【推荐2】For musicians and their fans alike, it’s hard to beat the excitement of a live concert. For fans gathering with others and seeing their favorite musicians face to face is an excitement. For musicians, concerts allow them to connect with their listeners and increase their income.

So what happens when live concerts are no longer possible? In early 2020, governments prohibited large gatherings because of the coronavirus (冠状病毒). Tours and concerts were canceled leaving musicians and fans disappointed.

But musicians are creative, and technology can bring people together in ways that were impossible just 10 years ago. And so one performer after another began to offer online concerts.

These online concerts tended to be simple. Since people were required to stay at home, musicians filmed themselves playing in their houses. They livestreamed (3 Bn f) their songs, so it didn’t need to edit video or mix sound in a studio. Sometimes, artists would spend time talking between songs. Audiences loved these online events.

Virtual concerts help musicians connect with their fans during a difficult time. Besides, they are a great way to bring people together, Although some online concerts required payment, most were free. And this raises questions about whether they will continue once large gatherings are allowed again.

It was easy for artists to offer free music online when no one could leave their homes. But for the long term, the practice could stop them from selling recordings or tickets to live shows. Some fans will buy tickets for online concerts. But no one knows if they’ll be willing to pay as much as they would for a live concert.

On the other hand, free online concerts are a good way to attract new fans. And they can inspire fans to buy music. Free concerts may be a good business decision after all.

【推荐2】Flow is a cognitive (认知的) state where one is completely immersed (沉浸) in an activity — from painting and writing to yoga and surfboarding.     1       

The process of flow was discovered and coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the 1960s, Csikszentmihalyi studied the creative process and found that, when an artist was in the course of flow, they would insist on their task strictly, regardless of hunger or exhaustion.     2    

One of Csikszentmihalyi’s key points about flow is that a person needs to push oneself out of their comfort zone to stimulate it. Because it’s a dynamic state, one has to constantly adjust the skill level, challenge, and complexity required for the activity.     3     If your skill level goes beyond the activity, boredom will set in, which will break the state of flow.

    4     One can access flow by thinking of activities like sports, dancing and painting. We can also have a flow state experience with many of our day-to-day tasks and encounters. Watching TV and video gaming, however, are not on that list.

Flow can also be a tool for better emotion regulation (调节). When a person is in a state of flow, there is little need for doubts or anxieties about oneself or the world in general.     5     Through the process of flow, a person chooses to focus on a task and gain a sense of autonomy over time, body, and mind.

However, pushing yourself to find the flow state can backfire. In fact, trying too hard or wondering whether you are in this state in itself goes against flow. We lose the balance between tension and skill level if we concentrate too much on the task.

【推荐3】When you're making a split-second decision, waiting a fraction of a second to decide can make a world of difference.

Scientists at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh found that when making choices between a right and wrong answer, people’s accuracy in making the right decision increased dramatically when they gave themselves a small amount of time.    1    

it's all about giving our attention enough time to sort out the relevant information from the distracters, says one of the study' s co- authors, incent Ferrera, an associate professor of neuroscience(神经科学) at Columbia University Medical Center. “The little extra time to sort out the irrelevant information makes the decision-making more efficient,” he says.

    2    They were told which set was their target, and then asked to indicate which direction the target dots were moving when the distracting set was introduced—the distracting set either moved in the same direction or the opposite direction of the target dots. The participants performed this task under different conditions: in some experiments they aimed for accuracy, in others for speed.

Ferrera and his colleagues found that when the participants had a little more time, even as few as 50 milliseconds to make their decision, their accuracy improved. The reason?    3     “If you take attention offline, you go from almost perfect accuracy to almost chance accuracy,” he says.

That doesn’t mean taking longer to decide necessarily leads to a better choice. With more time, there’s more chance for distracting and even misleading information to filter into the process, confusing the situation. Ferrera’s findings suggest that simply accumulating more and more information isn’t always helpful. “What we’re saying is that before you start gathering evidence, take a short moment to determine whether that evidence is really relevant to the decision you are making,” he says, “    4    ”

【推荐1】Coogle’s parent company is winding down a project that used high-lying balloons to provide Internet services to hard-to-reach areas of the world.

The project, known as Loon, started in 2011. It was managed by Alphabet Inc. It aimed to bring connectivity to areas of the world where ground-based cell towers (手机信号塔) were too expensive or too difficult to set up.

But Loon was unable to reduce costs enough to make its business model run, the project’ s leader, Alastair Westgarth, said in a blog post. “While we’ve found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, competitive business,” Westgarh said.

Loon’s shutdown isn’t surprising, economists said.

Loon’s technology sent gas-filled balloons the size of tennis courts into the air. They usually stay at heights of around 60,000 to 75,000 feet. There, onboard communications equipment sent Internet signals back down to earth. The system was able to offer mobile coverage to an area 200 times larger than a traditional ground-based cell tower. However, a carrier would need several balloons at once, each would cost tens of thousands of dollars and last only about five months.

Alphabet wasn’t alone in running projects aimed at offering Internet connection to hard-to-reach areas. Companies such as Amazon. com Inc. and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been making efforts to provide Internet connection in such places, using satellites in near Earth orbit.

Over the last few years, Loon’s technology has proved successful in some suffering communities. In 2017, the project sent balloons into the skies above Puerto Rico after a terrible hurricane damaged the island’s communications facilities. Two years later, soon after a 7. 8 earthquake struck parts of Peru, Loon’s balloons began to provide the locals with mobile connectivity.

Rich Devaul, a founder of the project, said the need for mobile connectivity was rapidly rising recently. This made cell towers more cost-effective than he had expected ten years ago, reducing the need for Loon, “The problem got solved faster than we thought,” he said in an interview.

【推荐2】Inspirational ideas have a habit of striking in the most unforeseen places. For example, dreams operate on the level of stories, making them primary sources of ideas and inspirations. The following are four great ideas created from dreams.

In 1895, Elias Howe was struggling with the needle (针) design. One night, he had a dream that some people on an unknown island caught him and were preparing to turn him into a meal. They were dancing around waving their spears (矛) in the air, and then he saw it. The spears had holes at the tip. It helped him solve his problem.

In his dream , Albert Einstein was talking to a farmer who was telling him about the fenced (被围住的) cows. However, the farmer saw something different from him. When waking up, he realized that a similar event could be different from a different point of view. Through this, the theory of relativity slowly began to fall into place.

Yesterday by the famous band Beatles is one of the most covered songs in history . It all came to one of the band members, Paul McCartney, in a dream. One night in 1963 he suddenly woke up with a tune (曲调) in his head. He got up and started playing the notes until the song came into being.

While in his mid - thirties, Dmitri Mendeleev, a known Russian chemist, was struggling to place 56 known elements on a periodic table. Then one night in a dream, he saw a table where all aspects fell into place as called for. When he woke up, he wrote it down on a piece of paper.

【推荐3】The starting point of herd immunity (群体免疫) for COVID-9 is still uncertain , but many epidemiologists (流行病学家) believe it will be reached when between 60 percent and 80 percent of the population has been infected and develops resistance. A lower level of immunity in the population can slow the spread of a disease somewhat, but the herd immunity number                    represents the point where infections are generally less likely to turn into large outbreaks.

Studies that use the tests to examine only a small quantity of population, often called serology (血清学) surveys, are being undertaken around America and the world. The purpose of these new studies is to look for antibodies (抗体) in people’s blood, proteins produced by the immune system that indicate a past infection.

An advantage of the tests is that they can pick out people who may have been infected and didn’t know they were sick. A disadvantage is that the tests are sometimes wrong---and several studies, including a notable one in California, have been criticized for not taking the possibility of inaccurate results into consideration or for not representing the whole population.

While these studies are far from perfect, many countries, including parts of Sweden, are on track to achieve so-called herd immunity from the novel coronavirus-caused COVID-19 disease within weeks. In general, they give a better sense of how far the coronavirus has truly spread and its potential for spreading further. The starting point of herd immunity may differ from place to place, depending on factors like density and social interaction.