"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."—Albert Einstein

If you have a kid with special needs in the school system, chances are you have come across that saying hanging on a classroom wall. My five-year-old daughter Syona has cerebral palsy (a medical condition affecting someone's control over their movement ) and it means, combined with her communication challenges and sight problems, that standard assessments (and by "standard", I mean the ones used to assess kids with special needs ) aren't always an accurate measure of her abilities.

By now you have probably heard about Chris Ulmer, the 26-year-old teacher in Jacksonville, Florida, who starts his special education class by calling up each student individually to give them much admiration and a high-five (a gesture of greeting or congratulation). I couldn't help but be reminded of Syona's teacher and how she supports each kid in a very similar way. Ulmer recently shared a video of his teaching experience. "I have seen their confidence and self-worth increase rapidly, " he said. All I could think was: How lucky these students are to have such inspirational teachers.

    Syona's teacher has an attitude that can best be summarized in one word: awesome. Her teacher doesn't focus on what can't be done—she focuses on what can be done. Over the past several months, my husband Dilip and I have seen Syona's confidence increase tenfold. She uses words she wouldn't have thought of using before. She recently told me about her classmate's trip to Ecuador and was very proud when I understood her on the first try.

    I actually wonder what the influence would be if we did something similar to what Ulmer does with his students in our home. We've recently started our day by reminding each other of the good qualities we all possess. If we are reminded of our strengths on a regular basis, we will become increasingly confident about progress and success.

    Ulmer's reach as a teacher goes far beyond the walls of his classroom. In fact, he teaches all of us to take a moment and truly appreciate the strengths of an important person in our lives.

    Can technology improve your trip? Meet Judy Williams. When she and her husband recently checked into Blu Hotel in Zurich, a clerk asked them to sign the dotted line on a room rate hundreds of dollars higher than their online offer.

    “It was not a cheap stay,” says Williams, a lawyer from Billings, Mont. But it became more of one after her husband fired up the Booking.com app he'd used to book their room on his smart phone. “As soon as we showed him the cost, he honored it,” Williams says.

    Technology may create challenges for travelers but it can also solve them. It's more than making sure of a hotel cost. The latest Booking.com can help users select hotels by location, make a secure booking and view the confirmed (已确认的) cost so they never need to re-discuss their hotel price.

    Another pain point for travelers is traffic that eats away precious vacation time. There's a new app called Commute which is aimed at users who have to make the same trip every day. But if you're headed to Los Angeles or Honolulu, where visitors can easily get stuck in hours of heavy traffic, Commute can help.         

    Just input basic information about your destination and expected leaving time, and the app will start sending you traffic information 15 minutes before you leave. Testing Commute proved to be a challenge for me, because my home address is about 900 miles from my place of work. But if you have only a short distance to travel through a heavily populated area, you can use Commute to avoid traffic jams.

    Another source of travel-related problems is money. That's particularly true when you're dealing with a foreign currency. The latest Travel Money Tracker helps travelers prevent currency mix-ups. It immediately changes a country's native currency to yours, so you know exactly how much that Espresso (浓咖啡) in Milan costs in dollars. It can also warn you when you're overspending, which can sometimes be a problem when you're on vacation. The only catch, of course, is that you have to remember to record all your purchases.

    Taken together, these apps solve some of the most common travel problems. But not all of them. Some things, no smart phone can fix, which means I get to keep my job – for now at least.

    On a cold winter day, many years ago, a French art teacher named Pierre Chevalier got on a train in Lyon to go to Paris. When he started his journey, he didn't know that it was the beginning of almost 40 years of accidents and near death experiences.

    During the journey, the train fell into an icy river, killing 12 passengers. Chevalier managed to swim back to the river bank. He only had a broken leg.

    Two years later, Chevalier was on a plane from Paris to Moscow when a door suddenly opened and he fell out. A few minutes later, the plane crashed(坠毁); 27 people were killed. Chevalier was so lucky that he landed in a haystack(干草堆).

    A few years later, he was hit by a bus, but again had no serious injuries. Then a year after that, he was driving on a mountain road when he saw a truck coming straight at him. He drove the car off the road, jumped out, landed in a tree—and watched his car fall 100 metres down the mountain.

    “There are two ways you can look at it,” Chevalier said. “I'm either the world's unluckiest man, or the world's luckiest.” When a reporter asked Chevalier what he thought, he chose the “luckiest” one.

    Two years ago, aged 71, Chevalier bought his first lottery ticket(彩票) in 50 years and won more than 2 million.

    After this, a TV company in America said they wanted him to make an advertisement. At first he accepted, but then he changed his mind. Chevalier said he wouldn't fly to Los Angeles for the filming, because he didn't want to push his luck. Who knows? If he had accepted the invitation, maybe he would have had another accident. But Mr Chevalier is a lucky man. If he'd had another accident, he probably would have survived that too!

    Many leading AI researchers think that in a matter of decades, artificial intelligence will be able to do not merely some of our jobs, but all of our jobs, forever transforming life on Earth.

    The reason why many reject this as science fiction is that we've traditionally thought of intelligence as something mysterious that can only exist in biological organisms, especially humans. But such an idea is unscientific.

    From my point of view as a physicist and AI researcher, intelligence is simply a certain kind of information-processing performed by elementary particles(基本粒子) moving around, and there is no law of physics that says one can't build machines more intelligent than us in all ways. This suggests that we've only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg and that there is an amazing potential to unlock the full intelligence that is potential in nature and use it to help humanity.

    If we get it right, the upside is huge. Since everything we love about civilization is the product of intelligence, amplifying(扩大) our own intelligence with AI has the potential to solve tomorrow's toughest problems. For example, why risk our loved ones dying in traffic accidents that self-driving cars could prevent or dying of cancers that AI might help us find cures for? Why not increase productivity through automation and use AI to accelerate our research and development of affordable sustainable(可持续的) energy?

    I'm optimistic that we can develop rapidly with advanced AI as long as we win the race between the growing power of our technology and the knowledge with which we manage it. But this requires giving up our outdated concept of learning from mistakes. That helped us win the race with less powerful technology: We messed up with fire and then invented fire extinguishers, and we messed up with cars and then invented seat belts. However, it's an awful idea for more powerful technologies, such as nuclear weapons or superintelligent AI—where even a single mistake is unacceptable and we need to get things right the first time.

A pair of researchers with Leibniz University of Hannover has demonstrated the means by which robots might be programmed to experience something similar to pain in animals. As part of their demonstration at last week's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Stockholm, Johannes Kuehn and Sami Haddaddin showed how pain might be used in robots, by interacting with a BioTac fingertip sensor on the end of a Kuka robotic arm that had been programmed to react differently to differing amounts of pain.

The idea of developing an artificial robot nervous system may seem contrary to all expectations, but Kuehn says doing so is important in the same way that it is good for humans to feel pain. "Pain is a system that protects us, "says Kuchn. "When we avoid the source of pain, it helps us not get hurt. "So when robots can feel and react to pain, they will become smart enough to avoid it. The more dangerous the robot registers the threat to be, the faster it will withdraw and avoid the source of danger. Additionally, Kuehn and Haddadin say humans working alongside robots that feel pain, especially those in heavy machinery, will be protected around them.

They have tested out some of their ideas using a robotic arm with a fingertip sensor that can detect pressure and temperature. It uses a robot-tissue patch(小片)modeled on human skin to decide how much pain should be felt and thus what action to take. For example, if the arm feels light pain, it slowly withdraws until the pain stops, and then returns to its original task; severe pain, meanwhile, causes the arm to go into a kind of lockdown mode until it can get help from a human operator.

Such robots are likely to raise a host of questions, of course, if they become more common —if a robot acts the same way a human does when touching a hot plate, are we to believe it is truly experiencing pain? Only time will tell of course, but one thing that is evident, Kuehn and Haddadin's work could lead to robots that are more human-like than ever.