【推荐2】Advanced technology brings with it a lot of benefits to us. You can now prevent the speech of a single target person from being recorded by using a device called voice jammer.

Voice jammers work much like noise-canceling headphones, which effectively remove unwanted background sound waves out of existence by playing back a copy of the unwanted sound with its wave pattern inverted (反向的).

Such voice jammers generally stop electronic eavesdropping (窃听) on conversations by broadcasting inverse sound waves that affect all microphones within earshot.

This can prevent nearby people’s phones from picking up their voices if they try to make a call, and can stop them interacting with smart assistants, warning that something strange is going on.

Now Qiben Yan at Michigan State University and his colleagues have created a voice jammer that can target a specific voice without causing interruption to anyone else. They did this by training an artificial intelligence called a neural network to isolate (隔断) a speaker’s voice, allowing the jammer to create an inverse sound matched to their speech.

Rather than sending an audible sound, their tool, called Neural Enhanced Cancellation (NEC), makes use of a bug found in all but the most expensive microphones. This bug introduces sounds at set distances above and below the microphone’s recording frequencies. NEC is able to play its inverse speech in the ultrasonic (超声波) range, so that humans can’t hear it. Doing this at the point of recording provides the necessary frequencies to secretly block an audible voice.

The team found that NEC blocked voices on a range of smartphones from Apple, Xiaomi and Samsung at a distance of up to 3.6 metres. And this technology could be useful.

【推荐1】Teen Eco-Art Exhibition

Young artists share your artwork and viewpoints on our environment in the Teen Eco-Art Exhibition this Spring!

Submission is open to artiste from Grades 11-12 who reside in West Vancouver or attend a West Vancouver secondary school.

Submissions will be reviewed by a Selection Committee. Artwork will be assessed on creative use of materials and expression of the theme.

Submission criteria (标准)

•Artwork addressing environmental themes such as clean water, climate change, sustainability, conservation, pollution, etc.

•Artwork created primarily from sustainable, repurposed, recycled materials. Other media such as paint, photography, paper, etc. can be used in combination with repurposed materials.

•Size. Wall-mounled (固定在墙上的) artwork: no larger than 36''×36''. Sculpture: no larger than l'5''×1'5''×1'5''.

•Artwork should be exhibition ready. Wall-mounted artwork should have hanging wire, D-rings or hangers. Sculptures should be able to stand on their own.

Artist statement: clear and brief, 100-200 word statement regarding your art practice and the concept/ theme of the work being considered.

How to submit

Complete the submission form & upload the required materials.

Submission close

March 25, 6 pm.

Results

Artists will be notified by April 6.

Exhibition location

West Vancouver Memorial Library, 1950 Marine Dr.

Exhibition Dates

April 15-May 29.

If you have any questions please contact Gallery Coordinator Steven Snider at steven. wvcac@shaw. ca. We look forward to seeing your artwork!

【推荐3】Sanjiangyuan National Park

Located on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau , the Sanjiangyuan covers about 123,100 square kilometeris .It is home to the headwaters of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers, which help to nurture billions of lives. Hence it is also called China's water tower.

The giant panda national park

The giant panda national park covers about 27,000 square kilometers in three provinces – Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi in the country's west. The park is home to 1,631 wild pandas, accounting for 87.50 percent of the country's total wild panda population.

Northeast China tiger and leopard national park

Northeast China tiger and leopard national park is located in the northeast of Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces at the junction, with a total area of 1.4612 square kilometers. The park is China's most important settlement and breeding area of the Siberian tiger and Amur leopard. It is also an important wildlife distribution area and one of the areas with the richest biodiversity in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere.

Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park

Located in the south-central part of Hainan Island, Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park covers an area of 4,269 square kilometers, covering more than 95 percent of the island's primary forest and 55 percent of its natural forest.

The park has the most concentrated distribution of the best preserved and the largest contiguous area of island tropical rain forest in China, an important part of the world's tropical rain forest, with a national representative and global protection significance.

【推荐2】In the social media age, teenagers are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than ever before.

According to a Common Sense Media research study, more than eight in ten teenagers have visited a social networking site like Facebook, and three out four teenagers now have an account on a social networking site.

However, while social media sites can improve teenagers’ communication abilities, experts say that social networking could be harmful to healthy teenage self-esteem. Health educator and motivational speaker Scott Fried began working with teenagers 22 years ago. He recently developed a new lecture, “Broken-Heartedness and Intimacy in the Age of Social Media,” to discuss with teenagers the differences between their personalities online and their true selves.

“The definition of growing up is bringing together many different parts of your personality,” Fried said. “As you grow, they turn into one whole personality. Now, you have a personality at school, at home, and online. The goal of being a teenager is to bring together all these different parts that are shown online in a complete way.”

Fried uses the phrase “compare and despair” to describe the bad effect of social media / on teenage self-esteem. you compare yourself to someone else, you’re usually going to end up despairing.”

Fried said, “One of the problems with social media is that we throw our best selves out there, or what we like to think of as our best self.”

Psychologist Nadine De Ciordany says that teenagers who already have low self-esteem can get easily depressed and give others their low self-esteem. She thinks social media is causing more and more depression. She adds that parents should educate their children early on social media.

“Teenagers can use a whole lot of resources that affect the way they deal with peer pressure,” De Giordaiiy said, “As the child is growing up, supervise(监督) what it is that they have access to. There is an age that social media is appropriate for and there is an age that isn’t appropriate for.”

【推荐3】Creativity is usually associated with open spaces and freedom, However, sometimes it can be beneficial, even essential, to build walls, make rules and impose (强加) limitations on ourselves in order to get our creativity flowing.

The fact is that unlimited options are very difficult to deal with — they keep us staring at the “blank page”. Our minds need some guidance; if there are no rules or restrictions in place, it’s hard to begin the creative process and even more difficult to remain focused or purposeful.

Most creative careers have limitations imposed upon them. If you' re an engineer working on a new product, you have instructions, including purpose, target market, materials and size. If you're a writer, you may have length or style restrictions to deal with. There is hardly a real life example of creation that exists without some kind of rules.

Famous for the wildly successful daily art project a skull a day for a year, Noah Scalin is an artist who created unique pieces of art using drawing, sculpture, painting — any other media he had around — to create representation of a human head. Each day he challenged himself to create a “head” that had to be unique during that 24-hour period. He couldn’t sit back waiting for inspiration to strike: he was forced to constantly seek out new materials and ideas to fill up his “blank page”.

Acts of creation without limitation exist in reality only in the most extreme cases. Inventors don’t generally wake up one day and say, “I’m going to invent something today.” They look around at what there is and what needs improving, and work with the resources available. While anyone can come up with random, fantastic ideas without direction or purpose, imposing limitations is a more effective way of encouraging creativity, and can inspire true innovation.