How has technology helped communication? 【小题1】 It’s unbelievable to look back and see   how much easier communication has gotten over the years. Communication tools offer one of the most significant examples of how quickly technology has changed.

【小题2】 However, to connect with someone in society today, nowadays you have many more good choices at your fingertips. You can send them a message on social media, text them, video chat, email, or put a call through.

These new methods can help you keep in touch with loved ones, especially if you’re aging in place or living alone. Video chat helps caregivers check on seniors who may not need continual check-ups in person. Social media is a great way to keep in touch in general. You are even   allowed to see what your loved ones are doing through the photos and updates they post.

Who hasn’t heard of Facebook, Twitter, or Skype?【小题3】 Even if you don’t use these platforms, they’re a part of everyday life and not going away anytime soon. Regardless of your location, messages via social media get delivered on these platforms at the same rate and speed whether the recipient is right beside you or on the other side of the globe. You can also send voice messages through these platforms, and it is delivered in nanoseconds.

Communication has even progressed beyond mobile devices and personal computers. We can now send messages through tablets, voice assistants, smartwatches, and more. The smartwatch is a relatively new technology that owns almost all the features of smartphones in a convenient touch-screen watch. You can receive notifications (通知), track your activity or set alarms.【小题4】

More than a billion people around the world have smart phones, almost all of which come with navigation (导航) apps such as Google or Apple Maps. This raises the questions we meet with any technology: what skills are we losing? What abilities are we gaining?

Talking with people who’re good at finding their way around or using paper maps, I often hear lots of frustration with digital maps. North/South direction gets messed up, and you can see only a small sections at a time.

But consider what digital navigation aids have meant for someone like me. Despite being a frequent traveler, I’m so terrible at finding my way that I still use Google Maps every day in the small town where I have lived for many years. What looks like an imperfect product to some has been a significant expansion of my own abilities.

Part of the problem is that reading paper maps requires specific skills. There is nothing natural about them. In many developed nations, including the U.S., one expects street names and house numbers to be meaningful references, and instructions such as “go north for three blocks and then west ” make sense. In Istanbul, in contrast, where I grew up, none of those hold true. For one thing, the locals rarely use street names. Why bother when a government or a military group might change them again? Besides, the city is full of winding, ancient alleys that meet newer avenues at many angles. Instructions as simple as “go north”would require a helicopter or a bulldozer.

Let’s come back to my original questions. While we often lose some skills after leaving the work to technology, it may also allow us to expand our abilities. Consider the calculator: I don’t doubt our arithmetic skills might have dropped a bit as the little machines became common, but calculations that once boring and tricky are now much more straightforward and one can certainly do more complex calculations more confidently.

We often share images or thoughts on social networks. Now, researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) have developed an algorithm (算法) that can analyse the content people post online.

According to William Glasser’s Choice Theory, there are five basic needs: Survival, Power, Freedom, Belonging and Fun. “These needs even have an influence on the images we choose to upload to our Instagram page,” explained Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi, a researcher at the UOC.

The research team has spent two years working on a deep-learning model that identifies the five needs described by Glasser. For the study, which has been published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, the researchers analyzed 86 Instagram profiles, in both Spanish and Persian (波斯语), and developed an algorithm to identify the content of the images and categorize textual content by assigning different labels.

Glasser’s theory argues that each choice users make on social media does not respond to just one basic need — the multi-label approach of this study helps to clear it up. Dehshibi uses an example to explain this: “Imagine that a cyclist is riding up a mountain, and at the top, he can choose between sharing a selfie (自拍照) and a group photo. If he chooses the selfie, we perceive a need for Power, but if he chooses the other option, we can conclude that the person is not only looking for Fun but also a way to satisfy his need for Belonging.”

“Studying data from social networks that belong to non-English-speaking users could help build inclusive and diverse tools and models for addressing mental health problems in people with diverse cultural backgrounds,” Dehshibi adds.

The research team believe that their study can help improve preventive measures, ranging from identification to improved treatment when a person has been diagnosed (诊断) with a mental health disorder.

Back in 2019, University of Vermont researchers developed an artificial-intelligence-based system that can detect signs of anxiety in the speech patterns of young children. Meanwhile, computer scientists from the University of Alberta, Canada, have developed algorithms that can detect and identify depression through people’s voices.