In 2019, Thierry Henry, a bus driver, found there was a rise in bike thefts in his city, Reykjavik. Rather than 1 that the bike was gone forever, he decided to take matters into his own hands and started to track down the bikes and return them to their 2 owners.
The 44-year-old has helped return hundreds of stolen bikes in the past 4 years. His social media account has over 14, 500 members and helps people track down more than just lost bikes. His page 3 to people who have lost tools, cars and other items of high value. On top of his noble act, Henry has helped the bike 4 to reform in the process.
5 , Henry would deal with the thieves with anger. However, over time, he realized that most of the thefts were driven out of poverty and other issues. He went from feeling 6 towards the thieves, to developing empathy （同理心） for their situations. It was very tough at first. But Henry decided to try to 7 them and just talk to them.
From this moment onward, he reached out to the thieves, offering help and guidance. After the change in his 8 , Henry found that the bike thieves began to often hand back the bikes to him. Amazingly, some former thieves that Henry helped now 9 him in looking for the stolen bikes.
"It's like a 10 that has got bigger and bigger, ". says Henry. "It's not only me. Many times, someone spots a bike hidden in a bush and takes a picture. Then someone else comments, 'hey, that's my bike'. "
Thanks to Henry, everyone's looking out.
When I lived in Boston, I taught English as a second language to adult students from around the world. On the last day, they threw a nice party. I was amazed they had learned enough English （arganize） such an event altogether. At the end of the party, they proudly handed me a gift box. After the box （open）, I gently lifted a beautiful coat from it. "We went shopping for a new coat!" they all shouted wonderfully perfect English.
In early November in 2023, a diver, swimming off the coast of Sardinia, （notice）pieces of metal on the ocean floor. He called the authorities and more divers were sent to look. The pieces turned out to be ancient Roman coins. The coins mostly lay （bury）in sand and seagrass not far from the coast. It is said that more than 30, 000 coins have been found, are close to 2, 000 years old. Experts call this a major historical discovery.
ChatGPT is a chatbot. Some schools （ban）it since its birth. They need time to make rules about it's to be used properly in class. Some teachers see it as a （cheat）tool. But many principals believe it's too late to keep AI out of classrooms. A growing number of （educate） say the panic about AI is a lot like the panic caused by the Internet when it was new. One of them says, "ChatGPT is to English and to writing what the calculator is to math.
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An Art Class
When Kelly was twelve, she started taking classes at Miss Grace's School for Art. She didn't like it at first: the "novice artists"-the kids who hadn't really done art before-worked mostly with clay, and Kelly was a terrible sculptor.
It wasn't until her third year that Kelly found something she was really good at-charcoal drawing （素描）. She loved watching the lines spread unevenly across the page as she moved the bits of charcoal back and forth over the paper.
One day, Sophia. the best artist in her class, sat down and set up her easel （画架） next to Kelly. Kelly felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. She'd. actually found an art form that she enjoyed-and was good at--and now Sophia was going to outshine her again? Kelly fought back tears when Miss Grace entered the room.
"Hello class, Miss Grace said. "We'll continue to work on the project today. What masterpiece would Sophia have come up with?
Kelly looked at Sophia's easel and she couldn't believe it--it was a mess! For a brief moment, Kelly couldn't actually believe her drawing was better than Sophia's.
But then she looked at Sophia, who was watching Kelly with an anxious expression. "I…. I couldn't decide what to do, " Sophia said. "And you're so good. Sometimes I feel like my stuff is just so bad in comparison.
Kelly looked to see if Sophia was joking, but she seemed completely serious. Now Kelly was shocked. "I'm not talented ... Miss Grace seldom praises me. You're the best one in our class!"
Sophia raised her eyebrows. "I might be a really good copier of the stuff, but I have no idea what to do when it comes to making up my own images. You are so great at making new things out of the old stuff. I've loved your works. "
"I've loved yours, too, Kelly said.
"Well, definitely not this one, " Sophia said.
Kelly smiled. "Maybe not right now. But if you move these lines up. . . "she said, pointing her finger on Sophia's paper.
Sophia was quiet for a moment. "That's a great idea!" she said finally.
Kelly smiled and turned back to her drawing, looking every so often at Sophia's work to see that she was taking her advice, down to the last line.
Research spanning several decades demonstrates that you are more likely to think the information that is repeated to be true than the information you hear only once. You usually assume that if people put in effort to repeat a statement, this reflects the truth of the statement. This tendency-also called the truth effect-is a bias （偏见） that can lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.
To what degree are people aware of the truth effect? This question was addressed in a paper in the journal Cognition early this year.
In the critical study in this paper, participants did two sessions. In one session, they read about a hypothetical （虚构的） study in which they were exposed to some statements and then were asked whether both statements they had heard before as well as these new statements were true. They were asked to predict the proportion （比例） of each statement that would be judged as true. They did this both as a prediction of other people's performance as well as a prediction of how they would do in this study.
At another session a few days later, participants actually performed this study, reading a set of 20 statements in the hypothetical study again and then judging the truth of altogether 40 statements, half of which were from the hypothetical study and the other half of which were new.
This study did replicate the well known truth effect. People were more likely to judge statements they had seen before as true than statements that were new. Two interesting findings emerged from the prediction. First, participants tended to underestimate the size of the truth effect for everyone. T hat is, while they did expect some difference in judgments between the statements seen before and those that were new, they thought this difference would be smaller than it actually was. Second, participants more significantly underpredicted the truth effect for themselves compared to that for other people.
This study is particularly important in light of the amount of misinformation present in social media. Many people have the power to influence public opinion about important matters. Flooding social media feeds with misinformation will lead people to believe this information is true just because it is stated. Recognizing that we are all susceptible to this influence of repeated information should lead us to mistrust our intuition （直觉） about what is true and to look up important information prior to using it to make important judgments and decisions.
When I teach research methods, a major focus is peer review. As a process, peer review evaluates academic papers for their quality, integrity and impact on a field, largely shaping what scientists accept as "knowledge"- By instinct, any academic follows up a new idea with the question, "Was that peer reviewed?"
Although I believe in the importance of peer review and I help do peer reviews for several academic journals-I know how vulnerable the process can be.
I had my first encounter with peer review during my first year as a Ph. D student. One day, my adviser handed me an essay and told me to have my -written review back to him in a week. But at the time, I certainly was not a "peer"--I was too new in my field. Manipulated data （不实的数据） or substandard methods could easily have gone undetected. Knowledge is not self-evident. Only experts would be able to notice them, and even then, experts do not always agree on what they notice.
Let's say in my life I only see white swans. Maybe I write an essay, concluding that all swans are white. And a "peer" says, "Wait a minute, I've seen black swans. "I would have to refine my knowledge.
The peer plays a key role evaluating observations with the overall goal of advancing knowledge. For example, if the above story were reversed, and peer reviewers who all believed that all swans were white came across the first study observing a black swan, the study would receive a lot of attention.
So why was a first-year graduate student getting to stand in for an expert? Why would my review count the same as an expert's review? One answer: The process relies almost entirely on unpaid labor.
Despite the fact that peers are professionals, peer review is not a profession. As a result, the same over-worked scholars often receive masses of the peer review requests. Besides the labor inequity, a small pool of experts can lead to a narrowed process of what is publishable or what counts as knowledge, directly threatening diversity of perspectives and scholars. Without a large enough reviewer pool, the process can easily fall victim to biases, arising from a small community recognizing each other's work and compromising conflicts of interest.
Despite these challenges. I still tell my students that peer review offers the best method for evaluating studies aird advancing knowledge. As a process, peer review theoretically works. The question is whether the issues with peer review can be addressed by professionalizing the field.
Today, what we have, is an always-in-your-pocket, 24/7 news cycle. When you open a news app, you'll notice a brief moment when the "old news" is still there. In a flash, the ancient history of a few hours ago is swept away for the next "breaking news". It's endless, but you had better keep up.
Researchers introduce this world to the phrase, "noise bottleneck". A noise bottleneck is where we are overwhelmed with so much information or noise that our cognitive （认知的） abilities can't keep up. Thus, while our attention can watch hours. of videos, our long-term learning processes can't.
We watch TV holding our phones, and we listen to music while shopping. However, the human brain might have structural limitation rooted in the cognitive architecture which causes the slowing down that occurs when two tasks are performed at the same time.
In short, your brain is not as good as you think it is. You are a human being who can only take in so much a day. Understanding the noise bottleneck allows us to fix it. So, here are three tips to get you going:
Clear your content-set up a new account on social media and follow only accounts or people that you think are really valuable.
Single-task-you don't need to rid the phone but do rid the distractions. Say, "I will only read this magazine after dinner. Multitasking is for show; single-tasking is for pros.
Accept your limits-you'll never read all the news. Accept you can only choose two or three and embrace that fact. You're getting more out of those few than that "super-productive" person on social media who says they read five books a week. After all, it's better to have a little remembered than a lot forgotten.
A. Give yourself a time limit or restriction if it helps.
B. Don't beat yourself up that you're being unproductive.
C. Every second, you are presented with new information.
D. Breaking through the noise bottleneck is a legendary idea.
E. The matter is made worse by our modern addiction to multitasking.
F. Multitasking has dramatically changed the way we use information.
G. Our brains have limited resources, spread across numerous functions.
If you are a psychology enthusiast, you have probably heard of the famous marshmallow test （棉花糖实验）. In this task, kids are given a marshmallow, and are told that they can eat that marshmallow now, or wait a little while, and have two marshmallows instead. Some kids eat the marshmallow immediately, but most try their best to wait for two.
When the researchers followed up with those kids later in life, children who waited longer had better life outcomes: more academic success, better social behavior, and even markers of better health. They believe those children who keep waiting are the ones with the most self-control-a key factor in success, and that's why they are so successful later.
But what if the behavior in the marshmallow test has more to do with cultural norms than self-control?
A 2022 study tested the idea that children may decide how long to wait for rewards based on what they are accustomed to waiting for in their culture. For example, in the United States, there is no widespread mealtime custom of waiting until everyone is served. In Japan, however, there is.
Because of this difference in norms, the researchers hypothesized that Japanese children would wait longer in the marshmallow test than the American children. This is exactly what they found later in experiments.
But this isn't conclusive evidence; after all, maybe Japanese children actually have better self-control, or maybe they differ from American children in other ways that could explain the result.
In the U. S. , gifts are usually given on special occasions and children usually have to wait before they can unwrap their presents. In Japan, however, gift-giving happens more often, and children usually open presents immediately.
Given these cultural differences, scientists expected that if they ran the test with gifts instead of marshmallows, American kids would wait longer. Once again, their hypothesis was correct.
This is a powerful result because it demonstrates the importance of culture and habit in shaping behavior. If a child waits only few minutes before giving up on two marshmallows but much longer to unwrap a gift, can we really say that child lacks self-control? I don't think so. I think it just means that they are adjusting well to their social settings.
1. 活动内容；
2. 你的任务。
注意：
1. 词数100左右；
2. 开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,
Yours,
Li Hua
