Television has turned 88 years old onSeptember 7, 2015, and it has never looked better. In its youth, television wasa piece of furniture with a tiny, round screen showing unclear pictures oflow-budget programs. In spite of its shortcomings, it became popular. Between1950 and 1963, the number of American families with a television jumped from 9%to 92% of the population.

    As the audience got larger, thetechnology got better. Television sets became more reliable through the 1960s.The reception (接收效果) improved. The picture improved. The major networks started broadcastingprograms in color.

    Even greater improvements were comingaccording to Sanford Brown, who wrote an article for the Post in 1967. Surprisingly, just about every prediction he made in the article became areality. For example: All sets in the not-distant future will be colorinstruments. He also predicted that TV sets would become smaller, simpler, morereliable and less expensive and may forever put the TV repairman out of work.Smaller sets do not, of course, mean smaller screens. TV engineers expectscreens to get much bigger. However, today's 3-D TV is even farther away, if it's coming at all. There is some doubt whether the public would be eager topay for it, in view of people's cold reception given to 3-D movies.

    But the technology with the greatestpotential, according to Brown, was cable television (有线电视), whichwas still in its early stages then. As he predicted, the future of cabletelevision was highly interactive (互动的). It wasn't cable television that gaveAmericans their electronic connection to the world, however. It was theInternet. He even foresaw the future office: using picture phones, big-screentelevisions for conferences, and computers providing information at the touchof a button.

    Brown ever said, “The future oftelevision is no longer a question of what we can invent. It's a question ofwhat we want.”

    Parents who help their children with homework may actually be bringing down their school grades. Other forms of prenatal involvement, including volunteering at school and observing a child's class, also fail to help, according to the most recent study on the topic.

    The findings challenge a key principle of modern parenting(养育子女) where schools except them to act as partners in their children's education. Previous generations concentrated on getting children to school on time, fed, dressed and ready to learn.

    Kaith Robinson, the author of the study, said, "I really don't know if the public is ready for this but there are some ways parents can be involved in their kids' education that leads to declines in their academic performance. One of the things that was consistently negative was parents' help with homework." Robinson suggested that may be because parents themselves struggle to understand the task." They may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learnt it themselves, but they're still offering advice."

    Robinson assessed parental involvement performance and found one of the most damaging things a parent could do was to punish their children for poor marks. In general, about 20% of parental involvement was positive, about 45% negative and the rest statistically insignificant.

    Common sense suggests it was a good thing for parents to get involved because "children with good academic success do have involved parents ", admitted Robinson. But he argued that this did not prove parental involvement was the root cause of that success." A big surprise was that Asian-American parents whose kids are doing so well in school hardly involved. They took a more reasonable approach, conveying to their children how success at school could improve their lives."

    Liverpool, my hometown, is a special city. It is so unique that in 2004 it became a World Heritage（遗产）Site.

    I recently returned to my home city and my first stop was at a museum on the River Mersey. Blanketed in mist（薄雾），Victorian architecture rose from the banks of the river, responded to the sounds of sea-birds, and appeared unbelievably charming. When I headed toward the centre, I found myself surrounded by buildings that mirror the best palaces of Europe. It is not hard to imagine why, on first seeing the city, most visitors would be overpowered by the beauty of the noble buildings, which are solid signs of Liverpool's history.

    As if to stress its cultural role, Liverpool has more museums and galleries than most cities in Britain. At Walker Art Gallery, I was told that it has the best collections of Victorian paintings in the world, and is the home of modern art in the north of England. However, culture is more than galleries. Liverpool offers many music events. As Britain's No. 1 music city, it has the biggest city music festival in Europe, and its musicians are famous all over the world. Liverpool is also well-known for its football and other sports events. Every year, the Mersey River Festival attracts thousands of visitors, making the city a place of wonder.

    As you would expect from such a city, there are restaurants serving food from around the world. When my trip was about to complete, I chose to rest my legs in Liverpool's famous Philharmonic pub（酒馆）. It is a monument to perfection, and a heritage attraction itself.

    Being a World Heritage Site, my home city is certainly a place of “outstanding universal value”. It is a treasure house with plenty of secrets for the world to explore.

    Chinese writer and translator Yang Jiang died early on May 25, 2016 in Beijing at age 104. The longest-living Chinese woman writer, she was known for her modest, subtle and witty writing style.

    Yang became a household name in China for her novels, essays, plays and translated works. Her most popular novel, Baptism, describing a group of intellectuals (知识分子) adjusting to a new society in the early 1950s, has been translated into French and English.

    Yang began learning Spanish in 1959 at age 48, and started to translate Don Quixote in 1962. She was the first to translate Don Quixote into Chinese. The work was stopped twice due to the "cultural revolution". She completed it in 1976, and the Chinese edition was published in 1978 and has sold more than 1 million copies. In that year, the Spanish king and queen visited China, and then-leader Deng Xiao-ping gave the royal couple Yang's translation as a gift. Yang was received by Deng at the Great Hall of the People. While shaking hands, Deng asked her when she had completed the translation. "It's just published," she replied, having no time to tell the full story.

    She was married to Qian Zhongshu, a well-known scholar and author of the best-selling novel Fortress Besieged. Yang's memoir about her family, The Three of Us, written after her husband and daughter died, in 1998 and 1997 respectively, was translated into German.

    Yang never stopped writing. At 94, she started writing the book Walking onto the Edge of Life to reflect on her life. It won China's top book award in 2007. At 100, she was still writing articles for newspapers.

    Vincent Van Gogh was the son of a pastor (牧师) in Holland. Around his early twenties he decided to become an artist. He felt that color was his main influence and he used it to express himself. The way he painted was very unusual during the late 1800s because he paid much attention to colorful abstract art. Van Gogh had many paintings that have changed the way we look at art. His paintings weren't popular during his lifetime because of an illness that was possibly a mental disorder. However, they are now considered to be the most popular forms of art in the world today. In what ways can we appreciate his paintings?

    Learn about the artistic style of expressionism. In Van Gogh's artwork, the style that he used was expressionism, which was the only one of this kind compared to other paintings.

    Look for key symbols that would help you understand his artwork better such as the background of the objects.

    Try to understand the artist's aims. You can do this by watching the use of colors, perspectives, and the subject. Knowing the artist's aims, you will be able to understand why he created the work.

    Take what you have learned from the artwork and put it in your feelings to see how it affects you and is related to you. This will allow you to make a connection with the artist.

    Microsoft announced this week that its facial-recognition system is now more accurate in identifying people of color, touting (吹嘘)its progress at tackling one of the technology's biggest biases (偏见).

    But critics, citing Microsoft's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly seized on how that improved technology might be used. The agency contracts with Microsoft for cloud-computing tools that the tech giant says is largely limited to office work but can also include face recognition.

    Columbia University professor Alondra Nelson tweeted, "We must stop confusing 'inclusion' in more 'diverse' surveillance (监管)systems with justice and equality."

    Facial-recognition systems more often misidentify people of color because of a long-running data problem: The massive sets of facial images they train on skew heavily toward white men. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study this year of the face-recognition systems designed by Microsoft, IBM and the China-based Face++ found that facial-recognition systems consistently giving the wrong gender for famous women of color including Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Shirley Chisholm, the first black female member of Congress.

    The companies have responded in recent months by pouring many more photos into the mix, hoping to train the systems to better tell the differences among more than just white faces. IBM said Wednesday it used 1 million facial images, taken from the photo-sharing site Flickr, to build the "world's largest facial data-set" which it will release publicly for other companies to use.

    IBM and Microsoft say that allowed its systems to recognize gender and skin tone with much more precision. Microsoft said its improved system reduced the error rates for darker-skinned men and women by "up to 20 times," and reduced error rates for all women by nine times.

    Those improvements were heralded(宣布)by some for taking aim at the prejudices in a rapidly spreading technology, including potentially reducing the kinds of false positives that could lead police officers misidentify a criminal suspect.

    But others suggested that the technology's increasing accuracy could also make it more marketable. The system should be accurate, "but that's just the beginning, not the end, of their ethical obligation," said David Robinson, managing director of the think tank Upturn.

    At the center of that debate is Microsoft, whose multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE came under fire amid the agency's separation of migrant parents and children at the Mexican border.

    In an open letter to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella urging the company to cancel that contract, Microsoft workers pointed to a company blog post in January that said Azure Government would help ICE "accelerate recognition and identification." "We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits," the letter said.

    A Microsoft spokesman, pointing to a statement last week from Nadella, said the company's "current cloud engagement" with ICE supports relatively anodyne(温和的)office work such as "mail, calendar, massaging and document management workloads." The company said in a statement that its facial-recognition improvements are "part of our going work to address the industry-wide and societal issues on bias."

    Criticism of face recognition will probably expand as the technology finds its way into more arenas, including airports, stores and schools. The Orlando police department said this week that it would not renew its use of Amazon. com's Rekognition system.

    Companies "have to acknowledge their moral involvement in the downstream use of their technology,"

    Robinson said. "The impulse is that they're going to put a product out there and wash their hands of the consequences. That's unacceptable."