【推荐1】Modern life is full of things that can influence your ability to be sensitive and responsive to your child. These include extra work, lack of sleep, and things like mobile devices. Some experts are concerned about the effects that distracted (分心) parenting may have on emotional bonding and children’s language development, social interaction, and safety.

If parents are inconsistently available, kids can get distressed and feel hurt, rejected, or ignored. They may have more emotional outbursts and feel alone. They may even stop trying to compete for their parent’s attention and start to lose emotional connections to their parents.

“There are times when kids really do need your attention and want your recognition,” explains Crnic, a psychologist. “Parents need to communicate that their kids are valuable and important, and children need to know that parents care what they’re doing,” he says.

It can be tough to respond with sensitivity during tantrums, arguments, or other challenging times with your kids. “If parents respond by being bad-tempered or aggressive themselves, children can copy that behavior, and a negative cycle then continues to upgrade,” explains Dr. Carol Metzler, who studies parenting at the Oregon Research Institute.

According to Crnic, kids start to regulate their own emotions and behavior around age three. Up until then, they depend more on you to help them regulate their emotions, whether to calm them or help get them excited. “They’re watching you to see how you do it and listening to how you talk to them about it,” he explains. “Parents need to be good self-regulators. You’re not only trying to regulate your own emotions in the moment, but helping your child learn to manage their emotions and behavior.”

As kids become better at managing their feelings and behavior, it’s important to help them develop coping skills, like active problem solving. Such skills can help them feel confident in handling what comes their way.

“When parents engage positively with their children, teaching them the behaviors and skills that they need to cope with the world, children learn to follow rules and regulate their own feelings,” Metzler says.

【推荐1】Researchers from North Carolina State University have designed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that is better able to predict how much students are learning in educational games. The improved model, which uses an AI training concept named multi-task learning, could be used to improve both instruction and learning outcomes.

“We wanted the model to be able to predict whether a student would answer each question on a test correctly, based on the student’s behavior while playing an educational game called Crystal Island,” says Jonathan Rowe, co-author of a paper on the work.

“The standard approach for solving this problem looks only at overall test score,” Rowe says. “In our multi-task learning framework, the model has 17 tasks — because the test has 17 questions.”

The researchers collected gameplay and testing data from 181 students. The AI could look at each student’s game- play and how each student answered Question 1 on the test. By identifying common behaviors of students who answered Question 1 correctly, and those of students who got Question 1 wrong, the AI could determine how a new student would answer Question 1.

This function is performed for every question at the same time. The gameplay being reviewed for a given student is the same, but the AI looks at that behavior in Question 2, Question 3, and so on.

The researchers found that the multi-task model was about 10 percent more accurate than other models that relied on conventional AI training methods.

“We expect that this type of model could tell teachers when a student’s gameplay suggests the student may need additional instruction. It’s also expected to facilitate adaptive gameplay features in the game itself. For example, altering a storyline in order to revisit the concepts that a student is struggling with.” says Michael Geden, first author of the paper.

“Psychology has long recognized that different questions have different values,” Geden says. “Our work here takes an interdisciplinary ( 跨学科的) approach that marries this aspect of psychology with deep learning and machine learning approaches to AI.”

“This also opens the door to incorporating more complex modeling techniques into educational software.” says Andrew Emerson, co-author of the paper.

【推荐3】Genetic testing companies have a long history of creative attempts to reach the mainstream. An early example was the sequencing of rock star Ozzy Osbourne’s genes in 2010, with accompanying guess about how they might have influenced his drug habits.

Lately, such projects have taken on a new, highly commercialized tendency. In 2017, we got the “Marmite (马麦酱) gene project,” run by London-based genetic testing start-up DNAfit. It claims to show that love or hate for Marmite was in our genes. The project turned into a full-blown marketing campaign, and even sold Marmite-branded DNA testing tools.

DNAfit is now working with Mercedes-Benz to find out whether specific genetic traits are associated with business wisdom. AncestryDNA, the world’s largest consumer genetic testing company, last year teamed up with Spotify to promote “music tailored to your DNA.” Just a few weeks ago, 23andMe, the second largest, announced a partnership with Airbnb to provide genetically tailored travel experiences, also inspired by ancestral DNA.

I have skin in this game. I run a genetic-testing start-up that connects people who want their genome sequenced with researchers who want data to improve their understanding of genetic disease. I believe that broadening access to DNA testing can be a powerful force for good, providing safer, more effective medicines and giving people more power over their healthcare. But these campaigns risk discrediting the industry, by giving a misleading impression of what genetics can and can't say and its role in determining behaviours and personal preferences.

Take the Marmite study. It covered 261 people — tiny, by the standards of the field. It was published not in a journal, but online on bioRxiv, a server where scientists typically put results before peer-review. Shortly after, researchers looked at the genetic data of more than 500 times as many people in the UK Biobank and found no such correlation. A large peer-reviewed study in 2013 found no significant link between genes and business common sense.

We need to inform the public about what this is all about: that is, the gathering of large amounts of genetic data. We need better regulation to ensure that consumers are clear that this may happen with this sensitive personal information. A checkbox on a 20-page web document full of legal terms should not be enough.

Scientists too, need to start asking hard questions about whether the information they are using has been sourced ethically. DNA testing has a great future, but we can't build this future with data acquired by any means.