Every month, more than 20,000 scientific manuscripts by authors from around the world are posted on the preprint repository arXiv, the oldest and best-known preprint site. Now researchers uploading their work to the site are facing a new requirement: from 11 February, all submissions must be either written in English or accompanied by a full English translation. Until now, authors have had to submit only an abstract in English. Staff at arXiv say that the English rule will make life easier for its moderators and keep its readership broad. 'We can't be fair in judging papers if they are not in English,' says Ralph Wijers, the chair of the arXiv editorial advisory council and an astronomer at the University of Amsterdam, whose native language is Dutch. The site, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, does not undertake peer review, but a team of some 300 volunteer moderators verifies that submissions are 'appropriate and topical'. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints across eight subject areas, although the vast majority of the manuscripts are in computer science, physics and mathematics. Just 1% of submissions are in a language other than English. Nonetheless, the revised language policy has prompted some vocal complaints, including arguments that the burden of the mandate might deter people from making content such as PhD theses and preprints of textbook chapters public. Authors of such texts might think it is not worth the effort to translate them or to find an alternative venue for making them accessible...
Generative AI is now embedded in daily workflows, shaping how people think, create, and decide. Yet, a critical assumption often goes unnoticed: that AI behaves consistently across languages. A new study corrects this assumption, finding that when prompted in different languages, generative AI models exhibit distinct cultural tendencies'shaping recommendations in ways leaders may not anticipate. These tendencies can have major implications on decisions from marketing to strategy. For global organizations, treating prompt language as a strategic choice is essential to ensure culturally attuned, effective, and responsible use....
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No one uses 'Malthusian' as a compliment. Since 1798, when the economist and cleric Thomas Malthus first published 'An Essay on the Principles of Population,' the 'Malthusian' position ' the idea that humans are subject to natural limits ' has been vilified and scorned. Today, the term is lobbed at anyone who dares question the optimism of infinite progress. The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an English country parson came up with the idea that population increases at a 'geometrical' rate, while food production increases at an 'arithmetical' rate. That is, population doubles every 25 years, while crop yields increase much more slowly. Over time, such divergence must lead to catastrophe. But Malthus identified two factors that reduced reproduction and held off disaster: moral codes, or what he called 'preventative checks,' and 'positive checks,' such as extreme poverty, pollution, war, disease and misogyny. In the all-too-common caricature, Malthus was a narrow-minded clergyman who was bad at math and thought the only solution to hunger was to keep poor people poor so they had fewer babies....
