【推荐1】Scientists have found further evidence that dolphins call each other by "name".

Research has revealed that the marine mammals use a unique whistle to identify each other. A team from the University of St-Andrews in Scotland found that when the animals hear their own call played back to them, they respond.

Dr. Vincent Janik, from the university's Sea Mammal Research Unit, said, "Dolphins live in this three-dimensional (三维) environment, offshore without any kind of landmarks and they need to stay together as a group. These animals live in an environment where they need a very efficient system to stay in touch. "

It had been long suspected that dolphins use distinctive whistles in much the same way that humans use names. Previous research found that these calls were used frequently, and dolphins in the same group were able to learn and copy the unusual sounds. But this is the first time that the animals' response to being addressed by their "name" has been studied. To investigate, researchers recorded a group of wild bottlenose dolphins, capturing each animal's signature sound. They then played these calls back using underwater speakers.

“We played signature whistles of animals in the group; we also played other whistles in their repertoire (曲目) and then signature whistles of different populations-animals they had never seen in their lives," explained Dr. Janik.

The researchers found that individuals only responded to their own calls, by sounding their whistles back. The team believes the dolphins are acting like humans: when they hear their names,   they answer.

Dr. Janik said this skill probably came about to help the animals to stick together in a group in their vast underwater habitat. He said, "Most of the time they can't see each other, they can't use smell underwater, which is a very important sense in mamma is tor recognition, and they also don't tend to hang out in one spot, so they don't have nests or burrows that they return to.”

【推荐3】In late 2020, a tweet spread quickly: “Another day of sharing at the big screen while scrolling through my little screen so as to reward myself for staring at the medium screen all week.” It seems right on. We are glued to our screens. And it’s not only about watching movies and scrolling through TikTok. As remote work has set in, we’re relying entirely on digital tools to keep in touch with each other and get our work done.

This has led to a worrisome spike in “digital intensity”. A new survey from Microsoft tracked the habits of more than 30,000 users in 31 countries over 2021, and the results are alarming.

The good news is that something as simple as a 10-minute break, if used correctly, can help lessen the effects of digital intensity. “If you give yourself a break, and do something like meditation (冥想), reading, drawing — anything that turns your brain to something more relaxing,” says Dr. Michael Bohan, the director of Microsoft’s Human Factors Engineering Lab, “it will begin to produce alpha waves.” After the break, “you’ll be more engaged and focused,” he adds. “Taking breaks lets you reset, and maintain better brain health across the day.”

Finding new ways to connect with our colleagues, and reducing the number of daily meetings, emails and virtual check-ins will do more than “lessen the digital load”. It will also pave the way for a reinvented workplace, which most expect to be a hybrid of old and new. “We need to look at every process,” says Bohan, “and ask: Why are we doing this Is there a way to do this more effectively Let’s not repeat what we’ve always done. Let’s figure out how to do it better.”

【推荐1】Brainstorming usually means getting a group of people together to generate new ideas. I have found a unique way of brainstorming by getting the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to generate interesting questions and answers.

I am now working on a chapter on musical consciousness and ChatGPT has generated great questions like “What are good questions about the role of consciousness in music?” Typically, ChatGPT produces 10-20 new questions including ones that probably would not have occurred to me even with quite a lot of research. The questions generated by ChatGPT are distinct. Many of them are surprising, and some of them are highly valuable. Therefore, ChatGPT’s question generation seems to me to qualify as creative.

After ChatGPT generates a list of questions, you can get it to answer one question at a time. This process of getting ChatGPT to provide questions and answers could go on and on and on, although some repetition will turn up. The questions are always interesting, but I don’t trust the answers until I can check them out in reliable sources because ChatGPT has a bad reputation for making stuff up.

I call this new method “ChatStorming”, but it raises some difficult questions: the first is whether it is plagiarism(剽窃)to use answers provided by ChatGPT. ChatGPT has no copyright to its materials. However, it would still be intellectually dishonest to claim the writing produced by ChatGPT as your own. The second: Is ChatGPT truly capable of generating new ideas? ChatGPT is skillful at producing creative questions, but how about concepts, hypotheses(假设), and methods? To my astonishment, the results are definitely novel and surprising, but I don’t yet know whether they can also be valuable. It will take much testing and evaluation to determine whether ChatGPT and even better models like GPT-4 can be creative with new ideas as well as questions.

A third question is what it would take for a large language model to dominate humans. Large language models are major advances in AI that can further improve human creativity, but they are to be confirmed.