Most Americans are worried about new technology. They are concerned that machines, including robots, will take over work now done by humans. These findings come from a new report by the Pew Research Center of Washington D. C.

    About 75 percent of Americans questioned by Pew said automation will increase income inequality between the rich and the middle class and poor. And 64 percent of people expect automation to be so common in America that people will face difficulty finding things to do with their lives.

    Some of the concerns about technology come from a distrust about whether machines will always make the right decision. Many Americans believe humans have better judgement in dealing with. complex matters. One example is selecting a person for a job. Three-quarters of Americans said they would not want to apply for a job that uses a computer program to choose the most qualified person.

    “Most Americans want the government to limit automation. For example, 87 percent support a requirement that all driverless vehicles have a human in the driver's seat who can take control when an emergency occurs. And 85 percent want to limit machines to mostly doing jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans. And only 25 percent expect more jobs to come from automation,” Pew said.

    Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, spoke last May to graduating seniors from Harvard University in Massachusetts. His talk centered on the uncertain future facing young people. “Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks.” Zuckerherg told the graduates.

    Zuckerberg said young people had better launch(发起)projects that will bring both jobs and direct benefits to the people of the world. He said in his speech that 30000 people worked to put a man on the moon, and millions of people built the Hoover Dam as well as other great projects over the last 100 years.

    According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Readers were “listeners attentive to a reading voice,” and “the text addressed to the ear as much as to the eye.” The significance of reading aloud continued well into the nineteenth century.

    Using Charles Dickens's nineteenth century as a point of departure, it would be useful to look at the familial and social uses of reading aloud and reflect on the functional change of the practice. Dickens habitually read his work to a domestic audience or friends. In his later years he also read to a broader public crowd Chapters of reading aloud also abound in Dickens's own literary works. More importantly, he took into consideration the Victorian practice when composing his prose, so much so that his writing is meant to be heard, not only read on the page.

    Performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. Apart from promoting a pleasant family relationship, reading aloud was also a means of protecting young people from the danger of solitary (孤独的) reading. Reading aloud was a tool for parental guidance. By means of reading aloud, parents could also introduce literature to their children, and as such the practice combined leisure and more serious purposes such as religious cultivation in the youths. Within the family, it was commonplace for the father to read aloud Dickens read to his children: one of his surviving and often-reprinted photographs features him posing on a chair, reading to his two daughters.

    Reading aloud in the nineteenth century was as much a class phenomenon as a family affair, which points to a widespread belief that Victorian readership primarily meant a middle-class readership, Those who fell outside this group tended to be overlooked by Victorian publishers。Despite this, Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, managed to distribute literary reading materials to people from different social classes by reducing the price of novels. This was also made possible with the technological and mechanical advances in printing and the spread of railway networks at the time.

    Since the literacy level of this section of the population was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act, a considerable number of people from lower classes would listen to recitals of texts. Dickens's readers, who were from such social backgrounds, might have heard Dickens in this manner. Several biographers of Dickens also draw attention to the fact that it was typical for his texts to be read aloud in Victorian England, and thus illiteracy was not an obstacle for reading Dickens. Reading was no longer a chiefly closeted form of entertainment practiced by the middle class at home.

    A working-class home was in many ways not convenient for reading: there were too many distractions, the lighting was bad, and the home was also often half a workhouse. As a result, the Victorians from the non-middle classes tended to find relaxation outside the home such as in parks and squares, which were ideal places for the public to go while away their limited leisure time. Reading aloud, in particular public reading, to some extent blurred the distinctions between classes. The Victorian middle class defined its identity through differences with other classes. Dickens's popularity among readers from the non-middle classes contributed to the creation of a new class of readers who read through listening.

    Different readers of Dickens were not reading solitarily and “jealously,” to use Walter Benjamin's term. Instead, they often enjoyed a more communal experience, an experience that is generally lacking in today's world. Modem audiobooks can be considered a contemporary version of the practice. However, while the twentieth- and twentieth-first-century trend for individuals to listen to audiobooks keeps some eharacteristics of traditional reading aloud-such as “listeners attentive to a reading voice” and the ear being the focus—it is a far more solitary activity.

My First Marathon（马拉松）

    A month before my first marathon, one of my ankles was injured and this meant not running for two weeks, leaving me only two weeks to train. Yet, I was determined to go ahead.

    I remember back to my 7th year in school. In my first P.E. class, the teacher required us to run laps and then hit a softball. I didn't do either well. He later informed me that I was ＂not athletic＂.

    The idea that I was ＂not athletic＂ stuck with me for years. When I started running in my 30s, I realized running was a battle against myself, not about competition or whether or not I was athletic. It was all about the battle against my own body and mind. A test of wills!

    The night before my marathon, I dreamed that I couldn't even find the finish line. I woke up sweating and nervous, but ready to prove something to myself.

    Shortly after crossing the start line, my shoe laces(鞋带) became untied. So I stopped to readjust. Not the start I wanted!

    At mile 3, I passed a sign: ＂GO FOR IT, RUNNERS!＂

    By mile 17, I became out of breath and the once injured ankle hurt badly. Despite the pain, I stayed the course walking a bit and then running again.

    By mile 21, I was starving!

    As I approached mile 23, I could see my wife waving a sign. She is my biggest fan. She never minded the alarm clock sounding at 4 a.m. or questioned my expenses on running.

    I was one of the final runners to finish. But I finished! And I got a medal. In fact, I got the same medal as the one that the guy who came in first place had.gkstk

    Determined to be myself, move forward, free of shame and worldly labels(世俗标签), I can now call myself a ＂marathon winner＂.

    I live in the center of the city and there is a largeparking lot full of parking spots nearby. Rain is a rare occurrence in LA,so cars easilycollect pollutants and dust. Together with my friends,I decided it shouldbe a kind gesture to surprise the owners with a car wash.So we bought carwashing supplies and brought out all the bath towels we could find.With all the suppliesin hand, wewere able to convince another roommate to help out as well and we beganwatering down the cars.

    Every once in a while, someone would come by and asked usseemingly stupid men, "Who told you to wash the cars?" or, even better, "who paid you to wash their cars?" Weexplained we just wanted to do something kind. But our response was often me with aneven more confused look.

    As the afternoon went on, some other friends that came byunderstood our goal of the spontaneous event and started helping out with someof the duties. Firstone friend then two, and by the time we had cleaned the entire lot,we had an entire carwashing crew with independent individually assigned tasks and duties.

    I wasn't cleaning cars to be able to afford a new phone.I was cleaning carssimply because I wanted to offer the car owners kindness.There was noequipment to weigh our value created. We couldn't measure our success indollars earned over the time spent washing cars when we could have been earningtwice as much at work.

    I now realize, first hand, that there is a special energy createdwhen you choose to think bigger than yourself and act in service of others andmaybe, likeme, you'llfind it's actually the greatest gift you' you'll ever get.

    Do you know the difference between a food chain anda food web? Food chains show how a living thing such as a plant or an animal gets its energy. A food web consists of multiple food chains and includes many more plants and animals than a food chain includes. This diagram shows a food chain within a food web of the African savanna.

    A team of engineers at Harvard University in trying to create the first robotic fly. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    "The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of its components is off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own' said Robert Wood, a Harvard engineering professor.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. "The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies (相互依赖）on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it d connected to," said Wood.

    While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers' fields or on the battlefield. "Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around," he said.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications." You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animal, but using these robots instead" he said. "So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day-to-day basis."