1 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.

2 . We all know that unpleasant feeling when we’re talking about something interesting and halfway through our sentence we’re interrupted. But was that really an interruption? The answer depends on whom you ask, according to new research led by Katherine Hilton from Stanford University.

Using a set of controlled audio clips (录音片段), Hilton surveyed 5, 000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people’s perceptions of interruptions. She had participants listen to audio clips and then answer questions about whether the speakers seemed to be friendly and engaged, listening to one another, or trying to interrupt.

Hilton found that American English speakers have different conversational styles. She identified two distinct groups: high and low intensity speakers. High intensity speakers are generally uncomfortable with moments of silence in conversation and consider talking at the same time a sign of engagement. Low intensity speakers find it rude to talk at the same time and prefer people speak one after another in conversation.

The differences in conversational styles became evident when participants listened to audio clips in which two people spoke at the same time but were agreeing with each other and stayed on topic, Hilton said. The high intensity group reported that conversations where people spoke at the same time when expressing agreement were not interruptive but engaged and friendlier than the conversations with moments of silence in between speaking turns. In contrast, the low intensity group perceived any amount of simultaneous (同时) chat as a rude interruption, regardless of what the speakers were saying.

“People care about being interrupted, and those small interruptions can have a massive effect on the overall communication,” Hilton said. “Breaking apart what an interruption means is essential if we want to understand how humans interact with each other.”

4 . Schools in the US and elsewhere are announcing bans on the recently released AI — powered ChatGPT out of fear that students could use the technology to complete their assignments. However, bans may be practically impossible given how difficult it is to detect when text is composed by ChatGPT. Is it instead time to rethink how students are taught and evaluated?

Educators are starting to question what it means to assess student learning if an AI can write an essay or paper similar to, or even better than, a student would — and the teacher can’t tell the difference. Many teachers believe the time-honored learning tradition will be destroyed from the ground up by Chat GPT. The Los Angeles Unified School District in California first blocked the use of ChatGPT on networks and devices in December 2022.

However, removing technology from the classroom can mean undesirable consequences, such as creating more obstacles for students with disabilities, says Trust. Additionally, restricting the use of ChatGPT on school networks and devices can’t stop students from using ChatGPT at home and in libraries.

It is also unclear if anti-cheating software can reliably detect AI-assisted writing. OpenAI is working to develop a digital watermark that can help teachers and academics spot students who are using ChatGPT to write essays. Open AI’s attempts to watermark AI text, however, hit limits.

Instead of worrying about how ChatGPT could enable cheating, educators should ask what motivates students to cheat in the first place and work on developing relationships of trust, says Jesse Stommel at the University of Denver in Colorado.

“Talk to students really frankly about what ChatGPT’s capable of, what it’s not,” says Stommel. “Have students use it to write an essay about Jane Austen and gender dynamics, and then have them read that essay and peer review it and think about what ChatGPT gets right and wrong.”

5 . History suggests that societies generally overestimate the short-term implications of new technologies while underestimating longer-term ones. Current experience with artificial intelligence — the technology enabled by machine-learning — suggests we are getting it ______ this time. There’s too much talk about the potential “______ risk” to humanity posed by AI, and too little about our experience of it so far and corporate plans for exploiting the technology.

Although AI has been hiding in plain sight for a decade, it took most people by surprise. The appearance of ChatGPT last November signaled that the world had discovered a powerful new technology. Not for nothing is this new “generative AI” called “______”: it provides the base on which the next wave of digital innovation will be built.

It is also transformational in innumerable ways: it weakens centuries-old conceptions of intellectual property, ______, and it has the potential radically to increase productivity, reshape industries, change the nature of some kinds of work and so on. On top of that, though, it also raises troubling questions about the ______ of humans and their capabilities.

The continuing dispute between the Hollywood studios and screenwriters’ and actors’ unions perfectly illustrates the ______ of the challenges posed by AI. Both groups are up in arms about the way online streaming has reduced their earnings. But the writers also fear their role will be ______ simply to rewriting AI-generated scripts; and actors are concerned that detailed digital scanning ______ by new movie contracts will allow studios to create persuasive deepfakes of them that studios will be able to own and use “for the rest of eternity (永久), in any project they want, with no permission and no compensation”.

So the key question for democracies is: how can we ensure AI is used for human flourishing ______ corporate gain? On this question, the news from ______ is not good. A recent study by two renowned economists, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, of 1,000 years of technological progress shows that although some benefits have usually trickled (流) down to the ______, the rewards have — with one exception — invariably gone to those who own and control the technology.

The “______” was a period in which democracies fostered countervailing powers (抵消力量) — civil-society organisations, free media, activists, trade unions and other progressive, technically informed institutions that supplied a steady flow of ideas about how technology could be repurposed for ______ rather than exclusively for private profit. This is the lesson from history that societies confronted by the AI challenge need to relearn.

There are some signs that governments may finally have realized the problem. The EU, for example, has an ambitious and far-reaching AI Act that is making its way through the union’s processes. In the US, the Biden administration recently published a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”, which looks impressive but is ______ just a list of aspirations that some of the big tech companies claim to share.

It’s a start — provided governments don’t forget that leaving the implementation of powerful new technologies solely to corporations is always a(n) ______ idea.

8 . Want to know what is coming soon to a cinema near you? Probably not a 1.5-hour-long movie, as in the old days. On October 20th comes Killers of the Flower Moon. At nearly three and a half hours, its length is nearly double that of the average film last year. Even movie fans struggle to concentrate for that long and some viewers even nod off. Afterwards there is a mad dash for the toilets. When does watching a film become such a slog?

The Economist analyzed over 100,000 feature films released internationally since the 1930s, the start of Hollywood’s golden age, using data from IMDb, a movie database. The average length of productions rose by around 24%, from one hour and 21 minutes in the 1930s to one hour and 47 minutes in 2022. For the ten most-popular titles, the average length grew to around two and a half hours in 2022, nearly 50% higher than in the 1930s.

One driver of this trend is that studios want to squeeze the most out of their costly intellectual property (知识产权), but they are competing with streaming platforms for eyeballs. The hope is that a spectacular, drawn-out “event” movie will draw audiences away from the small screen and into cinemas. This approach has often paid off: Avengers: Endgame Marvel’s three-hour superhero masterpieces, was the highest-grossing (票房最高的) film in 2019. Last year long movies series made up most of the highest-grossing films in America.

Another explanation for longer films has to do with directors’ growing influence. Who would dare tell the likes of Mr. Nolan to cut out his masterpieces? Moreover, streaming platforms, which do not have to worry as much about the length because viewers can pause whenever they like, may attract big names by promising them sufficient fund and creative freedom. Netflix funded and released three-hour The Irishman in 2019, a film that would have benefited from a decisive editor, Irish or otherwise.

9 . Accents are a sign of belonging and something that separates communities. Yet we can probably think of people who seem to have lost their accent and of others whose accent stays firmly in place. Given the personal and social importance of how someone speaks, why would anyone’s accent change?

A conscious or subconscious desire to fit in can influence the way you speak. If someone moves from Australia to America to work, for example, they will probably at least change their accent in order to get a better sense of belonging. This may be out of a need or desire to be more clearly understood and to be accepted in a new community. They might also want to avoid ridicule for the way they speak.

For people whose accents do shift, the way they speak may be less important to their sense of identity, or their identity with a social or professional group may be more pressing. Even before we are born, we are exposed to the speech patterns of those around us. We progress through various stages of speech development that result in us having speech patterns similar to those around us.

For others whose accent does not seem to change, it could be because they feel safe in their identity, and their accent is much part of that identity — or that keeping the difference is valuable to them.

Meanwhile, brain damage may result in foreign accent syndrome (FAS), which results from physical changes that are not under the speaker’s control. Suffering from FAS, speakers may lose the ability to speak at all or experience strange changes in the way they pronounce. In some cases, listeners might look down upon a person with FAS as they believe them to be foreigners. It’s no wonder many people unconsciously protect themselves by adapting their speech to those around them.