1 . How to Make Exercise a Habit

The new year is a time when it seems like everyone makes goals to work out and get fit. But by the third week of January, that all seems to go out the window. I’ve seen this happen almost every year: my workout classes are packed with fresh faces.     1     So I will share some tips on how to make exercise a habit, helping you stay healthier in the long run.

Focus on the routine and not the results

These days it feels like everyone is looking for a quick fix or fast results, particularly when it comes to health and fitness.     2     Focus on creating and enjoying the habit. Try scheduling your works alongside one of the other routines you already have in place.

    3    

Everyone seems to want to set big goals of working out 4 times a week with 60-minute sessions. But realistically, if you’re not used to this, it will just be overwhelming and lead you to quit. Given this, doing workouts even as small as5-10 minutes is a good place to start.

Forget the “all or nothing” view

When it comes to exercise, the all or nothing approach does not serve you. Say you plan a workout for today, but say things get crazy at work and you miss your scheduled time. Well that doesn’t mean you’ve failed.     4     Even if you miss your workout, that doesn’t mean you’ve given up. Just remember your results are from your every effort, not matter how small.

Find joy in your workouts

    5     Don’t let yourself be boxed into a certain type of workout just because it’s trendy or everyone is doing them. A workout that suits you will promote your drive and enjoyment.

3 . Why It’s Hard to Lose Weight

What makes people gain weight? This seems like a simple enough question to answer. If we eat a lot and don’t do enough exercise, we will become fat.     1    

As we know, what we eat greatly affects our weight. It is widely accepted that people have 100% control over what they eat and how much they eat. This, however, is partly true.     2     You may rarely touch vegetables while overeating fried chicken. Meanwhile, the serving size and the background music can both affect how much we eat.

Our bodies themselves can decide whether we are more likely to gain weight or lose weight. Scientists have found that the more delicious the food, the more excited our brains get.     3     Compared to people of normal weight, fat people feel more excited when they see delicious   food.

Also, our bodies use a variety of hormones (激素) to tell our brains whether they are hungry or full.   Ghrelin(胃饥饿素), for example, tells the brain that the body wants food. Leptin(瘦蛋白), meanwhile, tells the brain that it’s time to stop eating. Ghrelin and leptin help us to maintain a healthy weight.     4     As we get fatter, the levels of leptin in our bodies rises.   Our brains are told not to eat all the time. In the end, they would no longer trust leptin and would stop responding to its “warnings”. When we start to lose weight, leptin levels drop. Our brains think we are hungry and makes us find food in our fridge.

    5     They may have tried very hard, but their bodies are working against their will.

4 . It was a quiet early afternoon in the library, and we librarians were enjoying a chat at the library desk. Suddenly, a regular reader, who had been reading a magazine, marched up to us, gave us an annoyed “Shush (嘘)!” and went back to her seat.

Shocked into silence, we tried not to laugh. How strange for a group of librarians to be shushed by a reader! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Well, it seems hard to explain. If you’re a baby boomer (婴儿潮出生的人) like me, you probably remember libraries as places of adults’ silent reading. These days, however, libraries are more like busy community centers, where being noisy to some degree is the new normal, especially when kids are taking part.

I am a loud librarian. My voice is naturally on the louder side. The hundreds of programs I led as a children’s librarian were filled with singing, dancing, movement exercises and cheerful readings of books with crowds of children and their caregivers. No shushing allowed!

Growing knowledge about the importance of kids and teens learning through hands-on experiences has since caused a sea change in how public libraries connect with young readers. These types of programs like board games, poetry reading and story times certainly aren’t designed to be silent.

But it’s a balancing act. Not all readers—or librarians—like the idea of a noisy library. It’s clear to me now that on the day my colleagues and I were shushed by a reader, we should have been using our “library voices” as we talked. Still, it’s unlikely that libraries will ever return to the days when they were places of silence. There’s just too much fun and learning happening. I heartily agree with my friend Rachel Payne, an early-childhood service educator at the Brooklyn Public Library, who told me, “When I visit a library and it is quiet, I always feel a bit sad. A library where conversations are happening and tables are full is a very good thing!”

5 . Machine learning sees reasoning as a categorization task with a fixed set of predetermined labels. It views the world as a fixed space of possibilities, calculating and weighing them all. This approach, of course, has achieved notable successes when applied to stable and well-defined situations such as chess or computer games. When such conditions are absent, however, machines struggle.

In 2008, Google launched Flu Trends, a web service that aimed to predict flu-related doctor visits using big data. The project, however, failed to predict the 2009 HINI flu outbreak. After several unsuccessful adjustments to its algorithm (算法), Google finally stopped the project in2015.

In such unstable situations, the human brain behaves differently. Sometimes, it simply forgets. Instead of getting trapped in irrelevant data, it relies only on the most recent information and makes creative decisions. This is a feature called intelligent forgetting. Adopting this approach, an algorithm that relies on a single data point would have reduced Google Flu Trends' prediction error by half.

Intelligent forgetting is just one dimension of psychological AI, an approach to machine intelligence that also includes other features of human intelligence such as causal reasoning, intuitive (直觉) psychology, and physics. Soon, this approach to Al will finally be recognized as fundamental for solving poorly-defined problems. Exploring these amazing features of the human brain will finally allow us to make machine learning smart.

One feature of psychological Al is that it is explainable. Until recently, researchers assumed that the more transparent an AI system was, the less accurate its predictions were. This mirrored the widespread but incorrect belief that complex problems always need complex solutions. Now, this idea will be laid to rest. As the case of flu predictions illustrates, powerful and simple psychological algorithms can often give more accurate predictions than complex algorithms. Psychological AI opens up a new vision for explainable AI: Instead of trying to explain complex systems, we can check first if psychological Al offers a simple and equally accurate solution.

Without the help of human psychology, it will become clearer that the application of this type of machine learning to unstable situations eventually runs up against impassable limitations. We will finally recognize that more computing power makes machines faster. Not smarter.

6 . Most of us have told a lie at one time or another. Some lies are harmful. Others are mostly harmless. Still other lies may even be created with the best of intentions. But no matter what kind of lie you tell, it takes a great deal of brainpower to keep your lie covered.

People lie for different reasons. Sometimes they do it to make themselves look better. Sometimes they lie to get out of trouble. Some lies are well-intended, which scientists call “prosocial lies”. Maybe you tell your parents that you loved the sweater they gave you for your birthday (even though you were really hoping for a new cell phone). That’s a prosocial lie.

When you tell the truth, your brain doesn’t have to do anything unusual. Lying takes much more work. For example, when you are late for class, you tell a lie that you have to stop by the library and pick up a book. Your teacher may ask to see the book or even ask you to read it. This may result in a series (系列) of lies, causing a lot of brain work done in the prefrontal cortex (前额皮层). It’s the part in charge of working memory. Working memory keeps something in mind just for a little while. When you use self-control to keep from telling the truth, this part comes into play.

Spending so much brainpower trying to keep a story straight means prefrontal cortex has a harder time doing other tasks that require planning, self-control or working memory, such as planning a study schedule. Kid’s prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until around age 25. So they have fewer resources (资源) there to begin with. That is why researchers feel it’s important that kid students find dependable people to whom they can safely tell even painful truths about themselves.

“Nearly all cultures value honesty,” Talwar says. And, she adds, “There are things people can do to help create a culture that strengthens the value of honesty. Rather than punishing people for lying, it is more important to praise them for telling the truth.”

7 . Doctors have long advised patients to do physical activity to help keep their brains healthy. New research suggests that even a simple exercise program might help older people with light memory problems.

Researchers found around 300 inactive older adults with memory changes called mild cognitive impairment(MCI) (轻度认知障碍). Half of the older adults did aerobic (有氧) exercises, and the rest did light exercise that raised their heart rates a little.

“After a year, testing of cognitive skills showed neither group had worsened.” said lead researcher Laura Baker of Wake Forest School of Medicine in the state of North Carolina. “Brain examinations did not show the shrinkage (收缩) that often goes with worsening memory problems.”

By comparison, similar MCI patients in another long-term study of brain health—but without exercise—experienced cognitive reduction over a year.

The results suggest “this is doable for everybody—not just seniors healthy enough to work up a hard sweat,” said Baker at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. “Exercise needs to be part of the prevention strategies for at-risk seniors.”

The new study is especially interesting because the COVID-19 pandemic (疫情) began halfway through the study. That meant the study members became separated from others. Less social contact has long been known to increase people’s risk of memory problems. “For me, to show that we have a positive message even during a pandemic means that it could be a believable finding in the situation of other challenging life events,” Baker said.

8 . Technology is more than an abstract concept associated with advanced tools and systems. It also shapes the way people behave, grow and develop, both within their own lives and in their relationships with others. While technology has developed over thousands of years, the last century has seen an explosion in technology that has influenced fundamental changes in how humans see the world and interact with others. Specifically, the Internet and mobile devices have completely changed the way people interact with each other. There has been a debate going on whether technology is benefiting human communication or ruining it.

Undoubtedly, technology is helping people build newer and necessary communication skills. In business, office employees and managers use technology to send emails to one another, which is considered a communication skill. On social media, just share a few of your images and people start communicating on and about your images according to their viewpoint. With the outbreak of COVID-19, in order to work on the projects, the students use their phones to reach their teachers and classmates.

However, technology is sometimes considered to disconnect people from others around them. With cell phones, most people think that it’s easier and more convenient to text instead of meeting in person. Lucas Lengacher, an undergraduate from Huntington University, claims in his article that at least 42.91% people respond to messages immediately yet only 2.83% people don’t check their phones in the morning. In his research he “found that almost 60 percent of people felt disconnected from others around when they were on their phones”.

9 . Imagine climbing a mountain and getting half way up and saying to yourself, “You know what, I’m going to climb back down and finish this later.”

    1     We have projects that sit waiting to be completed. Some people start college but never graduate. We have books that we never finish reading.     2     Many people are great at beginning things but can’t seem to finish strong.

Not finishing what we started has been a repeated problem for us. We have to face it.     3     Whenever we delay, or put to the side, the things that will help us accomplish our goals, we stop developing our potential.

Not finishing not only causes us to stop making progress but also we find it harder whenever we do decide to start again. Consider this: every time I begin a new exercise program my muscles are sore (疼) for a few days. After a few weeks of routine, the muscles get accustomed to the program and grow stronger. Thus, no more sore muscles. Well, when I take some time off I fear starting again.     4    

Strong finishers are able to focus on getting the best result from anything that they start. So how do we know that we are a strong finisher? Along with the huge feeling of accomplishment, other people will begin to notice the change.     5     They will have no choice but to recognize our strong finishing ability. We will be rewarded with more trust from them.

10 . When a soccer ball lands in the garden, flattening newly grown peas, or a weeder pulls out a row of young plants by mistake, many gardeners would scream.     1     When something sets you back, isn’t that a negative thing?

    2     It is used to educate students about agricultural practices. Then those little setbacks are opportunities for learning.

“The garden is a wonderful place where children learn to come up with solutions to challenges they might not otherwise experience,” says Lisa Giroday, program manager for The Classroom Gardener, who helps schools transform schoolyards into dynamic outdoor learning environments. Nature is nature.     3     Lots of things come up in real time, and students have an opportunity to learn how to solve problems.

    4     After several decades of research into the effects of school gardens, social scientists and educators are starting to see the wide-ranging benefits that come from having green and growing spaces available to children at school. Some of these discoveries might surprise you. In the garden, children are usually freer to engage in what educators call risk assessment – activities that permit broader exploration, experimenting, and questioning.     5     It is key to responding properly in social situations.