The 2016 Rio Olympic Games have come to an end. Without doubt, many Chinese sports fans sat in front of the TV and cheered our athletes on, hoping that they would get as many gold medals as possible.

    But sometimes our desire for gold medals can result in the sadness of failure. When Liu Xiang, China's track hero, pulled out of the Beijing Olympics due to injury, he greatly disappointed many Chinese sports fans.

    But things are different now. In the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, we saw a healthier and more lenient Chinese attitude toward the sports people, fully in line with the Olympic spirit.

    China didn't win any gold medals on the first day. But, instead of criticizing the athletes who failed to finish on top of the podium(领奖台), the majority of fans were happy with their efforts. “Reacting in the right way when an athlete misses out on gold shows the maturity of a person, and is also a challenge for a country to face up to in the process of development,” commented CRI.

    Swimmer Fu Yuanhui won fans' hearts, even if she only won a bronze medal in the 100m backstroke final. Her fans on her Sina Weibo micro blog have increased 100,000 to over 6 million. Many sports fans appreciated her straightforward character and attitude toward competition.

    “The warm support from Internet users shows that public attitude toward competitive sport and the Olympics have gotten to a higher level,” said an article in the People's Daily.

    French writer Frantz Fanon once said, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. ” Since the world changes every day, so does our language.

    More than 300 new words and phrases have recently made it into the online OxfordDictionary, and in one way or another they are all reflections of today's changing world.

    After a year that was politically unstable, it's not hard to understand the fact that people's political views are one of the main drives of our expanding vocabulary. One example is “clicktivism”, a compound of “click” and “activism”. It refers to “armchair activists”—people who support a political or social cause, but only show their support from behind a computer or smartphone. And “otherize” is a verb for “other” that means to alienate (使疏远)people who are different from ourselves—whether that be different skin color, religious belief or sexuality.

    Lifestyle is also changing our language. For example, “fitspiration” —a compound of fit and inspiration—refers to a person or thing that encourages one to exercise and stay fit and healthy.

    The phrase “climate refugee”—someone who is forced to leave their home due to climate change—reflects people's concern for the environment.

    According to Stevenson, social media was the main source for the new expressions. “People feel much freer to coin their own words these days, ” he said.

    But still, not all newly-invented words get the chance to make their way into a mainstream (主流的) dictionary. If you want to create your own hit words, Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionaries head of content development,  suggests that you should not only make sure that they are expressive (有表现力的) and meaningful, but also have an attractive sound so that people will enjoy saying them out loud.

    No one likes to make mistakes. But a new study says organizations learn more from their failures than from their successes, and keep that knowledge longer.

    One of the researchers was Vinit Desai, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver Business School. He worked with Peter Madsen from the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University in Utah.

    They did not find much long-term "organizational learning" from success. It is possible, they say. But Professor Desai says they found that knowledge gained from failure lasts for years. He says organizations should treat failures as a learning opportunity and not try to ignore them.

    The study looked at companies and organizations that launch satellites and other space vehicles. Professor Desai compared two shuttle flights. In two thousand two, a piece of insulating (隔热的) material broke off during launch and damaged a rocket on the Atlantis. Still the flight was considered a success. Then in early two thousand three, a piece of insulation struck the Columbia during launch. This time, the shuttle broke apart on re-entry and the seven crew members died. NASA officials suspended all flights and an investigation led to suggested changes.

    Professor Desai says the search for solutions after a failure can make leaders more open-minded. He points to air-lines as an example of an industry that has learned from failures in the past. He advises organizations to look for useful information in small failures and failures they avoided. He also urges leaders to encourage the open sharing of information. The study appeared in the Academy of management Journal.

    The mistakes we learn from do not have to be our own. We recently asked people on our Facebook page to tell us a time they had done something really silly. Fabricio Cmino wrote: Not long ago I wanted to watch TV, but it wouldn't turn on, so I did everything I could to start it. Thirty minutes later my mum showed up and, passing by, said to me "Did you try plugging it?" "I'm just dusting, Mum!" So she wouldn't notice how dumb I am sometimes!

    Bruno Kanieski da Silva told about a time he looked everywhere for his key. It was in his pocket. He wrote: I always promise I will never do it again, but after a few weeks, where is my wallet? For sure it will be in a very logical place.

    It was many years ago. I was a young dad sitting on the couch reading a fairy tale to my little girl. She sat next to me with her head on my arm as I told the tale. When it came to the end I finished with those famous words: "And they lived happily ever after." As I looked over to her with her wavy(鬈曲的), brown hair and big, innocent eyes I could see the smile on her face and I never wanted it to end. Then it dawned on me that the ending of the book was what I wanted for her. I wanted her to "live happily ever after".

    Still, deep in my heart I knew that this couldn't always be so. I knew that there would be times when her heart was broken. I knew there would be times when she cried in grief and I couldn't comfort her. I knew there would be times when all she felt was fear, sadness, sorrow, and despair. As I stroked her hair and smiled at her I hoped that those times would be brief and that she would have joy in her life more often than not. Living happily ever after, though, seemed out of the question.

    It takes me a lot of years to realize that it is possible to live happily ever after. You just have to do it "one day at a time". Happiness you see isn't some reward that you get at the end of your journey. Happiness isn't something that depends on what life you own. Happiness is something you create in your life choice by choice and day by day.

    The truth is happiness comes when you love. Love is a gift from God. It is love that mends broken hearts. It is love that heals grief. It is love that gives us joy. Choose to "live happily ever after, one day at a time".

5 books I loved in 2018

By Bill Gates

    A great read is the perfect gift and I think everyone could use a few more books in their lives. My book list covers various topics, including an autobiography on learning throughout a life, a deep search on autonomous weapons (武器), a thriller about the fall of a once­promising company and a guide about meditation (冥想)­there's something for everyone.

    The Head space Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe. The book starts with Puddicombe's personal journey from a university student to a Buddhist monk and then becomes an entertaining explainer on how to meditate. If you're thinking about trying mindfulness, this is the perfect introduction.

    Army of None, by Paul Scharre. It's an extremely complicated topic, but Scharre offers clear explanations and presents both the advantages and disadvantages of machine­driven warfare. His fluency with the subject should come as no surprise: he's an ex­soldier who helped draw up the U.S. government's policy on autonomous weapons.

    Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou. Carreyrou gives you the definitive insider's look at the rise and fall of a company. I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the failure of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.

    21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari. I'm a big fan of everything Harari has written, and his latest is no exception. If 2018 has left you stressed out by the state of the world, 21 Lessons offers a helpful framework for processing the news and thinking about the challenges we face.

    Educated, by Tara West over. Tara never went to school or visited a doctor until she left home at 17. I loved this life story of a young woman whose thirst for learning was so strong that she ended up getting a P.h.D. from Cambridge University.

The prodigious ability of our species to rapidly assimilate vocabulary, expanding from a mere 300 lexemes by the tender age of two to an impressive repertoire exceeding 1,000 by the age of four, remains a subject of profound enigma. Certain scholars in the realms of cognitive science and linguistics have posited that the human mind enters the world equipped with innate cognitive predispositions and logical parameters that facilitate this linguistic feat. However, recent advancements in the sphere of machine learning have unveiled the potential for swift acquisition of semantic understanding from sparse data, eschewing the need for preconceived, hardwired assumptions.

An ensemble of researchers has triumphantly honed a rudimentary artificial intelligence construct to correlate visual representations with their corresponding lexical entities, utilizing a mere 61 hours of ambient visual recordings and auditory data—previously amassed from an individual known as Sam during the years 2013 and 2014. Though this represents but a minuscule fraction of a child's developmental chronicle, it transpires that this was sufficiently informative to incite the AI in discerning the significance of select vocables.

These revelations intimate that the process of linguistic acquisition may be more straightforward than hitherto presumed. It is conceivable that the juvenile mind does not necessitate a tailor-made, sophisticated linguistic apparatus to adeptly apprehend the essence of words, posits Jessica Sullivan, an adjunct professor of psychology at Skidmore College. "This is an exceptionally elegant inquiry," she articulates, as it presents corroborative evidence that rudimentary data extracted from a child's perspective is sufficiently abundant to initiate the processes of pattern recognition and lexical assimilation.

The recent scholarly endeavor also illustrates the plausibility of machines emulating the learning modalities inherent to human cognition. Vast linguistic models are typically nurtured on colossal datasets encompassing billions, if not trillions, of lexical permutations. In stark contrast, human beings manage with a significantly reduced informational intake, as articulated by the principal scribe of the study, Wai Keen Vong. With the appropriate genre of data, the chasm separating machine and human learning could be substantially bridged.

Nevertheless, further investigation is warranted in select dimensions of this pioneering research. The savants concede that their findings do not conclusively elucidate the mechanisms by which children amass vocabulary. Additionally, the study's purview was confined to the identification of nouns pertaining to tangible entities.

Despite these limitations, this represents a stride toward a more profound comprehension of our own cognitive faculties, which may ultimately contribute to the enhancement of human pedagogical practices, according to Eva Portelance, a scholar in computational linguistics. She remarks that AI research has the potential to shed light on enigmatic queries about our essence that have persisted over time. "We can harness these paradigms in a salutary manner, to the advantage of scientific discovery and societal progress," Portelance further elaborates.