If you are planning to start a career in the field of education，science，or culture，then an internship（实习） at UNESCO will be ideal for you．

Who can apply？

       You have completed your full-time university studies；or．

       You are studying in a graduate program for a master's degree．

       Applicants in technical assignments must have reached the last year of their studies in a technical institution．

What are the requirements？

       You must be at least 20 years old．

       You should have a good command （掌握） of either English or French．

       You must have an excellent knowledge of office-related software．

       You should be able to work well in a team and adapt to an international working environment．

       You should possess strong interpersonal and communication skills．

What do you need to prepare？

       Visa：You should obtain the necessary visas．

       Travel：You must arrange and finance your travel to and from the location where you will do your internship．

       Medical insurance：You must show proof of a comprehensive health insurance valid（有效的）in the target country for the entire period of the internship．UNESCO will provide limited insurance coverage up to USD30,000 for the internship period．

       Medical certificate：You must provide a medical certificate indicating you are fit to work．

       Motivation letter：You should have your motivation letter ready before filling out the application form．

Your application will be accessed by UNESCO managers and will stay in our database for six months．We do not respond to every candidate．If selected，you will be contacted by a manager．If you do not receive any update within six months，it means that your application has not been successful．

My friend never did well in school but always had a sharp eye for beauty. One day I was busy arranging some flowers in a vase but just couldn’t get them to look right. She came along, and with a few skillful waves of her hand, transformed them into a stunning bouquet. When praised for having this amazing ability, she shrugged off the compliment. She simply didn’t view her creativity as anything special.

Too often we underestimate our own talents in this way. Maybe it’s because we’ve become used to believing that only abilities like a high I.Q., a gift for mathematics or a large vocabulary have cognitive (认知的) value. I was fortunate to learn otherwise at a young age.

When I entered high school, a guidance counselor told my mother I wasn’t college material because I had performed miserably on the spelling section of a standardized test. Thankfully my mother recognized my other intellectual (智力的) gifts and stood up for me, insisting I be put into the college-track curriculum. This experience literally defined the course of my life. It showed me how important it is not to accept a label someone else put on me and it allowed me to realize my full potential.

In the early 1980’s, Howard Gardner, a prominent Harvard researcher, pioneered a concept of “multiple intelligences”. In his book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he suggested that intelligence is not limited to a traditional interpretation but instead includes a wide range of cognitive abilities.

What I love about the multiple intelligences theory is that it allows you to reframe your own abilities and talents, especially those that don’t necessarily fit into neat academic boxes. While it’s true one must meet a basic level of intelligence for achievement, the analytical skills measured by I.Q. do not tell the whole story. This is why we should celebrate all of our talents and abilities. They’re part of what makes your individual brain so wonderful and unique.

When American anthropologist Colin Turnbull published The Mountain People in 1972, he referred to his subjects — a Ugandan group called the Ik — as “the loveless people.” After two years of observations, he decided that they reflected humanity’s basic instincts (本能): cheat, thievery, and pitilessness. But when Athena Aktipis and her colleagues from the Human Generosity Project took a deeper look, they identified a community that shared everything. “Turnbull had visited Uganda during a disastrous famine (饥荒). All he saw is what happens when people are starving.” says Aktipis. But her team revealed that despite living under pressure, the Ik placed a high value on helping one another when they could.

Aktipis believes that altruism is more common and beneficial than evolutionary social science has long thought. “It was assumed that people are designed to only do things to help themselves or their relatives.” she says. By studying the unique, selfless practices that helped nine communities across the world to continue to exist, the experts from the Project are looking to show that we are indeed capable of widespread cooperation.

The Maasai people in Kenya provide one of the project’s main points. They rely on two-way friendships for resources like food or water when they’re in need, without expecting any repayment. Also, a world away, in New Mexico, while folks often help transport cattle and receive support in return, they will assist without repayment if someone faces difficulties, such as an injury or the death of a loved one.

Aktipis believes theoretical frameworks she’s perfected through studying these groups can apply broadly to any interdependent systems. Her big goal is to design social-service systems that support everyone. Take market-based insurance in the United States as an example: It’s priced based on individual risk factors such as health histories and where people live, which means millions of Americans can’t afford it. But in a system built on neighboring, pooled costs (合并成本) would level the burden during collective hardship like natural disasters and pandemics.

Our species’ incredible capacity to quickly acquire words from 300 by age 2 to over 1, 000 by age 4 isn’t fully understood. Some cognitive scientists and linguists have theorized that people are born with built-in expectations and logical constraints (约束) that make this possible. Now, however, machine-learning research is showing that preprogrammed assumptions aren’t necessary to swiftly pick up word meanings from minimal data.

A team of scientists has successfully trained a basic artificial intelligence model to match images to words using just 61 hours of naturalistic footage (镜头) and sound-previously collected from a child named Sam in 2013 and 2014. Although it’s a small slice of a child’s life, it was apparently enough to prompt the AI to figure out what certain words mean.   

The findings suggest that language acquisition could be simpler than previously thought. Maybe children “don’t need a custom-built, high-class language-specific mechanism” to efficiently grasp word meanings, says Jessica Sullivan, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore College. “This is a really beautiful study, ” she says, because it offers evidence that simple information from a child’s worldview is rich enough to kick-start pattern recognition and word comprehension.

The new study also demonstrates that it’s possible for machines to learn similarly to the way that humans do. Large language models are trained on enormous amounts of data that can include billions and sometimes trillions of word combinations. Humans get by on orders of magnitude less information, says the paper’s lead author Wai Keen Vong. With the right type of data, that gap between machine and human learning could narrow dramatically.

Yet additional study is necessary in certain aspects of the new research. For one, the scientists acknowledge that their findings don’t prove how children acquire words. Moreover, the study only focused on recognizing the words for physical objects.

Still, it’s a step toward a deeper understanding of our own mind, which can ultimately help us improve human education, says Eva Portelance, a computational linguistics researcher. She notes that AI research can also bring clarity to long-unanswered questions about ourselves. “We can use these models in a good way, to benefit science and society, ” Portelance adds.