In peer-reviewed publications, scholars who are at arm's length from one another evaluate a new experiment, report, theory, or claim.

They must be expert in the domain they're evaluating.

The method is far from foolproof, and peer-reviewed findings are sometimes overturned, or papers retracted.

Peer review is not the only system to rely on, but it provides a good foundation in helping us to draw our own conclusions, and like democracy, it's the best such system we have.

If something appears in Nature, The Lancet, or Cell, for example, you can be sure it went through rigorous peer review.

As when trying to decide whether to trust a tabloid or a serious news organization, the odds are better that a paper published in a peer reviewed journal is correct.

chIn a low-income society, when people have many children they tend to spend whatever money they have on keeping those ildren fed, so there is little left over to invest in future economic productivity (including education for children).

This is a situation that tends to lead to continuing poverty.

If there is no surplus income, there is nothing for the government to tax, so governments don't expand infrastructure: they don't build roads to rural areas so farmers can get their product to market - or water treatment facilities, or electricity grids, or schools.

If farmers can't get their products to market, they may eventually give up and move to the cities where they strain whatever support infrastructure does exist.

One of the best hopes for a society in this kind of bind is to reduce fertility.

The idea that the effect of technology on work might depend upon the interaction between these two rival forces - a harmful substituting force and a helpful complementing force - is not new. However, these forces tend not to be explained in a particularly clear way.

Books, articles, and reports on automation can be confusing, hinting at these two effects but often using wildly different terms.

Technology, they say, displaces and augments, replaces and enhances, devalues and empowers, disrupts and sustains, destroys and creates.

The challenge is to compete with computers and to cooperate with them, to race against the machines and to run alongside them.

There is talk of the rise of machines and the advance of humans, of threatening robots and comforting co-bots, of the artificial intelligence of machines and the augmented intelligence of human beings.

The future, they say, holds both obsolescence and ever-greater relevance; technology is a threat and an opportunity, a rival and a partner, a foe and a friend.

Motivational psychologists explain human behavior in terms of deep-seated psychological fears, desires, and needs.

These needs include self-esteem, social approval, and a sense of efficacy.

Motivational psychology helps us understand, for example, why almost all German diplomats before World War I gave false or misleading reports on the likely reactions of European countries to Austrian and German military moves.

The reason is that they were simply frightened of the consequences of not telling the notoriously intolerant German foreign ministry what it wanted to hear.

The one German diplomat who accurately reported the likely response of Britain to a German violation of Belgian neutrality, Ambassador Prince Karl Lichnowsky in London, was dismissed in Berlin as having "gone native," a judgmental error that itself can be explained in terms of a well-documented motivational-psychological tendency: namely, the desire to avoid the psychological pain of admitting one's own error.

Because Germany's entire strategy for swift victory in 1914 depended on Britain staying out of the war, Lichnowsky's accurate reports would have been extremely unsettling if they had been accepted.

Capitalism as an economic system thrives on the essential role played by failure in the subject's satisfaction

Without our enjoyment of failure and our constitutive allergy to success, capitalism would never have developed.

Although champions of the capitalist system preach success and the system's most fervent defenders are the successful rather than the downtrodden, their professions of success mask the key role that failure has in the system.

Just on a psychic level, a sense of failure or dissatisfaction drives the capitalist to create new products or find new markets for existing products, and it prompts the consumer to purchase new commodities.

The system itself expands because failure functions as an economic engine for individual capitalists and consumers.

Even those who are successful find motivation in the fear of future failure.

Scarcity is always just around the corner.

Leslie doesn't realize it, but she stalled out from her fear of failure.

She imagined hundreds of reasons why her ideas might not work, and then used these reasons as "legitimate" excuses for not taking action.

Leslie needed to face up to the fact that she concocted her own reasons for failing to act, and that the development of those reasons, if not grasped and eliminated, could lead to her being stymied further.

Leslie functions like many of those who never go forward with their ideas - the professor who never finishes writing his book, the artist who never paints the picture she dreams about and mentions to others, the business person who has a wonderful money-making scheme but never implements it.

The fear of failure in these people extends beyond an inability to reach a level of success or a level of perfection.

To these people - and Leslie might well be one of them - if their project isn't flawless, if it isn't of Nobel Prize quality, then, in their minds, it's a failure, and they will delay taking action because they cannot tolerate being imperfect.

Automation is what most professionals have in mind when they think of the relevance of technology for their disciplines.

They think of how they work today, they identify some inefficient activities, and then they imagine computerizing them.

Their focus is often on streamlining manual or administrative work.

Old ways of operating are not discarded.

Instead, a drive for efficiencies and cost-savings leads to an optimization of traditional professional work

Although adjustment in this spirit could be undertaken by introducing better manual systems, most current streamlining across the professions involves the deployment of technology.

This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

Automation is the comfort zone of technological change for most professionals.

They recognize great scope for technology in support of their current ways of working.

Interdependence is where the condition of one depends on another and vice versa.

Simply put, interdependence means mutual dependence.

Such a situation is neither good nor bad in itself, and there can be more or less of it.

Marriages are a good example of highly interdependent relationships.

The traditional Christian marriage vow commits both partners to stick with it "for richer, for poorer, for better, or for worse." Interdependence among countries sometimes means richer, sometimes poorer, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out that along with interdependence comes friction and conflict.

His "solution" was isolation and separation, but that is seldom possible in a globalized world.

When countries try isolation, as with the cases of North Korea today and Myanmar (formerly Burma) until quite recently, it comes at enormous economic cost.

It is not easy for countries to divorce the rest of the world.

When the information patterns of human mentality are successfully instantiated in a digital form, the potential arises to make a large (theoretically unlimited) number of copies of the autonomous agent.

Each replica or simulated self will then be able to perform functions that previously required the direct control of the embodied consciousness, thus creating a group or army of selves to multiply the impact and functionality of the authoring consciousness.

In contemporary culture, the benefits and drawbacks of multitasking, that is, dividing consciousness into more than one activity at the same time, are often discussed and debated.

In an immersive world filled with AI-equipped avatars, the self will have the unprecedented ability to simultaneously execute multiple tasks with each of its intelligent agents being able to fully focus on its assigned activity.

Thus, the development of autonomous agents will help achieve the coexistence of multitasking and undivided attention.

If your dog pesters you for petting when you need to be doing something else, break off visual contact with him.

You can use your torso to push him away with a body block (remember not to use your hands) or turn your head away (chin raised) in a benevolent but royal dismissal.

It's amazing how fast dogs will go away if you break off visual contact with them.

It's equally notable how hard it is for us humans to do that when we're trying to get our dogs to do something.

All of our instincts seem to have us look at our dog, just as primates do when they are trying to communicate directly with another individual in the troop.

But the look that works best, that we use ourselves when we're not thinking about it, is that slightly snobby, hard-to-get look when we turn our head away in dismissal.

It works with dogs as well as with humans.

Honest. Dogs can take you for granted just as anyone else in your social group can, and most of us hate being taken for granted.

You might be stuck with it from some of the people you know, but you don't have to put up with it from your dog.