【推荐1】Many small-business owners watched recent revelations about Facebook with mixed emotions. Like most Americans, they were surprised to discover how much information the social media giant collected on its users. But when it comes to small business, Facebook is a transformative advertising platform for small businesses, not easy to replace.

Let's say you own a small seafood restaurant, and Tuesday nights are $1 oyster （牡蛎）nights. Traditional advertising methods cost a lot and must be planned long in advance, and ifs hit-or-miss as to whether you actually get in front of oyster eaters. With Facebook, on Tuesday morning, with a few clicks, you can target Facebook users in your Zip code who love oysters and eating out （and are over age 21, so they can buy drinks, which is why you have $1 oyster nights）. And you can do this for as little as S20.

In my work with small businesses for more than 25 years, I've never seen a more effective method of micro-targeting prospects. Though Facebook is an effective tool for small-business, advertising does not justify （证明合理）the company's collecting vast amounts of data or allowing users' data to be invaded.

"Our primary concern was people's experience on Facebook," said Dan Levy, Facebook's Vice President. "Our teams have also been speaking to small businesses, and they want to make sure we're addressing the situation, and we are."

One concern small businesses want Facebook to address is protecting their uploaded lists. No one wants their customers' information misused or accessed by others, especially competitors.

Small-business owners are rightfully concerned about privacy. They don't want Facebook to know everything about them, and they don't want their customer lists to be let out to others.

But small businesses don't want to lose this effective advertising medium, either. Most Facebook ads are not invasive or offensive. And many receivers may actually benefit from receiving highly targeted ads—after all, those oyster lovers like learning about Tuesday night— $1 oyster night.

【推荐2】The traditional news media in America has been having a rough time in the last few years. According to a recent survey, more Americans have a negative (43%) than a positive (33%) view of the news media, and are finding it harder to be well informed because it is getting harder to determine which news is accurate.

The problem is preference. While ideally the media should be objective and hold power to account, in reality we know that most news outlets belong to a certain party and have their own agenda to advance. Whether state-owned or run by some shady tax-avoiding billionaire, getting “the masses” to view the world from a certain perspective has always been a priceless power to wield.

So why is trust in the media so low? Well, according to the same survey, 8 out of 10 Americans believe that the news media are critical to their democracy. The gap between these noble expectations of an honest, objective media and the performance that they actually deliver is large. Times when the mask slips and examples of media manipulation(操纵)are exposed are hugely damaging to trust, and people naturally turn to social media for others, even-easier-to-manipulate sources. Thus we are in the current state in which we find ourselves:confused and mistrustful.

People have been posting examples of how media can use different techniques of deception, to trick you into seeing exactly what they wanted you to see. As you will discover, perspective really is everything! It will goes to show that a healthy dose of skepticism goes a long way, and getting your news from a wide range of different sources is your best bet to a more rounded view of the world we live in. Social media is good in that respect, but bad in terms of regulation, trolling and people shouting horrible things at each other. The good old traditional news media really is needed as a forum for reasonable debate and expert opinion, but they gotta stop with the manipulation already!

【推荐3】For the second time in two years, an American has won one of the most respected global awards in literature. At a ceremony in London on Tuesday night, George Saunders accepted the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel.

The book is an impressive and experimental ghost story set in 1862. It explores the death of Willie Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, who died of fever during the second year of the Civil War. Saunders, a Tibetan Buddhist, imagines Willie’s experiences in the “bardo,” a Buddhist state between the worlds of the living and the dead where Willie communicates with other dead souls, and where he watches his father visit his entombed body.

Writing in The Guardian earlier this year, Saunders described the process of creating the novel: “There is something wonderful in watching a figure appear from the stone, feeling the presence of something within you ... and also beyond you — something consistent, willful, kind and generous, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground.”

Saunders was the bookmakers’ favorite to win the award, but the victory by an American writer immediately after Paul Beatty claimed the prize for his novel The Sellout is controversial. Before 2014, the Man Booker was qualified only to writers from the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland. The decision to allow American writers to enter has disappointed authors including A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes, who argue that the award’s main purpose was giving exposure to writers who were little-known in the broader American literary market. “The Americans have got enough prizes of their own,” Barnes told the Radio Times last year. Ron Charles, the book critic for The Washington Post, has also argued against the inclusion of Americans. “For any serious reader of fiction in this country,” Charles wrote in September, “the Americanization of the Booker Prize is a lost opportunity to learn about great books that haven’t already been publicly announced.”

Baroness Young, The Telegraph reported, stated that the judging panel was concerned only with the worth of the books on the shortlist (入围名单), which also included Mohsin Hamid’s refugee parable Exit West, Paul Auster’s complex epic 4321, Emily Fridlund’s coming-of-age tale The History of Wolves, and Fiona Mozley’s rural fable Elmet. “We’re only concerned with the book and what that book is telling us,” Young said. “Nationality is just not an issue.”

For Saunders, the prize is an extraordinary recognition of his first attempt into full-length novels. The 58-year-old writer was previously best-known for his short stories, which have won him four National Magazine Awards for fiction and a MacArthur Fellowship. He came to writing relatively late in life after studying geophysical engineering and working as a technical writer until 1996. The idea for Lincoln in the Bardo came to him, he wrote in The Guardian, during a visit to Washington, D.C., when his wife told him the story of a grief-stricken President Lincoln visiting Willie’s tomb to hold his son’s body. Saunders has often noted that the experience of writing for him feels like a way to transform pain and division into something positive. The author Zadie Smith, speaking with Saunders for Interview, noted that “what sets him apart is his willingness not only to go into the heart of darkness but to suggest possible routes out.”

【推荐1】Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is one of the most popular of the Post-Impressionist painters. He is famed for the great vitality of his works which are characterized by expressive and emotive use of brilliant color and energetic application of impastoed (厚原料的) paint.

Below are some famous pictures painted by Vincent and the poetic lyrics(歌词) to Don McLean’s hit song Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) in the famous cartoon film 《Loving Vincent》 .

【推荐2】For the second time in two years, an American has won one of the most respected global awards in literature. At a ceremony in London on Tuesday night, George Saunders accepted the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel.

The book is an impressive and experimental ghost story set in 1862. It explores the death of Willie Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, who died of fever during the second year of the Civil War. Saunders, a Tibetan Buddhist, imagines Willie’s experiences in the “bardo,” a Buddhist state between the worlds of the living and the dead where Willie communicates with other dead souls, and where he watches his father visit his entombed body.

Writing in The Guardian earlier this year, Saunders described the process of creating the novel: “There is something wonderful in watching a figure appear from the stone, feeling the presence of something within you ... and also beyond you — something consistent, willful, kind and generous, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground.”

Saunders was the bookmakers’ favorite to win the award, but the victory by an American writer immediately after Paul Beatty claimed the prize for his novel The Sellout is controversial. Before 2014, the Man Booker was qualified only to writers from the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland. The decision to allow American writers to enter has disappointed authors including A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes, who argue that the award’s main purpose was giving exposure to writers who were little-known in the broader American literary market. “The Americans have got enough prizes of their own,” Barnes told the Radio Times last year. Ron Charles, the book critic for The Washington Post, has also argued against the inclusion of Americans. “For any serious reader of fiction in this country,” Charles wrote in September, “the Americanization of the Booker Prize is a lost opportunity to learn about great books that haven’t already been publicly announced.”

Baroness Young, The Telegraph reported, stated that the judging panel was concerned only with the worth of the books on the shortlist (入围名单), which also included Mohsin Hamid’s refugee parable Exit West, Paul Auster’s complex epic 4321, Emily Fridlund’s coming-of-age tale The History of Wolves, and Fiona Mozley’s rural fable Elmet. “We’re only concerned with the book and what that book is telling us,” Young said. “Nationality is just not an issue.”

For Saunders, the prize is an extraordinary recognition of his first attempt into full-length novels. The 58-year-old writer was previously best-known for his short stories, which have won him four National Magazine Awards for fiction and a MacArthur Fellowship. He came to writing relatively late in life after studying geophysical engineering and working as a technical writer until 1996. The idea for Lincoln in the Bardo came to him, he wrote in The Guardian, during a visit to Washington, D.C., when his wife told him the story of a grief-stricken President Lincoln visiting Willie’s tomb to hold his son’s body. Saunders has often noted that the experience of writing for him feels like a way to transform pain and division into something positive. The author Zadie Smith, speaking with Saunders for Interview, noted that “what sets him apart is his willingness not only to go into the heart of darkness but to suggest possible routes out.”

【推荐3】Albert Einstein’s 1915 masterpiece “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” is the first and still the best introduction to the subject, and I recommend it as such to students. But it probably wouldn’t be publishable in a scientific journal today.

Why not? After all, it would pass with flying colours the tests of correctness and significance. And while popular belief holds that the paper was incomprehensible to its first readers, in fact many papers in theoretical physics are much more difficult.

As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “There was a time when the newspapers said that only 12 men understood the theory of relativity. I do believe there might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than 12.”

No, the problem is its style. It starts with a leisurely philosophical discussion of space and time and then continues with an exposition of known mathematics. Those two sections, which would be considered extraneous today, take up half the paper. Worse, there are zero citations of previous scientists’ work, nor are there any graphics. Those features might make a paper not even get past the first editors.

A similar process of professionalization has transformed other parts of the scientific landscape. Requests for research time at major observatories or national laboratories are more rigidly structured. And anything involving work with human subjects, or putting instruments in space, involves piles of paperwork.

We see it also in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the Nobel Prize of high school science competitions. In the early decades of its 78-year history, the winning projects were usually the sort of clever but naive, amateurish efforts one might expect of talented beginners working on their own. Today, polished work coming out of internships(实习) at established laboratories is the norm.

These professionalizing tendencies are a natural consequence of the explosive growth of modern science. Standardization and system make it easier to manage the rapid flow of papers, applications and people. But there are serious downsides. A lot of unproductive effort goes into jumping through bureaucratic hoops(繁文缛节), and outsiders face entry barriers at every turn.

Of course, Einstein would have found his way to meeting modern standards and publishing his results. Its scientific core wouldn’t have changed, but the paper might not be the same taste to read.