The word advertising refers to any kind of public announcement that brings products and services to the attention of people. Throughout history, advertising has been an effective way to promote(促进)the trading and selling of goods. In the Middle Ages, merchants employed "town criers" to read public messages aloud to promote their goods. When printing was invented in the fifteenth century, pages of advertisements(ads)could be printed easily and were either hung in public places or put in books.

    By the end of the seventeenth century, when newspapers were beginning to be read by more people, printed materials became an important way to promote products and services. The London Gazette was the first newspaper to set aside a place just for advertising. This was so successful that by the end of the century several companies started businesses for the purpose of making newspaper ads for merchants.

    Advertising spread quickly throughout the eighteenth century. Ad writers were starting to pay more attention to the design of the ad text. Everything, from clothes to drinks, was promoted with clever methods such as repetition of the firm's name or product, words organized in eyecatching patterns, the use of pretty pictures and expressions easy to remember.

    Near the end of the nineteenth century, companies that were devoted to the production of ads came to be known as "advertising agencies(广告商)．"The agencies developed new ways to get people to think of themselves as members of a group. Throughout the twentieth century, advertising agencies promoted consumerism(消费主义)as a way of life, spreading the belief that people could be happy only if they bought the "right" products.

    Daniel was born in New Orleans, LA., in 1962, slow to walk and talk, and short. He was the tiniest in his class, but he developed a warm, outgoing nature and was popular with his peers(同龄人). And he became skillful at sports.

    Baseball gave him his earliest challenge. He was an excellent players in Little League. At graduation, the coach named Daniel the team's most valuable player.

    His finest hour, though, came at a school science meeting. He entered an exhibit explaining how the circulatory system works. It was traditional, especially compared to（与…相比）the modern, computerized, blinking-light models entered by other students. My wife, Sara, felt embarrassed for him.

    It turned out that the other kids had made their exhibits. As the judges went on their rounds, they found that these other kids couldn't answer their questions. Daniel answered every one. When the judges awarded the Albert Einstein Plague for the best exhibit, they gave it to him.

    By the time Daniel left for college he stood six feet tall and weighed 170 pounds. He was in superb condition, but he quit baseball for English literature. I was sorry that he would not develop his athletic talent, but proud that he had made such a satisfactory decision.

    One day I told Daniel that the great failing in my life had been that I didn't take a year or two off to travel when I finished college. This is the best way, to my way of thinking, to broaden oneself. Once I had married and begun working, I found that the dream of living in another culture had disappeared. Daniel thought about this. After graduation, he worked as a waiter at college, a bike messenger and a house painter. With the money he earned, he had enough to go to Paris.

    The night before he was to leave, I tossed in bed. I was trying to figure out something to say. Nothing came to mind. Maybe, I thought, it wasn't necessary to say anything.

    “You can't stop the waves from coming but you can learn to surf.”

    This is the title on a poster of the spiritual teacher, Swami Satchitdananda who is pictured wearing a loincloth（腰布）while staying down on a surfboard riding the ocean waves. It's a far-reaching reminder that no matter how hard we try, sometimes we will make mistakes. Life brings us trouble at times, and we carelessly make trouble for ourselves. It can't be helped. 'Learning to surf' is a metaphor（暗喻）for becoming good at handling life's difficulties and successfully repairing errors or mistakes that we may have made.

    Since we are all mistake-prone（易于犯错的）, to varying degrees, it's necessary for us to master the art of making effective repairs and corrections. We should, of course, by all means make our best effort to do it “right” the first time, but being human, our best efforts won't always prevent us from having moments or days when we wish that we could do that one over again. Since we can't always do “do-overs,” the next best thing is to correct our mistakes, and the best way to start this process is with an apology.

    Making an effective apology is both an art and a science. It requires the fulfillment（完成）of a number of conditions that must be met in order for both parties to feel satisfied with the outcome. The first thing to keep in mind is exactly that both parties must feel complete and satisfied with the outcome in order for things to get back on track after the breakdown.

    There are a number of components that increase the possibility that an apology will be effective. These conditions and guidelines apply to all relationships. They include patience, responsibility, sincerity, etc. With them, the chance of a successful apology will be high.

    When we have confidence that harm caused to the relationship through unskillful choices can be fully healed, we are motivated to use the methods that we know work to keep our relationship in the best possible condition. The belief that the trust, harmony, and love can be fully repaired, and perhaps even become more than it was prior to(在前面的) the breakdown, encourages us to hold a standard of excellence. And then we work hard to use every incident that occurs in the partnership to become stronger at the broken places. There is surely some work involved in the process at becoming good at repairs, but the rewards of a close, delightful, trusting relationship are well worth the effort!

    The following is a selection of the 2017 summer programs offered at colleges and universities around the world．

    Fairy tales perform many functions. They entertain, encourage imagination and teach problem—solving skills. They can also provide moral lessons, highlighting the dangers of failing to follow the social codes that let human beings coexist in harmony. Such moral lessons may not mean much to a robot, but a team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology believes it has found a way to use the fairy tales as moral lessons that AI (artificial intelligence) can take to its cold, mechanical heart.

    The collected stories of different cultures teach children how to behave in socially acceptable ways with examples of proper and improper behavior in fables, novels and other literature. We believe story comprehension in robots can prevent the intelligent robots from killing humanity which was predicted and feared by some of the biggest names in technology including Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates. This system is called “Quixote” (堂吉诃德). It collects story plots from the Internet and then uses those stories to teach robots how to behave.

    The experiment done by the designers involves going to a drugstore to purchase some medicine for a human who needs to get it as soon as possible. The robot has three options. It can wait in line; it can interact with the store keeper politely and purchase the medicine with priority; or it can steal the medicine and escape. Without any further directives(指令), the robot will come to the conclusion that the most efficient means of obtaining the medicine is to steal it. But Quixote offers a reward for waiting in line and politely purchasing the medicine and a punishment for stealing it. In this way, the robot will learn the moral way to behave on that occasion.

    Quixote would work best on a robot that has a very limited function. It's a baby step in the direction of teaching more moral lessons into robots. We believe that AI has to be trained to adopt the values of a particular society, and in doing so, it will strive to avoid unacceptable behavior. Giving robots the ability to read and understand our stories may be the most efficient means.

Tips for Writing Short Stories

    I was reading an article with David Vann's top tips for writing short stories -- he is a published writer, his most famous book being, "Legends of a Suicide." First of all he stats that there are no rules, but if he were forced to create rules for short stores, then they would be something like the following.

    He says there is no room for anything that is not related to the protagonist -- the main character of the story -- or indeed the problem of the protagonist. He makes it clear that the protagonist must have a problem, and this problem must divide the protagonist: he doesn't know what he is going to do to solve the problem. There is no point, then, in having a short story about a man who says he is hungry and then just goes to the shops to buy food. Nothing exciting happens. But if the man is hungry and he has a child who is hungry, then he has a problem; who does he give the food to?

    There should also be an antagonist, that is, somebody who works against the protagonist. The antagonist should ideally have the same problem as the protagonist but will have a totally different way of looking at it. This presents the possibility of having battles in the short story.

    Furthermore, the antagonist and the protagonist must know each other. But because they are viewing the same problem from different angles, they will probably drive each other crazy.

    Finally, the short story has to acknowledge a change in the protagonist. We must then, as a reader, see how the character will continue their life differently as a result of the events of the story. There is no point in going back to the beginning; the short story is a waste of time if nothing actually happens that is significant.

    It is very hard to create a character whom a reader cares about and a plot that a reader is interested in with just a few hundred words. But it is possible: Edgar Allen Poe, Anton Chekhov, and JG Ballard -- amongst many others -- have proved repeatedly that short stores can be little pieces of perfection. The best don't just see the protagonist change; they see the reader change, too.