Human Development Award News Today

Adults can expand their limited working memory capacity by using stored conceptual knowledge to chunk items into interrelated units. For example, adults are better at remembering the letter string PBSBBCCNN after parsing it into three smaller units: the television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN. Is this chunking a learned strategy acquired through instruction? We explored the origins of this ability by asking whether untrained infants can use conceptual knowledge to increase memory. In the absence o...

BRAC founder Sir Fazle Hasan Abed talking to some of the NGO’s beneficiary farmers during a field visit. Photo: BRAC He is the "president of the people", more precisely the "president of the poor people". This is what the then UNDP chief said when conferring the Human Development Award in 2004. The first Human Development Award, after its introduction two years earlier, was given to Fernando Cardoso, President of Brazil. It provided a general idea that the award was meant for politicians, pr...