Social media are a powerful tool, and the go-green movement is becoming popular in the social media world. A new Facebook app is exercising this power to help people get back to work or even find their dream job---Hire My Friend.

With an unemployment(失业)rate of 9.7% in January 2010, there were nearly 15 million Americans out of work, of whom 6. 3 million had been jobless for 27 or more weeks. It is likely that these people have used the most traditional methods to find a job. But now it's time to get creative, and Hire My Friend can help people do that.

However, as you can see, the name of the app is Hire My Friend, not Hire Me, so it is designed for you to help a friend get a job. One of the most important parts of getting a job is who you know. Reach out to your network of friends and you will find more chances than applying for a job in a newspaper advertisement(广告). As a writer, I know that networking is the key to opening doors and getting new opportunities.

When you place the Hire My Friend app on your Facebook page, you can present your friend's job-related facts and then this information is shown through a live feed post(实时发布). Then your entire network of Facebook friends can see what your friend has to offer. In addition to the app itself, the Hire My Friend Facebook page has lots of useful resources for those who want to find a job. One tab(标签)has the latest jobs that are being posted on Twitter, another powerful social media tool. Another tab has a list of job searching blogs and major job search sites for the jobless. The developer of the app encourages people never to give up. If you know of someone who is out of work, I encourage you to try the Hire My Friend app.

Fears of unemployment brought by robots are on the rise, for tasks traditionally performed by humans are increasingly performed by using robots. The declining cost of machines threatens low-skill jobs and routine tasks. But actually, technology can be a job creator. With increases in efficiency brought about by digital technology, business can expand, digital platforms can create entirely new jobs and businesses can reach out to rural markets.

First, technology decreases the costs of doing business, and changes the geography of jobs. Digital platforms have enabled numbers of businesses to form in underdeveloped rural areas, which offers farmers more job chances.

Second, technology creates more opportunities for the job hunters with mixed skills. Wages for routine, job-specific skills are declining, while the skills that cannot be replaced by robots have been increasing. Although robots can recognize human faces, they can’t read their mind. Earnings are higher for those who have a combination of these skills.

Third, digital technology has changed the terms of work. Rather than “standard” long-term contracts, digital technology has given rise to more short-term jobs, often via online work platform. These jobs make certain kinds of work more accessible and flexible.

How will these changes play out in the post pandemic? It is likely that the pandemic will strengthen these pre-existing trends. “Platform companies” are dominating markets even more. We are already seeing Amazon and Alibaba getting even bigger and stronger. Companies will invest more to conduct business over the Internet to be more adaptable to potential lockdowns ( 隔离 ). The pandemic has pushed society to welcome technology, which is no longer an option but a necessity. With the right steps and actions, businesses and governments can take the crisis as an opportunity to build for the future.

No one can say whether human-like robots will have a sweet dream, but they will almost certainly need periods of rest that offer benefits like what sleep provides for living brains, according to new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

“We study spiking neural networks (尖峰神经网络), which are systems that learn much as living brains do,” said Yijing Watkins, a computer scientist from LANL. “We trained a neuromorphic processor in a way how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development.” Watkins and her research team found that the network simulations (模拟) became unstable after continuous periods of unattended learning. When they exposed the networks to states that are analogous to what living brains experience during sleep, stability was recovered. “It was as though we were giving the neural networks a good night’s rest,” said Watkins.

The discovery came about as the research team worked to develop neural networks that are as close as how humans and other biological systems learn to see. The group initially struggled with stabilizing simulated neural networks undergoing unattended dictionary training, which involves classifying objects without providing examples to compare them to. The researchers exposed the networks to an artificial simulation of sleep as nearly a final effort to stabilize them. They experimented with various types of noise. The best results came when they used waves of so-called Gaussian noise. These waves can make sure that the neural networks keep stable.

The group’s next goal is to apply their algorithm (算法) to Intel’s Loihi, a product which uses spiking neural networks to work. They hope allowing Loihi to sleep from time to time will enable it to stably process information from a camera in real time. If it can confirm the need for sleep in artificial brains, we can probably expect the same to be true of human-like robots and other intelligent machines that may come about in the future.