1 . Heads or Tails?

Careful: It’s not 50-50

The phrase “coin toss” is a classic synonym for randomness. But since the 18th century, mathematicians have _________ that even fair coins tend to land on one side slightly more often than the other. Proving this tiny bias, _________, would require hundreds of thousands of carefully recorded coin flips, making laboratory tests a logistical (后勤的，组织协调的) _________.

František Bartoš, currently a Ph.D. candidate studying the research methods of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, became interested in this _________ four years ago. He couldn’t _________ enough volunteers to investigate it at first. But after he began his Ph.D. studies, he tried again, recruiting 47 volunteers from six countries. Multiple weekends of coin flipping later, including one 12-hour marathon _________, the team performed 350,757 tosses, breaking the previous record of 40,000.

With one side initially upward, the flipped coin landed with the same side facing _________ as before the toss 50.8 percent of the time. The large number of throws allows _________ to conclude that the nearly 1 percent bias isn’t a fluke (侥幸). “We can be quite sure there is a bias in coin flips after this data set,” Bartoš says.

The leading theory explaining the _________ advantage comes from a 2007 physics study by Stanford University statisticians, whose calculations predicted a same-side bias of 51 percent. From the moment a coin is launched into the air, its entire track — including whether it lands on heads or tails — can be calculated by the laws of __________. The researchers determined that airborne coins don’t turn around their symmetrical axis (对称轴); __________, they tend to move off-center, which causes them to spend a little more time high in the air with their initial “up” side on top.

For day-to-day decisions, coin tosses are as good as random because a 1 percent bias isn’t __________ with just a few coin flips, says statistician Ameli, who wasn’t involved in the new research. Still, the study’s conclusions should eliminate any lasting doubt regarding the coin flip’s slight bias. “This is great experiment-based evidence __________ the bias,” she says.

It isn’t difficult to prevent this bias from influencing your coin-toss matches; simply __________ the coin’s starting position before flipping it should do the trick. But if your friends are __________ the tiny bias, you may as well benefit from your slight advantage. After all, 51 percent odds beat a casino’s house advantage. “If you asked me to bet on a coin,” Bartoš says, “why wouldn’t I give myself a 1 percent bias?”

2 . Facing AI extinction

In a recent White House press conference, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre couldn’t suppress her laughter at the question: Is it “crazy” to worry that “literally everyone on Earth will die” due to artificial intelligence? _________, the answer is no.

While AI pioneer such as Alan Turing cautioned that we should expect “machines to take control”, many contemporary researchers _________ this concern. In an area of unprecedented growth in AI abilities, why aren’t more expects weighing in?

Before the deep-learning revolution in 2012, I didn’t think human-level AI would emerge in my lifetime. I was familiar with arguments that AI systems would insatiably seek power and resist shutdown — and obvious _________ to humanity if it were to occur. But I also figured researchers must have good reasons not to be worried about human _________ risk (x-risk) from AI.

Yet after 10 years in the field, I believe the main reasons are actually cultural and historical. By 2012, after several hype cycles that didn’t pan out, most AI researchers had stopped asking ‘what if we succeed at replicating human intelligence’, _________ their ambitions to specific tasks like autonomous driving.

When concerns resurfaced outside their community, researchers were to quick to dismiss outsiders as _________ and their worries as science fiction. But in my experience, AI researchers are themselves often ignorant of arguments for AI x-risk.

One basic argument is by analogy: humans’ _________ abilities allowed us to out-compete other species for resources, leading to many extinctions. AI systems could likewise deprive us of the resources we need for our survival. Less _________, AI could displace humans economically and, through its powers of manipulation, politically.

But wouldn’t it be humans wielding AIs as tools who end up in control? Not necessarily. Many people might choose to deploy a system with a 99 per cent chance of making them phenomenally rich and powerful, even if it had a 1 per cent chance of _________ their control and killing everyone.

Because no safe experiment can definitively tell us whether an AI system will actually kill everyone, such concerns are often dismissed as unscientific. But this isn’t an excuse for ignoring the risk. It just means society needs to reason about it in the same way as other complex social issues. Researchers also emphasize the difficulty of predicting when AI might _________ human intelligence, but this is an argument for caution, not complacency.

Attitudes are changing, but not quickly enough. AI x-risk is admittedly more _________ than important social issues with present-day AI, like bias and misinformation, but the basic solution is the same: regulation. A robust public discussion is long overdue. By refusing to engage, some AI researchers are neglecting _________ responsibilities and betraying public trust.

Big tech sponsors AI ethics research when it doesn’t hurt the bottom line. But it is also lobbying to exclude general-purpose AI from E. U. regulation. Concerned researchers recently called for a(n) _________ in developing bigger AI models to allow society to catch up. Critics say this isn’t politically realistic, but problems like AI x-risk won’t _________ just because they are politically inconvenient.

This brings us to the ugliest reason researchers may dismiss AI x-risk: funding. Essentially every researcher (myself included) has received funding from big tech. At some point, society may stop believing reassurances from people with such strong conflicts of _________ and conclude, as I have, that their dismissal betrays wishful thinking rather than good counterarguments.

3 . To prevent tsunami-caused disasters, several countries worked together to expand the use of a tsunami-detecting system that had been developed in the United States by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The system________ of an instrument installed on the seafloor — called a tsunameter — that measures pressure changes caused by a passing tsunami. The tsunameter sends a signal to a surface buoy (浮标), which sends the data to a satellite, which ________ the information to warning centers around the world.

By 2004 only six such detectors had been installed, all in the Pacific. There were________ in the Indian Ocean, and many countries in the region had no national warning centers that could have ________ local communities. That policy mistake had tragic consequences. In Sumatra people had only a few minutes to run, ________the tsunami took two hours to reach India, and some 16,000 people died there. “It was totally unnecessary,” says Paramesh Banerjee, a geo-physicist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “Technically it would have been relatively ________ to install a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean.”

There are now 53 detector buoys operating in the world’s oceans, including 6 of a planned 27 in the Indian Ocean. So a (n)________ of the 2004 horror, in which the tsunami traveled for hours and still caught people by ________ is less likely. But buoys would not have helped in Sumatra. People living on coasts near a rupturing fault (地壳断层) can’t wait for ________ that a tsunami is on its way, which it often isn’t; they must flee as soon as the quake hits. The Japanese warning system relies not only on tsunameters but also on seismometers (地震测量仪) — a thousand of them ________ the country, the densest network anywhere — combined with a computer model that forecasts the scale of a tsunami from the magnitude (震级) and ________ of the quake.

In March, the system, which is run by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), did not work perfectly. JMA’s initial ________, while the ground was still shaking, put the quake magnitude at 7.9 — but later analysis revealed a quake that, at magnitude 9, was 12 times larger. The tsunami forecast warned of waves of ten feet or more — but they reached 50 feet in Minanisanriku and in some places even ________. But the human ________ to the warning was imperfect as well. “I think this time many people who lived above the high-water mark of the 1960 tsunami didn’t bother to run.” says Jin Sato, mayor of Minanisanriku. “Many of them died.” The town’s seawall, he thinks, also gave people a false sense of ________

4 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

5 . At first, the grains of rice that Ingo Potrykus held in his fingers did not seem at all _________, but inside, these grains were not white, as ordinary rice is, but a very pale yellow — thanks to beta-carotene (胡萝卜素), a building block for vitamin A.

For more than a decade Potrykus had _________ creating a golden rice that could improve the lives of millions of the poorest people in the world, strengthening their eyesight and their _________ disease.

_________ imagining golden rice was one thing and creating one quite another. Year after year, Potrykus and his colleagues ran into one _________ after another until success finally came in the spring of 1999.

At that point, he tackled an even greater challenge. The golden grains _________ pieces of DNA borrowed from bacteria and flowers. It was what some would call Frankenfood, a product of genetic engineering. As such, it _________ a web of hopes and fears.

The debate began the moment genetically engineered crops (GM crops) were first sold in the 1990s, and it has _________ ever since. First to start major protests against biotechnology were European environmentalists and consumer-advocacy groups. They were soon followed by their U.S. counterparts (相对应的人事物).

The hostility is _________. Most of the GM crops __________ so far have been developed to produce a plant that is not harmed by chemicals used to kill weeds (杂草) in the fields. These genetically engineered crops are often sold by the same large, multinational corporations that __________ the weed-killing chemicals that farmers spray on their fields. Consumers have become suspicious (怀疑的).

The benefits did seem small __________ golden rice was developed. It is the first strong example of a GM crop that may __________ not just the farmers who grow it but also the consumers who eat it. In this case, those include at least a million children who die every year because they are weakened by vitamin-A deficiency (缺乏) and an additional 350,000 who go blind.

Many people __________ poverty and hunger look at golden rice and see it as evidence that GM crops can be made to serve the greater public good. They see a critical role for GM crops in feeding the world’s ever-increasing population. As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it, “Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy; __________ is.”

7 . Now that we have briefly explored the history of the short story and heard from a few of its creators, let us consider the role of the reader. Readers are not empty vessels that wait, _______ raised, to receive a teacher’s or a critic’s interpretation. They bring their unique life experiences to the story. With these_______ , the best readers also bring their attention, their reading skills, and most importantly, their_______ to a reading of a story.

My students always_______ me to discuss, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the stories we read without destroying the excitement of being beamed up into another world. For years I _______with one response after the other to this challenge. Then one day I read an article by a botanist who had explored the beauty of flowers by x-raying them. His illustrations showed the rose and the lily in their_______ beauty, and his x-rays_______the wonders of their construction. I brought the article to class, where we discussed the benefits of examining the internal structure of flowers, relationships, current events, and short stories.

A short story, _______ , is not a fossil to admire. Readers must ask questions, guess at the answers,_______what will happen next, then read to discover. They and the author form a partnership that brings the story to life. Awareness of this partnership keeps the original excitement alive through discussion, analysis, interpretation, and ________. Literary explorations allow the reader to admire the authors’________ as well as their artistry. In fact, original appreciation may be enhanced by this x-ray vision. The final step is to appreciate once again the story________— to put the pieces back together.

Now it is your turn. Form a partnership with your author. During your________in reading, enter into a dialogue with the published scholars featured in Short Stories for Students. Through this________with experts you will revise, enrich, or________your original observations and interpretations.

During this adventure, I hope you will feel the same as the listeners that surround the neck of my Pueblo storyteller.

8 . If at first you don’t succeed, as the old saying goes, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a _________: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to declare victory and move on, in many endeavors there is much to be said for rethinking an apparently satisfactory formula.

Consider the advice for job interviews in Talent, a new book by economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist Daniel Gross. They suggest asking a(n) _________ question, such as “give me an example of when you resolved a difficult challenge at work.” Then ask for another example. And another. The pat answers will be _________ quickly, and the candidate will have to start improvising, digging deep — or perhaps admit to being stumped.

Indeed, one way to describe this tactic is that the interviewer is asking for answers in _________ rather than for answers in series. Instead of stringing together a logical sequence of 17 questions, the interviewer is asking for 17 different answers to the same question.

While that approach is _________ in job interviews, it is common practice among designers. They often produce several _________ attempts to meet a given brief, rather than immediately focusing on what seems to be the best idea. In doing so, the designers force themselves to _________ the full range of possibilities, to avoid the risk of committing too early to a concept that seems attractive but may _________ be a dead end.

A striking example of parallel design is the creation of the Windows 95 startup sound. Microsoft was looking for an opportunity to _________ the audio capabilities of the computers of the day, so it is commissioned the famed music producer Brian Eno to do so.

Eno recalls receiving a brief, asking for music that was “inspirational, sexy, driving, provocative, nostalgic... there were about 150 __________. And then at the bottom it said, ‘and not more than 3.8 seconds long’”.

Eno describes himself as being “completely bereft of ideas” at the time. He found the brief both hilarious and inspiring. In the end he __________ more than 80 tiny pieces of music. The final result was a musical signature that has stood the test of time and was one that helped to creatively liberate Eno. “It really __________ a logjam in my own work,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, in their delightful book Designing Your Life, suggest an exercise in which you sketch out a vision for the next five years of your life. What will you be doing? Where will you live and with whom? Are you hoping to run a marathon? Start a business? Write a novel?

This is often a straightforward act of __________, but what makes the exercise excruciating is what comes next: Burnett and Evans ask you to do it again, only this time, you’re to write an entirely different projection — the idea at the heart of the plan is one that is completely forbidden: Forcing yourself to go back to the __________ board, not only a second, but a third time.

I’ve tried this myself and seen others try it. People squirm. They protest. Sometimes they cry. And then, sooner or later, the ideas start pouring out.

We all contain __________. But we don’t always let them see the light of day. Perhaps we should try producing answers in parallel more often. Even when you do succeed, try, try again.

9 . During the initial stages of instructed L2 (the second language) acquisition students learn a couple thousand, mainly high frequency words. Functional language proficiency, however, _______mastery of a considerably large number of words. It is therefore _______ at the intermediate and advanced stages of language acquisition to learn a large vocabulary in a short period of time. There is not enough time to _______the natural (largely incidental) L1 (the first language) word acquisition process. Incidental acquisition of the words is only possible up to a point, _______, on account of their low frequency, they do not _______often enough in the L2 learning material.

Acquisition of new words from authentic L2 reading texts by means of strategies such as contextual deduction (演绎) is also not a _______for a number of reasons. There appears to be no _______to intentional learning of a great many new words in a relatively short period of time. The words to be learned may be _______in isolation or in context. Presentation in bilingual (双语的) word lists seems an _______shortcut because it takes less time than contextual presentation and yields excellent short term results. Long term memory, ________, is often disappointing so contextual presentation seems advisable.

Any suggestions on how to use this in educational contexts should be based on a systematic ________ of the two most important aspects of the L2 word learning problem, this is to say,   selecting the relevant vocabulary (which and how many words) and creating the best conditions for the acquisition process. This article sets out to ________a computer assisted word acquisition programme (CAVOCA) which tries to do exactly this: the programme operationalises current theoretical thinking about word acquisition, and its ________ are based on a systematic list of the vocabulary relevant for the target group. To ________its frequency, the programme was ________ in a number of experimental settings with a paired associated method of learning new words. The experimental results suggest that an approach combining the two methods is most advisable.

10 . Founded in 1880, the journal Science nowadays continues to publish the very best in research across the sciences. It is _________ an extra round of statistical (数据的) checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced today. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are _________ the irre-producibility (不可复制) of many published research findings.

“Readers must have _________ in the conclusions published in our journal,” writes McNutt in an editorial. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has _________ seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors (SBoRE). Manuscripts will be flagged up for additional scrutiny (审查) by the journal’s internal editors, or by its existing Board of Reviewing Editors or by _________ peer reviews. The SBoRE panel will then find external statisticians to _________ these manuscripts.

Asked whether any particular papers had _________ the change, McNutt said: “The creation of the ‘statistics board’ was motivated by concerns _________ with the application statistics and data analysis in scientific research. And it is part of Science’s overall _________ to increase re-producibility in the research we publish.”

Giovanni Parmigiani, a bio-statistician at the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the SBoRE group, says he __________ the board to “play primarily a consultive role”. He agreed to join because he “found the foresight behind the establishment of the SBoRE to be __________, unique and likely to have a lasting impact. This impact will not only be through the publications in Science itself, but hopefully through a larger group of publishing places that may want to __________ their approach after Science.

Professional scientists are expected to know how to analyze data. __________, statistical errors are alarmingly common in published research, according to David Vaux, a cell biologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Parkvilie, Australia. Researchers should improve their standards, he wrote in Nature in 2012, but journals should also take a(n) __________ line. Vaux says that Science’s idea to pass some papers to statisticians “has some merit, but a weakness is that it relies on the board of reviewing editors to __________ the papers that need scrutiny in the first place.”