【推荐2】“An aquaponics (鱼菜共生) system grows both fish and plants that can be harvested sustainably (可持续地),” said David Landkamer, an aquaculture specialist. “It’s an elegant system.”

Here’s how it works: Fish are typically raised in indoor tanks or outdoor ponds, where they produce waste. The water with the waste from the tank flows to a planting tray where plants grow in the water without soil. The waste is poisonous to the fish but is a rich fertilizer for the plants. As the plants absorb the nutrients, the water is purified for the fish. The clean water can then be recycled to the fish tank. Most importantly, because you can’t use chemicals or fertilizers that would harm the fish, it’s a natural organic production system.

“You can grow just about any kind of plant,” Landkamer said. Any leafy greens such as lettuce, kale, Swiss chard and arugula are the easiest to plant. You can also grow herbs, cucumbers, snow peas, eggplants, tomatoes, cabbages, cauliflower, peppers, beans, red onions and even potatoes.

“Aquaponics, which began in ancient China and Mexico, is gaining popularity around the world as a means of local food production,” Landkamer said. He regularly fields questions from people who want to start small-scale, backyard aquaponics operations or even commercial-scale aquaponics farms. “It is possible for hobbyists to start out with aquaponics kits available online and at stores,” Landkamer said.

Depending on which species of fish you choose, you may need to add a heater of some kind to keep the water temperatures just right for the fish and plants. “Aquaponics farmers often use inexpensive heat supplies such as solar greenhouses or hot compost (堆肥),” he said.

“These systems require monitoring to make sure everything is in balance and running smoothly,” Landkamer said. “You have to pay attention and see how well the fish are feeding, how well the plants are growing and see whether the water is circulating properly.”

【推荐2】In this age of screens, smartphones, virtual assistants and voice-enabled speakers, we constantly receive visual and auditory (听觉的) suggestions of things to do, products to buy, and media to consume. Yet are all these messages created equal? According to a research, the answer is no.

In the spring of 2018, Mariadassou and Bechler, both graduate students of Business, were sitting in a seminar (研讨会), in which they were studying how different types of messages affect decision-making. They learned that people generally perceive someone as more intelligent when they convey spoken information rather than delivering the same message in writing.

As they chatted after class, Mariadassou recalls, “We wondered, ‘What would happen if you apply this to recommendations?’” They believed there is “a general perception that people act on auditory and visual information the same way” and wanted to explore this assumption.

Mariadassou, who is pursuing her PhD in marketing, with Bechler, now a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, ran a series of studies where the same information was presented to participants in different forms, including computer-generated audio that sounded like a smart speaker.

The researchers were surprised that auditory recommendations for products like beer were more influential than textual ones. “In theory, this shouldn’t produce any difference in behavior,” Mariadassou writes in an email. “Hearing that you should drink the pale beer or reading that you should drink the pale beer is really one and the same. The fact that it leads to psychologically different experiences that are significant enough to lead to a change in behavior is not something you would expect.”

The effect was small but strong enough to demonstrate a “consistent effect of auditory power”, Mariadassou says. She believes the power of auditory information has to do with its ephemeral nature —“it seems like there’s this sort of fundamental need to act on information that’s going away,” she says. Bechler agrees: “When something disappears, it creates a kind of urgency to respond.”

【推荐3】I've been watching a lot of foreign-language television lately.( I do love good television.) It seems that all of a sudden there is a lot of non-American shows to watch. One night I may watch a Danish show, another night a show from Sweden or Mexico. And luckily for me, the world of children's books is following suit.

I had never heard of Gustavo Roldan before the book Juan Hormiga arrived at my door. Juan Hormiga, translated by Robert Croll, is, in a word, funny. Juan Hormiga is the one red ant among thousands of black ants, but it's not his being red that sets him apart from the rest of the colony. While every other ant is as hard-working as you might expect, busily collecting food or digging underground passages, that's just not Juan Hormiga's strengths. "If there was one way in which Juan Hormiga was second to none, it was his way of telling stories."

All those busy black ants could have hated the lazy Juan Hormiga. They could have denied him tunnel privileges or picnic pieces, but no, the other ants "didn't seem to mind too much". Juan is such a good storyteller that whenever he starts to tell a story, which seems to be whenever he's awake, all the other ants forget about their work and come close to listen to Juan tell his grandfather's adventures far beyond the world of the anthill.

It's hard to put into words what makes children's stories from other countries different from American children's stories. Certainly, European fairy tales historically have had a much darker tone than American fairy tales, as fairy tales from other countries. Language, culture, and historical context have a lot to do with what gives stories their taste, and it's no different with the Spanish Juan Hormiga. Juan Hormiga is a jewel of a story. It has everything my kids and I want from a book: silliness, adventure, daring and a satisfying ending.