【推荐1】“Heaven is where the police are English,the cooks are French the mechanics are German,the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss.Hell is where the.police are German,the cooks are English,the mechanics are French,the lovers are Swiss,and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Obviously the national stereotypes（模式化的思想）in this,old joke are generalizations,but such stereotypes are often said to "exist for a reason".Is there actually a sliver of truth in them?Not likely,an international research team now says.

"National and cultural stereotypes do play an important role in how people see themselves and others,and being aware that these are not dependable is a useful thing,"said study author Robert McCrae of the National Institute on Aging."These are in fact unfounded stereotypes.They don't come from looking around you,"McCrae said.

If national stereotypes aren't rooted in real experiences,then where do they come from?One possibility is that they reflect national values,which may become known from historical events.For example,many historians have argued that the spirit of American individualism has its origins in the experiences of the pioneers on the Old West.

We may be "hard-wired",to some degree,to keep incorrect stereotypes,since we are less likely to notice and remember information that is different from our stereotypes.Generally,according to Robins,when we meet people who are different from our stereotypes,we see them as unique individuals rather than typical national or cultural groups.

【推荐2】We live in a world of countless reminders, and constant push notifications (通知). Every service seems to be competing for our attention all the time. As it turns out, all this distraction may come at a massive cost, but you don’t even realize it.

The findings from new research at Ohio State University were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Dozens of participants were given a simple-sounding task. Look at a screen of four colored squares. One will be outlined in white-pay attention to that one. After these squares flash on the screen for a mere tenth of a second, pick the color that you remember from a color wheel.

Despite the rapid speed of such work, the human brain excels (擅长) at this task. “People are quite good at this, surprisingly good!” says Julie Golumb, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

They got quite good at it, to a point. Researchers threw a wrench by introducing an intentional distractor. Of the four squares, one would be outlined in white, but then another — the distractor — would be surrounded in white dots. Despite being instructed to ignore the distractor, subjects just couldn’t help it. Most of the time, they still recalled the color. But about20% to 30% of the time, they actually reported the distractor color as the correct one, unaware of the error.

As Golumb emphasizes, findings like these are a big deal. We’ve long known balancing too many tasks can slow down our thinking. But the fact that it can literally recolor our memories should give us pause, because there’s not a fundamental difference between colored squares and real versus fake news headlines on social media．

“If you’re trying to pay attention to multiple things, you’re not going to be as good at if it were one at a time,” she says. “We’ve known for a long-time multitasking might slow you down, but our research shows, it’s not just you might be slowed down; it might affect what you’re perceiving in the moment.”

【推荐3】Rather than building new homes to help satisfy housing markets, a new study says that taxing empty homes in big cities could increase housing affordability for local residents while generating income for the governments.

During the past 20 years, housing affordability has decreased significantly in the UK due to a rapid increase in prices relative to earnings. This may be due to foreign investors buying out properties in cities such as London, or from British citizens in the countryside buying out second homes in the city, which reduces the availability of affordable housing for local residents.

This means that local citizens who actually live in the city are forced to pay more money for housing in neighborhoods that are filled with homes that are unoccupied for more than half of the year.

In a study that was published recently,researcher Jonathan Bourne at University College London studied the relationship between the amount of properties which do not have permanent residents, and housing affordability in different parts of England and Wales. Upon researching the data, which represents about 40% of the population.the researcher was stunned to find that there were over 340,000 empty apartments across the places.

Though some cities are trying to meet housing demands by building more housing. Bourne suggests that local governments put an empty homes tax of 1% instead. “The data shows that empty homes are very concentrated in small numbers of desirable areas. In such cases simply building more homes is not going to solve the problem.as the issue is severe competition for property, not a lack of places to live." says Bourne.

Vancouver introduced a similar empty homes tax in 2017,which was the first oi its kind in North America. One year after it went into effect. the city reported a 15% decrease in unoccupied homes,which amounted to 163 properties being rented out to local people. Furthermore, the tax raised more than $ 38 million in city revenue(税收），all of which was spent on affordable housing programs.