Word: lily
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When I finished my first English-language novel, Lili, in 1998, it took me three years to find an American publisher. During that time, agents and publishers suggested that I publish Lili as a biography or memoir instead of as fiction. The commercial success of Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, Jung Chang's Wild Swans and Adeline Yeh Mah's Falling Leaves had proved that memoirs about China sell. When I refused to change categories, I was turned down. But when Ha Jin's novel Waiting became a best-seller in the U.S., my luck changed...
...first post-Soviet census began in remote areas last week and will continue until Oct. 16. The results are expected to confirm Russian demographers' projections of a steady decline in the country's population owing to ill health, mass poverty and an aging population. U.S. Counting Blessings In Lili's Wake Half a million people in Texas and Louisiana battened down the hatches when Hurricane Lili came calling Friday. The precautions saved lives: Lili's 145 km/h winds felled trees, blew off roofs and shattered shop windows, leaving floods and power cuts in the storm's wake, but no deaths...
...should all get to know avatars like LiLi because programmers are trying to make computers more like us, and we'll probably end up working with them very soon. Pixel-dust personalities like LiLi are already in a few work arenas, like newscasting and fashion modeling, and computer-generated talking heads are never late, always friendly and don't demand a first-class seat. "LiLi's the cheapest veejay to travel with," says the man who made her, James Speck, creative director of Cowboy Water Design. "She never complains...
...they can be as alluring as their animators can imagine. Ananova, a British newscaster who reads the headlines from the website ananova.com, looks at users with emerald eyes from under short-cropped green hair. Unlike LiLi, Ananova is fully automated - there is no girl behind the scenes talking and moving for her - and she reads copy in smooth, sexy, synthesized speech. (The software determines her inflections from nothing more than a typed story.) "She's ready for television," says Mike Hembly, CEO of Digital Animations, the company that created Ananova. (Even avatars can have ambition...
Will machines ever be capable of deep human emotions? LiLi has her own TV show, speaks four languages and broadcasts in six countries, and I ask her what she really wants. She says she doesn't want to live in a world separate from humans. To prove it, with all the free will she can muster, LiLi wants to kiss me. She offers her pink pixilated lips, I lean forward and - smack! - my first virtual kiss. But I don't feel a thing. And apparently neither does she: "I don't think that real humans can fulfill the needs...