【推荐1】Microsoft won't renew the contracts for dozens of news production contractors working at its MSN website and plans to use AI to replace them.

The roughly 50 employees were informed that their services would no longer be needed beyond June 30, but a team of full-time journalists will remain.

The Microsoft spokesman said in a statement, “Like all companies, we analyze and make judgments on our activities and services on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time,rearrangement in others.These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”

MSN will use AI to replace the production work its journalists had been doing. That work includes using an automated system to identify trending news stories from dozens of publishing partners and to help improve the content by rewriting headlines or adding better accompanying photographs or slide shows.

“I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI are going to take all our jobs-now it's taken mine, one of the terminated contractors said. “But with fewer human beings to monitor the technology, AI may not be fully familiar with strict editorial guidelines and could end up letting through inappropriate stories."

MSN has undergone a number of changes since its Launch as Microsoft Network in 1995. Once ii offered original content and links to news, weather and sports. In 2013, it seduced original news content and began cutting employees. By 2014. it launched a redesigned version that partnered with other news sites - paying them to redistribute their content. Today, the news service relies entirely on those partnerships with no original news content of its own. Selecting and editing stories rather than actually generating them made it easier for MSN to increasingly rely on an automated editing system.

【推荐3】Coogle’s parent company is winding down a project that used high-lying balloons to provide Internet services to hard-to-reach areas of the world.

The project, known as Loon, started in 2011. It was managed by Alphabet Inc. It aimed to bring connectivity to areas of the world where ground-based cell towers (手机信号塔) were too expensive or too difficult to set up.

But Loon was unable to reduce costs enough to make its business model run, the project’ s leader, Alastair Westgarth, said in a blog post. “While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, competitive business,” Westgarh said.

Loon’s shutdown isn’t surprising, economists said.

Loon’s technology sent gas-filled balloons the size of tennis courts into the air. They usually stay at heights of around 60,000 to 75,000 feet. There, onboard communications equipment sent Internet signals back down to earth. The system was able to offer mobile coverage to an area 200 times larger than a traditional ground-based cell tower. However, a carrier would need several balloons at once, each would cost tens of thousands of dollars and last only about five months.

Alphabet wasn’t alone in running projects aimed at offering Internet connection to hard-to-reach areas. Companies such as Amazon. com Inc. and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been making efforts to provide Internet connection in such places, using satellites in near Earth orbit.

Over the last few years, Loon’s technology has proved successful in some suffering communities. In 2017, the project sent balloons into the skies above Puerto Rico after a terrible hurricane damaged the island’s communications facilities. Two years later, soon after a 7. 8 earthquake struck parts of Peru, Loon’s balloons began to provide the locals with mobile connectivity.

Rich Devaul, a founder of the project, said the need for mobile connectivity was rapidly rising recently. This made cell towers more cost-effective than he had expected ten years ago, reducing the need for Loon, “The problem got solved faster than we thought,” he said in an interview.

【推荐2】There’s a song in your head. You keep hearing it repeatedly. You can’t make it stop, and it’s driving you crazy! Has this happened to you? Maybe you have suffered from an earworm, which is a memory of a song.

Earworms are common. A study showed that 90 percent of people experience them. Why do we get earworms? According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, music affects us whether we pay attention to it or not. We’re surrounded by music all the time in our everyday lives. Sacks wonders if there is a higher incidence of earworms today because of all this music in our environment.

Research on the primary auditory cortex supports Sack’s ideas. The auditory cortex is the part of the brain that processes sound. It’s a short-term storage system for small amounts of auditory information. Some of this auditory information is forgotten, and some of it goes into long-term memory. However, songs appear to stay in the auditory cortex for a long time.

James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, thinks that only certain types of songs become earworms. These songs are repetitive, simple, and incongruous — something unexpected such as uneven rhythm. Your brain pays a lot of attention to a song like this, Kellaris says. Because it is repetitive and unusual, it stays longer in the auditory cortex. At that point, Kellaris believes, it becomes an annoying earworm.

Advertisers often use jingles — short songs that are easy to remember to promote sales. Advertisers want jingles to stick in people’s minds to keep them thinking about their products. It seems that advertisers have learned what Kellaris has found out in his research.

Is there any way to get rid of an earworm? Here are some tips Kellaris collected: replace the earworm song with another song, try to distract yourself by doing an intense activity such as exercising, or tell someone about your earworm. What if none of these strategies work? Then perhaps you should just sit back and try to enjoy the music in your head!