2 . When Seymour Kankel, 10, was getting in the car to go to the summer camp in 2019, he wasn’t exactly keeping an eyc out for bears. But there it was, about 30 meters away, going calmly out of a dustbin. Different from Seymour, the bear wasn’t at all shocked to see him. Seymour immediately ran away.

Encounters like the one Seymour had aren’t that shocking. People and black bears are running into each other more and more. That’s partly because people are spending more time in wild areas-hiking and camping. They’re also living in areas near forests and mountains, areas where bears like to hang out. And the number of black bears has been growing since they were protected.

Black bears don’t usually bother anyone. But if a bear feels threatened, it might do something like a bluff charge. That’s when a bear runs towards a person but doesn’t attack. Even if no one is hurt, it can be frightening. And authorities may kill the animal in response.

People might be afraid of bears, but that fear goes both ways. Black bears living near people live in fear too, especially when they want to eat human leftovers. They’re weighing the high-calorie food against the risk often encountering people.

One way to reduce contact with bears is to remove the fast-food option. The hardest part is convincing people to do that. They need to keep bird feeders out of reach. They mustn’t leave pet food behind. Most importantly, they need to lock up the trash. Bears are changing their own behavior to coexist with people and their activities. And people will need to do the same — even if it means just locking up their trash.

3 . Searching online has many educational benefits. But spending more time online does not mean better online skills. Instead, a student’s ability to successfully search online increases with guidance and clear instruction. Young people often think they are already skilled searchers. Their teachers and parents often think so too. This belief means much classroom practice centers on searching to learn, hardly on learning to search. Many teachers don’t teach students how to search online. Instead, students often teach themselves. This does not result in students learning the skills they need.

For six years, I studied how young Australians use search engines. Both school students and home-schoolers showed some characteristics (特点) of online searching that aren’t beneficial. For example, both groups spent greater time on irrelevant (不相关的) websites than relevant ones and stopped searches before finding their needed information.

Search engines offer endless educational chances, but I find many students typically only search for isolated (孤立) facts, and move on. In one observation, a home-school family type “How many endangered Sumatran Tigers are there” into Google. They enter a single website where they read a single sentence. They write this “answer” down and they begin the next topic—growing seeds.

The practice means people are no better off than they were 40 years ago with a print encyclopedia (百科全书). Why not use different keywords, sites and search tabs? The student could have learned much more.

The other thing young people should keep in mind to get the full benefits of searching online is to avoid fast search. All too often we believe search can be a fast process. The home-school families in my study spent 90 seconds or less, viewing each website and searched a new topic every four minutes. But searching so quickly can mean students don’t write useful search keywords or get the information they need.

4 . The halo effect (晕轮效应) is a type of cognitive bias (认知偏见) in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character. Physical appearance is often a major part of the halo effect. However, this effect doesn’t just affect our perceptions (看法) of people based on their attractiveness. It can also include other traits (特点) as well. People who are sociable or kind, for example, may also be seen as more likable and intelligent.

Psychologist Edward Thorndike first coined the term in a 1920 paper. In an experiment, Thorndike asked commanding officers in the military to evaluate a variety of qualities in their soldiers. He found that high ratings of a particular quality correlated to high ratings of other characteristics, while negative ratings of a specific quality also led to lower ratings of other characteristics.

The halo effect may have an impact on a number of real-world settings. In a study that looked at academic records of more than 4, 500 students, a group of 28 people rated the attractiveness of the students based on a student ID photo. Researchers then compared students’ grades between classes taken in a traditional face-to-face classroom setting and those taken online. They found that students who were rated as above average in appearance earned significantly lower grades in online courses than they did in their traditional classes. In another study, researchers found that when an instructor was viewed as warm and friendly, students also rated them as more attractive and likable.

There are a number of ways that the halo effect can influence the perceptions of others. For example, a worker’s enthusiasm or positive attitude may overshadow their lack of knowledge or skill. The halo effect can also have an impact on income. A study found that, on average, attractive food servers earned approximately $1, 200 more per year in tips than unattractive servers. Marketers take advantage of the halo effect to sell products. When a celebrity spokesperson endorses a particular item, our positive evaluations of that individual can spread to our perceptions of the product itself.

So, the next time you try to evaluate another person, consider how your overall impressions of them might influence your evaluations of other characteristics.

5 . Parents always glued to their mobile phones may be damaging their relationships with their kids, according to a new study.

The study warns mums and dads addicted to their mobiles and other digital devices they may be causing “internal tension, conflicts and negative interactions” with their children.

The researchers said that technology today means work and outside pressures cannot be avoided at home. But these “blurred boundaries” may make it difficult to devote sufficient attention to the kids.

Study lead author Doctor Jenny Radesky, a child behaviour expert, said: “Parents are constantly feeling like they are in more than one place at once while parenting. They’re still ‘at work’. They're keeping up socially. All the while they’re trying to cook dinner and attend to their kids. It’s much harder to toggle between mum or dad’s brain and other aspects of life because the boundaries are all blurred together. Parents are struggling to balance family time and the desire to be present at home with technology-based expectations like responding to work and other demands.”

The study involved in-depth interviews with 35 caregivers, which included mums, dads and grandmothers.

Participants continuously expressed an internal struggle between multitasking mobile technology use, work and children, information overload and emotional tension around family routines, such as mealtime. Some parents also reported a trickle-down effect. Their emotional response to whatever they were reading on their mobile devices — whether it was a work email or bad news — sometimes affected how they responded to their children.

Dr Radesky said: “You don't have to be available to your children 100 per cent of the time — in fact, it’s healthy for them to be independent. It’s also important for parents to feel relevant at work and other parts of their lives. However, we are seeing parents overloaded and exhausted from being pulled in so many different directions.”

Dr Radesky added: “Compared to traditional distractions like books, mobile technology is described as being much more demanding of attention. Kids require a lot of different types of thinking, so multitasking between them and technology can be emotionally and mentally draining. We should remind parents and help them manage this conflict with ideas on how to unplug and set boundaries.”

6 . Still dressed in their sleepwear, Dian Turner’s kids couldn‘’t wait to get outside. But they didn’t go far — they stopped at the footpath outside their Melbourne home, armed with a box of chalks.

Max, seven, and Lenny, four, have been away from their friends since coronavirus physical-distancing rules came into force and the Victorian school holidays were brought forwards a week. They’re just two of the many children who have been spending their shutdown time drawing rainbows (彩虹) and encouraging messages like “We’re all in this together” across Australia. “It was something for the kids to make them feel connected to other people, because obviously they’re feeling a little bit uncertain about staying at home and what this means, and not being able to go to the playground and the park,” Ms Turner said.

Ms Turner first saw the idea when she was added to a Facebook group called the Rainbow Trail, which documents children and their parents drawing rainbows for others to spot. Ms Turner, a lawyer who has been spending much of her time working from home amid the shutdown measures, said it was “something positive to talk about” with the family. “You’re not breaking any of the social-distancing rules but it’s something that you can do and you can be happy and show that there’s a connection.”

University of Melbourne public health researcher Lisa Gibbs said it was important to provide children with age-appropriate ways to make them feel active and capable during the pandemic. “It’s easy in times of danger, which essentially this is, to be so concerned with protecting children, which obviously is of great importance,” Professor Gibbs said. “But in protecting children we can sometimes treat them as vulnerable (脆弱的), which makes them feel useless. So these sorts of activities are really helpful in providing a sense of agency in children that they can make a contribution to others.”

Professor Gibbs said in times of disaster, two patterns were very common — community mobilization, where people banded together, and community deterioration (恶化), where social supports fell apart. “So what these activities from children are doing is really contributing to social mobilization,” she said. “And people respond really positively to children’s messages, because they spread joy.”

With the development of computer technology, the Internet has become more and more popular.

9 . The traditional Chinese Shaoxing opera has a long history, but these days it seems that young people don’t show much interest in it.

Nowadays, as pop music and online films are popular with the public, Shaoxing opera is struggling for its survival. The market of the opera is becoming smaller. It remains popular only with the older generation. According to Zhejiang provincial cultural department, the most of fans of Shaoxing opera, China’s second largest traditional opera, are above 40 years old. And many teenagers know nothing about Shaoxing opera and have never been to the theatre.

Yang Jianxin, head of the department, said, “Now, young people are crazy about other art forms but not the traditional operas. The largest problem for Shaoxing opera today is how to become acceptable to the young.”

Actually, not only Shaoxing opera but also many other traditional Chinese operas are in danger. That’s really worrying. Luckily, people are trying to protect them. For example, Kunqu has been listed as one of the Masterpieces (杰作) of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO since 2001.

In 2006, Shaoxing opera, for the first time in history, entered the pub (酒吧). It was really a good try to attract the youth. Besides, a Shaoxing opera group opened a Shaoxing opera blog on the Internet to invite people, especially the young, to express their opinions about this traditional art form.

10 . Why Can’t People Stop Touching Museum Exhibits (展品)?

When visiting the British Museum, you can see visitors touch ancient bowls even though the museum rules say no touching is allowed. Museum guards say it’s impossible to stop people from breaking the no-touch rule.     1    

Most museum-going is still a mainly visual (视觉的) experience for visitors to admire the artworks.     2     But over the past few years, more and more museums have been working to include additional senses, like sounds and smells. But touch, especially, is only allowed in certain areas, like the Louvre’s Touch Gallery, or the British Museum’s Hands On Desks.

    3     Before there were museums, there were curiosity rooms filled with a collection of interesting objects from around the world. When people visited the collection, the objects were passed around. Museums continued with this spirit of openness at first.

But as museums grew, the spirit no longer existed. When you’ve got 4 million visitors a year, you can hardly have every body touching something. People are awkward and likely to damage the artworks. So the rule against touching artworks makes great sense. Smaller museums still sometimes encourage visitors to touch their objects.     4    

Why are we so unwilling to keep our hands to ourselves? Some people just want to make sure the artworks are real. But there’s a larger truth.     5     Visitors say that they want to feel how deep an engraving (雕刻) goes, so as to better understand the artistic skills. In this way, touching is part of trying to somehow make contact with the past.