【推荐1】Although the English language has been in a constant state of change, Shakespeare’s works have continued to influence the language we use daily. Shakespeare created many commonly used expressions, new words, and the way of using punctuation (标点符号).     1    

Shakespeare’s talent for making the English language into the powerful written word has ensured his lasting influence on our everyday language. Hundreds of expressions were invented by Shakespeare.     2    

They only know some well-known expressions, such as, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” can be attributed (认为是……所作) to Shakespeare.

    3     Many of his original words, for example, “uncomfortable” and “fashionable”, are still used today. Shakespeare’s effect on vocabulary is rather amazing when considering how much language has changed since his lifetime.

Shakespeare’s use of punctuation is also distinctive (有特色的). His punctuation is a clue to the way a piece should be performed. Punctuation is required to signal how each line should be delivered.     4     Consequently, lines without punctuation naturally seem to gather speed and emotional purpose. When analyzing a Shakespearean text, stop and consider how punctuation is used.

In conclusion, Shakespeare is truly a great author.     5     We will always have the benefit of his remarkable works for many years to come.

【推荐3】Why Is Canadian English Unique?

Is there such a thing as Canadian English? If so, what is it?

The standard stereotype (刻板印象) among Americans is that Canadians are like Americans, except that they say “eh” a lot and pronounce “out and about” as “oot and aboot.” Many Canadians, on the other hand, will tell you that Canadian English is more like British English, and proof holds that the spellings “colour” and “centre” and the name “zed” for the letter Z.

Canadian does exist as a separate variety of English, with subtly (细微地) distinctive features of pronunciation and vocabulary. It has its own dictionaries; the Canadian Press has its own style guide. However, the core of Canadian English is ambivalence (矛盾).

Canadian history helps to explain this. In the beginning, there were the indigenous peoples (原住民), with far more linguistic (语言的) and cultural variety than Europe. Starting in the 1600s, the French colonized the St. Lawrence River region and the Atlantic coast south of it. In the mid-1700s, England got into a war with France, concluding with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ceded (割让) “New France” to England. The English allowed any French to stay who were willing to become subjects (臣民) of the English King.

At the time of the Treaty of Paris, however, there were very few English speakers in Canada. The American Revolution(革命) changed that. The founding English-speaking people of Canada were United Empire Loyalists — people who fled (逃离) American independence and were rewarded with land in Canada. As a result, Canadian English was, from its very beginning, both American — because its speakers had come from the American colonies — and not American, because they rejected the newly independent nation.

Just as the Americans sought to have a truly distinct, independent American version of English, the loyalists sought to remain more like England. These were people whose variety of English was already different from the British and vice versa. When the residents of London began to drop their r’s and change some of their vowels (元音), people in certain parts of the United States adopted some of these changes, but Canadians did not.

There did end up being more British influx (大量涌入) and influence in Canada. After the War of 1812, Mother England encouraged emigration to Canada to ensure the loyalty to England. The accent did not become British, though British schoolteachers and authorities did leave their marks on the nation’s spelling and grammar.

Today, one-fifth of Canadians have a mother tongue other than English or French — nearly as many as have French as their mother tongue. And yet the basic character of Canadian English still appears like a household of Anglophile (亲英派) Americans, with bits from other cultures mainly in the kitchen, a few traces of the indigenous cultures who used to be the only residents, and some influence from the French roommate.

【推荐2】In less than 2 months, the artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT has become a cultural sensation (轰动). ChatGPT is developed with a technique called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to train the language model, enabling it to automatically create text based on written prompts. I asked it to rewrite the first scene of the classic American play Death of a Salesman. The output was an amusing conversation. This is certainly fun, but there are serious implications for generative AI programs like ChatGPT in science and academia.

Many concerns relate to how ChatGPT will change education. It certainly can write essays about a range of topics. I gave it both an exam and a final project. It did well finding factual answers, but the scholarly writing still has a long way to go. If anything, the implications for education may push academics to rethink their courses in innovative ways and give assignments that aren’t easily solved by AI. That could be for the best.

More worrisome are the effects of ChatGPT on writing scientific papers. In a recent study abstract created by ChatGPT were submitted to academic reviewers, who only caught 63% of these fakes. That’s a lot of AI-generated text that could find its way into the literature soon.

The text written by ChatGPT is not acceptable. An AI program cannot be an author. Still, according to Editorial Policies, text generated by ChatGPT (or any other AI tools) cannot be used in the work, nor can figures, images, or graphics be the products of such tools. Breaking these policies will be considered scientific misconduct (学术不端) no different from plagiarism (剽窃) of existing works.

The scientific record is ultimately one of the human efforts of struggling with important questions. Machines play an important role, but as tools for the people giving the hypotheses (假设), designing the experiments and making sense of the results. Ultimately the product must come from-and be expressed by-the wonderful computer in our heads.

【推荐3】For humans, the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were a stressful time, marked by fear, isolation(隔离), canceled plans and uncertainty. But for birds that inhabit developed areas of the Pacific Northwest, the reduction in noise due to pandemic lock downs allowed them to use a wider range of habitats in cities.

A new University of Washington study led by Olivia Sander foot reported that many birds were just as likely to be found in highly developed urban areas as they were in less-developed green spaces during the peak of the COVID-19 lock downs.

“Our findings suggest that some birds may have been able to use more spaces in cities because our human footprint was a little lighter,” said Sander foot. “For about half of the species we observed, neither land use nor canopy cover(林冠盖度)had an effect on their site use. That’s very interesting, because we had expected that whether a habitat was mostly covered in concrete or vegetation could tell us something about what birds would be there.”

In the spring of 2020, Sander foot and her colleagues invited more than 900 community scientists in the Pacific Northwest to participate in the study. The volunteers chose their own monitoring sites—mostly backyards and parks where they could safely follow public health orders—and recorded the birds they observed over a 10-minute period at least once a week.

In order to compare the volunteers’ bird observations with human activity, Sander foot and her colleagues used data from Google’s Community Mobility Reports, which track the relative amount of people moving around at various points during the pandemic. While most people spent the spring of 2020 isolated in their homes, many began venturing out again over the course of the study period.

As people returned to public spaces and human activity increased, the study volunteers recorded an increase in sightings of several bird species in their monitoring sites.

“The birds mostly were in highly developed urban areas at the height of the lock downs, because human activity wasn’t as much of a disturbance, but then returned to those vegetated areas as human activity increased again,” Sander foot said.