3 . The recent reports of a 4-year-old girl on a Shanghai beach have gone viral on social media platforms, provoking debate about whether China should criminalize negligence in child supervision.

The father of the little girl claimed that he left her alone on the beach for about 12 minutes to fetch his phone. However, she was nowhere to be found when he was back. Surveillance (监控) videos show that she waited for about 10 minutes before walking toward the water’s edge alone, and then disappeared into the water. Two weeks later, her body was discovered about 100 kilometers away in neighboring Zhejiang Province.

The core issue in this case is the father’s leaving his young daughter unattended on the beach, causing her tragic death. Should such behavior, when it causes harm to a child, be seen as a criminal act? In an online survey, more than 90 percent of respondents insisted that the father be held legally responsible and face criminal punishments.

Nevertheless, according to Liu Chunquan, a lawyer, it may not satisfy the criteria for criminal negligence, since the primary focus of Chinese criminal law is on extreme cases of parental neglect, such as physical abuse and mental torture. Rarely do legal authorities charge parents; instead, they are just likely to face penalties consisting of warnings and fines.

In 2022, a 2-year-old baby drowned in a cesspool while in the company of his father. The court ruled shared responsibility between the father and the cesspool’s owner, with a 7:3 proportion. The owner was ordered to pay 20,000 yuan to the child’s family. Unluckily, similar cases do exist nationwide. Roughly, 100,000 children lose their lives in accidents annually in China, which is largely due to negligence, such as parents leaving their children unattended, either in locked cars or at home. Besides, drowning is now the main cause of death for children aged 1 to 14 years old.

It is no wonder that an increasing number of netizens request that specific laws and regulations be passed to ensure the safety of children and their well-being. Hopefully, criminalizing child supervision negligence in China can serve as a warning and precaution.

However, downsides of introducing such legislation may also emerge. For instance, it’s difficult to distinguish between a regrettable accident and criminal negligence, so that over-criminalization can be triggered, in which well-meaning parents making honest mistakes are charged with a crime.

Therefore, a more balanced approach to addressing the issue of infant safety should involve a combination of new legislation, education and support services. The ultimate objective is to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. We must recognize that children are not only their parents’ offspring, but also the nation’s future.

4 . As athletes get stronger and faster, the pace of play continues to increase. The burden of making sure games are played according to the rules and that the officiating (裁判) is accurate is now being taken out of human hands and falling more and more into the lap of technology. It’s called the video replay.

The National Football League is expanding its replay system this upcoming season to include pass interference (传球干扰). Major League Baseball now relies on it for safe-or-out and home run calls. If you’ve been watching the FIFA World Cup, you may have noticed that the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) played a key role in almost every game. And in the Kentucky Derby, a horse was disqualified for knocking another horse. No one knew why until a video replay confirmed the call and controversy was avoided.

However, many purists—those who want people to follow rules carefully and do things in the traditional way—especially in soccer, argue it’s not the way the game was invented, and that the video replay is tainting the sport. But don’t you want to see the proper application of the rules throughout the games? I know I do. Yes, it can slow the game down, but I feel it is worth it. If technological advancements allow fans watching from home to spot mistakes instantly, those same views need to be available to the officiating crews. Another example occurred in the most recent National Football Conference (NFC) Championship Game between the Los Angeles Rams and the New Orleans Saints. When obvious pass interference was committed by the Los Angeles Rams player Nickell Robey-Coleman, with just 109 seconds to play, no flag was raised on the field. It weakened the New Orleans Saints spirits. The Los Angeles Rams won a 26-23 overtime victory. The no-call deeply angered the public. The video replay showed the referees had just missed one of the most apparent pass interference calls.

There are no easy answers regarding replay technology and whether it is a curse (魔咒). But for me, keeping the officiating honest and on task is the right step in limiting controversy.

6 . The idea that humans are facing a global extinction of experience of nature is popular, but is it true? To give more light on this issue, the scientists measured how the average distance from an individual’s home to the nearest area with low human impact changed in the last decade.

The scientists found that humans currently live 9.7 kilometers away from a natural area on average, which is 7% further away than in the year 2000. Europe and East Asia have the highest average distance to natural areas, such as 22 kilometers in Germany and 16 kilometers in France. The scientists also showed that tree cover within cities has declined worldwide since 2000, suggesting that the possibility for the urban population to access green spaces is reducing as well.

The scientists also systematically searched for scientific publications assessing a trend in experiences of nature, finding that the number of studies assessing these trends was very low (the number is 18), most of which are about the US, Europe and Japan. This shows that more studies should investigate the claim about the extinction of nature experience, especially in Africa and Latin America. The 18 studies found by the scientists show a decline in visits to nature parks in the US and Japan, a decrease in camping activities in the US, and a decrease in the number of flower species observed by Japanese children. They also find signs of decline in the use of natural elements in novels, songs and cartoons.

Despite these examples of decline, other interactions are increasing. Watching wildlife documentaries or interacting with wild animals in videogames is, for example, more common than a few years ago. “New ways of digitally interacting with nature have certainly emerged or increased in recent years,” says Dr Gladys Barragan-Jason. “But several former studies show that these vicarious interactions have a lesser effect on our sense of connection with nature than exposure to nature, such as visiting nature parks.”

8 . Conservationists go to war over whether humans are the measure of nature’s value. New Conservationists argue such trade-offs are necessary in this human dominated era. And they support “re-wilding”, a concept originally proposed by Soule where people reduce economic growth and withdraw from landscapes, which then return to nature.

New Conservationists believe the withdrawal could happen together with economic growth. The California-based Breakthrough Institute believes in a future where most people live in cities and rely less on natural resources for economic growth.

They would get food from industrial agriculture, including genetically modified foods, desalination intensified meat production and aquaculture (水产养殖), all of which have a smaller land footprint. And they would get their energy from renewables and natural gas.

Driving these profound shifts would be greater efficiency of production, where more products could be manufactured from fewer inputs. And some unsustainable commodities would be replaced in the market by other, greener ones-natural gas for coal, for instance, explained Michael Heisenberg., president of the Breakthrough Institute. Nature would, in essence, be decoupled from the economy.

And then he added a warning: “We are not suggesting decoupling as the pattern to save the world, or that it solves all the problems.”

Cynics (悲观者) may say all this sounds too utopian, but Breakthrough maintains the world is already on this path toward decoupling. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United Sates, according to Iddo Wernick, a research scholar at the Rockefeller University, who has examined the nation’s use of 100 main commodities.

Wernick and his colleagues looked at data carefully from the U.S. Geological Survey National Minerals Information Center, which keeps a record of commodities used from 1900 through the present day. They found that the use of 36 commodities (sand, iron ore, cotton etc.) in the U. S. Economy had peaked.

Another 53 commodities (nitrogen, timber, beef, etc.) are being used more efficiently per dollar value of gross domestic product than in the pre-1970s era. Their use would peak soon, Wernick said.

Only 11 commodities (industrial diamond, indium, chicken, etc.) are increasing in use (Greenwire, Nov. 6), and most of these are employed by industries in small quantities to improve systems processes. Chicken use is rising because people are eating less beef, a desirable development since poultry cultivation has a smaller environmental footprint.

The numbers show the United States has not intensified resource consumption since the 1970s even while increasing its GDP and population, said Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University.

“It seems like the 20th-century expectation we had, we were always assuming the future involved greater consumption of resources,” Ausubel said. “But what we are seeing in the developed countries is, of course, peaks.”

9 . The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas has issued a recent report in order to recommend ways to increase food donations, reduce food waste, and fight hunger, which may help Kenyan leaders meet 2030 food waste reduction goals.

Food donation can reroute eatable food—that would otherwise give off greenhouse gasses in a landfill—to those experiencing hunger. According to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, 3.5 million Kenyans, roughly 37 percent of the population, face severe hunger. At the same time, the Policy Atlas reports roughly 40 percent of food produced within Kenya goes to waste. But Broad Leib, Deputy Director of Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), sees some promising changes. “While progress is not happening as quickly as needed, Kenya’s food loss index has been steadily reduced from 1,744 metric tons in 2017, to 1,531 in 2018, to 1,446 metric tons in 2019, indicating a steady improvement and national commitment to food loss reduction,” reports Broad Leib.

According to the Policy Atlas, motivating food donation with rewards is particularly important, which helps food donors and food recovery organizations make up for costs necessary for recovery, storing, processing, and transporting food for donation.

“A major driver of food waste is inconsistent or unclear date labels that cause confusion among all actors along the value chain and limit the ability of businesses to donate food. This increases the likelihood that much safe food will go to waste,” Broad Leib tells Food Tank. However, he acknowledges Kenya’s current dual (双的) date labeling laws. While food may lose its freshness over time, it is still eatable before expiration (到期). Dual date labeling on packaged foods reduces bewilderment by defining dates for both safety and quality. This helps reduce considerable waste and responsibility for donors.

Broad Leib believes that the private sector can also play a significant role in decreasing food waste in Kenya. It is vital for consumer education campaigns. FLPC’s research shows that public-private initiatives can help raise awareness among consumers and donors around issues of food waste and food donation.

10 . Big Tech companies are “training” generative AI (生成式人工智能) models by stealing music, books, photographs, paintings and videos off the Internet using copyright “fair use” as an excuse.

Last month, Getty Images took legal action against Stability AI — the maker of the popular image generator Stable Diffusion — for not only using 2 million of Getty’s photos, but also for changing or removing copyright management information from the images. It seems clearly unlawful, but that doesn’t mean the courts will agree. Big Tech has successfully skated through legal matters for years, waving the banner (旗帜) of “permissionless innovation”.

Only the biggest of Big Tech players will dominate generative AI, because it requires massive amounts of computing power. But copyright appears to be anything but a top priority for Google and Microsoft. So while human creators rationally (理智地) explore and debate this issue, tech companies are using their work to train the generative machines that ultimately may make the artists irrelevant in the future.

The problem goes beyond artists losing incomes. AI operates on the theory that all the possible original ideas in the universe are already contained in the data sets from the Internet. So, the intelligence of AI merely requires reorganizing this data into something that differs enough from the original work to not risk a copyright problem.

Surely, the world has plenty of standardized artistic content already. What’s needed: ensuring a continuous flow of original ideas and fresh perspectives — to build a culture that goes beyond what is already found on the Internet and can be enriched by artists who might grow in ways no AI could predict.

We realize that Big Tech’s involvement in AI has raised concerns that may make the endangering of artists’ rights seem pale. Yet a nation’s cultural life is not a minor matter, and preserving artists’ rights is essential to ensuring their continued contribution. Existing copyright laws should ideally prevent abuses, but this is not always the case. Another solution may be needed: new laws governing AI and safeguarding the human core of artistic creativity.