【推荐1】Taking on the task of producing a short movie might seem like an impossible feat, but if you can assemble a good team and if you break down each stage of production into small blocks of tasks, you’ll come to realize that producing a small-scale movie isn’t too bad. Just follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to Kevin Smith-like fame in no time.

Assemble a production crew. If you run out of friends or people you can get to work for screen credit, offer people “points”, which is a percentage of the movie profits.

Get a director of photography. You need someone who knows a lot about films cameras to make the movie come out right. Local film schools are the best place to find them,

Assemble the props and costumes. Costume shops and local theater groups can definitely help you here. But you can also borrow from friends and family or check out thrift stores for bargains.

Choose filming locations. Make sure you have permission from the owners of the property you choose to film on.

Get the film processed. Find the right processor with the help of your director of photography. You may need to send the film to Los Angeles for this.

Edit the film, You need to find someone who can transfer your film to video and arrange the completed scenes in the right order. You can likely find one in the same place as your director of photography,

Obviously, this is just a basic overview—the thing about producing a short independent movie is that the whole process is unpredictable. You can only set yourself up for the basics, but as long as you know things will go wrong every day, at least you’ll be prepared to deal with the difficulties.

【推荐2】“Now I just don’t believe that.” Surely all of us, at some point, have watched a movie and thought: It’s simply badly researched, or, the makers must think we’re idiots.

The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph ran a humorous piece on unconvincing tech moments from some top movies. Let’s see what they are all about.

The Daily Telegraph writer Tom Chivers’ first example is from the end-of-the-world movie Independence Day, in which a character comes up with a virus which destroys Windows, the computer system the alien spacecraft uses. “It’s a good thing they didn’t have Norton Anti-virus,” jokes Chivers.

It’s just one case of a movie that takes a lot of license with its science. Another one Chivers mentions is from Star Wars, where glowing beams of light traveling through space look very impressive. But the problem is that in space there are no air particles for the light to reflect off. In reality, they’d be invisible, which wouldn’t look so cool on the big screen.

Chivers’ second piece of Star Wars nonsense is the sound the fighters make in the movies:“the bellow (咆哮) of an elephant mixed with a car driving on a wet road”. But sound needs a medium to travel through, like air. In space, there wouldn’t actually be any sound at all.

Few people would deny that the mind-bending Matrix films are made for great viewing, but for Chivers, the science in the movies is a little silly.

And finally, as Chivers points out, DNA is not replaceable. But this bit of elementary genetics passed the makers of the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day by. In the film the bad man has “gene therapy” to change his appearance and his DNA, which is completely impossible in our real world.

【推荐3】When thinking about shadow puppetry (皮影戏), most Chinese people are reminded of their experience of watching shadow play in some temple fairs during big festivals when they were little. But now, one can enjoy a whole shadow show just by putting on a Virtual Reality (VR) headset, which makes shadow puppetry easily accessible to us.

This VR game is designed by China Institute of Art Science & Technology affiliated (附属的) to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. “We’ve been looking for a connection between traditional art and modern technology, hoping that the people can appreciate the beauty of shadow puppetry and get to know more about this traditional art via the VR game,” said the VR game designer Zhang Qing, associate professor with the institute.

Shadow puppetry is a Chinese folk art known for its unique storytelling techniques via figures made from cowhide (牛皮) and a lit-up backdrop (幕布) that creates the illusion (幻觉) of moving images, which can date back more than 2,000 years to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). However, as films and TV series gradually became major entertainment options since the late 1980s, shadow plays declined, with many performers shifting jobs.

In order to bring the ancient art back to life via VR, Zhang, together with her team, has been to many shadow puppetry museums across the country and visited puppeteers at Houma city in north China’s Shanxi Province where Shadow puppetry once became successful.

As the VR industry is heating up in China, the cutting-edge technology was recently adopted in many aspects in culture and tourism. For example, in Shanghai, with a simple scan to the QR codes on the wall of the historical architecture, visitors can know culture and history behind old bricks with text, audio video and 360 VR Panoramas in the smartphone.

Another VR plus intangible (非物质的) cultural heritage (遗产) project of Zhang has been put on the agenda. “Peking Opera and Kunqu opera are next attempt. With a VR headset, people would feel like one of the performers on the stage in the virtual environment. It would be a brand-new approach to access traditional Chinese opera. ” Zhang said.

【推荐1】Sugar cane (甘蔗) contains around 10% sugar. But that means it contains around 90% non-sugar — the material known as bagasse (甘蔗渣) which remains once the sugar-bearing juice has been squeezed out of the cane. World production of cane sugar was 185m tonnes in 2017. That results in a lot of bagasse.

At the moment, most of this is burned. Often, it fuels local generators, so it is not wasted. But Zhu Hongli, a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University in Boston thinks it can be put to better use. "With a bit of improvement bagasse makes an excellent replacement for the plastic used for disposable food containers such as coffee cups," says Dr. Zhu.

Dr. Zhu is not the first person to have this idea. But previous attempts tended not to survive contact with liquids. She thought she could overcome that by combining the bagasse pulp (浆状物) with another biodegradable (可生物降解的) material. She discovered that the main reason past efforts failed is that bagasse is composed of short fibres which are unable to give resilience (韧性) to the finished product. She therefore sought to insert a suitably long-fibred substance.

Bamboo seemed to fit the bill. It grows quickly, degrades readily and has appropriately long fibres. When the researchers mixed a small amount of bamboo pulp into bagasse, they found that the short and long fibres combined with each other closely.

To put their new material through its paces, Dr. Zhu and her colleagues fist poured hot oil onto it and found that their invention showed resistance to oil. They also found that when they made a cup out of the stuff and filled it with water heated almost to the boiling point, the cup remained good for more than two hours. Though this is not as long as a plastic cup would last it is long enough for all practical purposes. Moreover, the new material is twice as strong as the plastic used to make cups, and is definitely biodegradable. When Dr. Zhu buried a cup made out of it in the ground, half of it rotted away within two months.

【推荐3】“Developed and developing nations can learn from each other seeking a low-carbon economy. In terms of energy saving and green economy, China doesn’t lag behind developed nations,” said Zhou Changyi, director of the energy saving department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

“While we can learn many aspects from developed nations, they also should learn something from us, such as water conservation,” Zhou said in a speech during the new Path of China’s Industrialization forum at the ongoing China International Industry Fair.

He said industrialized nations and China are dealing with different issues to fight climate change. The United Kingdom, for example, is concerned about transport, buildings and new energy in reducing carbon emissions. For China, the most urgent task is how to realize new type of industrialization and avoid mistakes that other countries made when they industrialized.

Swiss power and automation technology group ABB called for a stronger focus on product life-cycle assessment, or LCA, which is used to study the environmental impact of a product from the research and manufacturing stage through its usage and recycling.

Tobias Becker, head of ABB’s process automation division for North Asia and China, said LCA is an effective tool in helping manufacturing industries to reduce carbon emissions.

LCA shows that industrial customers should focus on a product’s environmental impact throughout its life-cycle instead of on its initial investment.

Richard Hausmann, North East Asia CEO of Siemens, said, “The color of future industrialization is green. ”

The Germany company recently announces that it wants to receive orders worth more than 6 billion Euros ( US 8. 8 billion) for intelligent power networks, Smart Grid, over the next five years. Siemens has set a 20 percent market share target for the global smart grid business.

A smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology, advanced sensors specialized computers that save energy, reduce costs and increase reliability. The United States and China are considered the two biggest markets for smart grid.

【推荐3】I have a younger brother. To me, he is a fourteen-year-old kid named Joe, with blond hair and blue eyes. To others, he is different. Where I see a kid who just needs a lot more attention, others see a mentally disabled boy, a kid who cannot walk or talk or think for himself. I see someone who just makes daily routine a bit less routine. Others see an annoyance, I a bother.

This is not to say that I have never felt resentful (怨恨的) toward Joe. He is my brother, and with that comes responsibility. “Gina, could you stay in tonight and watch your brother?” “Gina, do me a favor and feed him dinner and change his diaper (尿布) later, please?” “Could you come home right after school today and get Joe off the bus?”

These are phrases that I have heard since I was twelve. And sure, they have made me resent my brother to a certain extent. I would think: that’s not fair! Everyone else can stay after and be a member of this club, or get extra help from that teacher. Or, all my friends are going out tonight, why can’t I? And, how come I have to feed him? He is not my son!

However, the small amount of resentment I feel toward my brother is erased a thousand times over by what I have learned from him. Besides making me responsible from a young age, and helping me be more accepting of all kinds of people, he has taught me to be thankful for what I have.

I know that there are moments in my life that I should cherish and that Joe will never experience. He will never laugh so hard that he cries. He will never feel the glory of a straight-A report card. He will never comfort a best friend crying on his shoulder. And he will never know how much his family love him.

Because he will never know, it is up to me to know, every second, how lucky I am. It is up to me to realize that life should be lived to its fullest, and that you should always, always be grateful that God, or whoever are the powers that be, gave you the ability to live your life the way you were meant to live it.

TED is a non-profit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, and Design.Since then it has stepped into more and more fields. It includes two annual ( 年度的) conferences-the TED Conference on the North American West Coast each spring, and the TED Global Conference in Edinburgh UK each summer, which bring together the world's most excellent thinkers and doers,who are challenged to give the talk of their lives ( in 18 minutes or less).

On ted. com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 1 ,200 TED talks are now available,' with more added each week,which cover almost all topics from science to business to global issues- in more than 110 languages. They really help share ideas in communities around the world.

We believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and eventually, the world. So we' re building here a clearinghouse (信息交流中心 ) that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.

Today, TED is best thought of as a global community. It's a community welcoming people from every field and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world.

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【推荐3】Smartphone Bans in School

Today's students all over the world are losing an hour a week of productivity due to their smartphone activity.

That is what two researchers from the London School of Economics are arguing with their new study that examined 130,000 students in 91 British schools that employed various smartphone-use policies. Then, they looked at how their respective students performed in 16-year-olds' national exams.

In what may not come as a surprise to some, researchers Richard Murphy and Louis-Philippe Beland found that as schools' phone policies evolved since 2001, with some choosing to completely ban smartphones, school test scores improved by an average of 6.4 percent. The increase in scores from underachieving students was even more significant as they saw their scores increase by an average of 14 percent.

“The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of the mobile phone policy," the researchers told CNN. "We found the effect of banning phones for these students was the same as an additional hour a week in school, or increasing the school year by five days."

Professor Murphy and Beland said their study does not mean that smartphones and other technology have no place in assisting learning.

“There are, however, potential drawbacks to new technologies," they told CNN, citing the temptation to text, play games or chat on social media. Therefore, smartphones will not be completely out of classrooms anytime soon. Smartphone ownership among young people and children has skyrocketed in the past few years. Pew Research and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University reported that as of 2013, 78 percent of teens aged 12 to 17 owned a cellphone, 47 percent of which were smartphones.

The use of smartphones in schools is a controversial topic. Parents want to be able to reach their children while teachers complain about the effect they have on classes.

In March, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ended a decade-long city-wide ban on smartphones in public schools and left them to make up their own rules.

But Murphy and Beland said the decision may not have a good result.

“Schools could significantly reduce the education achievement gap by prohibiting mobile phone use in schools. So by allowing phones in schools, New York may unintentionally increase the inequalities of outcomes.”