【推荐1】Baseball is a sport that began in the eastern United States in the 1800s. It is known as the “national pastime”, a game that millions of people continue to enjoy each spring and summer. Major League Baseball recently opened its new season. So this is a good time to explore the influence of it on popular culture, including music. Many songs have been written about baseball.

Baseball expert Warner Fusselle writes that there are probably more than 1,000 songs about baseball. The most popular is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” It was written in 1908 by Jack Norworth. He wrote it after seeing a sign about baseball on an underground train in New York City. Two years later, his friend, Albert Von Tilzer, put the words into music and soon the song became very hot. It was reported that Mr. Norworth had never seen a Major League Baseball game.

People still sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during baseball games. Near the end of the game, people become tired of sitting on the hard seats. So, during the special time in the game, everyone stands up and stretches their arms and legs. Everyone sings a song together. Most often, it is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”.

A large number of songs have been written about America’s baseball teams. These teams include the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. Other songs have been written about famous baseball players: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson and Joe DiMaggio.

Baseball expert Richard Miller writes that many songs and poems about other subjects use words and expressions from baseball. In our daily life, we often hear that a girl tells her boyfriend that she will not like him unless he is a good baseball player.

【推荐2】Do you know the Eiffel Tower when you see a picture of it? Of course you do! So do a lot of other people. In fact, I believe more people recognize the Eiffel Tower than any other famous structure in the whole world. That long, long capital A is easy to remember.

The Eiffel Tower is the famous symbol of the city of Paris. It also stands for France just as the Statue of Liberty stands for the United States.

The Eiffel Tower was not very well liked at first, even though the design had been chosen out of seven hundred designs. A contest had been held to find a design for a tower to be built in Paris by 1889.That year would be one hundred years after the war known as the French Revolution. The French Revolution marked the time when the French people broke away from the rule of kings. It was a very important thing to all Frenchmen, and they wanted a special tower to be built to mark the 100 years.

When his design was chosen, Eiffel was fifty-four, rich, and well known for his fine work. He had already designed dams, churches, railroad stations, bridges, harbors and, of course, the framework of the Statue of Liberty. But it was the Eiffel Tower that made him really famous. At first, the French hated the tower. When it was begun in 1887, people called it ugly and useless. They also said that it couldn’t be built safely, and that it would fall down. As the tower gets close to her nineties, she is still in great shape. And the French people have changed their minds. Now they are very proud of their Eiffel Tower. They even think she is beautiful!

【推荐3】As the politicians made clear at last month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow, now is the time to act on climate change. We need to cut carbon emissions. But will people really be prepared to make changes in their lives? Can we really make society much greener than it is now?

Someone is feeling optimistic mostly because of one factor: Batteries. It isn’t obvious but over the last decade or so, just as we’ve watched our computers get faster and screens get thinner, batteries have dramatically improved too.

Battery innovation is exploding. According to the European Patent Office, the number of battery patents filed grew by an average of 14 percent every year between 2005 and 2018. Energy storage is getting better and better, as more companies are discovering new chemistry and processes to make them work more efficiently. And the costs will continue to fall, both as battery chemistry improves and because manufacturing lots of batteries on a massive scale makes the production of individual batteries a lot cheaper.

And the results of all of this work are astonishing. Today, battery power per kilowatt hour costs around only ten percent of what it did a decade ago, which has made the batteries in electric cars cheaper and longer-lasting. For example, the new Nissan Leaf is now capable of upwards of 230 miles without needing to recharge. This is a big deal, as it doesn’t just make electric cars more useful, but it also reduces the “range anxiety” worry that you will run out of charge before you can find a charger on a long trip.

Better batteries do not just mean better cars, however. They can also help us decarbonize the entire national grid. Storing energy has always been a problem for the grid. Today, only a tiny amount of generated electricity is stored for later use, which leads to lots of power going to waste. But better batteries make it technologically and economically workable to store large amounts of energy from the grid.

It’s likely that in the not-too-distant future, alongside other essentials in our homes like a boiler, we night also have an enormous battery in the garage. Batteries may not be as flashy as phones, rockets or other new technologies. But when it comes to technology to fight climate change, they’re definitely leading the charge.

【推荐2】In early 2023, OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought a new age—one in which artificial intelligence (AI) went from a dream to an issue for workers. Many workers may have believed that burger-flipping (翻汉堡包的) robots in fast food restaurants would be the first to be replaced by AI tools. Yet the light-speed use of AI tools may now mean knowledge-work jobs that were long considered “safe” could be endangered even faster than workers expected.

Robots that act like AI coworkers are on the way—and in some cases, they’re already here. In early December 2023, Artisan AI—a startup founded by Jaspar Carmichae-Jack—showed its first “Artisan”, an AI-powered digital worker called “Ava” who will work as a saleswoman. “She can make suggestions, edit campaigns, join meetings and take notes,” Carmichael-Jack says. “Our goal is to have Artisans working alongside humans directly and have cohesion (凝聚力), and we want the boring work to be moved onto the Artisan, which doesn’t have feelings about whether something is boring or difficult.”

Although AI technology is already shaking the workforce, “we’re still at the beginning” when it comes to AI fully combined into the workplace, says Erik Brynjolfsson, a Stanford University professor. He says as AI plays a more important role in economical fields, it should increase output and money for businesses. The question, however, is what the human toll of that growth will be, particularly in terms of job losses.

Whether the workers are reduced by AI technologies will be a choice. Workers will need to have the right to decide how AI is introduced and used in some industries. One example of this is the agreement between the Screen Actors Guild and Hollywood studios that sets limits on the use of AI in film and television production. The question is whether other industries will follow the example to protect their workers’ living.

【推荐3】A new study examined scientists’ peer reviews, or researchers’ official statements on others’ work, across multiple AI-related conferences. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” — a buzzword often associated with generative A.I., like ChatGPT — almost 3,400 percent more than the previous year. Other major conferences showed similar patterns. In other words, many researchers were handing, at least, parts of their peer review over to A.I.

What’s going on in science is a slice of a much bigger problem. Any viral post on social media now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated elements. There are synthetic videos for children on YouTube, like music videos about parrots where the birds have eyes within eyes, singing in an unnatural voice. The narratives make no sense, and characters appear and disappear randomly.

As a neuroscientist, this worries me. Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like reasonable sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? Einstein supposedly said: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But what happens when a child is consuming mostly A.I.-generated waste? We find ourselves in the middle of a vast developmental experiment.

A.I.’s cultural pollution is driven by a desire to fill the Internet’s appetite for content as cheaply as possible, which in turn pollutes our culture. And despite public appeals to act against it, A.I. companies are dragging their feet because it goes against the industry’s bottom line to have detectable products, which they fear might weaken the model’s performance, although there is no current evidence.

To deal with this general refusal to act, we need a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to force built-in watermarking to A.I. generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required action to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require actions to protect a different but equally critical resource: our shared human culture.