World’s oldest recorded tortoise prepares for 190th birthday party Guardian
An interesting piece in The Guardian by Howard French on Africa’s megalopolis and the difficulties of pulling together five countries with very different governments and colonial histories:
There is one place above all that should be seen as the centre of this urban transformation. It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres.
…In just over a decade from now, its major cities will contain 40 million people. Abidjan, with 8.3 million people, will be almost as large as New York City is today. The story of the region’s small cities is equally dramatic. They are either becoming major urban centres in their own right, or – as with places like Oyo in Nigeria, Takoradi in Ghana, and Bingerville in Ivory Coast – they are gradually being absorbed by bigger cities. Meanwhile, newborn cities are popping into existence in settings that were all but barren a generation ago. When one includes these sorts of places, the projected population for this coastal zone will reach 51 million people by 2035, roughly as many people as the north-eastern corridor of the US counted when it first came to be considered a megalopolis.
But unlike that American super-region, whose population long ago plateaued, this part of west Africa will keep growing. By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.
That is the title of the paper at least, here is the abstract:
It is widely assumed that thinking is independent of language modality because an argument is either logically valid or invalid regardless of whether we read or hear it. This is taken for granted in areas such as psychology, medicine, and the law. Contrary to this assumption, we demonstrate that thinking from spoken information leads to more intuitive performance compared with thinking from written information. Consequently, we propose that people think more intuitively in the spoken modality and more analytically in the written modality. This effect was robust in five experiments (N = 1,243), across a wide range of thinking tasks, from simple trivia questions to complex syllogisms, and it generalized across two different languages, English and Chinese. We show that this effect is consistent with neuroscientific findings and propose that modality dependence could result from how language modalities emerge in development and are used over time. This finding sheds new light on the way language influences thought and has important implications for research that relies on linguistic materials and for domains where thinking and reasoning are central such as law, medicine, and business.
That is by Geipel, J., & Keysar, B. Or do I need to shout?
And what does this mean for Socrates?
Think Hybrid Work Doesn’t Work? The Data Disagrees
Gartner: “If you don’t think hybrid work models work, you’re probably still fixating on location. For more success, pivot to focus on being more human-centric. As economic conditions sour, you may be tempted to take back more control over work — for example, by mandating a rigid return to the office. Our data shows that would be a big mistake. We surveyed more than 400 employees and leaders of organizations around the world who have worked consistently under some kind of hybrid-work model since the pandemic. Most of those work models delivered below-average outcomes. But one is wildly successful. Our findings show that the failing models are all location-centric, attaching some kind of rigid on-site requirement. Only one model scored above average — “hybrid-flexible,” which offers leaders and employees some flexibility to choose where they work from. More successful still is a hybrid-flexible model that incorporates other key elements of human-centric work design — that is location flexibility plus the practices of intentional collaboration and empathy-based management. You can’t just port over your work and management approaches from an on-site environment and expect them to work in a hybrid world, but if you transition successfully to a human-centric hybrid approach, our data shows you can clearly foil flight and power performance among employees…”
