【推荐3】Smart entertainment is changing how we engage with leisure. By combining cutting-edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), augmented reality, and the internet of things with traditional forms of entertainment, this innovation is enhancing users’ experiences.

In 2023, Huawei introduced its Vision Smart TV3, transforming your home into your own amusement park. This innovative technology features groundbreaking AI super-sensing cameras and AI vision chips powered by deep learning and big data. These advanced components see and study your movements, enabling you to control characters through your body gestures. Social media is busy with users sharing their experiences of playing motion-sensing games, which require real-life movements like jumping and squatting instead of simply holding a controller.

The Vision Smart TV is not only cutting-edge but also family-friendly. Turning on the kids mode allows the screen to monitor real-time data, offering suggestions for adjusting a child’s viewing distance and posture. This provides a safe and comfortable entertainment experience for the younger audience. TorieZ, a Huawei Vision Smart TV3 owner and a mother of a 3-year-old daughter, shared her experience on Xiaohongshu. “Thanks to the smart screen, my child maintains good posture without constant supervision because her favorite cartoons stop if she slouches (懒洋洋地坐),” she said. When she’s free, TorieZ and her husband enjoy exercising together under the instructions of the TV.

We can not only play video games merely on the screens; now, with smart entertainment, you can get an immersive experience of Mario Kart, a racing video game, put right into your living room. While playing the game, players can control their karts running in their living rooms. Each kart has an onboard camera on it. The camera can record the layout of where they are and upload it to the Nintendo system. After processing it, some settings, like jungles and snowy landscapes, are created based on the layout and shown on the Switch screen. So, things in your living room, like the sofa and table, your feet or even your cat, can be a part of your game.

Step outside and you can also enjoy smart entertainment experiences. Shanghai Disney Resort uses big data analysis to offer personalized services. In the US and South America, VR World, the largest VR club, gives users super real gaming and travel adventures.

Looking forward, cutting-edge technologies will continue to change how we spend our leisure time.

【推荐1】Facial recognition software has found an unlikely new application: scanning the faces of thousands of British children in school canteens.

Nine schools in North Ayrshire will today start taking lunch payments by scanning the faces of pupils, claiming that the new system speeds up queues and is more secure than the card payments and fingerprint scanners they used previously. “It’s the fastest way of recognising someone at the till,” said David Swanston, the managing director of CRB Cunninghams, the company that installed the systems. “In a secondary school you have around a 25-minute period to serve potentially 1,000 pupils. So we need fast productivity at the point of sale.” He said the average transaction time was cut to five seconds per pupil.

However, privacy campaigners say there is little need to spread out facial recognition technology, which has been criticized for often operating without gaining approvals from the owners. Swanston argued that CRB Cunningham’s system, which uses cameras to check against coded face-print modes stored on servers at the schools, was different from live facial recognition systems that scan through crowds to identify faces. Live facial recognition has previously caused debate after being used by schools for security or to monitor attendance.

North Ayrshire committee said that 97 percent of children or their parents had given agreement for the new system. “Pupils often forget their PINs and unfortunately some have also been the victim of PIN cheating, so they are supportive of the planned developments and appreciate the benefits to them,” the council said.

But some parents said they were unsure whether their children had been given enough information to make their decision, and suggested that peer pressure had also played a role.

【推荐3】A machine can now not only beat you at chess, it can also outperform you in debate. Last week, in a public debate in San Francisco, a software program called Project Debater beat its human opponents, including Noa Ovadia, Israel’s former national debating champion.

Brilliant though it is, Project Debater has some weaknesses. It takes sentences from its library of documents and prebuilt arguments and strings them together. This can lead to the kinds of errors no human would make. Such wrinkles will no doubt be ironed out, yet they also point to a fundamental problem. As Kristian Hammond, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, put it: “There’s never a stage at which the system knows what it’s talking about.”

What Hammond is referring to is the question of meaning, and meaning is central to what distinguishes the least intelligent of humans from the most intelligent of machines. A computer works with symbols. Its program specifies a set of rules to transform one string of symbols into another. But it does not specify what those symbols mean. Indeed, to a computer, meaning is irrelevant. Humans, in thinking, talking, reading and writing, also work with symbols. But for humans, meaning is everything. When we communicate, we communicate meaning. What matters is not just the outside of a string of symbols, but the inside too, not just how they are arranged but what they mean.

Meaning emerges through a process of social interaction, not of computation, interaction that shapes the content of the symbols in our heads. The rules that assign meaning lie not just inside our heads, but also outside, in society, in social memory, social conventions and social relations. It is this that distinguishes humans from machines. And that’s why, however astonishing Project Debater may seem, the tradition that began with Socrates and Confucius will not end with artificial intelligence.

【推荐1】Multi- tasking can get you through the day, but “deep work” is important to your sense of purpose and success.

“Zero distractions” is what Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, stresses and he believes that it is required to have a session of focused productivity he calls “deep work”.

Is a zero-distraction moment even possible for most of us these days? After all, every technical invention that makes our lives more convenient, like phones and apps and streaming services, are built for a multi-tasking lifestyle.

Add to your grocery list. Press “buy” on a shopping website. Book a table for this weekend. All of these are things many of us do at the same time—and all too often while we're doing something else, like working.

Newport described the disadvantages of this lifestyle in an interview with The New York Times, “Every time you switch your attention from one target to another and then back again, there's a cost. This changing creates an effect that scientists call attention residue, which can lower your cognitive capacity for an important amount of time before it clears. If you constantly make ‘quick checks’ of different kinds of inventions and inboxes, you will keep yourself in a state of constant attention residue, which is a terrible idea if you're someone who uses your brain to make a living.”

Instead of moving from activity to activity, Newport advises us to actively make time for “deep work" every day, time when we are focused on a cognitively challenging task without interruption from anything else. This could be reading or learning a language or meeting a professional goal. The important part is that it needs to be an activity you can put all your energy and attention into wholeheartedly.

Getting in the habit of working deeply will, says Newport, lead you to the conclusion that “concentration is a super power”.

【推荐3】What are the most sustainable crops to grow for food security? Perhaps, in your growing zones, oranges or peaches win for best fruit crop.Hot, dry climates might call for dates or grapes.For me, growing organic apples is the best.Perhaps that’s because my hometown knows more about growing and preserving apples than any other fruit.

Some apples may have worms in them.“It’s not that bad. It’s organic.Just cut the worm out.”I laugh even as I type this.For us, “organic”is how we grow apples, but it does mean carving good fruit away from black worm holes.Modern techniques for growing organic apples include worm traps, fruit barriers, and organic insecticides, like bacterial poisons that only target worms.

Wormy apples are just fine for apple juice and jam, Mom says.Cut off the good part and throw it in the pot.Throw the bad part to the chickens.Boil the fruit and put juice into canning jars.Apple jam become pancake topping and the replacement “oil” in recipes — that is, if we don’t eat it directly out of the jar.

Apples are now so symbolic to American life that other countries try out the market.When I was younger, I might have laughed at that because of how connected apples and American stories have become, despite the fact that apples aren’t native to North America.But a good friend, after visiting several farms in his motherland Nigeria, showed me photos of Nigerian apples. The skin texture (质地) and color resembled American apples, but they were shaped more like oxheart tomatoes.So even though apples have taken on symbolic significance in America, they can contribute to food security in all kinds of places.