Siri is an artificial intelligence (AI) that you can carry around in the pocket, where it waits patiently to be told what to do. In the week we spend together, my AI assistant has performed admirably in finding me restaurants, or the location of the nearest coffee shop.

    A typical command might be: “Reserve a table for two at a good French restaurant in San Francisco.” Siri responds by presenting a list of top-rated restaurants that can be booked on OpenTable.com. If you say which time you want, it can book you a table without your lifting a finger. In some ways Siri is just a fancy program to the 35 websites it can connect to, from taxi booking websites to movie review databases (数据库). But what's new is the way it can analyze the intentions of its users and use those sites to put them into action.

    Siri attaches possibilities to the explanation of each word and compare your location with other data, some of which you must provide yourself. To send email reminders, Siri obviously needs to know your email address. To “find me the flower shop closest to work”, it needs to know where you work. To pay bills or buy airline tickets, it would need to be linked to your credit card.

    That raises the question of how far we are willing to trust a piece of software that can go and do things for us based on what it “thinks” we mean. Siri may be simple, and always shows its explanation of a command before carrying it out. But it gives users a preview of a new balance between privacy, trust and convenience that the expansion of AI into everyday life is likely to develop.

    When her five daughters were young, Helen An always told them that there was strength in unity (团结). To show this, she held up one chopstick, representing one person. Then she easily broke it into two pieces. Next, she tied several chopsticks together, representing a family. She showed the girls it was hard to break the tied chopsticks. This lesson about family unity stayed with the daughters as they grew up.

    Helen An and her family own a large restaurant business in California. However, when Helen and her husband Danny left their home in Vietnam in 1975, they didn't have much money. They moved their family to San Francisco. There they joined Danny's mother, Diana, who owned a small Italian sandwich shop. Soon afterwards, Helen and Diana changed the sandwich shop into a small Vietnamese restaurant. The five daughters helped in the restaurant when they were young. However, Helen did not want her daughters to always work in the family business because she thought it was too hard.

    Eventually the girls all graduated from college and went away to work for themselves, but one by one, the daughters returned to work in the family business. They opened new restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even though family members sometimes disagreed with each other, they worked together to make the business successful. Daughter Elizabeth explains, “Our mother taught us that to succeed we must have unity, and to have unity we must have peace. Without the strength of the family, there is no business.”

    Their expanding business became a large corporation in 1996, with three generations of Ans working together. Now the Ans' corporation makes more than $ 20 million each year. Although they began with a small restaurant, they had big dreams, and they worked together. Now they are a big success.

    A new study suggests a simple getting-to-know-you exercise might improve classroom relationships. The teacher-student relationship affects every aspect of the educational experience. When students don't feel safe and respected by their teacher, they are less likely to devote themselves to their education. And when teacher feel distanced from their students, it is nearly impossible to walk into the classroom each day actively, let alone encourage motivation or investment in students.

    Hunter Gehlbach, a professor, explained that his research is primarily concerned with social perspectivetaking(换位思考), or the ability to understand what drives the people around us. As he explained, "My focus is classrooms and social perspective-taking--figuring out the thoughts and feelings of others seems important. We want teachers to be able to engage in this process and figure out the thought process of students as much as possible, in order to understand where and why they are making mistakes."

    Gehlbach and his colleagues gave 315 students and 25 teachers a "getting-to-know-you" survey of 30 items at the beginning of a school year. The researchers matched similarities between the teacher and the student, and then showed those similarities to the teachers and students. Five weeks later, the researchers returned to start a more indepth survey of both students and teachers, and to measure their opinions of their relationships and the classroom experience as a whole. The second survey showed that when teachers and students know they have five things in common, relationships and educational outcomes both improve.

    Gehlbach explained that the similarities he and his colleagues established were not based on personal information, but on shared preferences. Gehlbach explained: one of the biggest surprises in reading the similarity research was how little some of the similarities were that caused positive feelings towards others.

    Though Gehlbach's study has limitations, he is encouraged by the results and eager to explore the phenomenon further.

    For teenagers, it's great fun to explore new places and it feels like an adventure, even when you know you're not the first to have been there. But to make sure not to get lost or waste time going round in circles, the following tips may be helpful.

    Do the map reading if you're being driven somewhere. It'll be easier if you keep the map following the direction you are traveling in. Keep looking ahead so that you can give the driver lots of warning before having to make a turn, or you'll have to move to the back seat.

    Get a group of friends together and go exploring. You'll need a good map, a compass , a raincoat, a cell phone to call for help in case you get lost, and a bit of spare cash for emergencies .Tell someone where you're going before you set out and let them know what time you expect to be back. The purpose of the activity is in not getting lost, not in seeing how fast you can go, so always stick together, waiting for slower friends to catch up.

    See if your school or a club organizes orienteering（越野识途比赛）activities, in which you need a map and a compass to find your way. This can be done as a sport, with teams trying to find the way from A to B(and B to C, etc. ) in the fastest time, or simply as a spare-time activity. It enables you to be familiar with the use of maps and compass and gain some special skills. In some way, it's not only good fun, but also a great way to keep fit.

    Most of us will be familiar with the traditional talent show set-up: thousands of hopefuls line up outside the audition（试音）room, wait for hours to go in and perform for a group of judges. Then these potential pop stars could be lucky and get through to the next round, or they might hear the command, "Sorry, it's a no from me. But what do the judges actually bring to a talent show?

    Music talent show judges attract millions of viewers each week to their programs. As public figures, they play an important part in advertising campaigns for these programs. They often receive high salaries and can be moody. Are they really worth the expenses and difficulties that they cause? One solution might be to replace them with computers.

    Can computers really match human judges? Scientist Dr Nick Collins and his team at the University of Sussex think they can. Dr Collins has been working on a project that involves programming three computerized judges that he says would be far more consistent in their judgment of musical performances. Employing a special programming language, Dr Collins's digital judges can be trained up by "listening" to particular musical styles. After they have been listening for a while, the programming language allows these judges to spot the specific features of the music, including the voice quality, the rhythm etc. Collins says, “The judges' listening capacity is not yet as good as a human ear, but they won't be as moody as some human reality TV show judges.”

    Maybe that is the problem with this electronic musical innovation. Real human judges on talent shows interest us with their personality, decisions and catchy phrases. Will a computer program be able to do the same?

    We've all heard the saying: practice makes prefect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning pianist might rehearse scales(音阶) before chords(和弦). A young tennis player practices the forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this “blocking”， and because it is common and easy to schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other settings.

    However another strategy promises improved results. Enter “interleaving”， a largely unheard-of technique that is catching the attention of  cognitive(认知) psychologists and neuroscientists. Blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next (for example, “skill A” before “skill B” and so on, forming the pattern “AAABBBCCC”), while in interleaving one mixes practice on several related skills together (forming for example the pattern “ABCABCABC”).

    Over the past four decades, a small but growing body of research has found that interleaving often outperforms blocking for a variety of subjects, including sports and category learning. Yet there have been almost no studies of the technique in unplanned, real world settings-until recently. New research in schools finds that interleaving produces dramatic and long-lasting benefits for an essential skill: math. Not only does this finding have the potential to transform how math is taught, it may also change how people learn more generally.

    Researches are now working to understand why interleaving produces such impressive results. One important explanation is that it improves the brain's ability to tell apart between concepts. With blocking, once you know what solution to use, or movement to do, the hard part is over. With interleaving, each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote(死记硬背) responses don't work. Instead, your brain must continuously focus on searching for different solutions. That process can improve your ability to learn critical features of skills and concepts, which then better enables you to select and produce the correct response.

    A second explanation is that interleaving strengthens memory associations. With blocking, a single strategy，temporarily held in short-term memory, is sufficient. That's not the case with interleaving-the correct solution changes from one practice attempt to the next. As a result, your brain is continually engaged at regaining different responses and bringing them into short-term memory. Repeating that process can strengthen neural connections between different tasks and correct responses, which improves learning.

    Both of these accounts imply that increased effort during training, either to discriminate correct responses or to strengthen them, is needed when interleaving is used. This corresponds to a potential drawback of the technique, namely that the learning process often feels more gradual and difficult in the beginning. However, that added effort can have better, longer-lasting results.