Oddly enough

As we thought: according to a Europe-wide survey, children think their parents smoke and nag too much, are too strict, and do not let children watch their favourite TV programmes. Parents, on the other hand, think their children sulk, whinge a lot, are untidy, use too much toilet roll and don't blow their noses enough. The survey was conducted by the Cartoon Network television channel.

Hi-tech cheats: A professor at Moscow University has praised her pupils for the effort and ingenuity they put into cheating. Some students have evolved a complex system involving pagers and mobile phones, by which questions are identified to helpers outside the exam hall, who send the answers to the candidate's pager (set on vibrate rather than ring mode to minimise the risk of detection). Irina Prokhorova, who teaches Russian literature, told Associated Press: "It's clear that they haven't just taken the simple way out but have put some effort into the art of cheating."

Psychobabble: Psychologists at Ohio State University has discovered an aspect of personality which they call "spontaneous trait transference". According to their research, when a speaker attributes traits to someone else, anyone listening will often attribute those same traits to the speaker. So politicians who accuse others of corruption will be seen as corrupt; critics who praise artists will be seen as talented; and, presumably, anyone who dares to accuse academics of indulging in psychobabble runs the risk of not being taken seriously.