1 . Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.

To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”

2 . Escape to a New Life— Everyone’s Dream?

A TV series in Wales has become a heated issue by becoming the number one choice for teenagers to watch.

The main character is a young farmer and the series is about country life, making the popularity of the series all the more surprising. The series is calm and relaxing and really the opposite to city life. Escape to a New Life describes the Welsh countryside as a beautiful and peaceful place and its people as very caring and happy.

The series director believes that this is what young people want today. She says the success of the series is because teenagers want a happier and healthier life away from the pressures of deadlines and exams. She figures this series offers a form of escape from their fast and stressful lives.

Despite this, many parents and teachers are worried about the effect this is having on young people. Parents report that their children are just watching this series and neglecting everything else, using Escape to a New Life as an excuse for not completing homework, or refusing to revise for exams, citing a need for a happier and less stressful life.

One father, Paul McGregor, said his daughter Charlotte had changed a lot. He said, “She used to be in the school athletics team and loved the javelin, but now she only wants to watch the TV series and has been dropped from the team. She no longer completes her homework saying it doesn’t matter as she just wants to ‘escape to a new life’”.

Paediatrician, Dr. Elisa Carhart who specialises in child mental health, says that TV can influence young people’s decisions in life, but believes that if a young person reacts as strongly as Charlotte, it’s likely there are other reasons for the change in her behaviour.

3 . Stories have long been employed to instill (灌输) moral and cultural values in young children, but there is little research exploring the effectiveness of such stories.

“As parents, we want to know how effective the stories actually are in promoting honesty.” say lead author Kang Lee of the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto and co-author Victoria Talwar of McGill University. “Is it ‘in one ear, out the other,’ or do children listen and take the messages to heart?”

To find out, Lee and Talwar conducted an experiment with 268 children aged 3 to 7. Each child played a game that required guessing the identity of a toy based on the sound it made. In the middle of the game, the experimenter left the room for a minute, instructing the child not to glance at a toy left on the table. For most children, this temptation (诱惑) was too hard to resist. When the experimenter returned, she read the child a story, either The Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Pinocchio, or George Washington and the Cherry Tree. Afterward, the experimenter asked the child to tell the truth about whether he or she glanced at the toy.

Contrary to the experimenters’ expectations, Pinocchio and The Boy Who Cried Wolf , which associate lying with negative consequences, were no more effective at promoting honest behavior than a fable unrelated to honesty, in this case The Tortoise and the Hare. Only the made-up tale about young George Washington seemed to inspire the kids to admit glancing: Children who heard the tale in which the future first president was complimented because of admitting his mistake and rewarded a candy were three times more likely to tell the truth than their fellows who heard other stories.

“Our study shows that to promote moral behavior such as honesty, emphasizing the positive outcomes of honesty rather than the negative consequences of dishonesty is the key,” note they. “This may apply to other moral behaviors as well.”

They also warn that more research is necessary to determine whether moral stories influence kids’ behavior in the long term. Still, they have been quick to take advantage of the findings. Talwar reports a shift in her own parenting practices: “It really seems to work. I use this now with my child.”

I spotted my neighbor, Monica, working in her garden one day when I returned home from school. It was sunny, and the smell of cut grass made me feel refreshed. I popped my head over the fence, and Monica and I got talking.

“I’ve seen you’re very good at using a lawn mower(割草机) and gardening tools,” Monica said. “There’s a hedge(树篱) growing over the pathway near here. It’s so overgrown that it becomes a head ache for the passers-by. I was planning to cut it back myself. Would you like to help out?”

I loved the idea of helping Monica and our community. We agreed to cut the hedge the following Sunday. My brother Ivan, aged 10, also came along to help us. We wheeled Monica’s garbage can down to the hedge, which the community council was responsible for. All three of us cut it with shears (大剪刀) until a trouble-free pathway came in sight. Mr. Brown, a wheelchair user, was grateful that he didn’t have to make a detour(绕行) any more to pass the hedge. Encouraged by his words, I suggested doing more for our community, to make it a better place.

When we first started, we just made the best of the equipment we already had in my parents’ garage. But as time went on, donations came in from the local community. Our garage got filled up quickly with brushes, gardening tools, and even donated power tools like leaf blowers. With everything ready, our first project was to beautiful park near our houses, which looked a bit run-down. Ivan was in charge of painting the fence around, Monica cleared the lawn with a leaf blower, and I was responsible for repairing the benches where our neighbors usually sat at their leisure. After two weeks’ hard work, we felt stunned when stepping back and appreciating the clean and brand new small park. My heart swelled with pride because our efforts paid off.

I posted photos of our hard work on our local Facebook Group.

With more neighbors joining in, we headed for the flower bed near the community center.

6 . Compassion has not been a traditional characteristic of sport. With its UK roots in 19th-century British public schools and universities, modern sport developed as way of creating strong military leaders, training them to develop adaptability defined in those times by iron will and biting the bullet. Fear and harsh criticism were crucial to toughening up players and soldiers alike. The “tough guy” narrative was strengthened by 20th-century media stereotypes and Hollywood’s heroes and became rooted into sport and society.

I’ve heard countless stories like the popular culture I found when I joined the Olympic rowing team in the mid-1990s. We were expected to suffer after mistakes or losses to show that we truly cared, and everyone believed coaches needed to be severe and unforgiving to get results. These approaches still exist. But an alternative approach with compassion at its center addresses aims of performance and wellbeing for those with greater ambitions.

This isn’t some soft option which plays down hard work, as supporters of the earlier traditional sporting mindset might criticize. Research across branches of psychology — behavioral, sports, positive — shows how compassion creates the strongest foundation for adaptability and sustained performance under pressure whether in sport, the military, healthcare or business. Rather than activating our threat system which began to help us survive way back, compassion helps us to feel safe and protected, leaving us free to learn, connect with others and start exploring what we’re capable of.

The continuous need to improve performance has led top coaches to appreciate that high performance requires levels of support to match the level of challenge. When you provide that, players start thriving while striving to achieve more. Rooted in compassion, a different coach-athlete relationship thus develops.

The dictionary definition of compassion includes the recognition of another’s suffering and the desire and support to relieve it. Compassion has been shown to decrease fear of failure and increase the likelihood of trying again when failure does happen. But how many talented athletes experience that depth of support in moments of crisis and failure?