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For those who don't think Zoom meetings are a good enough substitute for the real thing, Facebook has another idea: a virtual reality app that lets you and your coworkers feel like you're sitting around a table in a conference room. On Thursday, Facebook unveiled Horizon Workrooms, an app standing out as the company's most ambitious effort yet to enable groups to socialize in VR and move the medium beyond entertainment uses such as gaming.
Workrooms allows up to 16 VR headset users to meet in a virtual conference room, with each of them represented by a customizable cartoon-like avatar that appears as just an upper body floating slightly above a virtual chair at a table. The app supports up to 50 participants in a single meeting, with the rest able to join as video callers who appear in a grid-like flat screen inside the virtual meeting room. Headset-wearing meeting participants can use their actual fingers and hands to gesticulate in VR, and their avatars' mouths appear to move in lifelike ways while they speak. A virtual whiteboard lets people share pictures or make presentations.
In recent weeks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech industry executives have spoken with increasing fervor about visions for a “metaverse”. The term draws inspiration from a decades-old dystopian sci-fi idea for a virtual world that provides an escape from the realities of everyday life. Despite its bleak origins, tech executives speak optimistically about what such a metaverse could be, with Facebook going so far as to create a “Metaverse product group” under Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs.
Workrooms may look like a step toward a more social virtual world, which employs a range of technologies and tricks to make the experience feel as in-person as it can be when you're represented in virtual space by an animated approximation of yourself.
Even with the rollout of Workrooms, Facebook continues to suffer from some of the problems plaguing VR: it must convince people (or perhaps in this case, companies) to buy its headsets, use them regularly, and adapt to new methods of interaction-both with the virtual world and with others within that world-that remain far from perfect. Then there's the headset itself. Bosworth said he expects people will use the app for about 30 minutes at a time, and that another team at Facebook is working on improving the ergonomics and weight of VR headsets. The headset currently weighs a bit over a pound, which may not sound like much but was definitely noticeable throughout the course of a half-hour meeting.
One thing Bosworth noted that the app can't improve on, however, is how engaging meetings are. “Even VR cannot make your boring meeting less boring,” he said.
[A] improving sales
[B] missing the mark
[C] receiving ridicule
[D] catching attention
[A] enhance the user experience of its games
[B] meet specific customer requirements
[C] put VR technology into wider use
[D] replace face-to-face meetings completely
[A] introduce the background to the launch of the app
[B] show the market positioning of the app
[C] analyze Facebook's organizational structure
[D] explain the process of the app development
[A] The selling price of the app.
[B] The weight of the VR headsets.
[C] The tediousness of the meetings.
[D] The length of virtual conferences.
[A] To Realize the Concept of “Metaverse” in Meeting Rooms
[B] Transformation from Real Dialogue to Virtual Interaction
[C] Facebook Wants You to Hold Your Next Meeting in VR
[D] Will the Consumers Welcome the Virtual Conference?
Our use of social media, specifically our efforts to maximize “likes”, follows a pattern of “reward learning”, concludes a new study by an international team of scientists. Its findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications , reveal parallels with the behavior of animals, such as rats, in seeking food rewards.
“These results establish that social media engagement follows basic, cross-species principles of reward learning,” explains one of the paper's authors. “These findings may help us understand why social media comes to dominate daily life for many people and provide clues, borrowed from research on reward learning and addiction, to how troubling online engagement may be addressed.”
In 2020, more than four billion people spent several hours per day, on average, on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other more specialized forums. This widespread social media engagement has been likened by many to an addiction, in which people are driven to pursue positive online social feedback, such as “likes”, over direct social interaction and even basic needs like eating and drinking. While social media usage has been studied extensively, what actually drives people to engage, sometimes obsessively, with others on social media is less clear.
To examine these motivations, the Nature Communications study directly tested, for the first time, whether social media use can be explained by the way our minds process and learn from rewards.
To do so, the authors analyzed more than one million social media posts from over 4,000 users on Instagram and other sites. They found that people space their posts in a way that maximizes how many “likes” they receive on average: they post more frequently in response to a high rate of likes and less frequently when they receive fewer likes. The researchers then used computational models to reveal that this pattern conforms closely to known mechanisms of reward learning, a long-established psychological concept that posits behavior may be driven and reinforced by rewards.
More specifically, their analysis suggested that social media engagement is driven by similar principles that lead non-human animals, such as rats, to maximize their food rewards in a Skinner Box-a commonly used experimental tool in which animal subjects, placed in a compartment, access food by taking certain actions.
The researchers then confirmed these results with an online experiment, in which human participants could post funny images with phrases, or “memes”, and receive likes as feedback on an Instagram-like platform. Consistent with the study's quantitative analysis, the results showed that people posted more often when they received more likes-on average.
“Our findings can help lead to a better understanding of why social media dominates so many people's daily lives and can also provide leads for ways of tackling excessive online behavior,” says the paper's lead author.
[A] the principles of reward learning
[B] the significance of social media
[C] the motive of online engagement
[D] the behavior of seeking rewards
[A] the development of specialized forums
[B] the popularity of social media
[C] the diversification of online social platforms
[D] the harm of Internet addiction
[A] Likes.
[B] Posts.
[C] Learning.
[D] Feedback.
[A] It is the basis of human social communication.
[B] It highlights the uniqueness of human behavior.
[C] It reveals the link between behavior and reward.
[D] It is summarized from animal foraging behavior.
[A] quantitatively analyzes online social behavior
[B] points out the dominance of social media
[C] puts forward a reasonable plan of daily life
[D] helps solve the problem of Internet addiction
President Biden on Monday announced the finalization of a federal rule to regulate so-called “ghost guns” more like regular guns, including requiring serial numbers and background checks for the purchase of kits to assemble guns privately. Last year, about 20,000 suspected ghost guns were recovered by law enforcement during criminal investigations, according to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), marking a tenfold increase in reported ghost guns compared to 2016. Biden also introduced his second nominee to lead the ATF, former US Attorney Steve Dettelbach.
The president noted that he announced the process to come up with the rule on ghost guns a year ago with political opposition in Congress to taking action on guns. “The National Rifle Association (NRA) called this rule I'm about to announce extreme. Extreme? Well then let me ask you, is it extreme to protect police officers? Extreme to protect our children? Extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people who couldn't even pass a background check?” Biden said. “Look, the idea that someone on a terrorist list could purchase one of these guns, is extreme? It isn't extreme. It's basic common sense.”
Biden showed off a kit sold to assemble a pistol to illustrate the ease of producing a functioning gun. Biden said ATF estimates being able to trace less than 1% of ghost guns. Biden described other ways in which the Department of Justice is cracking down on illegal guns and efforts his administration is making to support community policing. He also called on Congress to pass universal background checks and again ban assault weapons, as well as high-capacity magazines. Biden also called on Congress to ban sale and possession of unserialized guns, something the administration is not able to do through its regulation, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers.
The president was introduced by Mia Tretta, the survivor of a shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, who lost two classmates in the shooting and has worked with national gun rights groups as a gun safety activist.
The White House touted Dettelbach's two-decade career as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice, as well as his record of taking on criminal gang activity, domestic extremism and his experience with data-driven strategies to fight community gun violence. Dettelbach served as US attorney for the northern district of Ohio during the Obama administration before resigning in 2016.
It's Biden's second attempt at finding the ATF a permanent director. The White House in September withdrew David Chipman's nomination to lead the agency amid opposition from gun rights advocates, Republican senators and a few Democrats. Chipman, a former ATF agent, has pushed for tough gun regulations as a senior policy adviser for a gun safety group founded by former Republican Gabrielle Giffords, who was the victim of a shooting in 2011.
[A] intensify gun kit purchase review
[B] ask for a new leader for AFT
[C] reduce the number of ghost guns
[D] ban extremists from buying guns
[A] Irrational claim of the NRA.
[B] Political opposition in Congress.
[C] Universal permission for gun purchase.
[D] Overprotection of the vulnerable groups.
[A] destroy unserialized guns
[B] approve stricter regulations
[C] conduct background checks
[D] strengthen government supervision
[A] She was seriously injured by a ghost gun.
[B] Her work has gained nationwide recognition.
[C] She introduced the president about a shooting.
[D] Her experience caught the president's attention.
[A] the changes of American government's gun policy
[B] the unexpected difficulties in regulating ghost guns
[C] the deep divergence between Biden and his opposition
[D] the profound impact of the shooting incident on politics
Picture a lecture session at a business school and you probably envisage students gazing at screens filled with equations and acronyms. What you might not expect is choristers attempting to sing “O clap your hands”, an eight-part anthem composed by Orlando Gibbons and first performed in 1622.
This was a small game in class. Some of the students had to try conducting the choir. The first to take the challenge was a rather self-confident young man from America. It didn't take long for him to go wrong. His most obvious mistake was to start conducting without asking the singers how they would like to be directed, though they had the expertise and he was completely a green hand.
The experience was doubtless chastening, but also instructive. The session at Saïd Business School in Oxford, organised by Pegram Harrison, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship, cleverly allowed the students to absorb some important leadership lessons. For example, leaders should listen to their teams, especially when their colleagues have specialist knowledge. All they may need to do, as conductors, is set the pace and then step back and let the group govern itself.
It was noticeable, too, that the choir managed fairly well even if the conductors were just waving their batons in an indeterminate fashion. The lesson there, Mr. Harrison said, was that leaders can only do so much damage-provided they do not attempt to control every step of the process. The whole exercise illustrated it is possible for a lesson to be instructive and entertaining at once.
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) has trained many great actors and it also offers training courses for executives, ranging from half a day to six days. “Acting is about finding the truth in the character and in yourself,” says Charlie Walker-Wise, one of RADA's tutors. “We help people to become more aware of their habits; what they do without realising it. How people manage their physicality-their breath, their voice. Not many people are aware of how they come across.” Middle managers are often delivering speeches that are not their own (because they were devised by head office) or trying to inspire staff to meet an objective that was set by someone else. “The lesson from acting is how I connect to this message without betraying my own personality,” he argues.
Being a manager involves a lot more than just setting targets and entering numbers into a spreadsheet. It requires empathy and an understanding of human nature. It makes sense that an education in the arts might help develop those qualities. Above all, the students on Mr. Harrison's course at the Saïd school were experiencing something we never expected to see in those attending an MBA lecture: they were having fun.
[A] correct their overconfident attitude
[B] understand the art of leading a team
[C] take on challenges courageously
[D] learn to manage their physicality
[A] provide enlightening guidance
[B] avoid intervening in everything
[C] follow opinions from subordinates
[D] learn about professional knowledge
[A] self-control
[B] self-approval
[C] self-cognition
[D] self-regulation
[A] Good leaders must cultivate the empathy of their teams.
[B] The skill requirements for managers are now increasing.
[C] Art education helps to motivate staff more effectively.
[D] The MBA class could combine education with recreation.
[A] What can business students learn from art?
[B] How can lectures get more attractive?
[C] Why must students receive art education?
[D] Where should we start to improve leadership?