【推荐1】In the world of online shopping, many online purchases are based on careful consideration of star ratings and product reviews left by complete strangers. But should you trust customer reviews when deciding what to purchase? And do these mysterious reviewers have your best interests in mind? Here’s what you need to know.

Consumers today are skeptical, says Zach Pardes at review platform Trustpilot. “We live in a time when trust is completely under attack,” Pardes says. “So people are reading reviews and consuming them more than ever before, but I think there is a healthy skepticism at times of what they’re reading. Fake reviews do exist. Fake reviews include, but aren’t limited to, robot-generated reviews and reviews that are influenced by the seller.”

Of course, not all user reviews you read online are fake. High-quality reviews are a valuable too when making a variety or purchases. Pardes says Trustpilot features a team in place to detect and remove fake reviews. Perhaps one of the best-known review websites is Yelp. Yelp takes measures to ensure “high quality content,” says Katheen Liu, a company spokes person. That includes allowing Yelp’s community of business owners and users to fag content that may go against the site’s terms of service.

Since user reviews do provide helpful information, reviews as a whole shouldn’t be repudiated. But how can you tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not? It’s close to impossible for the everyday consumer. But if you conduct your investigations carefully, you can make an informed purchase.

Check more than one review source. Pardes advises consumers to read reviews on multiple platforms.“If you’re about to book a $10,000 vacation, you’d never rely only on the photos and the reviews posted by that hotel’s marketing team,” he says. “You’re going to want to use a third-party independent resource.” Read more than a handful of reviews. Pardes says there is “safety in numbers.” Question perfection. Pardes says consumers shouldn’t trust reviews that show only five stars.“Nobody’s perfect, so you can’t possibly have a perfect five-star review in every single category of your business,” he says.

【推荐2】Facebook's recent acknowledgment that social media may be making its users feel bad in some cases is a significant milestone. So far, the technology industry hardly has talked about the downsides of their products.

Academic research in a Facebook blog post in December documented that when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information, they feel worse. For example, clicking or liking too many links and posts can have a negative effect on mental health. Some researchers also believe that reading rosy stones about others leads to negative comparisons about one's life and that being online too much reduces in-person socializing. Social media may well be making many of us unhappy, jealous and anti-social. Although Facebook said that, as a result of the assessments, it would make some changes to its platform. It also highlighted some of the benefits of using the social network. It explained that “sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and recalling about past interactions” can make people feel better. “The research and other academic literature suggest that it’s how you use social media that matters when it comes to your well-being,” Facebook said.

But that approach doesn’t seem to be an effective solution for those who can’t pull themselves away from such platforms. The Pew Research Center estimates that 24 percent of teens go online “almost constantly”. It is becoming a matter of addiction.

We need to be aware of what we are up against. Remember when we would just pick up the phone and call someone rather than email them and create greater misunderstandings. This may be an old-fashioned choice, but the right one. And maybe we should just turn away from our screens sometimes and meet our friends and family in person.

【推荐3】Training monkeys to pick coconuts(椰子)is a 400-year-old practice in Thailand. Monkeys are superpickers, naturally at home in the tall coconut trees. Males can harvest over 1,000 coconuts a day, females around 600. Humans, on the other hand, are super-slow in the treetops, with a mere 80 coconuts a day to their name. However, it could be argued that monkeys are being exploited(剥削)to meet growing consumer demand for coconut products.

Throughout history, humans have used animal labor to increase productivity or make tasks more manageable. From horses pulling ploughs in the English countryside, donkeys carrying luggage on South American treks, drugsniffer dogs in the US to guide dogs literally everywhere—all of those animals were specifically raised and trained to do their “jobs”.

Perhaps what upsets people about monkeys picking coconuts is that monkeys are so much like us. We share 93% of our DNA with macaques(猕猴). We share many of their behavioral traits. So when we read about them being “abused” or “exploited”, we perhaps feel more strongly about the issue than we do about, say, parrots riding bicycles to entertain tourists in Spain.

According to Operation Blankets of Love(OBOL), a leading animal welfare organization in California, macaques are snatched from the wild as babies and chained up or stuck in cages, which makes them extremely stressed. They’re forced to pick coconuts for human gain and denied (拒绝给予)companionship, mental stimulation and basic freedom.

However, it’s important to note there is no concrete evidence of “baby-snatching” or mistreatment. It could even be argued that the process of training is mentally stimulating, which, being intelligent animals, the macaques would enjoy. Furthermore, coconut farmers insist the monkeys aren’t abused or exploited. They say the monkeys are treated like family pets: loved and cared for, fed and watered, bathed and decorated.

Ethical(伦理的)living can be a minefield in the modern age. But if we stick to the facts and live true to our individual values, we can’t go wrong.

【推荐3】New research found that children with positive, early interactions with their care givers - characterized by warmth, responsiveness, and a stimulating home environment -were at reduced risk of childhood obesity.

“A lot of the discussion around childhood obesity and other health risks focuses on identifying and studying the exposure to risk,” said Professor Brandi Rollins. ”We took a strength-based approach in our analysis. We found that a supportive family and environment early in a child’s life may outweigh some of the cumulative (累计的)risk factors that children can face. ”

The study recently appeared in the journal Pediatrics. In the article, Rollins analyzed data from over 1,000 mother-child pairs and found that children’s early exposures to family psychosocial assets (有价值的 事物)- including a quality home environment, emotional warmth from the mother, and a child’s ability to self-regulate - reduced the risk of developing childhood obesity.

“Research on parenting has shown that these types of family assets influence children’s behavior, academic success, career, and-not surprisingly - health,” Rollins said. “It’s inspiring to know that, by providing a loving, safe environment, we can reduce the risk that children will develop obesity.”

This work is based on research in parenting and child development. Responsive parenting, one of the family assets measured in the study, involves responding to children in a timely, sensitive, and age-appropriate manner based on the child’s presenting needs. This study focused on childhood obesity, but the researchers said that parents may improve many outcomes for their children by learning responsive-parenting skills. Knowledge of responsive-parenting skills, however, may not lead directly to implementing those skills in the home.

“No one can read a pamphlet (小册子) about cars and suddenly expect to drive,” said Rollins. “Driving is a skill that requires education and practice. The same is true of responsive parenting. Public health professionals, clinicians, and researchers must collaborate to help families develop psychosocial assets, including responsive parenting and a structured home environment. This could improve childhood obesity rates and other important quality-of-life outcomes,” she continued.

【推荐2】Ask any parents of young children whether they’ve ever felt overwhelmed (不堪重负的), and the answer will probably be — yes. Even in the most relaxed households there can be days when things seem to be out of control, leaving parents exhausted and annoyed. Kids often don’t have an off button or a quiet voice.

Common as this feeling is, there’s a personality trait (特点) that can make everyday family life more overwhelming for some parents. Roughly 20%-30% of the population are classed as being a highly sensitive person, according to a 2018 research. People who have it may find it hard to cope with bright lights and loud noise, and feel very stressful. It can also involve a stronger understanding of other people’s feelings — empathy (同情).

According to the psychologists, being highly sensitive is not a disorder but a personality trait — a way of responding to one’s environment. “Generally, highly sensitive people tend to react particularly strongly to sensory stimulation. They have stronger consciousness. They come to realize more details,” says Michael Pluess, a psychologist specializing in the study. “They will pick up on the moods of other people, have higher empathy, process things more deeply and pick up more about the environment. Deeply affected by what they see and feel, highly sensitive people are also easily overstimulated.”

The challenges highly sensitive parents face — including stress and overstimulation in a messy environment — can affect “high quality parenting”. In the early stages of parenthood, such parents report greater stress and find parenting more difficult than other parents do.

Fortunately, though, the trait also comes with certain advantages. Recent evidence suggests that while highly sensitive parents initially experienced high levels of stress, they showed improved parenting styles by the time their babies were nine months old. In the short term, sensitive people are more easily overwhelmed with change, but when it comes to parenting, highly sensitive parents have the potential to be exceptional. They can understand their children and respond to their needs quickly and appropriately.

Since parental overwhelm can affect anyone, whether highly sensitive or not, some of the coping strategies for highly sensitive people could benefit all parents.

【推荐3】Two and a half millennia ago, Socrates complained that writing would harm students. With a way to store ideas permanently and externally, they would no longer need to memorize. However, studies today have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to better understanding complex concepts.

For learning material by repetition, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The scribbling (涂鸦) on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page.

One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in note-taking. Students typing on computers wrote down almost twice as many words directly from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material. However, handwriting forces note-takers to process and organize ideas into their own words. This aids conceptual understanding at the moment of writing, resulting in better performance on tests.

Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have required more teaching of it. In Sweden there is a push for more handwriting and printed books and fewer devices. England’s national curriculum already includes the teaching of basic cursive writing (连写体) skills by age seven.

However, several school systems in America have gone so far as to ban most laptops. This is too extreme. Some students have disabilities that make handwriting especially hard. Nearly all will eventually need typing skills. Virginia Berninger, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, is a longtime advocate of handwriting. But she is not a purist; she says there are research tested benefits for “manuscript” print-style writing but also for typing.

Socrates may or may not have had a point about the downsides of writing. But no one would remember, much less care, if his student Plato had not noted it down for the benefit of future generations.