【推荐3】Navigating (导航) in China is easy and convenient — if you can read Chinese. Baidu and Alibaba offer fully featured map apps with detailed information, but foreigners have little access (通道；机会) to it.

“As a foreigner who can’t read Chinese characters, I noticed there was this hole,” said Jason Stine, a software engineer from the US, in an interview with the Charming China podcast. To fill that hole, he created his own app, called Lost Laowai.

Stine, 31, has lived in cities around China for seven years. He says people who can’t read Chinese are “a drop in the bucket (沧海一粟)” for companies like Tencent and Alibaba. There aren’t enough of these people for English versions of their apps to make economic sense. So Stine made one himself. “It’s essentially a translation of Alibaba Maps,” he said.

“The idea was to put everything into three forms. Chinese characters, pinyin...and then the English translation.” Also useful, it gives directions for city buses, one of the most difficult things for foreigners in China.

Although the app is useful, Stine says that it looks a bit “amateur (业余的)”. “I don’t have an app development background,” he adds, “I am self-taught.”

Stine has a full-time job with a Hong Kong company, so Lost Laowai is a weekend project. He depends on his user community, a WeChat group where users can report bugs and request features.

These lost laowais may be there to report bugs, but they are enthusiastic users of the app. “As someone actively trying to learn Mandarin, I...like the way the address is showed: Chinese characters, Pinyin, and English,” said Kevin Mulligan, a South African living in Shenzhen.

Lisa Schooling, from the US, has used the app in Suzhou and says it gives her a sense of safety. “I just like the feel that no matter where I am, I can check the app and gain a sense of direction,” said Schooling.

【推荐1】Recent research demonstrates the harmful mental health effects caused by social media use, including increased rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal tendency and self-harm. Adolescents (青少年) who spend more than three hours per day on social media face twice the risk of poor mental health outcomes.

Addictive feeds — designed to make use of personal data to intensify (增强) users’ content that will keep them on the platform for as long as possible — have dramatically heightened the risk to young users’ well-being and made our children addicted to these social media outlets.

In the first seven years after addictive feeds were introduced, suicide rates for 10- to 14-year-old girls doubled and hospitalizations for suicidal tendency and attempts increased nearly twice for all adolescents.

Instead of responding to the problem, social media empires have made great efforts to keep and capture user engagement, and the consequences have been catastrophic.

Beyond the direct harm of social media addiction, the collection of children’s data by these giant companies puts our kids at huge risk, leaving them vulnerable (易受伤的) to having their location and other personal data tracked, shared and sold online. As a consequence, that data is at greater risk of falling into the wrong hands-including human traffickers, identity thieves and others who might prey (欺凌) on young people.

We will not stand by and watch an arms race among social media mega-corporations (大型企业) over who can best profit from our children’s pain and addiction. That is why we should use and are using every tool at our disposal to fight back against these damaging practices: from the courthouse to the statehouse.

【推荐3】On Monday, December 5, online retailing (零售) giant Amazon announced the opening of its first physical store. Called Amazon Go, the Seattle-based store that is currently being tested by company employees, learns from regular grocery stores except for one thing — “Just Walk Out” technology. All purchases are handled electronically, which means there are no cashiers, checkouts or lines. Shoppers simply take what they need and leave.

To shop at Amazon Go, customers need to open an Amazon account and download the store’s App onto their smartphones. Upon entering the store, they scan a QR code (二维码) with their phones and begin shopping. Every item picked up gets added to the bill automatically. If the customer changes his/her mind, all he/she has to do is return the purchase back on the shelf, and it will be removed from the final bill. Once the customer leaves the store, the amount spent is automatically taken out from the Amazon account and a digital receipt is generated to remind the shopper of the trade.

To provide busy customers a pleasant shopping experience, Amazon, which has been working on this concept for four years, plans to keep the store size at a “comfortable” 1,800 square feet. In addition to typical grocery products like bread and milk, the store will stock ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch and dinner options, made by on-site chefs. There will also be chef-designed Amazon Meal boxes for those who prefer to cook the food at home.

After years of joint efforts by Amazon staff, Amazon Go finally opened in 2021. Amazon will not provide any insight into the cutting-edge “Just Walk Out” technology. The company website states, “The checkout-free shopping experience is enabled by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning.”