【推荐1】In the days before the Internet, critical thinking was the most important skill of informed citizens. But in the digital age, according to Anastasia Kozyreva, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development, and her colleagues, an even more important skill is critical ignoring.

As the researchers point out, we live in an attention economy where content producers on the Internet compete for our attention. They attract us with a lot of emotional and eye-catching stories while providing little useful information, so they can expose us to profit-generating advertisements. Therefore,we are no longer customers but products, and each link we click is a sale of our time and attention. Toprotect ourselves from this, Kozyreva advocates for learning the skill of critical ignoring, in which readers intentionally control their information environment to reduce exposure to false and low-quality information.

According to Kozyreva, critical ignoring comprises three strategies. The first is to design ourenvironments, which involves the removal of low-quality yet hard-to-resist information from around. Successful dieters need to keep unhealthy food out of their homes. Likewise, we need to set up a digital environment where attention-grabbing items are kept out of sight. As with dieting, if one tries to bank onwillpower not to click eye-catching “news”, he’ll surely fail. So, it’s better to just keep them out of sightto begin with.

The next is to evaluate the reliability of information, whose purpose is to protect you from false and misleading information. It can be realized by checking the source in the mainstream news agencies which have their reputations for being trustworthy.

The last goes by the phrase “do not feed the trolls.” Trolls are actors who internationally spread false and hurtful information online to cause harm. It may be appealing to respond to them to set the facts straight, but trolls just care about annoying others rather than facts. So, it’s best not to reward their bad behaviour with our attention.

By sharpening our critical ignoring skills in these ways, we can make the most of the Internet while avoiding falling victim to those who try to control our attention, time, and minds.

【推荐2】Happy, angry, amazed—these are some of the emotions we like to express these days when we’re sending a message on our smartphones! That’s why many of us now add little pictures to our texts to brighten up someone’s mobile screen but we’re also using them as a quick way of telling someone how we’re feeling. Yes, emojis (表情符号) have become a popular tool for communication.

The emoji was first invented in Japan in the late 1990s and the word “emoji” comes from the Japanese words for “picture” and “character”. The number of different images has greatly increased since then and now we have a picture for nearly every mood or situation.

Why are emojis widely used today? Professor Vyv Evans says, “Increasingly, what we’re finding is that digital communication is replacing face-to-face talk in some ways. One of the reasons why emojis are so interesting is that they really do enable us to express our emotional selves much more effectively.”

Another advantage of emojis is that they are an international language—they don’t use words but tell a message with pictures so they can be easily understood whatever your native language is.

But as linguist (语言学家) Neil Cohn says, “To many, emojis are an exciting evolution (进化) of the way we communicate; but to others, they are linguistic Armageddon.” It does show by using emojis, there is a lot more to our communication than words alone, but does this also mean that the traditional writing will die out one day?

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【推荐3】Like infectious diseases, ideas in the academic world are epidemic (传染的). But why some travel far and wide while equally good ones has been a mystery? Now a team of computer scientists has used an epidemiological model to simulate (模仿) how ideas move from one academic institution to another. The model showed that ideas originating at famous institutions caused bigger “epidemics” than equally good ideas from less famous places, explains Allison Morgan, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“This implies that where an idea is born shapes how far it spreads,” says senior author Aaron Clauset.

Not only is this unfair— “it reveals a big weakness in how we’re doing science,” says Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon university, who was not involved in the study. “There are many highly trained people with good ideas who do not end up at top institutions. They are producing good ideas, and we know those ideas are getting lost,” DeDeo says. “Our science, our scholarships, is not as good because of this.”

The Colorado researchers first looked at how five big ideas in computer science spread to new institutions. They found that hiring a new faculty member accounted for this movement a little more than a third of the time--and in 81 percent of those cases, transmissions took place from higher – to lower-prestige (声望) universities. Then the team simulated the spread of ideas using an infectious disease model and found that the size of an idea “epidemic” depended on the prestige of the originating institution.

The researchers’ model suggests that there “may be a number of quite good ideas that originate in the middle of the pack, in terms of universities.” Clauset says. There is a lot of good work coming out of less famous places. he says: “You can learn a huge amount from it, and you can learn things that other people don’t know because they’re not even paying attention.”

【推荐2】US food author M.F. K. Fisher once wrote about humans, “First we eat, then we do everything else.”

This is why each year we celebrate World Food Day, which falls on Oct. 16. But despite the importance of food around the world, food cultures often differ greatly from country to country. For example, things like chicken feet, duck heads, and pig brains are commonly eaten in Asia. If you asked most Westerners to try one of these things, though, the very thought would probably be enough to make them give up meat altogether.

At the same time, however, the majority of people in Western nations regard themselves as meat eaters. So, what could be the reason behind this double standard?

There are a number of possible answers to that question, yet one major reason could lie in recent cultural changes. During the mid-20th century and the years following it, eating most parts of an animal was common in many Western countries such as the UK—perhaps owing to rationing(定量配给) as a result of World War(1939-1945).

But later, during the 1960s and 70s, following the introduction of highways in the US and the UK, the popularity of supermarkets in those countries increased, wrote Francesco Burnett, author of Cultural History of Meat: 1900-The Present.

Thanks to the popularity and convenience of supermarkets which tend not to sell animal parts such as the head or limbs(四肢), the public’s attitude of meat soon shifted. “The ‘animal’ gradually disappeared from meat, and people’s ignorance about what animal the meat they ate came from increased.” Burnett added.

As a result, it’s believed that many Western cultures slowly began to view meat as simply a food product, rather than as something that came from an animal.

However, this theory may go even further back if we look at the words the English language uses to describe meat. “We ‘de-animalize’ certain foods that we eat by giving them different names,” Hal Herzog, author of Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals, told online magazine Grist. “We don’t say it’s cooked pig; we say it’s pork. And we don’t say hamburger is made of cow; we say it’s made of beef.”

So it seems that there’s not one simple answer to this question. When it comes to eating meat, however, perhaps we should simply just enjoy the taste.