LakeLander                                                                                                                    2 hours ago

                Today, a man talked very loud on his phone on a train between Malvern and Reading, making many passengers upset. I wonder how he would react if I were to read my newspaper out loud on the train, I have never had the courage to do it, though.

Pak50                                                                                                                        ···     ·57 minutes ago

     Why not give it a try? Perhaps you should take lessons on a musical instrument. The late musician Dennis Brian is said to have

asked a fellow train passenger to turn off his radio. When his request was refused, he took out his French horn(号) and started

                   to practice.

Angie O'Edema ·42 minutes ago

I don't see how musical instruments can help improve manners in public. Don't do to others what you wouldn't like to be done to yourself. Once, a passenger next to me talked out loud on his mobile phone. I left my seat quietly, giving him some privacy to finish his conversation. He realized this and apologised to me. When his phone rang again later, heleft his seat to answer it. You see, a bit of respect and cooperation can do the job better.

Taodas                                                                                                                                    ·29 minutes ago

                  I did read my newspaper out loud on a train, and it turned out well. The guy took it in good part, and we chatted happily all the way to Edinburgh.

Sophie 76                                                                                                                                 ·13minutes ago

                 I have not tried reading my newspaper out loud on a train, but ,several years ago, I read some chapters from Harry Porter to my bored and noisy children. Several passengers seemed to appreciate what I did.

    Kunta wondered why the white people had done this to him. Born a free man, he was now in chains. Heavy iron chains around his feet and hands were fixed to a metal bar that ran round the hall about ten centimeters off the ground. He was just able to lie down on the ground, but could not stand up.

    Kunta had been seized in the forest and then hit on the head with a hard object. When he woke up, his hands and feet had already been tied together. What shocked him most was that the men who carried him were black. He reasoned with them, and tried to persuade them to set him free. But they would not listen to him. When they came to the river, a white man was waiting in the boat for them. There was an argument about money, so it seemed, in a language that Kunta did not understand. Finally, Kunta was thrown into the bottom of the boat and covered with an old smelly cloth. The men took him in their boat to the castle on the coast where he was now held prisoner.

    Another thing which shocked Kunta was that women were held in the castle too. He could hear their crying, also children's voices. What was to become of them all, he wondered. For all his life, he had known that people suddenly disappeared from their villages. He had known that it was not safe to travel alone in the forest near the coast. But why did white people want to catch Africans and put them in chains? Would they be killed or even eaten? The situation seemed hopeless and he knew his life was in danger.

    Worse was to come. A few days later about 140 black people were taken and put on a tall sailing ship waiting off the coast. Once on the boat, they were taken below and their chains were fixed to two bars that ran the length of the ship. Their feet were fixed to one bar and their hands to another bar. Thus they lay on hard wooden boards, unable to stand up or move around.

    The sea journey lasted over sixty days and nights. They had rough weather and Kunta's back bled from rolling over on the hard wooden boards. Many of the men fell sick with fever. They sighed and cried out for more water, but food and water were only given out once a day. Once in a while sailors came down, Kunta thought, to carry sick men upstairs for treatment. When the ship finally arrived in a port, the wooden cover was opened wide and Kunta could see in daylight for the first time across the part of the ship where he had been chained. About a third of the people who had been chained up below at the beginning of the journey were missing.

    The human beings seem to be facing a crisis （危机）． After Our best Go players were defeated one by one by the artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo, we lost our pride of being at the top of the intelligence chain. And in October，when Saudi Arabia gave citizenship to a robot named Sophia, another privilege of being human was take away．It looks like everything that separates humans and AI is at risk fight now．

    But we keep hoping that instead of “everything ”, there's still something left in us that makes us irreplaceable.

    To Hao Jingfang, winner of the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, that “something” is our consciousness. “AlphaGo is intelligent in a certain way, but not intelligent enough to ask the important questions – Do I like playing Co? Do I want to play Go today? Why do I have to play Go when you tell me to?” she once said．In other words, computer programs don't have a choice to say “no”． They probably don't even know what a “choice” is – all they ever do is calculate．

    And to He Huaihong，a philosophy (哲学) professor at Peking University，imagination and creativity are also what make us special. A machine couldn't have come up with the theory of gravity just because it was hit by a falling apple，he said．It's human imagination that connects what seem to be completely random and irrelevant concepts，something that a machine—which works by fixed rules only—can't do，at least for now．

    This is why BBC reporter Viktor Mayer-Schonberger suggested that instead of focusing on how computers have overshadowed us on calculating abilities than humans，we should probably “consider our quality at a different end of the spectrum (光谱)：creativity，originality (原创性)，even plain illogical craziness，instead of hard-nosed (顽固的) logic”，he wrote．

    So maybe in the future，as artificial intelligence becomes even more intelligent，humans and A1 will learn to use each other's talents for good．If AI can handle the boring tasks like calculating and driving for us，we'll have more time to create，think，and be busy with “being human”．

    There is a story about a man who lost his legs and left arm in an accident. After the accident, only a finger and thumb on his right hand remained.

    He was a brilliant, creative, and educated man. He had gained a lot of experience while traveling around the world, so he became very depressed after his accident. He was afraid that he would spend the rest of his life suffering and would no longer be able to spend his life in a meaningful way. Then, he realized that he still had partial function of his right hand and could still write even though it was very difficult. An idea occurred to him. "Why not write to other people who need encouragement?"

    He wrote to the prison ministry about sending letters to the prisoners. The prison minister replied, "Writing to the prisoners is acceptable, but your letters will not be answered."

    Filled with excitement, the man knew he could write his letters. He began sending one-way messages of God's love, hope, strength, and encouragement. He wrote twice a week, testing his strength and ability to the limit. He poured his heart and soul into his words and shared his experience, sense of humor, optimism, and faith.

    It was difficult to write those letters, especially without hope of a reply. One day he received a letter from the prison ministry. It was a short note from the officer who monitored and checked the prison mail.

    The letter said, "Please write on the best paper you can afford. Your letters are passed from cell to cell until they literally fall to pieces!"

    No matter what circumstances life may present, we all have unique experiences, abilities, and God-given talents. We can discover ways to reach others who desperately need messages of encouragement and strength.

    An analysis of almost 50 years of competitions—including Eurovision Song Contests and world skating championships—has found that contestants are more likely to win if they are among the last to appear before the judges.

    The study by an American university appears to provide scientific proof that the best man, or woman, does not always win. It found that, on average, the last competitor to appear in the Eurovision Song Contest was more than twice as likely to win as the one who went on first.

    The first rounds of figure—skating championships, for which the running order is selected at random, showed more dramatic results. The final skater had a 14 percent chance of victory, making him or her more than four times as likely to win as the first skater.

    The study showed a gradual worsening of chances for competitors who appeared earlier in the running order. A contestant who appears first in a contest is two percent less likely to win than one who appears second. A contestant who appears second is two percent less likely to win than one who appears third, and so on.

    The findings are published in the March issue of Acta Psychologica, a scientific journal. Robert Hardman, a senior lecturer in psychology at London Metropolitan University who specializes in the science of decision-making, said that the results were interesting. He suggested that the effect was caused by the limitations of the human memory.

    "When people make comparison, they aren't really able to make a lot of fine-grade discrimination. When contestants appear at the beginning of a contest, judges have little to compare them to and are perhaps cautious about the scores they give." he said.

    "Later on, when judges are able to compare the contestants to those that have gone before, they might give more extreme marks because they feel more confident about their judgments."

WISH YOU WERE MORE CREATIVE?

    I want to ask you a favor. I have a pair of pants. Tell me: How many different ways can I put a pair of pants to use? Now imagine you're an architect. Same question. Now imagine you're Bill Gates. A scuba diver. A medieval knight. You still have the pants. What alternative uses come to mind?

    What you just practiced--the conscious act of "wearing" another self-is an exercise that, according to psychiatrist SriniPillay, MD, is essential to being creative.

    One great irony (讽刺) about our collective addiction to creativity is that we tend to frame it in uncreative ways. That is to say, most of us marry creativity to our concept of self: Either we're "creative" or we aren't, without much of a middle ground. "I'm just not a creative person!" a discouraged student might say in art class, while another might blame her talent at painting for her difficulties in math, making a comment "I'm very right-brained."

    Dr.Pillay, an assistant professor at Harvard University, has spent years overturning these ideas. He believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to challenge the stereotyped (陈词滥调的) advice that urges you to "believe in yourself." In fact, you should do the opposite: Believe you are someone else.

    He points to a study showing the impact of stereotype on one's behavior. The authors, psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar, divided their college student subjects into two groups, instructing one group to think of themselves as "eccentric poets" and the other to imagine they were "rigid librarians". The researchers then presented them all with ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one. The former group came up with the widest range of ideas, whereas the latter had the fewest.

    These results suggest that creativity is not an individual characteristic but a "product of context and perspective". Everyone can be creative, as long as he or she feels like a creative person.

    Dr. Pillay's work takes this a step further: He argues that simply identifying yourself as creative is less powerful than taking the brave, creative step of imagining you are somebody else. This exercise, which he calls psychological Halloweenism, refers to the conscious action of "wearing" another self. An actor may employ this technique to get into character, but anyone can use it. According to Dr. Pillay, it works because it is an act of conscious unfocus, a collection of brain regions that spring into action when you're not focused on a specific task or thought. Most people spend nearly half of their days in a state of "unfocus." This doesn't make us lazy; it makes us human.

    Imagining yourself in a new situation, or an entirely new identity, never felt so productive. You're making yourself more creative, and you're giving yourself permission to do something you'd otherwise feel guilty about.