104-2 Week 5: AlphaGo勝棋王

Google AI to play live Go match against world champion

5 February 2016

Google's artificial intelligence (AI) software will go head-to-head with the world's highest ranked Go player Lee Sedol, the firm has said.

It comes a week after the search giant announced that AlphaGo had beaten French Go champion Fan Hui. That was seen as a pivotal moment for AI, similar to IBM's Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov at chess. The match will take place in Seoul, South Korea, and will be live-streamed via YouTube. Demis Hassabis, head of Google's DeepMind lab, announced the news in a tweet. Mr Sedol said in a statement that although AlphaGo appeared to be a strong player, he was "confident" that he could win the match. Go is widely regarded as a more complicated game than chess, because of the larger choice of moves, making it a good measure of how AI technology is developing. Computers have played Go and beaten amateurs but, before Google's victory against the French champion, experts had predicted that it would take another 10 years until a computer could beat the world's best Go professionals. There has been a long tradition of AI software going head-to-head with human players. In 1996, IBM's Deep Blue took on chess world champion Garry Kasparov and won, although Mr Kasparov went on to win three and draw two of the following five games. Then in 2011, IBM's cognitive platform Watson took on the world's best Jeopardy players, a popular American quiz show and scooped the $1m prize. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content but was not connected to the internet during the game.

http://www.bbc.com/news/35501537

Structure of the lead:

WHO- Lee Sedol

WHAT-AlphaGo

WHEN-5 February 2016

WHERE- Seoul, South Korea

HOW-AlphaGo is going to have a match with the world’s highest ranked Go player

WHY- not given

Vocabulary

 1.         Pivotal:關鍵的

2.         AI:人工智慧

3.         Live-streamed:直播

4.         Complicated:複雜的

5.         Amateurs:業餘

6.         But: 任何人(代詞)

7.         Predicted:預測的

8.         Head-to-head:肉搏戰

9.         Cognitive:認知

10.    Scooped:掏出

104-2 Week 4: 台灣霸王寒流

Cold weather brings snow to nation

Mon, Jan 25, 2016

A rare sight of snow wowed people nationwide yesterday, from Taipei to Pingtung County. Under the influence of a strong cold air mass, many places in Taiwan — even those located at an altitude of only 400m to 500m — received a covering of snow or soft hail overnight, exciting locals, who likely have never seen snow in real life since they were born. Despite low temperatures, people were seen swarming to elevated areas, including Keelung’s 726m-high Jiangziliaoshan (姜子寮山), Taipei’s Yangmingshan (陽明山) and New Taipei City’s Linkou (林口) and Pinglin (坪林) districts, to appreciate the natural beauty of the snow. As of yesterday morning, the accumulated snow had reached 20cm in Taoyuan’s Lalashan (拉拉山) Forest Recreation Area. The Motian (摩天嶺-) mountain area along the Southern Cross-Island Highway also reported showers of snow started at 4am yesterday, as well as on Yunlin County’s Jiananyun Peak (嘉南雲峰), where snow began falling at about 11am yesterday at an altitude of about 1,500m. Under the influence of a cold air mass, the outlying island group of Penghu experienced soft hail yesterday morning.

Pingtung County’s Dawushan (大武山) also reported soft hail from halfway up the mountain to the summit at midnight on Saturday. The Central Weather Bureau said 27 weather stations in different parts of Taiwan registered their lowest temperatures yesterday. The temperature in Taipei fell to 4 ºC, the lowest level detected in the capital in 44 years and the second-lowest since 3.2 ºC degrees was recorded in 1972.

It was minus-3.1 ºC in the Yangmingshan area, 5.8 ºC in Yilan County’s Suao (蘇澳), and 4.2 ºC in Taoyuan’s Sinwu District (新屋) — all new lows for these places. In New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋), it was 3.8ºC yesterday morning — the second-lowest level in history. The temperature in Taipei is forecast to dip to 3ºC early today, while central and southern regions are expected to experience temperatures of 4ºC and 6ºC respectively, the bureau said. Chances of precipitation are expected to be low across the nation today, apart from in mountainous regions higher than 600m. The bureau urged people to be aware of icy road conditions. The bureau has issued special warnings for low temperatures and heavy rain across Taiwan, urging the public to take precautions and keep warm before the cold wave leaves Taiwan tomorrow, when temperatures across the nation are expected to rebound noticeably.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2016/01/25/2003637998

Structure of the lead:

WHO- Taiwanese

WHERE- Taiwan, from Taipei to Pingtung County

WHAT- Snow, low temperature

WHEN- Jan. 24, 2016

HOW- Taiwan was in low temperature, lots of plain snowed, and made a new record of low temperature.

WHY-not given.

Vocabulary:

1.         Nationwide : 全國性的

2.         Altitude : 海拔

3.         Swarming : 擠滿

4.         Elevated : 上升

5.         Accumulated : 累積

6.         Hail : 冰雹

7.         Summit : 頂點

8.         Bureau : 局；辦公處

9.         Precipitation : 降水量

10.    Rebound: 恢復

104-2 Week 3: 牛津字典2015代表字

Oxford’s 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji

Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives:

“Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”

Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number:

Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that characterizes emoji-using culture.

Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do so at this point. The word emoji, however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.

Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level. Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’ long history of using pictures to communicate. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.”

http://time.com/4114886/oxford-word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

Structure of the lead:

WHO- Not given

WHERE- Not given

WHEN- Nov. 16, 2015

WHAT- “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji,

HOW- A historic moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining popularity since 1999

WHY- People use Emoji to express themselves more than before

Vocabulary:

1.          Emoji: 表情符號

2.          String:字串

3.          Staple:主要的

4.          Mainstream:主流

5.          Embody:具體表達

6.          Aspect:外觀

7.          Linguistic:語言的

8.          Intimacy:親暱

9.          Emoticon:情緒

10.        Iconic:圖像的

104-2 Week 2: 深圳廢土場崩塌

Shenzhen landslide disaster: 11 arrests for negligence

Shenzhen prosecutors, late on Thursday, said a dispatcher and supervisor of the landfill, the chief and deputy manager of a company in charge of it, and seven other people were arrested. They said they have been charged with negligently causing a serious accident. The landslide happened when a hill of construction waste collapsed, leaving 74 people either missing or dead. The formal arrests come three days after the police took what Chinese media called "coercive measures" against 12 people. It is thought the 11 arrested today were among those. Officials have described the 20 December disaster as man-made, raising the possibility of severe punishments for those they consider responsible. One official, whose job involved regulating construction sites, apparently jumped to his death a week after the landslide. It is not clear if he was being investigated for his role in it. Officials have appealed for police and the public to help them find other suspects apparently on the run.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35208881

Structure of the lead:

WHO- people have been arrested

WHERE- Shenzhen

WHEN- 1 January 2016

WHAT- not given

HOW- landslide disaster

WHY- Eleven people in China have been arrested for their alleged role in the Shenzhen landslide disaster.

Vocabulary:

Negligence: 玩忽職守

Dispatcher: 調度員

Supervisor: 監督者

Landfill:垃圾填埋場

Arrested:逮捕

Collapsed:倒塌

Coercive: 強制

Punishments:懲罰

Regulating:規定

Landslide:山崩

104-2 Week 1: 台中國家歌劇院

National Taichung Theater

National Taichung Theater is located in Xitun District, Taochung. It is a very characteristic performance area. The theater is designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Using the concept of the primitive caves and holes, Toyo Ito designed the world first and only Sound Cave Curved Wall for National Taichung Theater. There are no vertical and horizontal structures and it’s the world’s first curve surfaced hanging structure architect. Due to the complexity, it is known as the most difficult architect to complete. Five years and NT$ 4.36 billion, the theater finally open in November 23rd, 2014. The theater is organized into a large theater, medium theater and experimental stage, which hold up to more than 3000 guests.

During the urban renewal in Taichung, Taichung city government tried get the Guggenheim Museum to join the museum project in Taichung. Unfortunately due to the budget shortage, the project was canceled. After Architecture Design Competition for the later idea to build a national theater, Toyo Ito’s design was selected. But the difficulty of building this monster in reality caused investments backing out over and over. But after conquering the obstacles, they finally broke the ground in the end of 2009.

After 5 years and NT$ 4.36 billion devoted in, the theater finally completed and the process of building the hardest architect was documented by foreign press. The theater was designated as a national degree performance center and was nominated as one of the World’s New 9 Landmarks. The first opening show “Cat Man” is performed by Ming Hwa Yuan Arts & Cultural Group.

The theater structure high 37.7 meters, 2 underground levels and 6 floors above ground. It is built with steel and concrete with the concepts of the primitive state of human livings, caves and holes. The structure consists of 58 curved surfaces, very difficult to construct. It is referred as the hardest building to be constructed. Interior designed with a large theater (2014 guests), medium theater (800 guests), and experimental stage (200 guests). Not just the main building but the surroundings is designed to correspond with Sound Cave Curved Walls.

The acoustic engineering was carefully designed. In the large theater, guests will see the round curve on the ceiling; this will reflect the sounds perfectly in every angle to every seat. A cat walk is organized on the top for maintenance purposes. The view to the stage will not be blocked in anyway. Everything is designed to what a theater may need in the best way. The exterior shapes like a tea pot during the day with the extraordinary curves. When the night falls, lightings will put the theater under the spot light.

https://www.travelking.com.tw/eng/tourguide/scenery105140.html

Structure of the lead:

WHO: not given

WHEN: November 23rd, 2014

WHAT: Complex Structure
WHERE: National Taichung Theater

HOW: Opening and was nominated as one of the World’s New 9 Landmarks.

WHY: Extraordinary and complex

Vocabulary:

1.          primitive : 原始的

2.          vertical : 垂直的

3.          horizontal : 平行的

4.          complexity : 複雜

5.          shortage : 短缺

6.          obstacles : 障礙

7.          nominated : 提名

8.          Landmarks : 地標

9.          exterior : 外觀

10.      extraordinary : 非凡的