【推荐1】As the clocks strike midnight one by one on New Year’s Eve, one song will ring out more than any other from the world’s crowds — “Auld Lang Syne”, the Scots-language ode (颂歌) to friendship and good times past, which was first set to paper by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, though he claimed he was not its original author, only a documentarian of one part of an old oral folk tradition. According to historian Dr. Morag Grant, the concept of   “auld lang syne” was once a Jacobite tradition.

Burns’ version quickly became popular in Scotland after it was published in 1799, and thanks to that Scottish diaspora—which carried its folk traditions to places like the States, Canada and New Zealand — snatches (音乐片段) of   “Auld Lang Syne” are productive throughout history.

It was in 19th-century England that the New Year’s Eve tradition emerged. At St Paul’s in London, Scotts who went abroad would gather together and belt out the words to “Auld Lang Syne”. “To miss it in the eyes of some Scots would amount to little less than a crime,” the Edinburgh Evening Courant wrote at the time.

An increasingly connected world helped to promote the song’s spread. The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, sang it down the mouthpiece to demonstrate the new telecommunications equipment. Later, another scientist called Emile Berliner chose it as one of the first songs to be recorded on the gramophone. In 1929, the bandleader Guy Lombardo began the tradition of playing “Auld Lang Syne” from Times Square, first on radio and then on television.

From its folkloric beginnings, “Auld Lang Syne” has travelled far, shapeshifting and acquiring new meaning as it passes between people and cultures. Today, it symbolises friendship and fond memory for communities across the globe, and it becomes the second most sung song in the English language, beaten only by “Happy Birthday”. It’s quite a success for a poem written in a Scottish minority language.

【推荐1】Advances in digital technology, including computers, smartphones, and mobile apps, have changed the way people communicate and learn at home and in classrooms around the world. Now, an international team of researchers are working to ensure that this changing educational landscape will help to support literacy (读写能力) in deaf children. “We’re using digital technology to encourage children to learn,” said Leandro F1órez-Aristizábal.

Leandro and his co-workers are working to design and test a storytelling app for sign language-speaking deaf children. They began by designing a series of black and white cards describing images. A single student would change the order of the cards he or she chose and then tell the story to the rest of the class through sign language.

The researchers conducted a case study with 5th graders. One thing that attracted the researchers as they watched the performances was the response of other students in the classroom. As one student was chosen to change the order of the cards, other students got up and began offering suggestions about a general storyline.

Then, the researchers added details and colors to the cards and tested those out with kids. Finally, they changed the colorful cards to digital form. And the kids appeared to love it. The researchers reported that children’s motivation (动力) increased when technology was part of the activity. They had more impressive performances.

While their original target audience at the moment are deaf children, Leandro says the app might also find use as a means for hearing kids to learn sign language. “We started with deafness, but we don’t want to stop there,” Leandro said. “We want to invite other researchers to join us on this journey and to help us develop improved functions to serve other disabilities and other educational goals. In this way, we’re trying to fill the gap with them. Finally, we want to forget about disabilities and think about different abilities.”

【推荐3】Mogao Grottoes is located at the western end of the Hexi Corridor along the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. Until now, most mural paintings at Mogao Grottoes have been dated by directly referring to the mural texts or historical documents. However, some are still left with the creation era (年代) uncertain due to the lack of reference materials or the disagreement of art experts.

The drawing style of mural paintings was changing throughout history and can be learned and quantified through painting data. A new dating method has been developed by encoding (编码) the drawing styles using visual codes learned through deep learning. This new method successfully discovered the creation era of six mural paintings at Mogao Grottoes. This new research work is led by Qingquan Li from Shenzhen University.

With the help of experts from Dunhuang Academy, seven mural paintings from two grottoes (No. 205 and No. 206) were chosen as subjects for this dating research.

To reveal the creation era of these paintings, Qin Zou, a researcher from Wuhan University, collected 3,860 mural paintings from 194 different grottoes with confirmed creation-era labels. To find the visual codes that can identify the era in these paintings, the authors constructed a deep convolutional neural network (卷积神经网络) and classified (将……分类) these painting images into the right eras. Based on the classification model, a dating method was built and applied to date the seven paintings.

Six of the new dating results were approved by experts from Dunhuang Academy. “These dating results are correct and the method is great,” said Mr. Hui-Min Wang, a distinguished expert from the Archaeological Institute of Dunhuang Academy.

“To the best of our knowledge,” wrote the researchers, “this work represents the first account of a scientific and quantitative manner to support the era prediction and reduce the uncertainties in dating ancient paintings by using deep learning.”