Raised in a fatherless home, my father was extremely tightfisted towards us children. His attitude didn't soften as I grew into adulthood and went to college. I had to ride the bus whenever I came home. Though the bus stopped about two miles from home, Dad never met me, even in severe weather. If I grumbled, he'd say in his loudest father-voice, “That's what your legs are for!” The walk didn't bother me as much as the fear of walking alone along the highway and country roads. I also felt less than valued that my father didn't seem concerned about my safety. But that feeling was canceled one spring evening.

    It had been a particularly difficult week at college after long hours in labs. I longed for home. When the bus reached the stop, I stepped off and dragged my suitcase to begin the long journey home.

    A row of hedge（树篱）edged the driveway that climbed the hill to our house. Once I had turned off the highway to start the last lap of my journey, I always had a sense of relief to see the hedge because it meant that I was almost home. On that particular evening, the hedge had just come into view when I saw something gray moving along the top of the hedge, moving toward the house. Upon closer observation, I realized it was the top of my father's head. Then I knew, each time I'd come home, he had stood behind the hedge, watching, until he knew I had arrived safely. I swallowed hard against the tears. He did care, after all.

    On later visits, that spot of gray became my watchtower. I could hardly wait until I was close enough to watch for its secret movement above the greenery. Upon reaching home, I would find my father sitting innocently in his chair. “So! My son, it's you!” he'd say, his face lengthening into pretended surprise.

      I replied, “Yes, Dad, it's me. I'm home.”

    I grew up in a troubled home in the 1970s, on the outskirts of downtown Orlando, Florida. Not far away, a three-story house attracted my eyes.

    It was nothing like the one I lived in with my mother, a small dark place with rules about befriending others. “Don't. Never, ever talk to anyone,” my mother said.

    One day, in sixth grade, a black-haired woman was introduced to our class: Mrs. Reese. Reese explained that she was starting Spanish Club. She invited anyone interested in learning Spanish language and culture to stay after school.

    I could not take my eyes off her bracelets(手镯) and shining rings. The bell rang, and to my shock, no one went up to Mrs. Reese. I was under strict orders to go straight home. But that day, I stayed. I asked Mrs. Reese when the club started.

    “We could begin right now if you like,” she said with a smile. I felt beautiful. That day I learned that the house of my dreams was her house. I learned how to answer questions about my age and my favorite food in Spanish. And I learned, “Do you want to come over tomorrow for cooking lessons?”

    I wanted to say “Yes”, but Mom's words held me back.

I begged my mother all summer and into fall, well after Spanish Club had dissolved. I wept at night sometimes, so worried that Mrs. Reese and her family would move away.

    At some point, I managed to wear my mother down and one Saturday afternoon. I rode out to Mrs. Reese's house.

    The details of that afternoon are marked in my mind: We had tea. She painted my toenails red. We made a garlicky picadillo. We spoke in Spanish. In Spanish, my voice was loud and romantic. This is the real me! I remember thinking.

    My mother never permitted me another visit to Mrs. Reese's house. But four decades later, I still remember that day and the life she showed me, proof of a possible future.

    Astronomy (天文学) is the oldest science known to man. Thousands of years ago man looked at the stars and wondered about heavens(天堂). But the six planets that he could see with his eyes alone limited man.

    The Greeks studied astronomy over 2,000 years ago. They could see the size, color, and brightness of a star. They could see its place in the sky. They watched the stars move as the seasons changed. But the Greeks had no tools to help themselves study the heavens.

    Each new tool added to the field of astronomy helped man reach out into space. Until there were telescopes(望远镜), man did not know much about the moon. He did not know that the planet called Saturn(土星) had rings around it. His sight was so limited that he could not see all the planets. In the early 1700s, people thought there were only six planets. Pluto (冥王星), the last of the nine planets to be discovered was seen until 1930.

    Before the spectroscopes (分光镜), man didn't know what kind of gas was in the sun or other stars, without radio telescopes(射电望远镜), we did not know that radio noise came from far in space.

    Today, astronomy is a growing science. We have learned more in the past fifty years than in the whole history of astronomy.

    Not long ago, I tried convincing my three daughters that the world's secrets are hidden inside silence. The girls looked at me skeptically. Surely silence is nothing?

    Sitting there at the dinner table, I suddenly remembered their curiosity as children, their wondering about what might be hiding behind a door and their amazement as they stared at a light switch and asked me to “open the light”. But now they are 13, 16 and 19 and wonder less and less. If they still wonder at anything, they quickly pull out their smart phones to find the answer. None of them have any interest in discussing with me. To attract their attention, I told them about two friends of mine who had decided to climb Mount Qomolangma.

    Early one morning they left base camp to climb the south-west wall of the mountain. It was going well. Both reached the summit, but then came the storm. They soon realized they would not make it down alive. The first got hold of his pregnant wife by satellite phone. Together they decided on the name of the child that she was carrying. Then he quietly passed away just below the summit. My other friend was not able to contact anyone before he died. No one knows exactly what happened on the mountain in those hours. Thanks to the dry, cool climate 8km above sea level, they have both been freeze-dried. They lie there in silence, looking no different.

    The girls remained quiet, listening. It seemed as though they had got something.

    It is easy to assume that the essence (本质) of technology is technology itself, but that is wrong. The essence is the time we spend with our family and how much freedom we have by technology.

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for companies to monitor workers' behavior in great detail and in real time. Start to slack off (懈怠), and AI could talk to your boss.

    One company offering such services is London-based start-up Status Today. Its AI platform relies on a regular supply of employee data, including everything from the files you access to when you use a key card. From this, it builds a picture of how employees normally function and signals any unusual performance. The idea is to spot when someone might become a security risk by doing something different from their usual behavioral patterns. “All of this gives us fingerprint of a user, so if we think the fingerprint doesn't match, we raise a warning”, says Mircea Dumitrescu, the company's chief technology officer.

    The system also aims to catch employee actions that could accidentally cause a security breach (漏洞), like opening malware (恶意软件).“We're not monitoring if your computer has a virus.” says Dumitrescu. “We're monitoring human behaviors.”

    But catching the security breach means monitoring everyone, and the AI can also be used to track employee productivity. “It seems like they are just using the reputation of AI to give an air of lawfulness to old-fashioned workplace surveillance (监视),” says Javier Ruiz Diaz of digital campaigning organization the Open Rights Group. “You have a right to privacy and you shouldn't be expected to give that up at work.”

    Exactly how companies use the system will be up to them, but it's hard to shake the picture of an AI constantly looking over employees' shoulders. “It will bother people, and that could be counterproductive if it affects their behavior,” says Paul Bemal at the University of East Anglia.

    Phil Legg at the University of the West of England says it will never catch every security risk. “If people know they're being monitored, they can change their behavior,” he says.

    A court battle between German and Israeli archives （档案馆） over Kafka's manuscripts （手稿）raised literary, not just legal, questions. At the time of his death, Kafka hardly seemed like a candidate for world fame. He had a minor reputation in German literary circles. He published a few stories in magazines, but they received little attention.

    After he died in 1924, his friend Max Brod collected, edited and published his works - despite Kafka's own instructions in his will ordering the manuscripts to be destroyed - thus making Kafka a household name after his death. When the Nazis invaded Prague, Brod escaped to Israel, bringing the manuscripts with him. When he died in 1968, his manuscripts, together with those of Kafka, were transferred to his secretary Esther Hoffe.

    Even though Brod asked in his will that the manuscripts be given to a public archive, Hoffe sold some of them abroad for a great deal of money. Many of them eventually made it to the German Literature Archive. In 2007, she died and left her properties to her daughters. Then the case about the manuscripts started after the death of one of her daughters. The court said Hoffe had no rights, and could not have any such rights for the documents Brod took from Kafka's apartment after his death.

    Ironically, Kafka's stubborn homelessness and non-belonging in his works were accurately what ensured his place at the center of 20^th-century literature. W. H. Auden proposed that Kafka was to the cold, absurd 20^th century what Dante or Shakespeare had been to their times - the writer who captured the spirit of the age. That is why, in the end, it hardly matters whether Kafka's manuscripts stay in Germany or Israel. What counts is that we are all living in Kafka's world.