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Rats and other animals need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so they can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid.To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Laleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats.

They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat—one social and one asocial—for four days.The robot rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels-to move around and colorful markings.

During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around,  played with the same toys, and opened cage doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.

 

 

Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave  the  rats  the  opportunity to release them by pressing a lever.Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 per  cent more likely on average to set the social robot free than the asocial  one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being,  says Quinn. The rats may have bonded more with the  social  robot  because it displayed behaviors like communal exploring and playing. This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped, she says .

“Rats have been shown to engage in multiple forms of reciprocal help and cooperation, including what is referred to as direct reciprocity where a rat will help another rat that has previously helped them,” says Quinn.

The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design.The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. “ We’d assumed we’d have to give it a moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scent on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn’t necessary,”says Janet Wiles at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research.

The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots. says Wiles. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals. “We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too,” says Wiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It is true that CEO pay has gone up—top ones  may  make 300  times the pay  of typical workers on average, and since the mid-1970s, CEO pay for large publicly traded American corporations has, by varying estimates, gone up by about 500%. The typical CEO of a top American corporation now makes about $18.9 million a year.

The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America’ s highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It’s not popular to say. but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.

 

Today’ s CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many mere skills than simply being able to “run the company.” CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them .They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant. Then there’s the fact that large American companies are much more globalized than ever before, with supply chains spread across a larger number of countries. To lead in that system requires knowledge that is fairly mind-boggling. Plus, virtually all major American companies are becoming tech companies, one way or another. Beyond this, major CEOs still have to do all the day-to-day work they have always done.

The common idea that high CEO pay is mainly about ripping people off doesn’t explain history very well. By most measures, corporate governance has become a lot tighter and more rigorous since the 1970s. Yet it is principally during this period of stronger governance that CEO pay has been high and rising.That suggests it is in the broader corporate interest to recruit top candidates for increasingly tough jobs.

Furthermore, the highest CEO salaries are paid to outside candidates, not to the cozy insider picks, another sign that high CEO pay is not some kind of depredation at the expense of the rest of the company. And the stock market reacts positively when companies tie CEO pay to, say, stock prices, a sign that those practices build up corporate value not just for the CEO.

 

 

 

 

 

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Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon last November when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone, a first step toward its possible demise.

Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida made opposition to the zone a centrepiece of his election campaign, despite its success in improving air quality. A judge has now overruled the city’s decision to stop levying fines, ordering them reinstated. But with legal battles ahead, the zone’s future looks uncertain at best.

Among other weaknesses, the measures cities must employ when left to tackle dirty air on their own are politically contentious, and therefore vulnerable. That’s because they inevitably put the costs of cleaning the air on to individual drivers—who must pay fees or buy better vehicles—rather than on to the car manufacturers whose cheating is the real cause of our toxic pollution.

It’s not  hard  to  imagine  a  similar  reversal  happening in London.  The new ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is likely to be a big issue in next year's mayoral election. And if Sadiq khan wins and extends it to the North and South Circular roads in 2021 as he intends, it is sure to spark intense opposition from the far larger number of motorists who will then be affected.

It's not that measures such as London’s Ulez are useless. Far from it. Local officials are using the levers that are available to them to safeguard residents’ health  in the face of a serious threat. The zones do deliver some improvements to air quality, and the science tells us that means real health benefits—fewer heart attacks, strokes and premature births, less cancer, dementia and asthma. Fewer untimely deaths.

But mayors and councilors can only do so much about a problem that is far  bigger than any one city or town. They are acting because national governments—Britain’s and others across Europe—have failed to do so.

Restrictions that keep highly polluting cars out of certain areas—city centres, “school streets”, even individual roads—are a response to the absence of a larger  effort to properly enforce existing regulations and require auto companies to bring their  vehicles  into  compliance.  Wales  has  introduced   special  low  speed  limits  to minimise pollution. We're doing everything but insist that manufacturers clean up their cars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring—the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take  a year—the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. Gen Zs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that’s tighter than it's been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates  for jobs in the U.S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them.

 

If “entitled” is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to     millennials  (those born between  1981 and 1995), the catchwords for Generation    Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite    graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash     of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both.    They aren't interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to       have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College  loan  balances  in the U.S.      now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.

One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was  the second most important career goal(work-life balance was number one),  followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good.

That’s a big change from the previous generation. “Millennials wanted more flexibility in their lives,” notes Tanya Michelsen, Associate Director of YouthSight, a UK-based brand manager that conducts .regular 60-day surveys of British youth, in findings that might just as well apply to American youth. “Generation Zs are looking for more certainty and stability, because of the rise of the gig economy. They have troubles seeing a financial future and they are quite risk averse.”

 

 

 

 

It's almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. But, the wonderful thing about failure is that it's entirely up to us to decide how to look at it.

We can choose to see failure as “the end of the world”. Or, we can look at failure       as the incredible learning experience that it often is. Every time we fail at something,        we can choose to look for the lesson we’re meant to learn. These lessons are very   important; they’re how we grow, and how we keep from making that same mistake      again. Failures stop us only if we let them.

Failure can also teach us things about ourselves that we would never have learned otherwise. For instance, failure can help you discover  how strong a person you are. Failing at something can help you discover your truest friends, or help you find unexpected motivation to succeed.