【推荐1】The Best Books of 2020

On Monday, the American Library Association announced the top children’s books of 2020. Here are the winners.

Devotion

Author Clare Vanderpool took home the John Newbery Medal for outstanding contribution to children’s literature for Moon over Manifest. The book is about a young girl’s magical adventures in a small Kansas town, in 1936.

Vanderpool said that she was shocked to learn that she had won. “You grow up reading legendary authors like Madeleine L’Engle, but I never expected to be put in a category with her,” Vanderpool told TFK, “It’s fabulous”.

Picture This

The picture book A Sick Day for Amos McGee won the Randolph Caldecott Medal. The book was illustrated by Ein E. Stead and written by her husband, Philip C. Stead. It tells the story of an elderly zookeeper and the animals that visit him when he’s not well enough to go to work.

“I love drawing animals and I love drawing people and I love drawing the emotional connection between animals and people,” said Stead.

More Honored Books

The Coretta Scott King award, given to an African-American author and illustrator of “outstanding books for children and young adults”, went to Rita Williams-Garcia for One Crazy Summer. Set in 1968, the novel follows three sisters from Brooklyn, New York, who visit their mother, a poet who ran away years ago and lives in California, and later learn much about family, their country and themselves.

The king prize for best-illustrated work went to Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave. The book, which was written by Laban Carrick Hill and illustrated by Bryan Collier, tells the story of a skilled potter who engraved his poems on the clay pots and jars that he made. The enslaved potter, known only as Dave, lived in South Carolina in the 1800s.

【推荐2】The pandemic saw an increased demand for stories that excite children in new ways and support them in processing difficult emotions. The features of personalized(个性化的) books meet this need well. With personalized Loss Books, children read about losing a family member. With personalized Me and My Pet Books, children read about how they first met their dogs or cats. Identified as the main driver of the rapidly growing interactive children’s book market, personalized books are far from a gimmick(噱头).

Personalized books are printed or digital books that have been crested based on the needs of a specific child. They follow a simple principle: the publisher provides the users with a pattern, which parents fill with children’s data. Thanks to the advanced print-on-demand possibilities of small-scale publishers, it’s not difficult to create a personalized version of any story.

Publishers claim that personalized books teach children empathy(同理心) and encourage love for reading. Now, you might think that it is surely what all parents and teachers want, so should we replace all books with personalized stories?

Our observational studies confirmed publishers’ claim that children are highly engaged and motivated to read personalized books. However, in a recent study, we compared children’s understanding of the moral(寓意) of a story and its application to their lives after they read a personalized, non-personalized or control story. Although children who read personalized stories had more detailed retellings, there was no other difference between the three groups. This could be because the differences among the children were higher than the effect of personalization. Studies with personalized books are too few for us to know for sure.

Besides, while personal stories are often used in therapeutic(治疗性的) practice or in children with special educational needs, personalized stories are a new writing style, raising many open questions. The misuse of children’s personal data and the questions concerning diversity(差异) make one wonder how “personalized” the books actually are. The other key point lies in directing children’s focus towards the other. However, given the increased focus on personalized learning during the pandemic, and the need to customize(定制) children’s reading experiences, there is every reason to believe that the rising trend of personalized books will continue.

【推荐3】How do young children learn to have good values? How can parents teach their children about the importance of kindness and patience? At a time more and more parents worry about the violent images (暴力形象) their children see on TV and on the Internet. So many parents are turning to fairy tales. They want to teach their children how to behave in society by this way.

It is believed that fairy tales have a great influence on children because they describe the two sides of good and evil (邪恶) very clearly. When children hear the tales, they learn to care about others’ feelings. In each tale, they can see that there are many different kinds of people in the world and that we all have a choice about what kind of person we want to be. We can choose to do good actions, rather than bad ones, in our lives.

What kind of values can children learn from fairy tales? In The Princess and the Pea, a poorly dressed girl says she is a princess. Few people believe her, so she is given a difficult test. When she passes the test, we learn that her dream comes true because she stays true to herself. In the Little Mermaid (《小美人鱼》), the mermaid, who lives under the sea, wishes to be with the humans on land. Through her experiences, we learn about the importance of living with and accepting other cultures.

Teaching values is probably the main reason for encouraging children to read fairy tales. These tales can teach children lessons about human relationships that have been accepted around the world for many centuries. This might be the reason why they have been around for so long and will not disappear any time soon.

【推荐1】Every Sunday at 2 p.m., Marisela Godinez, the owner of El Mesón Tequilería, a Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas, used to fill a 12-gallon bucket, plus another half-bucket, with leftover food from the restaurant’s all-you-can-eat brunch buffet. “We threw out a lot of food,” she said.

But a few months ago Ms. Godinez signed up to use an app called Too Good To Go. Now, 10 customers pick up “surprise bags” of her leftovers for $5.99 each, and she sends far fewer leftovers to the landfill.

Too Good To Go has tried to gamify (游戏化) buying leftover food. In the United States, customers in 12 cities can browse restaurants and stores, then reserve “surprise bags” that typically cost about $4 to $6 and contain food that would have been originally priced at roughly three times that amount. The bags can be picked up at a certain time window.

Around the country, apps that connect customers to businesses with leftover food have begun to spread. The concept is simple: Restaurants and grocery stores throw away huge amounts of food every day. Rather than trash it, apps like Too Good To Go and Flashfood help businesses sell it at a reduced price. They claim that the businesses and buyers are helping the environment because the food would otherwise become food waste, a big contributor to climate change.

Food production itself is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for between a quarter and a third of global emissions. Each step of the process — growing, harvesting, moving, processing, packaging, storing and preparing food — releases carbon dioxide, methane(甲烷) and other planet-warming gases. When the food is wasted, so are all those emissions. In addition, once unused food reaches landfills, it breaks down and releases more methane.

According to interviews with several companies selling on Too Good To Go, at least a few items for sale there aren’t necessarily what buyers might think of as “food waste.” A beverage (饮料) company owner George White said he not only used the app to sell discontinued products, but also sold new flavors there in hopes of attracting new customers.

【推荐2】More than a billion people around the world have smart phones, almost all of which come with navigation (导航) apps such as Google or Apple Maps. This raises the questions we meet with any technology: what skills are we losing? What abilities are we gaining?

Talking with people who’re good at finding their way around or using paper maps, I often hear lots of frustration with digital maps. North/South direction gets messed up, and you can see only a small sections at a time.

But consider what digital navigation aids have meant for someone like me. Despite being a frequent traveler, I’m so terrible at finding my way that I still use Google Maps every day in the small town where I have lived for many years. What looks like an imperfect product to some has been a significant expansion of my own abilities.

Part of the problem is that reading paper maps requires specific skills. There is nothing natural about them. In many developed nations, including the U.S., one expects street names and house numbers to be meaningful references, and instructions such as “go north for three blocks and then west ” make sense. In Istanbul, in contrast, where I grew up, none of those hold true. For one thing, the locals rarely use street names. Why bother when a government or a military group might change them again? Besides, the city is full of winding, ancient alleys that meet newer avenues at many angles. Instructions as simple as “go north”would require a helicopter or a bulldozer.

Let’s come back to my original questions. While we often lose some skills after leaving the work to technology, it may also allow us to expand our abilities. Consider the calculator: I don’t doubt our arithmetic skills might have dropped a bit as the little machines became common, but calculations that once boring and tricky are now much more straightforward and one can certainly do more complex calculations more confidently.

【推荐3】The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned about the potential negative effects of social media on young kids and teens. But the same risks may be true for adults, across generations. A review study suggests addiction symptoms, such as failure to pay proper attention to personal life, mental preoccupation, escapism, tolerance and trying to hide the addictive behavior, appear to be present in some people who use Facebook excessively.

A study also shows when people stop using the Internet, they also go through small but measurable physical effects. Rather than improving well-being, as frequent interactions with supportive offline social networks powerfully do, the current findings show that interacting with Facebook may predict the opposite result for young adults — it may undermine it.

In fact, another study found that social media use is linked to greater feelings of social isolation, mentally and physically. Facebook can be a jealousy generator. We fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to others as we check our Facebook pages, and make judgments about how we measure up. The study looked at how we make comparisons with others’ posts, in “upward” or “downward” directions — that is, feeling that we are either worse or better off than our friends. It turned out that both types of comparisons made people feel worse, which is surprising, since in real life, only upward comparisons make people feel bad. But in the social network world, it seems that any kind of comparison is linked to depressive symptoms.

All of this is not to say that there is no benefit of social media — obviously it keeps us connected across great distances, and helps us find people we had lost touch with years ago. But visiting social networks when you have some time to kill, or, worse, need an emotional lift, is very likely a bad idea. If you are feeling brave, try taking a little break, and see how it goes. And if you are going to keep “using” it, then at least try to use it in moderation.

【推荐1】The Sister Rice Festival is held every year in Guizhou’s Taijiang County, where 97 percent of the 168,000 people are from the Miao ethnic (民族的) group. It is an ancient tradition, which brings men and women together through food, gifts and music.

In the days before the festival, young women gather leaves and wild flowers, which they use to dye (给……染色) sticky rice with bright colors. This brightly colored rice, known as Sister Rice, gives the festival its name. During the festival, the young women dress in beautiful traditional clothes with large amounts of silver jewelry (首饰).

The festival includes parades, horse races and musical performances. But the real focus is the interaction between the young women and the young men who visit from surrounding villages and sing songs. In one traditional type of song, a man and a woman take turns to sing to each other, and the first one to make a mistake loses the game. The loser must give the winner a gift, but the winner is expected to give a gift in return, too.

After meeting the men, the women send them home with a bamboo basket containing dyed rice and hidden objects with special meanings. For example, a pair of chopsticks indicates that she wants to marry the man, while garlic shows that she is not interested.

One of several stories about the festival’s origin is about a girl and a boy who fell in love. The girl’s parents wanted her to marry her uncle’s son. She refused, and the boy likewise refused to marry anyone else. For a time, they could only meet in a field and pass hidden messages to each other through rice in a bamboo basket. Finally, the pair overcame their parents’ opposition and were allowed to marry.

The Sister Rice Festival is perhaps the oldest festival in Asia that encourages love.

【推荐3】Believe it or not, there are many strange things banned (禁止) around the world.

Black cars —Turkmenistan

Trying to buy a new car in the central Asian country of Turkmenistan can be a tricky business due to numerous restrictions issued by President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. Batir Turken, who is from Turkmenistan but lives in Dubai, explained, “For the country with 60°C in summer, it is really strange and stupid that cars with black colours are banned, and that dirty cars are not allowed to drive in the city.”

He added, “Cars which are older than five years are banned, cars with a right-hand drive are banned, sports cars and two-door cars are banned, and cars with tinted (有色的) windows are banned.”

Vacuum cleaners — Victoria, Australia

No one likes a noisy neighbour, but the state of Victoria in Australia has introduced a set of rules about at what point during the day when you can make noise including when you can vacuum.

Sumit Gupta, Mumbai, India, said, “In Melbourne, Australia, vacuuming your house between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. during weekdays and 10 p.m. and 9 a.m. during the weekends is against the law.”

Chewing gum — Singapore

Singapore bans the sale and import of chewing gum, which makes it impossible for locals to get their hands on gum. However, exceptions are made for people who have medical conditions and need to chew gum. The ban began in 1992 and is still in effect.

Running out of fuel — Germany

People are not allowed to let their cars run out of fuel if they are driving on the autobahn (高速公路) in Germany. What makes matters worse is that a person can’t walk along the highway to get some gas, as walking on the autobahn is also banned by law.

Changing bulbs — Victoria, Australia

In Victoria, one of the most populous states in Australia, changing a light bulb is illegal unless you are a licensed electrician. People who disobey this law could receive a fine of up to AU $10 (￡5.5).

【推荐1】Take a closer look at the wonders of Kew Gardens by joining a guided walking tour. Led by our knowledgeable volunteer guides, it is a fun and informative way to explore the grounds.

Tours leave at 11am and 1:30pm from the information desk at Victoria Gate Plaza. Each guide presents their own tour and takes in the highlights (最精彩的部分) of the season.

Tours leave at 12am from the information desk at Victoria Gate Plaza. Our guides offer attractive seasonal themes including Autumn Colour and Winter Evergreens.

Every Tuesday throughout the year at 11:30am and 2:30pm we’ll be holding an expert- guided tour. The tour will feature (以...... 为特色) a different plant each month and you’ll go behind the scenes and talk to Kew staff about their work. You’ll find out interesting facts about the featured plant or fungus (真菌), including why it’s grown at Kew and how it’s used and cared for.

The cost is 60 dollars per guide (this doesn’t include your entry to the Gardens). Each guide can take up to 15 people. Group of more than 15 must book more than one guide. Smaller groups are also accepted but the cost remains 60 dollars.

Tours take about one hour and may be booked from 10am every day. Please note that no refunds (退款) can be given once tickets are booked.

【推荐2】Did you know roughly one third of food for human consumption goes to waste? Most of it is fresh fruit and vegetables that go bad. The produce dries out or goes bad, which has led scientists to develop ways of coating or sealing the food to keep it fresher for longer. Now research at Rice University reveals there might be a better way.

Scientists discovered that dipping produce like strawberries and bananas into an egg-based wash is remarkably good for preserving it. The coating is extremely thick, and made from a mixture of powdered egg whites and yolks(70%), and some wood-sourced cellulose to act as a barrier preventing water loss.

What the scientists found was that the egg wash made a significant difference in helping produce stay fresh over a two-week observation period. The appearance of the coated fruits and vegetables didn’t change much, while the uncoated produce ripened and. even rotted within the same time frame. The egg-based coating, as it turned out, reduced each fruit’s chance to get exposed to oxygen.

The non-poisonous coating was found to be flexible and tests showed that it was just as tough as other products, including synthetic films, used in produce packaging. For anyone with an egg allergy, the coating can be removed by thorough washing in water and is tasteless.

The scientists hope this could be a breakthrough in the fight against food waste. "Reducing food shortages in ways that are not related to genetic modification, uneatable coatings or chemical additives is important for better sustainable living ,”said materials scientist and study author Pulickel Ajayan.

What’s great about this discovery is that it fights food waste in more than one way: even the coating was made from eggs that would otherwise have been discarded because they weren’t fit for consumption. The researchers said roughly 200 million of US produced eggs go to waste annually. So if this were scaled up, it could be a win-win situation all around.

【推荐3】When was the last time you listened to someone? And when was the last time someone really listened to you? I asked people what it meant to be a good listener. The typical response was a blank stare. People had no trouble, however, telling me what it meant to be a bad listener.

Of course, technology plays a role. Social media helps filter out (滤掉) opposing views. People find phone calls disturbing and ignore voice mail, preferring text or wordless emoji. But tech is not the only blame. High schools and colleges rarely, if ever, offer classes or activities that teach careful listening. Traffic noise on city streets and music playing in shops exceed (超过) the volume of normal conversation by as much as 30 decibels (分贝), and can even cause hearing loss.

So how can we reclaim the lost art of listening? After years of studying and consulting, I discovered that listening goes beyond simply hearing what people say. It also involves paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it, in what context, and how what they say resonates (与. . . 共鸣) within you. It’s not about merely holding your peace while someone holds forth. Quite the opposite. A lot of listening has to do with how you respond — the degree to which you assist in the clear expression of the other person’s thoughts and in the process, express your own.

Good listeners ask good questions. Good questions don’t begin with “Wouldn’t you agree. or “Don’t you think. . . ?” and they definitely don’t end with “right?” The idea is to explore the other person’s point of view, not sway it. You also want to avoid asking people personal and evaluating questions. Instead, ask about people’s interests so that they feel more connected than if they spend time together accomplishing a task.

The reward of good listening will almost certainly be more interesting conversations. Attentive listeners receive more information, related details from the speakers, even when the listeners didn’t ask any questions. We are, each of us, the sum of what we attend to in life. And to listen poorly, selectively or not at all limits your understanding of the world and prevents you from becoming the best you can be.