【推荐1】“Beijing’s Forbidden City can be at risk of being flooded, but it’s not because modern technologies and repairs have deteriorated the drainage (排水) system,” Beijing News Radio reported.

The report is in response to a popular online view: The Forbidden City, the royal palace of Ming and Qing dynasties also known as the Palace Museum, has never been flooded throughout its history of more than 600 years.

Earlier, a video showed ankle-deep water near the Forbidden City’s Cining Palace, where the royal women used to live. Some netizens have questioned whether modern drainage repair works have made the system much weaker.

Di Yajing, an official in control of affairs relating to the site, told Beijing News Radio that the Forbidden City has a complex (复杂的) drainage system. “Rain coming down from roofs was guided to the basement and then to the drains,” she said, adding that rainwater would flow from the central of the palace to both sides, and from north to south, due to differences in heights.

“The drains were cleared once a year in springtime in ancient times and nowadays they are cleared three times a year except in winter,” the report said. “Although the number of clearing increased every year, it’s not modern technology that worsened the ability of the drainage system,” the report said. During the clearing process, workers found lots of modern objects such as plastic bottles and bags, even towels and clothing, and these things resulted in the blocking of the drainage system.

In addition, there are plenty of records that have recorded occasions in which the palace was flooded and some roofs or walls were damaged by floodwaters, according to the report. For example, a rain in 1885 led to floodwaters of about 1 meter deep. Every time people would have to find out the place of blockage, clear it and then the drainage system would work well right away.

【推荐2】You’ve probably often read about quiet firing on the Internet. According to a recent LinkedIn News survey of 20,000 + workers, 87% believe quiet firing to be real, with only 13% denying its existence. 48% of the employees have seen it happen in their workforce, and 35% claimed to have been subject to it themselves.

Quiet firing describes the practice of gradually freezing an employee out until they are left with no choice but to resign. Employers quietly fire out of fear of having tough conversations with employees. Rather than risk a worker growing angry at being fired, these employers gradually make the employee want to leave. Sometimes there are also financial considerations that matter. Employees who hand in the notice will not get a severance package (离职金). Still, companies often replace them with fresh and inexperienced workers who get much less salary.

So, how can you tell when it’s happening to you? A sign of quiet firing could be that you’re not getting new assignments that are taking the organization to the next level. Your workload is actually increasing, but it swells to the point of becoming unmanageable. A crucial sign is that you’re getting the cold shoulder and the boss is not making an effort to interact with you.

If you are doubtful that you are being quietly fired, first determine whether the treatment is directly relevant to you or applicable to all employees. Lack of promotions or failure to give feedback (反馈) might mean mismanagement rather than quiet firing. If you are being quietly fired, ask managers about the cause. Or, talk about your current role and where you want to be, and ask for clear instructions. If you do not see significant progress on the timeline, then perhaps start networking and job hunting to find another opportunity.

【推荐3】You can tell a lot about people's general state of mind based on their social media feeds. Are they always tweeting about their biggest annoyances or posting pictures of particularly cute kitties? In a similar fashion, researchers are turning to Twitter for clues about the overall happiness of entire geographic communities.

What they're finding is that regional variation in the use of common phrases produces predictions that don't always reflect the local state of well being. But removing from their analyses just three specific terms — good, love and LOL — greatly improves the accuracy of the methods.

“We're living in a crazy COVID-19 era. And now more than ever, we're using social media to adapt to a new normal and reach out to the friends and family that we can't meet face-to-face.” Kokil Jaidka studies computational linguistics at the National University of Singapore. “But our words aren't useful just to understand what we, as individuals, think and feel. They're also useful clues about the community we live in.”

One of the simpler methods that many scientists use to analyze the data involves correlating words with positive or negative emotions. But when those records are compared with phone surveys that assess regional well-being, Jaidka says, they don't paint an accurate picture of the local zeitgeist.

Being able to get an accurate read on the mood of the population is no laughing matter.

“That's particularly important now, in the time of COVID, where we're expecting a mental health crisis and we're already seeing in survey data the largest decrease in subjective well-being in 10 years at least, if not ever.”

To find out why, Jaidka and her team analyzed billions of tweets from around the United States. And they found that among the most frequently used terms on Twitter are LOL, love and good. And they actually throw the analysis off. Why the disconnect?

“Internet language is really a different beast than regular spoken language. We've adapted words from the English vocabulary to mean different things in different situations.” says Jaidka. “Take, for example, LOL. I've tweeted the word LOL to express irony, annoyance and sometimes just pure surprise. When the methods for measuring LOL as a marker of happiness were created in the 1990s, it still meant laughing out loud.”

"There are plenty of terms that are less misleading," says Jaidka. "Our models tell us that words like excited, fun, great, opportunity, interesting, fantastic and those are better words for measuring subjective well-being."

【推荐1】“Teenager Therapy”, hosted by five rising seniors at Loara High School in Anaheim, Calif., has become a breakout hit. The podcast show features five teens having loose, sincere conversations about mental health, school and family, friendships, and more. Sometimes they interview big names, including Loren Gray. But typically, the show is more of a free-form discussion.

“There are episodes where we offer advice about teenage life, and there are episodes where we simply talk about our experiences,” said Gael Aitor, 17.

He got the idea for “Teenager Therapy” in 2018 after hearing “Couples Therapy”, a podcast by the YouTuber Casey Neistat and his wife. The then 15-year-old rounded up four friends to record the first episode of “Teenager Therapy”. “The first two tries were terrible,” Mr. Aitor said. “The third time we were happy with it, so we posted it online.”

Building a podcast audience is no easy job, especially since the group of high schoolers had no marketing budget. To attract listeners, Mr. Aitor repurposed an old Instagram account, which had 20, 000 followers.

Within a few months of posting their first episode, “Teenager Therapy” had over 100, 000 downloads — a number it can take years for self-governing podcasts to hit. From there, the show kept growing. But part of the great popularity of the show is that it’s produced for teenagers by several hosts from the same age group. “People often say, ‘I don’t know who to tell but you guys,’” said Mr. Aitor. “We never really scripted (写脚本) anything or planned it out.”

Maya Gabay, 16, a rising high school junior, said the podcast was now her favorite show. “The podcast never holds back on anything,” said Ms. Gabay, who, like many other young listeners, considers it as their lifeline. The podcast has helped her process things going on in her life, including problems with friendships. “It’s really great to see kids my age doing something like this,” she said.

【推荐2】Professor Devi Sridhar will discuss Preventable, her definitive account of the Covid-19 pandemic (疫情) and how it changed the world.

As a professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Sridhar rose to fame during the pandemic for her vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power.

Her wide-ranging new book looks at the medical, political and economic effects of the public health crisis. Exposing the realities of those affected by the pandemic, from the passengers marooned (受困) on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to tired healthcare workers, she reveals the deep seated economic and social inequalities that have influenced the outcomes of the pandemic

Sridhar will join BBC science correspondent Nicola Davis to explore what we have learned from Covid-19, and to put forward a vision for how we can better protect ourselves against another health crisis in the years to come. She will also be answering your questions in his live streamed event.

●Wednesday 25 May 2022 8pm - 9pm

£7 plus £0.92 booking fee

If you live in the United Kingdom, you can purchase a ticket with a copy of Preventable (£ 20) at checkout for a special combined price of £22.

This ticket will give you access to the live streamed event and the on-demand recording which will be available in the days following. A link to the recording will be sent to all ticket holders.

【推荐3】If you haven’t started live stream (网络直播) commerce on social media, maybe you should.     1    It is growing in popularity, accounting for $200 billion in sales in China and $11 billion in the United States in 2020. Those numbers are only expected to climb.

“Livestream commerce is fast becoming a medium of choice,” said Thomas S. Robertson, a marketing professor. In an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review, he examines the rise of livestream commerce and offers guidance for companies that want to jump on the trend.

    2    We have to look at the evolution of online. It started with text, and over time that became rather boring. Text then became accompanied by imagery, and that was a step forward in building audience engagement. The next step was video, which turns out to be more powerful than imagery in building engagement. After that came livestream.     3    That’s where we’ve arrived in terms of the evolution of online. It’s become an important means of going to market and selling with certain audiences and under certain conditions.

What should brands be thinking about as they jump into livestream commerce?     4    For example, brands have to choose the right plat form and influence. Is it someone with followings, or a more specialized influence who knows more about a specific category, such as cosmetics or a technology product? Brands have to measure success against goals.     5    It’s not just about making immediate sales. Their objective is to reach new markets, introduce new products，or create a buzz (轰动效应) for the brand. Given their expectations, they are going to track sales outcomes, social media mentions, likes and dislikes.