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 . 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   ______.

4 . 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.

5 . 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.

6 . Transition. It’s a pleasant word and a calming concept. It means going surely and sweetly from somewhere present to somewhere future. Unless, that is, it is newspapers’ ‘transition’ to the _______ world, an uncertain and highly uncomfortable process.

Just look at the latest print circulation figures. The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year, but their websites go ever higher.

All of that may well be true, depending on timing, geography and more. _______, everyone— from web academics to print analysis—says so. Yet pause for a while and count a few little things that don’t _______.

One is the magazine world, both in the UK and in the US. It ought to be _______, wrecked by the move to the tablets which fit existing magazine page sizes so perfectly. But, in fact, the rate of decline in magazine purchasing is relatively small, with subscriptions holding up strongly and advertising remarkable _______.

As for news and current affairs magazines — which you’d expect to find in the eye of the digital storm — they had a 8.4% increase to report. In short, on both sides of the Atlantic, although some magazine areas went down, many showed rapid growth.

You can discover a _______ phenomenon when it comes to books, Kindle and similar e-readers are booming, with sales up massively this year. The apparent first step of transition couldn’t be _______. Yet, when booksellers examined the value of the physical books they sold over the last six months, they found it just 0.4% down. Screen or paper, then? It wasn’t one or the other: it was _______.

So if sales in that area have fallen so little, perhaps the _______ mostly affects newspapers? Yet again, though, the messages are oddly ________. The latest survey of trends by the World Association of Newspapers shows that global circulation rose 1.1% last year (to 812 million copies a day). Sales in the West dropped back but Asia more than ________ the difference.

Already 360 US papers—including most of the biggest and best — have built paywalls around their products. However, the best way of attracting a paying readership appears to be a deal that offers the print copy and digital access as some kind of ________ package.

________, print is also a crucial tool in selling internet subscriptions. And its advertising rates raise between nine and ten times more money than online.

Of course this huge difference isn’t ________ news for newspaper companies, as maintaining both an active website and an active print edition is difficult, complex and expensive. But newspaper brands still have much of their high profile in print: a drift on the web, the job of just being ________ becomes far harder.

7 . Expressive arts therapy is a form of therapy that uses dance, drama, music, poetry, and art to enhance one's overall well－being. The arts are used to let go, _____ and to release.

People have been using the arts as tools for _____for many centuries. In the early 1940's expressive arts therapy became formally _____ and has since provided meaningful therapeutic _____ for people of all ages in a variety of treatment settings. There is no right or wrong way in the arts and clients are encouraged to be _____ with self－expression. Expressive arts therapy focuses on the _____ of making art and exploring _____ the piece means to the individual, _____ the final product.

Through the arts, people can _____ ideas and feelings that may be hard to put into words, such as negative memories and stress. It has been _____ that use of the arts can help people develop social skills, _____ anxiety, manage behavior, and increase self－confidence. A free form of expression makes clients _____ of their own work by reducing the need to compare themselves to others, an unfortunate problem seen today.

Expressive arts therapists are professionally _____. Anyone can be an expressive art therapist provided that they get the appropriate training. Knowledge in psychology is _____ to all training, but from there training _____ includes getting a master's degree in counseling with specialized instruction in implementing (实施) the art, music, poetry, and dance/movement therapeutically. Some professionals extend their _____ and obtain a PhD in expressive therapy.

_____ expressive arts therapy is unique, the clinical goal is _____ to other mental health professions. This _____ is to facilitate clients' growth and _____ change.

8 . ‘Small Data’ Are Also Crucial for Machine Learning

Many people relate “artificial intelligence” with “big data.” There’s a reason for that: some of the most prominent AI breakthroughs in the past decade have relied on enormous data sets. Image _________ made great progress in the 2010s thanks to the development of ImageNet, a data set containing millions of images hand sorted into thousands of categories. More recently, GPT-3, a language model, was trained on _________ online texts to produce humanlike text in Jan, 2021. So it is not surprising to see AI being tightly connected with “big data” in the _________ imagination. But AI is not only about large data sets, and research in “small data” approaches has grown extensively over the past decade. The so-called transfer learning serves as an especially _________ example.

Also known as “fine-tuning,” transfer learning is helpful in settings where you have _________ data on the task of interest but abundant data on a related problem. You need to first train a model using a big data set and then retrain slightly using a smaller one related to your _________ problem. A research team working on German-language speech recognition, _________, showed that they could improve their results by starting with an English-language speech model trained on a larger data set. Then, they used transfer learning to _________ that model for a smaller data set of German-language audio.

Small data approaches such as transfer learning are more _________ than more data-intensive methods. They can promote progress in areas where little or no data exist, such as in forecasting natural hazards that occur relatively __________. In this context, small data approaches will become increasingly important as more organizations look to diversify AI application areas and invest in previously __________ fields.

Despite the progress in research, transfer learning has received relatively little __________. While many machine learning experts are likely familiar with it at this point, the existence of techniques such as transfer learning does not seem to have reached the awareness of the broader space of policymakers in positions of making important decisions about AI funding and __________.

As long as the success of small data technique like transfer learning is __________, resources can be allocated to support their widespread use. In that case, we can help correct the popular __________ regarding the role of data in AI and foster innovation in new directions.

9 . Why working from anywhere isn’t realistic

For most white-collar workers, it used to be very simple. Home was the place you left to go to work. The office was almost certainly where you were_________. Co-working spaces were for entrepreneurial people in T-shirts who wanted to hang out with other entrepreneurial people in T-shirts. You could stay at a hotel on a work trip, but it was not a place to get actual work done, which is why a hotel’s “business centre”_________all of business as using a printer.

The pandemic has thrown these neat_________up into the air. Most obviously, home is now also a place of work. According to a recent Gallup survey, three-quarters of American workers whose jobs can be performed_________expect to spend time doing just that in the future. And offices are increasingly where you go to put the company into company – through collaborative work and social activities.

_________, the boldest version of remote working extends well beyond these two locations. “Working from anywhere” imagines a completely_________existence, in which people can do their jobs in Alaska or Zanzibar. The idea sounds wonderful. Nevertheless, plenty of_________remain. Some are practical. The payroll and tax of working from different locations in a year are an administrative headache._________, working from anywhere is only feasible if your equipment functions reliably. If you spill suntan lotion on your laptop, the people on the hotel’s reception desk are more likely to offer you_________than a replacement computer.

Another set of obstacles is more__________. The carefree promise of working from anywhere is far easier to__________if you don’t have actual cares. Children of a certain age need to go to school; partners may not be able to work remotely and have careers of their own to manage.

The option to work from anywhere will be most attractive to people who have well-paid jobs and fewer__________: childless tech workers, say. For many other people, the “anywhere” in working from anywhere is a simple choice between their home and their office. That might be a recipe for__________within teams. Imagine dialing into a Zoom call covered in baby drool (口水), and hearing your colleague Greg saying how amazing Chamonix (法国城市夏蒙尼) is at this time of year.

Adding it to the menu of working options for sought-after employees__________. The working-from-anywhere policy will probably help employers attract better people. But for the foreseeable future, working from anywhere will be a bonus for a lucky few rather than a(n)__________for things to come.

10 . When Nelson Mandela opened South Africa’s Constitutional Court in 1995, he said it would determine “the future of our democracy”. The first president of the democratic era argued that the court was as important to the new constitution as the parliament and presidency. Judges should be “creative and independent” in ensuring that, _______apartheid (种族隔离), no person was above the law, regardless of their race, power or wealth.

By and large, the judges have done their job. The Constitutional Court has defended citizens _______ by a cold-blooded state, for instance by ordering the government of Thabo Mbeki to provide anti-retroviral drugs to people with HIV. It has challenged abuses of power by Jacob Zuma, whose presidency in 2009-2018 was defined by widespread corruption.

_______ the courts are facing serious threats. Populist politicians who hate the rule of law want to see pliant (容易摆布的) judges appointed who will bend to their will. Those who believe in the _______ principles set out by Mandela, including the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, are not doing enough to safeguard his legacy. The _______of endless fierce attack and cowardly indecisive defence is not a good sign for South African democracy.

Critics accuse judges of overstepping their boundaries and usurping (篡夺) legislation. It is true that the judicial branch has become involved in political disputes. But this reflects the _______ of the other branches of government to do their jobs. The more politicians from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have abused their privileges, and the more miserable their failure to improve the life of ordinary South Africans, the more NGOs and opposition parties ask the courts to hold them to _______. As Dikgang Moseneke, a retired justice, _______ it, “Judges don’t look for cases; rather cases look for judges.”

It is, _______, vital to protect the Constitutional Court as the last line of defence for democracy. Mandela once warned the country “to stand on guard not only against ________ attack on the principles of the constitution, but against stealthy corrosion (侵蚀)”. Both now threaten the courts. South Africa must listen to his words before it is too late.