I’ve recently found myself wondering if I could do without Google Maps. It is, I think, the only app on my phone I’d really miss were I to swap my smartphone for a “dumb” one that handles only calls and text messages.

Why am I thinking about this? It’s because every time I try to read a book, I end up picking up my phone instead. I keep interrupting my own train of thought in order to do something that I don’t consciously want to do.

This is not accidental. Developers have become even more unashamed in their attempts to keep us hooked on our smartphones. Some of them speak in the language of addiction and behavioural psychology, though most prefer the term “persuasive tech”. In itself, persuasive tech is not a new idea — an academic named BJ Fogg has been running classes from a “persuasive tech lab” at Stanford since the late 1990s. But as smartphone ownership has rocketed and social-media sites have been born, persuasive tech has vastly expanded its reach.

One company, Dopamine Labs — named for the chemical released in the reward center of the brain — offers a service to tech businesses wanting to “keep users engaged”. Founder Ramsay Brown tells me he wants people to understand that “their thoughts and feelings are on the table as things that can be controlled and designed”. He thinks there should be more conversation around the persuasive power of the technologies being used. “We believe everyone has a right to cognitive liberty, and to build the kind of mind they want to live in,” he says.

The poster child of the resistance movement against addictive apps is former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris. He thinks the power to change the system lies not with app developers but with the hardware providers. In 2014, Harris founded “Time Well Spent”, a group that campaigns for more moral design practices among developers.

Any tech business that relies on advertising profits is motivated to hold its users online for as long as possible, Harris says. This means apps are specifically designed to keep us in them. Apple, on the other hand, wants to sell phones but doesn’t have a profit stream so tightly connected to the amount of time its customers spend online. Harris hopes that companies like Apple could use their influence to encourage more morally designed apps.

While I wait for Apple to sort this out, I find myself longing for something called a “Light Phone”, a credit-card-sized handset that does absolutely nothing but make and receive calls. Price tag? $150. Seems expensive. But the company’s website is very persuasive.

When the two Afghan boys arrived，they were seemingly quiet and scared. In an effort to break their silence，I asked Umair if he liked to throw snow balls in winter because I knew the temperatures in their country can reach as low as —10 degrees centigrade. His face turned colorless. “I couldn’t sell the hats and gloves when it snowed. I would just sit in the room and wait for the snow to melt(融化）.How else would I earn the money to feed my family?” My heart sank.

In the days that followed, my husband and I offered to teach them English and mathematics. They were from diverse linguistic (语言的）backgrounds，so teaching them proved to be challenging but a lot of fun. In fact it became a mutual(共同的）experience. I remembered many words which I had not used since graduation.

Having passed through war zones and lived in jungles, the boys treasured the comfort provided to them by their foster carers, whose love made them show more confidence in daily life and exhibit enthusiasm for learning. Such was their hunger for learning that even if five minutes had passed the set time，there was a knock on the door, reminding us to start the lesson.

Another interesting character in this experience was my four-year-old son. His presence would keep the atmosphere cheerful and light. Learning was a mutual experience for him too. The boys would correct him when he made a mistake in counting, and he would correct the boys when they got wrong in pronunciation.

Teaching these children gave me some very important lessons in life： that a spirit which has the willingness to learn is stronger than the sharpest sword, that an environment that fosters love, support and encouragement can make broken souls shine，and that learning and education is the true lighthouse to fight darkness in this world.

Photography has opened our eyes to a multitude of beauties, things we literally could not have seen before the invention of the frozen image. It has greatly expanded our notion of what is beautiful, what is aesthetically(审美上) pleasing. Items formerly considered trivial, and not worth an artist's paint, have been revealed and honored by the photograph: things as ordinary as a fence post, a chair, a vegetable. And as technology has developed, photographers have explored completely new points of view: those of the microscope, the eagle, the cosmos.

What is it that delights the human eye and allows us to claim that a photograph is beautiful? Photography depends on the trinity of light, composition, and moment. Light literally makes the recording of an image possible, but in the right hands, light in a photograph can make the image soar. The same is true with composition. What the photographer chooses to keep in or out of the frame is all that we will ever see - but that combination is vital. And the moment that the shutter is pressed, when an instant is frozen in time, provides the whole image with meaning. When the three - light, composition, and moment - are in balance, there is visual magic.

Light, composition, and moment come together in a photograph to bring us the ultimate reality: a view of the world unknown prior to the invention of the camera. Before photography, the basic artistic rules of painting were rarely broken. Images were made to please, not to capture reality. But as photography evolved, painterly rules were often reacted in the pursuit of fresh vision. Photographers became interested in the real world, good and bad, and it was the accidental detail that was celebrated. Photography invited the world to see with new eyes - to see photographically - and all of the arts have drawn new inspiration from this change.

With these basic aesthetic tools, photographers have evolved from scientists longing to “fix” an image — any image — to artistic revolutionaries. Photographs have created a new way of seeing, changed our ideas of beauty and, most importantly, made art more democratic. They have given us visual proof that the world is grander than we imagined, and that there is beauty, often overlooked,