Augusto Esquivel is a sculptor who, in his own words, is “crazy with comparisons of reality and potential and the balance between them.” Perhaps the best example of what he's talking about are his most famous creations: the suspended(悬挂的) button sculptures.

    Made entirely from buttons hanging on various lengths of string, Esquivel's sculptures are made to look like common objects: a piano, a gumball machine, and even a toilet. If it wasn't for the clear string hanging above, these objects, these sculptures, would look solid, yet you can put your hands right through them. The process starts with him deciding on a subject and setting the acrylic （丙烯酸树脂）from where the buttons are being suspended. He buys buttons of different shapes and sizes, paints them with spray paint, and carefully hangs them. After that, it's a manner of hanging each individual button, which takes a lot of time. For his piano, for example, he individually hung over 60 pounds worth of tiny buttons.

    Esquivel's sculptures, while mostly housed inside art galleries, perfectly capture one of the main principles of street art: something that is eye-catching and something that invites interaction. Often the best sculptures outside the art galleries aren't the ones behind guards and fencing, but the ones people can go right up to and touch. In Vancouver, a series of laughing old men are attracting people for pictures and to just generally hang around, but the people who simply walk by and see the sculptures almost always leave with a smile on their face. That's good street art: it draws the viewer in rather than relying on a gallery to draw in an audience and point them to certain pieces.

    Esquivel's art is not only a presentation of talent, something that mentions larger philosophical questions, like the ones he stated above, but also just the right combination of interesting idea and painstaking work. One can look at his work in a critical way, or simply appreciate his idea and execution(艺术品的制作).

    Students taking Georgia Tech's online Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence course received some surprising news. Jill Watson one of the nine teaching assistants(TAs) that had helped them finish the challenging course for the past five months was not a ‘‘she'' but an “it”—an intelligent robot!

    Watson is the brainchild of Ashok Goel, who teaches the popular online course. The Professor-of Computer and Cognitive Science in the School of Interactive Computing came up with the idea as a way to deal with a number of questions posed by students in the online forums(论坛). According to Goel, every time the course is offered, the 300 or so students that enroll post over 10,000 questions which are often repetitive. This led Goel to wonder if a smart robot would handle the questions which require standard responses.

    Having worked' with IBM's Watson technology platform in the, the professor knew it would be ideal for his artificial TA: Jill Watson. The artificial intelligence system that uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze large amounts of data has even been cleverer than human competitors on the television show. It would therefore easily be able to handle routine questions that required little “thinking”.

    The professor and his team of graduate students began by populating Jill's memory with 40,000 questions and answers from past terms. Then came the testing stage. At first, Jill was not very good and often gave strange answers. It often got stuck on certain keywords. By the end of the semester, Jill had attained enough knowledge and skills to participate in forums without any management from Goel, or the other assistants.

    When her five daughters were young. Helene An always told them that there was strength in unity（团结）. To show this, she held up one chopstick, representing one person. Then she easily broke it into two pieces. Next, she tied several chopsticks together, representing a family. She showed the girls it was hard to break the tied chopsticks. This lesson about family unity stayed with the daughters as they grew up.

    Helene An and her family own a large restaurant business in California. However, when Helene and her husband Danny left their home in Vietnam in 1975, they didn't have much money. They moved their family to San Francisco. There they joined Danny's mother, Diana, who owned a small Italian sandwich shop. Soon afterwards, Helene and Diana changed the sandwich shop into a small Vietnamese restaurant. The five daughters helped in the restaurant when they were young. However. Helene did not want her daughters to always work in the family business because she thought it was too hard.

    Eventually（最终）the girls all graduated from college and went away to work for themselves, but one by one, the daughters returned to work in the family business. They opened new restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even though family members sometimes disagreed with each other, they worked together to make the business successful. Daughter Elizabeth explains. “Our mother taught us that to succeed we must have unity, and to have unity we must have peace. Without the strength of the family, there is no business.”

    Their expanding business became a large corporation（企业） in 1996, with three generations of An working together. Now the An' corporation makes more than ＄20 million each year. Although they began with a small restaurant, they had big dreams, and they worked together. Now they are a big success.

    Apps such as Snapchat already give users the ability to add dog ears, colorful hats and other images onto smart phone photos. Virtual(虚拟的)mirrors are a little different. They are designed to let users see what they would look like wearing something that they might want to buy, such as eyeglasses and earrings.

    A smart mirror is an app that turns the screen of a smart phone or other mobile device (装置) into a mirror, using its camera. As users look at the image(影像), the app will make it appear as if they are wearing the object. These smart mirror Apps are becoming popular among retail(零售的))businesses, which want to get people into their stores.

    Peter Johnson is with FaceCake Marketing Technologies. He said, “Virtual try-on off the ability to try on a great many objects, many more than they would be able to try on if were no such kind of App.” Recently, Johnson showed how an app called Dangle works. It lets store customers try on different earrings(耳环)without touching a single pair Dangle can be used on a computer. It uses the app's facial recognition technology to make it appear as if the user is wearing earrings. The earrings in the image appear almost real.

With Dangle, retailers can show customers all of their earrings in a short period of time—something almost impossible without technology. There are other good reasons to use the app. Trying-on goods with the virtual mirror means there is nothing to damage, lose or at risk of being stolen.

    Alec Gefrides is with the American technology company Intel. “We always hear about the big store closings,” said Gefrides. “But Intel sees technology becoming more important in providing customers with a better experience.”

    "Hey, Bruno! Great to see you again, man!" Zeca shouted. "Come over here and meet the boys." But before Bruno could move he was frisked by two guards. He cringed as the men searched his body for hidden guns, knives or other weapons.

    "He's clean, boss," one of the men shouted out.

    Zeca introduced all the members of his gang, including the man who worked inside the printer's who was going to steal the exams. He then explained all the details of the plan. It seemed foolproof and nothing could go wrong.

    They all shook hands and quickly left.

    Bruno's heart was beating fast. He was anxious to get away from the gang and phone Clara. He raced down the hill. Then he stopped at the bottom and looked behind him. It was clear, no one was following him. He took out his phone and called Clara.

    "Hey, Clara. Listen." He was out of breath, panting heavily. "Everything went according to plan. To my plan, of course, not Zeca's!" he added, laughing excitedly.

……

    "This is amazing!" the police officer said, smiling broadly, as he looked at Bruno and Clara, who were sitting in front of him at the police station. "Well done! How did you manage to come up with such a brilliant idea?"

    "Thanks. I guess it was kind of clever." Bruno answered, acknowledging the compliment with a polite smile. He felt slightly embarrassed. "Believe it or not, the idea just popped into my head while I was taking a shower. I remembered I saw an advert once on the Internet for special spy-camera sunglasses. They have a tiny, hidden, built-in video recorder. Here they're only used by detectives and law enforcement agencies, but anybody can buy them on the Internet."

    When Bruno talked to Clara before his meeting with Zeca's gang, they both agreed it would be wrong to steal the exams, and help Zeca sell them to other people. But Bruno had worked out an ingenious plan to dounle-cross Zeca and stay out of trouble himself.

    First of all, he had wisely agreed to go along with Zeca's plan, and go to the meeting with the gang of thieves. When he arrived at the hideout, they frisked him for hidden weapons, but no one ever imagined that Bruno was wearing sunglasses with a tiny built-in camera. Bruno had secretly videoed the entire meeting, making sure he had taken close-up shots of all the gang members. Their conversations with all the details of their plan had also been recorded.

    Then, as soon as he was sure that he wasn't being followed, he phoned Clara and together they went to the police with the camera and told them the whole story.

    "Thanks to this evidence we can finally catch Zeca and his entire gang red-handed," the police officer continued. "But we need you and Clara to help us. It's very important that you both continue to act as if nothing has happened. You must play along with whatever Zeca wants. We'll be following your every move from now on. Just do everything Zeca tells you to, OK?"

    The police then went to the printer's and spoke to the owner. He agreed to co-operate and they installed some hidden cameras there, too. The day of the theft they saw the thief copy the exam papers on Closed Circuit Television(闭路电视), but they did not arrest him yet.

    Then they waited until Zeca made the next move.

    While every dog owner knows their dogs can read their moods perfectly, scientists have always been a little doubtful. Now thanks to some researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, we finally have some convincing evidence.

    For their study, biologist Corson Miller and his team exposes eleven selected dogs to digital images of women that were either angry or happy. Half the dogs were rewarded for touching the screen when shown a happy face, while the other half got their treat for selecting those that appeared angry.

    Interestingly, the dogs were not provided with the entire face. Some dogs were shown only upper halves while the others observed lower halves. That's because the scientists believe humans show their emotions on their entire face.

    After some training like how to recognize small differences like the wrinkles between the eyes or the changes in their shape that accompany the happy or angry expressions, the dogs were mostly able to identify the correct expression not only on a familiar face but on a strange face. The researchers concluded the dogs were smart enough to read human emotions.

    They also found those being trained to read angry expressions took a longer time to learn. They guess it may be because dogs find angry faces disgusting, causing them to withdraw quickly. However, once the smart dogs realized they were getting rewarded, the trepidation seemed to disappear. In fact, the dogs had such a good time playing the computer "game" That scientists had a hard time keeping them away from the touch screens after the study was completed.

    The researchers also noticed only dogs with a male owner had a harder time understanding the expressions correctly. Since the touch-screen models were all females, this confirmed what has been observed in previous studies dogs are more efficient at reading facial expressions of people that are the same gender as their owner.