【推荐2】Over 70% of the earth’s surface is covered in water, but it’s undrinkable. Scientists at the   University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have modeled a system that can collect water vapor (水蒸汽) from above the ocean surface and freeze it into fresh drinking water at a large scale.

Water shortage is an issue that’s projected to get worse, as climate change makes dry areas even drier. The oceans, home to over 96% of water on Earth, represent a huge potential reservoir (a place to store water), but desalination (海水淡化) is a challenging and complex prospect to scale up on account of the poisonous wastewater it produces.

But nature already has a pretty good desalination system — the sun is heating up the surface of the ocean and evaporating water out of it, which of course goes on to become rain. In a new study, the UIUC team came up with a method to use this resource. The team proposes that structures could be built several kilometers offshore to obtain air rich in water vapor from above the ocean surface. That air can then be piped back to land and turned into water. This fresh water could then be used for drinking, agriculture, or whatever else a region needs it for. The whole system could be powered by offshore wind farms and land-based solar panels.

The researchers evaluated 14 cities around the world, analyzing how much water could be collected based on the offshore air in those locations. Based on their models, the scientists estimated that these structures could collect between 37.6 billion and 78.3 billion liters of water per year, depending on the conditions in a specific location.

The team says that the solution is pretty good, since it works like the natural water cycle except that the vapor is guided to where it’s needed. And while many proposed drinking water sources could become less as climate change progresses, this one should actually get even better. “The climate projections show that the oceanic vapor will only increase over time, providing even more freshwater supply,” said Afeefa Rahman, the co-author of the study. “So, the system we are proposing will be useful under climate change. This provides a much needed approach for adaptation to climate change, particularly to populations living in dry and semi-dry regions of the world.”

【推荐1】Kite surfing is a sport that takes place on the surface of the water, on top of boards that are similar in design to wakeboards (尾波滑水板), with the surfer pulled by a kite. The popularity of kite surfing has grown, although it is rather difficult to master. Kite surfing uses the same equipment as kite boarding, but is generally given more to riding on top of waves, rather than on smaller lakes or other calm bodies of water.

Early experiments in kite transportation took place through the 19th century, and at the dawn of the 20th century Samuel Cody crossed the English Channel using kites and a small boat. Kite surfing itself, however, wasn’t really born until the late 1970s. Beginning in that decade, more people became involved in using kites for personal transport and sport. Kite technology itself advanced enormously during the 1970s, with kites becoming much more controllable.

The early kite surfing was rather accidental, but innovators continued to develop the technology to make it easier to control and safer. By the late 1990s, kite surfing was becoming popular off the coast of Maui, France and throughout the world. In 1997, a special kite system was built specifically for kite surfing, which helped kite surfing into the mainstream.

Because of the high speeds and the dangers, it is generally recommended that would-be kite surfers take at least a few basic classes to learn the fundamentals. The main attraction of kite surfing is the potential for amazing tricks. The kite allows the surfer to experience enormous jumps, flying through the air for large distances before hitting the water in a controlled fashion. Like skateboarding, kite surfing makes use of a number of board grabs, with complex tricks possible due to the long period of time the surfer can remain in the air.

【推荐3】Lake Titicaca is a freshwater lake in the Andes mountains on the border of Bolivia. It’s the largest lake in South America. Dotted along the lake’s western corner, you can find dozens of artificial islands. Several thatched (茅草的) houses and structures sit on each island, some of which are only 30 meters or so wide, although larger ones exist.

The floating platforms are built by piling layers upon layers of mixed totora roots and reeds (芦苇). The totora plant is necessary to life on the lake. Its strong root fibers are used to make houses, boats, roofs, mattresses, and more, as well as used to make tea, traditional medicine, and tasty dishes known as “lake banana”.

So the story goes, this unusual living arrangement came out in the pre-Columbian era when the ambitious Inc a Empire began invading (入侵) into the mainland villages of Uros. The Uros villages moved to Lake Titicaca where they built these floating platforms. If invading Inca came their way, the Uros could push these artificial islands out to the middle of the lake and flee their attack.

The threat of the Inca Empire has long passed, but the tradition remains strong. Even today, it’s estimated that around 1,300 Uros live on some 100 constructed islands on Lake Titicaca. Maintaining the lifestyle isn’t easy. While totora is a tough material, the thatched organic material degrades due to the forces of nature over time, meaning the islands and homes are in a constant state of repair.

However, the traditional way of life isn’t without its modern benefits. Many of the islands have solar panels that power lights, radios, and television satellites. The lake’s artificial islands have also become a must-see spectacle for tourists, with some locals even renting out their totora-thatched homes to travelers on online rental website Airbnb.

【推荐2】Will chatbots that can generate fascinating articles destroy education as we know it?

New York City’s Department of Education recently banned (禁止) the use of ChatGPT. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions,” says the official statement, “it does not build critical-thinking skills, which are necessary for academic and lifelong success.”

Banning such use of technology from the classroom is a nearsighted response. Instead, we must find a way forward in which such technologies combine well with, rather than replace, student thinking.

Banning ChatGPT is impossible in practice. Students will find ways around the ban, which will cause a further defensive response from teachers and administrators, and so on. It’s hard to believe that a close race between those digital natives and their educators will end in a decisive victory for the latter. In fact, chatbots may well speed up a trend (趋向) toward valuing critical thinking. In a world where computers can fluently answer any question, students need to get much better at deciding what questions to ask and how to fact-check the answers the program generates.

So how do we encourage young people to use their minds when real thinking is so hard to tell apart from its simulacrum (假象)? Teachers, of course, will still want to watch students taking old-fashioned, in-person, no-chatbot-allowed exams to check that they do not cheat.

But we must also figure out how to do something new: how to use tools like GPT to inspire deeper thinking. GPT often generates text that is fluent and “reasonable” — but wrong. So using it requires the same mental heavy lifting that writing does: forming an opinion, creating an outline, picking which points to explain and which to drop, and looking for supporting facts. GPT can help with those tasks, but it can’t put them all together. Writing a good essay still requires lots of human thought and work. Indeed, writing is thinking, and good writing is good thinking.

One approach is to focus on the process as much as the result. For instance, teachers might require four drafts of an essay. After all, as John McPhee, the famous writer, said, “the central nature of the process is revision.” Each draft gets feedback from the teacher, from peers or even from a chatbot. Then the students produce the next draft, and so on.

Will AI one day outperform human beings in thinking? Maybe, but for now, we must think for ourselves. Like any tool, GPT is an enemy of thinking only if we fail to find ways to make it our partner.

【推荐3】As Geoffrey Hinton, widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence, warns about growing dangers from how it is developing, businesses are scrambling to see how they can use the technology to their advantage.

Recently, the hot topic is how to employ ChatGPT style technology across their businesses as quickly as possible. A boss looked at his computer, entered the transcript of a customer complaint call, and asked ChatGPT to respond to it based on set of rules. In about a minute it came up with a very credible answer, which was 85% accurate but only cost 1% of the cost of employing staff. The good news for all is the pure enhancement to productivity.

Technology has improved the quality of life. A lot of innovation has made our entertainment time more enjoyable. But the real shock has been that these technologies are usable in a commercial context, not just for “low-cognitive, repetitive” tasks, i. e. robotic-tasks likely to be automated.

The surprise has been how employable the technology is to highly creative, high-value work. Specifically, creating an image, or music, or coding a programme can be achieved in seconds rather than weeks of briefing and refining. So the good news is that rapid employment of this technology could solve the longstanding productivity crisis. The bad news is that it could occur so rapidly as to overtake workers’ ability to adapt in time, creating social crisis. Could we face in call centers and creative studios in the 2020s, the equivalent of what happened in the coal mines in the 1980s?

Some individuals have started to suggest that states should provide a basic income due to the possibility of AI leading to job loss. The response of tech enthusiasts is that “You won’t be replaced by an AI, but you might be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI”. But they used to say that’s why everybody should learn how to code. That might not be such wise career advice any more.