We talk of being a global community, but our institutions and behaviors tend to run counter to these currents. Our new reality-complex, interconnected, and faster than ever-means that the need for global cooperation and global solutions has never been greater. So what criteria should underpin a global system for the 21st century?
    First, such a system must foster cooperation. We're all in this together. Governments, business, and civil society cannot do it on their own. Global issues are interrelated, and multi-stakeholder responses such as public-private partnerships bring innovative solutions to the table. They engage the passion, purpose, and networks of civil society with the resources and experience of business.
    Next, a global system must also approach challenges in a systematic, integrated way. The issues on the global agenda are all interrelated, but our current system is too compartmentalized: the World Trade Organization for trade, the World Health Organization for health, and the International Monetary Fund for finance. We also have to establish the necessary interlinkages to create coherence. For example, how do we strike the optimal balance between the G-20 and the Untited Nations? We need flexible net-works-more heterarchies, fewer hierarchies.
    Third, the system should be strategic, not crisis-driven. Most of our energy is currently absorbed by reactive rather than proactive measures. Managing crisis instead of thinking about the future leads to defensive attitudes. We must adapt to a changing world, not defend outdated models.
    Fourth, a global system must continually demonstrate legitimacy. Today, this goes beyond mandates based on democratic principles; it includes clear objectives and concrete results. We undoubtedly have a delivery problem. And since promised actions are not fulfilled, we also have a trust deficit with governments, international organizations, and business.
    Finally, our global governance system must embrace the notion of global citizenship. In an interconnected world, it is in the interest of nation-states to strive for solutions to truly global challenges, such as climate change. Today, we not only need a Charter of Human Rights, but must also expand this notion to include responsibilities.   
    As a global community, we depend on the functioning of institutions and processes to manage our global neighborhood. Integrating these five criteria into our global system will be challenging, but if we don’t, we will continue applying topical treatments to conditions that fundamentally require global cardiac care.
 
    By Klaus Schwab who is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

Let me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you’re reading. Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. Because, these days, a shocking amount of what we’re reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms. We probably should have suspected that the information assaulting us 24/7 couldn’t all have been created by people bent over their laptops.

 

It’s understandable. The multitude of digital avenues now available to us demand content with an appetite that human effort can no longer satisfy. This demand, paired with ever more sophisticated technology, is spawning an industry of “automated narrative generation.”

 

Companies in this business aim to relieve humans from the burden of the writing process by using algorithms and natural language generators to create written content. Feed their platforms some data - financial earnings statistics, let's say - and poof ! In seconds, out comes a narrative that tells whatever story needs to be told.

 

These robo-writers don’t just regurgitate data, either; they create human-sounding stories in whatever voice befits the intended audience. They’re that smart. And when you read the output, you’d never guess the writer doesn’t have a heartbeat.

 

Algorithms and natural languagegenerators have been around for a while, but they’re getting better and faster as the demand for them spurs investment and innovation. The sheer volume andcomplexity of the Big Data we generate, too much for mere mortals to tackle, calls for artificial rather than human intelligence to derive meaning from it all.

 

Set loose on the mother lode - especially stats - rich domains like finance, sports and merchadising - the new software platforms apply advanced metrics to identify patterns, trends and data anomalies. They then rapidly craft the explanatory narrative, stepping in as robot-journalists to replace humans.

 

The associated Press uses Automated Insights' Wordsmitn platform to create more than 3000 finaincial reports per quarter. It published a strory on Apple's latest record-busting earnings whithin minutes of their release. Forbes uses Narrative Science's Quill platform for similar efforts and refers to the firm as a partner.

 

But we should be forgiven a sense of unease. These software processes, which are, after all, a black box to us, might skew to some predicated norm, or contain biases that we can't possibly discern. Not to mention that we may be missing out on the insights a curious and fertile human mind could impart when considering the same information.

 

The mantra around all of this carries the usual liberation theme: Robo-journalism will free humans to do more reporting and less data processing.

 

That would be nice, but Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science's co-founder, estimates that 90% of news could be algorithmically generated by the mid-2020s, much of it without human intervention. If this projection is anywhere near accurate, we are on a slippery slope.

 

It's mainly robo-journalism now, but it doesn't stop there. As software stealthily replace us as communicators, algorithmic content is rapidly permeating the nooks and crannies of our culture.

 

Books are robo-written, too. Our phones can speak to us. Our home appliances can take commands. Our cars will be able to drive themselves. What does "human" even mean?

 

With technology, the next evolutionary step always seems logical. That's the danger. As it seduces us again and again, we relinquish a little part of ourselves. We rarely step back to reflect on whether, ultimately, we're giving up more than we getting.

 

Then again, who has time to think about that when there's so much information to absorb everyday? After all, we're only human.

When I left school in 2002 with a master’s degree in international affairs, I was set on having a career at the United Nations. By then I had already once changed career by dropping out of a clinical psychology program. Ten years later, I have the experience of both working for and leaving the UN.
 
In my undergraduate and graduate studies, I found pure joy in learning history and philosophy; studying the requirements, including statistics and economics, was less joyful. What I learned in both types of courses, though, was equally useless when I made my way as a working adult.
 
What was useful was the fact that I had a diploma in a relevant field, even though my mastery of the content mattered very little. It was useful that I was enthusiastic and willing to work long hours. On the other hand, I lacked the constitution to thrive in a hierarchical organization such as the UN. But school couldn’t have taught me that. The rest of what I needed, I learned on the job.
 
For generations, higher education has been associated with better career prospects. And certain degrees, parents believed, represented more marketable skills.
 
There is no paucity of researchers, policymakers, and business leaders who insist that producing more highly trained engineers and scientists is the key to reviving the economy. Many have embraced the House decision in May to cut funding for political science research at universities and reallocate it to physics, engineering, and chemistry through the National Science Foundation. The hard truth is no degree guarantees a clear-cut, secure professional trajectory anymore. 
 
In a similar trend, the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States, has seen its annual budget shrink from $167.5 million in 2010 to $146 million this year. Academics are worried that budgetary shortfalls will push the humanities to backslide a century, when only a privileged few had access to them. 
 
Take a look at Europe’s most economically troubled countries. In Spain, for example, the job market hardly kept up with the rising education rates and half of its young people are unemployed. In America, half of the unemployed aged 25 and younger have some form of college education. Almost 40 percent of graduates who are employed are working in jobs that do not require a college degree.
 
“Security” today, as a former colleague of mine said, is skills, not a permanent contract. When I think about the work I did at the UN, knowledge of phenomenology or regression analysis was absolutely useless. But the ability to sum up hundreds of pages of technical and bureaucratic language in a crisp memo or a snappy presentation was – is – a great asset.
 
A foreign language works like a passport. Critical thinking helps put complex situations into perspective. Emotional acuity serves as a compass when navigating office politics. And these are skills that training in the humanities can enhance.
 
Commentators have already pointed out that unemployment among recent college graduates is not due to mismatch of skills, but rather to a lack of demand in the feeble economy. In the absence of growth to create jobs, young people with or without a college degree will continue to bear the brunt of the consequences.   
 
Higher education is more than a vocational or technical training. The essential purpose of it has never been primarily about “usefulness” in a narrow sense of acquiring a specific, practical tool to make oneself marketable. 
 
In the words of my late college professor – of philosophy – the purpose of higher education is to become broadly acquainted with cultural traditions and deeply appreciate them, so that it may help us become responsible citizens and good people in general. 
 
It is also about love – learning what one loves for the love of learning. Hence, it is “gloriously useless.” 
 
Sadly, it seems that rising student debt, coupled with the lack of economic opportunities thereafter, are diminishing access not only to certain disciplines but to higher education altogether. The recent cuts in the federal Pell Grant to save $11 billion over 10 years will make it even more difficult for low-income students to get a college education.
 
As for me, there was no way of knowing which major or degree was going to be “useful.” And since then, everything around me is constantly changing – and I with it. Priorities shift and my heart no longer desires what it once did.
 
I have long forgotten the details of what I absorbed in classrooms and libraries. I did, however, learn how to think for myself, and that is invaluable in the workplace and outside of it.
 

When watching Holly wood movies, I am often moved by their romanticism spirit and consciousness of earth ownership. They fight on the screen from year to year so that they can salvage New York, America or even the whole earth from the talon of the villains. For better completion of the mission, they invented a speciality which exists for saving city, salvaging human and protecting the earth...
This speciality is called super hero.
Obviously Hollywood likes this speciality very much using which to produce many new kinds stories every year. But I am confused in so many heros such as superman, black superman, superman family, batman, spiderman etc who have the same feeling of justice and the same mission. The difference is that someone likes to wear the underpants outside and someone likes to wear them on head.
To be honest, I was annoyed before by such hard to be memorized piece though I have found the rule recently: Who is the leading actor is not important, how to save the earth is also not important, the most important is that whether the villain does personalized bad thing or high level bad thing which in turn decides the level of movie.

Generally, there are three kinds of villains. One is ambitious machinator such as the villain in superman movie who has crazy smile and cloudy eye with the only target to enslave or destroy earth. This kind move is called gut popcorn movie.
The second is failing experiments mouse-they were originally scientists who lost his human nature by unsuccessful experiments with obtaining super power at the same time such as those in spiderman movie who bring us with splendid visual effect to create the visual series of popcorn movie.
The third one is the person who has bad luck. They opposed the super hero in the shadow of bad children memory or all kinds of love or hate such as those in Avenger alliance or spiderman3. They are pathetic and hateful or even lovely. And because of them, superman movie cannot be so popcorn like.
And whether is there the exception? Yes, clown in the dark knight is like this. They do not chase for money or power. They have no distorted bodies and even they do not hate the leading actor. Their fun are only to look for the bad side of the human mind and enjoy the evil side drives them to destroy.
The latest batman is so bourgeois. Batman is still there with lacking the frightening and lovely clown creates the bourgeoisness. The most fearful evil is not from violence, ambition, hate or uncontrolled high technology, but the darkness in the deep mind of human being.

Translated from Xia Haishu article who has the mentto 'Gain without pay and win in every gambling"

  Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that the character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn't.
  As Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution pointed out recently in National Affairs, both orthodox progressive and conservative approaches treat individuals as if they were abstractions-as if they were part of species of "hollow man" whose destiny is shaped by economic structure alone, and not by character and behavior.
  It's easy to understand why policy makers would skirt the issue of character. Nobody wants to be seen blaming the victim-spreading the calumny that the poor are that way because they don't love their children enough, or don't have good values. Furthermore, most sensible People wonder if government can do anything to alter character anyway.
  The problem is that policies that ignore character and behavior have produced disappointing results. Social research over the last decade or so has reinforced the point that would have been self-evident in any other era-that if you can't help people become more resilient, conscientious or prudent, then all the cash transfers in the world will not produce permanent benefits.
  Summarizing the researth in this area, Reeves estimates that measures of drive and self-control influence academic achievement roughly as much as cognitive skills. Recent research has also shown that there are very different levels of self-control up and down in the income scale. Researchers often use dull tests to see who can focus attention and stay on task. Children raised in the top income quintile were two and a half times more likely to score well on these tests than students raised in the bottom quintile.
  People who have studied character development through the ages have generally found hectoring lectures don't help. The superficial "character eduction" programs implanted into some schools of late haven't done much either. Instead, sages over years have generally found that at least effective avenues to make it easier to climb. Government supported programs can contribute in all realms.
  First, habits. If you can change behavior you eventually change disposition. People who practice small acts of self-control find it easier to perform big acts in times of crisis. Quality preschools, K.I.P.P.(Knowledge is power program) schools and parenting coaches have produced lasting effects by encouraging young parents and students to observe basic etiquette and practice small but regular acts of self restraint.
  Second, opportunity. Maybe you can practice self-discipline through iron willpower. But most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self denial now and something better down the road.Young women who see affordable college prospects ahead are much less likely become teen moms.
  Third, exemplars. Character is not developed individually. It is instilled by communities and transmitted by elders. The centrist Democratic group Third Way suggests government create a BoomerCorps. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65, some of them could be recruited into an AmeriCorps-type program to help low-income families move up the mobility ladder.
  Fourth, standards. People can only practice restraint after they have a certain definition of the sort of  person they want to be. Research from Martin West of Harvard  and others suggests that students at certain charter schools raise their own expectations for themselves, and judge themselves by more demanding criteria.
  Character development is an idiosyncratic, mysterious process. But if families, communities and the government can envelop lives with attachments and institutions, then that might reduce the alienation and distrust that retards mobility and ruins dreams.

American mythology loves nothing more than the reluctant hero: the man whose natural talents have destined him for more than obliging obscurity. George Washington, we are told, was a leader who would have preferred to have been a farmer. Thomas Jefferson, a writer. Martin Luther king, Jr., a preacher. These men were roused form lives of perfunctory achievement, our legends have it, not because they chose their own exceptionalism, but because we, the people, chose it for them. We seeing greatness in them that they were too humble to observe themselves-conferred on them uncommon paths. Historical circumstance became its own call of duty, and the logic of democracy proved itself through the answer.
Neil Armstrong was a hero of this stripe: constitutionally humble, circumstantially noble. Nearly every obituary written for him has made a point of emphasizing his sense of privacy, his sense of humility, his sense of the ironic ordinary. And yet every aspect of Armstrong’s life made clear: On that day in 1969, he acted on our behalf, out of a sense of mission that was communal rather than personal. The reluctant hero is also the self-sacrificing hero.
And so Armstrong was an icon fit for America’s particular predilections: one who made history, yet one who recognized the ultimate contingency of his own history making. One who, Washington-like, preferred quiet retirement over continued fame. “Nothing is more typical of Armstrong, or more estimable,” Anthony Lane put it, “than his decision not to go into politics; heaven knows what the blandishment, or the invitations, must have been. That is not to deprecate the service rendered by, say, John Glen, but simply to remind ourselves that political ambition, like our other passions, is in the end a low sublunary affair; and that Armstrong, by dint of being the first man to tread not upon terra firma but upon the gray dust of terra incognita, rose above the fray and stayed there.”
It’ hard, now, to find heroes who seem motivated, in some deep and cosmic way, by something more than themselves. It’s hard not to imagine that many of the cultural figures we’re meant to look to for inspiration-sports stars, movie stars, writers, business leaders-will one day end up as characters on reality TV.
And so Armstrong’s loss is not merely a loss for all the obvious reasons, but also because it signals a small shift in American mythology. If Armstrong’s was the age of the reluctant hero, ours is the age of adamant heroism. Our familiar figures are people who, whether or not their talents entitle them to it, explicitly sought their own fame.
That is largely to the good. It means a democratic culture, a culture where systematized notions of merit-based on race, based on class-dissolve into the broader culture will. But it also means a shift in how we see success and ourselves as seekers of it. The tension Armstrong embodied so succinctly-publicity on the one hand, humility on the other-is dissipating. The humility factor is dissolving into a culture that often equates fame with power. Our current icons are less the people who have been called to duty, and more the people who have battled their way into it-the subjects, rather than the predicates, of their own greatness. The reluctant hero is diminishing. Armstrong’s passing signals an end to that myth.
Megan Garber

In the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers unheard-of wage of $5 a day.
Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.
This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well paid workers generating consumer demand and that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives brought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts.
Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today.
The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well being ran in tandem. Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family.
Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits.
Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyper concentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t.
In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interests.”
In short, German leaders have practices stakeholder capitalism, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, off shoring and short-term profit and big dividends of their investors.
Today, we are all paying the price for the shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that.
Hedrick Smith

Commencement is life's great ceremonial beginning, with its own attendant and highly appropriate symbolism. Here we are on a literal level palying field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume is shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whaterver male or female, tall or short, sholar or slacker, each of you is dressed, you'll notice, exactly the same. And your diploma, but for your name, are exactly the same.
All of this is as it should be, because one of you is special.
You are not special. You are not exceptional.
The empirical evidence is everywhere. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are gradudating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. Even if you are one in a million, on a planet of 6.8 billion that means there are nearly 7,000 people just like you. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. We have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.
It is an epidemic-and in its way, not even dear old Wellesley High is immune...one of the best of the 37,000 nationwide, Wellesley High School...where good is no longer good enough, where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called advanced College Placement. And I hope you caught me when I said "one of the best". I said "one of the best" so we can feel better about ourselves, so we can bask in a little easy distiction, howerver vague and unverifiable. But the phrase defies logic. By definition, there can be only one best. You are it you you are not.
if you have learnt anything in your years here I hope it is that education should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You've learned, too, I hope, that Wisdom is the chief element of happiness. I also hope you have learnt enough to recognize how little you know now, at the moment, for taoday is just the beginning. It is where you go from here that matters.
As you commence, then, and before you scatter to the winds, i urge you to do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance. Resist the easy comforts of complacency, the specious glitter of materialism, the narcotic paralysis of self-satisfaction.
And read...read all the time...read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer.
Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilled life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It is what happens when you are thinking about more important things. Climb the moutain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.
Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they bring you, but for the good they will do others. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you are not special.
Because everyone is.