2 . If you have a chance to go to Finland, you will probably be surprised to find how “foolish” the Finnish people are.

Take the taxi drivers for example. Taxis in Finland are mostly high-class Benz with a fare of two US dollars a kilometer. You can go anywhere in one, tell the driver to drop you at any place, say that you have some business to attend to, and then walk off without paying your fare. The driver would not show the least sign of being annoyed and worried.

The dining rooms in all big hotels not only serve their guests, but also serve outside diners. Hotel guests have their meals free, so they naturally go to the free dining rooms to have their meals. The most they would do to show their good faith is to wave their registration card to the waiter. With such a loose check, you can easily use any old registration card to take a couple of friends to dine free of charge.   

The Finnish workers are paid by the hour. They are very much on their own as soon as they have agreed with the boss on the pay. From then on, they just say how many hours they have worked and they will be paid accordingly.

With so much carelessness in everyday life, surely Finland must be a heaven to those who love to take “petty advantages” (小便宜). But the strange thing is, all the taxi passengers would always come back to pay their fare after they have attended to their business; not a single outsider has ever been found in the free hotel dining rooms. And workers always give an honest account of the exact hours they put in.

As the Finns always act on good faith in everything they do, living in such a society has turned everyone into a real “gentleman”. In a society of such high moral practice, what need is there for people to be on guard against others?

4 . Magazines make great reading materials for kids. Libraries often have a large selection of periodicals (期刊) for every age group and reading level, and for many areas of interest. And some magazines may even have issues going back years and even decades! Below is a list of some of them!

It is about finding the bright side of life as a military kid! Inside each quarterly issue, your child will encounter inspiring stories, articles, and photographs! (8 to 16 years)

With articles, folk tales, and hands-on projects, Faces magazine takes young readers around the world for an honest and objective view of how children in other regions live. (9 to 14 years)

Make magazine publishes tested projects, skill-building tutorials, in-depth reviews and inspirational stories, accessible by all ages and skill ranges. (9 to 18 years)

Brio magazine for teen girls has a fresh new look that includes more pages filled with inspiring profiles, cultural insights, health & beauty tips, faith-filled features and added fun! (13 to 18 years)

Please note: Though all the magazines on this list are written for children, some issues may contain content that you may feel inappropriate for your child. As always, please review all reading materials before giving them to your child to read.

5 . As evening fell, five people moved nervously around a baby elephant. All the science, all the ideas leading up to this moment, checked out. But now, it was a question of practice: Would this baby elephant like the newly developed baby formula (配方)? Would her body react well to it?

The five people, keepers at Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, northern Kenya’s only elephant orphanage (孤儿院), held one another’s hands. They hoped that she would be healthy. As baby Sera gulped down one bottle after another, they smiled with relief. And in the days that followed, the weak two-week-old put on weight and had the strength to play with the other baby elephants at the orphanage.

The keepers celebrated the breakthrough. The formula was simple and the main ingredient (成分) of the new formula was easy to get: goat milk.

The team had been thinking about how to improve their milk recipe for a long time, says Katie Rowe, co-founder of Reteti, in the community-owned Namunyak Conservancy. The orphanage had used human baby formula since its establishment in 2016, but costs were high, cans had to be bought from foreign countries, and ingredients weren’t always natural. “I was looking at the ingredients, believing there were better choices out there,” Rowe says.

The new formula has also been a success for the Samburu community, which sells goat milk to the orphanage. Each morning, Stamen Lemajong’s family and others travel along tree-lined roads to sell more than 150 liters of milk to the orphanage. “We use the money from selling goat milk for everything the kids to school, paying hospital bills,” Lemajong says. “And in times of hardship last year, it has been a huge help. Then we could even buy food with it.”

6 . We’re getting more used to chatting to our computers and smart phones through all kinds of voice assistants.     1     People who can’t read or write can send and get information using the spoken web.

Some think voice could soon become the main way to interact online. They believe online interaction would soon depend mainly on the spoken web.     2    

Building the spoken web-web-to-voice and voice-to-web — is by no means an easy task. For software, to answer simple questions about the weather and play music for us is easy.     3     AI technology isn’t smart enough yet. Even turning your voice into text is one of the hardest problems for it to solve. There are as many ways to pronounce things as there are people on the planet.

Using voice interaction makes people feel much kinder than surfing the net in the old way.     4     But if something speaks, it must also listen. Our phones are always near us and they are constantly collecting our personal information. This has already raised privacy concerns.

    5     When you are driving or cooking, the voice assistant will be helpful. On the other hand, in a quiet library, using voice assistants to do something may not be as suitable as typing, as it could disturb others. The effectiveness of using voice depends on the specific surroundings.

8 . The Benefits of Listening to Music

Whether you like Beethoven or Mozart, there is one thing I think we can all agree on: music makes life better.     1    .

Listening to music can reduce stress

A lot of us may turn to relaxing music when we are feeling stressed or tired. A recent research shows that slow, quiet classical music is suggested to have the most exciting effect.     2    . Or listening to a relaxing, classical-style movie soundtrack can also help you reduce stress.

Listening to music can improve your memory

The interesting part about the research is that it shows music helps your brain develop in many areas, one of the most important being your memory.     3    

    4    .

Do you work out? Have you always felt like you perform better when you listen to music? Strange as it might seem, there has actually been a lot of research done on this subject. And sure enough, one study shows that music can increase endurance (耐力) by 15%.     5    . However, another study suggests that it’s not the type of music, but rather the speed of the music—the beats per minute—that matter.

9 . When looking at fashion shows or the latest magazine trends, you might think you’ve seen it all before. It seems that designers often revisit past concepts (概念). However, to glimpse the future of fashion, one must turn to the meeting point of fashion and technology, where innovative ideas are born.

For several years now, people have been talking about “wearable technology” as the next big development. You can already buy watches that do everything your smartphone can do, or glasses with computers that follow your eye movements and feed information to you as you walk around. But there’s much more to wearable technology than that.

Sports clothing is one of the areas. Runners already wear small computers on their wrists (手腕) that give them continuous information about how fast they’re running, how hard their bodies are working, and so on. Experts agree that it’s often sportspeople (usually young men) who are the first to take up new fashion ideas. Others then follow.

Women, it seems, are usually more interested in what clothes look like than what they can do, and technology has a part to play here too. Designers are making clothes that can change color with how you feel, or react to sound. And if you think that sounds unlikely, just think of all the things we accept as quite normal today that seemed impossible or silly only ten years ago.

The primary reason such items aren’t available in mainstream stores is their high cost. However, like all technological products, their prices are likely to decrease rapidly, as technological clothing doesn’t necessarily have to be costly.