French forest fire consumes home, forces evacuations

The fire rages in the Chiberta forest, in the southwestern French municipality of Anglet

A wildfire fanned by soaring temperatures tore through a pine forest in southwestern France on Thursday, burning down at least one house and forcing dozens to flee their homes.

"At the end of my street the flames were approaching the homes and they were very strong—we all jumped in our cars," a resident of the coastal Anglet municipality near tourism hotspot Biarritz told AFP.

Around 100 firefighters and two water bombers tried to beat back the fire, which consumed one home and around 40 hectares (100 acres) of the Chiberta forest by 10:30pm, the local prefecture said.

"We evacuated all the residences on both sides of the fire," Angelet mayor Claude Olive told AFP.

A young woman evacuated from her boyfriend's apartment said everything was fine at 8 pm.

"Then at 8.30 pm we were told 'Everyone come out! The tide has turned'," she recalled in tears.

"I had the flames 10 metres (33 feet) away!" said a resident who lives on the edge of the forest, adding that "usually there is never stong wind here".

Strong winds and thunderstorms were forecast for overnight.

The southwest of France experienced particularly hot weather on Thursday, with the nearby town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz setting its new temperature record of 41.9 degrees Celsius (107 Fahrenheit).

Around a hundred firefighters tried to beat back the fire

Fierce wildfire halted in southern France

North Atlantic climate far more predictable following major scientific breakthrough

by CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A team of scientists led by UK Met Office has achieved a scientific breakthrough allowing the longer-term prediction of North Atlantic pressure patterns, the key driving force behind winter weather in Europe and eastern North America. CMCC scientists Panos Athanasiadis, Alessio Bellucci, Dario Nicolì and Paolo Ruggieri from CSP—Climate Simulation and Prediction Division were also involved in this study.


Published in Nature, the study analyzed six decades of climate model data and suggests decadal variations in North Atlantic atmospheric pressure patterns (known as the North Atlantic Oscillation) are highly predictable, enabling advanced warning of whether winters in the coming decade are likely to be stormy, warm and wet or calm, cold and dry.

However, the study revealed that this predictable signal is much smaller than it should be in current climate models. Hence 100 times more ensemble members are required to extract it, and additional steps are needed to balance the effects of winds and greenhouse gasses. The team showed that, by taking these deficiencies into account, skillful predictions of extreme European winter decades are possible.

Lead author Dr. Doug Smith, who heads decadal climate prediction research and development at the Met Office Hadley Center, said: "The message from this study is double-edged: climate is much more predictable than we previously thought, but there is a clear need to improve how models simulate regional changes."

Advance warning of severe winter weather is imperative to those who make risk-based decisions over longer timescales.For example, better forecasts can help the Environment Agency plan water management and flood defenses, insurance companies plan for the changing risks, the energy sector to mitigate against potential blackouts and surges, and airports plan for potential disruption.

Improving model simulations will enhance the countries' response, resilience and security against the effects of extreme weather and climate change—influencing future policy decisions to protect people's lives, property and infrastructure.


Explore further The Atlantic Ocean's fingerprint on the climate of the Middle East 

More information: D. M. Smith et al, North Atlantic climate far more predictable than models imply, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2525-0

Journal information: Nature

Provided by CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change

New smartphone game lets you solve real-world ecological puzzles

by Imperial College London

EcoBuilder, which is downloadable now on smartphones and tablets, teaches players how ecosystems work and aims to crowdsource solutions to unsolved ecological puzzles.

Ecosystem research looks at how animals and plants interact with each other and their environment. Climate change and other human interventions pose ongoing threats to how ecosystems function, resulting in changes to carbon flows and even extinctions of certain species.

EcoBuilder lets players build their own ecosystem of plants and animals. They throw together a bunch of species of different shapes and sizes, decide who eats who within the confines of the game, and depending on their decisions species will either survive or go extinct.

The in-game processes that decide extinction and survival are modelled using the same equations used by scientists to study real world ecosystems. This means that natural phenomena can be reproduced inside the game, creating ecosystems that behave in realistic ways to provide real-world answers.

Therefore, players' successful game strategies could make their way into the research literature and expand our understanding of ecology, potentially helping conservationists to save endangered species and conserve biodiversity.

Jonathan Zheng, who developed the game as part of his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, said: "This game presents a fun opportunity to contribute to real research that could change policy and affect our natural world. Players will learn about various ecological phenomena along the way, and their solutions could help real researchers to understand ecosystems better."

Canine inspiration

The game's designers took inspiration from a project to save the habitat of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S.. In 1926, wolves were declared extinct in the park due to a lack of hunting regulations. The lack of wolves meant that the population of elk boomed. The elk in their vast numbers ate too much vegetation and, in turn, caused smaller animals such as beavers and fish to struggle and eventually go extinct as well.

Following failed attempts to control the elk population by hunting and moving them, ecologists reintroduced 14 wolves into the park from Canada in 1995.


The new wolves suppressed the elk, triggering a chain of effects rippling through the ecosystem. Fewer elk meant plants could grow bigger and taller; more plants meant beavers could return and build dams again; the dams drew fish and more water back into the rivers and lakes. Thus, the ecosystem was saved.

However, the Yellowstone ecosystem still hasn't recovered to pre-1926 levels—a conundrum the researchers say highlights how complex and sensitive to human intervention these communities are.

In EcoBuilder, players can make the same sorts of decisions that ecologists made in Yellowstone.

Project co-supervisor Dr. Dan Goodman, also of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, said: "Since scientific understanding informs governmental policy, perhaps one day the strategies designed by players may influence decisions made by real conservationists, just like those made to reintroduce wolves back to Yellowstone park."

The game

EcoBuilder is divided into two 'Worlds'.

The first world, 'Learning World', gradually teaches players how different sizes and biomasses of animals and plants interact with one another, using colourful graphics and characters. In the scenarios presented, the researchers already know the 'answers', or the best ways to preserve the ecosystem without extinctions.

Once players master the Learning World they move on to the Research World, which presents ecological puzzles to which the researchers are unsure of the answers, making decisions about which species to introduce and seeing who survives and who goes extinct.

The research team collects data on players' solutions within both Worlds, but hope that players in the Research World might help solve real-world ecological puzzles that are reflected in the game.

Project co-supervisor Dr. Samraat Pawar, of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: "As well as crowdsourcing the intellectual power of the general public, the game has a powerful capacity for outreach and teaching purposes, as players learn how ecosystems function and why they may collapse from even small changes to their structure."

The researchers hope players will find interesting and unique strategies that lead to the healthiest ecosystems, which researchers can learn from—a form of 'citizen science'.

Jonathan added: "Raising awareness for environmental issues is as important as ever, especially given the fragility of many ecosystems around the world because of global warming."

What Jenga can teach us about wildlife conservation before it's too late

Provided by Imperial College London

Post-pandemic brave new world of agriculture
Robots working in abattoirs, sky-high vertical farms, more gene-edited foods in our supermarkets and automated farming systems could all help guarantee food supply in the next pandemic.

by University of Queensland

Robert Henry is a Professor of Innovation at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Director of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI). Credit: QAAFI

University of Queensland Professor Robert Henry said the technologies had all been in various stages of planning prior to COVID-19, but food producers would now be moving much faster to prepare for the next pandemic.

"Food processing facilities like meat works have had to close due to a staff member being infected with the coronavirus, and all food processing industries where you have workers in small confined spaces are similarly at risk," Professor Henry said.

Professor Henry, who is the Director of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI), said roboticized abattoirs and automated harvesting and production facilities would also reduce the risk of transmission of pathogens among workers but also the spread of viruses via the food itself.

"COVID does not seem to be transmissible from an infected human touching food but a future pandemic virus might be transmitted this way, so automating the food supply chain reduces this risk.

"It also minimizes reliance on human workers that are not available due to migration restrictions and border closures."

Professor Henry said protected cropping, including vertical farms—or growing food in vertically stacked layers similar to a skyscraper building—would optimize plant growth and enable control over climate variations, chemical inputs and water resources.

"There will have to be policies that drive consumer acceptance of gene edited foods, which some consumers consider as GMOs.

"Advanced technologies need to be adopted globally, in each region, to deliver local food production capability that could provide secure sources of food in future pandemics.

"We will need to design crops to suit automated systems—for example for fruit to grow in places where it can be harvested robotically."

Professor Henry said the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to fully assess the impact on agriculture and food supply.

He said despite growing stocks of foods such as cereals, it was estimated the number of people facing a food crisis will grow from 135 million to 265 million by the end of 2020.

"It may seem to those of us in Western countries that the only impact on food supply has been a rush on pasta and rice in the supermarket and home-baking but the loss of income caused by the pandemic has hit some countries in Africa hard.

'We are in a situation where we have food surpluses while there has been a doubling in the number of people who can't afford to eat—and the situation is likely to get worse."Professor Henry said increased investment in agricultural research and development would support enhanced food security.

Ensuring global food security during COVID-19

More information: Robert Henry, Innovations in Agriculture and Food Supply in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Molecular Plant (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.molp.2020.07.011

Journal information: Molecular Plant 

Provided by University of Queensland

Perceived 'whiteness' of Middle Eastern Americans correlates with discrimination
by Rutgers University

A new Rutgers-led study examined discriminatory attitudes toward Middle Eastern and North African Americans. Credit: Rutgers University

The perceived 'whiteness' of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent is indirectly tied to discrimination against them, and may feed a "negative cycle" in which public awareness of discrimination leads to more discrimination, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, points out a tension between the fact that Middle Eastern and North African Americans are instructed to select "white" on U.S. Census forms, although they are culturally perceived as not being white.

"Middle Eastern and North African Americans are left in a precarious position of not being legally classified as a racial minority group, while at the same time not being able to fully occupy the white racial category," said study co-author Kimberly Chaney, a doctoral graduate student in social psychology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick's School of Arts and Sciences.

The researchers reviewed the extent to which discriminatory attitudes toward Middle Eastern and North African Americans is tied to the perception of them as white or not white.

A group of white adults were asked whether they supported discriminatory policies such as "America would be safer if we prevent Middle Easterners from entering the country" or "America would be safer if there was a registry of Middle Easterners." Then they were shown faces with a range of complexions, and asked to indicate which one most represented Middle Eastern Americans.

Those who saw Middle Eastern Americans as typically white were less likely to support discriminatory practices against them. Those who viewed Middle Eastern Americans as less typically white were more likely to support discriminatory policies.

The researchers also examined whether highlighting the discrimination faced by Middle Eastern and North African Americans would shift perceptions of them. After reading an article about discrimination against Middle Easterners in the United States, a group of white adults were more likely to perceive Middle Eastern Americans as not being white. But the researchers noted that if awareness of discrimination leads white Americans to see Middle Easterners as "less white," this perception may, in turn, lead to more discrimination.

"It is a negative cycle of exclusion and discrimination," said Diana Sanchez, a professor of psychology.
The next step for the research would involve examining Middle Eastern and North African Americans' own experiences and self-identities, the researchers said.Racial discrimination may adversely impact cognition in African Americans

More information: Kimberly E. Chaney et al, White Categorical Ambiguity: Exclusion of Middle Eastern Americans From the White Racial Category, Social Psychological and Personality Science (2020). DOI: 10.1177/1948550620930546

Journal information: Social Psychological and Personality Science Provided by Rutgers University

Study examines stay-at-home worker productivity potential 

by David Bradley, Inderscience JULY 31, 2020

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Working from home has become part of the so-called "new normal" for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there has been a move underway towards increased telecommuting for many years. Writing in the Global Business and Economics Review a research team from Portugal has set out to explore the potential of telecommuting in terms of productivity and quality of life gains, cost savings for workers and employers, and perhaps even environmental improvements through reduced transport pollution.

Commuting generates enormous economic, social, and environmental costs, although it has been the conventional approach to "going out to work" since the industrial revolution if not before. There are some benefits, of course, but largely these are often outweighed by infrastructure and transport requirements and ultimately increased use of energy and resources and an increase in pollution and carbon emissions. However, with a big shift to online services and the increased use of information technology in this so-called digital age many traditional jobs can readily be performed from the home at least some of the time if not the whole of the working week. Obviously, some jobs, such as construction and manual factory work, farming, and healthcare can rarely be reduced to the working from home paradigm.

Deveani Babu, Nelson Ramalho, and Pedro Falcao of the University Institute of Lisbon suggest that increasing the level of telecommuting across various sectors is entirely feasible. Moreover, given the global pandemic that emerged since the time of their review, it is likely that we will garner more evidence for the personal and societal benefits of this form of working. Our unwitting experiment caused by the pandemic might also offer insights into previously unknown problems with telecommuting too.Remote work worsens inequality by mostly helping high-income earners

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More information: Deveani Babu et al. Telecommuting potential analysis, Global Business and Economics Review (2020). DOI: 10.1504/GBER.2020.108396

Provided by Inderscience 

One-size does not fit all for post-disaster recovery, study finds

by Portland State University

Residents in Kashigaun used work exchange to build and renovate homes according to the new building codes at 2.5 years after the earthquakes. Because of the high building costs, they are being forced to construct very small houses to code in order to get funds through the government reconstruction program. Credit: Jeremy Spoon / Portland State University

When a natural disaster strikes, it often takes years for vulnerable communities to recover, long after the news coverage fades and the rest of the world seems to move on. A new Portland State University study that followed 400 households after the 2015 Nepal earthquakes provides insight into better understanding the factors that contribute to resilience and change in short-term rural natural disaster recovery.


"Recovery is a dynamic process with multiple dimensions which means that government and outside aid programs cannot be one size fits all," said Jeremy Spoon, the lead researcher and an associate professor of anthropology at PSU.

Spoon's team conducted surveys with 400 households in four communities both nine months and 1.5 years after the April and May 2015 earthquakes. The team also returned at 2.5 years for research workshops to connect the results to the participant experiences and perspectives. They used a novel methodology to document and analyze recovery as a multidimensional phenomenon with more than 30 recovery indicators, from rebuilding of homes and access to electricity to impacts on herding, farming, and wage labor.

Researchers found substantial geographic variation in recovery across the sites but were also able to identify several common patterns in recovery.

The households that appeared the most resilient nine months after the earthquakes were those that had less herding and farming-based livelihoods, more market connections to shops and tourism, and easier access to rebuilding funds from the government and through loans.

The results suggest that a settlement's proximity to the road and access to outside aid and government services may be negatively or marginally benefitting recovery in certain situations.

In Gatlang, a cluster of two settlements in northern Nepal, their growing dependence on outside aid and a more tourism-centric economy as a result of being close to the road actually impeded their recovery. For most households, their circumstances were getting worse a year and a half after the earthquakes. Only 8% of households had returned to their homes from temporary shelters and they were experiencing greater impacts to their herding, farming, and forest product collection.

The study suggests that access may be a trap, where individuals receiving assistance adapted to waiting for help rather than helping themselves. The aid received was also not enough to help the residents recover to a point that was comparable to where they were before the earthquakes and contained generic rebuilding solutions that did not take into account local knowledge or perspectives.

By contrast, in Kashigaun, a cluster of three settlements that is a two- to three-day walk from the road with very few aid organizations serving the area, households pooled their resources and collectively worked together to rebuild their community through work exchange. A year and a half after the earthquakes, 92% of households returned to their homes from temporary shelters; however, few, if any, were rebuilt to code. The earthquakes helped to revive and reinforce communal traditions of work exchange, which served as a safety net for the poorest and most marginal.

Spoon said the lessons learned can help evaluate relief and reconstruction interventions where outside expert knowledge ignores cultural diversity and place-specific dynamics, such as the roles of local knowledge and institutions.

"We feel that governments and aid organizations can use our approach to capture some of the most important facets of recovery in a variety of contexts over the short- and long-term, especially if they use participatory methods and outreach to develop appropriate recovery indicators," Spoon said. "Better understanding recovery dynamics then leads to improved natural disaster response."

Spoon, along with Drew Gerkey from Oregon State University, and their team received another grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their work in Nepal and collect data from the same 400 households in years six through nine. The study was published in the journal World Development. Its co-authors include Alisa Rai and Umesh Basnet from PSU; Gerkey from OSU; and Ram Bahadur Chhetri from Tribhuvan University in Nepal. Additional publications from this study are forthcoming.Volunteer tourism can aid disaster recovery

More information: Jeremy Spoon et al, Navigating multidimensional household recoveries following the 2015 Nepal earthquakes, World Development (2020). 

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105041

We urgently need new tools to measure economic recovery after coronavirus
by Ala'a Shehabi, The Conversation

Economic recovery: a Nike swoosh? Credit: Thomas Serer/Unsplash, FAL

Economies across the world are on course to face the worst fall in GDP figures since 2008. In the UK, GDP fell by 10.4% in the first three months of 2020, and a whopping 20.4% in the month of April, the largest fall since records began in 1997. The Bank of England predicts that GDP will fall by 14% this year, probably more. The IMF has revised downward its forecast for global economic growth from -3% to -4.9% this year.


This is scary. But these GDP figures also hide the deep inequalities that our economic system produces. It confuses the growth of markets and prices with prosperity and value. It is assumed that if we make, consume and sell more things, our welfare and life quality improves. Is this true?

Governments all over the world still mostly rely on the use of GDP for economic planning and to set monetary and fiscal policy. Companies, meanwhile, use it to make investment decisions: choosing who to hire, what to build, borrowing ability, interest rates. Whatever the economy's recovery looks like—U, a V, W or Nike swoosh – GDP is the main metric that will be tracked, reported and acted on, with enormous implication for our lives.

GDP was itself borne in times of crisis, just after the first world war. Even its inventor, the progressive economist Stephen Kuznets, understood its severe limitations. When tasked with finding a way of measuring total national income, he said: "The welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income." Since then, the case against GDP has been made over and over again, particularly after the 2007 financial crash, which demonstrated that macroeconomic data and models failed to reflect the reality of the economy. So why do we still use it?

An unhelpful gage

Recessions cannot be fully captured by GDP—it understates costs on health, the environment, society, community, and trust. This tells us that economic welfare is probably much worse than it is: the models that we use systematically underestimate decreases in wealth and hide widening income disparities that fuel political resentment.

Millions of pounds has gone into research to upgrade these economic models through multiple projects, but they still seem to be failing us.


A recent poll published on behalf of Positive Money showed that 80% of people in the UK believe that health and wellbeing should be prioritized over economic growth. Just 12% opted for economic growth over health and wellbeing. Government targets should reflect this. Some are pushing to get rid of GDP altogether. What is certain is that the compounded crises we face today in health, climate and racial inequality require economic reconfiguration.

GDP is insufficient, distortive, and requires replacement. It ignores social value and the worst tendencies our economic system has produced: inequality and the climate emergency. Because GDP ignores the depreciation of physical and environmental capital goods, we will continue running down our human and natural assets, even if GDP begins to rise.

And what about the pandemic? GDP may not have created coronavirus, but it has certainly determined our capacity to respond to it—just consider how many resources have been misdirected over the years through policies of austerity that used GDP-based metrics to justify reducing government spending.

The alternatives

So how do we measure economic recovery in a way that reflects what matters to us? There are several alternatives. The difficulty is in balancing useful but reductive simplicity versus the complicated reality of what makes a "good life." Left, liberal and right leaning organizations have all waded in with alternatives.

The main alternative approach that has emerged is to move away from a single metric to a bunch of indicators on a dashboard, such as housing, health, and the environment. This would reflect the multi-dimensionality of prosperity and quality of life. Examples of this include the OECD Better Life Index, UN Human Development Index and its environmentally-inclusive version, the Sustainable Development Index.

A subset of this approach are those that measure prosperity at more local levels, such as the Thriving Places Index. Another approach is to directly ask people about what matters to them. The results include the Happy Planet Index and my own department's Prosperity Index. These focus on people's wellbeing and quality of life as they see it.

Another suggestion is to use other single metrics to GDP, like the Genuine Progress Indicator. This includes financial estimates of unpaid household labor, environmental damage and income inequality.

The next step is to embed these metrics into policy, as targets. In 2019, New Zealand did so, launching its "wellbeing budgets," which include 43 indicators across 12 wellbeing areas such as housing, environment, and social connection. More countries and cities may follow their lead in their pandemic recovery, with Amsterdam leading the way.

Views from the ground

At UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity, we have been asking people what a good life means for them as the basis of constructing a citizen-led prosperity index. We work with local councils and community groups in several countries to understand what metrics should be used to reflect community needs. These metrics differ from community to community and what gets measured nationally might not be the same as what should get measured locally. Knowing which inequalities exist across given groups can help redistribute resources across and within households.

For example, our data shows that in the area of Hackney Wick in London, childhood development is particularly concerning residents, while in Coventry Cross, housing affordability is of acute concern.

As we recover from the current crisis and reconstruct our economic systems, we need to have a conversation about what we value in life and begin to measure the things that matter. I am not calling for the abandonment of growth, only to abandon the concept of growth that is defined by GDP.

New metrics will force states not to seek to restore GDP without also restoring social equity and ecological equilibrium.


Explore further New framework will help to make 'net zero' a reality
Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Academic achievement is influenced by how pupils 'do' gender at school

by University of Cambridge

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Pupils' achievements at school are often shaped by the way that they 'act out' specific gender roles, according to a new study which warns against over-generalising the gender gap in education.

The study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge, suggests that young people's attainment is linked to their ideas about what it means to be male or female. Those who defy traditional gender stereotypes appear to do better in the classroom.

Annual GCSE results in the UK, in common with many western countries, typically show that boys lag behind girls academically, but the research argues that this broad pattern masks a more nuanced picture. In particular, the researchers warn that a large sub-group of girls, who conform fairly rigidly to some traditional 'feminine' norms, could be academically at-risk. They point out that these girls are often 'invisible' in broad surveys of attainment by gender that show girls performing well as a group.

The researchers examined the English and Maths results of almost 600 GCSE candidates at four schools in England. On average, the girls did significantly better in English, while boys were slightly better at Maths. Girls outperformed boys overall.

But the study then went a step further, analysing sub-groups of boys and girls according to how they expressed their gender identity. This revealed that around half of the girls displayed 'maladaptive patterns of motivation, engagement and achievement'. By contrast, around two-thirds of boys were motivated, engaged and did well in exams. The pupils' academic performance corresponded closely to their sense of gender.

Dr. Junlin Yu, a researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: "There has been a lot of justifiable concern about low attainment among boys, but we really need to move on from looking at averages, and ask which specific groups of boys and girls are falling behind. These findings suggest that part of the answer is linked to how pupils 'do' gender at school."

The study asked pupils to complete questionnaires which measured their motivation and engagement, and also examined how far they conformed to certain gender 'norms'.


These norms were drawn from two widely-used scales that identify the characteristics which people in western countries consider 'typically' masculine or feminine. The supposedly 'masculine' traits were emotional control, competitiveness, aggression, self-reliance, and risk-taking. The 'feminine' traits were thinness, an interest in appearance, concern with relationships, and an inclination towards domesticity.

In reality, most people exhibit a combination of masculine and feminine traits and the researchers found that pupils typically belonged to one of seven gender profiles that blended these characteristics. They classified these as:
'Resister boys' (69% of boys): typically resist traditional ideas about masculinity.
'Cool guys' (21%): competitive risk-takers, but concerned with appearance and romantic success.
'Tough guys' (10%): have an emotionally 'hard' image, self-reliant.
'Relational girls' (32% of girls): shun appearance norms, comfortable connecting with others emotionally.
'Modern girls' (49%): concerned with appearance, but also self-reliant and emotionally distant.
'Tomboys' (12%): uninterested in feminine qualities, often regarded as 'one of the lads.'
'Wild girls' (7%): embrace masculine behaviours, but also display an exaggeratedly 'feminine' appearance.

These profiles were then cross-referred with the pupils' GCSE results.

On average, the sample group performed as international trends predict. Girls had an average grade of 6.0 (out of 9) in English, compared with the boys' average of 5.3. In Maths boys averaged 5.9; slightly higher than the girls' 5.5.

But the researchers also found strong correlations between the specific gender profiles and patterns of engagement, motivation, and attainment. The two groups who resisted conventional gender norms—resister boys and relational girls—were found to be 'better academically adjusted' and typically did well in exams. The lowest overall performers were the 'cool guys' and 'tough guys'.

This significantly affected the average patterns of attainment by gender. In English, for example, relational girls far outperformed all other pupils in the cohort (averaging 6.3), almost single-handedly raising the girls' average.

The 'modern' and 'wild' girls typically had more mediocre GCSE results. More worryingly, these groups also displayed signs of low engagement and motivation: they gave up easily when faced with difficult tasks, and generally put less effort into their work. Collectively, these girls represented 56% of the total, but their underachievement was partially obscured by the high attainment average for girls.

The study suggests that one reason for the close correspondence between gender profile and academic achievement is that adolescents tend to express strong and inflexible ideas about gender, which influences their attitude towards school. For example, 'cool guys', who prize risk-taking and winning, consistently admitted to not trying hard at school—probably because doing so maintained the illusion that they would succeed if they put in more effort.

Attitudes towards gender probably also influence pupils' engagement with certain subjects. Previous studies have, for example, shown that Maths is often perceived as 'male'. Tellingly, within the sample, tomboys—girls who rejected 'feminine' traits—earned higher grades than the other girls in Maths.

The study's main recommendation is that efforts to close the gender gap in attainment need to focus less on 'girls versus boys' and more on these nuanced profiles. However, the researchers also suggest that schools could support pupils by encouraging them to think beyond traditional gender stereotypes.

"Among boys in particular, we found that those who resist gender norms were in the majority, but at school it often doesn't feel that way," Yu said. "Teachers and parents can help by encouraging pupils to feel that they won't be ridiculed or marginalised if they don't conform to traditional gender roles. Our findings certainly suggest that resistance to stereotypes is fast becoming less the exception, and more the rule."

The research appears in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.Researchers study videogame use patterns and the differences in gender among adolescents

More information: Journal of Youth and Adolescence (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s10964-020-01293-z

Journal information: Journal of Youth and Adolescence

New algorithms could reduce polarization driven by information overload

by Mary L. Martialay, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

As the volume of available information expands, the fraction a person is able to absorb shrinks. They end up retreating into a narrow slice of thought, becoming more vulnerable to misinformation, and polarizing into isolated enclaves of competing opinions. To break this cycle, computer scientists say we need new algorithms that prioritize a broader view over fulfilling consumer biases.


"This is a call to arms," said Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Informed citizens are the foundation of democracy, but the interest of big companies, who supply that information, is to sell us a product. The way they do that on the internet is to repeat what we showed interest in. They're not interested in a reader's growth; they're interested in the reader's continued attention."

Szymanski and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, explore this troubling "paradox of information access," in a paper published on arXiv.org.

"You would think that enabling everybody to be an author would be a blessing," said Szymanski, an expert in social and cognitive networks, with previous work that includes findings on the power of a committed minority to sway outcomes. "But the attention span of human beings is not prepared for hundreds of millions of authors. We don't know what to read, and since we cannot select everything, we simply go back to the familiar, to works that represent our own beliefs."

Nor is the effect entirely unprecedented, said Tarek Abdelzaher, a professor and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign lead on the project.

"It's not the first time that affordances of connectivity and increased access have led to polarization," said Abdelzaher. "When the U.S. interstate freeway system was built, urban socioeconomic polarization increased. Connectivity allowed people to self-segregate into more homogenous sprawling neighborhoods. The big question this project answers is: how to undo the polarizing effects of creating the information super-highway?"

The effect is exacerbated when our own human limitations are combined with information curations systems that maximize "clicks."

To disrupt this cycle, the authors contend that the algorithms that provide a daily individualized menu of information must be changed from systems that merely "give consumers more of what these consumers express interest in."

The authors propose adapting a technique long used in conveying history, which is to provide a tighter summation for events further back from the present day. They call this model for content curation "a scalable presentation of knowledge." Algorithms would shift from "extractive summarization," which gives us more of what we consumed in the past, to "abstractive summarization," which increases the proportion of available thought we can digest.


"As long as you do balance content, you can cover more distant knowledge in much less space," said Szymanski, who is also the director of a Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer. "Although readers have a finite attention span, they still have a slight knowledge in new areas, and then they can choose to shift their attention in a new direction or stay the course."

Few analytical models exist to measure the trend toward what the authors call "ideological fragmentation in an age of democratized global access." But one, which the authors considered, treats individuals as "particles in a belief space"—almost like a fluid—and measures their changing positions based on the change in content they share over time. The model "confirms the emergence of polarization with increased information overload."

The more ideologically isolated and polarized we are, the more we are vulnerable to disinformation tailored to reinforce our own biases. Szymanski and his colleagues offer a slew of technical solutions to reduce misinformation, including better data provenance and algorithms that detect misinformation, such as internal consistency reasoning, background consistency reasoning, and intra-element consistency reasoning tools.

"The very sad development discussed in this paper is that today, people are not conversing with each other. We are living in our own universe created by the data which is coming from these summarization systems, data that confirms our innate biases," Szymanski said. "This a big issue which we face as a democracy, and I think we have a duty to address it for the good of society."

Szymanski and his co-authors are working on mathematical models that both measure the extent of polarization in various media, and predict how trends would change under various mitigating strategies.


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More information: Abdelzaher et al., The Paradox of Information Access: Growing Isolation in the Age of Sharing. arXiv:2004.01967 [cs.CY]. arxiv.org/abs/2004.01967

Provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute