【推荐2】With the new semester about to start, our school is welcoming a group of new international students. We have some apps here with an English version that will make your life easier. We hope you will have a wonderful life here.

★WeChat

WeChat is now the most popular social media app in China. Almost everyone is using WeChat. You can send both text and voice messages on WeChat. You can also make voice and video calls. You can also post texts, pictures and video clips. If your friends in your home country have this app, you can also chat with them through voice or video. WeChat is also widely used now as a form of payment which can be used in stores, online, and in other shopping apps.

★Alipay

Alipay is a similar app to PayPal. It was first used on Taobao and now people can use it as a mobile payment option. You can even use mobile payment at street vendors, so if you have this app, you can leave your wallet at home.

★Didi

Now Didi seems to be the smartest way to travel around. With one tap, a car comes directly to you. Didi is a Chinese car-hailing service app. It has a function called “ride sharing”, which saves a lot of money for passengers, but it does not have an English version, so if you want to use it, you will have to learn some Chinese.

★Pleco

This is one of the top Chinese/English dictionary apps and it covers 130,000 Chinese words and includes 20,000 example sentences with pinyin. It is perfect for those who want to learn Chinese, and also for tourists who need to translate words or phrases from English to Chinese.

【推荐3】Best Internet phone calls apps

Voice

You can use it to make free calls to an actual phone number, PC to PC calls, and free PC to phone calls.

What We Like

●Can forward all calls to your existing phone.

●Easily connects with your existing phone contacts.

What We Don’t Like

●Requires an existing phone number to call landlines and other numbers.

●Limits calling time.

WhatsApp

You cannot use it to make free calls to phones that don’t have the app installed, nor to landlines.

What We Like

●Calls work with any user no matter where they’re located.

●Helps you find users from your existing phone contacts.

●Works on a wide variety of devices, including the web.

What We Don’t Like

●Requires a real phone number to sign up.

●It’s unable to call non-users like landline phones.

Google Duo

You can make audio calls only or you can use it for free video calling.

What We Like

●Calls are 100% free with other users.

●The app helps find existing users from your contact list.

What We Don’t Like

●Doesn’t support sending texts like most similar apps do.

●Works with other users only, so you can’t call a landline or other numbers.

Viber

PC to PC and app to app free Internet phone calls are available with Viber, so lots of devices are supported.

What We Like

●All calls and texts are free with other users.

●Works on desktop and mobile devices.

What We Don’t Like

●A real phone number isn’t free.

【推荐2】Detecting a person with a high temperature who could be carrying COVID-19 isn’t as easy as it may seem, especially in a crowd. Yet that’s what public health authorities (官方) want to do in the countries around the world.

Thales, an electronic equipment manufacturer, is conducting a study with the NHS Scotland (National Health Service) for a new system to detect individuals with high temperatures, whether they’re on their own or in the middle of a crowd. The trial is being conducted at the emergency department of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. This first section of the trial was performed over a four-week period with around 100 patients — a relatively small sample, admittedly, but big enough to show some interesting correlations (相关性) and confirm whether the concept was trusted. The trial could now be extended to a much broader population of patients.

“Most existing solutions are based on industrial systems and they’re not designed for medical uses,” said Willie Alexander, Technical Director for Thales Optronics continues. “They can only scan one face at a time, they’re less accurate, and they need to be operated by specialist technicians. With our system, we can scan entire groups of people at the same time and focus on the parts of the face with the same temperature as an ear thermometer (温度计), which is the standard equipment for healthcare professionals. And the solution uses machine learning, so the more patients we work with, the better the model gets.”

If the promising initial results of this trial are confirmed, the solution could be used in other sensitive public spaces where groups of individuals need to have their temperatures taken quickly and reliably, such as border areas and airports. And because it’s entirely contactless and none of the data is stored, the method makes both the testers and the people being tested less worried.