1 . “Blame My Brain” by Nicola Morgan, reviewed by Rosalie Warren

As someone who constantly blames my brain for all sorts of things (not my fault — my brain did it!), I was _______ by the title of Nicola Morgan’s book and only slightly disappointed to learn that it was _______ teenagers. Since I have many days when I feel that I am barely out of my teens (though the mirror, sadly, does not bear this out), I decided that the book might still be relevant to me, and indeed to my relationships with my no-longer-teenage children.

The subtitle is “The amazing teenage brain revealed” and amazing is, I soon _______, exactly what the teenage brain is. I learned that one of the things that _______ to the brain in our early teenage years is a flurry of growth of the dendrites (connections between neurons), followed a few years later by a major pruning session where many of the relatively unused connections are culled and the remaining ones are strengthened and coated with a fatty myelin layer ready for adult life. Not _______, all this activity is not without its downside for the person “within”, and it goes along way towards _______ why teenagers can be so difficult to live with and to cope with themselves.

There are also brain-based explanations of why teenagers need so much sleep, why they don’t tidy their rooms, why they come _______ when the rest of the world is going to sleep and why some of them, at least, are risk-takers. There’s stuff about alcohol and drugs and why such things are not good for the brain, but all of it is written in a very _______ and understanding way that I think teenagers will warm to.

Nicola Morgan is not a neurologist or a _______ scientist, but she clearly had done a great deal of research and ________ experts including Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and Professor Susan Greenfield, among many other eminent names in the field. Morgan has a gift for simplifying and explaining ________ subject matter with a light but precise touch, and she is careful to ________ between established facts and theories and speculations of her own and other people’s.

There’s plenty of humour and a good few well-deserved digs at the stupidity of parents and other well-meaning but misguided adults, which teenagers will ________. There are diagrams, tests, photos relating to questions like What emotions can you recognize? Do you ________ other emotions with anger? What kind of thinker are you? Which mental tasks do you find comparatively easy or difficult? There’s also sound advice for addiction, self-harm, depression and other ________ illnesses, and some pointers towards recognizing when you may need to seek help.

The illustrations by Andy Baker are great, too. And oh yes — there’s some interesting discussion on the differences between girls’ brains and boys’, if there are any. You’ll have to read it to find out...

2 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

3 . Transition. It’s a pleasant word and a calming concept. It means going surely and sweetly from somewhere present to somewhere future. Unless, that is, it is newspapers’ ‘transition’ to the _______ world, an uncertain and highly uncomfortable process.

Just look at the latest print circulation figures. The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year, but their websites go ever higher.

All of that may well be true, depending on timing, geography and more. _______, everyone— from web academics to print analysis—says so. Yet pause for a while and count a few little things that don’t _______.

One is the magazine world, both in the UK and in the US. It ought to be _______, wrecked by the move to the tablets which fit existing magazine page sizes so perfectly. But, in fact, the rate of decline in magazine purchasing is relatively small, with subscriptions holding up strongly and advertising remarkable _______.

As for news and current affairs magazines — which you’d expect to find in the eye of the digital storm — they had a 8.4% increase to report. In short, on both sides of the Atlantic, although some magazine areas went down, many showed rapid growth.

You can discover a _______ phenomenon when it comes to books, Kindle and similar e-readers are booming, with sales up massively this year. The apparent first step of transition couldn’t be _______. Yet, when booksellers examined the value of the physical books they sold over the last six months, they found it just 0.4% down. Screen or paper, then? It wasn’t one or the other: it was _______.

So if sales in that area have fallen so little, perhaps the _______ mostly affects newspapers? Yet again, though, the messages are oddly ________. The latest survey of trends by the World Association of Newspapers shows that global circulation rose 1.1% last year (to 812 million copies a day). Sales in the West dropped back but Asia more than ________ the difference.

Already 360 US papers—including most of the biggest and best — have built paywalls around their products. However, the best way of attracting a paying readership appears to be a deal that offers the print copy and digital access as some kind of ________ package.

________, print is also a crucial tool in selling internet subscriptions. And its advertising rates raise between nine and ten times more money than online.

Of course this huge difference isn’t ________ news for newspaper companies, as maintaining both an active website and an active print edition is difficult, complex and expensive. But newspaper brands still have much of their high profile in print: a drift on the web, the job of just being ________ becomes far harder.

4 . Group-Centered Societies Have Just as Much Creativity

What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot”. For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the ways in which two different types of cultures can come to have an effect over its artistic and _________ output. Individualistic cultures encourage people to be unique and to _________ their own interests even if doing so comes at a cost to the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people. These types of cultures often _________ the individual’s wants for the needs of those who are close to them or for those in their community.

Individualism has long been thought to have a creative _________. Individualists _________ social convention, the logic goes, and that pushback supports innovation. For instance, around the world, individualistic cultures have more patents than collectivistic cultures do. _________, a new study suggests that these ideas about culture and creativity could be off base. People in collectivistic cultures actually do better with a particular type of creative thinking than those in individualistic cultures. And the findings overall reveal the shortcomings of thinking about innovation too _________.

The new work comes from comparing communities in different parts of China. Though it scores high, as a nation, on measures of cultural _________, China’s 1.4 billion people are more than just a single culture. People from areas north of the Yangtze River tend to be more _________, open to strangers and self-confident, whereas people along the river and farther south are often more inter-dependent, partial to friends over strangers and likely to try harder to __________.

In the new creativity study, researchers investigated innovation with these two groups in mind. The team used a drawing test that had been created by psychologists. They gave kids a sheet of paper with just a few basic elements printed on it: some dots here, squiggles (弯曲的线条) there, and a rectangle that suggested a drawing frame. The children got 15 minutes to use the elements already on the page to draw whatever they wanted. They could get “adaptive creativity” points for doodling in ways that connected the squiggles and lines into an original and __________ image. In addition, a judge checked whether the children chose to incorporate a small shape that could be found just outside the rectangular. This element was easy to __________, so those who included this outside-the-box detail could get points for “boundary-breaking creativity.”

The researchers gave the test to 683 middle school students from north and south of the Yangtze River. When the scientists got the scores back, they discovered that there were no differences in the children’s overall creativity. When they broke down the results into components, they found that students from collectivistic regions scored __________ in adaptive creativity while those from individualistic areas did better in boundary-breaking creativity.

The findings are also a warning against cultural chauvinism (极端民族主义). Western countries have tended to lead the way in innovation — at least as defined by the metrics (指标) we Westerners have created. Perhaps we have been __________ China’s adaptive creativity. For example, while the country may not have invented the assembly line, it is largely thanks to the __________ its people have made to this system that the country has such a thriving manufacturing sector today.

5 . Artificial intelligence (AI) has amazing potential to change the world, and we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. As AI matures and people move further away from distinct programming and monitoring of systems, unidentified bias (偏见) might make decisions continue for a long time that cause _______ harm for individuals and society. This bias might _______ input data or even the algorithms (算法) themselves.

All too often, data sets are incomplete and the sample represented in the data set does not _______ the population that the AI model is making predictions about — this is known as coverage bias. Some other types of bias related to input data include sampling bias, where data is not collected randomly from the target group, and participation bias, where users from certain groups _______ surveys at different rates than users from other groups. Still, another more challenging bias to identify is confirmation bias that occurs when a decision maker or analyst has a strong _______ belief or experience that affects their ability to consider alternatives. This could lead one to more strongly _______ data that confirms a preexisting belief.

Bias resulting from AI algorithms themselves, or algorithmic bias, is equally _______. One example of algorithmic bias is implicit bias or unconscious bias, where data scientists _______ make associations or assumptions based on their mental models and memories that affect data modeling decisions. Implicit bias can _______ how data is collected and classified, or how systems are designed and developed. As machines learn, their conclusions and decisions affect people. Ethical (道德的) AI must understand these impacts and create governance and testing methods to ________ mistakes and inaccuracies.

To create ethical AI, companies need to put the ________ of the individual at the center of data innovation. This means thinking about ________ rights as human rights and developing a comprehensive approach to data, including how we use AI.

Having ________ data practices for AI means having good AI governance. This governance not only focuses on data and analytics but also understands the impacts of any given analysis and makes sure it’s ________ and accurate. Good AI governance includes data responsibility as well as a commitment to transparency (透明性).

None of this will be easy, but true innovation never is. By coming together and working on the problem of bias now, before it becomes a(n) ________ force, businesses can help bring out the best AI has to offer the world.