If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get

hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results

only in hotter water. But at some points everything changes—the water 【M1】__________

starts to boil, turned from hot liquid into steam. Physicists call this a 【M2】__________

“phase transition”.

Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing

inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economical 【M3】__________

thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the

potential effects of automation on jobs, employment and human

activity: Will new technology spawn on mass unemployment,as the 【M4】__________

robots take jobs away from humans? Or will jobs robots take over release 【M5】__________

or unveil—or even create—demand for new human jobs? The debate has

flared up again recently because technological achievements such as deep 【M6】__________

learning, which recently enabled a Google software program called

AlphaGo to beat Go world champion Lee Sedol, a task considered even

hard than beating the world’s chess champions. 【M7】__________

Ultimately the question boils down to it: Are today’s modern 【M8】__________

technological innovations like those of the past, which made obsolete

the job of buggy maker, but created the job of automobile

manufacturer? Or is there something about today that is marked 【M9】__________

different? Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point highlighted what

he called “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior

cross a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire”. Can we really be 【M10】_________

confident that we are not approaching a tipping point, a phase

transition—that we are not mistaking the trend of technology both

destroying and creating jobs for a law that it will always continue

this way?

Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than

their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five

psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal

relationships and American society.

“We need to stop endless repeating ’You’re special ’ and having 【M1】__________

children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean

Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough

already.”

“Fortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences 【M2】__________

for society including the breakdown of close relationships toothers,” he 【M3】__________

said. The study asserts that narcissists “are more like to have romantic 【M4】__________

relationships that are short-lived, at a risk for infidelity, lack emotional 【M5】__________

warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling

and violent behaviors.” Twenge, the author of “Generation Me: Why

Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—

and More Miserable Than Ever Before”, said narcissists tend to lack

empathy, react aggressively with criticism and favor self-promotion over 【M6】__________

helping others.

Some analysts have commended today’s young people for increased

commitment to volunteer work. And Twenge viewed even this 【M7】__________

phenomenon skeptically, noting that many high schools require

community service and many youths feel pressure to list some endeavors 【M8】__________

on college applications.

Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced which 【M9】__________

he was unsure if there were obvious remedies. “Permissiveness seems to

be a component,” he said. “A potential antidote would be authoritative 【M10】_________

parenting. Less indulgence might be called for. “

Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such

findings, don’t necessarily accept negative generalizations about their

generation.

The business of social walking is setting off into a largely

unexplored area of navigation. A community-based group in the wooded

hinterlands of southeast London has developed a system in which the

conventional map of coloured lines and contour patterns have been 【M1】__________

replaced by photographs of the way ahead.

An app created for the purpose leads walkers from starting point to

finish by means of a chain of photos, each image taken over from where 【M2】__________

the previous one leaves off. This means that in stroll of, say, two hours,【M3】__________

there will be between 20 and 40 guiding pictures. The group is called Go

Jointly and it is run by Hana Sutch and Steve Johnson, both of whom

have careers in interactive design; more importantly, both have young

children, what energy and curiosity they wanted to channel into an 【M4】__________

exploration of the outdoor world.

Started in April, the free app already claims to have between 450

and 500 monthly users, and about 4,000 downloads. Several users have

started attributing their own routes. A premium subscription of ￡1.99 a 【M5】__________

month gives access to 100% of the curated walks. While originally

perceived to appeal to young families, it has had a lot of interest from 【M6】__________

millennials and the recent retired. Walking organizations in Canada and 【M7】__________

Germany have also expressed their enthusiasm for the model.

“One of our main hope,” says Sutch, who lives in nearby Brockley, 【M8】__________

“is that the app will increase the social appeal of people walking

together, and coming up new routes in their own neighborhoods.” For 【M9】__________

her and her husband Liam Owen, who grew up in the fine walking

country of Northumberland and is also involved in the project, the habit

of walking regularly is much a necessity as a pleasure. 【M10】_________