Can you teach a computer to be funny?

Here’s one example of a machine-generated joke: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To see the punchline.” Learn about the work that scientists are doing to make AI more LOL.

When it comes to predicting advances in AI, the popular imagination tends to fixate on the most dystopian scenarios: as in, If our machines get so smart, someday they’ll rise up against humanity and take over the world.

But what if all our machines wanted to do was crack some jokes? That is the dream of computational humorists -- machine learning researchers dedicated to creating funny computers.

While there’s intrinsic value in cracking the code for humor, this research also holds practical importance. As machines occupy larger and larger chunks of our lives

We’ve all experienced the frustration caused by a dropped phone call or a crashed program. Your computer isn’t a sympathetic audience during these trials and tribulations; at times like these, levity can go a long way in improving our relationship with technology.

So, how do you program a computer for laughs? “Humor is one of the most non-computational things. In other words, there’s no formula for funny-ness. While you can learn how to bake a cake or build a chair from a set of instructions, there’s no recipe for crafting a great joke. But if we want to imbue our machines with wit, we need to find some kind of a recipe; after all, computers are unflinching rule-followers. This is the great quagmire of computational humor.

To do this, you have to pick apart what makes a particular joke funny. Then you need to turn your ideas into rules and codify them into algorithms. However, humor is kind of like pornography ... you know it when you see it. A joke told by British comedian Lee Dawson exemplifies the difficulties of deconstructing jokes, according to Misra. It goes: “My mother-in-law fell down a wishing well the other day. I was surprised -- I had no idea that they worked!” It’s not so easy to pick out why this joke works (and some mothers-in-law would argue it does not work at all). For starters, there’s a certain amount of societal context that goes with understanding why a mother-in-law going down a well is funny. Does this mean that creating a joke-telling computer would require the uploading and analyzing of an entire culture’s worth of knowledge and experience?

Some researchers have been experimenting with a different approach. Abhinav Moudgil, a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Information Technology in Hyderabad, India, works primarily in the field of computer vision but explores his interest in computational humor in his spare time. Moudgil has been working with a recurrent neural network, a popular type of statistical model. The distinction between neural networks and older, rule-based models could be compared to the difference between showing and telling. With rule-based algorithms, most of the legwork is done by the coders; they put in a great deal of labor and energy up-front, writing specific directions for the program that tells it what to do. The system is highly constrained, and it produces a set of similarly structured jokes. The results are decent but closer to what kids -- not adults -- might find hilarious.

Here are two examples:

• “What is the difference between a mute glove and a silent cat? One is a cute mitten and the other is a mute kitten.”
• “What do you call a strange market? A bizarre bazaar.”

With neural networks, data does the heavy lifting; you can show a program what to generate by feeding it a data set of hundreds of thousands of examples. The network picks out patterns and emulates them when it generates text. (This is the same way computers “learn” how to recognize particular images.) Of course, neural networks don’t see like humans do. Networks analyze data inputs, whether pictures or text, as strings of numbers, and comb through these strings to detect patterns. The number of times your network analyzes the data set -- called iterations -- is incredibly important: too few iterations, and the network won’t pick up enough patterns; too many, and the network will pick out superfluous patterns. For instance, if you want your network to recognize flamingos but you made it iterate on a set of flamingo pictures for too long, it would probably get better at recognizing that particular set of pictures rather than flamingos in general.

Moudgil created a data set of 231,657 short jokes culled from the far corners of the Internet. He fed it to his network, which analyzed the jokes letter by letter. Because the network operates on a character level, it didn’t analyze the wordplay of the jokes; instead, it picked up on the probabilities of certain letters appearing after other letters and then generated jokes along similar lines. So, because many of the jokes in the training set were in the form “What do you call…” or “Why did the…”, the letter “w” had a high probability of being followed by “h”, the letter pair “wh” had high probabilities of being followed by “y” or “a,” and the letter sequence “wha” was almost certainly followed by “t.”

His network generated a lot of jokes -- some terrible, some awful and some okay.Here’s a sample:

“I think hard work is the reason they hate me.”

“Why can’t Dracula be true? Because there are too many cheetahs.”

“Why did the cowboy buy the frog? Because he didn’t have any brains.”

“Why did the chicken cross the road? To see the punchline.”

Some read more like Zen koans than jokes. That’s because Moudgil trained his network with many different kinds of humor. While his efforts won’t get him a comedy writing gig, he considers them to be promising. He plans to continue his work, and he’s also made his dataset public to encourage others to experiment as well. He wants the machine learning community to know that, he says, “a neural net is a way to do humor research.” On his next project, Moudgil will try to eliminate nonsensical results by training the network on a large set of English sentences before he trains it on a joke dataset. That way, the network will have integrated grammar into its joke construction and should generate much less gibberish.

Other efforts have focused on replicating a particular comedian’s style. He Ren and Quan Yang of Stanford University trained a neural network to imitate the humor of Conan O’Brien.

Their model generated these one-liners:

“Apple is teaming up with Playboy in the self-driving office.”

“New research finds that Osama Bin Laden was arrested for President on a Southwest Airlines flight.”

Yes, the results read a bit more like drunk Conan than real Conan. Ren and Yang estimate only 12 percent of the jokes were funny (based on human ratings), and some of the funny jokes only generated laughs because they were so nonsensical.

These efforts show there’s clearly a lot of work to be done before researchers can say they’ve successfully engineered humor. “They’re an effective illustration of the state of computational humor today, which is both promising in the long term and discouraging in the short term,” says Misra. Yet if we ever want to build AI that simulates human-style intelligence, we'll need to figure out how to code for funny. And when we finally do, this could turn our human fears of a machine uprising into something we can all laugh about.

Remember to leave a comment.

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What to know about Shopify !!!

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Set up your store in minutes and bring your brand to life with Shopify

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Mattis: North Korea nuclear threat accelerating

Image copyrightAFP/GETTYImage captionNorth Korea engaged in "outlaw" behaviour, Mr Mattis said

The threat of nuclear attack from North Korea is increasing, US Defence Secretary James Mattis said during a visit to South Korea.

Mr Mattis warned it would face a "massive military response" if it used nuclear weapons.

Separately, North Korea released a South Korean fishing boat which it said had been found in North Korean waters illegally.

The crew of 10 were released on Friday evening, South Korean officials said.

It comes at a time of heightened tension in the region, with both sides running a series of military exercises.

"North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbours and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs," Mr Mattis said, AP news agency reported.

He said North Korea engaged in "outlaw" behaviour and said US-South Korean security collaboration had taken on "new urgency".

Washington could not accept a nuclear North Korea, he added, speaking alongside his South Korean counterpart Song Young-moo.Image copyrightAFP/GETTYImage captionThe threat of nuclear attack from North Korea is increasing, Mr Mattis says
Mr Mattis is in Seoul for annual defence talks with South Korea.

US President Donald Trump is due to visit South Korea in November as part of a trip to Asia.

In September North Korea carried out its sixth nuclear test, which was its biggest yet.

The bomb was thought to have had a power range from 50 to 120 kilotonnes. A 50kt device would be about three times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

It has also carried out a series of missile tests, firing two ballistic missiles over Japan in August and September.

South Korea has begun deploying the US Thaad (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) missile defense system in response to the threat of a missile attack from the north.

Earlier this month, the US and South Korea also began joint military exercises in waters surrounding the Korean peninsula, involving fighter jets, destroyers and aircraft carriers.

The drills anger the North, and Pyongyang has in the past denounced them as a "rehearsal for war".

Separately, the US has imposed sanctions on seven North Koreans and three entities over "flagrant" human rights abuses.

Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said those sanctioned included diplomats placed in China and Vietnam who had taken part in the forced repatriation of North Korean asylum-seekers.

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A rare, intimate look at the lives of single mothers in Afghanistan

Millions of women singlehandedly raise their children in the war-torn country, but their stories are rarely told in the media. Photographer Kiana Hayeri captures their struggles and strength in these photos.

Malika is 28 years old. Just 14 when she was married off by her family, she lives with her five children in a small room in the Wazir Abad neighbourhood in Kabul, Afghanistan. Malika is also a single mother -- when she was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, her husband was murdered, and she now supports her family on a monthly income of 800 afs, or $12, from washing clothes. The hardest part of being a single mother, Malika says, is watching her children go to bed hungry.

Photographer Kiana Hayeri, based in Tehran, Iran, was the same age as Malika when she spent one month last summer photographing the intimate and scarcely seen daily lives of around 30 single mothers in Kabul and at a women’s prison in Herat. “When you ask somebody outside of Afghanistan what they picture when they think of the country, everyone talks about war, land mines, men with beards,” says Hayeri. “But never mothers, and especially single mothers.”

Malika, 28, comforts her son after a fight with his siblings. Malika and her five children live in a small room in the Wazir Abad neighbourhood in Kabul.

Culturally, women in Afghanistan are expected to be modest, which means most are reluctant to be photographed. But Hayeri believes that because the mothers in her images did not have husbands, they were more willing to welcome her into their homes and tell her their stories. “A lot of these women are very lonely, so for them, it was nice to talk about everything and vent out their frustrations at the difficult parts of life,” she says.

Hayeri, a Fellow, has an eye for under-the-radar stories like these -- stories of everyday life from places around the world known to most outsiders for their civil strife or extreme violence. She has photographed queer teenagers in her home country of Iran, ex-child soldiers learning capoeira in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syrian refugees seeking asylum in South Africa.

Mina, 38, became paralyzed from the waist down during childbirth. Now jobless, Mina pulled her oldest daughter (left) out of school so she could help rear her siblings.

Nearly four decades of war, terror and internal conflict in Afghanistan have left Malika and millions of mothers like her without husbands. Yet there is no word for “single mothers” in Dari and Pashto, the languages spoken in Afghanistan. “Single moms are described only by the status of their husbands,” Hayeri says, “so they're either widowed or divorced. But their motherhood is not recognized.”

Although more Afghan women in urban areas have started going to school and getting jobs in recent years, 85 percent of women in the country are still illiterate and only 20 percent are employed. “Women really don't have lives outside of their homes,” Hayeri says. When a woman’s husband dies, she is often forced by family to marry a brother-in-law, usually as his second or third wife, so she will have a man who can take care of her family. But what happens to those who don’t remarry? “Unfortunately, in Afghanistan, and even in Kabul, a woman without a man in the house is considered immoral or available,” Hayeri says. “Single mothers endure serious harassment, abuse and threats, usually coming from neighbors and shop owners.”

Aziza, 52, puts on makeup as she prepares to go out after lunch.

Most of the single mothers Hayeri met were either unemployed or barely able to provide for their families with jobs cleaning homes and washing clothes for the wealthy. When one women she photographed, Mina, was pregnant with her fifth child, she was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis and became paralyzed from the waist down while giving birth; the child did not survive. Her husband kicked her and their children out of the house, and he re-married. Jobless, Mina has attempted suicide multiple times and told Hayeri she resented her own daughter for saving her life.

Afghan single mothers receive very few social services from their government, and media coverage of the ongoing war as well as international aid for women have both declined in recent years. Only a small fraction of the single mothers that Hayeri met have defied the odds and found success. Aziza, 52, for example, has a good job at the National TV and Radio of Afghanistan. She lost her husband to cancer in 2006 and has brought up her four children on her own with the support of her brother-in-law, a prominent musician.

A photo of Aziza and her late husband from the 1970s.

Unsurprisingly, the children of single mothers in Afghanistan are forced to grow up very quickly, and their lives are stressful and their opportunities constrained. Often, the oldest daughter will be forced to leave school to assist their mother. “The daughter of one woman I met, Shakar, was very resentful and bitter to her mother, because she made the decision not to pull out the oldest son from school, but to pull her out instead,” Hayeri says.

After speaking to so many single mothers and observing them and their families, Hayeri believes that education is key to changing their fates. Ensuring that young women remain in school will help a new generation of women enter the workforce and achieve greater independence and better jobs. And while not all educated Afghan women are able to find employment, they tend to allow their children more freedom and let them stay in school for as long as possible.

Reihana, 28, and her children at home. She was only 14 when she was sold by her father to a man twice her age, who abused her. Eventually, she ran away with her five children, now aged 5 to 11 years old, and also takes care of her niece. Reihana studies part-time at a university and works full time at the Ministry of Counter Narcotics.


Of course, the culture cannot change if the men don’t too, acknowledges Hayeri. A staggering 87 percent of women in Afghanistan have reported experiencing physical, sexual or psychological violence, and most of the men Hayeri met showed little respect for women’s rights. She did, however, observe that the sons of single mothers exhibited a deeper appreciation for the role women play in Afghan society. “All of the men I met who were brought up by single moms have more respect for women, for their wives, even for their own mothers,” she says. “If women can teach their sons to have respect and value for their wives and their sisters and their mothers, the next generation will be a little bit better.”

Hayeri’s photos, which were published in Harper’s Magazine in May, won her the International Academic Forum’s grand prize in documentary photography earlier this year. But she says that most of the single mothers haven’t seen their published photographs yet -- and probably won’t, because they lack access to smartphones or the Internet. Hayeri recalls many of her subjects asking how their lives would change after she took their photographs. She remembers telling them, “I honestly don't know. But I think sharing your story will touch some people, so hopefully in the bigger picture it will make changes.”

Shakar, 29, lost her husband to a suicide attack; she now works as a cleaner. She has five children and had to pull her oldest daughter out of school so she could help take care of the home and her siblings. Here, the oldest daughter rubs Shakar’s temples to ease the pain of a migraine.

What’s next for Hayeri? She is working on a project that profiles women in Afghanistan as agents of change, as opposed to victims of circumstances. Her subjects include a successful TV host of the first women-focused station in the country, women in the police force and military, and a judge who works on child abuse cases. “At a time when international interest in Afghanistan is diminishing, it’s crucial to illustrate the progress that Afghanistan has made in the past 15 years,” Hayeri says. “It is important to show there are still people thriving inside the country -- especially a younger generation that has seen nothing but war -- whose lives could drastically change if they just have the opportunity to change them.”

Shakar’s children team up to hang a photo of their father on the wall.

All photos from Kiana Hayeri.

Taking care of children are very hard tasks, they can be challenging and might require a lot of attention, Effort and most intriguing Time. Children Means a lot to us.

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How to fix a frayed Charger Cord

Problem: Frayed charger cord

Time: 1 to 2 hours

Materials: Silicone sealant, painter's tape (which is less sticky than regular masking tape), protective gloves (optional)

A frayed power cord can be dangerous.
Because a notebook that travels needs to be plugged in and unplugged several times a day, the cord and connector can take a beating, leading to a frayed power cord. If this happens, it's important to get a new cord or fix it right away, because it not only can damage the system's battery through intermittent charging, but it can also be a fire hazard.

Fortunately, most power adapters have removable AC power cords, which cost a few dollars and are available at stores like Radio Shack. On the other hand, if the connector that plugs into the computer is the problem, it can cost $50 to $75 to replace because you have to find the exact AC adapter for your laptop from your notebook manufacturer or an online retailer such as Shop For Battery, LaptopTraveller.com or Notebook AC Adapter (search for your make and model name followed by "AC adapter").

Or you can just fix it yourself.

There's a quick-and-dirty repair for a frayed cord: Just roll electrical or duct tape over the damage and hope for the best. A better way is to make a more permanent repair with silicone sealant, available at any hardware store and many supermarkets, which will insulate and protect it. It's best to use black to match the cord's color, but clear sealant works just as well.

To protect the surface you're working on, lay down a wide strip of painter's tape, sticky side down, and place the frayed area of the cord on top of it. The sealant won't stick to the back of the painter's tape the way it might to other barriers made out of paper or plastic, and the painter's tape should peel right off the table when you're done. (Note, however, that you shouldn't be doing any kind of computer repairs on your good furniture.)

Next, squeeze out a gob of sealant onto the area that needs fixing. Work the gooey sealant into place, covering the damage with a liberal coating. If you have sensitive skin, it's a good idea to wear thin protective gloves for this part.

Applying silicone sealant to the frayed cord.

Let the sealant cure for an hour or two until it is firm. Gently remove the cord from the tape (and the tape from the table), and you have the equivalent of a new power cord that's flexible and ready for years of road work.

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BLACK FRIDAY!!! What it is really all about.

BLACK FRIDAY

Thanksgiving Day in the United States (the fourth Thursday of November). Since 1952, it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the U.S., and most major retailers open very early (and more recently during overnight hours) and offer promotional sales. Black Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some other states observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday such as Columbus Day Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend, makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential shoppers. It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005, although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate, have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time. Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback.

In 2014, spending volume on Black Friday fell for the first time since the 2008 recession. $50.9 billion was spent during the 4-day Black Friday weekend, down 11% from the previous year. However, the U.S. economy was not in a recession. Christmas creep has been cited as a factor in the diminishing importance of Black Friday, as many retailers now spread out their promotions over the entire months of November and December rather than concentrate them on a single shopping day or weekend.

The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".

For many years, it was common for retailers to open at 6:00 a.m., but in the late 2000s many had crept to 5:00 or 4:00. This was taken to a new extreme in 2011, when several retailers opened at midnight for the first time. In 2012, Wal-Mart and several other retailers announced that they would open most of their stores at 8:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, prompting calls for a walkout among some workers. In 2014, store opened at 5:00 PM on Thanksgiving Day while stores such as Target, Wal-Mart, Belk, and Sears opened at 6:00 PM on Thanksgiving Day. Three states, Rhode Island, Maine, and Massachusetts, prohibit large supermarkets, big box stores, and department stores from opening on Thanksgiving, due to what critics  refer to as blue laws. The Massachusetts ban on forcing employees to work on major holidays is not a religion-driven "blue law" but part of the state's Common Day of Rest Law. A bill to allow stores to open on Thanksgiving Day was the subject of a public hearing on July 8, 2017. 

There have been reports of violence occurring between shoppers on Black Friday. Since 2006, there have been 7 reported deaths and 98 injuries throughout the United States. It is common for prospective shoppers to camp out over the Thanksgiving holiday in an effort to secure a place in front of the line and thus a better chance at getting desired items. This poses a significant safety risk, such as the use of propane and generators in the most elaborate cases, and in general, the blocking of emergency access and fire lanes, causing at least one city to ban the practice.

 Shop Online

These day's most Black Friday items are available online as well. Checkout thetelefuture.info for all online deals. This is one of the best and most frequently updated website on the web so you are sure to get all bargains there. With rising gas prices, sinking temperatures (harsh winter) and many online deals with Free Shipping Offers, Online Shopping is gaining ground.

 If you miss the deal, No problem! We highly recommend you to visit dealsofamerica.com every hour - throughout the year - as they have new deals every 30 minutes or so. You are likely to see black Friday like deals throughout the year. You can set a Keyword Alert for the item that you are looking for, as soon as they post that item you will receive an alert.

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Rooting your Android Phone

I believe that you've heard the word "root" a lot from the geek guys. But do you know what exactly "root" is? Here we will give you a comprehensive introduction on what is "root", what to do before rooting and how to root Android devices with Kingo Root. Now let's know more details about "Root Android".

Note:

Verizon and AT&T have locked the Bootloader in Android, leading to difficulties in rooting Android and possibilities of bricking the device. So the solution we offer below may not works on Android manufactured by Verizon or AT&T and it is better not root your phone with this method.


In brief, "root Android" means getting the highest authority on Android and has access to better use your Android phone by optimizing your phone, and its data, etc.

Part 2: Precautions before rooting Android
Before you root your Android, you'd better do the things below in advance:

Back up your Android, in case you fail rooting your Android and need to recover your lost data, you need to have an backup file with you.

Make sure that your Android has at least 50% of battery remained. If unfortunately, your Android runs out of battery, the device is likely to turn brick.

Find a third-party root tool which provides less and easy steps with higher success rate freely, for example, KingRoot.

Part 3: Get Your Android Rooted via KingRoot on PC
Step 1. Launch the program - KingRoot after installing it.

Step 2. Connect your Android smartphone to PC via USB cable. When it asks you to set up debugging mode, please follow the guide. Otherwise, the connecting would fail.




Step 3. As it is successful to get connected, the program will detect your phone to check whether it is supported.

Step 4. If your phone/tablet has not been rooted yet, just click “Start to Root” and the process will get started.




Step 5. In this process, your mobile will restart itself, which is normal. As there is a signal called “Successfully Gained Root” on the screen, your device is rooted.

Part 4: Steps to Root Android Device with KingRoot App

Note: You are not allowed to root your Android phone with Mac. For example, when you are intended to root your Android phone and then use our software, 

you can directly root on the Android phone with the below method.

Step 1. Run KingRoot on Android

Install KingRoot on your Android phone. Tap the icon of KingRoot. This will start the app. And you will have the interface as below. If your phone is unrooted, you can see the prompt saying that "Root access is unavailable". Then click the button "START ROOT".





Step 2. Root Android with KingRoot

When rooting, you can view the progress. When it is done, you will see the big green tick icon. After that, you can remove apps, purify system, etc. with this app.


As an open operating system, Android triggers a wide range of Android mobile brands and Android OS versions, we still have not found out a program which is 100% compatible for every Android phone or leads to absolutely successful rooting, particularly for Android 4.4 and the later. If both two programs fail to root your mobile, we suggest you turn to other solutions, please refer to this link.

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9 pieces of practical advice about bullying

A teacher, psychologist, crisis-line supervisor and others share their suggestions for what you can do.

Bullying knows no borders -- it occurs in every country in the world -- and its impact can last long after the incidents end. For National Bullying Prevention Month, we asked people from the TED community who have firsthand experience of the problem to offer their best advice.

1. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness ...
“Don’t think that letting someone else know you’re being bullied or asking them for help is a sign of weakness or that it’s a situation you should be able to handle on your own. Going through it alone isn’t a sign of strength on your part, because that’s what the bully wants. They want your isolation, they want you to feel helpless, and if they think they got you in that position, then they’re often emboldened. That was a mistake I made as a kid. It made things worse. When you don’t reach out, you feel like nobody understands what you’re going through and nobody can help you. Those monologues in your mind start getting louder.”

2. ... And telling someone about being bullied is not snitching.
“Often, kids have this fear of what they call snitching. But if you feel significant stress when you come to school, if it’s too hard for you to come into the building, or if you have the fear that someone will bother you by saying something or touching you inappropriately, then you must tell someone. This is not snitching -- you’re protecting yourself.”

3. Surround yourself with allies.

“Bullies tend not to want to bully someone when that person is in a group, so make sure you’re with friends, people you trust and connect with. Knowing you have defenders around you who will stand up for you can really help.”

4. Try to pity, rather than hate, your bullies.
“I was bullied as a child, and I like to think the experience contributed to my sense of empathy. I want to see people treated with dignity, always. But for those who are being bullied, the key thing for them to remember is that bullying is not a show of strength but a show of weakness on the bully’s part. And if you can pity those who are bullying you -- which I know is not so easy to do -- then you can defend your inner self from their behavior.”

5. It’s possible to triumph over bullies in your own mind.
“Fighting back on the inside can be as important as what happens on the outside. There was a study of 81 adults who were held as political prisoners in East Germany. They were subjected to mental and physical abuse, and decades after release, about two-thirds of the prisoners had struggled or were still struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder; one-third of the prisoners had not. Why? The smaller group had fought back in their own minds. Even though they complied with guards and signed false confessions, they prevailed on the inside in ways no one could see. Secretly, they refused to believe they were defeated, and they imagined that, sooner or later, they’d triumph.”

6. Focus on everything that’s great about you; others notice those things, too.
“If you’re being bullied, remind yourself of all the good and beautiful things about you. You, like most of us, are here to make the world a better place. Nobody is liked by everyone, so just because one bully or one group of bullies doesn’t like you doesn't mean other people don't see all your amazing qualities.”

7. The traits singled out by your bullies are the ones that make you the wonderfully singular person you are.
“Bullies think and think about us to come up with various ways to make us feel down. But whatever reason you’re bullied for, that’s exactly what makes you unique! Do they call you fat? Correct them: you are not fat; you are just easier to see! Do they say you have a big nose? Tell them you breathe better than other people do! Everything about you is unique, like nothing else in the world.”

8. If you’re considering retaliating against your bullies, stop before you act.
“Pause for a moment, and understand that what you’re about to do or about to say can have long-range implications. What you do or say will be how you’re remembered. So think: how do you want to be remembered? As somebody who was kind or mean?”


9. If you ever witness someone being bullied, show them your support.
“This can be in the moment or afterwards, and it can consist of sending them a text, an anti-bullying emoji, or asking them to sit with you. Stepping into a bullying situation can sometimes be helpful if handled in the right way, but that's not always right for each situation or each up stander.”

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The story behind LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves

Three American scientists have just been awarded the Nobel Prize for their space-time breakthrough, and LIGO team astrophysicist Gabriela González tells us about all the researchers, work and technology that contributed to it.

A little over 100 years ago, in 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which, despite its name, is a theory that actually explains gravity. It states that mass -- meaning all matter, including the planets -- attracts mass, not because of an instantaneous force but because all matter wrinkles the flexible fabric of space-time.

Space-time is this thing in which we live and that connects us all. It's like when we lie down on a mattress and distort its contours. The masses move when they see this space-time curvature and they follow the little curves, just like when our bedmate nestles up to us because of the curvature of the mattress.

A year later, Einstein derived from his theory that gravitational waves existed and that these waves were produced when masses move. For example, when two stars revolve around one another, they create folds in space-time that carry energy from the system, and the stars move toward each other. However, he also estimated these effects were so minute, it would never be possible to measure them.


A long time ago, two black holes were revolving around one another, accelerating until they were almost at the speed of light, and they fused into a massive black hole.

Thanks to the work of hundreds of scientists working in many countries over the course of many decades, these gravitational waves were finally discovered for the very first time in 2015. The story starts 1.3 billion years ago. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, two black holes were revolving around one another -- or, as I like to say, dancing the tango. They started moving slowly, but as they emitted gravitational waves, they grew closer together, accelerating in speed until they were revolving at almost the speed of light and fused into a single black hole that had 60 times the mass of the Sun compressed into the space of 360 kilometers. (That's the size of the state of Louisiana, where I live.) And this incredible effect produced gravitational waves that carried the news of this cosmic hug to the rest of the universe.

It took us a long time to figure out the effects of these gravitational waves, because the way we measure them is by looking for those effects in distances. When the gravitational waves passed by the Earth, which was in 2015, they produced changes in all distances -- the distances between all of you, the distances between you and me, our heights -- every one of us stretched and shrank a tiny bit. It was predicted the effect would be proportional to the distance. But it's still extremely small: even for distances much greater than my height, the effect is infinitesimal. For example, the distance between the Earth and the Sun changed by just one atomic diameter.

In 2015, we didn't think we'd see anything in the data we were collecting via LIGO -- and then nature surprised us.

How can that be measured? Fifty years ago, visionary physicists at Caltech and MIT -- Kip Thorne, Ron Drever, Rai Weiss -- thought they could precisely measure these distances using lasers that measured the distances between mirrors placed kilometers apart. (Editor’s note: on October 3, 2017, Thorne and Weiss -- along with Barry Barish -- were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.) It took many years, a lot of labor, and many scientists to develop the technology and the ideas. Almost 30 years ago, researchers started building the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO): a pair of gravitational wave detectors, or interferometers, in the US. Each is four kilometers long; one is in Livingston, Louisiana, in the middle of a beautiful forest, and the other is in Hanford, Washington, in the middle of the desert.

These L-shaped interferometers have lasers that travel from the center through four kilometers in a vacuum, they’re reflected in mirrors, and then they return via separate arms. We measure the differences in the distances of the two identical arms. These detectors are very, very, very sensitive -- they're the most precise instruments in the world. But why make two? The signals we want to measure come from space, but since the mirrors are moving all the time, we need two interferometers in order to distinguish the gravitational wave effects (which are astrophysical effects and should show up on the two detectors) from the local effects (which should appear separately, on either of the detectors).

In September 2015, we were finishing installing the second-generation technology in the detectors. We weren't at the optimal sensitivity that we wanted -- and we're still not, two years later -- but we wanted to gather data. We didn't think we'd see anything, but we were ready to start collecting. And then nature surprised us. On September 14, 2015, we saw, in both detectors, a gravitational wave. In both detectors, we saw a signal with cycles that increased in amplitude and frequency and then went back down. These were the same in both detectors, and they were gravitational waves. And not only that -- in decoding this type of wave, we were able to deduce they came from black holes fusing together to make one, more than a billion years ago. That was fantastic.

At first, we couldn't believe it. We didn't imagine this would happen until much later; it was a surprise for all of us. It took us months to convince ourselves it was true, because we didn't want to leave any room for error. But it was true. To clear up any doubt the detectors really could measure these waves, we measured another gravitational wave -- it was smaller than the first one -- in December 2015. The first gravitational wave produced a difference in the distance of four-thousandths of a proton over four kilometers. The second detection was even smaller, but it was still very convincing by our standards.


We like to say gravitational waves have a purpose, because they're opening up a new way to explore the universe.

Despite the fact that these are space-time waves and not sound waves, we like to put them into loudspeakers and listen to them. We call this "the music of the universe." If you listen to the first two notes, the second, shorter sound was the last fraction of a second of the two black holes which, in that fraction of a second, emitted vast amounts of energy. It was so much energy, it was like three Suns converting into energy, following that famous formula E = mc2. We love this music so much we actually dance to it.

People frequently ask me, "What can gravitational waves be used for?” When they asked author Jorge Luis Borges, "What is the purpose of poetry?" he asked them, "What's the purpose of dawn? What's the purpose of caresses? What's the purpose of the smell of coffee?" And he answered, "The purpose of poetry is pleasure; it's for emotion, it's for living."

Since time immemorial, when humans -- all of us, everyone, as kids -- have looked up at the sky for the first time and seen the stars, we’ve wondered, "What are stars?" That curiosity is what makes us human. And that's what we do with science. We like to say gravitational waves have a purpose, because they're opening up a new way to explore the universe. Until now, we were able to see the light of the stars via electromagnetic waves. Now we can listen to the sound of the universe, even to things -- like gravitational waves -- that don't emit light.


As we make the detectors more and more sensitive, we'll be able to see other objects, like neutron stars that fuse and turn into black holes, or explosions of supernovas.

Are they useful? Can we derive any technology from gravitational waves? Yes, probably. But it will probably take a lot of time. Even though we've developed the technology to detect the waves, maybe we'll discover in 100 years that they’re useful. It takes a lot of time to derive technology from science, but that's not why we do it. All technology is derived from science, but we practice science for the enjoyment.

So what's left for us to do? A lot. As we make the detectors more and more sensitive -- and we have lots of work to do there -- not only are we going to see more black holes and be able to catalog how many there are, where they are, and how big they are, we'll also be able to see other objects. We'll see neutron stars fuse and turn into black holes. We'll see a black hole being born. We'll see rotating stars in our galaxy produce sinusoidal waves. We'll see explosions of supernovas in our galaxy. We'll be seeing a whole spectrum of new sources.

We like to say we've added a new sense to the human body: now, in addition to seeing, we're able to hear. This is a revolution in astronomy, like when Galileo invented the telescope. Or, it’s like when they added sound to silent movies. This is just the beginning. We like to think the road to science is very long (it’s also very fun). Our large, international community of scientists, working from many countries together as a team, is helping make this road -- we're shedding light, sometimes encountering detours, and building, perhaps, a highway to the universe.

Watch this video to understand why gravitational wave changes

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Are You Desperate to quit your JOB? Read this first.

Instead of spending your days complaining, you might try changing your workplace from within, says leadership expert Simon Sinek.


Simon Sinek now spends his days helping people create inspiring workplaces, but he found this calling only after experiencing profound professional despair. “I hated waking up in the morning,” he recalls. “I was no fun anymore, and I became paranoid.” His lack of fulfillment was due to a misalignment between his purpose -- what he calls his “why” -- and his job. Despite being someone who believes that people should only do jobs they love, Sinek does not advocate simply leaving a so-so job.“The opportunity to quit is always there, but I don’t recommend doing it until you exhaust all the other avenues,” he says. In a Facebook Live conversation at TED’s NYC headquarters in September, he shared the steps he advises people to take before throwing in the towel.

1. If your boss or work environment are abusive, leave immediately.

2. If your boss or work environment aren't abusive and you’ve been there for only a few months, hold off on giving notice.

“If I were to offer some advice to people, it’s that sometimes they make the decision to leave too quickly. They show up, start working and after four months, they’re like, ‘This is not for me.’ However, it takes around six months for anyone to settle into a job.”

3. If you’ve been there for more than six months, try to figure out what’s wrong. For starters, check your attitude.

“People can come in with the attitude that ‘Work is just for work, and I find fulfillment in other places.’ Which means they're showing up half-hearted and not committed, they’re acting like this job is just a means to an end. And guess how they're going to be treated? If you show up just to check in and check out, because you get your fulfillment somewhere else, then you'll be labelled as such. No one's going to be looking after you and watching out for your career.”

4. Consider the other possibilities.


“Uncover what it is exactly that's not sticking. Is it your coworkers? Your boss? The job itself?”


5. If you have a difficult boss, try a little empathy.

“When a boss is particularly hard in a meeting, yelling at people or being short with them, you can walk into their office, close the door and say, ‘Hey, you were really short with us in the meeting. Are you OK?’ You don't have to use those words, but you want to get across that you think they’re acting out of character and you want to check on them. Sometimes it gets them to open up. It might not happen immediately, and maybe they won't open to you, but it can be an impetus for them to open up to someone.

6. Treat your boss like a person, not a problem.

“The other thing you can do is to inquire about your boss as a human being, saying something like, ‘Can we start this meeting by talking about what we did this weekend? We can learn a little bit about each other. Hey, [Boss’s name], what did you do this weekend?’ We can be so quick to criticize bad leaders, yet they're human, too, and they want to feel heard and feel like they belong. We don't know why they're bad leaders -- maybe they’re under stress or pressure, maybe they don't realize that they're bad, or maybe they’re just bastards. But we have to give them the benefit of the doubt first.”

7. If that doesn’t work, then be the leader you wish you had.

“We might be the most junior person in the organization, but we still work with people. We can occupy ourselves with helping them go home fulfilled, that they feel heard, that they feel someone has their back. If you commit yourself to being the leader you wish you had and see your friends and colleagues love their work, it actually affects leadership, believe it or not. We've seen it happen; it's kind of amazing. You can build a little subculture. We worked with a large software company, and we helped just a small group in the company build a stronger culture. And they started getting phone calls from all across this company wanting to find out if there were any jobs available in this group. Everybody wants in! Commit yourself to being a leader you wish you had, and building that subculture.”

8. Know this process doesn’t happen overnight.

“It's going to take time, like any relationship. Some people might be suspicious at the start. I find being open about it allays some of the suspicions. You could say something like, ‘Hey, guys, I wish we had a stronger culture here’ or ‘We can complain about our culture until we're blue in the face, so I'm going to try and contribute to building a culture for us so we come to work and feel fulfilled and hopefully we'll have an impact on those around us.’”

9. If you’re still certain you want to quit, put your energy into growing -- not griping.

“For my first job out of school, I had a terrible boss -- just terrible! So I committed myself to learn how not to lead, and I actually got a lot out of it because I was like, ‘Oh, I'm not going to do that one day.’ I also made incredibly good friends with the people with whom I worked, because misery loves company. We all took care of each other, and we learned teamwork from camaraderie. I was learning leadership at a very junior level. And when opportunities arose, I moved on. So there are ways to work at a job you don’t like without complaining every day. Try and seek the advantages and the lessons you can learn.”

10. Never settle for a job that’s just “good enough.”

“I think one of the biggest mistakes our counselors and parents is telling us, ‘Find a job.’ Nobody ever says, ‘Find a job you love.’ People are often told that they don’t need to find a job that’s fulfilling because they can find fulfillment elsewhere. But that’s like saying you don't have to love the person you marry, because you can get that somewhere else. That's not going to set you up for a great marriage; it's the same thing with a job. You're going to spend more time at work than being with your family or friends or doing anything else. So you should absolutely find a job you love.”

Your Job Helps you a lot, Why not face the challenges, Overcome Them and have a beautiful live. Remember humans are created to take Risks, Face Challenges And Solve Problems. Consider this before Picking choices. 

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