Wondering where to watch the fireworks on the fourth Friday of July? Here are some restaurants where you can sit, grab a bite to eat and watch the show.

    The Roof on Wilshire offers a view of the city, so chances are that you'll be able to catch a fireworks show while you're up there. The restaurant will also offer an all-you-can-eat menu for $20 that includes all beef hot dogs and sweet potato chips. The festivities will take place from 2 to 11 pm. Reservations are recommended. 6317 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, (323) 852-6002.

    Whiskey Red's is located in Marina Del Rey. Beginning at 5:30 pm, it will include live music from Jack of Hearts. The event is free and open to the public. Guests can make reservations from 5:30 to 10 pm. It costs $59 to reserve a seat on the patio(露台) and $49 for indoor seating. Kids aged 5 to 12 need $25 for a seat outside and $20 for an indoor seat. Kids aged four and below are free. 13813 Fiji Way, Marina Del Rey, (310) 823-4522.

    High Rooftop lounge in Venice at the top of the Hotel Erwin offers views of the Venice coastline. The fireworks show starts at 9 pm. The rooftop lounge (休息室) offers a full menu of cocktails and a selection of snacks. 1697 Pacific Avenue, Venice Beach, (800) 786-7789.

    The last one is Carbon Beach Club at the Malibu Inn. Here you can see fireworks from a seat on the restaurant's oceanfront balcony from 6 to 9:30 pm. Reservations are recommended. 22878 Pacific Coast Hwy, Malibu, (310) 456-6444.

    Dogs can tell how other dogs are feeling from the way their tails are wagging(摇摆)，according to researchers who monitored the animals' heart rate as they watched dogs' movies. The Italian team found that dogs had higher heart rates and became more anxious when they saw others wag their tails more to the left，but not when they wagged more to the right, or failed to wag at all.

    The curious form of communication is probably not intentional, or consciously understood, but is instead an automatic behavior that arises from the structure of the brain, said Giorgio. “It's not something they clearly and exactly understand,” Giorgio told The Guardian. “It's just something that happens to them.”

    Giorgio traces the effect back to the way the two halves of the brain process different experiences. In a previous study, his team showed that when a dog had a positive experience, activity rose in the left side of the brain, bringing about more tail wagging to the right. Or else more tail wagging to the left. The effect is barely visible to the human eye because dogs tend to wag their tails too fast, but it can be seen with slow motion video, or in some larger types.

    In the latest study, the researchers wanted to find out whether the direction of tail wagging had any effect on other dogs. To get an answer, they fitted dogs with vests that recorded their heart rates, and played them movies of other dogs wagging their tails one way and then the other. To ensure the dogs reacted only to tail wagging, and not appearance? They repeated the experiment with dogs that appeared only as shadows.

    “When dogs saw other dogs wagging their tails to the right, there was quite a relaxed reaction and no evidence of an increased heart rate. But when the wagging was to the left we saw an increase in heart rate and a series of behaviors typically associated with stress, anxiety and being more watchful, “Giorgio said. The anxious animals held their ears up, breathed, and kept their eyes wide open. The study appears in the latest issue of Current Biology.

    Getting rid of dirt, in the opinion of most people, is a good thing. However, there is nothing fixed about attitudes to dirt.

    In the early 16th century, people thought that dirt on the skin was a means to block out disease, as medical opinion had it that washing off dirt with hot water could open up the skin and let ills in. A particular danger was thought to lie in public baths. By 1538, the French king had closed the bath houses in his kingdom. So did the king of England in 1546. Thus began a long time when the rich and the poor in Europe lived with dirt in a friendly way. Henry IV, King of France, was famously dirty. Upon learning that a nobleman had taken a bath, the king ordered that, to avoid the attack of disease, the nobleman should not go out.

    Though the belief in the merit of dirt was long-lived, dirt has no longer been regarded as a nice neighbor ever since the 18th century. Scientifically speaking, cleaning away dirt is good to health. Clean water supply and hand washing are practical means of preventing disease. Yet, it seems that standards of cleanliness have moved beyond science since World War II. Advertisements repeatedly sell the idea; clothes need to be whiter than white, cloths ever softer, surfaces to shine. Has the hate for dirt, however, gone too far?

    Attitudes to dirt still differ hugely nowadays. Many first-time parents nervously try to warn their children off touching dirt, which might be responsible for the spread of disease. On the contrary, Mary Ruebush, an American immunologist (免疫学家), encourages children to play in the dirt to build up a strong immune system. And the latter position is gaining some ground.

    One silly question I simply can't stand is "How do you feel? Usually the question is asked of a man in action — a man on the go, walking along the street, or busily working at his desk. So what do you expect him to say? He'll probably say, "Fine, I'm all right," but "you've put a bug in his ear" — maybe now he's not sure. If you're a good friend, you may have seen something in his face, or his walk, that he overlooked that morning. It starts him worrying a little. First thing you know, he looks in a mirror to see if everything is all right, while you go merrily on your way asking someone else, "How do you feel?" Every question has its time and place. It's perfectly acceptable, for instance, to ask "How do you feel?" if you're visiting a close friend in the hospital. But if the fellow is walking on both legs, hurrying to catch a train, or sitting at his desk working, it's no time to ask him that silly question. When George Bernard Shaw, the famous writer of plays, was in his eighties, someone asked him, "How do you feel?" Shaw put him in his place. "When you reach my age," Shaw said, "either you feel all right or you're dead."

    News anchors(主播) must have been reluctant to read out the following news: Xin Xiaomeng began working as the world's first female artificial(人工的) intelligence news anchor at Xinhua News Agency on Sunday, three months after a male robot joined the profession.

    Unlike previous news robots though, Xin does not read news like a cold machine; she reads it almost like a human being. The muscles on her face stretch and relax — and her reactions change as she continues reading. That's why many news anchors were worried: Will AI replace us in the near future?

    To find the answer, we have to analyze the technologies that support Xin at her job. Three key technologies are used to support Xin. First, samples of human voices are collected and synthesized (合成). This is followed by the collection and synthesis of human muscle movement samples. And third the voices and movements are married in a way that when the AI news anchor reads, the micro- electric motors behind her face move to make her expressions seem more human.

    Yet we need a thorough knowledge of deep learning technology to make a robot imitate a person's voice. The developer needs to collect tens of thousands of pieces of pronunciations, input them into the machine and match them with the text for the AI to learn and read. The process for imitating facial movements is similar. The developer has to analyze the movements of the 53 muscles in the human face, make a model set from the collected data for the AI news anchor to learn, and imitate the movements of facial muscles via programs

    Both the technologies used to make Xin's performance impressive are mature. The real difficulty lies in the third — the technology to match the pronunciations with facial movements so that Xin's expressions vary according to the content of the news report. In fact, Xin's expressions don't always change according to the content. As a result, her expressions look anything but human. Actually, AI is still no match for human qualities.

Father's Day is celebrated today in 75 countries around the world. In my personal world, it's a day I like to think of my father's father.

I learned a lot in my later life from my dad. But I learned something else, as a kid not even yet in school, from my grandfather. I learned to be curious. Little things fathers and grandfathers do can change the life of a child forever. In my case, this change came from necessity：My mom needed someone to look after little Allen, barely 4 years old, during the school day. My grandmother volunteered, and my grandfather came up with a way I could be watched while he worked in his clockmaker's shop.

He seated me on a chair every day while I was there, right in front of his big workbench.  He told me stories. He had a great sense of humor and a funny way of making a "buh﹣buh﹣buh" sound when he sensed my attention was weakening, and he encouraged me to ask questions about anything he was doing.

Naturally, I was usually asking questions about clocks﹣what made the hands move, what the pendulum (钟摆) did, why you had to stop winding just before the weight hit the stop.  Sometimes I just asked about which shiny parts went where.

Most of all, he showed me how clocks worked. He treated me as if I were a sort of small grown﹣up. He never talked down to me, never told me I was "too young to understand".

And so my grandfather granted me two things: A love of clocks, and an everlasting curiosity.

As a journalist, I turned that fascination into explanations of why computers and software do what they do﹣﹣and, perhaps even more importantly, why they fail at that task. I haven't been afraid of opening up the innards and looking for what is wrong with the computer.