2 . Improved mental health is on the agenda for many people in 2024 and being organized is the preferred method of realizing it.

Disorganization is often considered to have a negative impact on the way we see ourselves and the lives we lead. The studied downsides of living in a disorganized environment include memory problems, poor eating habits, and decreased self-control. “There’s an obvious link between increased stress and anxiety disorders and living in a messy space,” says Daniel Levitin, a behavioral neuroscientist (行为神经科学家) at McGill University.

“Disorganization brings a loss of productivity that is difficult to quantify (量化),” says Levitin. He points to the amount of time people lose looking for lost items, missing appointments, or falling behind at work or school because of disordered living. “The average person likely loses 5 percent of their time due to disorganization,” he says. “Take your annual salary, multiply that by 5 percent, and you can measure what disorganization may be costing you.”

Joseph Ferrari, one of the most recognized scholars on disorganization research, says that nearly every mental health downside that comes from disorganization can be improved by getting organized. “You’ll feel more energetic, enhance your productivity in the office, and greatly improve the quality of your life,” he says.

Tidy homes have been found to be a predictor of physical health. “Those whose houses are cleaner are more active and physically healthy,” says Libby Sander, an assistant professor of organizational behavior. Part of this is due to organized people being better at managing their time, but it’s also because research demonstrates that less clutter can help improve one’s diet. “Studies show an association between clutter and overweight,” says Libby.

Getting organized has also been shown to decrease one’s stress levels, increase personal efficiency, and even improve sleep. Another studied advantage of getting organized may be improving the quality of one’s relationships. Libby explains that relationships can be negatively impacted when too much clutter affects communication or distracts one’s brain from noticing important message from their partner. Research shows this can cause others to feel ignored, misunderstood, or unimportant.

3 . The maker of ChatGPT recently announced its next move into generative(有生产力的)artificial intelligence. San Francisco-based OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator, called Sora, is a tool that instantly makes short videos based on written commands, called prompts.

Sora is not the first of its kind. Google, Meta and Runway ML are among the other companies to have developed similar technology. But the high quality of videos displayed by OpenAI —some released after CEO Sam Altman asked social media users to send in ideas for written prompts —surprised observers.

A photographer from New Hampshire posted one suggestion, or prompt, on X. The prompt gave details about a kind of food to be cooked, gnocchi(意大利团子), as well as the setting —an old Italian country kitchen. The prompt said: “An instructional cooking session for homemade gnocchi, hosted by a grandmother —a social media influencer, set in a rustic(土气的)Tuscan country kitchen.” Altman answered a short time later with a realistic video that showed what the prompt described.

The tool is not yet publicly available. OpenAI has given limited information about how it was built. The company also has not stated what imagery and video sources were used to train Sora. At the same time, the video results led to fears about the possible ethical and societal effects.

The New York Times and some writers have taken legal actions against OpenAI for its use of copyrighted works of writing to train ChatGPT. And OpenAI pays a fee to The Associated Press, the source of this report, to license its text news archive(档案). OpenAI said in a blog post that it is communicating with artists, policymakers and others before releasing the new tool to the public.

The company added that it is working with “red teamers” — people who try to find problems and give helpful suggestions — to develop Sora. “We are working with red teamers who will be adversarially(对立地)testing the model,” the company said. “We’re also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora.”

China Mobile, the world’s largest telecom carrier by mobile subscribers, has successfully launched the world’s first satellite     1     (test) 6G architecture, marking a milestone in its efforts to explore integrated space and ground communication technology.

The low-earth orbit test satellite is     2     world’s first to employ 6G design architecture, and it     3     (launch) on Saturday along with another satellite that comes with China Mobile’s 5G technology.

The 6G test satellite hosts a distributed autonomous architecture for 6G,     4     was jointly developed by China Mobile and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Innovation Academy for Microsatellites. The system, using domestic software and hardware, supports in-orbit software reconstruction, flexible deployment of core network functions and automated management,     5     (enhance) the efficiency and reliability of the in-orbit operation of the satellite core network, China Mobile said.

Set at an orbit    6     (high) of approximately 500 kilometers, these     7     (experiment) satellites offer advantages such as low latency (延迟) and high data transfer rates     8     (compare) with high-orbit satellites which travel at 36,000 kilometers.

Positioned     9     a crucial platform for future integrated space and ground networks, low-earth orbit satellites can address telecom signal coverage gaps in land mobile networks, providing higher bandwidth satellite internet services    10     (global), according to China Mobile.

5 . Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite and quiet laugh to a great hearty laugh. Scientists are now developing an AI system to recreate different laughs in proper social contexts (环境). The team behind the laughing robot Erica said that the system could improve natural conversations between people and an AI robot. “We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy (共情),” said Dr Koji Inoue, the lead author of the research. “So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with its users is to share their laughter.”

The team have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 daily dialogues between male subjects and the robot that was initially operated by four actresses remotely. The dialogue data was grouped into social laughs (where polite or embarrassed laughter isn’t involved) and laughter of joy. Based on the audio files, the robot learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be softer, and merry laughs, with the aim of mirroring these inappropriate situations.

“Our biggest obstructor in the work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all,” said Inoue. “We had to carefully decide exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and we couldn’t just assume (认为) that any laugh can be responded to. It was really not easy work.” The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character although it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.

“One of the things we’d keep in mind is that a laughing robot will never be able to understand you or the meaning of laughter,” points out Prof. Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute. “But with their development, they might get very good at tricking you into believing they understand what’s going on.”

This year, our city is carrying out a program, called on everyone to throw rubbish into the right dustbin according to the four categories. Teachers and students in our school take a active part in the activity. In order to protect our environment, the waste classification activity is launching. People are required to sort garbage into different category such as harmful waste, recyclables and kitchen waste, that are supposed to be thrown into right bins. At the first, people are confused about which category the rubbish belongs to, but under the help of the posters, we're doing a much better job now. Waste Classification is environmental friendly. In long run, the result is very worth our efforts. Let's work together make our city more beautiful!