1 . Many industries are facing a shortage of labour. Warehousing has grown rapidly. And robots are now indispensable, picking items off shelves and helping people pack an exponentially rising numbers of boxes. They are even beginning to walk slowly along some pavements, delivering goods or food right to people’s doors. Having more robots to boost productivity would be a good thing.

And yet many people fear that robots will destroy jobs. A paper in 2013 by economists at Oxford University was widely misinterpreted as meaning that 47% of American jobs were at risk of being automated.

In fact, concerns about mass unemployment because of robots are overblown. The evidence suggests robots will be ultimately beneficial for labour markets. A Yale University study found that an increase of one robot unit per 1, 000 workers boosted a company’s employment in Japan. Another study, by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues elsewhere, looked at Finnish firms and concluded that their use of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.

For all that, the march of the robots will bring big changes to workplaces. The skills and firms that are rewarded will shift, too. But that need not be the disaster many fear. One supposed example of “bad automation” is self-service checkouts in supermarkets because they displace human workers. Checkout staff who retrain to help customers pick items from aisles may well find that dealing with people in need is more rewarding than spending all day scanning barcodes.

Certainly, some people will be on the losing end of change even as the robots make society as a whole better off. One lesson from the freewheeling globalization of the 1990s and 2000s is that the growth in trade that was overwhelmingly beneficial contributed to a political backlash (强烈抵制) because the losers felt left behind. That’s one more reason why firms and governments would do well to recognize the value of retraining and lifelong learning. As jobs change, workers should be helped to acquire new skills, including how to work with and manage the robots that will increasingly be their colleagues.

The potential gains from the robot revolution have just started. It won’t be the plot in some films where the robots fight against their human masters and cause mass unemployment.

3 . Walking has been considered as one of the best possible exercises. For many people,daily walking offers massive and long-term physical and mental benefits.     1    A Stanford University study found that participants were more creative when walking as opposed to sitting.

    2    You’ve probably heard the phrase“exercise your creativity”,which referee to the brain as muscle.Our creative mindset is triggered by physical movement,which is exactly why walking-with your dog, a friend, or alone-feeds creative thinking.

But the scenery is almost as important as the sweat. Just by going outside, you are stepping out of your habitual surroundings and your comfort zone,which is necessary if you want to open your mind to new possibilities. You can walk through a tree-filled neighborhood.     3    Even when you walk down a busy street, you can’t help but get distracted by the sweet smells from a food cart or the child pointing to a building you hadn’t even noticed before.

Our brains work harder to process indifferent environments. Therefore, walking outside cultivates our ability to collect new ideas and take in new sights,sounds,smells, and flavors. Shinrin-yoku, a common form of relaxation in Japan, suggests that being in the forest and walking among the trees can lower your stress levels.     4    Research has shown that immersion in nature and the disconnection from multimedia increased performance on a creative problem-solving task in a group of hikers.

So instead of setting a fitness goal, why rot set a creativity goal that just starts with walking outdoors?    5    For example,you can turn off your phone and give yourself the chance to be present in the world,to hear conversations and natural sounds, and to notice the way people move and the way the sun reflects in a lake. Walk not just for exercise.Walk for wonder.

5 . It was rush hour on the morning of June1. Heather Santellano, 36, was driving her car on Houston Harte Frontage Road with her nine-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son in the back. Suddenly, a red pickup truck cut them off. Santellano turned the wheel hard to the right, sending the car running off the road and down an embankment (路堤) that ended in a drop-off after about 50 feet. If the car didn’t stop, it would go up into the air and slide onto the road some 20 feet below. Then came a bit of luck. As the car raced towards the edge, its undercarriage got stuck on the embankment, stopping it cold. The occupants, however, were far from safe. The car had come to rest on top of a retaining wall, literally teetering on the edge of disaster. One sudden move by anyone inside could send it over.

Jacob Rodriguez, a veteran, watched the scene unfold from the company where he works. Then, he and four other men ran to the car. They leaped onto the trunk to balance the weight as the terrified kids in the back seat watched.

Meanwhile, Julio Vasquez and his nephew, Marco Vasquez, were driving to their jobs at nearby Premier Automotive. Julio jumped out of the car to help while Marco went to the shop, grabbed a heavy-duty strap and returned to the dangling car. He tied the car to and F-350 truck that had been driven over by one of the other rescuers. With the car secured the group carefully opened the back doors and helped the children out.

But their departure shifted the car’s weight, causing it to lean forward. The men, still on the trunk, implored Santellano to jump into the back seat to re-balance the weight. She did and then inched out from the back door. Finally, the men carefully got off the trunk Everyone was safe. “Another foot,” Rodriguez told the media, “and this would be different story.”

Tips for Dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that sets in or starts in the winter months. Unlike other types of depression, it may improve as spring comes on. It is often a periodic recurring disorder—you’ll feel depressed every winter and begin to feel better each spring. SAD depression is caused by lowered levels of serotonin, the mood-affecting brain chemical that is caused by seasonal changes in daylight. Shorter days may also disrupt the body’s biological clock, which upsets the balance of melatonin, the hormone which regulates mood and sleep patterns.

Seasonal affective disorder is far more common in northern climates, where days can be very short in winter. SAD affects more women than men and is more likely to occur in people under age 40 than those older than that.

Although any amount of outdoor light can help raise serotonin levels, getting light in the morning seems to offer the most benefit. If the weather permits, take a walk. In your home or office, try sitting close to a window that faces south. Replacing light bulbs in your home with full spectrum light bulbs can help because they give out light similar to sunlight.

Studies have shown that increasing your exercise routine can counteract SAD. Exercise raises levels of serotonin. Moderate exercise, which means neither too much nor too little exercise, such as walking, riding a stationary bike or swimming is a great way to get started. But any activities that raise your heart rate, including daily chores, can help, especially if you can do them outdoors or near a sunny window. Yoga, jogging and Tai chi can all help lift your mood.

Year-end panic refers to the self-blame and overall feeling of panic brought about by the approach of the year’s end, often due to a poor financial year and pressure from work and family. Psychological experts suggest that we should avoid peer competition. While regretting for the failed plans in the past year, you can still make resolution to do it better in the coming year.

8 . “After 30 years of reading cardiograms (心电图), I can never tell whether it’s from a man or woman, or the age of the person,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist from Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. “A machine can detect if a person has anaemia (贫血) or other difficult diagnoses (诊断).”

Topol is excited not only about how machines are already better than experts at spotting problems, but how they can discover patterns that experts wouldn’t even notice. “In Japan, doctors are using machine vision to pick up polyps (息肉) in real time, and detecting whether or not they could be cancerous and whether they should have a biopsy,” he said. “Machines will not replace physicians—but physicians making use of AI will soon replace those not using it.”

Still, these are early days for the application of AI in healthcare. Pearse Keane, a consultant doctor at Moorrelds Eye Hospital, has been leading a collaboration between Moor fields and Google’s Deep Mind Health. In 2018, he famously published a proof-of-concept paper in Nature showing the erst successful AI diagnosis for eye disease. “The algorithm that we’ve developed isn’t in clinical use at the minute, so we’re trying to implement this now,” Keane said.

Keane mentioned the INSIGHT study, which is looking into eye disease and its link to other conditions such as diabetes (糖尿病). “We are using the eye as a window to the rest of the body. With deep learning, we can now look at a retinal (视网膜）photograph and say: ‘This is a woman, she’s 58 years old, she’s not a smoker or a diabetic, her BMI is around 25, and her blood pressure is around 150 over 85’. Now, to me, that’s staggering.” Keane said.

The INSIGHT study is analysing more than three million OCT scans from around 300,000 patients. “We now know, for every person having had a retinal scan here, who’s gone on to develop a heart attack or diabetes,” he said. “The reason why we’re excited is that we think that if we can get the appropriate data sets and learn them deeply, we can find much more in the back of the eye about the health of the rest of the body.”

“The application of AI for healthcare and medicine is about precision and accuracy, but that’s not all,” said Topol. The most important aspect is how AI can promote a stronger human connection between doctor and patient. “We see patients in single digit numbers of minutes. And that’s not enough, you need the gift of time, which AI can give back,” he said. “Next year this will be the standard,” he believes. “Rather than doctors being data clerks, they will be making eye contact with patients. There’s no algorithm for empathy. That’s a human characteristic that we have to develop and get back in the way it used to be.”

9 . Stare at a blank wall in any room, and you are unlikely to learn much more than the paint color. But a new technology can inconspicuously scan the same surface for shadows and reflections.     1     But they can be got by one tool and analyzed to determine details including how many people are in the room—and what they are doing.

This tool could gather information from a partial view of a space. It can spy on activity from around a corner.     2    

As people move around a room, their bodies block a portion of any available light to create delicate and indistinct “soft shadows” on walls.     3     But these faint (微弱的) signals are usually drowned out by the main source of environment light. “If we neglect whatever we are observing, you would just be left with camera noise—and signal,” says Prafull Sharma, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sharma and other researchers did the experiment by filming a wall in a room as its occupants moved around and averaging the frames over time.     4     Then the team fed the videos into a machine-learning model to teach it which soft shadow patterns indicated which behavior. The resulting system can automatically analyze footage of a blank wall in any room in real time, determining the number of people and their actions.

    5     It can register only group sizes and activities for which it has been trained, and it requires a high-resolution camera; a standard digital camera creates too much background noise, and smartphone camera results are even worse.

10 . Farmed fish should have the same legal protection as other farmed animals, according to an animal welfare group. The Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, which has Carrie Johnson as a supporter, says fish deserve to be treated with the same care as cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock because they experience stress and pain.

The foundation is focusing on improving fish welfare during slaughter (屠宰) because that is where the biggest differences in protection lie.

Slaughterhouses for land animals are required to have a vet on site and must have closed-circuit television in all areas where animals are handled, stunned and killed, with footage stored for independent inspection. Such legal requirements do not apply to fish slaughter facilities, which are not subject to routine welfare inspections by public bodies.

The UK industry, which rears up to 80 million fish a year, has instead adopted voluntary codes of practice. A report by the foundation cites evidence of abuses of fish revealed last year by The Times. A stunning machine at the firm’s plant at Arnish on the Isle of Lewis failed to make them unconscious and workers used their fingers to tear the gills (鳃) and struggled to keep up with the volume of fish wriggling on the unit. Fish were thrown and kicked as they struggled on the ground in 2020 at Test Valley Trout Farming in Hampshire, which supplied the Ritz and Harrods. Fish considered unprofitable were dropped on the floor and left to die. The company said the treatment of the fish was unacceptable and it operated under “the best industry standards available”.

The foundation’s report refers to the findings of the government’s Farm Animal Welfare committee, which said in a 2014 opinion on fish welfare that “at least some species, including trout, have a sensory experience of pain” as well as “a degree of sense”.

Studies have shown that fish feel pain and change their behaviour to avoid it. In one study, goldfish were given an electric shock in an area of a tank where they received food. They avoided that area for three days before hunger overcame their fear.

The foundation report states that the UK government is failing aquatic animals dismally and calls for unannounced welfare inspections of fish slaughterhouses and says they should be required to install closed-circuit television, with footage reviewed by public bodies.