“Asia's Challenge 2020” Essay Prize

    DESCRIPTION

    What is the most important challenge facing Asia over the next decade? Why? What should be done about it?

The best answer in 3,000 words or less will win a prize of 2,500. Two runners-up will be awarded prizes of 1,000 each. These three prize winners will be invited to Singapore for an expenses-paid awards ceremony. The winning articles will be posted on Time.com.

    PURPOSE

    The main purpose of the essay prize is to generate fresh ideas for tackling key challenges to Asia's continued competitiveness and development, as well as encourage young professionals to make an impact on public policy and business in Asia.

    SELECTION CRITERIA

    The essay will be judged according to creativity, innovation, rigor of research and writing, as well as achievability of idea. It can be focused on one or more areas relevant to Asia, such as macro-economics, business, international relations, trade and investment, education, healthcare, urban development, science and technology, and energy and the environment. The essay must be written in English. It should not have been previously published in English in a publication with broad international circulation.

    CANDIDATE REQUIREMENTS

    The candidate authoring the essay must be under 32years of age as of December 31, 2010. The candidate must be an Asian national.

    SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

    The essay should be submitted electronically to prize@asiabusinesscouncil.Org. by August 31, 2010. Prize winners will be announced in September 2010.

    The submission should contain the candidate's full name, nationality, and month and year of birth. The essay should include a title and word count.

    Staying positive through the cold season could be your best defense against getting ill,a new American study suggests.

    In an experiment that exposed healthy volunteers to a cold or flu virus,researchers found that people with a generally sunny character were less likely to fail ill.The findings,published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, build on evidence that a “positive emotional style” can help ward off the common cold and other illness.

    Researchers believe the reasons may be both objective―as in happiness improving immune function―and subjective―as in happy people being less troubled by a sore throat or runny nose.“People with a positive emotional style may have different immune responses to the virus,” explained lead study author Dr Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.“And when they do get a cold,they may interpret their illness as being less severe.”

    Cohen and his colleagues has found in a previous study that happier people seemed less likely to catch a cold, but some questions remained as to whether the emotional quality itself had the effect.

    For the new study,the researchers had 193 healthy adults complete standard measures of personality qualities, physicals health,and emotional “style”.Those who tended to be happy,energetic and easy –going were judged as having a positive emotional style,while those who were often unhappy,tense,and hostile had a negative style.

    Afterwards,the researchers gave them nose drops containing either a cold virus or a particular flu virus.Over the next six days,the volunteers reported on any aches,pains,sneezing they had,while the researchers collected objective data.Cohen and his colleagues found that happy people were less likely to develop a cold.

    What's more,when happy folks did develop a cold,their symptoms were less severe than expected based on objective measures.

    On the contrary,people with negative characters were not at increased risk of developing a cold based on objective measures,though they did tend to get down about their symptoms.

    “We find that it's really positive emotions that have the big effect,” Cohen said,“not the negative ones.”

    So can a bad-tempered person fight a cold by deciding to be happy?

    A man walked into a small Irish pub and ordered three beers. Bartender was surprised, but he served that man three beers. One hour later the man ordered three beers again. The very next day that man ordered three beers again and drank quietly at a table. This repeated several times and shortly after the people of the town were whispering about the man, who was ordering three beers at once.

    A couple of weeks later, the bartender decided to clear this out and inquired: “I do not want to pry, but could you explain, why do you order three beers all the time?” The man replied: “It seems strange, isn't it? You see, my two brothers live abroad at the moment, one – in France and another – in Italy. We have made an agreement, that every time we go to pub each of us will order extra two beers and it will help keeping up the family bond”.

    Soon all the town have heard about the man's answer and liked it a lot. The man became a local celebrity. Residents of the town were telling this story to newcomers or tourists and even invited them to that pub to look at Three Beer Man.

    However, one day the man came to pub and ordered only two beers, not three as usual. The bartender served him with bad feeling. All that evening the man ordered and drank only two beers. The very next day all the town was talking about this news, some people pray for the soul of one of the brothers, others quietly grieved.

    When the man came to pub the next time and ordered two beers again, the bartender asked him: “I would like to offer condolences to you, due to the death of your dear brother”. The man considered this for a moment and then replied: “Oh, you are probably surprised that I order only two beers now? Well, my two brothers are alive and well. It's just because of my decision. I promised myself to give up drinking.”

    Vinegar makes salad, fries and dumplings taste better, and you can even use it to clean your windows. And now, according to scientists, it may even the planet's population survive climate change.

    Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science （CSRS） in Japan found that growing plants in vinegar makes them more resistant to droughts. This could mean that in the future, worries about climate change affecting the world's supply of food will be much lower. The discovery was made after the researchers studied the Arabidopsis, a plant known for its ability to survive in dry weather. It was found that when the plant was placed in drought﹣like conditions, it produced a chemical called acetate（醋酸盐）﹣the main component of vinegar.

    After discovering this, the scientists experimented further by adding acetate to the soil of other plants, before they stopped giving them water completely. After leaving the plants for 14days, they found that the ones treated with acetate had survived, while the untreated plants had dried up and died.

    It's hoped that this simple method of survival could soon be used to help farmers in dry countries keep their crops alive. "In the experiment, we targeted the staple foods of the world﹣rice, wheat and maize﹣and the basic plant of breeding species, rapeseed（油菜籽）," Jong Myong Kim, co﹣author of the study, told Popular Science magazine.

    Kim also told the magazine he's already been in touch with people all over the world who are interested in trying this simple and cost﹣effective method out for themselves from flower growing companies to amateur gardeners. Although at this point keeping thirsty plants alive isn't as easy as just pouring vinegar over them, Kim said he and his team are working on making the process as simple as possible. "Now we are trying to cooperate with some farmers, and also some companies, to make a method to apply this system, "he said. And for those of us who always forget to ask our neighbors to water our plants when we go away, hopefully this means the end of returning home from a trip to find our favorite flowers have died.

When your boss calls and tells you to send $100,000 to a supplier, be on your toes. It could be a fake call. As if fake emails weren't enough, on the rise now is the deep fake audio (虚假音频) that can be cloned to sound almost real and perfect and is easy to create. "It's on the rise, and something to watch out for," says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, the CEO of a company called Pindrop.

Balasubramaniyan stated during a safety meeting how easy it is to use machine to create sentences that a person probably never said from recorded words. "All you need is five minutes of audio, and you can create fake audio," says Balasubramaniyan. Then, he showed a database (数据库) of voices, typed a sentence, and connected it to a famous people's name on the list. A few seconds later, he clicked "play", and it sounded quite real.

More costly are fake phone calls, where cheaters are able to fake the phone number of real contacts and make calls that result in workers sending off lots of money. He mentioned the example of a United Kingdom energy company in 2019 that got attacked by deep fake audio in a call that asked a worker to send $243,000 to a supplier. Reported by the Wall Street Journal, the worker was directed to pay it within an hour.

Balasubramaniyan says if you were to get that kind of call from a "boss" be doubtful and ask to call back right away to prove authenticity (真实性). Besides this, in his opinion, companies need to use more safety measures for keeping up with deep fake artificial intelligence (AI) that produces phone calls and software to check authenticity versus fake calls. "This is a threat that's waiting to happen," he says. "It's a very small number now, but it's very real."

English businessman Richard Branson made history on July 11, 2021 as he and three other crewmates became the world's first space tourists. The flight was made by a spacecraft named VSS Unity that was built by Branson's company, Virgin Galactic. The flight lasted slightly more than an hour, and took Branson and crew to an altitude（海拔） of 53. 5 miles above the Earth, just a little above the boundary（边界） of space which lies 50 miles above the Earth.

At that height, the atmosphere turns into the black of outer space and the Earth becomes a bent ball of blue. Travelers also exhibit weightlessness as there is no gravity, the force that keeps our bodies walking on the Earth's surface. Therefore, Branson and his fellows were able to float around in VSS Unity while enjoying the views. They were able to do that for three minutes before the spacecraft began its downward journey. It landed back at Virgin Galactic's space port in New Mexico, United States, which is the same place from where it took off 90 minutes ago.

On landing back, Branson said, "I have dreamt of this moment since I was a kid but honestly, nothing could prepare you for the view of the Earth from space. It was just magical. I'm just taking it all in, and it's unreal."

July 11's flight is the start of space tourism for one and all. In early 2022, customers who could afford a ticket for a quarter of a million dollars could line up for a seat on a trip to space. And guess what—they will have a choice of spacecraft. Jeff Bezos, who owns a famous company, is all set to launch himself into space on July 20 on board a spacecraft built by his new branch company Blue Origin. Blue Origin will also carry tourists to space.