Do you like spicy food?

    What's your opinion on spicy food? Some people cannot handle even the smallest amount of chili-red pepper-in their dinner while others can't get enough of it.

    Scientists have long been puzzled by why some people love chili while others loathe it. Plenty of research has been done on the subject, dating as far back as the 1970s. Previous results showed that a love of chili is related to childhood experiences, and cultural influences affect our taste buds too. But the latest study has found that a person's love of spicy food may be linked to his or her personality more than anything else, CBC News reported.

    'We have always assumed that liking drives intake-we eat what we like and we like what we eat. But no one has actually directly bothered to connect these personality traits with intake of chili peppers,' said Professor John Hayes from Pennsylvania State University, who led the study.

    But before you look at the study, you should first know that “spicy” is not a taste, unlike sour, sweet, bitter and salty. It is, in fact, a burning sensation that you feel on the surface of your tongue. This got scientists thinking that maybe a love of spicy food is brought about by people's longing for thrill, something they usually get from watching action movies or riding a roller coaster.

    In the study, 97 participants, both male and female, were asked to fill out questionnaires about certain traits of their personality, for example, whether they like new experiences or tend to avoid risks. They were then given a glass of water with capsaicin, the plant chemical that makes a chili burn, mixed into it.

    By comparing the answers to the questionnaire and what participants said they felt about the spicy water, researchers found that those who tended to enjoy action movies or take risks were about six times more likely to enjoy the spicy water.

    Interestingly, we used to believe that the reason some people can withstand spicy food is that their tongues have become less sensitive to it. However, this latest study has found otherwise. “It's not that it doesn't burn as badly, it's that you actually learn to like the burn,” Hayes explained.

    On 29 May last year, I was doing my swim training for a half Ironman race in the bay near my home.

    I was finishing my first loop (圈) when I felt jaws coming around my body and a sharp pain. The water was dark, so I couldn't see anything. It just came out of nowhere and then it was gone in a flash. I knew it was something really big and assumed it was a shark. I panicked, but knew I needed to get out of the water. I was kicking wildly in case it came back. There was a lifeguard boat close by, so I waved my arms in the air and screamed for help. It got to me within 20 seconds. At that point I didn't feel anything; adrenaline (肾上腺素) had taken over. The lifeguards held me under the arms and pulled me up out of the water. Then the pain kicked in and it was pretty hard to bear. Some muscle had been bitten off my right arm. I felt a lot of warm, gushing blood.

    My chest felt heavy, as if someone had put their foot on it, and I was having trouble breathing. It was extremely painful. When I got to the hospital, I told the nurses to put me to sleep because of the pain. I just wanted them to fix me.

    I woke up after surgery four hours later. My doctor was amazed when I managed to move my fingers: the bite just missed a major nerve. My right lung had been damaged; I had several broken bones and a nerve in my leg was cut, so I have reduced feeling at the top of my leg. The shark also bit through my upper back muscle.

    Local experts determined that the shark was probably 9-10 feet long. It was young, about seven years old. It just attacked me, left and didn't come back because it figured I wasn't food.

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    Vacation is a time for refreshment. In work, we are often called to think. Sometimes, it's good to give our brains a rest. Without a break, we may not be able to perform up to our potential. This can be a problem, not only for the employee, but for the employer as well.

    “The main benefit of vacation is for the worker to come back energized,” says Weaver. “If they haven't had a break, then they're not coming back with new energy. They haven't had a chance to step back and get perspective (远景), and come back with renewed enthusiasm.”

    Long working hours without a break, insecurity (不安) about one's job, and other work-related worries can lead to burnout and stress. Humans can usually adapt to pressure, but not for a limitless amount of time.

    “It is a problem of relating good workers and having them loyal to the firm while they're there,” says David Maume, PhD, professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati. He says burnout can also affect employees' productivity, creativity, and effectiveness.

    In addition, high levels of stress are likely to be precursors (前兆) to depression, which can hit both the employer and employee's pocketbook. Even people who manage to remain productive at work can have problems. If they're always at work, then they're not with their family and friends. If they're working while on vacation, for the time that they're on the job, they're not really present.

    An unbalanced emphasis on work can strain family and social life. When you come up for air, you may see that you're alone, or that your relationships have gone on without you.

    For years, decades in fact, I've puzzled over the response most people have when I tell them I mostly travel alone.

    "You're so brave!"

    Why is it that a woman travelling alone, as I have often done for months at a time, is perceived to be "brave", whereas men who travel alone are entirely unremarkable?

You are only brave when you are afraid of something but still do it anyway. I have never been afraid of travelling alone.

    The first time I travelled alone was when I was 19. I was due to travel in Europe with a friend at the end of the summer. She announced by letter two days before our departure that she would be leaving me halfway at Vienna. It was too late by then to rope in another friend, so it was either to go home after Vienna, or keep going by myself. I kept going. I got on trains by myself, checked into hostels by myself and found my way around by myself. It was weird at first, but later I stopped worrying about it.

    When I got back to Ireland after that trip, I felt proud of myself. I had done something I had assumed would be hard, and it had turned out to be not hard at all.

    That was three decades ago, and since then I have travelled all over the world, usually on my own. I still do what I did then, which is to keep a diary. The greatest gift of solo travel has been those I've met along the way. I may have set off alone each time but I've encountered many people who became important to me. I met my husband in Kathmandu, Nepal. I met lifelong friends in Australia, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, India, Indonesia and many other places.

    Learning is so complex that there are many different psychological theories to explain how people learn. A psychologist named Albert Bandura suggested a social learning theory which shows that observation, imitation (模仿), and modeling play a primary role in this process.

    In Albert Bandura's opinion, people can learn through observation. Observational learning doesn't even necessarily require watching another person join in an activity. We can also learn by reading, hearing, or watching the actions of characters in books and films. However, just observing someone else's actions isn't always enough to lead to learning. Your own mental state also plays an important role in determining whether a behavior is learned or not. In addition, though in many cases, learning can be seen immediately when the new behavior is displayed, yet sometimes we can learn things even though that learning might not be immediately obvious, which means people can learn new information without showing new behaviors.

    Not all observed behaviors are effectively learned. Certain requirements need to be related to the observational learning process. For example, you need to be paying attention. Also your retention is an important part of observational learning as you need to pull up information later and act on it during the process. Once you've paid attention to the model and kept the information, it's time to actually perform the behavior you observed. Further practice of the learned behavior leads to improvement. Finally, you have to be motivated to imitate the behavior that has been modeled.

    Social learning theory have many real-world applications. For example, researchers employ it to look into and understand ways that positive role models can be used to encourage desirable behaviors. Besides, it's also applied in the field of education, and today, both teachers and parents recognize how important it is to model appropriate behaviors.

Learning, Fast and Deep

    Over the past five years researchers in artificial intelligence have become the rock stars of the technology world. A branch of AI known as deep learning, which uses neural(神经的) networks to scan through large volumes of data looking for patterns, has proven so useful that skilled practitioners can command high six-figure salaries to build software for Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

    The standard route into these jobs has been a PhD in computer science from one of America's top universities. Earning one takes years and requires a personality suited to academia, which is rare among more normal folk.

    That is changing.

    Last month fast.ai, a non-profit education organization based in San Francisco, kicked off the third year of its course in deep learning. Since its foundation it has attracted more than 100, 000 students around the globe from India to Nigeria. The course and others like it, come with a simple idea: there is no need to spend years obtaining a PhD in order to practise deep learning. Creating software that learns can be taught as a craft, not as a high intellectual pursuit to be undertaken only in an ivory tower. Fast. ai's course can be completed in just seven weeks.

    To make it accessible to anyone who wants to learn how to build AI software is the aim of Jeremy Howard, who founded fast.ai with Rachel Thomas, a mathematician. He says school mathematics is sufficient. "No. Greek. Letters," Mr. Howard intones, pounding the table with his fist for punctuation.

    Some experts worry that this will serve only to create a flood of unreliable AI systems which will be useless at best and dangerous at worst. In the earliest days of the Internet, only a select few nerds, namely computer holies with specific skills, could build applications. Not many people used them. Then the invention of the World Wide Web led to an explosion of web pages, both good and bad. But it was only by opening up to all that the Internet gave birth to online shopping, instant global communications and search. If Mr. Howard and others have their way, making the development of AI software easier will bring forth a new crop of fruit of a different kind.