1 . My 10-year-old son and two friends attended a 2-hour fantastic basketball camp on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A few minutes before the session ended, there was a shooting contest. Only a few kids were chosen to compete, and my son was not one of them. The contest winners received prizes and recognition, as did a few kids chosen as “all-stars” for effort, skill and participation. Again, my son was not selected.

My son was struggling to deal with his disappointment.

At the camp, he played a basketball game with kids he had never met, guarded them fiercely and took shots easily against them. As his mom, I was thrilled that he spent the day without his iPad. All in all, the day felt wonderful. The last thing I wanted was for these awards to ruin the experience.

I decided to simplify it for him. I did the math and figured out the shooting contest and awards were about 6% of the total camp. The rest of the camp, the parts that he enjoyed, were 94% of the day. Even though the kid loves math, it was hard for him to see the contests and awards as a small part of his day.

My son once told me about a negative situation that played out at recess（课间休息）. The way he explained it felt like the disagreement lasted hours, but it turns out it was only the last few minutes of recess.

Now is the time for me as the parent to help my kids think more positively. If my son leaves a half-day camp and most of the day was great —that’s a win. If our family is able to go to Florida over winter break and enjoy time together, away from the everyday headaches, that’s also a win. We can acknowledge the aspects that disappoint us, as long as we are willing to then focus on the bigger picture.

It starts with me and my husband. Our kids will model the behavior we show. They need to see us thinking positively and not hyper-focusing on the negative 6%.

2 . Over the past year, several films and TV dramas have put their shooting locations into the public spotlight.

Dali in Yunnan Province

With the TV drama Meet Yourself earlier last year, Dali in Yunnan Province emerged as a highly sought-after tourism destination.

During the Spring Festival holiday, Yunnan Province received the second most tourists in the nation with a tourism profit of 38.4 billion yuan, ranking top. Among this, Dali received 4.24 million tourists, marking a remarkable 219 percent increase compared to the previous year.

Jiangmen in Guangdong Province

Thanks to the success of the hit show The Knockout, Jiangmen in Guangdong Province became an outstanding tourism destination last year.

Data reveals a remarkable 217 percent month-on-month increase in searches related to tourism in the city in February. Currently, travel bookings witness a substantial 144 percent month-on-month rise.

Taiyuan Ancient County in Shanxi Province

Full River Red has set Taiyuan Ancient County in Shanxi on fire with excitement.

From Jan. 21 to 31, the county witnessed over 400,000 tourists, a significant rise compared to the about 180,000 visitors during the previous Spring Festival holiday. Notably, one-third of these tourists were from outside Shanxi Province.

Ningbo Museum in Zhejiang Province

With the broadcast of the TV drama Three-Body Problem, Ningbo Museum has gained significant attention.

Visitor numbers rose to 50,000 during the Spring Festival, marking a remarkable 220 percent year-on-year increase. Even after the festival, there were 2,000 to 3,000 visitors daily consistently.

3 . Late last year, in the days before the Dosakian election, a video featuring a well-known journalist and a key candidate circulated on social networks. However, it was absolutely fake (虚假的). The International Press Institute has called this episode in Dosakia the first time that AI deepfakes — fake images, or videos generated by artificial intelligence — have influenced a national election greatly.

Security experts consider misinformation the biggest global risk recently — more dangerous than war, and extreme weather events. A constant stream of people is wrestling with this issue. Now even economists are joining in.

Economist Iyan Smith, and others conduct a real-world experiment to see whether simple, low-cost nudges, or interventions, can be effective. Instead of focusing on the supply side of misinformation like social media platforms, they pay attention to the demand side: increasing our capacity to identify the fake information.

The economists split participants randomly into four different groups. One group was shown a video demonstrating a convincing journey of two people from two different social groups who, before interacting, express negative stereotypes (刻板印象) about the other’s group, overcoming their differences and ultimately regretting unthinkingly using stereotypes to dehumanize one another. Another group completed a personality test that shows them their cognitive traits (认知特点) causing prejudice, hoping to increase their self-awareness, and decrease their demand for misinformation. A third group did both while a control group did neither.

The economists find the simple intervention of showing the video makes the participants over 30 percent less likely to “consider fake news reliable”. But the personality test has little effect. As for participants doing both, they were about 31 percent less likely to view true headlines as reliable. In other words, they became so skeptical that even the truth became suspect.

Smith and his colleagues are far from the first scholars to fight misinformation by helping people to think more critically. University of Weymouth psychologist Lisa Kindle also advocates similar ways to help reject misinformation in the wild.

4 . Whether you live in a house, cottage, flat or rented property, we all love and treasure our homes — so protecting your property with a comprehensive home insurance policy should be a priority. But what should you consider when purchasing your next home insurance policy? Here are some key points.

VALUE YOUR VALUABLES

We all take possessions away from the home, including items such as jewelry, mobile phones, tablets, and handbags. When buying home insurance, always discuss this. A policy that provides overseas cover means you can often save money on your travel policy — since you don’t need to insure these items twice.

WATCH OUT FOR WATER

If there’s damage to your property caused by an escape of water, you may have additional costs in removing and replacing any other part of the building while accessing the source of the leak. Trace and access cover is important as it could save you a substantial amount of money should your property develop a leak.

ACCIDENTS HAPPEN

One in four home insurance policies don’t include accidental damage cover. Accidental damage cover is recommended as even the most careful person could accidentally knock their television when decorating or even while cleaning the carpet.

It may surprise you to learn comprehensive home insurance — which includes all the important levels of cover as standard—may not cost as much as you might think. Leading insurance broker Higos Insurance Services recently revealed that 66 percent of their clients have paid less than 240 for their new home insurance policy in 2023.

6 . Our old, artificial Christmas tree was in rough shape by the time we retired it. At least a decade had passed since my wife and I bought the tree, a medium-size fake tree with built-in lights, at a Target in Brooklyn and carried it on the subway to our tiny apartment. Over the years, we dragged that tree from apartment, jammed it onto a moving truck to Los Angeles and later packed the weathered box onto another moving truck, this time to Chicago and our current home. By the end, layers of duct tape (强力胶布) held the box together, the wear and tear of a decade of delivering holiday cheer.

Our little tree looked run down, but it was the only tree our family ever knew. It stands proud and glowing in the background of photos of me and my pregnant wife during our last Christmas in Brooklyn without children. Our oldest was born a month later during a January snowstorm. The tree shows up again in the next year’s photos, this time surrounded by holiday gifts for a boy about to turn 1. Then it appears in photos of our son and his 1-month-old brother, this time with California palm trees just outside the door. And in more recent photos, our tree lights up windows overlooking shining Chicago snow. This year, after much debate, we decided to retire our dear old tree, with its bent branches and the lights that had burned out years ago. Rather than feel depressed, we used the moment to launch a new family tradition: our first real Christmas tree.

So here’s a toast to all your family’s traditions—the old and the new. I hope you enjoy this issue, which we have filled with stories of seasonal joy and holiday cheer. Happy holidays!

10 . My mother died of breast cancer when she was merely 50 in 1970. Afterwards, the comment repeated most often was: “You’ll need to be careful for the rest of your life because it may have been passed to you.” In 1994, the first ever breast cancer gene testing arrived. I jumped right to it and tested negative. I’m thankful for the science that has given me this preventive screening (筛查). Good for me, but is it good for everyone?

Here’s the catch. Research on genetic disease has been based mostly on European people, like me. The same went to the mapping of the human genes. The problem is that we know little about how new treatments might work for people of other races. If we diversify patients in clinical trials, we can realize the promise of personalized medicine for everyone, not just white patients. Faced with the unfair phenomena in medical research, what should we do to resolve the problem?

Not only do we need more diverse populations participating in research, but we also need diversity among biomedical researchers and medical professionals to make efforts. That makes research stronger and builds trust with diverse communities. A medical team is working on this now. They are building a diverse next generation of gene editing researchers by teaching high school and community college students from different backgrounds about promising technologies like gene editing to encourage them to become future researchers. This sort of educational outreach can also help to build trust in the medical and research communities. The team leader, John Cooper, PhD, has been outspoken about the current inequalities of delivering new technologies to all people at a fair cost.

Numerous scientists and medical leaders are working to change the situation. While science wasn’t yet far enough along to save my mother, I have harvested the benefits of advanced research and so should we all.