1 . Modern computer technology has made a new kind of human relationship possible: online friendship.     1     Are online friendships as beneficial as face-to-face friendships? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having virtual friends? Can people form strong bonds online? Today these questions are the subject of lively debate.

Some people believe that the Internet is the best way to make new friends. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it allows making contact with different kinds of people from all over the world. When you use social networking, websites and chat rooms, you can easily find people with interests and hobbies similar to yours. Information updates and photos add to the experience. Making friends on the Internet is especially good for shy people who feel uncomfortable in social situations. It’s often easier to share thoughts and feelings online.     2     They can make people feel less lonely and help them solve problems.

Although the Internet can encourage friendship, it has a major disadvantage.     3     Online friends only tell you what they want you to know. They sometimes exaggerate their good qualities and hide the less positive ones, so you can’t be sure of what they really like. That is why you should not give personal information to anyone online unless you’re totally sure of who that person is.

Can online friendship be as meaningful as face-to-face ones? There are different points of view. Researchers at the University of Southern California surveyed 2,000 households in the United States. The results showed that more than 40 percent of participants feel “as strongly about their online buddies” as they do about their “offline” friends.     4     In contrast, there are many people who believe that it’s not possible to have deep relationships with online friends, A young Indian software engineer, Lalitha Lakshmipathy, says, “it’s good to feel connected with many people, but all my e-buddies are not necessarily my close friends.” They say that it’s hard to develop feelings of trust and connection when you don’t share experiences in person.

People continue to express different opinions about online friendship. However, most of them would agree that virtual friendships must not replace face-to-face friendships. As one life coach says, “a social networking site should only be the ‘add on’ in any relationship.”

2 . Club Activities in Japanese Schools

In the after-class activities of Japanese high schools, there are various clubs. Participation depends on students; however, most students choose a certain club.     1     And there are various kinds within each type.

A recent survey showed activity participation rate (比率). In junior high schools, participation rate was around 70% in sports clubs and around 20% in culture clubs. In senior high schools, participation rate in sports clubs dropped to about 50%, and in culture clubs, rose to around 25%. One reason is that there are more kinds of culture clubs in senior high schools than in junior high schools, so there is a wider range of choices.     2    

The rate of junior high school students not choosing any club was less than 10%. However, that number more than doubled in senior high school. In recent years, the number of students not joining in any clubs is increasing. Stronger individualism, which causes unwillingness to participate in group activities, is one factor behind this change.

    3     Japanese clubs are considered “a part of education” and are different from club activities overseas. Learning teamwork is a common factor; in particular, sports clubs have a strict hierarchy (等级制度) and are useful in leaning to be polite. This is said to have influenced the way Japanese companies work, for example, with respect for seniors. Compared to sports clubs, the hierarchy in culture clubs is not as strict.     4     Besides, clubs which practice traditional Japanese martial arts and culture offer a valuable chance to learn the traditional arts firsthand. By experiencing such arts in teenage years, the chance of passing traditional culture to the next generation is large.

3 . The world’s population reached five billion on the day I was born. That was in Indonesia back in 1987, and my parents was shocked that there were so many people on the planet.     1     In October 2011, the seven billionth baby was born, and experts predict that there will be ten billion of us before the end of this century.

    2     If you said “hello to a different person every second, it would take you 222 years to greet everyone on the planet. If seven billion people made a human chain with their hands, the chain would go to the moon and back nine times.

The human population has never been bigger, but in some ways the planet seems to begetting unbelievably smaller. In the past, travellers from Europe to Indonesia spent months at sea. Now you just have to sit on a plane for a few hours. When you arrived in another country a hundred years ago, you saw unfamiliar styles of clothing and buildings and discovered a completely different culture. In many places today, clothing and new buildings are very similar, and people enjoy the same things.     3    

Even the languages that we use are becoming more global. There are around seven thousand languages in use today.     4     I grew up in a small village where everyone spoke Baras, one of Indonesia’s local languages. Today, like most of the youth from my village, I live in the capital, Jakarta, and speak Indonesian there. The only regular Baras speakers at present are the older people who have stayed in the country, so the language is threatened with extinction.

4 . How Young Americans Spend Their Money

Young people have always puzzled their elders. Today’s youngsters are no different; indeed, they are confusing. They have thin wallets and expensive tastes. They prize convenience and a social conscience. They want shopping to be personal.     1     As they start spending in earnest, brands are trying to understand what these walking paradoxes with conflicting features want and how they shop. The answers will define the next era of consumerism.

Their absolute numbers are impressive. The European Union is home to nearly 125m people between the ages of ten (the youngest will become consumers in the next few years) and 34. America has another 110m of these Gen-Zs and millennials, a third of the population. The annual spending of households headed by American Gen-Zs and millennials hit $2.7trn in 2021, around 30% of the total.

    2     Forrester, a market-research firm, found that most users of “buy now, pay later” apps are around 20. Megan Scott, a 20-year-old student from London, speaks for many of her peers by admitting that, when shopping, she has no self-control—until the bill arrives.

The light-speed online world also appears to have lowered tolerances for long delivery times. A study by Salesforce, a business-software giant, found that Gen-Z Americans, who prefer to use their phones to pay for shopping, are the likeliest of all age groups to want their groceries delivered within an hour.     3    

The Internet has also changed how the young discover brands. Print, billboard or TV advertising has given way to social media. Instagram, part of Meta’s empire, and TikTok, a Chinese-owned app, are where the young look for inspiration, particularly for goods where looks matter such as fashion, beauty and sportswear.     4     Such apps are increasingly adding features that allow users to shop without ever leaving the platform. According to McKinsey, six in ten Americans under the age of 25 had completed a purchase on a social-media site.

5 . Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education is the formal teaching and care of young children. It primarily focuses on learning through playing to encourage children’s different kinds of development.     1    

Studies with Head Start programs throughout the United States have shown some evidence that there are quite a few advantages to early childhood education, which can produce significant gains in children’s learning and development. Compared with a child who does not attend pre-school, children completing their early education programs are found to be better at math and reading skills. They are excited to learn and have the tools to do so.     2     These children are more competent in their pre-school, kindergarten and school-age years, and they are usually reported as “friendlier” by parents and the children’s peers.

    3     In studies with matched control groups, more students who had early schooling experiences were employed at the age of 19, fewer were on welfare, and fewer were involved with the criminal activity. What’s more, some studies show that children attending pre-school are more likely to graduate and have higher education, and be well integrated as an adult.

Early childhood education gives most children a jump-start on education for their kindergarten and primary school years. It is clear that early childhood education do a lot of good to children.     4     If early childhood education is less effective, perhaps the best model is finding strategies for allowing a parent to stay home with his or her child for at least the first two to three years. Also important is considering a child’s own personality. Individual differences in children mean that not all children will get equal benefits from early childhood education.

6 . The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled over the past 50 years. But what this trend means for children’s long-term health, and what to do about it (if anything), is not so clear.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made waves this year by recommending that doctors put obese kids as young as two years old on intensive, family-oriented lifestyle and behavior plans.     1     This advice marks a shift from the organization’s previous stance of “watch and wait,” and it reflects the AAP’s belief that obesity is a disease and the group’s adoption of a more proactive position on childhood obesity.

Yet the lifestyle programs the AAP recommends are expensive, inaccessible to most children and hard to maintain — and the guidelines acknowledge these barriers. Few weight-loss drugs have been approved for older children, although many are used off-label.     2     And surgery, while becoming more common, has inherent risks and few long-term safety data — it could, for instance, cause nutritional deficits in growing children. Furthermore, it’s not clear whether interventions in youngsters help to improve health or merely add to the stigma overweight kids face from a fat-phobic society. This stigma can lead to mental health problems and eating disorders.

Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale, the U.S. and countries with similar trends should focus on an underlying truth: we need to invest in more and safer places for children to play where they can move and run around, climb and jump, ride and skate.

    3    In 2020 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, unsurprisingly, that kids’ sports participation increases with their parents’ incomes: about 70 percent of kids whose families earn more than $105,000 a year participate in sports, but only 51 percent of middle-class kids and 31 percent of children at or below the poverty line do. This disparity hurts people of color the most. More than 60 percent of white children, for instance, participate in athletics, but only 42 percent of Black children and 47 percent of Hispanic children do. Experts blame these problems on the privatization of sports — as public investment in school-based athletics dwindles, expensive private leagues have grown, leaving many kids out.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, children between ages six and 17 should get at least an hour of moderate to intense physical activity every day. Yet only 21 to 28 percent of U.S. kids meet this target, two government-sponsored surveys found. The nonprofit Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance evaluates physical activity in American children, and in 2022 the group gave the U.S. a grade of D–.

Why is it so hard to get kids moving? In addition to fewer opportunities at school, researchers cite increased screen time, changing norms around letting kids play outdoors unsupervised, and a lack of safe places for them to play outside the home.

New York City, for example, had 2,067 public playgrounds as of 2019 — a “meager” amount for its large population, according to a report from the city comptroller — and inspectors found hazardous equipment at one quarter of them. In Los Angeles in 2015, only 33 percent of youths lived within walking distance of a park, according to the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust. Lower-income neighborhoods tend to have the fewest public play spaces, despite often having a high population density.     4    

Kids everywhere need more places to play: trails, skate parks and climbing walls, gardens and ball fields, bike paths and basketball courts. Vigorous public funding to build and keep up these areas is crucial, but other options such as shared-use agreements can make unused spaces available to the public.

7 . Hello, everyone!

Are you worried about crime? I am. We read it every day in the newspapers. A terrible crime has been committed, and the police have arrested someone. He has appeared in court and claimed his innocence but has been found guilty of his crime and he has been sentenced to ten years in prison.     1     Innocent citizens like you and me can sleep more safely at night.

But what happens next? We all hope the prisoner will benefit from society’s retribution. A spell (一阵子) in prison will reform him and make him a better person. We all hope he’ll reform and become like us. We all hope that when he is eventually released, he will be a good character.     2     But, let’s face it. The reality is usually very different. The prisoner may be released on parole (假释) before the end of his sentence. He will try to re-enter society. But then he often becomes a victim himself, unable to find work and is rejected by society.     3    

So what can we do to make sure the offender doesn’t commit another crime? Of course, there are alternatives to prison, such as community service or he can pay a large fine. Alternatively, we could establish a more severe system of punishment.

The answer is far simpler. We need to be tough not on the criminal, but on the cause of the crime. We should spend less of the taxpayer’s money in funding the judges and all the other people who are working for the legal system.     4     We in the ConLab Party believe that everybody needs a good chance in life, and this is a good step forward.

Vote for us now!

8 . How to Thrive in a video age

The pandemic embedded video into the workplace. Workers who had never previously been on camera suddenly spent every hour of the day getting used to the sight of themselves and their colleagues on screen.     1    

There is no going back. Blogs have become vlogs. Meetings are now recorded as a matter so that people can fail to watch them back later. Some firms routinely ask applicants to record answers to certain questions on video, so that people can’t see how well prospective recruits communicate.

Since video has become more central to work, it pays to be good at it.     2    . Workers can improve under their own steam, but companies can help, too.

To see what the right set-up looks like, just observe the range of images on your next, video-conferencing call. It will probably be a complete mishmash (大杂烩). Some people will be bathed in the warm glow of a ring light; others will be emerging from the shadows like the Emperor Palpatine. Obviously, there is a limit to how level the playing-field-between home offices can be, when living environments between employees differ so greatly.     3    : people who regularly make presentations or see clients have greater claim on fancier equipment.

Advice on how to present well on video is not that different to advice on presenting in general. But there are some specific pitfalls with video. One is where to look. Staring into the camera is unnatural. Some advice pinning a photo of someone you respect right by the lens. But looking at the camera is harder if you are referring to notes no the screen at the same time. Teleprompter (提词器) software maybe the right answer.

Perhaps the least recognised skill in the video age is listening well.     4     — being able to turn your camera off when your time is being royally wasted may be the pandemic’s greatest gift to productivity. Yet one of the downsides is how distracting it can be: as well as checking yourself out and following the online chat, you can comment on someone’s new wallpaper while watching their neighbour shovel noodles into their mouth. It takes real effort to stay focused in such circumstances.

9 . Nobel economics prize goes to professor for research on the workplace gender gap

The Nobel economics prize was awarded Monday to Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin for research that has advanced the understanding of the gender gap in the labor market.     1     Goldin is just the third woman to win the prize out of 93 economics laureates.

Claudia Goldin has studied 200 years of women’s participation in the workplace, showing that despite continued economic growth, women’s pay did not continuously catch up to men’s and a divide still exists despite women gaining higher levels of education than men.

“    2     But when I look at the numbers, I think something has happened in America, that we, in the 1990s, our labor force participation rate for women was the highest in the world, and now it isn’t the highest in the world,” Goldin told The Associated Press. “We have to step back and ask questions about piecing together the family, the home, together with the marketplace and employment,” she said.

Goldin’s research does not offer solutions, but it allows policymakers to tackle the entrenched problem, said economist Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the Nobel committee. “    3     And therefore, there is no single policy,” Hjalmarsson said. “It’s a complicated policy question because if you don’t know the underlying reason, a certain policy won’t work.” However, “by finally understanding the problem and calling it by the right name, we will be able to pave a better route forward,” Hjalmarsson said.

Goldin said that what happens in people’s homes reflects what happens in the workplace, with women often taking jobs that allow them to be on call at home work that often pays less. “Ways in which we can even things out or to create more couple equity also leads to more gender equality,” she said.

Goldin had to become a data “detective” as she sought to fill in missing data for her research.     4     “So how did Claudia Goldin overcome this missing data challenge? She had to be a detective to dig through the archives to find novel data sources and creative ways to use them to measure these unknowns,” Hjalmarsson added.

10 . Will we ever fully be ready to remember 2020? The masks. The quarantines. Racial injustice. So much death.

Assembled from video footage shot by people from around the world on July 25 of last year, “Life in a Day” is a well-meaning but unnecessary crowdsourced documentary, a companion piece to a 2011 version of the same name, that thinks we’re ready.

The film gets off to an obvious start: with a symphony of child birth. Mostly, though, the breezy snippets capture everyday mundanities (世俗之事) that include a vast range of human experiences and multicultural behavior, bringing together beauty and darkness, birth and death.     1     What this video portrait doesn’t do is focus enough on its subjects to allow for any true investment in their lives.

Though participants’ experiences vary, their clips are cut together into montages (蒙太奇) to create a sense of pandemic-era interrelational connection.     2     The result is a tediously formatted stream of categorized clips that might as well fall into hash tagged classifications: Environmental Conservation, Zoom Life, Class of 2020, Love Is Love and You Weren’t the Only One Cooking All the Time.

The film indicates that the director Kevin Macdonald and the producer Ridley Scott received 324, 000 videos submitted from 192 countries for this project. That’s a lot of videos.     3     I know his pursuit is meant to be an unusual break from other cinematic portraits. But over and over in a film about 2020? When a young Black woman is only briefly shown lamenting the death of two of her brothers who died while in police custody? I want her story.

“Life in a Day” seeks to be a time capsule during a period of great racial divide and pandemic distress.     4     As it stands, it hasn’t captured anything that 90 minutes of TikTok surfing can’t.