【推荐1】Next time you go on holiday, it's going to feel pretty different. You may have to wear a face mask. And that means getting your point across in an unfamiliar language—all while keeping your mouth covered—could become a bit of a problem.

That's where the C-mask, by Japanese company Donut Robotics, comes in. It's a smart, Internet-connected mouth covering that can make calls, raise the wearer’s voice, and most helpfully for travelers, translate conversations into eight different languages.

If need be, you simply place it over a standard face mask and connect it via Bluetooth to a smartphone. A special app will then allow you to record live conversations, turn them into text and translate them into English, Chinese, French, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Spanish or Vietnamese (currently only from Japanese)—making it easy to understand what people are saying. It won't actually speak the translated phrases for you, but it does have a built-in amplifier（扩音器）to help you make yourself heard.

“We worked hard for years to develop a robot and we have used what we've researched to create a product that responds to how COVID-19 has reshaped society,'' Donut's CEO recently told reporters. The firm has already raised more than 28 million yen via crowdfunding to develop the product, which will go on sale for 3 ,980 yen in Japan.

There are all manner of fashionable, eco-friendly masks you can now get your hands on— check out these in London, Singapore and Barcelona. But in creating an affordable, high-tech mask, Donut could well be on to something.

【推荐2】“The failure to play is now a serious issue and it calls for action for change,” says Sir Ken Robinson, a leading expert in education, creativity and human development. This is the driving force behind Outdoor Classroom Day - a global teacher­led campaign, supported by Dirt is Good, a company producing daily chemical products.

Outdoor Classroom Day, taking place on 17th May and 1st November this year, will see schools around the world swap the inside for the outside and take learning into the playground and beyond to make playtime a key part of the school day. This might involve using natural objects like stones to do sums, or going on an insect hunt to encourage curiosity. By now, Outdoor Classroom Day has grown from a grassroots movement to a global campaign that is expected to benefit five million children and over 40,000 schools from all around the world in 2018.

This is helping to change the trend that sees many schools selling up or building on their playgrounds and cutting back on playtime to make more room for academic studies, while at home children’s lives are increasingly filled with organized activities intended to help them learn. Today globally 61% of parents surveyed in the Dirt is Good Qualitative Study said that children don’t know how to play without using technology.

Outdoor Classroom Day is making playing time happen, with 22% of participating schools having increased their playtime since joining the campaign. 93% of teachers surveyed saw improvements in children’s creativity after playing outside, and 97% believe that time outdoors is necessary for children to reach their full potential.

Scientific studies show that real play - the active, physical, self­directed play - is essential for children to develop key life skills that are not taught elsewhere. Few would question the value of developing creativity, leadership, resourcefulness, and curiosity.

【推荐3】Later this month, Tate Britain will host its first Van Gogh exhibition since 1947. Here we’ve collected 4 of his best paintings before the show.

Potato Eaters

Potato Eaters was Van Gogh’s first major work and, despite a distinct lack of colour, it was one that he was most proud of. His aim was to represent the difficulties of country life, so the farmers are painted in earthy tones with rough faces and bony hands. He was more concerned with conveying his message than achieving technical perfection in this painting.

Irises

Van Gogh finished almost 142 pieces during his stay in the Saint Remy de Provence asylum (精神病院), where he was a voluntary patient from 1889 to 1890. This piece was started shortly after he arrived there. The hospital garden provided much inspiration for the artist during his stay there. Originally, the flowers in this work were painted purple but the red pigment (色素) faded over time and has now turned blue.

Cafe Terrace at Night

Despite being painted more than 130 years ago, this cafe still exists in France and has since been renamed the Cafe Van Gogh. This artwork marks the first time Van Gogh’s famous post-impressionistic star-filled sky was seen in a piece, and it was painted on the ground, in person, rather than from memory. While the artwork doesn’t bear his signature (签名), it’s widely known to be Van Gogh’s, as he mentioned Cafe Terrace at Night in a number of his letters.

Wheat Field With Cypresses

This piece was inspired by the view from Van Gogh’s asylum window and was finished on the spot. The work was the title of three paintings that offer an insight into his stay at the hospital. Van Gogh was so pleased with the summer landscape that he made three copies there, one of the same size — which hangs in the National Gallery and two smaller copies which he planned to gift to his mother and sister.

【推荐1】Recently, there have been huge advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs that create art. The programs, which create artworks based on short descriptions, have amazed many people. They have also raised difficult questions.

In April, NewsForKids.net reported on Dall-E 2, a tool from OpenAI. Dall-E uses AI to create incredible paintings, photos, and other artworks in many different styles based on simple descriptions. Since then, OpenAI has changed its rules to allow anyone to sign up and use the tool. But it’s still putting strong control on the art that can be created.

But now there are several other AI tools that work in similar ways. These new tools are free or cheap, and don’t have some of Dall-E 2’s limits. MIdjourney is a website that allows users to create images from short descriptions. Stable Diffusion is similar, but users can also run the program on their own computers.

The new tools are entertaining and powerful. They allow people to quickly see almost any idea they can imagine, even if they aren’t artists. For some creative workers, like those at companies that create ads or images, the tools allow them to quickly explore new ideas.

Many artists are upset that they’re now competing against computers for attention, prizes and jobs. It’s hard for a single artist to compete against all the art and photography that have ever appeared on the Internet. In August,Jason Allen won first place at the Colotsfo State Fair with his picture Theatre D’opera Spatial, which was created with Midjourney. That upset many people.

The images and the descriptions used to train these AI programs were taken from the Internet. The training images were without permission, which has raised questions about whether what these tools are doing is fair or legal.

The creators of training pictures haven’t given permission for their images to be used, but their skills and talents are a huge part of what makes the new tools so successful. Some artists’ groups say artists should get to decide if their work can be used by these tools.

【推荐2】Can artificial intelligence uncover a liar? It sounds like science fiction, but such an AI system is possible. Rada Mihalcea, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has worked on deceit (欺骗) detection for about a decade.

The first thing that researchers working on artificial intelligence and machine learning need is data. In the case of the work that Mlhalcea did, they began with videos from actual court cases. For example, a defendant speaking in a trial in which he is found to have committed a crime could provide an example of deceit; they also employed words from witnesses as either example of truthful or deceitful statements. Altogether, they analyzed 121 videos — about half represented dishonest statements, and half truthful. It was this data that they used to build machine learning deceit detectors that ultimately had between a 60 to 75 percent accuracy rate.

One thing the system noticed is the use of pronouns—people who are lying would tend to less often use the word “I” or “we”, Mihalcea explains. “Instead, people who are lying would more often use ‘you,’ ‘yours’.” Besides, someone telling a lie would use “stronger words” such as “absolutely,” and “very,” that reflect certainty, while interestingly, people telling the truth were more likely to use words such as “maybe” or “probably.” As for gestures, she points out that someone being deceitful would be more likely to look directly into the eyes of the person questioning them. They also tended to use both hands when gesturing.

However, Mlhalcea’s work is “far from perfection,” she admits. “As a researcher, we are content that we were able to get to 75 percent accuracy. But looked at another way, that’s an error rate of one in four. ” Ultimately, she sees technology like this as being assistive for people — it could indicate that it noticed something “unusual” in a speaker’s statement, and then perhaps have a person “investigate more. ”