【推荐1】With all the traditional media channels, including newspapers, magazines and television shows, shrinking, advertisers are worrying about how they can reach customers. Banners (横幅) ads on our devices are ugly and disturbing. To overcome various digital problems, the ad industry has been serving up a sneaky (不光明正大的) solution: make ads look less like ads and more like the articles, videos and posts around them.

This trend, called native advertising, has taken over the Internet; even the websites such as NYTimes.com and Wall-Street.com are using it. On Facebook and Twitter, every 10th item or so is an ad; only the small subtitle “Sponsored (赞助)” appearing in light gray type tells you which posts are ads.

Won’t dressing up ads to make them look like reported articles mislead people? Sometimes, yes. An Interactive Advertising Bureau study found that only 41 percent of general news readers could tell such ads apart from real news stories. And it’s getting worse. Advertisers worry that the “Sponsored” label discourages readers from clicking, so some websites are making the labels smaller and less noticeable. Sometimes the labels disappear entirely.

At a recent talk about the difficulty of advertising in the new, small-screen world, I heard an ad manager tell an impressive story. She had gotten a musical performance – paid for by her soft drink client- perfectly inserted (插入) into a TV awards show, without any moment of blackness before or after. “It looked just like part of the real broadcast!” she recounted happily.

Look, it is great that native advertising works. But if advertisers truly believe in their material, they should have no problem labeling it as advertising.

For now native ads continue to be a fashion- with no laws governing them and no labeling standard. But that could change; the Federal Trade Commission has begun considering regulation. If the new generation of digital advertisers clean up their act according to the regulation, native ads might become more acceptable.

【推荐2】Online, English has become a common language for users from around the world. In the process, the language itself is changing. There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. Some language experts predict that within 10 years English will occupy the Internet — but in forms will be very different to what we accept and recognize as English today.

That’s because people who speak English as a second language already outnumber native speakers. And increasingly, they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, particularly on the Internet where less attention is paid to grammar and spelling and users don’t have to worry about their accent (口音).

Users of Facebook already socialize in a number of different “Englishes” including Indian English, Spanish English and Korean English. While these different styles have long existed within their cultures, they’re now expanding and coming online. Technology companies are introducing newly-developed English words with products aimed at enabling users to add words that are not in the English dictionary. And most large companies have English websites, while smaller businesses are learning that they need a common language — English — to reach global customers.

The increasing popularity of the Internet allows more languages to develop quickly.

“Most people actually speak several languages — it’s less common to only speak one,” says Mr. Munro. “English has taken its place as the world's common language, but it’s not pushing out other languages.” Instead, other languages are pushing their way into English, and in the process creating something new.

【推荐3】Your alarm goes off on your phone, and instead of turning it off and going on sleeping, you pick it up and stupidly say, “Hello?”

You are, to use the technical term, suffering sleep drunkenness (迷糊), those first few confused minutes people sometimes experience after waking, according to a just-published paper in Neurology (神经学). For the first time, the phenomenon has been studied in a general adult population.

In telephone interviews the researchers conducted with more than 19,000 healthy individuals, about 25 percent reported experiencing some sort of sleep-drunk episode (插曲) in the last year, and 12 percent said this happens to them at least once a week.

Most of their stories were actually pretty funny, said Stanford University School of Medicine psychiatrist (精神病学家) Maurice Ohayon. One man picked up his alarm clock and mistook it for his phone, holding a two-minute conversation on it. Another participant woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t find the bathroom in her own home. Other common examples are that foggy feeling you get when you first wake up with a start on a Saturday before realizing it’s the weekend, or when you wake up in a hotel room and can’t immediately figure out where you are.

Ohayon explains that a sudden awakening, to our poor, half-asleep brains, signals an emergency - a time for action, not reason.

“For most people, and especially if this only happens to you every once in a while, it’s nothing to worry about. But for people who experience sleep drunkenness once a week or more, you might as well refer to professional help to have a sound sleep.”