【推荐2】Columbus Day has been on American calendars since 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared October 12 a federal holiday to honor the Italian explorer who “discovered” the Americas in 1492. However, the holiday has always been controversial. Many people believe that Christopher Columbus should not be given credit for “discovering” the continent, since native Americans had already been living there for generations.

Besides, the explorer’s mission was not a scientific “voyage of discovery”, but one intended to conquer the new land. Critics maintain that the Spanish army Columbus brought on his second voyage, caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of indigenous(土著的) people. Those that survived the massacre became slaves, working in mines. Many, therefore, believe that the explorer’s arrival should not be celebrated.

In 1977, a delegation of Native nations at the International Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas, proposed renaming the holiday to “Indigenous People’s Day”. The proposal passed with a majority.

However, convincing the rest of the country to do the same was not that easy. It took 15 years before the city of Berkeley in California adopted the name in 1992 and then 22 more years before Minneapolis, MN and Seattle, WA did the same in 2014. The following year, eight more cities including Albuquerque, NM and Portland, OR, began celebrating the second Monday of October as “Indigenous People’s Day”. The movement really started to gain momentum in 2016 when 19 cities, including Boulder, CO and Phoenix, AZ, as well as the states of Minnesota and Vermont, all decided to rename the day to honor Native Americans. In 2017, 21 more cities, including Austin, TX and Los Angeles, CA have made the shift.

With the increasingly larger number of cities moving away from Columbus Day each year, it will be interesting to see if “Indigenous People’s Day” gets federal recognition. Meanwhile, it will continue to be the focal point of debates throughout the Americas.

【推荐3】Freeloaders, they just sit around while their hard-working colleagues get things done. But might freeloaders actually be necessary for society to function efficiently? The answer could be yes — at least when it comes to fire ants and their efforts to dig nests underground.

Daniel Goldman is a physicist at Georgia Tech. Because fire ants are highly social organisms, Daniel and his colleagues wanted to know how ants knew what to do without a central leader issuing orders.

To find out, Daniel’s team labeled individual fire ants with paint and then watched them dig their narrow tunnels— barely wide enough for two workers. Turns out, just 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the labor. “I was surprised that we ended up with so few workers actually doing the work at any one time. “

A quarter of the ants never even entered the tunnel. Others crawled inside, but left without digging a single grain of dirt. These behaviors ensured the crowded tunnels did not get blocked with insect traffic, which bring the construction process to a halt.

And when the scientists removed the five hardest-working ants from the colony, others immediately jumped in to compensate —with no reduction in the group’s productivity. Seems that it doesn’t matter which ants are working or freeloading at a given time, as long as there is some division of labor to keep the tunnels flowing smoothly.

The study could have implications for robotics. Imagine groups of robots sent to search stones for disaster survivors. Or nanobots coursing through our bodies to diagnose illness and deliver targeted medical treatment. Such robot clouds will need to avoid getting jammed up in tight spaces. It might be necessary to program them so some just sit back and watch their colleagues do the work.

【推荐2】Thomas had achieved fame as a poet in the 1930s and had spent World War Two in London writing propaganda(宣传) films. But by 1946, after the end of the war, he needed a regular income to support his wife Caitlin, and children Llewelyn and Aeronwy. Luckily he had a new admirer in the form of Margaret Taylor, wife of noted historian and broadcaster A．J.P Taylor. Introduced as an “entertaining guest” by a mutual friend, he had succeeded in charming Mrs Taylor, who put the family up in a summerhouse in their garden in the grounds of Magdalen College(牛津大学莫德林学院)．①

Thomas had a love­hate relationship with Oxford, according to his biographer Andrew Lycett. His poetry may have brought him respect and celebrity in literary circles, but in Oxford he felt at odds with his surroundings. “His father, who had been a schoolmaster in Swansea, would have liked him to go to Oxford University, ” Mr Lycett explains. “When he did actually get to Oxford he wasn’t actually at the university. It was a curious period. He was in this academic environment though he wasn’t a born academic himself. But he generally enjoyed himself because he got to know some of the professors there. He wasn’t popular among them, because they thought he was a bit of a wastrel(不务正业者), so he hung out in pubs and met students.”②

Thomas also took paid jobs at the BBC, regularly travelling to London and became something of a celebrity through appearing on panel shows.③

“He didn’t really endear(使受垂青) himself to Professor Taylor，” Mr Lycett says. “He overstayed his welcome. The professor liked to have a barrel of beer in the house and Dylan would finish it off. He just took a dislike to him, partly because, reading between the lines, his wife rather fancied this young man.” Mark Davies, an Oxford historian, says Professor Taylor disliked the poet “intensely”. “He ended up being banished(驱逐) a safe distance away from his wife,” he adds.

This banishment was in the picturesque village of South Leigh, nine miles out from the city, in a house set up for Thomas by Margaret, who continued to be his proud sponsor. However, it was here that his granddaughter Hannah Ellis believes Thomas found much of the inspiration for one of his most famous works, the radio drama Under Milk Wood. “South Leigh is hugely important because that was one of those villages where he met all the different characters and it helped him arouse his passion,” she says. “The play had been a seed from when he was about 20 and I think it was that village lifestyle and all the characters that helped. He liked sitting in the corner of the pub, watching all the drama going on. Also he had somewhere quiet to work and a home. For such a long time he hadn’t settled and it was a good period in his life.”④

Mrs Taylor also helped him return to Wales when he was ready in 1949, buying him a boathouse with her own money. He lived there for the remainder of his life.

“People so often focus on the other periods of his life and they forget about Oxford，” adds Ms Ellis. “They see the romantic period of living in Laugharne at the boathouse, and the contrast of the chaotic times in New York.”

“There’s just something interesting about this little Welshman wandering around the streets of Oxford，” adds Mr Lycett. “The period isn’t discussed much. Somehow or other there was this intervening period that tends to get forgotten. People don’t realize he was starting to think about Under Milk Wood so it wasn’t unproductive. His time in Oxford was an important period of his life.”

Indeed Mr Davies believes Thomas’s connection to Oxford would be better known if he had studied at the university. “Because he didn’t and he was only here as a guest of the college it has been brushed to one side，” he said. “There are some great historical characters who, because they’re not associated with the university, have been pushed sideways out of history.”

A new tour, organized by Literature Wales, aims to make this clear. Its trail takes in the poet’s summerhouse, and the village that became his home. It means the city will finally take the time to remember and treasure one more person in its long line of literary giants.

【推荐3】Dale Carnegie(戴尔·卡耐基) was an American writer and lecturer, and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills.

Born in 1888 in Maryville, Missouri, Carnegie was a poor farmer's boy. His family moved to Belton, Missouri when he was a small child. In his teens, though still having to get up at 4 am every day to milk his parents' cows, he managed to obtain an education at the State Teacher's College in Warrensburg. His first job after college was selling correspondence courses. He moved on to selling bacon, soap, and lard（猪油）for Armour&Company.

After saving $500, Dale Carnegie quit sales in 1911 in order to achieve a lifelong dream of becoming a lecturer. He ended up instead attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but found little success as an actor. Later he got the idea to teach public speaking. In his first session, he suggested that students speak about "something that made them angry", and discovered the technique that made speakers unafraid to address a public audience. From its beginning, the Dale Carnegie Course developed. Carnegie had made use of the average American's desire to have more self-confidence.

Perhaps one of Carnegie's most successful marketing moves was to change the spelling of his last name from "Carnagey" to Carnegie, at a time when Andrew Carnegie was a widely recognized name.

Carnegie's works include Lincoln the Unknown (1932), Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1937), and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948). His greatest achievement, however, was when Simon &. Schuster published How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book was a bestseller from 1936. By the time of Carnegie's death, the book had sold five million copies in 31 languages, and there had been 450,000 graduates of his Dale Carnegie Institute.

Carnegie died at his home in New York in 1955.