Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- Using “big data” to evaluate the productivity of individual scientists may have unintended consequences. A recent editorial in Science argues that any automated scoring of an individual’s publication output discourages “risky and potentially groundbreaking work” and tends to steer scientists towards highly populated fields where they will have many peers who can cite their articles, boosting their apparent impact.
- Researchers at MIT argue that automation may explain the pattern of economic growth that isn’t reflected in rising income that has prevailed in the United States in recent decades–and they warn that worse is to come.
- New research from Pew shows that the roles of mothers and fathers in the US are converging. While mothers still do the bulk of childcare and fathers still do the bulk of paid work, the gap between how the genders spend their time is shrinking. And moms and dads are almost equally likely to say that balancing work and family remains challenging.
- China has begun a carbon-trading experiment in seven cities.
- Over the next 12 years, China plans to move 250 million people from rural areas in to cities. To put this in perspective, that number is about 2/3 the population of the United States