A very beautiful town Bravuogn in Switzerland has banned（禁止）tourists from taking photos in order to get holiday makers to take a break from social media（媒体）.

The tourist office of Bravuogn announced the news on Facebook on Tuesday. “It is proven that beautiful vacation photos on social media make the viewers unhappy, because they themselves cannot be there,” the tourist office said. Tourists will be punished with 5 Swiss Francs if they are caught taking pictures under the new rule. Many people considered the move was stupid and strange with some joking that they were going to call off their trips to Bravuogn. However, others gave the photo ban a thumbs-up. “Exactly right!” one person shouted.

The announcement comes after a study found how technology is marring our travel experiences. In a survey of 1,037 American adults done by Wyndham Vacation Rentals, almost half of them said social media negatively influenced their trips as they felt stressed to pose all the time.

A message on the Bravuogn tourism Facebook page states that the main reason for the ban on taking photos is to encourage a happier holidaying environment. In the summer, Bravuogn is a popular place for hiking while in the winter it’s a top place for skiing. The tourist office said it had known that the new law would not make everyone happy but it wanted a “special way” to draw people’s attention to the village and the beauty of Switzerland.

Facing some people’s suggestions, the village’s director of tourism Marc-Andrea Barandun said that, in part, the ban is a marketing strategy（营销策略）. He told Thelocal.ch, “We hope everyone talks about Bravuogn’s beauty. So we made the law and also there’s some marketing purpose behind it.”

Imagine you’re playing a computer game that asks you to design a poster for the school fair. You’re playing with letters, changing background colors and deciding what activity to feature.

Then, animal characters—maybe a panda—offer feedbacks on you design. You can choose whether to hear a praise or a complaint: “The words are overlapping（重叠）too much,” or, “I like that you put in the dates.” You can use their critiques（批评）as guides to help you revise your poster. Finally, you get to see how many tickets your poster sold.

This little Web-based game isn’t just a game. It’s a test, too. Most kids likes video games—a lot more than they like taking test.

Schwartz is among a new group of researchers who are working on a series of video games. They’re designed to evaluate students on factors that traditional test can’t assess. He wants to measure how students learn, how they make decisions and how they respond to feedback.

Scholars like James Paul Gee believe video games actually come much closer to capturing the learning process in action than traditional tests. In fact, in a video game, “you’re always being tested—you can’t get out of a level until you finish it.”

And, the researchers point out, at the same time you’re playing a game, the game can record your actions. When it’s over, the software can create a report: not just a record of right and wrong answers, but all the steps you took to get there.

Schwartz’s theory of assessment focuses on choice. He argues that the final goal of education is to create independent thinkers who make good decisions. And so we need assessments that test how students think, not what they happen to know at a given moment.

For example, the real point of the school-fair game is not test how good students are at graphic design. Instead, the bottom of the game comes when students choose to hear comments on their work. “So they’re not just measures of what the student already knows, but attempts to measure whether they are prepared to continue learning when they’re no longer told exactly what to do.”

Watching the Northern Lights（北极光）shining on the sky’s natural canvas may be on your list already, but be prepared to up the money.

A developer is creating a floating, snowflaked - shaped（雪花形状的）glass hotel from which guests can stare in fear at the Northern Lights from their beds. The project is called Krystall. Eighty –six luxury rooms will be covered within a glass structure alongside conference rooms and a spa, all of which is only accessible by boat.

The stationery hotel will be built near in northern Norway reportedly between bays. It will be constructed, in pieces, in dry docks（码头）, before being fit together on location.

Explaining the physics and design of the hotel, Koen Olthuis, Dutch architect and founder of Waterstudio, a specialist in floating structures, said: “The floating base is very big and because of that also very stable. You will not notice any movement. Different to any vessel this hotel is a floating building and will not move. The shape provides most of the stability but cables（缆绳）are used to take away any speed.”

“Same look and feel as a land based hotel but then on the most beautiful spot on the water. The hotel is not connected to land so all the things will be provided by boats.”

According to Mr Olthuis, who wouldn’t tell the actual cost of the project, the budget is 15 percent more than it would have been if it were built on land. He said that an important thing to the hotel’s construction was for its creation to be “scarless” on the perfect environment surrounding it.

“We call it a scarless development. If you take it away after a hundred years or so it will not leave any physical footprint. That is the only way to bring developments to such a valuable and beautiful marine environment in Norway.”

It is hoped that the hotel will be “self-supporting and sustainable” using top of the range technology, helping to support the “growing eco-tourism market.”

“Dutch Docklands has learned to live with the water instead of fighting it,” the firm states. “Floating houses are common in the Netherlands but we took that technology abroad and scale it up in size.”

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that older and younger people have varying preferences about what they would want a personal robot to look like. And they change their minds based on what the robot is supposed to do.

Participants were shown a series of photos portraying either robotic, human or mixed human-robot faces and were asked to select the one that they would prefer for their robot’s appearance. Most college-aged adults in the study preferred a robotic appearance. However nearly 60 percent of older adults said they would want a robot with a human face, and only 6 percent of them chose one with a mixed human-robot appearance. But the preferences in both are groups were different when participants were told the robot was assisting with personal care, chores, social interaction or for helping to make decisions.

Preferences were less strong for helping with chores, although the majority of older and younger participants chose a robot with a robotic face. But for decision-making tasks, such as getting advice for where to invest money, younger participants tended to select a mixed human-robot appearance. A robotic face was their least favored choice for this task. Older adults generally preferred a human face.

Personal care tasks such as bathing provoked the most divisive preferences within both age groups. Those who chose a human face did so because they associated the robot with human-like care capabilities—such as nursing and trustworthy traits（特点）. Many others didn’t want anything looking like a human to bathe them due to the private nature of the task.

In the final category, assistance with social tasks, both age groups preferred a human face.

Based on this early research, Prakash, a researcher who led the study says that if a robot is designed to help only with a specific task, its appearance should be decided by the features of the task. For instance, if the robot is designed to specifically assist the user with critical decisions, the robot should be given an intelligent look instead of a funny one. Prakash plans to expand the study to other age groups and more diverse educational backgrounds.