 Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. Coming up on the program, Dan Friedel has a story on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Gina Bennett reports on a training program in Pakistan for Afghan women. Brian Lin brings us the technology report on a study about AI tools in the workplace. Later, Andrew Smith and Jill Robbins present the English lesson of the day. First, three scientists in the United States won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday. The three won for their discovery of quantum dots, a technology widely used today to make displays for electronic devices and medical imaging. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Monji Bohendi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Louis Bruce of Columbia University in New York, and Alexey Yakimov of Nanocrystals Technology. The Academy said the three were honored for their work with particles that have unique properties and now spread their light from television screens and LED lamps. LED lights are electronic lights used all over the world, which use energy very effectively. Pranila Wittung Stafshada, a member of the Nobel Committee that awarded the prize, said, We have displays on TVs in your cell phone that use quantum dots inside. Quantum dots are extremely small particles called nanoparticles. They are said to be about one-tenthousandth the width of a human hair. The dots glow blue, red, green, or other colors when exposed to light. The color they give off depends on the size of the particles. Larger dots look red and smaller dots look blue. The color change is caused by the behavior of electrons in these small spaces. Physicists had predicted these color change properties as early as the 1930s. However, it took 50 years of research and development to control the size of quantum dots correctly. Yakimov and Bruce were the early researchers of the technology. Bawendi is credited with developing the production of quantum dots being used today. Bawendi used the words very surprised, sleepy, shocked, unexpected, and very honored to describe his feelings. Bawendi added he was not thinking about the possible uses of his work when he started researching quantum dots. The motivation really is the basic science, a basic understanding, the curiosity of how does the world work? And that's what drives scientists and academic scientists to do what they do, he said. Bruce said the practical uses of quantum dots, like creating the colors in TV screens, are something he was hoping for when he started the work many years ago. Basic research is extremely hard to predict exactly how it's going to work out, Bruce said. It's more for the knowledge base than it is for the actual materials, but in this case, it's both. Yakimov is the former chief scientist at NanoCrystal's Technology, a company based in New York where he started working in 1999. The Swedish Academy credited him with showing how the size of nanoparticles affected the colors in glass. I'm Dan Friedl. In a small building in Peshawar, Pakistan, a group of Afghan women watch a teacher show them how to use a sewing machine. The training program was established last year by Mara Bashir, who saw an increasing number of women coming from neighboring Afghanistan. Since the Taliban took over in 2021, women in Afghanistan have faced growing restrictions and an economic crisis. Bashir created the program to provide choices for women to support themselves. She teaches sewing, digital skills, and beauty treatments. And Bashir quickly found hundreds of women wanting to join the program. If we get assistance, I think we will be able to train between 250 and 500 students at one time, empowering women who can play an important role in the community, Bashir said. Officials say hundreds of thousands of Afghans have traveled to Pakistan since the Taliban took over in 2021. Even before then, 1.5 million registered refugees were in the country. This is one of the largest such populations in the world, the United Nations Refugee Agency says. More than a million others are estimated to live there unregistered. Struggling with an economic crisis of its own, Pakistan's government is increasingly worried about the number of Afghan refugees. Many Afghans have been arrested in recent months. Lawyers and officials say they do not have the correct legal documents to live in Pakistan. Bashir said that her main aim was expanding operations for Afghan women. But she has also included some Pakistani women in the program to increase their choices in the conservative area. The training program lasts three months. When they complete the program, the women direct their attention to earning enough money to survive. Many women begin their own businesses. Fatima, a 19-year-old from Afghanistan, completed the training program. She said she wants to open a beauty salon in Peshawar. It is currently banned in her home country just a few hours away. I'm Gina Bennett. An experiment involving hundreds of office workers has found that artificial intelligence, AI tools, can greatly help but also hurt worker performance. AI tools designed to operate at human levels have greatly expanded in popularity over the past year. These include OpenAI's chat GPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's AI-powered search engine Bing. Such tools, also known as chatbots or generative AI, are computer-powered systems. They are designed to interact smoothly with humans and perform high-level writing and creative work. In recent months, these tools have demonstrated an ability to produce high-quality work. This has led some technology experts to warn that generative AI systems could end up replacing workers in many industries. This year, researchers at Harvard Business School and other organizations carried out an experiment. It aimed to test how well AI tools could help workers perform their usual duties or tasks. It involved more than 700 business advisors called consultants from Massachusetts-based Boston Consulting Group. Harvard Business School recently published results from the experiment in a working paper. The main findings suggest that AI tools like chat GPT can greatly improve worker performance. For example, researchers found that, on average, workers who used OpenAI's latest chat GPT for tool completed 12% more tasks than non-chat GPT users. Tasks carried out with help from the AI technology were completed 25% faster, and the team found the quality of work performed by consultants using chat GPT for increased about 40%. Work tasks used in the study covered four main areas, creativity, analytical thinking, writing, and persuasiveness. The team gave examples of worker tasks in each of these areas. One example for creativity was propose at least 10 ideas for a new shoe targeting an underserved market or sport. For writing, consultants were asked to write a press release with marketing copy for a new product. To show persuasiveness, workers were told to write a letter to employees that explained why a particular product would beat competitors. Harvard Business School's Fabrizio de la Croix was the paper's lead writer. He told technology website Venture Beat he thinks the results were especially important because they showed that AI tools can help even highly educated, experienced workers. The fact that we could boost the performance of these highly paid, highly skilled consultants from top elite MBA institutions, I would say that's really impressive. De la Croix said. However, the paper also noted areas where the performance of consultants using chat GPT for dropped. The researchers said this was especially true with tasks the AI tool was not good at completing. Of tasks the AI was good at, the experiment showed it significantly improved human performance, the paper said. But for tasks chat GPT for was not right for humans relied too much on the AI and were more likely to make mistakes. The researchers reported that consultants who used AI for tasks it was not well equipped for were 19% less likely to produce correct solutions compared to those without AI. The experiment also showed how consultants used the AI tool differently to improve their work. The researchers said some workers purposely divided the tasks with some being completely carried out by the AI tool and others the workers themselves carried out completely. Other workers chose to use AI for all tasks while continually interacting with the technology. The team suggests one of the biggest barriers to companies effectively using AI is not knowing which tasks can be completed best with the technology. Finding this out will require businesses to carry out thoughtful research and training efforts in order to find the right mix of AI and human level work. I'm Brian Lin. Brian Lin is here to talk more about his technology report. Thanks for being here again Brian. Sure Dan glad to be here. This week you reported on an experiment that aimed to measure how AI tools can help workers with their jobs. What kinds of workers were involved in the research? So in this experiment one of the first of its kind actually to study the effects of chat GBT style tools in the workplace researchers centered on professional workers and they were consultants involved in marketing activities so their jobs require them to sometimes be very creative and come up with new product ideas on their own and this was one of the areas where the researchers noted the AI tool performed quite well. And in what areas did the AI system struggle to produce human quality results? So the researchers said there were certain areas where the AI tools did not perform very well and these included tasks where the AI was asked to analyze specific problems a particular business was experiencing so these tasks which were more strategic in nature were much harder for the AI to handle compared to creating say a list of ideas for a new product launch. So did organizers of the experiment offer any suggestions for companies on how to improve the ways their employees use AI? Yes one of the main suggestions was that businesses should fully research what specific tasks are best handled by chat GBT style tools because they said this is the only way their workers will be able to effectively use the technology when they know the AI tools exact capabilities across many different areas of the company. Got it thanks again for being here Brian. You're welcome thank you Dan. My name is Anna Matteo and my name is Jill Robbins and I'm Andrew Smith. You're listening to the Learning English podcast welcome to the part of the show where we helped you do more with our series Let's Learn English. The series shows Anna Matteo in her work and life in Washington DC. In the lessons we have been watching lately Anna has been trying new things at work. In lesson 18 she tried reading the news. And the best word to describe that experience is challenging. Miss Weaver asked Anna to read the news without showing her feelings. Anna is very expressive so that was difficult. I hope her boss gives her another opportunity in this lesson. Let's watch the beginning of lesson 19. A lesson we call when do I start? Anna is talking with her boss on the phone to explain why she is late coming to work. Hi there. Summer in Washington DC is hot and sunny. I always ride the metro to work. Riding the metro is cool and fast but today it's closed so I am walking to work. Miss Weaver I am late this morning. The metro is closed so I am walking to work. That's too bad. It's really hot today. Yes it is. When you arrive please come to my office. I have important news to tell you. Of course goodbye. My boss has news for me. The question is, is it good news or bad news? This is a phrase you will often hear in jokes and daily conversation. We talk about something being good news or bad news and give our listener a choice to hear one of them first. What do you think she will hear Andrew? I think she might hear some bad news since she had so many problems trying to read the news objectively as we said in our last podcast. Let's watch and find out. Hello Miss Weaver. Anna, I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you want to hear first? The good news. No. Okay the bad news. Notice the way Miss Weaver asked Anna to choose. She said, which do you want to hear first? If we have some difficult news or criticism to tell someone, we can add a more pleasant comment to make it easier to take. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, right? Let's see what the bad news is first. The bad news is you are not good at reading the news. Oh, I am very sorry to hear that. So starting next month, you will not read the news. Next month is July. You are firing me in July. No, I am not firing you in July or in August or in September. That is the good news. Okay, you are not firing me. I am not reading the news. What will I be doing? Once again, you're listening to the lesson of the day on the Learning English Podcast. I'm Jill Robbins. If any of our listeners are not familiar with the word Anna uses here, firing, it means when someone is ordered to leave their job. Here, we heard good news and bad news. The good news was that Anna will not lose her job. The bad news is Anna is not very good at reading the news. I wonder what new position Anna will have. Did you notice how Anna summarized what Ms. Weaver says or what she thinks she said? This is a skill we call summarizing. That means saying something you read or heard again in a shorter and simpler way. A lot of school assignments involve summarizing. In fact, you could say a big part of our job here at VOA Learning English is summarizing. We take news stories and put them into simpler sentences. And Anna summarized what she heard Ms. Weaver say as a way of confirming her understanding. Okay, you are not firing me. I am not reading the news. What will I be doing? You're listening to the Lesson of the Day on the Learning English Podcast. I'm Andrew Smith. Maybe Ms. Weaver should review Anna's skills and try to find something she's more able to do. Great idea, Andrew. I think you'll be happy with the next clip then. Well, you are good at asking questions. You are good at talking to people. You are good at showing your feelings. And you are great at being silly. Thank you, Ms. Weaver. But what does all that mean? I have a new assignment for you. Your skills are perfect for a new show. A children's show. A children's show. That is awesome. When do I start? You start next month. Start thinking of ideas for the show. That sounds familiar. I think she has tons of ideas for the show too. But you're right. Ms. Weaver helps Anna to see her strengths and gives her a new assignment. She doesn't want to spend a lot of time discussing them, so she summarizes them this way. Well, you are good at asking questions. You are good at talking to people. You are good at showing your feelings. And you are great at being silly. Jill, have you ever changed roles at a job? Yeah, lots of times. But I had one job where I started out with limited responsibilities. But gradually my supervisor saw that I had some skills in organizing projects. So I was given more responsibility. Skills like that can be learned through experience, or by working with someone who is more experienced than you are. I think you might also have some talent, which is a quality you're born with. I've never thought about that talent in relation to career skills. How about you? What talents and skills do you think are most valuable in your job? That's a good question. And I think that's kind of a chicken and egg question, or chicken and egg idea. That means it's hard to say which one comes first. I think I've developed some of my natural talents, like being able to use my voice well, maybe being able to sing a few simple songs or something like that. And those skills can help with broadcasting. I think other skills like writing have come mostly from my education and working to improve them. I think you have great people skills too, like the soft skills we talked about in another podcast. I had to learn those skills myself because I was very shy when I was younger. Yes, those soft skills sometimes take some time to learn, just like other skills. Now, I think before we go today, we should give our listeners a good news, bad news, joke. Are you sure? Most of those jokes are pretty dark. I mean, they deal with some serious issues like illness. That's true, but don't worry. I have a good one. Here's the joke. There's a troop of soldiers out in the middle of the desert. The captain gets his men together and says, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is we have run out of food and there is nothing to eat but sand. Oh, I know this one. The captain goes on to say, the good news is there's plenty of sand. So that's all for this lesson of the day on the Learning English Podcast. I'm Jill Robbins. And I'm Andrew Smith. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.