“Marilyn, you have so much determination and so much heart. If you work at it you’ll be a fine swimmer,” Gus Ryder said to me after I finished a one-mile race in the freezing cold Lake Ontario.

I believed him and started swimming for Gus. Every day, we trained for hours in open water. But no matter how hard I worked, I still came in third or fourth. Four years later, it was clear that I was never going to the Olympics. That’s when Gus suggested I challenge the famous American long-distance swimmer Florence Chadwick to swim the thirty-two miles across Lake Ontario from New York to Toronto.

The idea had never occurred to me, but Gus had made up his mind. “I wasn’t sure Florence could make it. If we could swim one stroke further than her, it would be worth it,” Gus encouraged me.

Eventually, I decided to do it for Gus, and for myself.

The race started at 10 pm on September 6. It was cloudy, windy, and very dark. When I looked around, I couldn’t see where the lake ended and the sky began.

“Marilyn, just follow my light and I will guide you across this lake,” said Gus, who had a big flashlight and shone it just ahead of me from the lifeboat.

Florence swam for about four hours before she quit. But it wasn’t until several hours later, when I was having difficulty, that Gus told me that Florence was out and that I was the only one left!

I felt very encouraged. But it was such a long night that Gus had to do his best to keep me going. At the dawn, he even began writing messages on a chalkboard to keep my thoughts positive. Once he wrote, “You know you can do it. You can do it for me!” Another time he even wrote, “If you give up, I give up.”

By midday I felt so tired that I started falling asleep. So Gus started swimming with me to get my attention back. “I’m here to swim with you, Marilyn. Come on!” he said.

At the very moment, I began to experience a very unusual feeling.

After twenty-one hours in the water, we began approaching the shore.

5 . The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas has issued a recent report in order to recommend ways to increase food donations, reduce food waste, and fight hunger, which may help Kenyan leaders meet 2030 food waste reduction goals.

Food donation can reroute eatable food—that would otherwise give off greenhouse gasses in a landfill—to those experiencing hunger. According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, 3.5 million Kenyans, roughly 37 percent of the population, face severe hunger. At the same time, the Policy Atlas reports roughly 40 percent of food produced within Kenya goes to waste. But Broad Leib, Deputy Director of Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), sees some promising changes. “While progress is not happening as quickly as needed, Kenya’s food loss index has been steadily reduced from 1,744 metric tons in 2017, to 1,531 in 2018, to 1,446 metric tons in 2019, indicating a steady improvement and national commitment to food loss reduction,” reports Broad Leib.

According to the Policy Atlas, motivating food donation with rewards is particularly important, which helps food donors and food recovery organizations make up for costs necessary for recovery, storing, processing, and transporting food for donation.

“A major driver of food waste is inconsistent or unclear date labels that cause confusion among all actors along the value chain and limit the ability of businesses to donate food. This increases the likelihood that much safe food will go to waste,” Broad Leib tells Food Tank. However, he acknowledges Kenya’s current dual (双的) date labeling laws. While food may lose its freshness over time, it is still eatable before expiration (到期). Dual date labeling on packaged foods reduces bewilderment by defining dates for both safety and quality. This helps reduce considerable waste and responsibility for donors.

Broad Leib believes that the private sector can also play a significant role in decreasing food waste in Kenya. It is vital for consumer education campaigns. FLPC’s research shows that public-private initiatives can help raise awareness among consumers and donors around issues of food waste and food donation.

6 . Electronic timing is older than most people imagine and was used for the first time more than a hundred years ago at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Initially, the well-known company Ericsson was tasked with developing the technology, but it was the Swedish inventor Ragnar Carlstedt who eventually created the final product.

At the same time, Carlstedt introduced another invention: the finish line camera. The 1, 500-meter Olympic final was extremely close with Arnold Jackson from Great Britain winning by only 0.1 seconds. But it was impossible to decide on the silver medal since the two Americans Abel Kiviat and Norman Taber finished side by side. For the first time in history, the outcome of an Olympic event had to be settled based on a photo finish when Kiviat was judged to be “slightly ahead”.

The significance of these two inventions led a major newspaper to write: “Electronic timing at the Olympic Games. Simultaneous (同时发生的) timing and photography of contestants. A brilliant idea!”

The next step in timekeeping was the photo-finish camera with a time stamp imprinted on each picture, which was introduced at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. The 1948 Olympics saw the introduction of another invention with the continuous slit camera (狭缝摄影机), where a film behind a narrow slit rolls (滚动) with the same speed as the runners. Four years later the clocks were connected to the slit camera giving a solution of 1/100 s. But it was not until 1972 that official times were recorded to the 100th of a second.

The next big step in the eighties was to make the camera digital to speed up the feedback (反馈). But the idea behind the slit camera was kept and is still the basis of all timing systems for athletics used today. The only difference is that now there is a very narrow sensor array ( 阵列传感器) instead of the moving film.

After a century technology has reached the point where the whole timing system can be stored in a smartphone. So in a way, the circle was closed when SprintTimer, a sports timer and photo finish app, was developed in the same place and precisely a hundred years after Ragnar Carlstedt.

Missy was absolutely my best friend in the whole world. We had known each other since first grade, and we literally did everything together. We frequently visited each other’s homes, we knew each other’s families like they were our own. The interesting thing about our relationship, however the fact was that the older we got, the more our values seemed to differ. We still enjoyed a lot of the same things, but I was a bit more settled while she loved being associated with popular people and things. Although she was basically a good person, she had no problem with forcing things to go her way.

Perhaps this is why it seemed that her family actually trusted me more than they trusted her. So, on the day when Missy showed up at my house with a huge dent (凹痕) in her father’s car, I knew that we were in for a troublesome time.

She had banged the car into a tree while out that day, and she knew her father was going to have an explanation. So she stopped by my house in order to make up a story that would lessen her father’s rage. Missy decided to tell him that while in a parking lot, someone must have backed into the car and dented it. Looking at the dent with some crashed leaves and bark still sticking there, I attempted to perish (打消) her thought. “I don’t think your father will buy it.” “ Don’t worry,” she insisted,“even if my dad doesn’t trust me, he’ll trust you.” My role was to confirm for her. Now keep in mind that I had strong objections to lying and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the situation. I loved her parents just like my own, and I did not want to be a party to this lie that Missy was creating. Nevertheless, after much request and a general questioning of my loyalty to our friendship, I decided that the least I could do was to act as a silent witness. That way, I wasn’t actually lying; I just wasn’t telling the full truth.

8 . When the company OpenAI developed its new artificial intelligence (AI) program, ChatGPT, in late 2022, educators began to worry. ChatGPT could create text that seemed like a human wrote it. How could teachers discover whether students were using language created by an AI chatbot to cheat on a writing task?

As a linguist who studies the effects of technology on how people read, write and think, I believe there are other more pressing concerns besides cheating. These include whether AI, more generally, threatens student writing skills, the value of writing as a process, and the importance of regarding writing as a tool for thinking.

As part of my research on the effects of AI on human writing, I surveyed young adults in the U.S. about some issues related to those effects. One participant said that at some point if you depend on predictive text, you’re going to lose your spelling abilities. Enter “Was Rom” into a Google search and you’re given a list of choices like “Was Rome built in a day”. Type “ple” into a text message and you’re offered “please” and “plenty”. These tools complete our sentences automatically, giving us little chance to think about our spelling, and continuously asking us to follow their suggestions.

Evan Selinger, a philosopher, worried that predictive texting reduces the power of writing as a form of mental activity and personal expression. “By encouraging us not to think too deeply about our words, predictive technology may change how we deal with each other,” Selinger wrote. “We give others more algorithms (算法) and less of ourselves. Automation can stop us thinking and the resulting text didn’t feel like mine anymore.”

I asked ChatGPT whether it was a threat to humans’ motivation to write. The bot responded: “There will always be a demand for creative, original content that requires the unique viewpoint of a human writer.” It continued: “Writing serves many purposes beyond just the creation of content, such as self-expression, communication, and personal growth, which can continue to encourage people to write even if certain types of writing can be automated.”

I was glad to find the program had seemingly admitted its limitations.