【推荐1】Chinese consumers’ crazy appetite for luxury goods and services appears unstoppable, with just 2 percent of the Chinese population responsible for one-third of the world’s luxury items.

As China’s economic miracle develops, the market opportunities for all sorts of luxury goods and services are increasing. Luxury consumption in China now extends ways beyond well-known car, clothing and jewelry brands. For example, the luxury jet market in China is the fastest-growing in the world, even outstripping that of the United States, with a market share of 25 percent. This trend appears to continue, with 20 to 30 percent growth expected in China, compared with only 2 to 3 percent in the US. But more importantly, China’s luxury jet market growth represents a major development in the private consumption of luxury items.

China’s high-quality red wine market also provides evidence of the growth in private consumption of luxury goods. In 2013, China became the largest market for red wine in the world, even overtaking France, with l.86 billion bottles consumed in China last year. Over the past five years, China’s red wine consumption has grown 136 percent.

According to my ongoing consumer research in this area while working at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, public consumption of such expensive global luxury brands such as Prada and Armani is easily explained by the desire to “gain face” and publicly display social climbing through material possessions. On the other hand, it is “self-reward” that lies behind consumer motivation in this area. Chinese consumers who have experienced rapid financial and economic gains appear particularly prone to the need to reward themselves for their success. But this has little to do with ”gaining face” and impressing others and much more to do with the need for personal contentment.

Finally, the growth in private luxury consumption in China is set to continue in part due to the maturity of the Chinese consumer and advancement of Chinese consumer culture generally.

【推荐3】Do you like shopping? Or does the thought of wandering round the shops fill you with terror? For some of us, shopping is an enjoyable way of spending our spare time and our money. For me, it’s something I would rather avoid. Thank goodness for the Internet! It’s more convenient to buy CDs, electrical items, and even food from the comfort of your sofa. But that’s not the only reason: price is an important factor. We can buy goods and services cheaper online. But sometimes the problem is knowing what to buy. This has led to a type of shopping called “showrooming”.

Showrooming is something I’ve done. I will go to a shop to see, touch and try out products but then go home and buy them online at a knock-down price. I’m not alone in doing this. Research by a company called Foolproof found 24% of the people showroomed at Christmas in 2013.

Amy Cashman, Head of Technology at TNS UK, says the reasons for this new shopping habit are that people are lacking time, lacking money and they want security about the products they are buying. She explains that consumers are not only shopping online at home but they are using the Internet in store or on their smart phones to shop around.

But does this mean technology will kill shops? Certainly shops will change. They will have to offer more competitive prices or encourage people to buy more by giving in-store discounts or free gifts.

We mustn’t forget that buying in a shop means you can get expert advice from the sales assistant and you can get good aftercare. It’s good to speak to a real human rather than look at a faceless computer screen, but at least by showrooming, you get the best of both worlds.

【推荐1】When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T-shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn’t tell the whole story. Or the possibility that the T-shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you still consider the T-shirt green?     1    .

It’s a question that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the debate over what is and isn’t green becomes all-important in a hot and crowded world.     2    . We evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present. That’s why, when we eat spoiled food, we get disgusted and when we see a bright light, we shut our eyes.     3    . Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose —and probably couldn’t make sense of the information even if we had it.

But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies?     4     That’s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision—and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That’s thinking ecologically—understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. “We can know the causes of what we’re doing, and we can know the impact of what we’re doing,” says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence.

    5     It’s also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Golem an highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. “We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts,” says Goleman. “Not anymore.”

【推荐3】Self-driving vehicles will rely on cameras, sensors(传感器) and artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize and respond to road and traffic conditions, but sensing is the most effective for objects and movement in the neighborhood of the vehicle. Not everything important in a car’s environment will be caught by the vehicle’s camera. Another vehicle approaching at high speed on a collision (碰撞) track might not be visible until it’s too late. This is why vehicle-to-vehicle communication is undergoing rapid development. Our research shows that cars will need to be able to chat and cooperate on the road, although the technical challenges are considerable.

Applications for vehicle-to-vehicle communication range from vehicles driving together in a row, to safety messages about nearby emergency vehicles. Vehicles could alert each other to avoid collisions or share notices about passers-by and bicycles.

From as far as several hundred metres away, vehicles could exchange messages with one another or receive information from roadside units（RSUs）about nearby incidents or dangerous road conditions through 4G network. A high level of AI seems required for such vehicles, not only to self-drive from A to B, but also to react intelligently to messages received. Vehicles will need to plan, reason, strategize(制定策略) and adapt in the light of information received in real time and to carry out cooperative behaviours. For example, a group of autonomous vehicles might avoid a route together because of potential risks, or a vehicle could decide to drop someone off earlier due to messages received, a foreseen crowding ahead.

Further applications of vehicle-to-vehicle communication are still being researched, including how to perform cooperative behaviour.

【推荐2】In the first days of space exploration, one concern was the possibility that astronauts or spacecraft might be hit by meteoroids. Scientists calculated that this possibility was extremely small because meteoroids are rare. Astronauts and spacecraft, on the other hand, would almost certainly encounter space debris, which poses a greater threat.

However, in the 60 years since the beginning of space exploration, large quantities of human-made orbital debris have accumulated. Much of the debris consists of satellites that have stopped functioning or rocket booster sections that separated from the main spacecraft. Some of the debris consists of items lost by astronauts. Still more of the debris is the result of collisions. such as when one satellite collides with another or with a large piece of debris.

NASA estimates there are millions of debris particles that are too small to be tracked. These circle Earth at a speed of up to 17, 500 miles per hour, making even the smallest particles dangerous. One scientist calculated that a chip of paint hitting the window of a spacecraft at orbital speeds will hit with the same amount of force as a bowling ball traveling at 60 mph. Such an impact occurred on the space shuttle Challenger's second flight.

Larger objects are even more dangerous, but they can be monitored and avoided. Many satellites have the ability to adjust their course slightly and can be remotely directed to avoid collisions with larger objects that would damage or destroy the satellites. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have departments dedicated to cataloging, modeling, and predicting the movements of space debris.

To avoid adding to the amount of debris, obsolete satellites may need to be able to take themselves out of orbit as their usefulness comes to an end. Until a way to remove these remains is implemented. however. those 500, 000 pieces of large fragments, along with the millions of smaller pieces, will continue to orbit Earth.

【推荐3】News anchors(主播) must have been reluctant to read out the following news: Xin Xiaomeng began working as the world’s first female artificial(人工的) intelligence news anchor at Xinhua News Agency on Sunday, three months after a male robot joined the profession.

Unlike previous news robots though, Xin does not read news like a cold machine; she reads it almost like a human being. The muscles on her face stretch and relax — and her reactions change as she continues reading. That’s why many news anchors were worried: Will AI replace us in the near future?

To find the answer, we have to analyze the technologies that support Xin at her job. Three key technologies are used to support Xin. First, samples of human voices are collected and synthesized (合成). This is followed by the collection and synthesis of human muscle movement samples. And third the voices and movements are married in a way that when the AI news anchor reads, the micro- electric motors behind her face move to make her expressions seem more human.

Yet we need a thorough knowledge of deep learning technology to make a robot imitate a person’s voice. The developer needs to collect tens of thousands of pieces of pronunciations, input them into the machine and match them with the text for the AI to learn and read. The process for imitating facial movements is similar. The developer has to analyze the movements of the 53 muscles in the human face, make a model set from the collected data for the AI news anchor to learn, and imitate the movements of facial muscles via programs

Both the technologies used to make Xin’s performance impressive are mature. The real difficulty lies in the third — the technology to match the pronunciations with facial movements so that Xin’s expressions vary according to the content of the news report. In fact, Xin’s expressions don’t always change according to the content. As a result, her expressions look anything but human. Actually, AI is still no match for human qualities.