【推荐1】All across America, students are anxiously finishing their “What I Want To Be …” college application essays, advised to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by experts and parents who insist that’s the only way to become workforce ready. But two recent studies of workplace success contradict the traditional wisdom about “hard skills”.

Google originally set its hiring systems to sort for computer science students with top grades from top science universities. In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring theory by quickly dealing with large amounts hiring, firing, and promotion data collected since the company’s establishment.

Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM capability comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing comprehension into others; being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those characteristics sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in more experts to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs (Master of Business Adminstration).

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments. Project Aristotle analyzes data on inventive and productive teams. Google takes pride in its A-teams, assembled with top scientists, each with the most specialized knowledge and able to throw down one creative idea after another. Its data analysis revealed, however, that the company’s most important and productive new ideas come from B-teams comprised of employees who don’t always have to be the smartest people in the room.

Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, understanding, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.

STEM skills are vital to the world we live in today, but technology alone, as Steve Jobs famously insisted, is not enough. We desperately need those who are educated to the human, cultural, and social as well as the computational.

【推荐2】It is said that there are about 40,000 different kinds of jobs in the world.     1      “Finding a job” is not the same as “choosing a job”. Many young people end up in a job which they are not suitable for.      2       Here are a few steps to help you think abut jobs which you might enjoy doing after school or university.

First, it is important to realize what kind of person you are, which special qualities make you different from everyone else and what you are interested in.      3      If you like art and enjoy looking at pictures,   that is an interest. But if you can draw a horse that looks like a horse instead of a big dog, that is a skill.

Then ask yourself this question: in the following three areas—skills with people, skills with information and skills with things—which are your best skills?

After examining your skill, the next step is research. To find out as many different kinds of jobs as possible, go to the library and read books, magazines and newspapers.      4    

Finally, trust your own ideas and your own thinking!      5    

【推荐3】The release of GPT-4, the latest language model developed by Open AI, has raised concerns about its potential impact on the job market. In the finance industry, fears around AI disruption are particularly severe, as many jobs involve the processing of data that could easily be done by machines.

This has prompted questions about what it means for the CFA Institute, which offers chartered financial analyst qualifications to humans who pay a considerable fee to take the exams. If an AI algorithm (算法) can pass the CFA exam, it could threaten the CFA Institute’s revenue (收入) model and potentially affect several hundred thousand bank employees.

However, recent experiments have shown that GPT-4 is not yet capable of passing the CFA exam. The simulation scored only 8 out of a possible 24 points, demonstrating that faking logical thought is very different from fake reasoning through the application of arbitrary rules and definitions. Humans still retain an upper hand in this area.

The CFA exam relies heavily on memorization and pattern matching, rather than processing the meaning of each question. This has allowed humans to continue to excel at the exam compared to machines that rely on algorithms and logical deductions (推理).

While the development of advanced AI may pose a threat to some industries, including finance, it appears that in the case of CFA accreditation, humans still have the upper hand. For now, those working in financial regulations and those responsible for setting exams in this field can breathe a small sigh of relief knowing their jobs are safe — at least for a little while longer.

In conclusion, the release of GPT-4 has sparked concerns about its potential to disturb the job market, especially in finance. However, experiments have demonstrated that AI still has limitations, particularly in areas requiring fake reasoning through memorized answers. While this news may reassure those in the finance industry, there is no denying that AI technology continues to transform many aspects of work and life.

【推荐2】In the last decade great changes have taken place in the way that scientists think about the brain. We now know that the origins of the decisions humans make lie in the firing patterns of neurons (神经元) in specific parts of the brain. These discoveries have led to the field known as neuroeconomics, which studies the brain's secrets to success in an economic environment that requires innovation (创新) and being able to do things differently from competitors. A brain that can do this is an iconoclastic one. Briefly, an iconoclast is a person who does something that others can't do. Neuroscientists have suggested that iconoclastic brains are different in three ways: perception (感知)，the fear response and social negligence.

The best way to see things differently is to flood the brain with things it has never experienced before. Freshness forces the brain to make new judgments. Successful iconoclasts have an extraordinary willingness to be exposed to what is fresh while most people avoid things that are different.

The problem with freshness, however, is that it tends to set off the brain's fear system. There are many types of fear, but the two that prevent iconoclastic thinking are fear of uncertainty and fear of public ridicule (嘲笑) . These fears may not seem like something to be worried about. But the fear of public speaking, which everyone must experience from time to time, troubles one-third of the population. It is simply a common feature of human nature, one which iconoclasts do not let stop their reactions.

Finally, to be successful iconoclasts, individuals must sell their ideas to other people. This is where social intelligence—the ability to understand and manage people in a business setting- comes in. Neuroscience has shown which brain parts are responsible for functions like empathy (the ability to sense and understand someone else's feelings as if they were one's own) and fairness. These brain areas play key roles in whether people convince others of their ideas.

Iconoclasts supply innovation and create new opportunities in every area, which are not easily achieved by others. It is important for success in any field to understand how the iconoclastic mind works.

【推荐3】As levels of carbon dioxide - CO₂ - in the atmosphere have been rising in recent decades, Earth has been warming. That’s because as a greenhouse gas, CO₂ traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere. That warming is one symptom of climate change. And it has the potential to affect food in many ways. Data now show that rising levels of CO₂ also can affect how nutritious a crop will be. Some of those data were reported last year in Annual Review of Public Health. Indeed, it noted that several studies have come to this conclusion.

Samuel Myers is an environmental health scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He was part of a team that has studied the potential effects of climate change on nutrition. In one 2014 study, his group looked at six major food crops: wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize (corn) and sorghum. They exposed plants to different amounts of CO₂. Some got levels of between 363 and 386 parts per million (ppm), which were typical at that time. (CO₂ levels have since risen.) Other plants were exposed to more of that greenhouse gas as they grew — 546 to 586 ppm. Such levels are expected to develop within the next 50 years or so.

After harvesting the plants, the researchers measured their levels of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. And plants grown with more CO₂ were less nutritious. Most people depend on cereal crops, such as wheat and rice, to meet their dietary needs for both zinc and iron. If crop levels of such nutrients fall, people may face an even greater risk of falling ill.

Scientists don’t yet know why CO₂ impacts levels of these nutrients. But the new findings suggest scientists may want to try breeding new varieties of crops that are less affected by CO₂. That way people will still get the most benefits from their greens and grains.