【推荐1】Huang Hua, 36, has been working at the Yangshan Deep Water Port for 13 years. But for the first twelve years, he worked as a driver, operating machines in sky-high cranes (吊车). Now, his work location has moved to a control center, monitoring the cranes from afar.

“At a traditional port, I would work with a handle all day, repeating the same motion 12 hours a day, four days a week. I used to have lots of neck problems. Now the task is less physically challenging, but much more complex,” says Huang, who is now a crane teleoperator.

Now, Huang’s daily work is to closely monitor a dozen computer screens, collect data on the operation status of each cargo crane, and deal with emergencies and malfunctions (故障).

Manual workers like Huang are no longer needed at the terminal. Bridge cranes, auto-guided vehicles and rail-mounted gantry cranes (轨行龙门吊) are now taking over the job. While the labor cost is down 70 percent, the handling efficiency has increased by 50 percent.

The Vice General Manager of the Shangdong Container Terminal Branch, Luo Yunjie told CGTN that all the automated handling equipment is designed and manufactured in China. Once the fourth phase (期) enters full operation, it will be able to handle 6.3 million TEUs. This will further strengthen Shanghai Port’s status as the busiest in the world.

Shanghai has the ambition of becoming a global shipping center by 2020. Phase IV of the Yangshan Port marks an important step in reaching that goal. In the near future, the Shanghai Port not only aims to gather more value-added shipping resources and offer more various services, but also to play an even bigger role in the country’s Belt and Road initiative.

【推荐2】Siri is a virtual assistant, applied to electronic devices with the ability to recognize humans' speech, answer questions, make recommendations and so on. Ask Siri if she's a woman. Go ahead; ask about her gender. She'll tell you that she' s "genderless". So are many other virtual assistants. But, man, do they ever sound a lot like women? Yes. Culturally, we think of them as ladies, too.

If we advocate gender diversity in other areas of daily life, why does our tech sound so female? It would be easy to blame male designers. Perhaps it's influenced by science fiction. But the biggest reason rests in social science. “Research indicates there's likely to be greater acceptance of female speech,” says Karl MacDorman, an associate professor at Indiana University who specializes in human-computer communication. MacDorman and his team played male and female voices to people of both genders, and then asked them to identify which they preferred. They reported that both women and men said male voices sounded seemingly indifferent, in comparison.

Why do we have such prejudice? Stanford University communication professor Clifford Nass says that people tend to consider female voices to be helpful for them to solve their problems by themselves, while they view male voices as those from authority figures who tell them the answers to their problems.

This finding suggests that companies will make a better impression on a broader group of customers with a woman's voice — but not just any voice. It has to be based on a brand's personality. Greg Pal, vice president of business development at Nuance Communications, Inc. insists that some brands choose male speakers. He turned on his iPhone and pulled up the Domino's Pizza app, which has an assistant, Dom. He sounded like his high school English teacher — educated. That's right for a brand attempting to appeal to guys ordering pies before the big game.

As voice technology improves, though, designers say diversity will too. Many devices already let you customize a voice interface (界面). Siri can become a sir as you want it — if you take the time to reprogram it.

【推荐3】Booking your next vacation to space with out-of-this-world views could soon be a reality. Orbital Assembly Corporation announced two new station concepts designed with space tourism accommodations. One of the stations, called Pioneer, could orbit Earth as early as 2025.

The Gateway Foundation circulated ideas for a space hotel in 2019. The goal of the stations is to run a space business park that can serve as a home away from home with room for offices and tourists. Orbital Assembly was founded by the Gateway Foundation team as a way to help make these dreams come true.

The proposed Pioneer station can accommodate 28 people. The second station, Voyager, scheduled to open in 2027, can hold up to 400 people. “The goal has always been to make it possible for large numbers of people to live, work and thrive in space,” says Orbital Assembly’s COO Tim Alatorre.

Both stations look like a wheel and will feature artificial gravity that allows guests to move comfortably on each station. Pioneer features five modules built around the rotating “Gravity Ring” architecture design. Tourists may still feel some weightlessness but will also be able to drink out of a cup and won’t have to be tied to a bed to sleep. The gravity works similar to how a spinning bucket pushes the water out to the sides of the bucket and stays in place, Alatorre explains. Near the middle of the station, there will be no artificial gravity, but gravity gradually increases further away from the center.

While the Pioneer station will be smaller than Voyager, guests can still shower, eat and drink sitting down in areas with gravity. Each station is furnished like luxury hotels on Earth. Voyager will feature a restaurant and suites with views of Earth.

A significant barrier to space travel is the cost. However, Orbital Assembly expects tourists to seek a trek into space as space travel eventually becomes less expensive. “We envision our Pioneer and Voyager space stations as the ultimate ecotourism destinations. Once people get to space, it will change their perspective about Earth,” Alatorre says. “Space travel is still at its early stage, and we’re excited to do our part to push it forward to help improve life on Earth.”

【推荐3】When Jane Goodall was young, reading and exploring nature were her ideas of fun. Her mother encouraged her to learn and ask questions. Goodall dreamed of seeing the habitats of her favorite animals on her own.

In 1957, Goodall visited a farm in Kenya, Africa. There, she met a famous paleoanthropologist (古人类学家), Louis Leakey. He was looking for someone to study chimpanzees, which could tell us about early human history. Once he got to know Goodall, he knew she was the perfect person for the job.

Goodall arrived in Tanzania, East Africa, in 1960, and journeyed to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve. She learned early on that studying chimpanzees wouldn’t be easy. To observe them up close, she had to take months to gain their trust. To her, the chimpanzees were complex creatures with lives surprisingly similar to humans’. She rejected the practice of identifying chimpanzees by numbers and gave each of them a human name. Goodall was observing chimpanzees she’d named David Greybeard and Goliath. She watched as they made tools out the roots of grass to pick termites (白蚁) out of a nest. Until then, people thought humans were the only species that used tools. Because of Goodall’s discovery, chimpanzees are now accepted as intelligent and social animals.

Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to provide conservation and environmental education. In the late 1980s, her focus changed to something much larger. Deforestation (滥伐森林) and climate change were affecting the world’s natural habitats. The plants that the chimpanzees depended on for food were in danger. The fight she began against habitat loss continues today, through animal preserves and research sites.

Throughout her life, Goodall’s work has protected the lives of people and animals around the world. And she encourages young people to join this struggle for a better world. Goodall says that the world will be a better place if people do some help.

【推荐1】Never play games with a bot (robot) — it will find a way to cheat if it can. A team from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco, has developed artificially intelligent bots that taught themselves to cooperate by playing hide-and-seek. The bots also learned how to use basic tools to help themselves win.

Bowen Baker at OpenAI and his colleagues wanted to see if the team-based dynamics of the OpenAI Five could be used to produce skills that could one day be useful to humans.

The researchers set their bots loose in a simulated (模拟的) environment filled with fixed walls, movable boxes and ladders, and left them to play team games of hide-and-seek. The bots each had their own view of the world and couldn’t communicate with each other directly.

At first, the hiders simply ran away. But they soon worked out that the quickest way to stop the seekers was to find objects in the environment to hide themselves from view. The seekers learned that they could move boxes around and use them to climb over walls. The bots then discovered that being a team-player — passing objects to each other or cooperating on a hide-and-seek — was the quickest way to win.

But the real surprise came when the bots started making use of problems or faults. Seekers found that if they pushed a ladder towards a wall, they could launch themselves into the air and spot hiders from above. Hiders found that they could get rid of the ladders by pushing them aside.

“It shows that AI is able to find solutions that humans miss,” says Baker. “Maybe it’ll even be able to solve problems that humans don’t yet know how to.” However, it is a large leap (飞跃) from virtual hide-and-seek to real problem-solving. “The main limitation is that it is in simulation,” says Chelsea Finn at Stanford University.