【推荐3】The COVID-19 forced 57th Street Books in Chicago to close its doors. Director Jeff was worried. Customers couldn’t come to the shop. His main advantage over online bookstores has disappeared overnight.

Jeff says he was lucky. Customers stepped up, offering gifts and support. Similar stories have played out over the past two years in cities and towns around the country. Though independent bookstores were forced to close during the pandemic, many found ways to connect with and help their community.

Before the pandemic, bookstores were already having a hard time competing with online bookstores. Then came COVID-19. It broke supply chains and caused labor shortages. But many stores turned things around with new ideas. Some put books outside for viewing and started events online. Others set up bookselling hotlines, sold books out of cars, and improved their tools for e-commerce. Some bookstores offered COVID testing or collected food for people in need. “Having an independent bookstore in your community is an important place to build community,” says Samira, an author of books for young adults.

One young fan of 57th Street Books is Adele Sorkin, 11. Members receive early copies of books in exchange for writing reviews. “I think of the bookstore as a biscuit jar,” Adele says. “It’s something special and fun that is always there for you.”

“If we reimagine bookstores and make an effort to support them, then bookstores can long survive. You can support your local bookstore and buy books there, or check if an author is making an appearance there, Recommend the store to a friend. Young people are responsible for creating a society that values bookstores and a shared love of literature,” Jeff says.

【推荐1】Deepak Chopra is an American author who was born in India in 1946. He is a well-known and respected advocate of alternative approaches to medicine. He has written some 80 books and produced several videos that promote his philosophy on life.

After a career in conventional medicine, he became influenced by Maharishi Maresh Yogi and adopted an approach to medicine based on spirituality and consciousness. Essentially, he views the human body as a whole unit, and by treating the whole, a person can achieve “perfect health”. He describes this state as being free from pain, disease, and the aging process.

For Chopra, the mental state of a person affects every other part of his body, including their spirit. From this, all aspects of a person’s life are influenced, including their social life, work-life, relationships, and even the environment around them.

Part of the treatments that Chopra encourages is meditation(沉思), which aims to calm the mental state of the patient. He also believes that the power of the mind can be used to correct imbalances in the body. He suggests that serious illnesses can be cured or positively affected by the power of the mind.

Chopra’s philosophy on life goes beyond just medical matters. Many of his sayings can be applied to everyday life and the pursuit(追求)of happiness. He believes that to achieve happiness—which for him is the ultimate measure of success-requires positive choices to be made, and that only when we are in the right mental state can we do that.

For him, part of the journey towards ultimate happiness is the ability to reflect, and meditate. In other words, we should all adopt a philosophical approach to life and thus free our imaginations, creativity, and the ability to act with free will.

The promotion of self-awareness is also an aspect of Chopra’s philosophy. Self-awareness comes from theability to make choices, and there are choices to be made throughout one’s life, and those choices often require both dynamic action and meditative relaxation. Through self-awareness, we can know that we can make those choices from an informed position.

【推荐3】Everything is practice. When we learn ballet, gymnastics or soccer, we practice these movements in a conscious and repeated way. Through planned and repeated practice, we become good at these movements.     1     There's more to life than non-stop practice. Conscious living is the key to real health, growth and success.

Each day, we repeat movements, patterns of thought and behavior, and ways of interacting with others. With repeated practice, we become good at these things. If you constantly check Facebook or Twitter, that is practice.     2    

In most cases, your actions are driven largely by your unconscious mind and most of the time you allow your unconscious and conditioned habits to take over. When you are conscious of what you are doing, you can decide whether this is an action or a thought pattern you want to practice or if there's an alternative you'd rather be good at.     3     The reality is that you won't always remember to do this, so remind yourself.

    4     Studies show that the concept of life control is extremely necessary to your health, happiness and success. Through conscious living you can learn to listen more deeply to those around you and your own inner voice.

Changing your habits within a short space of time is not a practical solution in that the habit you're really changing is due to repeated practice.     5     Give yourself permission to make mistakes without feelings of guilt.

【推荐2】Scientists say they have created a new method that can turn brain signals into electronic speech. The invention could one day give people who have lost the ability to speak a better way of communicating than current methods.

Brain-computer interfaces (交界面) already exist to help people who cannot speak on their own. Often these systems are trained to follow eye or facial movements of people who have learned to spell out their thoughts letter by letter. But researchers say this method can produce many errors and is very slow, permitting at most about 10 spoken words per minute. This compares to between 100 and 150 words per minute used in natural speech.

For the new method, scientists created a brain-machine interface that is inserted in the brain. It can read and record brain signals that help control the muscles that produce speech, like the lips, the tongue and the jaw. The experiment involved a two-step process. First, the researchers used a “decoder (解码器)” to turn electrical brain signals into representations of human vocal (声音的) movements. An electronic instrument then turns the representations into complete spoken sentences.

The new two-step method actually presents a “proof of principle” with great possibilities for real-time communication in the future. Five volunteer patients who were being treated for epilepsy (a disease of the nervous system) participated in the study. The individuals had the ability to speak and already had interfaces built in their brains. They were asked to read several hundred sentences aloud while the researchers recorded their brain activity.

The researchers then used audio recordings of the voice readings to reproduce the vocal muscle movements needed to produce human speech.

This process made it possible for the scientists to create a realistic “virtual voice” for each individual, controlled by their brain activity.

The study reports the spoken sentences were understandable to hundreds of human listeners later asked to write out what they heard. Scientists say future studies will test the technology on people who are unable to speak.

【推荐3】Playing Minecraft, a video game, could be key to creating adaptable (可调试的) artificial intelligence models that can pick up a variety of tasks the way humans do.

Steven James at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues developed a test within Minecraft to measure the general intelligence of AI models. This MinePlanner test rates an AI’s ability to ignore unimportant details while solving a complex multi-step problem.

Lots of AI training “cheats” by giving a model all the data it needs to learn how to do a job and nothing related to it, says James. Future AI models will need to deal with confusing problems, and he hopes that MinePlanner will guide that research. AI working to solve a problem in the game will see everything involved, including objects and other details that aren’t necessarily needed to solve a problem and must be ignored. It will have to survey its surroundings and work out by itself what is and isn’t needed.

The virtual test consists of 15 construction problems, and each one can be easy, medium and hard. To finish each task, the AI may need to take some steps in between, like building stairs to reach a certain height. This means the AI has to think about the whole picture and plan what to do next.

State-of-the-art planning AI models were unable to complete any of the tough problems and they only do a little better on the easier ones, suggesting there is room for improvement.

“We can’t require a human designer to come in and tell the AI exactly what it should and shouldn’t care about for each and every task it might have to solve,” says James. “That’s the problem we’re trying to address.”