A recent study found that kindergarten children who are exposed     1     electronic screens for more than an hour a day have a     2     (significance) increase in mental health risk regardless of the content viewed, and the risk worsens as the duration of screen exposure increases.

According to the study     3     (conduct) by experts from the Shanghai Children’s Medical Center Affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, children     4     (watch) entertainment and non-child-directed programs have     5     (great) mental health risks than those who watch educational programs.

A paper about the research,     6     involved nearly 16, 000 kindergarten children from Shanghai for three continuous years,     7     (publish) on the website of the journal JAMA Pediatrics early this month.

The new study was designed     8     (find) whether the associations between excessive screen time and mental health risks differ by the content viewed.   Screen exposure time was collected when the children were aged 3, 5 and 6, and their mental health was reported by parents using     9     standard questionnaire. Experts reminded parents and guardians that children under 2 should only use electronic     10     (device) to conduct video calls when necessary. They also suggested that for children between 2 and 5, parents should accompany and communicate with them when they are in front of screens.

4 . If you’re stuck in what seems like an endless cycle of procrastination (拖延), guilt and chaos, you might be wondering “Why am I so lazy?”. Despite that common belief, laziness usually isn’t the reason behind procrastination, said Jenny Yip, a clinical psychologist. “Laziness is like, ‘I have absolutely no desire to even think about this.’ Procrastination is, ‘It troubles me to think about this. And therefore, it’s hard for me to get the job done.’ That’s a big difference.”

Knowing why you procrastinate and learning how to fight against it are the only ways to change your behavior. Psychologist Sapadin sought to help this self-improvement effort with her book How to Beat Procrastination in the Digital Age. You could be the perfectionist, the dreamer, the worrier or the defier (对抗者) — these are all procrastination styles that Sapadin lists in her book. Both perfectionists and worriers might put off starting tasks due to a fear of failure or criticism. And like a perfectionist, a dreamer might always want something better. As for the defier, they tend to view life in terms of what others expect or require them to do, not what they want. This pessimism weakens their motivation to complete tasks.

Procrastination can have practical consequences, such as falling behind at work or failing to achieve personal goals. But there are also emotional or mental impacts. It has been associated with depression, anxiety and stress, poor sleep, inadequate physical activity, loneliness and economic difficulties, according to a January study of more than 3,500 college students.

Knowing why you procrastinate can make you self-aware, but you still need strategies to break the habit. In such cases, “consider contacting a professional, like a psychologist, who might be able to help you,” said Shatz, a creator of the website Solving Procrastination. “Visualization (可视化) works,” Shatz added. “If you can imagine Yourself completing a task, then it becomes more achievable simply because you have an idea that it can be done.” At the end of the day, how you approach life is “all about your belief system”. If you believe you can, you can. Whatever you believe, you’re right.

5 . Zibo has long sought to publicize its unique idea on roasted skewers (串肉扦) of meat, vegetables, seafood and other foodstuffs in the hope of attracting business. But it was only in March, when college students tried the barbecue food, took videos of themselves enjoying it, and posted the clips on social media that it went viral. Since then, young people from across the country have flocked to Zibo to try its barbecued food.

During weekends last month, Yang Benxin, who has run a barbecue restaurant in the city for nearly three decades, used a loudspeaker to tell people waiting in line for a table to choose another restaurant because the meat at his business had sold out. Yang’s restaurant has 200 tables, which can accommodate about 1,000 diners. But almost every weekend for the past month, the number of people visiting the restaurant rose beyond its capacity, forcing him to tell those waiting to try elsewhere.

In Zibo, the food on barbecue skewers is 70-80 percent precooked before it is brought to the table, where diners complete the cooking process on small stoves fueled by hot coals. Zhang Hanzhe, 27, who visited Zibo with friends from Jinan, capital of Shandong, during the May Day holiday to try the city’s barbecued food, said, “We prepared the food according to our own tastes, and it’s also affordable.”

The authorities in Zibo have been quick to gain a further advantage from the sudden inflow of visitors. The market supervision and public security authorities acted to ensure food safety and reasonable pricing in the barbecue sector, while the city’s public transportation company launched bus routes especially for people visiting barbecue restaurants. The city issued a notice ahead of the May Day holiday, warning that hotels in Zibo that raised their room rates by more than 50 percent during the holiday would be punished.

Qu Chuang, a professor at Shandong University’s School of Economics, doubted whether the barbecue craze in Zibo would last long, but said the city’s biggest gain is that it is now known by more people.

6 . In 1991, the American band The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy called television “the drug (毒品) of the nation.” But more than 30 years later, more and more people are turning away from their televisions. So, has the world kicked the TV habit?

Well, many of us might not be watching regular TV, but instead we’re relaxing ourselves from streaming services and mobile devices (设备). In February 2023, Insider Intelligence foretold that in the US in 2023, for the first time ever, people will spend more time watching digital video than traditional TV. So how did we get here?

It was the Scotsman John Logie Baird who built the first of all televisions in 1925. Progress was quietly being made. Just after World War II, around 8,000 homes in the US had a TV. By 1960, this number had risen to more than 45 million - and the television had overtaken the radio as the device to gather around. TV watching became part of the family habit. And when choice was limited in its early days, millions of people watched the same shows together - something we might now call “event television ” Cable (电缆) and digital TV, with hundreds of programs, began to change that, and event television is now hard to find.

While the popularity of streaming and short online videos comes recently, perhaps the move away from shared TV began when television sets became cheaper and families could afford to buy an extra one for the bedroom or the kitchen. There was no more fighting about what to watch - but also less watching together. Now, with younger generations used to immediate access to content, television as we knew it shows little sign of making a return.

Will it die? No, but it will certainly change. Experts say TV has a future with sports and news. But scripted (有剧本的) shows like talk shows and TV series will be seen more on streaming services, and less on TV.

7 . As the Internet becomes a bigger part of our lives, more of our data (数据) becomes publicly easy to get.     1     So, how can we protect our online privacy?

If you have ever searched how to learn German on the Internet, you will find an advertisement (广告) for a book and an app called German for Beginners immediately appear. Later the same day, while you’re sending an email, you see an advertisement for a local language school. How did they know?     2     At all stages of your search, your computer, websites and applications are collecting data on your preferences and tracking your behavior online.

Every search you make, service you use, message you send and something you buy is part of your “online footprint”. Companies and online platforms (平台) use this “footprint” to track exactly what you are doing.     3     Knowing so much about you gives online platforms and companies a lot of power and a lot of money.

Some of the time our personal data is shared online with our agreement. We post our birthday, our photos and even our opinions online. We know that this information can be reached by the public.     4     It can be used in ways we did not mean.

As people increasingly know about and worry about data protection, governments and organisations are taking a more active role in protecting privacy. For example, the European Union passed the General Data Protection Law.     5     However, there is still much work to do.

9 . There is a kind of climate pollution that we can’t see clearly. It isn’t in our rivers, lands or skies, it is in our minds. When climate disinformation goes unchecked, it spreads like wildfire, undermining the existence of climate change and the need for urgent action.

Like the biosphere that sustains us, the health of our information ecosystems is vital to our survival. As an artist, I feel a responsibility to create new ways of seeing the disinformation that has come to define the age of fake news.

Social media sites are honed to grab our attention. Using sophisticated algorithms, the corporations behind them decide what billions of people see around the world, dictated by what keeps you hooked, but also by what the companies paying social media sites choose to put in front of you.

Powerful corporate actors deploy clever influence campaigns via ads targeted at specific users based on what social media firms know about those people. Major oil and gas companies have spent billions of dollars over the years persuading consumers about their green proofs, when only 1 per cent of their expenditure in 2019 was on renewable energy. This is known as corporate greenwashing. Still, fossil fuel firms maintain that their climate policies are “responsible” and “in line with the science”.

To expose the scale of corporate greenwashing online, I was part of a team that recently launched Eco-Bot.Net. Co-created with artist Rob “3D” Del Naja of the band Massive Attack and Dale Vince, a green entrepreneur, Eco-Bot. Net’s AI-powered website ran throughout the COP26 climate summit, exposing climate change misinformation by releasing a series of data drops for heavily polluting sectors, including energy, agribusiness and aviation.

Academic definitions of climate disinformation and greenwashing were used to unearth posts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and visualize them on our website. Eco-Bot.Net then flagged greenwashing ads and posts on the original social media site with a public health warning.

By digging into our data, journalists have already revealed that companies are targeting specific demographics in order to influence public perceptions about climate change – and even alter government policy.

One data drop focused on the 100 biggest fossil fuel producers, companies that have been the source of 71 per cent of global carbon emissions. It found that 16 of these companies ran 1705 greenwashing and climate misinformation ads globally on Facebook and Instagram this year. In total, they spent more than £4 million creating influence campaigns that generated up to 155 million impressions.

Social media companies could end most of the harms from climate disinformation on their platforms if they wanted to. Flagging systems were swiftly introduced to warn users of posts containing disinformation about covid-19. The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming has been resolute for decades, so why can’t a similar flagging system be implemented for related disinformation?

It is true that Twitter and Facebook have both introduced climate science information hubs, but these are little more than PR exercises that fail to directly tackle climate disinformation on any kind of scale.

This epidemic of climate change disinformation on social media is eroding collective ideas of truth. In this post-truth age of disinformation, we hope that the public, the press and policy-makers will be able to use our data findings to see what is hidden by what we see online.

For the first time, we can witness the regional scale of corporate greenwashing. The era of climate denial and delay is largely over — except, as Eco-Bot.Net has revealed, on social media.

10 . Throughout history, many species of animals have been threatened with extinction. When Europeans first arrived in North America, more than 60 million buffalo (水牛) lived on the continent. Yet hunting the buffalo was so popular during the 19th century that by 1900 the animal’s population had fallen to about 400 before the government stepped in to protect the species. In some countries today, the elephant faces a similar challenge, as illegal hunters kill the animals for the ivory in their tusks.

Yet not all animals with commercial value face this threat (威胁).The cow, for example, is a valuable source of food, but no one worries that the cow will soon be extinct. Why does the commercial value of ivory threaten the elephant. while the commercial value of beef protects the cow?

The reason is that elephants are a common resource, while cows are private goods. Elephants wander freely without any owners. The hunter has a strong motivation to kill as many elephants as he can find. Because illegal hunters are numerous, each has only a slight motivation to preserve the elephant population. By contrast, cattle live on farms that are privately owned. Each farmer makes great effort to maintain the cattle population on his farm because he harvests the benefit of these efforts.

Governments have tried to solve the elephant’s problem in two ways. Some countries, such as Kenya and Uganda, have made it illegal to kill elephants and sell their ivory. Yet these laws have been hard to put into effect, and elephant populations have continued to dwindle. By contrast, other countries, such as Malawi and Namibia, have made elephants private goods and allowed people to kill elephants, but only those on their own property.

With private ownership and the profit motive now on its side, the African elephant might someday be as safe from extinction as the cow. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out the problem with common resources: “What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.”