2 . Unique and Weird New Year's Eve Traditions

German

In some parts of Germany, they do lead （铅）pouring. Pour a dollop （团）of lead into cold water and the shape it dorms may be telling you about the year to come. A heart shape, naturally, means love will come your way. A crown predicts wealth and fortune. A star indicates happiness. But if you see a cross, you're almost dead!

Latin America

If you are in Latin America, make sure you have some colourful underpants to ring in the New Year. End — of — the — year partiers put on colourful underwear to ensure certain types of outcomes of the following year, red for love and yellow for success.

Naples, Italy

Neapolitans like throwing things out of the windows, at least on New Year's Eve. Furniture, kitchen machines, grandma.. Well, maybe not the last one. Let's hope not, anyway. This tradition is meant to symbolize an out — with — the — old gesture and get a new beginning of the new year. These days people are a bit more mindful of what they throw into the street below.

Spain

In 1909, winegrowers in the Alicante region of Spain had a brilliant idea: Start and promote an annual tradition that would involve people in having to buy and eat more grapes. Everyone must eat 12 grapes on New Year's Eve to pray for wealth of the coming year. Now, it's a popular custom in Spain. But the problem is that people have to eat a grape for each bell striking at midnight.

4 . As more and more people speak the global language of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will be likely to die out by the next century, according the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations — UNESCO and National Geographic among them — have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Center, Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of Thangmi and Their Culture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.

At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials —including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes — which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded — the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project — Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to schools but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

6 . Children's Books That Teach Empathy and Kindness

Little Blue Truck

By Alice Schertle

Little ones are introduced to Blue, a little pickup truck that gets stuck pushing a dump truck out of the mud in this board book. Thankfully, Blue made a group of animal friends along the way that are happy to do whatever they can to help him get back on the road. The main themes are kindness and the benefits of helping others.

Most People

By Michael Leannah

The book is an amazing lesson for kids that want to do good in the world and that there are plenty of good people out there. Told in the third person, the book tells the story of two pairs of siblings (兄弟姐妹) and the people they meet.

If You Plant a Seed

By Kadir Nelson

A mouse and a rabbit teach children how to plant and grow food, while also passing along some valuable lessons. After learning that a carrot seed will grow a carrot, and a cabbage seed will result in a cabbage, children also learn the value of thoughtfulness and how a seed of kindness can bear sweet fruit.

Save Me a Seat

By Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan

Joe lived in the same town all his life and felt perfectly pleased until his best friend moved away. Ravi's family recently moved from India to the US and he's struggling to find where he belongs. Even though Joe and Ravi at first believe that they don't have much in common, they both realize they have a common enemy-the biggest bully (仗势欺人者) in their class. Save Me a Seat is a story about the true meaning of friendship and understanding.

7 . In the field of educational technology, some apps might be getting too smart. There are more and more apps providing help for students.

PhotoMath

The new, seemingly magic app allows users to take pictures of a math problem, and then receive a step-by-step solution. It is now the number one free app on the App Store. A PhotoMath spokeswoman says educators have welcomed the app with positive reviews, but the software causes a lot of angry public discussion and disagreement. Why? It is because students can use it to cheat when doing their math homework.

Price: Free

iHomework

Whether you’re a high school student or a college student, there’s one thing you’ve got for sure: a lot of homework. iHomework can help you keep track of all your homework. It can help you arrange it in a particular order according to types, or based on deadlines.

Price: Free

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is similar to PhotoMath, but it focuses on older students studying high levels of math and doesn’t support photos. The service also produces step-by-step solutions to advanced topics, making it a popular tool for college students.

Price: $2.99

Homework Helper

Chinese Internet search company Baidu has launched (发起) an app called Homework Helper with which students can get answers to homework. Users post a picture or type their homework questions onto online forums (论坛), and those who answer the questions can win e-coins that can be used to buy devices like iPhones and laptops. The app has logged 5 million downloads, much to the concern of many parents who argue that the students spend less time thinking about challenging problems.

Price: Free

8 . Three French students，using the name “Obvious”， have produced the first artwork created mainly by a computer program to be sold at auction (拍卖). Using artificial intelligence (AI)，Obvious created 11 portraits (肖像画) of an imaginary family they called Belamy.

Obvious used 15,000 real portraits to train an AI program which has two parts.One part tries to create pictures that look real.The other part judges the work.If the portrait doesn’t look real enough，the first part goes back and changes its decisions until it comes up with a better picture.These decisions are controlled by an algorithm (计算程序). The students made many choices，helping guide the AI’s decisions.But even so，the painting is “signed”by the algorithm，instead of the students.

On October 25，Obvious’s picture，Edmond de Belamy，was sold at auction at Christie’s in New York.The final price for Edmond de Belamy was $432,500—about ten times more than Christie’s expected.

This is not the first AI artwork，just the first one sold at auction.In fact，many people are not impressed with the portrait.“The work isn’t interesting，or original，”says 19­year­old Robbie Barrat.He should know.He wrote much of the program that created the pictures.

But he doesn’t like the idea of Obvious selling the picture.He thinks it’s too simple and gives a bad idea of what real AI artists are doing.He points out that he created many pictures like these over a year ago.

Obvious doesn’t hide the fact that it used Mr.Barrat’s work，or even that its portrait is not the best AI artwork ever.Pierre Fautrel of Obvious said，“...the goal of our project was to do something that was simple enough for...my mother or brother to understand.”

Obvious got the attention of Christie’s by selling another work，Le Comte de Belamy，for over $11,000 in February. One reason Christie’s chose to auction Obvious’s work is because AI art is unusual now.In the future it will be much more common.

9 . Having worked for more than a decade in finance in the oil industry in Canada, Tori Fahey found herself wanting more from life. But it wasn't through desperation that her circumstances changed: “I didn't get fed up and storm off, nothing like that; it was curiosity about other interests and wanting to experience something new.”

Fahey left her job and completed an MBA before setting up a move to New York to begin a degree. However, the opportunity of an open year between the MBA and the degree came up, and as a keen touring cyclist, Fahey realised that a much dreamed-about adventure was now becoming a possibility: "The ride in Africa had been on my fantasy list. It was a moment when I realised that I could do anything, so I should."

Fahey rode across Africa, a 7,500-mile trip that took four months. The whole experience had a life-changing impact. Fahey said: “Bicycles provide a literal freedom. You don't allow yourself to feel like that in everyday life because there are so many distractions. But when you' re out on the bike and there's nothing else, you' re really free to experience what life is.”

Post-degree, Fahey worked on projects with the UNDP(United Nations Development Project) in Montenegro with the aim of bringing investment to rural communities.

It was while working on these projects that the seeds were sown for the next new investment. “It was through my trip across Africa that I discovered pannier and rack systems inconvenient and I was never going to use them again.” Little did she know this would lead her to start up her own company.

In 2013, Apidura was born, producing storage solutions for people looking to travel the world by bike, race across continents and carry all they need to do so. It's now a successful global brand, but Fahey remains reflective about what else the company can do for people.

10 . A woman held her phone tightly to her heart the way a church-goer might hold a Bible. She was anxious to take a picture of an impressive bunch of flowers that sat not so far away, but first she had to get through a crowd of others pushing their way to do the same. The cause of this was Bouquets to Art, one of the most popular events at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Flower sellers were asked to create flower arrangements that respond to pieces of art on display, from ancient carvings to contemporary sculptures. It’s extremely attractive and also memorable, to the point that it has become a problem.

In recent years, the de Young received more than a thousand complaints from people who felt that cell phones had spoiled their experience of the exhibit. Institutions of fine art around the world face similar problems as the desire to take photographs becomes a huge attraction for museums, as well as something that upsets some of their patrons (资助人). So the de Young responded with a kind of compromise:carving out “photo free” hours during the exhibition’s six-day run.

One common complaint about the effect of social media on museum culture is that people seem to be missing out on experiences because they are so busy collecting evidence of them. A study recently published in the journal Psychological Science suggests there is some truth to this. It finds that people who keep taking photos of an exhibit and posting them on social media rather than simply observing it, have a hard time remembering what they see. But the issue is complex for the professionals running museums. Linda Butler, the de Young’s head of marketing and visitor experience, acknowledges that not everyone wants a museum to be“a photo-taking playland”. Yet a lot of people do and she believes that the de Young is in no position to judge one reason for buying a $ 28 ticket to be more valid than another. “If we removed social media and photography,” she says. “We would risk becoming irrelevant.”