Our Skift Forums（论坛） are the leading creative business events in the global travel industry. We＇ve hosted 18 annual forums around the world, in world-class cities like London, Berlin, San Francisco and New York City. Now as we prepare to lift the curtain on our new Skift Global Forum, we wanted to look back on some of the figures and highlights from over the years.
Our speakers are the leading innovators from every corner of this global industry, and beyond. From top CEOs of the largest travel companies to new, business leaders driving innovation, the voices onstage are a reflection of the best the industry has to offer. Over the years, we＇ve welcomed 700+ speakers to the Skift stage.
Our attendees come from all over the world, with 116 nations represented at our events. Last year, we were able to host our most geographically diverse events ever with the introduction of hybrid programming.
Our global attendees represent every diverse field of the world's 10 largest industries - we've got the entire customer journey covered. With these diverse perspectives comes unmatched cooperation and insights on the future of travel — both onstage, and off.
Since the inception of Skift years ago, our mission has remained strong: Helping you - the travel professional - learn, grow and be inspired, by providing the best content, products and event experiences known to the professional world. From the very first Skift Forum, we knew we had something special. And this year will be no different. In fact, it'll be better.
With stunning visuals of Tamil Nadu's nature, The Elephant Whisperers, which won the Oscar in the' documentary （纪录片） short film category, tells a story of a loving relationship between people and elephants.
The filmmaker Kartiki Gonsalves spent her childhood in and around nature in southern India, "My family loved exploring nature. " she says. Her mother loved animals and her, father was a photographer. Her grandmother led school trips to local nature reserves.
The chance elephant encounter came in October 2017 that changed Gonsalves's life and stimulated her to make the film. "I was moving back to my hometown when I met Raghu, a three-month-old elephant, in the Theppakadu Elephant camp, " she recalls: Gonsalves was pleasantly surprised by how playful Raghu was.
"This documentary was made because I fell in love with Raghu first, " she says. "We would happily splash （戏水） along the river, and I would spend hours scrubbing him and rubbing his tongue. He absolutely loves his tongue being rubbed and enjoyed pulling my hair and splashing around in the water.
In the film, Gonsalves takes viewers to the heart of Theppakadu Elephant camp in a landscape that is one of the largest undisturbed spaces for the Asian elephant. Here, the Kattunayakan community has been caring for abandoned elephants for generations. The documentary follows the journey of Bomman and Bellie, two elephant caretakers and the baby elephant Raghu, who was abandoned by the herd but fortunately found by the forest department. As Bomman and Bellie raised Raghu, their relationship progressed. The 40-minute documentary was cut down from more than 450 hours of raw footage （镜头） and filmed over the last five years. A lot of the moments in the documentary were unexpected but "that is the true beauty of telling a story as it unfolds, " Gonsalves says. "The Elephant Whisperers helps people realize what beautiful beings elephants were and to respect their intelligence, how they love and understand their human caretakers, how they've learnt to adapt and live with human. I wanted The Elephant Whisperers to be that glow of hope. "
ChatGPT-a conversational language model which was launched in November and is free and simple to use - can swiftly produce poems, math equations or essays on topics, bringing concern that students will misuse the technology. And because it doesn't copy an existing text, there is no easy way to be certain whether a human or a bot wrote the answer.
As many educators began to worry about whether students may use ChatGPT to generate papers, Edward Tian had an idea. The 22-year-old student, who studies computer science and journalism, decided to build an app to detect whether a text- was human-written or AI-written.
Over a few days in a Toronto coffee shop during winter break, he got to work. On Jan. 2, he launched' GPTZero. It analyzes' different properties of a text for its "perplexity", which is the randomness of the text, and the "burstiness", 'which is the variation of the text over time. So, a human-written text would have high perplexity, something very unfamiliar to an Al model, and exhibit properties of burstiness, which are non-common items that appear in random clusters （集 群）, rather than being uniformly distributed.
Tian said he expected a few dozen people to ever try it. But he woke up the next morning stunned by the response. He has even heard from people all over the world— many of them are teachers or college admissions officers, Many people have subscribed for updates from Tian as he works to improve the technology.
The quick response to Tian's effort highlighted the breakneck pace at which technology is changing classrooms, teaching, and the ways that people define and understand learning. Tian believed everyone deserved to reap the benefits of Al, but safeguards were needed to make sure new technologies were not abused.
Tian said it would be sad if, years from now, people mostly relied on AI and writing became far more uniform. "There's something implicitly（含蓄地） beautiful in human prose, " he said, "that computers can never copy. "
The number of seabirds killed by colliding（撞击） with wind turbines could be cut by painting black-and-white stripes on the blades（叶片）, and poles, say researchers. Graham Martin at the University. of Birmingham, UK, and Alex Banks at Natural England, a public organization that has a say in planning applications for offshore wind farms in England, wanted to design a pattern that could be easily painted onto turbines to reduce their impact on bird life.
Between 140, 000 and 328, 000 birds are killed each year by onshore wind turbines in the US, according to, one estimate. It is harder to tell how many birds are killed by offshore turbines each year, says Martin, as they fall into the ocean,
A previous study, published in 2020, looked at the effect of painting a single blade black on four onshore turbines in Norway. Bird collisions were reduced by 70 percent compared with all-white turbines nearby. Martin believes that further improvements could have an even greater impact. Based on analysis of previous studies into bird vision and bird collisions with wind turbines, the two researchers came up with a series of guiding principles to aid their design of a turbine that would harm. fewer birds.
"Most birds do not see too much fine detail in their vision - especially compared to humans, " says Martin, so any design shouldn't be too complex. Many collisions occur in low light, so the design should be easy to decipher in the dark, while high internal contrast would help the turbine stand out against different backgrounds, such as a cloudy or sunny sky. In low levels of light, black-and-white patterns are best, says Martin. "In the dark, a red-and-white pattern would rapidly look like shades of grey, " he says. The design hasn't yet been tested, but Martin hopes that manufacturers will consider it, particularly as it would be easy and cheap to implement.
Sending handwritten letters may have fallen out of fashion, but I'm a great believer in the power of letters. There's something unique and special about handwritten things. You write a letter not because there's something you need to know, but there's something you want to say.
The letter is a powerful and memorable way to touch the ones you care about. When my granny died and I cleared her house, I found hundreds of letters she had kept. There were letters from her mother, who died long before: I was born, but sitting reading them one rainy afternoon, her words stretched out across time and I felt I knew her.
It can enrich a relationship and allow it to grow. When I was 12, I faked a letter from a parent to the pet shop for a pet mouse. My mum punished me and made me write letters to some relatives. One of them was my uncle who I'd only met a few times before. I wrote a long letter detailing my life and listing my interests. My punishment-complete, I forgot about this until I suddenly got a reply from him. "How lovely to hear from you, " he said, and went on to tell me all about his life. He'd love to hear about what subjects at school I enjoyed. I have grown close to him since then.
I often think about how that one naughty childhood behavior led to such an enriching communication that stretched on for many years. It encouraged me to write to lots of other people in fact. So, I'd encourage you to put pen to paper and see where it leads. What have you got to lose?
A. That is the point of the letter.
B. They told the story of her relationships.
C. Receiving a letter is such a lovely surprise.
D. It's also a way to make you more thoughtful.
E. And it's something I keep up with to this day.
F. Then we started a communication that went on for years.
G. That's why we would prefer handwritten letters to emails.
A video of Tommy Carroll skating near his home has been viewed millions of times around the globe, gaining him fame as a skateboarder. He can't see, but he can pull off some of the most incredible 1 on his skateboard without showing any 2 "I: think everybody should know that everything happens for a reason and that there's always a way to 3 an obstacle if you really want it enough. " Carroll said in the video.
Carroll, was born with the retinal（视网膜） cancer and lost his 4when he was two years old. He 5 to skateboard at the age of ten and has been on the board ever since. In the video, he explains how he uses sound to 6 , listening for what's around him and gaining a sense of his surroundings through his ears.
"I am always constantly using the sound of my wheels to 7 if there's anything in my way and get my sense of 8 , " he says. Carroll used to get lots' of doubts from 'his classmates about his 9for mastering' the sports. "There were people who 10 me. " Carroll smiled, adding, "They considered it no way, taking it for granted that people like me, can't skateboard. But I just 11 them. "
Though courageous, Carroll learns to be 12 . When he skateboards in the new location, he gradually 13 himself with the surroundings. After a number of rides he then starts trying tricks. "Falling is as 14 as the sport itself. " he said, "I have proved peers 15 ."
Recently, many government officials across the country have put themselves into videos promoting local culture and tourism. The videos, （publish） over short-video platforms such as Douyin, have drawn lots of attention from netizens, giving likes and showing interest.
Yin Wentao, among these creative civil（servant）, is proud that he could help promote his hometown, Lintao county in a publicity video. The county （possess）rich cultural' resources, including the Majiayao culture and the site of the western beginning of the Great Wall during Qin Dynasty （221-206 BC）. In the 1920s, the site dating back thousands of years ago was discovered in the village of Majiayao and （preserve） as a key national relics protection unit since 1988.
With more videos emerging on (variety） online short-video platforms, more places have been （gradual） known to more people, receiving more visitors. Using short videos over new media platforms to promote tourism has become effective publicity channel. All this reflects that the local government has the strong desire （develop） tourism and the local economy rapidly, shows that the officials have a strong sense of responsibility for the development of their hometowns.
It was a late Saturday afternoon in early March, and I was sweating gracelessly, in search of the only gift my son said he wanted from Los Angeles: a map to the homes of the stars.
I was here for meetings in Westwood, near the UCLA Medical Centre. Should I wander a little? Try to find one of the treasured maps?
From the front of the hotel taxi line, a cheerful driver said, "No problem. Map vendors（小 贩） are everywhere!" Before long, we saw a hand-painted sandwich board saying: Star Maps. The taxi stopped. A fellow approached with a thin folded sheet and said: "Ten dollars. "
Ten dollars. American! With righteous assurance, I informed him, "That's too much. " The map man shrugged. We continued, whizzing past the Beverly Hills Hotel into West Hollywood. The driver dropped me at the House of Blues, encouraging me to stroll. I began walking, certain I would find a low-cost star map soon.
I was wrong. There was hardly anybody on the street. There didn't seem to be many real stores, just cars and bars. No maps. No stars. Blocks passed. The sun began to sink. At the edge of West Hollywood, another fellow appeared ahead, selling star maps to a car full of teenage girls.
Ten dollars still. Still too much. Forgot it. My son would understand. Time to go back to Westwood. That night, I called my wife. " Did you get one of those maps to the stars? He's been talking about nothing else. " This news was hard to ignore. But it was late.
Morning was coming. There would be last try. After I checked out, the first taxi in the hotel line was an old Chevy driven by a skinny guy from North Carolina. At nine in the morning, map vendors were nowhere to be found,
"You know, " said the driver, " The guys with the maps just aren't up yet!" He was right.
"Forget it. Let's go to the airport. "
"Well, " said the driver, "I could mail you one if you like. "
Sure. Trust this guy? I might as well toss cash onto the freeway. But exiting the taxi, I recognized my last chance. I handed the driver $13 and my business card.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150 左右：2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Three weeks passed, no reply form LA.
I held the package and the note in my hand, speechless.
