【推荐1】Every day, millions of shoppers hit the stores in full force, searching wildly for the perfect gift. Aside from purchasing holiday gifts, most people regularly buy presents for other occasions throughout the year, including weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. This frequent experience of gift-giving can cause uncertain feelings in gift-givers. Many enjoy the opportunity to buy presents because gift-giving offers a powerful means to build stronger bonds, while many worry that their purchases will disappoint rather than delight the intended recipients (接受者).

Anthropologists describe gift-giving as a positive social process, serving various political, religious, and psychological functions. Economists, however, offer a less favorable view. According to Waldfogel, gift-giving represents an objective waste of resources. People buy gifts that recipients would not choose to buy on their own, or at least not spend as much money to purchase (a phenomenon referred to as ‘‘the deadweight loss of Christmas”).

What is surprising is that gift-givers have much experience acting as both gift-givers and gift-recipients, but nevertheless tend to overspend each time they set out to purchase a meaningful gift. In the present research, we propose a unique psychological explanation for this overspending problem — gift-givers link how much they spend with how much recipients will appreciate the gift. Though it seems natural to gift-givers, such an assumption may be unfounded. Indeed, we propose that gift-recipients will be less likely to base their feelings of appreciation on the value of a gift than givers assume.

Why do gift-givers assume that gift price is closely linked to gift-recipients’ feelings of appreciation? Perhaps givers believe that more expensive gifts communicate a stronger sense of thoughtfulness and consideration. According to Camerer and others, gift-giving represents a symbolic ritual (习俗), by which gift-givers attempt to signal their positive attitudes towards the recipient and their willingness to invest resources in a future relationship. In this sense, gift-givers may be motivated to spend more money on a gift in order to send a “stronger signal”. As for gift-recipients, they may not interpret smaller and larger gifts as representing smaller and larger signals of thoughtfulness and consideration.

The idea of gift-givers and gift-recipients being unable to account for the other party’s viewpoint seems confusing because people slip in and out of these roles every day. Yet, despite the experience as both givers and receivers, people often struggle to apply information gained from one role in another. In theoretical terms, people fail to use information about their own preferences and experiences to produce more efficient outcomes in their exchange relations. In practical terms, people spend hundreds of dollars each year on gifts, but somehow never learn to estimate their gift expense according to personal insight.

【推荐2】Most cities were built on rivers. People originally settled in Paris because of the Seine, and in London for the Thames. A third of New York City's surface area is water. For centuries, city folk used rivers for shipping, wastes, fishing and play.

The Industrial Revolution ruined rivers for more than a century. Huge new urban populations overwhelmed them with the pollution from wastes, factories and ships.

In recent decades, rivers lost their industrial function and cities began cleaning them up. The Thames is now the cleanest it has been in 150 years and proud of seals and the occasional whale, sometimes alive. In cities from Chicago to provincial China, dirty riverside warehouses have been turned into restaurants and apartments.

But rivers also need to regain their original purpose as transport centers. Cities are shifting more traffic back to the river—but this time cleanly and silently, using the coming generation of electric ferries. Ferries already transport 2.1 billion passengers a year. Numbers have been rising in San Francisco, New York and Sydney, while London plans to double its annual total of riders to 20 million by 2035.

Imagine using the huge capacity of shipping to take delivery trucks off the roads. One of the newer Thames boat with a capacity of 1,750 tons can replace 44 large trucks. Even without being electric-powered, it uses much less energy per ton and causes less noise pollution.

In other words, we need to turn truck drivers into boat captains. Delivery companies will need to build new distribution centres on cheap riverside land. When their boats stop at the new downtown wharves, electric cargo bikes will deliver packages the last mile.

Boat-to-bike is more complicated than delivery by truck, because it adds a stage. You might have to pay more to get your parcels the same day. As for the advantage, it will unblock city centres. Rivers are the reason our cities are where they are. We just forgot about them.

【推荐1】Can you imagine there being a community where boys and girls growing up together can finally speak different 1anguages? In Ubang, Nigeria, it really happens. It’s not exactly clear what percentage of the words in the men’s and women’s languages are different, but there are enough examples to make sentences sound different when spoken by the opposite sex. For “clothing”, men use the word “nki”, while women say “ariga”; “kitchi” means tree for men, while women say “okweng”. These are not just some slight pronunciation differences, but totally different words. “It’s almost like two different lexicons (词汇集),” a language expert, Chi Chi Undie said. “There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, but there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don’t sound alike, and don’t have the same letters. They are completely different words.”

Interestingly, both men and women are able to understand each other perfectly in Ubang, as both boys and girls grow up around their parents and get to learn both languages, but by the age of 10, boys are expected to speak in the male tongue. It seems that there is a stage the male will reach and he discovers he is not using the rightful language. When he starts speaking the men’s language, you know the maturity is coming into him.

No one really knows how or why the double-language tradition of Ubang began. Chi Chi Undie believes the two languages are the result of a “double-sex culture” where men and women operate and live in separate worlds that rarely come together. However, she admits this is a weak theory, as the double-sex culture is present in many parts of Africa, where there are no different languages for men and women.

Today, with English words constantly entering the lexicon of young Nigerians, Ubang’s two languages are in danger of being lost forever. Worse still, neither the male nor female language is written down, so they both rely on young people passing them down to the next generation.

【推荐2】Language is in a constant state of change. British English shows this clearly. Take the word “Cheerio!” for example. It has been a British way to say goodbye for more than a century, but it’s dying out as the English language evolves. These days, many young people simply say “laters”. Or take the word “marvelous”. At one time it was a common British word meaning “wonderful”, but over the last ten years it’s been overtaken by the American word “awesome”.

So how and why do words come into and fall out of fashion? The influence of US culture is only one explanation for why popular words in British English may change or even stop being used over time. “Awesome” is a good example, but also “fortnight”, a term not used in the US, is now falling out of fashion in British English, and in some cases has been replaced by “two weeks”.

New inventions also bring in new words. As old inventions are replaced by new ones, the words which described them also disappear and are replaced. So it’s out with the “Walkman” (a cassette player from the 80s) and in with MP4 players!

Then there’s the influence of social media. Text messages and emails have reduced words for convenience, with something like ICYMI (“in case you missed it”) becoming words in their own right. Where “friend” was once a noun, we now “friend someone on Facebook” and where we used to “love” something, now we’re “loving it”!

【推荐3】It’s possible that interstellar space explorers arriving on another planet come across problems communicating with previous and subsequent arrivals, as their spoken language has changed in isolation along the way.

Regarding the issue, two American scholars, Andrew McKenzie and Jeffrey Punske, co-authored the article “Language Development During Interstellar Travel”. What has been discussed in the article is the concept of language change over time. They wrote that given more time, new grammatical forms can completely replace current ones.

In a recent interview, McKenzie explained it. “If you’re on a spaceship for 10 generations, new concepts will emerge, new social issues will come up, and people will create ways of talking about them, ” McKenzie said, “and these will become the vocabulary particular to the spaceship. People on Earth might never know about these words, unless there’s a reason to tell them. And the further away you get, the less you’re going to talk to people back home.”

“So if we have Earth English and spaceship English, and they become different over the years, you will have to learn a little Earth English to send messages back or to read the instruction manuals and information that come with the spaceship.”

“Also, keep in mind that the language back on Earth is going to change, too, during that time. So they may well be communicating like we’d be using Latin — communicating with this version of the language nobody uses.”

McKenzie and Punske also pointed out that an adaptation in the form of sign language will be needed for use with and among those working on the spaceship who are sure to be born deaf.

There will be a need for an informed linguistic policy on board that can be maintained without referring back to Earth-based regulations.

The authors concluded that if a study of the linguistic changes aboard a spaceship could be performed, it would add to its scientific value.