When I was a child, I had to go to church and obey many other rules, though these rules at times caused resentment (怨恨). Perhaps the most extreme parenting decision my parents made for my four brothers and sisters and me was to create a home environment without a television.

    We hated this decision at that time, because there was seemingly no way to keep this embarrassing fact a secret at school. Naturally, simple pleasures like cartoons, football games, and movies became huge novelties (新奇事物). I would go over to friends' or relatives' houses for that access alone.

    When I reached high school, my parents bought a television, though it had no cable. However, I did spend most of my childhood in a home without a television. In fact not having a television did contribute a great deal to my skills, and it also forced me to develop other valuable interests. We grew up in a small town, so my brothers and sisters and I spent time exploring streets, fields and woods. And of course I read and wrote and studied, which pushed me toward a career path.

    So would I give a similar situation to my own children if I had them? I doubt it, at least not in the most extreme sense. I'm too much of a football fan, not to mention the TV serials (连续剧) like The Wire. But television or almost anything for that matter is unhealthy for kids. It can prevent them from living a full life. So maybe a reasonable answer is no cable or no video-game systems or simply setting the time limit, but I haven't exactly worked out how to confine it yet. Although some people are against my idea, we do need limits after all.

    Parents and kids today dress alike, listen to the same music, and are friends. Is this a good thing? Sometimes, when Mr. Ballmer and his 16-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, listen to rock music together and talk about interests both enjoy, such as pop culture, he remembers his more distant relationship with his parents when he was a teenager.

    “I would never have said to my mom, 'Hey, the new Weezer album is really great. How do you like it?'” says Ballmer. “There was just a complete gap in taste.”

    Music was not the only gulf. From clothing and hairstyles to activities and expectations, earlier generations of parents and children often appeared to move in separate orbits.

    Today, the generation gap has not disappeared, but it is getting narrow in many families. Conversations on subjects such as sex and drugs would not have taken place a generation ago. Now they are comfortable and common. And parent-child activities, from shopping to sports, involve a feeling of trust and friendship that can continue into adulthood.

    No wonder greeting cards today carry the message, “To my mother, my best friend.”

    But family experts warn that the new equality can also result in less respect for parents. “There's still a lot of strictness and authority on the part of parents out there, but there is a change happening,” says Kerrie, a psychology professor at Lebanon Valley College. “In the middle of that change, there is a lot of confusion among parents.”

    Family researchers offer a variety of reasons for these evolving roles and attitudes. They see the 1960s as a turning point. Great cultural changes led to more open communication and a more democratic process that encourages everyone to have a say.

    “My parents were on the 'before' side of that change, but today's parents, the 40-year-olds, were on the 'after' side,” explains Mr. Ballmer. “It's not something easily accomplished by parents these days, because life is more difficult to understand or deal with, but sharing interests does make it more fun to be a parent now.”

Most young people enjoy some form of physical activity. It may be walking, cycling or swimming, or winter, skating or skiing. It may be a game of some form—football, hockey, golf or tennis. It may be mountaineering.

    Those who have a passion for climbing high and difficult mountains are often looked upon with surprise. Why are men and women willing to suffer cold and hardship, and to take risks on high mountains? This astonishment is caused, probably, by the difference between mountaineering and other forms of activity to which men give their leisure.

    Mountaineering is a sport and not a game. There are no man-made rules, as others, as there are for such games as golf and football. There are, of course, rules of a different kinds which would be dangerous to ignore, but it is this freedom from man-made rules that makes mountaineering attractive to many people. Those who climb mountains are free to use their own methods.

    If we compare mountaineering with other more familiar sports, we might think that one big difference is that mountaineering is not a “team game”. We should be mistaken in this. There are, it is true, no “matches” between “teams” of climbers, but when climbers are on a rock face linked by a rope on which their lives may depend, there is obviously teamwork.

    The mountain climber knows that he may have to fight forces that are stronger and more powerful than man. He has to fight the forces of nature. His sport requires high mental and physical qualities.

    A mountain climber continues to improve in skill year after year. A skier is probably past his best by the age of thirty. But it is not unusual for men of fifty or sixty to climb the highest mountains in the Alps. They may take more time than younger men, but they perhaps climb with more skill and less waste of efforts, and they certainly experience equal enjoyment.

    Scientists have recreated a 1985 study of birds in Peru that shows climate change is pushing them from their natural environment. Thirty years ago, researchers studied over 400 kinds of birds living on a mountainside in Peru. In 2017, researchers looked again at the bird populations. They found that almost all had moved to higher places in the mountain. Almost all had decreased in size. And, the scientists say at least eight bird groups that started at the higher elevations (高地) had died out completely.

    The researchers say the birds might have moved up the mountain because of temperature changes. Or changes to food sources may have forced them to go higher. The findings were published in a science journal. The 1985 research has documented birds and other animals moving up in elevation (高地) in reaction to warming temperatures. Mark Urban, a biologist at a university, said this recent study was the first to prove that rising temperatures and moving to avoid them can lead to extinction.

    In 2016, Fitzpatrick, director and a co-writer of the study passed his notes, photos and other records to Benjamin Freeman. Freeman has been researching tropical birds for more than 10 years. He set out in August and September of 2017 to copy Fitzpatrick's study. His team used the same methods, searching the same places in the same time of year.

    Freeman's team wanted to see how things had changed for the bird groups since 1985. The average temperatures on the mountain had risen 0.42 degrees Celsius. His team placed 20 sound recording devices on the mountain to record the sounds of birds that might not easily be seen.

    Freeman said that the birds moved an average of 98 meters further up the mountain. He believes that temperature is the main cause of the birds' movement. Fitzpatrick noted that birds used to living in areas with little temperature change may be especially at risk because of climate change. He said, “We should expect that what's happening on this mountain top is happening more generally in the Andes, and other tropical mountain ranges.”

    Most dog owners believe their dogs experience guilt, but animal behaviorists say the "guilty look" of a dog is simply a reaction to you and that dogs lack the ability to feel shame.

    Alexandra Horowitz, a psychology professor and principal investigator at the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Columbia University once carried out a study on dog "guilt". She videotaped 14 dogs in a series of trials and observed how they reacted when their owners left the room after instructing them not to eat a treat. When the owner was gone, Horowitz gave some of the dogs the forbidden treat. Then she would tell the owners whether their dogs had eaten the treat or had behaved. However, Horowitz wasn't always honest with them.

    Horowitz found that the dogs' "guilty looks" had little to do with whether they'd eaten the treat or not. In fact, dogs that hadn't eaten it but were scolded by misinformed owners tended to exhibit the most elements of the "guilty look".

Horowitz says this shows that the dogs' body language is actually a response to their owner's behavior—not an experience of shame for a misdeed. Why then, do dogs look so ashamed when we scold them?

Maybe that look of guilt is the result of a learned association. When you scold your dog for chewing up a pair of slippers, he quickly learns that if he lowers his head and tucks his tail, the undesirable response—raised voice and angry expression—is more likely to disappear.

    If you are worried about the planet, please make sure your rubbish is buried under the ground.

    People talk about "reduce, reuse, recycle." It sounds like a good idea. There is a problem, though. Recycling costs too much money.

    Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it only makes sense economically and environmentally to recycle about 35 percent of disabled (废弃的) materials. Among those materials are paper and aluminum(铝) cans. Recycling 1 ton of paper or aluminum cans, the agency says, can save about 3 tons of CO₂ emissions (排放物) over producing those materials anew. Paper producers pay for the trees they process. If it was cost-effective to recycle paper, producers would be beating down your door to buy it. But they aren't. That means it's more expensive to recycle old paper than to cut trees and then replant trees for processing.

    Plastic can be recycled too. Given the recent drop in crude oil (原油) prices, it is now cheaper to make a new plastic container than to recycle an old one. Even if that were not true, the EPA says that recycling a ton of plastic saves only about a ton of CO₂. However, it doesn't take into account the water most consumers use to wash their plastic containers before having them recycled. The New York Times journalist John Tierney recently wrote, "If you wash plastic in water that was heated by electricity, then the effort of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere."

    Glass is another recyclable material. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 ton you have to recycle 3 tons of glass. If one includes the cost of collecting glass waste from neighborhoods, and the pollution produced by the collection trucks and the recycling process itself, glass recycling creates more greenhouse gas emissions and is more expensive than making new glass, which comes primarily from sand that exists everywhere.

    If recycling were truly cost-effective, private companies would be lining up at your doorstep to buy your rubbish. Don't look now because they're not there.