Idema, a Dutch Sinologist（汉学家）, has served as the director of the Chinese Languages and Cultures Department at Leiden University of the Netherlands and was also director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.He has studied ancient Chinese plays, novels and literature, and has authored or translated a number of influential books published in English and other languages.

    The 70-year-old Dutch Sinologist recalled his half-century-long romance with Chinese culture during a recent visit to Beijing.As a child,the vivid descriptions of China in Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winner Pearl S.Buck's books sparked Idema's interest in the country.He later read classic Chinese literature and spent whole days pouring through works at the National Library of China.

    While many other experts on China focused on the country's economic transformation, Idema continued to study traditional Chinese literature."There were scholars studying law, religion and society, but not traditional Chinese literature,which was my personal interest," Idema explains.

    Finding reference books for his research,especially regional publications,used to be a huge challenge,and Idema used to spend a lot of time collecting books and other materials during visits to China.Now it is much more convenient with the Internet.

    Idema usually chooses less-known subjects for his research and tries to get firsthand materials.In recent years, he has devoted himself to translating Chinese folk tales and writing about Chinese folk society and folk culture.

    "Traditional Chinese culture is a passion.I have been studying it for 50 years and will continue to do so,"says the retired professor.

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    A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    “It's extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it's connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

    While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers' fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

    Almost every machine with moving parts has wheels, yet no one knows exactly when the first wheel was invented or what it was used for. We do know, however, that they existed over 5,500 years ago in ancient Asia.

    The oldest known transport wheel was discovered in 2002 in Slovenia. It is over 5,100 years old. Evidence suggests that wheels for transport didn't become popular for a while, though. This could be because animals did a perfectly good job of carrying farming tools and humans around.

    But it could also be because of a difficult situation. While wheels need to roll on smooth surfaces, roads with smooth surfaces weren't going to be constructed until there was plenty of demand for them. Eventually, road surfaces did become smoother, but this difficult situation appeared again a few centuries later. There had been no important changes in wheel and vehicle design before the arrival of modem road design.

    In the mid-1700s, a Frenchman came up with a new design of road—a base layer (层) of large stones covered with a thin layer of smaller stones. A Scotsman improved on this design in the 1820s and a strong, lasting road surface became a reality. At around the same lime, metal hubs (the central part of a wheel) came into being, followed by the pneumatic tyre(充气轮胎) in 1846. Alloy wheels were invented in 1967, sixty years after the appearance of tarmacked roads (柏油路). As wheel design took off, vehicles got faster and faster.

    It's the holiday season, the time when we connect with family and friends. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are full of festive pictures, featuring parents' catching and sharing those special family moments, their child's wish list, and maybe even a cute video of their child dancing to “Jingle Bell Rock” while wearing a diaper (尿片) and Santa hat. Swelling with pride, parents can't wait to get approval with a “thumbs up” or better yet a personalized message on their treasured post.

    Adults should be able to post what they want online. However, when exposing family moments online, are they sharing too much information? Do parents have the right to share those cute now, but embarrassing later moments about kids? Have children willingly given their agreement to sharing their cute but funny video online?

    A recent study found that 75% of parents turn to social media for parenting-related information and social support. There is even a term used to describe the overuse of sharing too much information about kids on social media: “sharenting”. Research also finds that “sharenting” isn't going anywhere anytime soon. What's troublesome is that a typical parent has about 150 Facebook friends and only a third of them are actual friends. So that brings up good questions – Who are we really sharing our information with and why? Who knows when and where that photo could resurface in the future?

    While there's no reliable information on how young children feel about things posted online, we do have information about how teens feel. According to a report by the Family Online Safety Institute, 76% of teens are concerned about their privacy. Many teens constantly search for new apps that allow anonymity. When names are required, they use screen names that don't reveal real information. If our teens are doing a better job of protecting themselves online, shouldn't parents take the lead and do the same? Plus, with more and more college admission representatives and potential employers surfing the internet for potential candidates, we'd hate for one of our posts to change an important decision. Think about it … online reputations are now becoming inseparable with real life ones.

    Of course, we can secure our privacy settings, only allowing our friends to view pictures, posts and videos, but that doesn't stop others from uploading our pictures. Adults need to be cautious of sharing information online, especially information about children.

    So, this holiday season, enjoy family time and share those special memories with family and friends. Before clicking the app to upload photos or videos, stop and think twice.

    Going to university is supposed to be a mind-broadening experience. That statement is probably made in comparison to training for work straight after school. But is it actually true? Jessika Golle of the University of Tubingen, in Germany reports in Psychological Science this week that those who have been to university indeed seem to leave with broader and more curious minds than those who have spent their immediate post-school years in vocational (职业的) training for work. However, it was not the case that university broadened minds. Rather, vocational training for work seemed to have narrowed them. The result is not quite what might be expected.

    Dr. Golle came to this conclusion after she and a team of colleagues studied the early careers of 2,095 German youngsters. The team used two standardized tests to assess their volunteers' personality traits (特点) including openness, conscientiousness (认真) and so on, and attitudes such as realistic, investigative and enterprising twice, once towards the end of each volunteer's time at high school, and then again six years later. Of the original group, 382 had to make a choice between the academic and vocational routes, and it was on these that the researchers focused. University beckoned for 212 of them. The remaining 170 chose vocational training and a job.

    When it came to the second round of tests, Dr. Golle found that the personalities of both groups had not changed significantly. As for changes in altitude, again, none were noticeable in the university group. However, those who had chosen the vocational route showed marked drops in interest in tasks that are investigative and enterprising in nature. And that might restrict their choice of careers.

    The changes in attitude that the researchers recorded were more worrying. Vocational training has always been what Germany prides itself on. If Dr Golle is correct, and changes in attitude brought about by the very training are narrowing people's choices that is indeed a matter worthy of serious consideration.

"I'm going to fail!" My best friend cried. She and I had this conversation almost every day while we were in high school.
    The truth was that my friend never failed in any subjects. I just think that she can't accept failures because she lives her life as a perfectionist. What she fails to understand is that a lot of good can come from failures.
    For example, failure can help build relationships. Once I was cooking dinner for a friend, I was tired, and several dishes I tried to make turned out bad. I grew more and more upset until my friend told me that I shouldn't worry. She cared more about our friendship than the dishes. That day, I learned that failure doesn't always make people dislike you. In fact, after she said those words to me, I grew closer to her.
    Failure can make success evermore exciting. Every few years, there would be an important test in the PE class at our school. Students had to run a mile within eight minutes. I was never good at running, so I failed every time until the third year at school. Then I began working out regularly, and yet still failed that year. A few days later, however, the teacher gave me and some other students another chance to run and I got a pass finally! You can't imagine how excitedly I was after that. I felt the memory of the success was as sweet as honey, because I had to overcome failure to reach it.
    Now it's clear to see that failure can teach us good lessons. It's not an end, but it can be a beginning