【推荐2】Does Using Technology in the Classroom Help College Students?

Almost anywhere in the world, you are likely to find people doing the same thing in public places, on trains and buses or wherever else you look. They spend their day looking at laptop computers, smartphones or other personal electronic devices. They are thinking mainly about their electronic devices, and not much else.

    1    . More and more college students have no problem walking into a classroom and immediately opening their laptops. Others may spend an entire study period with a smartphone in hand.     2     But recent research suggests that using technology during class time may harm college students’ ability to remember and process the subject material they are learning.

Arnold Glass, a professor in Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a student researcher investigated the issue of divided student attention. During half of their daily class periods, the students in their study were permitted to use any electronic device as much as they wanted.     3    

The students’ academic performance was measured in several ways throughout the semester. They took a short test every day, longer tests every few weeks and a final exam covering all the class material. The researchers found that the average daily quiz results showed no evidence of harmful effects from the use of technology.     4     They showed that all the students performed poorly on questions covering material taught on days when they were permitted to use technology in the classroom.

Glass says that it shows the use of electronic devices in the classroom prevents students from processing information. The students hear what the professor is saying. But they might be buying things online or reading unrelated emails at the same time, for example. So they are not thinking deeply about the subject matter as they are hearing it.     5    

【推荐1】You are just waking up in the spring of 2030. Your Internet of Things bedroom opens solar-powered e-windows and plays gentle music while your smart lighting displays a montage(蒙太奇) of beachfront sunrises from your recent vacation.

Your shower uses very little water or soap. It recycles your grey water and puts the extra heat back into your home's integrated operating system. While you dress, your artificial intelligence (Al) assistant shares your schedule for the day and plays your favourite tunes.

You still start your day with caffeine but it comes from your loT refrigerator which is capable of providing a coffeehouse experience in your home. A hot breakfast tailored to your specific nutritional needs (based on chemical analysis from your trips to the "smart toilet") is waiting for you in the kitchen.

When it's time to leave, an on-demand transport system has three cars waiting for you, your spouse and your kids. On the road, driverless cars and trucks move with mathematical precision, without traffic jams. Accident rates are near zero.

En route, you call your R&.D team, who are wrapping up a day's work in Shanghai. Your life-sized image will be projected,which makes your colleagues see you as if you were sitting with them. It's a bit surreal(超现实的)for them to see you in the morning light given that it's dark on the Bund, Shanghai's waterfront, though the novelty fades after a few uses.

You review the day's cloud-based data from your Shenzhen manufacturing centre, your pilot project in San Diego, and your QA team in Melbourne. The massive datasets are collected in realtime from every piece of equipment and have been beautifully summarized by your company's AI. All these facilities are closely maintained and operated via a skilled predictive analytics platform. Pleased with the team's progress, you end the call and ease into a good book. This is the future and it will be here sooner than you think.

【推荐2】When your pen is broken, the batteries (电池) in your toys run out, or you have some leftover food, what will you do with these things? You will probably throw them all into one bin. But actually, all of these pieces of rubbish need to be sorted (分类) separately.

Rubbish sorting is a big problem worldwide. In recent years, some Chinese cities have been working hard on it. Shanghai has worked with Alipay to create a “green account (账户)” service. Account owners get points by correctly sorting their rubbish. Through the Alipay app, they can exchange the points for milk, phone cards or other products. The city is asking all people living there to sort their rubbish into four groups: wet, recyclable, harmful and dry.

Wet waste is something you don't want but that pigs can eat. Plastics, glass, paper and other things that can be reused are recyclable waste. Harmful waste includes things like medicine, batteries and bulbs. Finally, any waste that’s not wet, recyclable or harmful will go in the “dry waste” bin.

Many other Chinese cities are also sorting their rubbish in this way. For example, Shenzhen has been doing this since 2012. Students there also receive waste-sorting guidebooks that they must study.

In fact, there are still many workers specially working for sorting rubbish by hand in China. There is still a long way to go. But it’s never too late for every Chinese to learn how to sort rubbish properly and protect the environment.

If you don't sort your rubbish, all of it will go to a landfill (垃圾填埋场) and be buried together.

These landfills can take up much ground that could be used for planting. The electronic waste you throw away, such as batteries or used mobile phones, can cause pollution. Other pieces of rubbish, like the metal part of a pen, can be used to make other things if they are properly recycled.

【推荐3】A good modern newspapers is an extraordinary piece of reading. It’s extraordinary first for what it contains: the news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business to   fashion to science, and the news of comment and special features (特征) as well, from editorial page to feature article and interviews to criticism (批评) of books, art, theatre and music.

A newspaper is even more extraordinary for the way one reads it; never completely, never straight through but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, looking at one piece quickly, reading another articles all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next.

A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality, its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also much of what appeals in a newspaper has no more than value that just last for a short time. For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper; what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day’s paper, his own selection and order, his own newspaper.

For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently(高效地), which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you change apply the techniques of reading.

【推荐1】When my husband and I moved back to the United States years ago, we had been living an adventurous life on a boat overseas. We moved to Maine and fell in love with a piece of land. It came with a huge farmhouse much larger than we needed. We went rapidly from living in an extremely small space on the water with only two bags to a life on land as a family of four in a big house jammed with stuff.

How did we end up with so much stuff? We just didn't see things piling up so quickly. It's an embarrassment of riches. It's an overabundance. And it's burying us.

A couple of weeks ago, going through a pile of books I’d organized, I found my late mother's now-twenty-year-old copy of “Simplify Your Life" by Elaine St. James. I’d read it a number of times, adding my own penciled notes and folding down more pages.

Wondering if St. James wrote other books on the topic, I began an Internet search that led me deeper and deeper into simplicity, and a concept that was new to me, zero waste. I sensed that what was missing from our life, from our home, was emptiness. My house can't breathe, it's no wonder I feel like I can't either.

Now, my husband and I have undertaken an experiment that we hope will lead to a major lifestyle shift for our whole family. I first started to declutter and downsize by cleaning my kitchen. I emptied out my cupboards and drawers. I put everything needed on our dining-room table. Everything else went into a huge bin for sale. My drawers are beautiful now and I’m content to take this step.

Like any new beginning, there are hesitations. But in a few months, we will move into a new house less than half the size of the one we have. Can my two kids adjust to the idea of reducing their two separate rooms to one small shared bedroom with just a few toys? I can see I'm still thinking about what I will lose. But what I hope becomes clearer is what we will gain by letting go.

【推荐2】Lions are opportunists. They prefer to eat without having to do too much work. When resting in the shade, they are also watching the sky to see what is flying by, and even in the heat of the day they will suddenly start up and run a mile across the plains to find out what is going on. If another animal has made a kill, they will drive it off and take the kill for themselves. A grown lion can easily eat 60 pounds of meat at a single feeding. Often they eat until it seems painful for them to lie down.

The lionesses (母狮) , being thinner and faster, are better hunters than the males (雄狮). But the males don’t mind. After the kill they move in and take the best share.

Most kills are made at night or just before daybreak. We have seen many, many daylight attempts but only ten kills. Roughly, it’s about twenty daytime attempts for one kill.

When lions are hiding for an attack by a water hole, they wait patiently and can charge at any second. The kill is the exciting moment in the day-to-day life of the lion, since these great animals spend most of their time, about 20 hours a day, sleeping and resting.

Lions are social cats, and when they are having a rest, they love to touch each other. After drinking at a water hole, a lioness rests her head on another’s back. When walking, young lions often touch faces with older ones, an act of close ties among members of the group.

【推荐3】One of my favorite posters says, “Life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been a real life, you would have been instructed where to go and what to do.” Whenever I think of this humorous bit of wisdom, it reminds me not to take my life so seriously.

When you look at life and its many challenges as a test, or series of tests, you begin to see each issue you face as an opportunity to grow, a chance to discover more about life. Whether you’re being bombarded(轰炸) with problems, responsibilities, even insurmountable(不能超越的) difficulties, when looked at as a test, you always have a chance to succeed, in the sense of rising above that which is challenging you. If, on the other hand, you see each new issue you face as a serious battle that must be won in order to survive, you’re probably in a very rocky journey. The only time you’re likely to be happy is when everything is working out just right. And we all know how often that happens.

As an experiment, see if you can apply this idea to something you are forced to deal with. Perhaps you have much pressure from your parents or you have a demanding boss. See if you can redefine the issue you face from being a “problem” to being a test. Rather than struggling with your issue, see if there is something you can learn from it. Ask yourself, “Why is this an issue in my life? What would it mean and what would be involved to rise above it? Could I possibly look at this issue any differently? Can I see it as a test of some kind?”

If you give this strategy(策略) a try you may be surprised at your changed responses. It has become far more acceptable to me to accept things as they are.

【推荐1】For art, the year 2115 will be one full of events. In May of that year in Berlin, the philosopher-artist Jonathon Keats' "century cameras'' — cameras with a 100-year-long exposure（曝光）time — will be brought back from hiding places around the city to have their results developed and exhibited Six months after that, the Future Library in Oslo, Norway, will open its doors for the first time, presenting 100 books printed on the wood of trees planted in the distant past of 2015.

As Katie Paterson, the creator of the Future Library, puts it: **Future Library is an artwork for future generations/' These projects, more than a century in the making, are part of a new wave of "slow art'' intended to push viewers and participants to think beyond their own lifetimes. They aim to challenge today's short-term thinking and the brief attention spans of modern consumers, forcing people into considering works more deliberately. In their way, too, they are fighting against modern culture — not just regarding money, but also the way in which artistic worth is measured by attention.

In a similar fashion, every April on Slow Art Day, visitors are encouraged to stare at five works of art for 10 minutes at a time — a tough task for the average museum visitor, who typically spends less than 30 seconds on each piece of art.

Like the Future Library, the century cameras are very much a project for cities, since it's in cities that time runs fastest and the pace of life is fastest. "Since I started living in a city, I've somehow been quite disconnected/' Anne Beate Hovind, the Future Library project manager, who described how working on the library drew her back to the pace of life she knew when she was growing up on a farm in her youth, told the Atlantic magazine.

【推荐2】It’s nothing unusual for people to multitask nowadays. But the ability to do a number of things at the same time could be different between the two sexes.

A team of UK researchers recently compared the performances of 120 women and 120 men in a computer test about switching(转换) between tasks of counting and shape recognition.

Men equalled women when tasks were done one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up, there was a clear difference. According to the paper published in the journal BMC Psychology, both women and men slowed down and made more mistakes as the switching became more rapid. But men were slower, taking 77 percent longer to answer, while women took 69 percent longer.

To make the experiment more connected to day-to-day life, researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of everyday tasks, such as finding restaurants on a map, doing simple math problems, answering a phone call, or deciding how they would search for a lost key in a field.

Once again, women performed better than men in the test, especially in the key-searching task.

Where do women get the ability to keep organized under pressure better than men? Researchers believe that it has its origins in evolution(进化). In ancient times, women had to keep an eye on children while cooking meals. Meanwhile, men only needed to focus on hunting.

However, as with all studies, the results don’t necessarily apply to every single person in the world. “We don’t mean that men can’t multitask, or that only women can,” researcher Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told BBC News. “We are saying that the average woman is better able to organize her time and switch between tasks than the average man.”

【推荐3】As levels of carbon dioxide - CO₂ - in the atmosphere have been rising in recent decades, Earth has been warming. That’s because as a greenhouse gas, CO₂ traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere. That warming is one symptom of climate change. And it has the potential to affect food in many ways. Data now show that rising levels of CO₂ also can affect how nutritious a crop will be. Some of those data were reported last year in Annual Review of Public Health. Indeed, it noted that several studies have come to this conclusion.

Samuel Myers is an environmental health scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He was part of a team that has studied the potential effects of climate change on nutrition. In one 2014 study, his group looked at six major food crops: wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize (corn) and sorghum. They exposed plants to different amounts of CO₂. Some got levels of between 363 and 386 parts per million (ppm), which were typical at that time. (CO₂ levels have since risen.) Other plants were exposed to more of that greenhouse gas as they grew — 546 to 586 ppm. Such levels are expected to develop within the next 50 years or so.

After harvesting the plants, the researchers measured their levels of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. And plants grown with more CO₂ were less nutritious. Most people depend on cereal crops, such as wheat and rice, to meet their dietary needs for both zinc and iron. If crop levels of such nutrients fall, people may face an even greater risk of falling ill.

Scientists don’t yet know why CO₂ impacts levels of these nutrients. But the new findings suggest scientists may want to try breeding new varieties of crops that are less affected by CO₂. That way people will still get the most benefits from their greens and grains.