Yours,

Li Hua

“The Space-Time Painter” by a Chinese writer Hai Ya won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette at the 81st World Science Fiction Convention     1     (hold) in the city of Chengdu. It is the first time that the world’s largest and longest-running sci-fi gathering     2     (come) to China.

Hai shared his source of     3     (inspire) of creating the award-winning book at a press conference. “I watched a program of China Media Group named National Treasure Archive.     4     interested me was the detailed information of the painter of One Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains,” he said,     5     (add) that the painter was an extremely gifted young man     6     never seen again in history, which is a concept that could     7     (explorer) with science-fiction. The fiction tells a story about the     8     (politics) power struggle of the time combined     9     diverse elements such as Chinese traditional culture, history, inference and science fiction.

Hai, also a financial worker, thinks of himself more     10     sci-fi enthusiast than a writer. “I write while doing my job, so I have very little time to write every day,” he said. “But I think as long as I love it and am willing to put efforts in it, I will see hopes and the dawn.”

3 . I have struggled with feelings of unworthiness since forever. My most painful moments were at parties. My friends made fun of me because I was rhythmically (有节奏地) _________ and I couldn’t get my _________ body to imitate the latest dance moves. I was never chosen to dance. I felt like I didn’t _________.

Around age 12, I decided that the way to _________ these feelings of unworthiness was perfection. If I was just perfect then I would fit in. But this strategy didn’t _________. My self-esteem (自尊心) was high when I got good grades and felt _________, but crashed when I didn’t do well _________ or was left out.

After several years of spiritual growth, it _________ me that for many of us, self-worth is tied to our _________. We experience low self-worth as __________ as we fail or lose approval. So I have begun to cultivate an unconditional self-worth. It’s not about doing things perfectly. __________, “Unconditional self-worth” is the __________ that you deserve to be alive, to be loved and cared for.

The __________ to unconditional self-worth is not always easy. It takes courage to __________ yourself from the conditions you’ve placed on your worth. But this journey is beautiful and worth taking. So I challenge you to embrace yourselves and find your metaphorical (隐喻的) __________ floor and move freely.

4 . All the hard work that you’ve spent making strong passwords, combining pet names with numbers, symbols and birthdates could all soon be for nothing as a new artificial intelligence (AI) model achieves a 95% accuracy of understanding keystrokes (按键).

At least that’s the extreme view of a team of British researchers. Using a deep learning model, they were able to steal data from a laptop’s keyboard using a microphone to understand what is being typed. This, in theory, would allow hackers who were able to gain access to your laptop to obtain what is being typed including messages and passwords.

The first step for this attack to work is by recording the keystrokes on someone’s keyboard. This is needed to train the algorithm (计算程序). While this could be done from the laptop’s microphone, it could equally be achieved by placing a smartphone near the computer. By pressing 36 keys on a modern MacBook Pro 25 times each and recording the sounds produced, the researchers gained a full set of training data. This information is turned into waveforms to show identifiable differences between each key. With this information in hand, they could then build a machine-learning model to understand which of these waveforms lines up with which key.

“If you get enough data, a model can be built pretty easily,” Oli Buckley, a professor of Internet security. “If it works on one keyboard, it will likely work on the next. The MacBook has a nice, quiet keyboard, so the idea is that if it works on something quiet, it will have a wide-reaching ability on louder keyboards”.

While this all sounds pretty scary, not to mention a new form of hacking (侵入) to look out for, it isn’t quite as worrying as it sounds.

“A good sample of data is needed for it to work, so this changes if you’re using a Dell, a MacBook or an external keyboard. Also, factors change. Some people type louder and harder, or my keyboards full of cat hair so that impacts things slightly”, says Buckley.

5 . Five years ago, French navy officer Jérôme Chardon was listening to a radio program about the journey of the bar-tailed godwit, a bird that migrates 14,000 kilometers between New Zealand and Alaska. Chardon understood how treacherous the journey would be, as heavy storms frequently hit Pacific island communities. Yet, somehow, bar-tailed godwits routinely pass through the area uninjured. Chardon wondered whether learning how birds traveled could help coastal communities avoid natural disasters.

This past January, a team from France’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) began experiments designed to test Chardon’s idea. Researchers with a project led by Frédéric Jiguet from NMNH equipped 56 birds of five species with cutting-edge animal tracking technology. The team members were ferried to remote islands in French Polynesia, where they attached tags (标签) using tracking technology. These tags sent the birds’ locations to the International Space Station, which bounced the data back to scientists on Earth who could then follow the birds — waiting to see how the birds responded to natural disasters.

The project is focusing on birds’ ability to hear infrasound, the low-frequency sound humans cannot hear but that the researchers believe is the most likely signal birds would use to sense storms and tsunamis (海啸). In a 2014 study, scientists tracking a kind of golden-winged birds in the central and southeastern America found that the birds flew up to 1,500 kilometers to escape from an outbreak of tornadoes (龙卷风) that killed 35 people. The birds fled at least 24 hours before any extreme weather hit, leaving the scientists to believe that they had heard the storm system from more than 400 kilometers away.

The team plans on tagging hundreds more birds across the Pacific to prepare for a potential tsunami. “I think if there’s one wave that spreads across islands, we can get data from different species at different locations,” says Jiguet. “That will say it’s worth continuing to tag and to develop local systems to better analyze this. There are chances that we will develop a bird-based tsunami early warning system.”

6 . Do you think cookies can tell stories? Jasmine Cho, 35, does.

A baker, artist, entrepreneur and activist, Cho tries to spread knowledge about social justice issues and diversity through the delicious medium of cookies.

It was in high school that she discovered her love of baking. At a sleepover a friend taught her how to make a dessert, “sort of demystifying baking and that whole process”.

Later, Cho realized her second passion: learning more about her Asian, American culture. An elective in college that taught Asian-American immigrant experiences brought an emotional moment for her. “So many emotions came up that I just couldn’t articulate. It was like this mix of anger, of relief, empowerment, sadness…” Cho said.

Cho realized she could combine these two passions to educate others about influential Asian American people and showcase matters that were important to her. With her online bakery, she designed cookie portraits about people she admired and posted the images on Instagram. “I don’t think I ever really knew how to communicate these stories until I found cookies,” Cho said. “Cookies are just so disarming. Who doesn’t like cookies?”

One cookie that Cho has identified with deeply is one she made of George Helm, a Hawaiian activist in the 1970s.

“It’s insane the amount of injustice that the native Hawaiian population has faced as well through the whole annexation (吞并) of the kingdom. There were so many horrific stories that I heard about nuclear testing and the fallout (核爆炸后的沉降物) impacting native Hawaiian populations in all of this,” Cho said, “George Helm was one of those activists who really represented the spirituality of the native Hawaiians and the connection to their land, to nature.”

Among her amazing cookie art are other political figures such as Larry Itliong, a Filipino-American labor organizer, and pop culture figures such as Keanu Reeves, a Canadian actor.

Cho hopes her cookie art continues to inspire people to be creative and think positively.

“Instead of trying to think of something new and original, just look inward and see, maybe there’s already a passion or a love that you have,” Cho said. “Use that for something that will serve the world in a better way.”