In addition to being open to opposite opinions, here are some techniques that could help broaden the way you think.

The mere presence of individuals from different backgrounds with different points of view in your everyday life creates an atmosphere in which people can better respond to change.

A change in your everyday life may provide the force needed to change the direction of your thinking. For some people, small changes might help reorganize your desk or take a new route to work, whereas for others, more adjustments are required.

Unlike negative emotions that bring about specific reactions, positive emotions prompt us to broaden our attention, explore our environment, and open ourselves to absorbing information. Take a few moments to think about the things in your life that are going well and for which you are grateful; this will automatically brighten your mood-and free your brain.

A Zen Buddhist concept for approaching even routine situations as if you were encountering them for the first time, “beginner’s mind” allows you to remain open to new experiences despite any expertise you may have. For instance, when you brush your teeth, take a moment to look at the toothbrush as if you’ve never laid eyes on such an object and notice its color and shape. Think about the flavor of the toothpaste and notice how your mouth feels as you move the brush back and forth.

Avoiding the worst effects of climate change will require action. But it’s hard to take action when you don’t even know there’s a problem. Around the world, only half of adults understand that humans are causing climate change through activities that produce greenhouse gases. But the picture is different for kids. Previous work has shown that children are more engaged and more knowledgeable than adults are about climate change. The question is, can we harness this to make a difference?

“We had come across this idea that kids are capable of influencing their parents. And when we say influence, we really mean just teaching them.” said Daniella Lawson, a social scientist at NC State University. “That’s what we set out to really investigate: can we design things in such a way that kids are able to teach their parents about climate change. A parent is willing and able to listen to their children speaking to them instead of just an adult on the street or a different climate communicator. ”

To test the idea, Lawson set up a wildlife-based climate course for kids. This approach was based on previous courses, but the team added a twist: involving the parents. First, parents were invited to come along to an event that formed a part of the course. And that’s not all. “So we also had students interview their parents. And this interview never mentioned climate change specifically. But it had questions like: how have you seen the weather change over the last five to ten years? Do you believe the sea level is rising? How do you think that could impact our communities?”

The study showed that the course did indeed increase concern about climate change: not just among the kids, but their parents too. And there were some surprising findings in the results. These findings come at a time when more kids are becoming climate activists. And Lawson says that her study shows just how persuasive young people’s voices can be.

It was New Year’s night. An aged man was standing at a window. Few more hopeless people than himself now moved towards their certain goal-the tomb. He had already passed sixty of the age leading to it, and he had brought from his journey nothing but errors and regrets.

The days of his youth appeared like dreams before him, and he recalled the serious moment when his father placed him at the entrances of the two roads. One leading to a peaceful, sunny place covered with flowers and fruits; the other leading to a deep dark cave which was endless. He looked towards the sky and cried painfully, “Oh youth, return! Oh, my father, place me once more at the entrance to life”. But both his father and the days of his youth had passed away.

He saw the lights flowing away in the darkness，and these were the days of his wasted life; he saw a star fall from the sky and disappear, and this was the symbol of himself. Then he remembered his friends in his childhood, who entered life together with him. But they had made their way to success and were then honored and happy on that New Year’s night.

The clock in the high church tower struck and the sound made him remember his parents. They had taught him and prayed to God for his good. But he chose the wrong way with shame and grief. He dared no longer to look towards the heaven where his parents lived. He burst out a cry: “Come back, my early days!”And his youth did return, for all this was only a dream on New Year’s night. He was still young though his faults were real. He had not yet entered the deep dark eave, and he was still free to walk on the road which leads to the peaceful and sunny land.

The English-language version of Wikipedia has almost six million articles. And if you’re a cheating student, that’s six million essays already written for you. But plagiarism (剽窃) isn’t really an effective way—just type the text into a search engine and the game is over. Then what about having a ghostwriter compose your final essay?

“Standard plagiarism software cannot detect this kind of cheating.” said Stephan Lorenzen, a data analyst at the University of Copenhagen. In Denmark, where he’s based, ghostwriting is a growing problem at high schools. So Lorenzen and his colleagues created a program called Ghostwriter that can detect the cheats.

At its central part is a neural (神经的) network trained and tested on 130,000 real essays from 10,000 Danish students. After reading through tens of thousands of essays labeled as being written by the same author or not, the machine taught itself to tune into the characteristics that might tip off cheating. For example, did a student’s essays share the same styles of punctuation? The same spelling mistakes?

By examining inconsistencies like those, Ghostwriter was able to seek out a cheated essay nearly 90 percent of the time. The team presented the results at the European Meeting on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning. There’s one more aspect here that could help students. Your high school essays probably get better over time as you learn to write-and the machine can detect that. The final idea is to detect students who are at risk because their development in writing style isn’t as you’d expect. Teachers could thus give extra help to kids who really need it, while sniffing out the cheaters too.