Tips for a Happier Workplace

    You don't have to be friends with your co-workers, but you do need to be friendly. Read on for fresh ways to make your office a kinder, gentler place.

◆Give a happy “Hello! ”in the morning

    Do you walk into the office, eyes down, and immediately start work? If so, you are likely to find that co-workers ignore(忽视)you or avoid you.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}It's really amazing how fast this small gesture can change unfriendly workplace relations.

◆Learn the art of small talk

    Ask your co-workers about their interests—their favorite music, movies, and books, as well as their hobbies {#blank#}2{#/blank#} Once you know what catches their imagination, pick up stories from newspapers or magazines to help start conversations.

◆Ask what they think

    People love to be asked for their opinion, so go out of your way to ask, “What do you think of this report? ” or “How do you think I should deal with this situation? ”{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

◆Avoid gossip(流言飞语)

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}So return the favor. When a co-worker walks towards you bearing a piece of gossip, respond(回应)with, “Really? ”and then change the subject or get back to work. If you don't respond, the gossiper will move on.

◆{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    To win friends at work, start with good office etiquette(礼节). There's nothing more frustrating(令人沮丧的)to busy co-workers than to have their emails and phone messages ignored. Your silence doesn't just make their jobs harder; it also conveys(传达)an unpleasant message: You are unimportant to me.

A. Stop complaining.

B. Return calls and emails immediately.

C. Then give the advice giver a silent thank-you.

D. Always work as hard as anyone working for you.

E. You don't want anyone talking about you behind your back, right?

F. Showing an interest in them will make them feel comfortable around you.

G. Get into the habit of greeting your co-workers with a smile as you arrive in the morning.

    People who multitask all the time may be the worst at doing two things at once, a new research suggests. The findings, based on performances and self-evaluation by about 275 college students, indicate that many people multitask not out of a desire to increase productivity, but because they are easily distracted and can't focus on one activity. And “those people turn out to be the worst at handling different things,” said David Sanbonmatsu, a psychologist at the University of Utah.

    Sanbonmatsu and his colleagues gave the students a set of tests and asked them to report how often they multitasked, how good they thought they were at it, and how sensation-seeking (寻求刺激) or imperative (冲动) they were. They then evaluated the participants' multitasking ability with a tricky mental task that required the students to do simple mathematical calculations while remembering a set of letters.

    Not surprisingly, the scientists said, most people thought they were better than average at multitasking, and those who thought they were better at it were more likely to report using a cellphone while driving or viewing multiple kinds of media at once. But those who frequently deal with many things at the same time were found to perform the worst at the actual multitasking test. They also were more likely to admit to sensation-seeking and impulsive behavior, which connects with how easily people get bored and distracted.

     “People multitask not because it's going to lead to greater productivity, but because they're distractible, and they get sucked into things that are not as important.” Sanbonmatsu said.

    Adam Gazzaley, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not a member of the research group, said one limitation of the study was that it couldn't find out whether people who start out less focused tend toward multitasking or whether people's recognizing and understanding abilities change as a result of multitasking.

    The findings do suggest, however, why the sensation-seeker who multitask the most may enjoy risky distracted driving. “People who are multitasking are generally less sensitive to risky situations.” said Paul Atchley, another researcher not in the group. “This may partly explain why people go in for these situations even though they're dangerous.”

    2017 was an influential year for artificial intelligence (人工智能), not just in terms of the advancement of the technology itself, but also for the development of our understanding of AI's impact on our society.

    When we talk about AI, often we focus on the belief that it is going to take away certain types of jobs. However, we often ignore the fact that this technology will also slowly spread into most of our lives.

    Thanks to the development of AI, we are on the highway of IA, (human) intelligence augmentation (增强). Despite the great steps we've made in AI development and will continue to make in 2018, we are still years away from AI fully replacing human jobs. However, we are much closer to seeing the impact of AI spread into almost every job and the growth in human intelligence.

    Take a doctor for example: AI will soon be able to detect and diagnose common diseases more quickly and accurately than humans. Now, doctors can spend more of their time explaining the possible diagnoses, communicating with patients and developing unique, reliable treatment plans that are most effective for each specific patient.

    However, AI is so powerful and its adoption will only accelerate as it begins to help our work and allow us to focus on the parts of our job that are most important. But part of why AI is so attractive is also why it's so dangerous. That is, that same power allows AI that are making incorrect decisions to do so with greater speed and impact than humans have ever had.

    This is why, as AI becomes more useful in 2018, it will also become more closely examined. 2018 will be the year when companies purchasing AI products don't just ask about the power of AI—they will make sure that it is tested carefully in advance, minimizing their potential unexpected impact.

    The world's population is more mobile (移动的)today than ever before. In 2010, more than 200 million people left their home countries to live in a new country. This is about 3 percent of the total world population. Some experts believe that number will swell to 400 million by 2050. Rates of immigration have remained strong for the last 300 years, but patterns of immigration have changed since World War II. The backgrounds and experiences of today's immigrants are different from those of the typical European immigrant of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary immigrants range from unskilled laborers to highly skilled professionals, and they come from and go to countries all over the world.

    In the nineteenth century and until World War II, immigration was primarily in one direction- from the Old World to the New World. This is no longer the case. Countries such as Russia and China, which have long been, and continue to be, significant source countries, are now also destination countries. There is also considerable mobility inside regions, such as from one European country to another, or among the countries of the former Soviet Union.

    In spite of such differences, the push and pull factors for immigration remain essentially the same as they were 100 years ago. Most people move to another country because they want a better life. For the majority of immigrants, this means better economic conditions. As in past generations, a labor shortage in one country often draws workers from another country, especially if wages are significantly higher. In some small countries, for example, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, there are more jobs than citizens. The demand for labor is so high that the majority of the population consists of foreign-born workers, ranging from highly skilled engineers and financial experts to domestic and construction workers.

    In traditional destination countries, such as the United States, however, labor needs have changed. Today, although there is still demand for unskilled labor, there is increasing demand for people with a high level of skill and education. The need for less skilled labor has shifted to other countries. As work on farms and in industry in the United States and Canada once drew workers from all over the world, now work in factories in Taiwan and south Korea attracts workers from Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia.

    Most global immigration is legal: however, a large number of people also move across national borders illegally in pursuit of(寻找) employment. Experts estimate that about 15 to 20 percent of immigrants worldwide are in their new countries illegally. The United States has the largest number of these immigrants, followed by South Africa, with significant numbers also in Northern and Western Europe and Mexico. These immigrants face particular challenges because they often must hide from the authorities who might deport them back to their home countries. Their illegal status also means that employers may take advantage of them by forcing them to work longer hours and paying them less than the legal minimum wage.

    Although economics remains the most important motivation in all forms of immigrant, other factors are also important. Some people decide to leave their home countries because their actions or political beliefs make it dangerous for them to remain. Others choose to leave because their home country has become too dangerous and unstable, often because of war or political unrest. They wish to find a place that is secure for themselves and their families. Education is also a significant factor for many modern immigrants. They want to raise their children in a place where they can get a good education, which, in turn, they hope will provide them with better prospects for the future. Finally, family and community ties also play a role in immigration decisions. As in the past, once a group of people from one country establishes a community in a new country, more people from that country is likely to follow.

    The pattern, direction, and rate of immigration may change as the global economy changes. However, as long as life in a new country is more attractive than life in the old country, immigration will continue.

The cane toad (海蟾蜍) was imported to Australia in 1935 to protect sugarcane crops. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Experts estimate that there are currently over 200 million samples spread across Northern Australia, and the numbers are only growing. The increasing population is proving to be deadly for many native Australian animal species that hunt the toads as food. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    While some animals have learned to completely avoid the frogs, the Australian monitor lizards continue to be killed by them. The lizards that catch small animals love eating cane toads. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} It takes the cane toad less than 30 seconds to release enough poison to kill a lizard.

{#blank#}4{#/blank#} They decided to train the lizards to avoid the cane toads. To carry out the idea they went to a region of northwestern Australia that had not yet been invaded by cane toads and fed the wild lizards with young cane toads. Though the smaller animals release the same poison as the adults, they do so in smaller amounts. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} The researchers say it took just one or two tests to teach the lizards to stay away from cane toads. They continued to avoid the animals even when the larger cane toads arrived.

A. Not surprisingly, their population has dropped sharply.

B. Unfortunately, in most cases, it turns out to be their last meal.

C. With very few natural enemies, their population began to grow rapidly.

D. Now a team of researchers came up with a good plan to save the lizards.

E. Gradually, the lizards learned to eat only the mildly poisonous cane toads.

F. Therefore, while the poison does make the lizards sick, it does not kill them.

G. That's because cane toads release some deadly poison when they sense danger.

    In 2009 a new flu virus was discovered. Combining elements of the viruses that cause bird flu and swine flu, this new virus, named H1N1, spread quickly. Within weeks, public health agencies around the world feared a terrible pandemic (流行病) was under way. Some commentators warned of an outbreak on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu. Worse, no vaccine(疫苗) was readily available. The only hope public health authorities had was to slow its spread. But to do that, they needed to know where it already was.

    In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) required that doctors inform them of new flu cases. Yet the picture of the pandemic that showed up was always a week or two out of date. People might feel sick for days but wait before consulting a doctor. Relaying the information back to the central organizations took time, and the CDC only figured out the numbers once a week. With a rapidly spreading disease, a two-week lag is an eternity. This delay completely blinded public health agencies at the most urgent moments.

    Few weeks before the H1N1 virus made headlines, engineers at the Internet giant Google published a paper in Nature. It got experts' attention but was overlooked. The authors explained how Google could "predict" the spread of the winter flu, not just nationally, but down to specific regions and even states. Since Google receives more than three billion search queries every day and saves them all, it had plenty of data to work with.

    Google took the 50 million most common search terms that Americans type and compared the list with CDC data on the spread of seasonal flu between 2003 and 2008. The idea was to identify areas affected by the flu virus by what people searched for on the Internet. Others had tried to do this with Internet search terms, but no one else had as much data-processing power, as Google.

    While the Googles guessed that the searches might be aimed at getting flu information—typing phrases like "medicine for cough and fever"—that wasn't the point: they didn't know, and they designed a system that didn't care. All their system did was look for correlations(相关性) between the frequency of certain search queries and the spread of the flu over time and space. In total, they processed 450 million different mathematical models in order to test the search terms, comparing their predictions against actual flu cases from the CDC in 2007 and 2008. And their software found a combination of 45 search terms that had a strong correlation between their prediction and the official figures nationwide. Like the CDC, they could tell where the flu had spread, but unlike the CDC they could tell it in near real time, not a week or two after the fact.

    Thus, when the H1N1 crisis struck in 2009, Google's system proved to be a more useful and timely indicator than government statistics with their natural reporting lags. Public health officials were armed with valuable information.

    Strikingly, Google's method is built on "big data"—the ability of society to handle information in new ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value. However,   ▲  . For example, in 2012 it identified a sudden rise in flu cases, but overstated the amount, perhaps because of too much media attention about the flu. Yet what is clear is that the next time a pandemic comes around, the world will have a better tool to predict and thus prevent its spread.