【推荐2】We grow up going to school and learning about “common core” subjects, along with others. We are also given information about things from the media, governments, and the Internet. We are conditioned by all of this information to see reality. But all that learning is not as important as it’s made out to be. In fact, it can be limiting you to a life of mediocrity (平庸).

The more you learn about things, whether they are true or not, the more rigid your reality becomes. The less possible certain things seem to be limiting your ability to imagine possibilities as a child does. This goes for information as well as applied activities.

This is not to say that you should not learn anything. The key is, you should be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn. You should be able to get rid of information that becomes contradicted by something with more evidence supporting it, and reprogram over things which no longer serve your continued evolution.

The sooner you allow yourself to go through the process of unlearning, the easier it will be to unlearn things which are limiting your ability to see things as the limitless possibilities they are. As Seneca once said,“The mind is slow to unlearn what it learned early. ” This is why you see old people become set in their ways,being imprisoned by the same beliefs they had in their youth. Once those beliefs are formed in the brain, it will take something extraordinary to reprogram over them.

You can go about unlearning by making a list of a few beliefs you have about things which you feel may be holding you back from evolving. Then explore what else is possible in regards to those areas and take action. When you come across information and receive greater understanding on something, make it a part of your reality and belief system.

Remind yourself that even though some new information has replaced what you believed was true and worth continuing to support, it may one day also be replaced by something even more consistent with truth and more helpful with your evolution.

Learning to unlearn is the highest form of learning. You will begin to notice you are growing once again.

【推荐3】Never Think You’re Too Old to Become a Beginner

As we head into a new year, there is one thing from the outgoing disastrous year we should carry forward and even deepen: the spirit of the beginner.

Many people, in the face of such disorder, decided that they wanted to learn new things. But there’s a warning: The older you are, the harder you’re going to have to work. There’s a happy twist (扭转), however:     1    , the faster they seem to learn — the more they become like younger adults.

How, then, to prepare ourselves to become better beginners? We can draw crucial guidance from a group of research subjects:     2    .

For adults, the lessons are clear.     3    . Babies spend roughly a third of their day for six solid months practicing walking. So don’t worry if you’re still terrible at tennis after a few months.

Babies also remind us that progress is often not a straight process. Babies seem to learn best when operating near the limits of their current skill level. In other words:     4    .

    5    . If it feels easy, you’re not learning. If you don’t learn to fail, you’ll fail to learn. So let “beginner” be your watchword for 2024. But watch for overreach in your resolutions.

【推荐1】With a name like The Daily Orange in America, you will think the Syracuse University student-run newspaper prints a new issue every day. The newspaper began operating at the Syracuse, New York-based school in 1903. But it only prints a new issue three times a week.

Editor in chief Haley Robertson worries about where she will find companies willing to pay for advertising space. She also worries about having to fire friends. And, she searches out former students willing to donate money so the newspaper can send reporters on the road to cover the university’s sports teams. Media executives many years older than Robertson are facing similar problems. The news industry’s financial difficulties have spread to colleges and universities across the US, which brought challenges to these young journalists. Student reporters train for the future in two main ways. They receive a traditional classroom education from professors. They also put what they learn to use in student-run newsrooms.

Chris Evans is president of the College Media Association, or the CMA. He notes that few college newspapers have shut down the way local newspapers in towns and cities across the country have, considering the central role they are playing. But some have had to cut the number of times they publish each week. Some would find a former student for donation or sell enough advertising to cover it.

The University of North Carolina reports that newspaper newsroom jobs across the country dropped from 52,000 in 2008 to 24,000 today. There are other kinds of jobs in the field, of course, but not a very high number of them. Many journalism educators have wondered whether their students can deal with that. Journalism schools should do more than just equip students for possible media jobs, said Marie Hardin, head of Penn State’s Donald Bellisario College of Communications. She said journalism educators need to teach students communication, critical thinking and writing. Such skills are highly sought in many different fields.

【推荐2】The Four Worst Car-Buying Mistakes

Here’s your crash course on what to keep in mind so you don’t end up paying more than you should for a new or used vehicle.

Mistake 1: Skipping the mechanical check

All new cars generally have to pass an inspection before they leave the lot.     1    , it’s suggested finding a local mechanic to conduct a prepurchase inspection before you complete the deal of buying a second-hand one.

Mistake 2:    2    

Car dealerships have been known to throw a bunch of extras onto a purchase once you’re signing papers. You can decline any of these items if they aren’t yet installed. And remember,   don’t give money for a test drive, ever.

Mistake 3: Skipping the things that do make sense to buy

The one thing worth buying from the dealership is brake replacement, which ensures your brakes are working properly. Whether you want to buy common add-ons such as roof racks and winter tires is a matter of personal preference.     3    .

Mistake 4: Regretting after signing the contract immediately

    4    .We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you usually have few options if you change your mind post-purchase. The best course of action is to do your research, think carefully and be sure a car is the right fit for you before signing on the dotted line.

Green hands are likely to make these “big mistakes” when buying their first car.       5    . So, watch out for and avoid them!

【推荐3】By now, the story of Britney Spears’s guardianship and its eventual end is well known: For years, Ms. Spears was trapped in a legal situation in which most of the money she earned went to her father, who controlled not only her finances, but things like her medication, her performance schedule and more.

Ms. Spears’s story triggered an examination of guardianship laws, and that may have helped prompt recent assessments of the protections - or lack thereof - available to child influencers. Yet in nearly all of the United States, these workers have no legal protections and no guarantees that they will ever see any of the money that they have earned.

If this has parallels with Ms. Spears’s guardianship, its roots stretch back nearly a century. In 1938, a 23-year-old named Jackie Coogan, who had starred in Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid” as a toddler, learned that his mother and his stepfather had spent the millions of dollars he had earned as a child star. He sued and won, and in response, California passed a bill in 1939, commonly referred to as the Coogan Law, to protect children in similar roles.

Today, a revised version of the law requires that 15 percent of a child entertainer’s earnings go into a trust. A few other states have their own versions of California’s law, but barring one exception, these laws do not extend to children who are making their names on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or any of the other major social media platforms. Even if child influencers produce their own content and are not managed by their parents, they are at risk of being exploited by adults in their lives.

Now, politicians are starting to catch up, motivated in part by civic-minded teenagers who have watched as popular family vloggers like Machelle Hobson and Ruby Franke have been exposed for abusing and exploiting their children, mostly behind the scenes, but sometimes on camera.

【推荐1】If you easily make mistakes when in a hurry, a new study from Michigan State University—the largest of its kind to date-found that meditation (冥想) could help you improve the situation.

The research tested how open monitoring meditation (OMM)—or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings or thoughts as they unfold in one’s mind and body—altered brain activity in a way that suggested increased error recognition.

“People’s interest in meditation is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits.” said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author. “But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of a guided meditation could produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.”

“Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring meditation is a bit different,” Lin said, “It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.”

Lin and his MSU co-authors—William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser—hired more than 200 participants to test how open monitoring meditation affected how people detect and respond to errors.

The participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through electroencephalography (脑电图), or EEG. Then, they completed a computerized distraction (分心) test.

“The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of brain activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses,” Lin said. “A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.”

“These findings show what just 20 minutes of open monitoring meditation can do to improve the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes,” Moser said.

【推荐3】The Earth’s ozone (臭氧) layer is on its way to recovering, thanks to decades of work to get rid of ozone-damaging chemicals, a panel of international experts backed by the United Nations has found.

The ozone layer serves an important function for living things on Earth. This shield in the stratosphere (平流层) protects humans and the environment from harmful levels of the sun’s radiation.

The international community was alarmed after experts discovered a hole in the ozone layer in May 1985. Scientists had previously discovered that chemicals, used in manufacturing certain sprays and used as refrigerants (制冷剂), could destroy ozone. Two years after the discovery of the dreadful state of the ozone layer, international bodies adopted a global agreement called the Montreal Protocol. This established the phaseout (逐步淘汰) of almost 100 man-made chemicals that were tied to the destruction of the all-important ozone.

In the latest report on the progress of the Montreal Protocol, the UN-backed panel confirmed that nearly 99% of banned ozone-eating substances have been phased out. If current policies stay in place, the ozone layer is expected to recover to 1980 values by 2040, the United Nations announced. In some places, it may take longer. Experts said that 1980-level recovery over Antarctica is expected by around 2066 and by 2045 over the Arctic.

The destruction of the ozone layer is not a major cause of climate change. But research is showing that these efforts to save the ozone layer are proving beneficial in the fight against climate change. “Ozone action is a pioneer for climate action,” said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “Our success in phasing out ozone-eating chemicals shows us that what can and must be done-as a matter of urgency-to shift away from fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gases and so limit temperature increase.”