【推荐2】From writing Shakespeare-style poetry to making music, ChatGPT has amazed the world since its launch in late 2022 by the US-based company Open AI. The AI program can answer questions on a whole host of topics, and write essays, stories and any other written texts you can think of. It does this by drawing on information collected from a large corpus (语料库) of text data.

    1     As Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, said in an interview with Forbes, “it’s not actually fundamentally new technology that made this (ChatGPT) have a moment.”

One breakthrough behind today’s model is a network called Transformer, which was invented by Google researchers in 2017.     2     Transformer can therefore understand the meaning of texts more accurately with the help of the context.

The GPT models built by Open AI combined Transformer with unguided learning.     3     ChatGPT can now generate human-like responses instantly due to the large scale of texts it learned from.

“One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT is that it comes back, very confidently, with mistakes,” Michael Wooldridge at the Alan Turing Institute in London, UK, told The Guardian, “because it learns information from various resources.     4     So, at this point, ChatGPT doesn’t know the truth about the world, yet.”

Some argue that ChatGPT will be used to generate fake news, spread misunderstanding, or be used for ill purposes. As for education, many US schools recently banned students from using ChatGPT on school networks since students began to use it as a shortcut for essays and research projects.     5    

【推荐3】We can video chat with astronauts aboard the International Space Station and watch live footage from the frozen heights of Everest. But communicating with a submarine (潜艇) or a diver is not so easy. The lack of practical methods for sharing data between underwater and airborne devices has long been a frustration for scientists. The difficulty stems from the fact that radio signals work perfectly in air travel but poorly in water. Sonar(声呐)signals used by underwater sensors reflect off the surface of the water rather than reaching the air.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method with the potential to revolutionize underwater communication. "What we've shown is that it's actually feasible to communicate from underwater to the air，" says Fadel Adib, a professor at MJT's Media Lab, who led the research.

The MIT researchers designed a system that uses an underwater machine to send sonar signals to the surface, making vibrations (震动)corresponding to the Is and Os of the data. A surface receiver then reads and decodes these tiny vibrations. The researchers call the system TARF. It has any number of potential real-world uses, Adib says. It could be used to find downed planes underwater by reading signals from sonar devices in a plane' s black box and it could allow submarines to communicate with the surface.

Right now the technology is low-resolution. The initial study was conducted in the MIT swimming pool at maximum depths of around 11 or 12 feet. The next steps for the researchers are to see if TARF is workable at much greater depths and under varying conditions-high waves, storms, schools of fish. They also want to see if they can make the technology work in the other direction- air to water.

If the technology proves successful in real-world conditions, expect "texting while diving" to be the latest underwater fashion.

【推荐1】A NASA-funded study used satellite to search for penguin poops (粪便) in Antarctica: funny at first sight though, it resulted in unique insights on the Adelie penguin’s diet and its future as the climate changes. The findings published recently unlocked the secrets about the species that can provide an early-warning of threats to Antarctica’s delicate ecosystem.

Researchers from Stony Brook University used satellite images to see if the Adelie penguin’s diet has been changing in response to Antarctica’s changing climate. Adelie penguin population has dropped greatly in some areas even as the global population increases. The satellite images cannot show the penguins individually, but their presence can be detected by the stain (污渍) left on the ice by their waste, called guano.

Male and female penguins take turns incubating (孵化) in the nest. The guano builds up in the same areas occupied by the nests. Heather Lynch, associate professor at Stony Brook, along with his team, used the area of the colony as defined by the guano stain to work back to the number of pairs. A global survey for Adelie penguins turned up 3.8 million breeding pairs. Also, the satellite data can detect the color of the penguin guano, ranging from white to pink to dark red. White guano is from eating mostly fish; pink and red would be from eating mostly krill (磷虾). The team found that while the Adelie penguin’s diet did show changes from year to year, no consistent pattern was obvious.

“This was a big surprise, since the abundance and distribution of Adelie penguins has changed dramatically over the last 40 years and scientists had assumed that a change in diet might have played a role,” said Casey Young flesh, a graduate student from the university. However, continued changes in the physical environment and a growing krill fishery in the region are likely to have an influence on penguin prey (猎物) and penguin population itself. “Tools like this will be important for the management of the Antarctic ecosystem, which is often considered among the most primitive areas in the world,” said Young flesh.

【推荐2】Note taking

Note taking as an accommodation is available only to students who have documented disabilities and are registered with Queen's University Accessibility Service（QSAS）. Note taking is approved for students with disability-related functional limitations that makes it difficult for them to access academic information presented in class.

There is a wide range of reasons why students may require note taking as an accommodation，including students with：

·hearing loss，who may have difficulties hearing the instructor while writing notes at the same time

·vision loss，who may have difficulties seeing information presented on overhead screens

·mental health conditions or attention-related disabilities，who may have difficulties attending to orally-presented information while taking notes

·learning disabilities，who may have difficulties recording notes when information is presented orally

·physical disabilities，who may have motor or pain related difficulties

Accessibility advisers consider a student's description of their need for note taking along with information contained in their disability documentation and the type of course in approving note taking as a formal accommodation.

Online Note Taking Portal（门户网站）

QSAS is in charge of the exchange of notes taken by student volunteer note takers and students registered with QSAS via our secure online note taking portal.

The pages in this section provide information for students with disabilities，volunteer note takers and instructors on requesting note takers，signing up to be a volunteer note taker and assisting QSAS with recruiting volunteer note takers.

If you are a student seeking note taking accommodation please click here to read the Starting Your Accommodation information.

【推荐3】News anchors(主播) must have been reluctant to read out the following news: Xin Xiaomeng began working as the world’s first female artificial(人工的) intelligence news anchor at Xinhua News Agency on Sunday, three months after a male robot joined the profession.

Unlike previous news robots though, Xin does not read news like a cold machine; she reads it almost like a human being. The muscles on her face stretch and relax — and her reactions change as she continues reading. That’s why many news anchors were worried: Will AI replace us in the near future?

To find the answer, we have to analyze the technologies that support Xin at her job. Three key technologies are used to support Xin. First, samples of human voices are collected and synthesized (合成). This is followed by the collection and synthesis of human muscle movement samples. And third the voices and movements are married in a way that when the AI news anchor reads, the micro- electric motors behind her face move to make her expressions seem more human.

Yet we need a thorough knowledge of deep learning technology to make a robot imitate a person’s voice. The developer needs to collect tens of thousands of pieces of pronunciations, input them into the machine and match them with the text for the AI to learn and read. The process for imitating facial movements is similar. The developer has to analyze the movements of the 53 muscles in the human face, make a model set from the collected data for the AI news anchor to learn, and imitate the movements of facial muscles via programs

Both the technologies used to make Xin’s performance impressive are mature. The real difficulty lies in the third — the technology to match the pronunciations with facial movements so that Xin’s expressions vary according to the content of the news report. In fact, Xin’s expressions don’t always change according to the content. As a result, her expressions look anything but human. Actually, AI is still no match for human qualities.

【推荐1】The values of artistic works, according to cultural relativism, are simply reflections of local and economic conditions. Such a view, however, fails to explain the ability of some works of art to excite the human mind across cultures and through centuries.

History has witnessed the endless production of Shakespearean plays in every major language of the world. It is never rare to find that Mozart packs Japanese concert hall, as Japanese painter Hiroshige does Paris galleries. Unique works of this kind are different from today’s popular art, even if they began as works of popular art. They have set themselves apart in their timeless appeal and will probably be enjoyed for centuries into the future.

In a 1757 essay, the philosopher David Hume argued that because “the general principles of tastes are uniform(不变的) in human nature”, the value of some works of art might be essentially permanent. He observed that Homer was still admired 2000 years. Works of this type, he believed, spoke to deep and unvarying features of human nature and could continue to exist over centuries.

Now researchers are applying scientific methods to the study of the universality of art. For example, evolutionary psychology is being used by literary scholars to explain the long-lasting themes and plot devices in fiction. The structure of musical pieces are now open to experimental analysis as never before. Research findings seem to indicate that the creation by a great artist is as permanent an achievement as the discovery by a great scientist.

【推荐2】On Wednesday, two things happened. In Syria, 80 people were killed by government airstrikes. Meanwhile, in Florida, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched and fired a sports car into space. Guess which story has dominated mainstream news sites?

The launch of Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful ever launched by a private company, went off successfully. Musk sent his cherry-red Tesla roadster running toward Mars, launching “a new space age”. The event attracted phenomenal publicity and made the rocket launch a masterstroke of advertising for Tesla.

Meanwhile, in Syria, where hundreds of thousands of refugees may be forced to return to unsafe homes, a UN human rights coordinator for Syria said despondently(沮丧地) that he was no longer sure why he bothers to videotape the effects of bombing, since nobody ever pays attention. He wondered what level of violence it would take to make the world care.

There is, perhaps, no better way to appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into space.

Musk said he wanted to participate in a space race because “races are exciting” and that while strapping his car to a rocket may be “silly and fun … silly and fun things are important”. Thus, anyone who mentions the huge waste the project involves, or the various social uses to which these resources could be put, can be dismissed as a killjoy.

But one doesn’t have to hate fun to question the justification for pursuing a costly new space race at exactly this moment. If we examine the situation honestly, it becomes hard to defend a project like this.

A mission to Mars does indeed sound exciting, but it’s important to have our priorities straight. First, perhaps we could make it so that a child no longer dies of malaria every two minutes. Or we could try to address the level of poverty in Alabama which has become so extreme that the UN investigator did not believe it could occur in a first-world country. Perhaps when violence, poverty and disease are solved, then we can head for the stars.

Many might think that what Elon Musk chooses to do with his billions is Elon   Musk’s business alone. If he wanted to spend all his money on medicine for children, that would be nice, but if he’d like to spend it making big explosions and sending his convertible on a million-mile space voyage, that’s his right.

But Musk is only rich enough to afford these money-consuming projects because we have allowed social inequalities to arise in the first place. If wealth were actually distributed fairly in this country, nobody would be in a position to fund his own private space program.

Elon Musk is right: silly and fun things are important. But some of them are an indefensible waste of resources. While there are still humanitarian crises such as that in Syria, nobody can justify vast spending on rocketry experiments.

【推荐3】I used to think the whole purpose of life was pursuing happiness. Everyone said the path to happiness was success, so I searched for that ideal job, that perfect boyfriend, and that beautiful apartment. But instead of ever feeling fulfilled, I felt anxious and lost. Eventually. I decided to go to graduate school for positive psychology to learn what truly makes people happy.

And what's the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? Many psychologists describe happiness as a state of comfort and ease, feeling good in the moment. Meaning, though, is deeper. The famous psychologist Martin Seligman says meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and from developing the best within you. Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path.

There are four pillars of a meaningful life.

The first pillar is belonging. Belonging comes from being in relationships where you're valued for who you are and where you value others as well. For many people, belonging is the most essential source of meaning.

For others, the key to meaning is the second pillar: purpose. Finding your purpose is not the same thing as finding that job that makes you happy. A doctor told me her purpose is healing sick people. Many parents tell me, “My purpose is raising my children.” The key to purpose is using your strengths to serve others. Without something worthwhile to do, people flounder, thus losing the aim of life.

The third pillar of meaning is also about stepping beyond yourself, but in a completely different way: transcendence (超然). Transcendent experiences can change you. Transcendent states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality. For me, I’m a writer, and it happens through writing. Sometimes I get so in the zone that I lose all sense of time and place.

The fourth pillar is storytelling, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you. But we don’t always realize that we're the authors of our stories and can change the way we’re telling them. Your life isn't just a list of events. You can edit, interpret and retell your story, even as you're constrained by the facts.

That’s the power of meaning. Happiness comes and goes. But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to.

【推荐1】Imagine you are floating in space on a huge NASA spacecraft. A satellite is on a collision course with your spaceship. You have just been told by your commanders on Earth to evacuate. You and your teammates have to make rapid decisions for your escape and survival.

Engaging children in a NASA mission (任务) is a lesson that 23 pre-service teachers (职前教师)were taught to carry out at a recent Pre-Service Teacher Institute (PSTI) summer workshop (讲习班)at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

At this two-week workshop, these college students were given hands-on activities designed to increase their skills in teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) . They were shown how to include NASA missions and research into their lesson plans. They met with NASA engineers and were given tours of NASA facilities (设施)by the latter to help them develop and teach a problem-based lesson to children.

“NASA is pleased to support college students who want to teach STEM to young children,” said Lewis Braxton, director of the research center. “It was exciting to see PSII students fully engaged in developing new skills in STEM to meet the challenges of a space-related teaching task,” said Steve Price, the principal investigator of PSTI at California State University, Fresno.

“PSTI has provided me with the necessary tools and techniques to fully develop my skills as a teacher. I’ll use what I’ve learned to help my students succeed in their studies,” said Elijah Carnillo, one of the pre-service teachers.

【推荐2】Smart TVs and other Internet-connected household devices will be made to carry labels setting out how secure they are, under proposals being put forward by the government.

Ministers want the labels introduced on a voluntary basis at first, but propose that they are eventually made compulsory. The labels will help consumers identify which products are more and which are less secure. Under the plans, announced by the digital minister Margot James on Wednesday, merchants will only be able to sell products that carry the label, which will indicate to consumers whether the device observes the principal three security standards set out by the government practice in February.

The move is designed to deal with the problems caused by insecure connected household devices, such as TVs, doorbells and locks, which can be hijacked by malicious (恶意的) actors. There have also been warnings that governments could use them to spy on people in their homes. James said, “Many consumer products that are connected to the Internet are often found to be insecure, putting consumers’ privacy and security at risk. Our code of practice was the first step towards making sure that products have safety features built in from the design stage.”

Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, said the proposals represented a good start, but added, “The problem is what happens to those who don’t follow the guidelines. Or, more importantly, who is going to check that a device does follow whatever the eventual guidelines are. “

Woodward said the government would need to “put some teeth behind whatever standards they set out”, suggesting a watchdog along the lines of the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The plan will form part of a wider government consultation into improving general cybersecurity in the UK, with three key requirements in a code of practice for device manufacturers. The requirements include ensuring passwords of devices are not resettable to a universal factory setting, and ensuring they provide a public point of contact as part of a policy for disclosing any discovered weaknesses. It also calls for device makers to explicitly state the minimum length of time a device will receive security updates, never making users puzzled.

【推荐3】Happiness can be described as a positive mood and a pleasant state of mind. According to recent polls(民意测验),sixty to seventy percent of Americans consider themselves to be moderately happy and one in twenty persons feels very unhappy. Psychologists have been studying the factors that contribute to happiness. It is not predictable, and nor is person in an apparently(表面上)ideal situation necessarily happy. The ideal situation may have little to do with his actual feelings.

A good education and income are usually considered necessary for happiness. Though both may contribute, they are only chief factors if the person is seriously undereducated or actually suffering from lack of physical needs.

The rich are not likely to be happier than the middle-income group or even those with very low incomes. People with college educations are somewhat happier than those who did not graduate from high school, and it is believed that this is mainly because they have more opportunities to control their lives. Yet people with a high income and a college education may be less happy than those with the same income and no college education.

Poor health does not rule out happiness except for the severely disabled or those in pain. Learning to cope with a health problem can contribute to happiness. And love has a higher correlation with happiness than any other factor.

It should be noted that people quickly get used to what they have, and they are happiest when they feel they are increasing their level no matter where it stands at a given time.

Children whose parents were happily married have happier childhoods yet they are not necessarily happier adults.

The best formula for happiness is to be able to develop the ability to tolerate frustration(挫折), to have a personal involvement and commitment, and to develop self-confidence.