How to Stay on Task

“In many activities, it is difficult to maintain a high level of focus over time. Our research asks why this is the case,” said Matthew K. Robison, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Although humans generally perform fine in situations that require sustained attention, they are often distracted, which can lead to inattention. Common distractions can be anything from thinking about a new romantic interest to reacting to a car honking. Most inattention has minor consequences like forgetting to forward an email or pick up an item at the grocery store. However, other inattention can lead to serious consequences, such as a train operator not reacting to an incident, a surgeon forgetting a step in an operation or an individual forgetting to turn off an oven.

“Sustaining attention can be easier said than done, as attention fluctuates(波动) across short and long intervals,” Robison said. One of the most common approaches to studying inattention has been to examine response time to a variety of tasks. For this study, Robison and colleagues employed more than 100 participants to complete reaction time tasks for about 25 minutes. In a standard control condition, participants were simply told to respond as quickly as possible on each trial. “In this condition, reaction times systematically increased across time, consistent with the idea that task focus was decreasing,” Robison said. “However, when we gave them specific goals to pursue and made those goals harder over time, they did not show that effect.”

The drop in concentration goes some way to explaining why we remember or forget the moment and why some people remember better than others. Robison and colleagues at the University of Oregon have also published a new study on maintaining attention. The results provide evidence that a simple and easily implementable change in behavior — setting specific goals for oneself — can significantly improve our ability to maintain task focus over time. “Setting a specific goal will increase sustained attention and reduce inattention,” said Robison based on his studies.

ChatGPT Helps People a Lot

In real life, robot customer service in various applications are broadly similar to ChatGPT’s Al products. It is ChatGPT’s ability to learn the most with the highest level of intelligence that has made it a global hit. At the end of November 2022, AI research lab OpenAI launched AI chat software ChatGPT. So what exactly can ChatGPT do, and how can it help us ordinary people?

First, chat with ChatGPT as if it were your friend when you’re bored, and it will constantly revise its parameters (参数) and behavior with your advice and guidance. So the more you talk to it, the more it knows what you want, and the more it responds to you. Take travel as an example. While there are a lot of travel recommendation sites out there right now, they can’t be customized to the individual, but you can ask ChatGPT for very specific information to get suggestions.

Second, ChatGPT can be used when you want to create content but lack ideas. It can open your mind to ideas as well as create ideas for you. Children in the growth always like to listen to parents tell new stories, and story-telling gives a lot of parents a headache. What should we do when we run out of storybooks? ChatGPT is a great story generator, which generates a whole new story, as many as you want, based on the themes and characters you provide. It’s perfect.

Third, let ChatGPT help you out when you’re not sure how to get started with a paper, or an article. Of course, it doesn’t always provide the right content, so we can learn from its framework, and it’s much easier to fill in the content from there. Enter information about the type, title, column name, data, and so on, and ChatGPT will generate the table with one click. You can add columns and rows and do in-table calculations.

According to ChatGPT’s own answer, it’s just an unconscious computer program. It can carry on self-active learning and realize task transfer under the regular instruction. Docs the answer ChatGPT gives you have to be the right answer? For conscious humans, it might be better to pick from all the possible answers.

How to Stay Healthy in Autumn

In recent days, the weather in most regions is no longer hot, and people can relax and enjoy the cool autumn. However, there is a big gap in temperature in the morning and evening, and the air is also drier. All of these factors can lead to dry mouth and nose, sore throat, dry cough, dry hair loss and other symptoms. People are more likely to get sick during the seasonal change from summer through autumn. So, here are some tips to keep you healthy and comfortable into the winter months.

Do eat watery food. According to traditional Chinese medicine, autumn corresponds to the lungs of the human body.Pay attention to wet lungs in dry weather.The most convenient and easy way to protect lungs in autumn is to drink more water. In addition, you can adopt the diet therapy of traditional Chinese medicine, eating some watery food, like pear and duck meat.

Do have easily digested food. People’s spleen (牌) and stomach functions are weakened because of the raw and cold food they had during the long, hot summer. So in autumn, you should give your spleen and stomach a rest. For example,you can choose some nutritious food that is easy to digest to eat, such as fish and red bean.

Be sure to take vitamin supplements. Vitamins play an important role in the body’s immune system. The number and vitality of immune cells are related to vitamins when the body resists foreign invasion. It is recommended that you eat plenty of fresh vegetables and fruits rich in vitamin C, such as kiwi and oranges.

Sleep is an important means for people to restore their physical strength, ensure their health and enhance their immunity. In autumn, it is suggested that you go to bed at 9 pm, or try to fall asleep before 11 o’clock. If you sleep at this time, it is great for your body and you can get a good quality of sleep.

Zaha Hadid

Born in Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid was the first woman to win the Pritzker prize, the field’s highest honor. But for years, she had to fight to prove that her designs could even be built. She was a pioneer in Deconstructivism: Designing buildings that looked unstable, jagged, or frozen in mid-explosion. She gained a reputation for her gorgeous, fantastical designs—painted by hand. But her ideas looked impossible to build, so they remained on paper.

Then, in 1983, she won a big competition to design a club in the hills of Hong Kong. Hadid proposed carving chunks out of the mountainside, which she called a “man-made geology.” The project was eventually canceled, but the world of architecture then knew her name.

Still, it took another decade before one of her concepts actually got built: A fire station in Germany with no right angles; looking like it could take flight. It was a great success—quickly becoming a prime example of Deconstructivist architecture.

Around the same time, she won an international competition to design an opera house in Wales, but it was overruled by local politicians, and the funding was pulled. Later, Hadid said it was resistance and prejudice that killed the project.

But she kept winning competitions, building momentum—and finally, buildings! By the early 2000s, she was an architecture superstar. She still drew by hand, but adopted new computer technology to model her designs. The software made even wilder shapes possible—including the curves that became her signature. A Hadid design was no longer crazy or impossible—it was simply a Hadid.

Sadly, she died of a heart attack in 2016. By then she had built hundreds of buildings, with many more in progress. And she had proved she could build nearly anything she could imagine.

Graduates Turn to Teaching

China has witnessed a 66-fold increase in the number of applicants for teaching qualification tests over the past decade, and experts say the popularity has mainly been driven by more graduates chasing stable jobs. According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Education, the number of applicants for teaching exams each year has grown from 172,000 to 11.44 million in the past decade.

Experts said the sharp increase corresponds with the increase in teachers’ salaries and status within society, and it is expected to bring about an overall improvement in quality teaching. However, another big reason for the enthusiasm for teaching posts is that the challenging and complicated employment situation is driving graduates toward stable jobs such as working as teachers and government officials.

Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences, said the popularity of teaching posts is closely associated with people’s changing perception of the economic situation, job stability and security, which are major concerns for graduates.

In view of the coronavirus epidemic in recent years, many college graduates just want a stable job, so teaching suddenly becomes a very popular profession, and many students from well-known universities have joined the competition. Of course, everyone has their own ideas. Take Wang Lin for example. Wang Lin, who graduated from a famous university, said she had wanted to be a history teacher since middle school, inspired by her own history teacher. She added she had a good impression of her teachers from an early age and was grateful to those who had taught her. In fact, there are many such cases.

While passing the teaching qualification test is the first step to becoming a teacher in China, landing a post at schools in big cities can be very competitive.

Are People Unique?

It is human beings' pride that we are the only species on the Planet that can speak and think. However, recent research casts doubt on that common belief.

Zuberbuhler, a psychologist at St Andrews University, and his colleagues recorded thousands of calls made by Diana monkeys and noticed that the monkeys adapted their calls to change the meaning to warn one another about different situations. For example,they made a "krack" alarm call at the sight of a tiger. However,when they merely repeated calls made by other monkeys they added an "oo".

The researchers found that the same calls would be recognized by other species, like Campbell's monkeys. So they are communicating across species."And since then we have found that hornbill birds can understand these calls and they too can understand all the different meanings, said Zuberbuhler. What is also surprising is that signs of intelligence have been found in birds whose small brains were long assumed to be a complete barrier to intelligence. However,   all that is changing fast. A few years ago, Irene Pepperberg of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taught a parrot to recognize and count up to six objects, which couldn't have been achieved if birds were unable to memorize.

Last year that was topped by Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who discovered that crows (乌鸦) are capable of using tools in complex orders, the first time such behavior had been observed in non-humans. In an experiment seven crows successfully grabbed a piece of food placed out of reach using three different lengths of stick. Crucially, they were able to complete the task without any special training, suggesting the birds were capable of a level of abstract reasoning normally associated only with humans.

All this is powerful evidence against the idea that people are unique.

Can Birdsong Make You Happier?

If you are able to step outside and hear many types of birds, you might also have a greater feeling of well-being. Two studies show that hearing diverse birdsongs may help increase our happiness.

One study was done by the researchers at California Polytechnic State University. The team studied the effects of birdsong on people walking through a park in the U.S. state of Colorado. Danielle Ferraro, who led the Cal Poly study, says that there could be an evolutionary reason why we like birdsong. The idea is that when we hear birdsong it could signal safety to us. There could be many other reasons too Ferraro states that in some areas around the world birdsong can also signal the arrival of spring and nice weather. Bird diversity, she adds, can also mean a healthy environment.

Similarly, scientists in Germany examined for the first time whether a diverse nature also increases human well-being across Europe. The researchers looked at the European Quality of Life Survey to study the connection between the different kinds of birds in their surroundings and life satisfaction. They looked at more than 26,000 adults from 26 European countries. “Europeans are particularly satisfied with their lives if their surroundings have a high species diversity,” explains the study’s lead author, Joel Methorst, a researcher at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He and his team found that the happiest Europeans are those who can experience many different kinds of birds in their daily life, or who live in near-natural surroundings that are home to many species.

So, if birdsong is good for our mental health, how can we increase the different types of birdsongs we hear? Scientists also mentioned, “We would recommend planting native trees and flowers because we have a lot of pretty decorative plants in our cities. And they might look nice to us, but birds can’t necessarily use them. So, we think it important to have species that are native to the area to increase bird diversity.”