Email is a form of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write and use language, say some communication researchers. It is also changing the way we interact(交流) and build relationship. These are a few of the recently recognized features of email, say experts, which should cause individuals and organizations to rethink the way they use email.

“Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits,” says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics(语言学) at an American university. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure of emails reflect(反映) a growing unconcern about the way we write.

Baron argues that we shouldn’t forgive and forget the poor writing often shown in email. “The more we use email and its tasteless writing, the more it becomes the normal way of writing,” the professor says.

Others say that despite its poor writing, email has finished what several generations of English teachers couldn’t: it has made writing fashionable again.

“Email is a critical new communication technology.” says Ian Lancashire, a professor of English at Toronto University. “It fills the gap between spoken language and the formal methods of writing that existed before email. It is the purest form of written speech.”

Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to get people who are usually scared by writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because of email’s close similarity to speech. “It’s like a circle of four or five people around a campfire,” he says.

Still, he accepts that this new-found freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble. Emails sent in a day almost exceed(超过) the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content of a typical email message is not often exact.

【推荐2】A http:/www.literacynet.org/cnnsf/

Fantastic site from CNN. Over 50 news stories categorized under headings such as crime, environment and adventure. Each story has a range of activities focusing on comprehension and vocabulary, mostly of the multiple-choice variety.

B http:/www.npr.org/

NPR is an American radio network with an extensive audio archive—an excellent source of authentic English.

C http:/www.humorlinks.com/

Hilarious site bringing together over 7,000 links to humor of every kind, from American comedy to Australian cartoons. Here you will see the funniest jokes and pictures from around the world.

D http:/www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/

Hundreds of fascinating interviews with famous people from every walk of life: actors, cartoonists, musicians, painters, philosophers, political activists, scientists and writers.

E http:/www.bbc.co.uk/music/listen

Lots of online music from classical to jazz, from blues to rap. You can listen to radio programs or select a range of special features.

F http: /www.onestopenglish.com

Here you will find listening activities—updated each month--from the online magazine from Macmillan.

【推荐3】You see your phone light up from the corner of your eye and quickly reach for it. What started as a simple notification (通知) check snowballs into an hour-long period as you look through rows of notifications and endless social media feeds.

This is by design. Tech companies such as Google and Facebook have spent years working to make consumer technology as addictive as possible. After all, time spent with their products could equal big profits for the company.

However, that’s starting to change. Apple takes action with the introduction of tools in its new operating system aimed at informing users to better manage their smartphone usage and parental controls that allow parents to better monitor and control their children’s phone time.

Google also offers a “Wind Down” feature to set at bedtime, which automatically puts the phone into “Do Not Disturb”. No notifications will show up on your phone, and losing all colour on-screen is certainly a cause to put your phone away.

There are still no clear guidelines on what causes tech addiction, but it’s a growing concern likely on the minds of parents everywhere as they see their kids’ faces constantly glued inches away from a screen. And everywhere you go, you’re all but guaranteed to see people buried in their phones.

Apart from Apple and Google, Facebook deserves a fair amount of blame, as an expert acknowledged in a blog post earlier this year. The social network announced plans to roll out changes aimed at making interactions more meaningful.

“By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook will go down,” the expert said. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And is over the long term too.” If we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business.

【推荐2】Last year more than 13 Korean (韩国) TV series were introduced in China. Turn on the TV, and Korean beauties are appearing during peak viewing times(黄金时段). Some of the dramas are being repeated, but audiences continue to watch them. Why are the South Korean TV series loved by so many Chinese people? Cheng Yiting, a student from East China Normal University, gives us her reasons. She thinks that the good-looking actors with cool clothes and the beautiful sight in the dramas are the selling points for South Korean TV dramas. But what attracted the young audiences most is the pure and moving love stories.

And it seems that South Korean TV series has also won the hearts of middle-aged people. They are touched by the morals(道德)in the shows. These include the importance of respecting elders and social order. Though some people think South Korean TV series are too slow and too long, most of the Chinese audiences like them. Maybe we are really tired of Western TV series. Compared with that, South Korean TV series are not bad.

【推荐1】 “Today, technical innovations dominate our everyday life in many areas. New technologies, however, always are associated with risks-and these are also seen by laymen,” says Christoph Böhmert, first author of the recently published study and researcher of the Science Communication Group of KIT's Institute for German Studies. “It is crucial to enable adequate communication between science and society, which does not only consider scientific findings, but also concerns of the population.” The study clearly showed that communication of risks may be complicated sometimes. Information on efficient precautions was found to lead to an increased risk perception by the recipients of the information.

In their study, the researchers analyzed communication about a technology that has become indispensable in our life-mobile communications and the electromagnetic fields(电磁场) on which it is based. All over the world, radiation protection authorities, such as the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection, communicate the current state of research into risks of electromagnetic fields as follows: Investigations made and all findings obtained so far do not allow any conclusions to be drawn with respect to mobile communications being a risk for human health. But, the experts continue, there still are knowledge gaps as regards long-term impacts. Then, measures are recommended to reduce exposure of the individual to electromagnetic fields.

It had been known from previous studies already that information on precautions may increase worries. It had been suspected that people conclude from the recommendation of precautions that there really is a risk. This effect was not confirmed by the recent study. The scientists rather attributed the increased worries to a lack of knowledge about the propagation(传播) of electromagnetic fields.

Within the framework of the study, the recommended precautions were submitted to 1717 Australians, together with one of six information brochures providing scientific background information. When test persons were given not only the recommendations, but also explained why observation of these tips strongly reduces their exposure to electromagnetic fields, worries increased. For example, scientists explained to the test persons that telephone conversations with a headset largely reduce exposure. When a mobile phone is located ten centimeters instead of just one centimeter away from the ear, the electric power absorbed by the ear is about one hundredth of the initial value. Hence, their own mobile phone usually causes an exposure that by far exceeds that of mobile communications stations that are generally referred to as “cellphone towers”. While the scientists wanted to explain the effectiveness of precautions, test persons mainly considered this information to be an indication of their mobile phone-not the transmission towers-being dangerous. As a result, they perceived increased risk potentials for telephone conversations with their mobile phones.

“The study reveals that messages on precautions and information are a double-edged sword in terms of subjective risk perception. Their use should be far better understood,” Boehmert says.

【推荐2】Some people think if you are happy, you are blind to reality. But when we research it, happiness actually raises every single business and educational outcome for the brain. How did we miss this? Why do we have these social misunderstandings about happiness? Because we assumed you were average. When we study people, scientists are often interested in what the average is.

Many people think happiness is genetic. That’s only half the story, because the average person does not fight their genes. When we stop studying the average and begin researching positive outliers -- people who are above average for a positive aspect like optimism or intelligence -- a wildly different picture appears. Our daily decisions and habits have a huge impact upon both our levels of happiness and success.

Scientifically, happiness is a choice. It is a choice about where your single processor brain will devote its limited resources as you process the world. If you scan for the negative first, your brain really has no resources left over to see the things you are grateful for or the meaning embedded(嵌入) in your work. But if you scan the world for the positive, you start to acquire an amazing advantage.

I wrote the cover story for the Harvard Business Review magazine on “Happiness Leads to Profits”. Based on my article called “Positive Intelligence” and my research in The Happiness Advantage, I summarized our researched conclusion: the single greatest advantage in the modern economy is a happy and busy workforce.

A decade of research in the business world proves that happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: increasing sales by 37%, productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a number of health and quality-of-life improvements.

【推荐1】Since November last year, cyclists in the northern Dutch town, Krommenie, have been part of a revolutionary experiment—a length of 70 meters of the town's main bikeway has been resurfaced with a layer of glass tiles treated with a non-slip coating. The panels, which are laid on a bed of concrete, are only one centimetre thick, but it's what's inside the glass that makes them truly impressive—each individual section contains a solar cell and together they form one long energy producing net work.

There were a number of reasons to start with a bike path. One is that when you start an innovation like this you want a step that is doable, but still guarantees that things are pretty safe for road users. In a bike path, the loads are not too heavy, and the requirements are not too severe. The Krommenie experiment has four goals. One is to see how it performs technically and what the energy production is. The second goal is to know what the satisfaction of the users is; do they have any kind of discomfort or negative perception? And the last thing, is to see if the road managers are comfortable with this type of road which is completely new.

More than 150 ,000 cyclists have used the bike path in the first six months of its operation and the trial has met with no serious problems, even during recent testing using heavyweight vehicles. Some wear and tear on the non-slip coating was expected and has been repaired.

Despite the trial's promise, there is still one major problem to deal with—the initial cost of road construction using the solar panels is higher than it is for standard forms of surfacing. But the researchers predict that will come down, when the technology enters mass production.

【推荐2】It turns out that nodding off (睡觉) in class may not be a bad idea, as a new study has shown that going to sleep shortly after learning new materials is the best way to remember them.

According to US lead author Jessica Payne, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, nodding off after learning something new is like “telling” the sleeping brain what to remember. Along with colleagues, she studied 207 students who slept for at least six hours per night. Students were randomly (随机地) assigned to study something declarative (陈述的) at 9 am or 9 pm, and returned for testing 30 minutes, 12 hours or 24 hours later.

Declarative memory refers to the ability to consciously (有意识地) remember facts and events, and can be divided into memory for events and memory for facts about the world. People use both types of memory every day — remembering where they parked today or learning how a colleague prefers to be called.

At the 12-hour retest, memory was better following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness (不眠). At the 24-hour retest, with all students having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, students’ memories were greater when sleep happened shortly after learning rather than following a full day of wakefulness.“Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory. What’s special for this study is that we have shown sleep’s influence on declarative memory,” Payne said. “Since we found that sleeping soon after learning benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to go over any information you need to remember before going to bed. In some sense, you may be telling the sleeping brain what to consolidate (巩固).”

【推荐3】8:30 PM

Outlook

Outlook is back with a new series of reports to keep you up date with all that’s new in the world of entertainment. Stories go all the way from the technical to the romantic, from stage to screen. There will be reports of the stars of the moment, the stars of the future and the stars of the past. The director with his new film, the designer with the latest fashion, and the musician with the popular song are part of the new Outlook. The program is introduced by Fran Levine.

9:00 PM

Discovery

When a 10-year-old boy gets a first-class degree in mathematics or an 8-year-old plays chess like a future, grand master, they are considered as geniuses. Where does the quality of genius come from? Is it all in the genes or can any child be turned into a genius? And if parents do have a child who might become a genius in the future what should they do? In this 30-minute film, Barry Johnson, the professor at School of Medicine, New York University will help you discover the answer.

10:00 PM

Science/Health

Is it possible to beat high blood pressure without drugs? The answer is “yes”, according to the researchers at Johns Hopkins and three other medical centers. After a study of 800 persons with high blood pressure, they found that after 6 months, those devoted to weight loss— exercise and eating a low-salt, low-fat food- lost about 13 pounds and became fitter. Plus, 35% of them dropped into the “normal” category(范畴). This week, Dr. Alan Duckworth will tell you how these people reduce their blood pressure to a level familiar to what’s achieved with Hypertension drugs.