China launches Shenzhou 13 astronauts on historic mission to new space station

The nation’s Shenzhou 13 spacecraft was launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert today , rising off the pad (发射台) atop (在……顶上) a Long March 2F rocket at 00:23 Oct. 16 local time.

Shenzhou 13 and its three passengers—commander Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu—are headed toward Tianhe, the core module (舱) of the Tiangong space station that China is building in low Earth orbit.

After reaching orbit, Zhai reported the crew was doing fine and all systems were nominal .

Tianhe has only been aloft (在高空中) since April, but the module has already hosted one crewed visit—Shenzhou 12, which was launched in June and returned to Earth last month. The three-month mission was China’s longest-duration human spaceflight to date, but Shenzhou 13 willwreckthat record, racking up six months aboard Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”).

Shenzhou 13 will break new ground in another way as well: Wang will become the first woman to live aboard the core module. (The Shenzhou 12 crewmembers were all men.)

This is the second spaceflight for the 41-year-old Wang. She also flew on Shenzhou 10, which visited China’s Tiangong 1 prototype (雏形；原型) space lab for two weeks in 2013.

Zhai, 55, is also a spaceflight veteran (经验丰富的人), having served on the Shenzhou 7 mission in 2008. During that three-day flight, he conducted China’s first-ever spacewalk.

Shenzhou 13 is the first spaceflight for Ye, who is 41.

Zhai, Wang and Ye will be busy during their six months in orbit. They’ll spend a lot of time testing and validating (证实；确认) technologies that will allow China to finish construction of the new space station, which is called Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”). That station will consist of three modules; the other two are expected to launch toward the 54-foot-long (16.6 meters) Tianhe next year.

The Rockford police chief and some city officials want to put video cameras in all 100 police cars. They think this will reduce the number of lawsuits (诉讼) filed against the city. In the last five years, Rockford has paid out more than five million dollars to settle about four lawsuits.

The chief said, “If cameras had been in those cars, we wouldn’t have had to pay any money. We’re always pulling over drunks of drug users who try to fight the police officers or shoot them. Then they always say that the police started basting them first or started shooting at them first.”

The cost of fixing cameras will be about $500 per car. The city council (市正厅) will make a final decision on the proposal (提议) next Monday. Ten of the 13 council members, when asked about the proposal, said that they liked the idea. One member said that it is money-saving and it makes common sense. If this is agreed, cameras can be fixed in all the cars within six weeks.

The police officers fully support camera use. One office said that too many people think the police are liars; cameras would show citizens that the police tell the truth. “The money that we’ve been spending on lawsuits will be better spent our more cameras,” said one officer.

The citizen response to the idea of police car cameras is mixed. One person said that the police should have started doing this years ago when video cameras were invented (发明). But an elderly man said that cameras might be misused. “These police are trying to stick their nose into everything,” he said. He was going to attend the council meeting to stop the proposal. He hoped that other citizens would join him.

British programmer Joshua Browder is helping people save much money on legal fees with his latest project — the world’s first robot lawyer. The 19-year-old first started the project last summer as a free website to help people appeal(诉讼)unfair parking tickets. He came up with the idea after getting a series of tickets himself for unimportant reasons. Having wasted several hours on writing appeals to these tickets, he realized that many people have no time or legal knowledge or even the energy to appeal. So he decided to create an automatic appeal generator, which he named DoNotPay.

DoNotPay was a huge success, and the tech genius has now gone a step further with the website, converting(转变)it into a robot lawyer equipped to help with various legal issues. “The robot can currently handle parking ticket appeals and delayed flights/trains. It can also answer some general legal questions like ‘I can’t afford my ticket. What do I do?’” said Browder.

To use the service, users need to go to the website donotpayco. uk and sign up for free. Once signed in, the robot will ask the user a series of questions about their situation. When it has collected enough information, and if the person has legal grounds(依据)for an appeal, the robot will then generate a letter for the person to use.

Browder said he received good advice from his professors at Stanford University, where he is currently a freshman. “Initially, I thought the best way to go about it was to create lots of individual rules for it to follow,” he explained. “However, I quickly failed with this approach because there are thousands of ways to say the same thing and it would be impossible to catch every one. The breakthrough came when I learned how to create a way for the robot to learn and compare phrases itself, so that it doesn’t matter how the user phrases his or her requests.”

So he programmed the robot to use test comparison that includes keywords, word order and pronouns. And the more people use the robot, the better the algorithm(演算法)gets. But there are situations where the robot can’t help. “If the robot can’t answer, it provides helpful message offering the user some sample phrases or the choice of contacting me directly.” Browder said, “On the backend, whenever the robot can’t answer, I get notified and I work as quickly as possible to add functionality for any future requests of a similar nature.”