We are surrounded by mixed messages about mistakes: we're told we earn by making them, but we work hard to avoid them. So the result is that most of us know that we are going to make mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.

    Experiments with schoolchildren who did well on a given test show that those who were praised for being smart and then offered a more challenging or less challenging task afterward usually chose the easier one. On the other hand, children praised for trying hard-rather than being smart-far more often selected the more difficult task.

    If we try hard to avoid mistakes, we aren't open to getting the information we need in order to do better. In a writing study, experiments showed that those who are so scared to make mistakes perform worse in writing tasks than those who aren't as worried about being perfect. They fear receiving any kind of negative feedback, so they don't learn where they went wrong and how to get better.

    We don't just learn more when we're open to mistakes, we learn deeper. Research tells us that if we're only concerned about getting the right answer, we don't always learn the underlying concepts that help us truly understand whatever we're trying to figure out. Mistakes

need to be seen not as a failure to learn, but as a guide to what still needs to be learned. As Thomas Edison said, “I am not discouraged, because every abandoned wrong attempt is another step forward. "

    Furthermore, we often make mistakes because we try new things-we wander away from accepted paths. Teflon, penicillin-these are examples of great discoveries made by mistake. Take a page from Albert Einstein, who said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. "

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.

    The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias (偏见) in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their own capabilities. This phenomenon is something you have likely experienced in real life, perhaps at a holiday family gathering. Throughout the course of the meal, a member of your extended family begins spouting off on a topic, boldly announcing that he is correct and that everyone else's opinion is stupid, uninformed, and just plain wrong. It may be plainly evident to everyone that this person has no idea what he is talking about, but he talks continuously, blithely oblivious (忘乎所以) to his own ignorance.

    The effect is named after researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two social psychologists. They found incompetent people are not only poor performers, they are also unable to accurately assess and recognize the quality of their own work. These low performers were also unable to recognize the skill and competence levels of other people, which is part of the reason why they consistently view themselves as better, more capable, and more knowledgeable than others.

    This is the reason why students who earn failing scores on exams sometimes feel that they deserved a much higher score. They overestimate their own knowledge and ability and are incapable of seeing the poorness of their performance.

    “In many cases, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, encouraged by something that feels to them like knowledge.” Dunning and his colleagues have also performed experiments where they ask respondents if they are familiar with terms related to subjects including politics, biology, physics, and geography. Along with genuine concepts, they added completely made-up terms. In one such study, approximately 90 percent of respondents claimed that they had at least some knowledge of the made-up terms.

    So what can you do to gain a more realistic assessment of your own abilities? Instead of assuming you know all there is to know about a subject, keep digging deeper. Once you gain greater knowledge of a topic, the more likely you are to recognize how much there is still to learn. Another effective strategy involves asking others for constructive criticism. While it can sometimes be difficult to hear, such feedback can provide valuable insights into how others perceive your abilities. Even as you learn more and get feedback, it can be easy to only pay attention to things that confirm what you think you already know. In order to minimize this confirmation bias, keep challenging your beliefs and expectations and seek out information that challenges your ideas.

    Riverside presents

    Sharp Short Theatre

    This competition offers students a rare experience of working in a professional theatre.

    Now in its fourth year of providing an opportunity for new writers, directors and performers to exercise their creative ability, Sharp Short Theatre has fast become one of the most exciting parts of the Riverside year. All entries（参赛作品）perform in a heat and then the best pieces are invited to perform in the final, where students can be awarded prizes in four types including writing, performing, directing and overall.

    Entries must be written and directed by students (18 years old and under) and can be up to at most 10 minutes in time length. Entries must be handed in by a producer, for example a parent, teacher or responsible adult 18 years old or over.

    Sharp Short Theatre is a youth arts pioneer focusing on encouraging the works of students in theatre. Its aim is to unearth and develop the young to be Australian theatre professionals.

    So what are you waiting for? Get into the spirit and register（注册）now.

    Advisory Service:

    Students may hand in their plays for review by a professional playwright（剧作家）in the lead-up to this event.

    Price: ＄30 per play.

    Deadline（截止日期）: 21 March, at 5 pm, 2018.

    Registration:

    To register, click here to complete our online form （one form per entry）.

    Entries Close: 11 April, at 5 pm.

    Price:＄15 per entry.

    Dates & Times:

    Heats: 21-24 May, at 7:30 pm.

    Final: 8 June, at 7:30 pm.

    Price:

    Heats: Adult ＄18, kids under 18 ＄12.

    Final: All tickets ＄20.

    Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy(同感) and concern for others and behaving in ways to help or benefit other people.

    Prosocial behavior has long posed a challenge to social scientists seeking to understand why people engage in helping behaviors that are beneficial to others, but costly to the individual performing the action. Why would people do something that benefits someone else but offers no immediate benefit to the doer?

    Psychologists suggest that there are a number of reasons why people engage in prosocial behavior. In many cases, such behaviors are fostered during childhood and adolescence as adults encourage children to share, act kindly, and help others. Prosocial behaviors are often seen as being compelled by a number of factors including egoistic reasons (doing things to improve one's self­image), reciprocal benefits (doing something nice for someone so that they may one day return the favor), and more altruistic reasons (performing actions purely out of empathy for another individual).

    Characteristics of the situation can also have a powerful impact on whether or not people engage in prosocial actions. The bystander effect is one of the most notable examples of how the situation can impact helping behaviors. The bystander effect refers to the tendency for people to become less likely to assist a person in distress when there are a number of other people also present. For example, if you drop your purse and several items fall out on the ground, the likelihood that someone will stop and help you decreases if there are many other people present. This same sort of thing can happen in cases where someone is in serious danger, such as when someone is involved in a car accident. In some cases, witnesses might assume that since there are so many other present, someone else will have surely already called for help.

    Why do people help in some situations but not in others? Experts have discovered a number of different situational variables that contribute to (and sometimes interfere with) prosocial behaviors. First, the more people that are present decreases the amount of personal responsibility people feel in a situation. People also tend to look to others for how to respond in such situations, particularly if the event contains some level of ambiguity. Fear of being judged by other members of the group also plays a role. People sometimes fear leaping to assistance, only to discover that their help was unwanted or unwarranted. In order to avoid being judged by other bystanders, people simply take no action.

    Experts have suggested that some key things must happen in order for a person to take action.