2 . Recycling Electronic Waste

When Alex Lin was 11 years old, he read an alarming article in the newspaper which said that people were burying old computers in backyards, throwing TVs into streams, and dumping (丢弃) cell phones in the garbage. This was dangerous because e-waste contains harmful chemicals that can leak into the environment, getting into crops, animals, water supplies—and people.

Alex was really worried and decided to make it next project for WIN—the Westerly Innovations Network. Alex and six of his friends had formed this organization to help solve community problems two years before.

But what could they do about this project with e-waste? The team spent several weeks gathering information about the harmful chemicals in e-waste and their effects on humans. They learned how to dispose (处置) of e-waste properly and how it could be recycled. Then, they sent out a survey and found only one in eight knew what e-waste was, let alone how to properly dispose of it.

Alex and his friends went into action. They advertised in the local newspaper and distributed notices to students, asking residents to bring their unwanted electronics to the school parking lot. The drive lasted two days, and they collected over 9, 500 kilograms of e-waste.

The next step was to set up a long-term e-waste drop-off center for the town. After some research, they’d learned that reusing is the best way to deal with electronic devices and it is seven times more efficient than recycling. So, they began learning to refurbish (翻新) computers themselves and distributed them to students who didn’t have their own. In this way, they could help students in the area and protect the environment at the same time.

For a lasting solution to e-waste, the drop-off center wasn’t enough. Laws would have to be passed. In 2016, WIN helped push for an e-waste bill in their town, which required companies that manufactured or sold electronics to take back e-waste. The bill clearly forbids the dumping of e-waste.

Because of the work of WIN, more and more people, like Alex and his team, are getting the message about safe disposal of e-waste. As Alex says, “Today’s technology should not become tomorrow’s harmful garbage.”

4 . At university, when I told people I was studying for a history degree, the response was almost always the same, “You want to be a teacher?” No, a journalist. “Oh. But you’re not majoring in communications?”

In the days when a university education was a privilege, perhaps there wasn’t the assumption that a degree had to be a springboard directly into a career. Those days are long gone. Today, a degree is all but a necessity for the job market, one that more than halves your chances of being unemployed. Still, that alone is no guarantee of a job—and yet we’re paying more and more for one.

Given those costs, most of us want to maximize that investment — and that can lead to a plug-and-play type of approach to higher education. Want to be a journalist? Study journalism, we’re told. A lawyer? Pursue pre-law. Not totally sure? Go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer and Maths) — you can become an engineer or an IT expert. And no matter what you do, forget the humanities, such as history, philosophy and languages.

It’s true that the humanities come with a higher risk of unemployment, but the risk is slighter than you would imagine. For young people in the U.S. , the unemployment rate of those with humanities degrees is four percent, just a little more than that of engineering degree holders. Lower salaries may not be caused by the degree itself either. The gender pay gap persists in the humanities, whose graduates are more likely to be female. Is it any wonder then that language teachers tend to make less than engineers?

According to LinkedIn’s research on the most sought-after job skills by employers for 2019, the ability to communicate and get along with people, to understand what’s on other people’s minds, and to do full-strength critical analysis were all valued and appreciated. It goes without saying that you can be an excellent communicator and critical thinker without a humanities degree. And any good university education, not just one in English or psychology, should sharpen these abilities further. But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the humanities — whether that’s by debating other students in a seminar, writing a thesis paper or analyzing poetry.

The whole question of whether a student should choose STEM versus the humanities might be misguided to begin with. The headlines most of us see don’t help. Whatever a student pursues in university, it must be something that they are not only good at, but interested in. Even if it means pursuing a “useless” degree — like one in humanities.

Monster Zoo is one of the largest zoos in the world, covering more than 15 km squares. It is home to more than 50 species of rare and native animals. The zoo is located 70 km from the city New South Australia.

Monster zoo was founded in 1983 as a breeding area (繁殖区). Officially open to the public in October 1993, Monster Zoo is now home to more than 500 animals.

Monster zoo is open daily from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm with last entry at 3:00 pm. The zoo is open every day of the year, including Christmas Day and all public holidays. The exception to this is if the forecast temperature for Monster Zoo is 40 degrees or above, it will be closed.

To get the most out of your visit we recommend setting aside a minimum of four to five hours to fully enjoy the Monster zoo.

Child (4-14 years old) : AU $28.50

Adult (15 years old and over) : AU $ 51.75

Family / Mini Group: AU $132.75

Monster zoo offers various daily zoo keeper talks and animal feeds that give guests the chance to interact (互动) with our friendly workers and learn about the zoo’s unique residents.

Looking for a more unique animal experience? Consider booking a Behind the Scenes Animal Experience to come face to face with some of our special animal residents.

Ketabi Café is open from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm daily and offers a variety of tasty treats, small snacks and hot meals.

For those who prefer to bring their own meals, special picnic areas are available close to the Visitor Center. Please note that due to fire risk, the zoo does not allow for the use of BBQs.

6 . A star athlete at the college where I work recently stopped by my office. After committing a few unforced errors during a weekend match, she was riven by self-criticism. “I’m at peak fitness, and I practice hard. How is this happening?” She asked.

This student believes she should be able to control the outcomes of her life by virtue of her hard work. She has a sense that hours on the field should get her exactly where she needs to go. Many students have similar mentality. When they win, they feel powerful and smart. When they fail, they are crushed by self-blame. If my achievements are mine to control, they reason, my failures must be entirely my fault, too.

We talk often about young adults struggling with failure because their parents have protected them from discomfort. But there is something else at play: a false promise that they can achieve anything if they are willing to work for it.

Psychologists have sourced this phenomenon to a misapplication of “mindset” research, which has found that praising children for effort will increase academic performance. A 2018 analysis found that while praising effort over ability may benefit economically disadvantaged students, it does not necessarily help everyone.

One possible explanation comes from Suniya Luthar, who argued in a research paper that for teens in wealthy, pressure-cooker communities, “it is not a lack of motivation and perseverance (毅力) that is the big problem. Instead, it is unhealthy perfectionism, and difficulty with backing off when they should, when the desire for achievements is over the top.” They push themselves onward in face of impossible goals. A 2007 study found that teens who refused to give up impossible goals showed higher levels of C-reaction protein, a marker of systemic inflammation (全身炎症) linked to heart disease and other medical conditions. A 2014 study showed a connection between the perfectionist tendencies and depression.

The cruel reality is that you can do everything in your power and still fail. Instead of allowing our kids to beat themselves up when things don’t go their way, we adults should help students pursue success in healthier ways in part by redefining failure as a feature, not a bug, of learning. At Smith College where I teach, students are asked to explore how setbacks and missteps made them stronger or more effective. We would be wise to remind our kids that life has a way of sucker-punching (意外打击) us when we least expect it. It’s often the people who learn to say “stuff happens” who get up the fastest.

7 . Just because a scientist puts a GPS tracking collar on a wild polar bear does not mean the animal will willingly keep it on. They can remove it, if one becomes annoying. But scientists have now found a way of using signals from those dropped collars to track the ice itself.

The scientists identified 20 collars that transmitted movement data consistent with ice drift (漂流) rather than polar bear motion between 2005 and 2015. The resulting records of how melting ice drifts in Hudson Bay are unique; there are no easily accessible on-the-ground sensors, and satellite observations often cannot accurately capture the motion of small ice sheets.

The team compared the removed collars’ movements to widely used ice-drift modeling data from the U. S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Collar data indicated that the NSIDC model underestimates the speed at which ice moves around in Hudson Bay — as well as the overall extent of drift. Over the course of several months the model could diverge (偏离) from an ice sheet’s location by a few hundred kilometers, the scientists say.

This means the bears may be working harder, when moving against the direction of the ice, than scientists had assumed, “Since we’re underestimating the speed of drift, we’re likely underestimating the energetic effort of polar bears,” says Ron Togunov, who led the study.

The study reveals timely insight into how highly mobile ice moves. As melting increases in coming years, such ice will likely become more common farther north, in the central Arctic, says Andy Mahoney, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska, who was not involved in the study. Scientists had known NSIDC data could underestimate drift speeds, Mahoney says, but “any time we can find a data gap and plug it is a good thing.”

Plus, such data could improve predictions about how oil spills or other pollutants may spread in seas littered with drifting ice, says Walt Meier, a senior NSIDC research scientist. The findings may even influence future NSIDC models. “It'’s a really nice data set.” Meier says. “And certainly one we’ll take under consideration.”

9 . If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange ambition for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance-parents happy, kids taken care of, work working-then our overriding thought would be to shout “Nobody move!” and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.

Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life-just as family is, as are friends and community. All of these aspects of living have their share of uplifting moments and moments that drag us down. The same is true of work. Treat work the same way you do life: by maximizing what you love.

We have interviewed several anesthesiologists (麻醉师) about the thrills they feel in their jobs. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation aiming to calm the panic that affects many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the anesthetic mechanism and has devoted himself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does.

Think of your life’s many different activities as threads. Some are black and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the tell-tale signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you’re doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you’ve done them, you feel energetic. These are your red threads, and research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20% red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout.

The simplest way for you to do this is to spend a week in love with your job. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love write down exactly what you were doing in the column “Love”. And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse write down what you were doing in the column “Loathe”. By the end of the week you will see a list of activities in your “Love” column, which create in you a positive feeling, one that draws you in and lifts you up.

Our goal should be to, little by little, week by week, intentionally unbalance all aspects of our work toward the former and away from the latter. Not simply to make us feel better, but so that our colleagues, our friends and our family can all benefit from us at our very best.