1. A quarter of the nation's voters think neither President Biden nor former President Donald Trump has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. While partisanship plays a role in these perceptions, that's led to what may be a tough tradeoff for some voters, with many independents voting for someone — whether Mr. Biden or Trump — who they don't think has the cognitive ability to serve. Trump fares relatively better than Mr. Biden in perception of cognitive ability, though neither is drawing wide confidence. Only about a third of voters think Mr. Biden has the cognitive ability. Half of voters think Trump does. (Source: cbsnews.com)
2. A Scientific Superpower:
One way to measure the quality of a country’s scientific research is to tally the number of high-impact papers produced each year—that is, publications that are cited most often by other scientists in their own, later work. In 2003 America produced 20 times more of these high-impact papers than China, according to data from Clarivate, a science analytics company. By 2013 America produced about four times the number of top papers and, in the most recent release of data, which examines papers from 2022, China had surpassed both America and the entire European Union.
Metrics based on citations can be gamed, of course. Scientists can, and do, find ways to boost the number of times their paper is mentioned in other studies, and a recent working paper, by Qui Shumin, Claudia Steinwender and Pierre Azoulay, three economists, argues that Chinese researchers cite their compatriots far more than Western researchers do theirs. But China now leads the world on other benchmarks that are less prone to being gamed. It tops the Nature Index, created by the publisher of the same name, which counts the contributions to articles that appear in a set of prestigious journals. To be selected for publication, papers must be approved by a panel of peer reviewers who assess the study’s quality, novelty and potential for impact. When the index was first launched, in 2014, China came second, but its contribution to eligible papers was less than a third of America’s. By 2023 China had reached the top spot.
According to the Leiden Ranking of the volume of scientific research output, there are now six Chinese universities or institutions in the world top ten, and seven according to the Nature Index. They may not be household names in the West yet, but get used to hearing about Shanghai Jiao Tong, Zhejiang and Peking (Beida) Universities in the same breath as Cambridge, Harvard and eth Zurich. “Tsinghua is now the number one science and technology university in the world,” says Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at Oxford University. “That’s amazing. They’ve done that in a generation.” (Source: economist.com)
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