【推荐1】Have you ever made eye contact with a robot? It can be a very strange experience. Scientists even have a name for the feeling: the “uncanny valley ”.

Now, researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Italy have found that it is more than just a feeling. They ran an experiment that showed how a robot’s gaze (注视) can make people think they are socially interacting with a human being. That experience can slow a person’s ability to make decisions.

The team asked 40 people to play a video game of “chicken”. In the game, each player has to decide whether to allow a car to drive straight toward another car or to turn to avoid a crash. The people were playing against a human-like robot sitting across from them.

During breaks in the game, players had to look at the robot. Sometimes the robot would look back and other times it would look away. As the interactions happened, the scientists collected data on behavior and brain activity.

“Our results show that, actually, the human brain treats the robot gaze as a social signal, and that signal influences the way we’re making decisions, on the way we use in the game and also on our reactions, ” Wykowska said.

The findings could be useful in helping to decide where and how human-like robots might be placed in the future.

【推荐2】How often have you heard decision-makers say, “Just give me the facts.” The assumption? The “facts” alone—delivered without emotion—convey the whole story. But experiments by psychologists have long suggested otherwise.

The data show that emotion plays an essential role in all communication. That’s because people first seek out and prioritize the emotional meaning hidden in the language. They process the emotional content in about 200 milliseconds. The rest of the meaning gets processed in 400-plus milliseconds. When we comprehend, we combine the “hot” component of processing (emotion and feeling) with the “cold” (facts and logic). That’s how we come up with the full meaning. What’s more, hot processing often dominates. And it gains the upper hand well after the cold processing. It doesn’t matter if people are reading or listening. Nor does it matter where they live on the planet or how they grew up.

This means that, when choosing your words, you best consider their emotional associations. Choose the language in which the emotional component agrees with or amplifies your intended meaning. Pioneering psychologist Amos Tversky and a team did a classic experiment that shows the impact of getting the feeling wrong: They gave Harvard Medical School physicians statistics on outcomes for lung cancer treatments. The data came from two sets of patients, some who had surgery, and some who had radiation. The doctors were to decide which treatment was preferred.

Roughly half the doctors got data as “probability of living” after treatment. The rest got the same data as the “probability of dying.” The result? The doctors’ answers depended not on the data alone. Their judgment is also based on whether the wording indicated a happy or sad emotion. The most interesting finding: “The attractiveness of surgery, compared with radiation, was much greater when the problem was described in terms of the probability of living rather than in terms of the probability of dying.”

【推荐1】In 2015, the town of Carefree, in the USA was seeking a pumpkin carver to help their newly-planned Enchanted Pumpkin Garden Festival become an instant success. Luckily for them, the sculptor Ray Villafane fell in love with the four-acre Carefree Desert Gardens and agreed to carve pumpkins for the tourists. Then, the festival became a hit in 2015. Now the annual event, which took place from October 19-28, in 2008, includes many fun activities for both kids and adults. However, it is the pumpkin carvings that remain the star attraction.

This year, Villafane and his team reached the garden in early October to carve the popular “pickled (腌制的) pumpkins”. Placed inside tanks resembling a kind of plants to fit in with the environment, the 3D pumpkin artworks were put in a special liquid that helped preserve them for a longer period of time.

Throughout the festival, Villafane and his team also held several live demonstrations, adding to the impressive carved pumpkins on exhibition. They also volunteered to give many pumpkin-carving fans valuable tips.

Besides the wonderful carvings, guests had the chance to go into a pumpkin world, complete with tales. The tales featured pumpkin dead bodies running through the grass, and a group of helpless pumpkins attempting to free their peers imprisoned by a scary-looking figure with only bones. Then, there were the hard-working rats who were sewing a pumpkin.

The highlight of the festival came on October 27, when Villafane transformed a huge pumpkin into a dinosaur. The festival also featured activities including pie-eating matches, story-telling, face painting, and pumpkin-carving matches.

Villafane’s skill first came to light in 1993 after he sculpted a pumpkin for his students during Halloween. In 2004, while still teaching, he decided to use his skills to create action figures for Marvel Comics. Over the next two years, the artist created numerous popular characters. In 2006, Villafane accepted a full-time position about carving toys at DC Comics. In 2010, he finally decided to go after his true love—pumpkin carving. Since he first began carving, the expert has sculpted 2,576 pieces of outstanding works in 102 cities around the world.

The expert using basic carving tools for his most complex creations stands out in the festival.

【推荐3】Many years ago, Beverly Johnson was one of the original “supermodels”. She walked on the runways of fashion shows around the world. Today, Johnson is 69 years old. She is not letting her age stop her from walking the runways again. She has a simple answer to why she decided to return to the fashion world during New York Fashion Week: She was asked to.

Johnson, a writer and businesswoman, helped to break barriers for other Black women in the modeling industry. In 1974, she appeared on the cover of the American Vogue magazine. This made her that magazine’s first Black cover model. She had great success in her modeling career. She remained a popular face for many years, appearing on the covers of hundreds of magazines.

During this year’s Spring New York Fashion Week, Johnson walked the fashion runways for designers Sergio Hudson and Bibhu Mohapatra. She was the last model to walk in the Mohapatra show on February 15. The crowd clapped and cheered when they recognized her.

“Today, all of the models were models of color in honor of Black History Month,” Johnson said as she started to cry. “In 2024, it will be my 50th anniversary of that historic cover of being the first Black woman to grace the cover of American Vogue,” she added. When Johnson was first coming up in the fashion industry in the 1970s, she said she did not see this kind of presentation by Black designers or models.

Johnson said she enjoyed spending time with the younger models during this year’s New York Fashion Week. She found them “beautiful, elegant, and wonderful”.

She noted one big difference between them and her and it was not their ages. “The girls are much taller.” In the Hudson show, she said, no model was under 1.8 meters. Back when she was modeling, she said, 1.5 meters was tall enough.