【推荐1】Many people try to make society change for the better. The real challenge is how to get good solutions to scale up(按比例放大)for major change. New research suggests that social change may depend on the relationship between beneficial behaviors and policies.

The research, conducted by the University of Maine, University of Vermont and Université Laval in Quebec, Canada, attempted to understand how society can accomplish major, transformative social change, particularly the kind of social change necessary to solve the growing problem of climate change.

The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without pol- icy support, such as a costly measure to relieve the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model, which simulates (模拟) a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers. That behavior, given the right conditions, can spread like viral, but not if the institutional costs are too high.

“Large-scale social change is not just policy or behavior, but the emergence of a new self- reinforcing (自我强化)system that combines both. This allows us to ask new questions, such as “how would a new pattern of behavior and policy spread?’” says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, lead author on the study.

The results showed that both behavioral change and policy change are required to achieve large-scale social change-and that they need to happen together. Though neither can get the job done on its own, policy change is especially critical. They found that sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy, thereby limiting beneficial social change overall.

In future research, the team aims to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.

【推荐2】The Internet is an amazing tool, especially for children who want to learn. But it also has dark side. Parents have to ask themselves, “When is the right time to let my child go online?”

This is a much bigger problem than it used to be. Now we live in a time when a family could have more than one computer. It is common for children to have their own computers or laptops. Some also have phones and tablets (平板电脑).

Parents do have difficulty in acting correctly. On the one hand, it would be foolish to keep children from the Internet as they can learn a lot from it. But on the other hand, parents shouldn’t let children do whatever they like on the Internet. The problem is that everybody is busy nowadays, and this is certainly true for parents. How many parents have the time to sit don with their kids when they do their homework online? Some do, but more are just not able to.

So at what age should children be allowed to use the Internet? According to a survey, the average age when parents allow their children to go online independently is about eight years old.

As a nonparent (无子女者)，I do find it hard to agree. I always believe that education is the key to success. However, I think children as young as eight may face a lot of dangers when they use the Internet without parents being around. So I think schools and parents have the responsibility to teach children not only how to use the Internet, but also how to do it safely.

【推荐1】If you’ve been painting for a while, you would have heard about some of the age-old “rules” that regularly go the rounds.

Regardless, we tend to love art for what it is and thank goodness— because art would have died out long ago if its success depended on whether the artists followed all the rules in making it. To be fair, a lot of rules are tried-and-true-procedures, ways of doing things that have proved their worth over time. But rules regarding composition (构图), tone and color are all there to be broken if we dare.

Black paint was almost banned by the Impressionists, who preferred to get their darks from mixtures rather than use black in any way. However, John Singer Sargent certainly used black, as did Turner (who is widely regarded as the father of Impressionism), and Renoir is quoted as saying ‘‘I’ve been for 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors is black”.

Even today, many artists will not consider using black paint and this has become one of the “rules”. You’ll often hear that “black is a dead color”— I don’t know who first used that phrase but it is so well-worn that it has become gospel (真理).

Black is still in the palettes (调色板) of many portrait artists and, interestingly, the Swedish artist Anders Zorn famously often used a palette of just black, white, vermilion and yellow ochre, and his paintings are anything but dead! It is well worth the time to look at Zorn’s limited-palette work and marvel at what can be obtained from those four colors.

I tend to use black in my rainy cityscapes. My favorite colors to use with black are some amazing grays that are possible without too much complication. The rebellion is already underway and black paint is being squeezed out of tubes all over the world.

Are you coming over to the dark side?