Our emotions? Our behavior?

All of these things make us who we are, but at the center of the matter is the genome(基因组) the genes inside our bodies that may determine everything from our hair color to our intelligence. But if we could change our genome, what would it mean to us?

In an online video posted on Nov. 26, He Jiankui, a biological researcher from Southern University of Science and Technology in China, said that he had helped to make the world’s first genetically edited babies.

These are twin girls, born in November, with genes edited in an attempt to help them resist possible future infection with the AIDS virus.

He said that he chose to do this because HIV infections are a big problem in China. “I feel such a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also to set an example,” He told the Associated Press(AP).

The announcement has caused an international storm.

Some believe that success will benefit the families of HIV patients. Given that HIV is “a major and growing public health threat,” attempted gene editing for HIV is “justifiable(无可非议的),” Harvard Medical School genetics professor George Church told AP.

However, others think that since gene editing technology is still premature, it is unsafe to attempt it.

“Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with unexpected mutations(突变), capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer.” Julian Savulescu, a specialist in ethics(伦理学) at the University of Oxford, told BBC News.

Others fear that this could open the door to using gene editing technology to make designer babies. It might give the parents the options to choose everything from their baby’s eye color to intelligence.

“You could find wealthy parents buying the latest ‘upgrades’(升级) for their children, leading to even greater inequality than we already live with,” Marcy Darnovsky, director of the San Francisco Center for Genetics, told BBC News.

However, Merlin Crossley, a biologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, believes that’s a long way off . According to him, many genes produce qualities like height and intelligence—not to mention environmental influences.

And he believes the technology will be better controlled in the future.

“It’s hard to get genies(妖怪) back into bottles... but I’m optimistic that this technology, which I think of as ‘genetic surgery’, could be regulated quite effectively in the future,” Crossley told BBC News.

【推荐2】Great work is work that makes a difference in people’s lives, writes David Sturt, Executive Vice President of the O.C. Tanner Institute, in his book Great Work: How to Make a Difference People Love. Sturt insists, however, that great work is not just for surgeons or special-needs educators or the founders of organizations trying to eliminate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The central theme of Great Work, according to Sturt, is that anyone can make a difference in any job. It’s not the nature of the job, but what you do with the job that counts. As proof, Sturt tells the story of a remarkable hospital cleaner named Moses.

In a building filled with doctors and nurses doing great life-saving work, Moses the cleaner makes a difference. Whenever he enters a room, especially a room with a sick child, he engages both patients and parents with his optimism and calm, introducing himself to the child and, Sturt writes, speaking “little comments about light and sunshine and making things clean.” He comments on any progress he sees day by day (“you’re sitting up today, that’s good.”) Moses is no doctor and doesn’t pretend to be, but he has witnessed hundreds of sick children recovering from painful surgery, and parents take comfort from his encouraging words. For Matt and Mindi, whose son McKay was born with only half of a heart, Moses became a close friend. As Sturt explains, “Moses took his innate (与生俱来的) talents (his sensitivity) and his practical wisdom (from years of hospital experience) and combined them into a powerful form of patient and family support that changed the critical-care experience for Mindi, Matt and little McKay.”

How do people like Moses do great work when so many people just work? That was the central question raised by Sturt and his team at the O.C. Tanner Institute, a consulting company specialized in employee recognition and rewards system.

O.C. Tanner launched an exhaustive Great Work study that included surveys to 200 senior executives, a further set of surveys to 1,000 managers and employees working on projects, an in-depth qualitative study of 1.7 million accounts of award-winning work (in the form of nominations (提名) for awards from corporations around the world), and one-on-one interviews with 200 difference makers. The results of the study revealed that those who do great work refuse to be defeated by the constraints of their jobs and are especially able to reframe their jobs: they don’t view their jobs as a list of tasks and responsibilities but see their jobs as opportunities to make a difference. No matter, as Moses so ably exemplifies (例证), what that job may be.

【推荐3】Imagine looking at a view of mountaintops and wondering about the name of each peak. Suddenly, above each mountaintop, a name appears on the sky. The words are not written in smoke by skywriting planes. The words are actually not in the sky at all. They come from tiny computers in contact lenses (隐形眼镜).

Computers have become smaller and smaller over the decades. The first computers filled houses. Transistors (晶体管) and then chips allowed computers to become small enough to fit on a desktop, then a laptop, and finally a phone. When experimenting with further contraction in size, developers often have to deal with the limits of human eyesight, which control how small the computers can be and still present visible information.

One new solution employs microprojectors (微型投影机) to create a readable display (显示) for tiny computers. These machines project computer information onto any surface. Though an impressive breakthrough, there are potential problems. Such public displays can lead to privacy concerns; most people do not want their information displayed on a wall for everyone to see. Besides, these projectors are extremely expensive, and their screens give users headaches.

Babak Parviz, a researcher at the University of Washington, created another solution: inventing a screen visible only to a person wearing a contact lens. Parviz created a computer in a contact lens that uses the wearer’s field of vision as the display. To create the display, Parviz took ordinary soft contact lenses with a wirelessly controlled system. At some point, Parviz says, it will be possible to connect the lens to a remote personal computer device such as a cellphone or a laptop. By looking in a certain direction, the wearer sends the computer visual information about what he or she sees. The device then uses this information to point out the names of peaks.

These contact lenses are inserted and removed in much the same way as ordinary contact lenses. In addition, the computers in the lenses won’t block the wearer’s sight at all. Although now the computers are not on lenses treating eyesight problems, Parviz hopes that someday the technology will progress to that level.

【推荐1】Smartphones are our constant companions. For many of us, their glowing screens are a ubiquitous (十分普遍的) presence, drawing us in with endless distractions. They are in our hands as soon as we wake, and command our attention until the final moments before we fall asleep.

Steve Jobs would not approve.

In 2007, Jobs took the stage and introduced the world to the iPhone. If you watch the full speech, you will be surprised by how he imagined our relationship should be with this iconic invention. This vision is so different from the way most of us use these devices now.

In his remarks, Jobs spent an extended amount of time demonstrating how the device utilized (应用) the touch screen before detailing the many ways Apple engineers had improved the age-old process of making phone calls. It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made,” Jobs exclaimed at one point. “The killer app is making calls,” he later added. Both lines drew thunderous applause.

The presentation confirms that Jobs imagined a simpler iPhone experience than the one we actually have more than a decade later. For example, there was no App Store when the iPhone was first introduced, and this was by design. Jobs was convinced that the phone’s carefully-designed native features were enough. He did not seek to completely change the rhythm of users’ daily lives. He simply wanted to take experiences we had already found important－listening to music, placing calls, generating directions－and make them better.

The minimalist (简约主义者) vision for the iPhone Jobs offered in 2007 is unrecognizable today－and that is a shame.

Under what I call the “constant companion model,” we now see our smartphones as always-on portals (通道) to information. We have become so used to it over the past decade that it is easy to forget the novelty (新奇之处) of the device. It seems increasingly clear to me that Jobs probably got it right from the very beginning: Many of us would be better-off returning to his original minimalist vision for our phones.

Practically speaking, to be a minimalist smartphone user means only using your device for a small number of features that do things of value to you. Otherwise, you simply put it away outside of these activities. This approach dethrones (废黜) this device from the position of a constant companion down to a luxury object, such as a fancy bike, that gives you great pleasure when you use it but does not dominate your entire day.

Early in his 2007 keynote, Jobs said, “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” What he didn’t add, however, was the follow-up promise: “Tomorrow we’re going to reinvent your life.” The smartphone is fantastic, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence.

If you return this innovation to its original role, you will get more out of both your phone and your life.

【推荐2】To learn to think is to learn to question. Those who don't question never truly think for themselves. These are simple rules that have governed the advancement of science and human thought since the beginning of time. Advancements are made when thinkers question theories and introduce new ones. Unfortunately, it is often the great and respected thinkers who end up slowing the progress of human thought. Aristotle was a brilliant philosopher whose theories explained much of the natural world, often incorrectly. He was so esteemed by the scientific community that even 1，200 years after his death, scientists were still trying to build upon his mistakes rather than correct them!

Brilliant minds can intimidate up­and­coming thinkers who are not confident of their abilities. They often believe they are inferior to the minds of giants such as Aristotle, leading many to accept current paradigms instead of questioning them.

I, like many thinkers of the past, once believed in my mental inferiority. I was certain that my parents, my teachers-adults in general-were always right. They were like a textbook to me; I didn't question what was written on those pages. I respected them, and accepted whatever they told me. But that attitude soon changed. My mind's independence was first stimulated in the classroom.

A stern, 65­year­old elementary­school science teacher once told me that light is a type of wave. I confidently went through years of school believing that light is a wave. One day，however I heard the German exchange student mention that light could be made up of particles. As the others laughed at his statement, I started to question my beliefs.

Maybe the teachers and textbooks hadn't given me the whole story. I went to the library, did some research and learned of the light­as­a­wave versus light­as­a­particle debate. I read about Einstein's discovery of the dual nature of light and learned the facts of a paradox(悖论) that puzzles the world's greatest thinkers to this day. Light behaves as both a particle and a wave, it is both at once. I realized I had gone through life accepting only half of the story as the whole truth.

Each new year brought more new facts, and I formulated even more questions. I found myself in the library after school, trying to find my own answers to gain a more complete understanding of what I thought I already knew. I discovered that my parents and teachers are incredible tools in my quest for knowledge, but they are never the final word. Even textbooks can be challenged. I learned to question my sources, I learned to be a thinker. I once believed that everything I learned at home and at school was certain, but I have now discovered to re­examine when necessary.

Questions are said to be the path to knowledge and truth, and I plan to continue questioning. How many things do we know for sure today that we will question in the future? At this moment, I know that our sun will burn for another five billion years, and I know nothing can escape the gravity of a black hole. This knowledge, however, may change in the next 20 years-maybe even in the next two. The one thing we can control now is our openness to discovery. Questions are the tools of open minds, and open minds are the key to intellectual advancement.

【推荐3】Financial regulations in Britain have imposed a rather unusual rule on the bosses of big banks. Starting next year, any guaranteed bonus of top executives could be delayed 10 years if their banks are under investigation for wrongdoing. The main purpose of this “clawback” rule is to hold bankers responsible for harmful risk-taking and to restore public trust in financial institution. Yet officials also hope for a much larger benefit: more long-term decision-making not only by banks but also by all corporations, to build a stronger economy for future generations.

“Short-termism” or the desire for quick profits, has worsened in publicly traded companies, says the Bank of England’s top economist, Andrew Haldane. He quotes a giant of classical economies, Alfred Marshall, in describing this financial impatience as acting like “Children who pick the strawberries out of their pudding to eat them at once” rather than putting them aside to be eaten last.

The average time for holding a stock in both the United States and Britain, he notes, has dropped from seven years to seven months in recent decades. Transient(短期的) investors, who demand high quarterly profits from companies, can hold back a firm’s efforts to invest in long-term research or to build up customer loyalty. This has been called “quarterly capitalism”.

In addition, new digital technologies have allowed more rapid trading of equities( 股 票 ), quicker use of information, and thus shortens attention spans in financial markets. “There seems to be an advantage of short-term thinking at the expense of long-term investing,” said Commissioner Daniel Gallagher of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in speech this week.

In the US, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has pushed most public companies to delay performance bonuses for senior executives by about a year, slightly helping reduce “short-termism.” In its latest survey of CEO pay, The Wall Street Journal finds that “a substantial part” of executive pay is now tied to performance.

Much more could be done to encourage “long-termism,” such as changes in the tax code and quicker disclosure(披露) of stock acquisitions. In France, shareholders who hold onto a company investment for at least two years can sometimes earn more voting rights in a company.

Within companies, the right compensation design can provide motivation for executives to think beyond their own time at the company and on behalf of all shareholders. Britain’s new rule is a reminder to bankers that society has an interest in their performance, not just for the short term but for the long term.