【推荐1】In what’s believed to be a first London’s Imperial College Business School is using holographic technology（全息技术）to present lectures to students. From California a product manager was beamed onto a stage like magic. The head of Imperial’s EdTech Lab says, this presents a window to the world. Through holograms（全息图）we can bring in lectures from across the globe, and they can appear in front of our students in a realistic manner. That’s the key.

The developer of the technique explains how it works. “We’re presenting a 2D image as a 3D image, and the iris（虹膜）is flat so we see everything in 2D.Our brain changes it to 3D. We’re doing exactly the same trick. We’re presenting a 2D image but with depth of field and a really good vision. My brain just changes it to a 3D image.” Attendees say there are many ways this tool can help educators and students.

The second thing we could do with that is having CEOs coming to the classroom, and engaging with students. And the third way probably is maybe to have Albert Einstein coming to the classroom. There might be a long wait for that. Meanwhile, master student Josephine Collins says she prefers the interaction a hologram lecture offers compared to those presented online.

I wouldn’t mind it. I think its very interesting if we can have access to different lectures and different things like guest speakers. That’s something I would definitely enjoy. Developers say the cost of holographic technology has dropped considerably since the days it was used mostly in big-budget music shows making it possible for educational institutions to afford it.

【推荐1】People climbing Qomolangma are two times as likely to reach the top and less likely to die on the climb than 20 years ago, a new study finds. Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level on the earth. It reaches 8,848.86 meters into the sky. Between2006 and 2020, around two thirds of climbers were successful in their attempt to reach the top. In the 15 years before that, only about one-third went all the way to the top.

The study was a project of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, Davis. They found that the risk of dying on the mountain was 0.5 percent for women and 1.1 percent for men in recent years. That is down from 1.9 percent and 1.7 percent in the period from 1990 and 2005.

The study noted that on a single day in May of last year, 396 climbers had gathered at the narrow path just below the top. The area, known as the “death zone”, is so narrow that only a small number of climbers can pass through, one directly behind another.

A picture of climbers waiting their turn to go up and down through the death zone became famous as it was shared online. Yet researchers say the crowds were not the main reason for the deaths last year. However, overcrowding does make the climb more dangerous. If crowding slows climbers (as is expected), this increases their exposure to the elements, which should increase risk of an accident or illness. An unexpected storm, earthquake, or landslide could be disastrous.

Climbers have expressed concern that Nepal was giving anyone willing to pay the government $11,000 authorization to climb Everest.

【推荐3】Ian Happ is a professional baseball player for a baseball team in the United States. When he first started playing with the team in 2017, he was looking for pictures to hang in his home. An idea and an unlikely partnership with a British artist came from that simple desire.

Happ wanted to show Wrigley Field, the team’s ballpark, from a different artistic vision. He said that many baseball fans had been to Wrigley Field but had never seen what the ballpark looked like, from the field. He thought looking up from the field was such a cool experience that he intended to bring that to more fans. So, from his point of view, he let the British artist Patrick Vale create three large drawings of Wrigley Field. Instead of having pictures hung in his home, the partnership led to something quite different.

Happ’s views of Wrigley Field became the project, Through My Eyes, in which fans could purchase prints. The money made in this way went toward those people in need. The drawings by Vale became See What I See, an exhibition at a Chicago’s gallery. The show lasted a period of time.

Happ ever brought Vale to Chicago in September of 2018 and showed him around Wrigley Field. Vale knew little about the sport of baseball. But he understood the connection fans had with Wrigley Field. Happ had to explain to Vale the importance of the 400-foot sign in the center field and the famous manual scoreboard. He had to teach him the correct positioning of the players. He also explained what it felt like standing in the field under the bright lights with a loud crowd.

Vale took pictures and used them to help him create drawings in great detail. He was very modest and would send rough drawings to Happ, who would mark them up in red ink, like a teacher, with suggestions. It was in this way that their cooperation was so successful.

【推荐1】A growing number of people are using ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) program, to create books for sale. Although sales have so far been slow, human writers are worried that ChatGPT-created books might hurt the writing and publishing industry.

Until recently, Brett Schickler never imagined he could be a published author. But after learning about the ChatGPT AI program, Schickler decided that he had a good chance.

“The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible,” said Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York. “I thought ‘I can do this.’”

Using the AI software, Schickler created a 30-page illustrated children’s e-book in a few hours. He offered it for sale in January through Amazon’s self-publishing department. The e-book, which is named The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing, has made Schickler less than $100.

While that may not sound like much, it is enough to make him want to create other books using the software. “I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Schickler.

There were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February that say ChatGPT is a writer or co-writer. And the number is rising daily. But because of the nature of ChatGPT and the fact that many writers didn’t concede that they had used it, it is nearly impossible to get a full count of how many e-books may have been written by AI.

Some professional writers are becoming worried about the effects that ChatGPT could have on the book publishing industry. Mary Rasenberger is the executive director of the Authors Guild, a writer’s group. She said, “This is something we really need to be worried about — these books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work.”

【推荐2】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.”

【推荐3】Artificial intelligence is being introduced to match NHS hospital patients with home carers, meaning they can be discharged (出院)five times faster than before.

The software, developed by the care provider Cera, contains a database of thousands of social care staff including their availability, location, specific qualifications and language. NHS staff uploads details of patients needing social care and within minutes, the software finds and notifies the most suitable people available via an app. Cera launched the AI tool last month in five NHS regions, covering a population of a million. Dr Ben Maruthappu, a former A&E doctor who is founder and CEO of Cera, said that the technology was a big leap forward in releasing and reducing NHS pressure by freeing beds.

He said, “Every day someone is in hospital when they could be home, which costs the NHS about £1,500. Patients want to be at home, not in a hospital bed. One of the reasons why they aren’t discharged in a timely way is that care providers aren’t able to organise the care quickly enough. Every day tens of thousands of patients need to be matched up with tens of thousands of carers.”

“Organising this carer-patient match just depending on people’s effort is a very complicated process, which is time-consuming and not efficient. Nonetheless, by using AI to tackle this issue, we can rapidly match carers to patients on the same day.”

The platform is being introduced at seven new “digital areas” run by Cera. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike the current discharge system which often stops over weekends. Cera employs more than 10,000 staff, delivering 50,000 appointments a day.

The AI takes into account a patient’s specific needs. For example, if they have dementia or do not speak English, it matches them with the most suitable carer. It also schedules visits, aiming to ensure continuity of care, with patients seeing the same carer over and over.