【推荐1】Just last year, the number of websites worldwide reached 1.8 billion. We are constantly surrounded by information and have countless sources of information available at our fingertips.     1     Being able to evaluate the credibility of information is an important skill used in school, work, and day-to-day life. The following tips will help you tell a good source from inaccurate ones.

Check the domain name.

Look at the three letters at the end of the site’s domain name, such as “edu” (educational), “gov” (government), “org” (nonprofit), and “com” (commercial). Generally, .edu and. gov websites are credible, but beware of sites that use these suffixes in an attempt to mislead.     2     Commercial websites, such as those of reputable news organizations, can also be good sources, but do some investigation to look for signs of reliability.

Check the Date.

    3     In some subject areas, such as the sciences, having current sources is essential; but in other fields, like the humanities, including older material is critical. If you need the most up-to-date information available, it’s probably best to keep clear old websites. One way to check: Look for a “last updated” date on the page or site.

Research the author.

A source is more credible if written by someone with achievements. If no author is named, the source should not be considered highly credible. However, if the author is presenting original work, evaluate the value of the ideas.     4     The history of science tells us that the big advances in sciences tend to come from outsiders, not the establishment.

    5    

If a site is poorly designed and amateurish, chances are it was created by amateurs. Odd look generally equals odd and rarely truthful news. Sloppy writing is another bad sign. Keep clear. But be careful: Just because a website is professionally designed doesn’t mean it’s reliable.

【推荐3】Many of the emails in our inboxes (收件箱) are not particularly important.     1     . So, here are five ways to manage those messages so that they don’t take you away from important tasks.

    2     . Turn off the alert that appears on your computer screen when you receive an email, and check and respond to messages at set times of the day. Give yourself a maximum of 30 minutes for each session. Manage your co-workers’, manager’s and customers’ expectations about how and when you will reply to them.

Choose “low-productivity” times. There are likely certain times of day when you do your best work, maybe in the morning or maybe late at night. Schedule an email check-in for your less productive times.     3     .

Turn emails into actions. If you need more than a few minutes to read or reply to an email, add it to your Action Program or To-Do List.

Use the garbage can.     4    . If you do, you run the risk of paying no attention to the important ones as your inbox grows, and of your inbox becoming harder and harder to man-age. Once you’ve replied to them, put the ones that you don’t need in the garbage can, and file the ones that you want to keep.

Sync (同步) up with your smartphone.     5    . This helps you to free up your computer from distractions. Then apply the advice we’ve given above to your personal device.

【推荐1】Too clever to be wise

I am not the calm, sensible person that I hope to be. It didn’t take much to discover this-just my answers to a couple of quick questions.

Here is the first: How many pairs did Moses take on the ark(方舟)? And the second: Jack is looking at Anne but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

It took me no seconds at all to answer the first: I couldn’t, but I thought the Bible would tell me. What I did not see, because I was too busy looking at the end of the question and not the premise(前提), was that the answer is zero. Moses was not busy building any arks; that was Noah.

As for Anne, George and Jack, I quickly concluded we could not know, because we had not been told the status of Anne.     1     If I had stopped to draw two diagrams of Jack, Anne and George looking at one another, I would have seen that no matter whether Anne was married, a married person was indeed looking at an unmarried one.

This is what the science writer David Robson has called “the intelligence trap”-our tendency to assume that general intelligence leads to good thinking. Actually, it doesn’t. It doesn’t protect us from cognitive biases(认知偏误)like the ones I have just demonstrated.     2     They seldom question their assumptions, learn from their mistakes, take advice or change their decisions when discovering new facts. Instead, they use their brainpower to skillfully defend their original positions.

    3    In health, 15% of all hospital diagnoses are wrong, often because they are made quickly and rarely rethought. In business, a reluctance to think through consequences, question optimism or challenge decisions leads to countless failures and some major disasters. Robson’s term for these failures is “functional stupidity”. These errors could be largely avoided if we could approach problems differently.

The intelligence trap is largely a cultural phenomenon. Western culture highly values quick decisions, dominant leadership and simple answers. From school onwards, they are taught to argue their case convincingly, persuade others to follow.     4    

The key insight is our pressing need to use intellectual humility, open-mindedness, curiosity and wide consultation, rather than the blind stubbornness and grandstanding(哗众取宠)that so often passes for judgement. It has never been more necessary to recognize and release ourselves from the intelligence trap.

【推荐2】Robots doing chores is nothing new, with Tesla having put forward its cool Optimus robot and DeepMind revealing its latest achievements in robotics. Recently, a robot called Mobile Aloha caught the attention of many at the beginning of 2024, with short videos of it cooking at someone’s home going viral in January.

Developed by a team of researchers at Stanford University in the US, the robot can handle everything for a dish, whether it is chopping(切) vegetables or cracking eggs.

It is also good at various household tasks like watering plants, petting cats, cleaning the floor and doing laundry. It even knows to shake the pillow after putting on a pillowcase (枕套). An Internet user joked under one video that as long as this thing doesn’t try to kill him while he is asleep, he is in real need of it.

However, a following video posted by one of the researchers, Tony Zhao, and showing Mobile Aloha’s failures proved that the idea of having a robot servant may just be wishful thinking. In the video, Mobile Aloha randomly smashed(打碎) glasses and plates, collided(碰撞) with cabinets(橱柜) and even burned a pot.

It turns out that Mobile Aloha is not a complete self-learning system that can independently navigate new environments. It relies on demonstrations by human operators in its surroundings, meaning that the robot needs to learn from human behavior before completing each task. Also, according to the team, the robot achieves a 95 percent success rate in wiping red wine stains(污渍), 80 percent in pushing chairs, and a me re 40 percent in frying shrimp(虾). In short, it’s far from perfect.

The behavioral problems of AI robots have been bothering scientists for decades. Although AI robots do pretty well in things requiring high-level reasoning like math, they perform worse than a one-year-old child when it comes to simple tasks demanding abilities of perception, reflexes(反射) and mobility, among others.

As the team observed, the interaction between the arm and the base of Mobile Aloha would get quite complex if more flexibility is required in a task. Even a slight deviation(偏差) in the base settings might lead to significant drift in the arms’ motions, resulting in failure to complete the task.