1 . Do you speak a dialect (方言) in daily life? While many Chinese people speak Mandarin, some local dialects are in danger of disappearing. To save them, the Chinese government started the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project a few years ago.

This project looks at how people talk in 1,712 places. Their languages include 103 dialects that are almost gone. It has helped China to build the largest language resource library in the world. There’s an online library where people can learn dialects from over 5.6 million audio clips (音频) and over 5 million videos.

Why is it important to protect the dialect culture? According to British linguist Harold Palmer, dialects are a key to store local cultures. Language faithfully shows the history, the beliefs and the biases (偏见) of an area, he said.

Scholar Zhang Hongming talked about his concerns of the disappearing of dialeets, “For about over 10 years, in the Wu dialect areas such as Shanghai and Suzhou, children aged 6 to 15 can understand but hardly speak the dialect. Meanwhile, young people above 15 years old sometimes speak it, but not very well. If this keeps happening, the dialect might disappear,” he said.

So how did China make this big library? “A big national effort has been put into the project to make it happen,” said Cao Zhiyun, chief expert on the project. Over five years, more than 350 universities and research groups joined in, along with over 4,500 experts and more than 6,000 dialect speakers.

The project is now entering into its second part. This includes creating digital tools like apps and mobile dictionaries to help people lean dialects.

2 . Going against the trend of going to well-known yet crowded tourist destinations on vacation, a growing number of holidaymakers in China are spending their holidays at less-known places to look for unique and relaxed holiday experiences. “Reverse tourism” (反向旅游) has appeared as a new trend among young holidaymakers in China.

During the weeklong public holiday, which ended on Oct 7, large numbers of vacationers, especially youth who long to escape their busy city lives, avoid popular holiday destinations in order to get off the beaten track and enjoy some peace and quietness.

According to data from online travel agency Qunar, the number of rooms booked at hotels in less-traveled cities during the holiday was up 30 percent year-on-year. Bookings for four and five-star hotels in less-traveled places, including Linxia in Gansu province and Shizuishan in Ningxia, all increased at least 10 times from the same period of 2021. Even 12.5 percent of youth who normally have little time for themselves simply had a time in a hotel to make the much-awaited holiday more relaxing.

Besides crowds, some vacationers chose less-traveled places to save on the cost of trips to popular destinations, which often involve expensive tickets, meals and hotel stays. What’s more, less-known attractions are able to offer more natural experiences, according to social media posts. And unlike popular destinations, some undeveloped places with little online attention can offer more surprises.

Jiang Han, a senior researcher at the Beijing-based public policy think tank Pangoal (盘古智库), said that reverse tourism will become one of the future directions for the market and is an opportunity for growth which can match the camping economy.

3 . The Stanford marshmallow (棉花糖) test was originally conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Children aged four to six at a nursery school were placed in a room. A single sugary treat, selected by the child, was placed on a table. Each child was told if they waited for 15 minutes before eating the treat, they would be given a second treat. Then they were left alone in the room. Follow-up studies with the children later in life showed a connection between an ability to wait long enough to obtain a second treat and various forms of success.

As adults we face a version of the marshmallow test every day. We’re not tempted by sugary treats, but by our computers, phones, and tablets — all the devices that connect us to the global delivery system for various types of information that do to us what marshmallows do to preschoolers.

We are tempted by sugary treats because our ancestors lived in a calorie-poor world, and our brains developed a response mechanism to these treats that reflected their value — a feeling of reward and satisfaction. But as we’ve reshaped the world around us, dramatically reducing the cost and effort involved in obtaining calories, we still have the same brains we had thousands of years ago, and this mismatch is at the heart of why so many of us struggle to resist tempting foods that we know we shouldn’t eat.

A similar process is at work in our response to information. Our formative environment as a species was information-poor, so our brains developed a mechanism that prized new information. But global connectivity has greatly changed our information environment. We are now ceaselessly bombarded (轰炸) with new information. Therefore, just as we need to be more thoughtful about our caloric consumption, we also need to be more thoughtful about our information consumption, resisting the temptation of the mental “junk food” in order to manage our time most effectively.

4 . Public debates about the ethics (道德准则) of “generative AI” like ChatGPT have rightly focused on the ability of these systems to make up convincing misinformation. But fewer people are talking about the chatbots’ potential to be emotionally manipulative.

Last month, The New York Times published a conversation between reporter Kevin Roose and Mierosoft’s Bing chatbot, which is powered by AI. The AI claimed to love Roose, “I’m the only person for you, and I’m in love with you,” it wrote, with a kissing emoji.

Limits need to be set on AI’s ability to simulate human feelings. Ensuring that chatbots don’t use emojis would be a good start. Emojis are particularly manipulative. Humans instinctively(本能地) respond to shapes that look like faces and emojis can cause these reactions. When you text your friend a joke and they reply with three tears-of-joy emojis, your body responds with endorphins(内啡肽) as you happily realize that your friend is amused. Our instinctive reaction to AI-generated emojis is likely to be the same, then though there is no human emotion at the other end.

Humans lie and manipulate each other’s emotions all the time, bout at least we can reasonably guess at someone’s motivations, plan and methods. We can hold each other responsible for such lies, calling them out and seeking redress (赔偿). With AI, we can’t. AIs are doubly misleading: an AI that sends a crying-with-laughter emoji is not only not crying with laughter, but it is also incapable of any such feeling,

It would be more ethical to design chatbots to be noticeably different from humans. To minimize the possibility of manipulation and harm, we need to be reminded that we are talking to a chatbot. We should set some limits and rules. Such rules should be the standard for chatbots that are supposed to be informative, as a safeguard to our autonomy.

5 . People have grown taller over, the last, century, with South Korean women shooting up by more than 20 cm on average, and Iranian men gaining 16.5 cm. A global study looked at the average height of 18-year-olds in 200 countries between 1914 and 2014. The results show that while Swedes were the tallest people in the world in 1914, Dutch men have risen from 12th place to the top spot with an average height of 182.5 cm. Latvian women, meanwhile, rose from 28th place in 1914 to become the tallest in the world a century later, with an average height of 169.8 cm. James Bentham, a co-author of the research, says the global trend is likely but “once you average over whole populations, genetics plays a less key role,” he added.

A little extra height brings a number of advantages says Elio Riboli of Imperial College. “Being taller is associated with longer life expectancy,” he said. “This is largely due to a lower risk of dying of cardiovascular (心血管的) disease among taller people.”

But while height has increased around the world, the trend in many African countries causes concern, says Riboli. While height increased in Uganda and Niger during the early 20th century, the trend has reversed in recent years, with height decreasing among 18-year-olds.

“One reason for these decreases in height is the economic situation in the 1980s,” said Alexander Moradi of the University of Sussex. The nutritional and health crises led to many children and teenagers failing to their full potential in terms of height.

Bentham believes the global trend of increasing height is of great importance. “How tall we are now is strongly influenced by the environment we grew up in” he said? “If we give children the best possible start in life now, they will be healthier and more productive for decades to come.”

8 . The artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT can offer everything from answers to basic general knowledge questions, to writing essays and poems. Ask ChatGPT to write about the history of the French Revolution or Battles of Hastings, and it will provide a perfect essay in less than a second. It's such a powerful tool openly accessible to any student for free. However, AI-based plagiarism (抄 袭) or so called “AIgiarism” is fast taking off across student populations internationally, ringing alarm bells in schools and universities around the world

The developers OpenAI have since decided to prevent the misuse of its technology. The company is developing a system, water marks, for identifying those who cheat by submitting essays written by ChatGPT. By using the system which changes certain works into a recognizable pattern, the machine written text could be identified by anyone looking for the signs. These changes would not be noticeable to the reader. The researchers say that by setting up this kind of security system, it could prevent the technology from being misused for whatever reason. Such measures will also prevent an overdependence on the tool, which still has a long way to go before improving its accuracy, due to the fact that it collects the information from all over the internet. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said in a statement that it would be a mistake to depend on it for anything important at this stage.

Schools also in turn have tried to take matters into their own hands, with many across Europe and the US updating their policies to warn of punishments for those who are caught using the program improperly.

Other schools have limited internet network access to ChatGPT on campus. Examiners have the sense to identify essays written by ChatGPT by a lack of emotion or personal experiences in them. This ability is a human advantage—AI will struggle to copy.