Booking a trip on an online travel site is convenient, but comes with its own set of problems.

    They know who's going to spend more.

    Last year, US travel research company Orbitz tracked people's online activities to test out whether Mac users spend more on travel than PC users. It turns out that on average, Mac users lay out US $20-30 more per night on hotels. As a result, online travel sites show these users more expensive travel options first. To avoid paying more, sort results by price.

    Their software doesn't always link to the hotel's system.

    A guaranteed reservation is almost impossible to come by anywhere — but the risk of your flight or hotel being overbooked increases with third-party providers. The middleman's software isn't immune(防护作用的) to system errors, so always call the hotel or airline to make sure your booking was processed.

    Don't be fooled by packages: Often, they're low-end items grouped together.

    Ever notice how travel sites recommend a hotel, a rental car, and tour package all in one click? These deals usually feature travel that no one wants, like flights with multiple layovers(中途停留). Check the fine print.

    Once your trip is purchased, you're on your own.

    An online travel agency can't provide assistance the same way an agent can if a flight is cancelled or a room is substandard. Basically, when you arrive at the airport or hotel, you're just another customer who booked at the lowest rate.

    “Smombies” are very real and a growing cause for concern. Tired of having to constantly warn both locals and tourists to pay more attention to their surroundings to avoid serious accidents, authorities of a small German town have come up with a more positive solution — embedding (嵌入) traffic lights in the pavement to make them visible to people constantly looking down at their phones while walking.

    The seemingly ridiculous safety measure was put in place. Authorities in Augsburg decided to act, installing ground level traffic lights at two tram (有轨电车) stops last Tuesday. The lights flash red every time a tram is approaching, or when the regular traffic light turns red. “We realized that the normal traffic light isn't in the line of sight of many pedestrians these days,” said Tobias Hermes, a city administration official. “So we decided to have an additional set of lights — the more we have, the more people are likely to notice them.”

    Some Augsburg residents appear to be quite happy with the idea. “I think it makes sense,” said Jack Smith, “One always sees young people these days running over red lights. This makes it more obvious that you need to stop.” Others, however, found the need for ground traffic lights disturbing and even frightening. “I find it scary that smart phone users are so engrossed that they need to install lights in the ground so that they notice the tram coming,” one person told the local paper.

    But do this kind of pavement-embedded lights actually work? Well, if one interviewed teenager is to be believed, not really, “To be honest I didn't even notice it,” he said, “Maybe it'd be useful at night, but yeah, I didn't realize it was there until just now.”

    The word “smombie” — a mashup of the words smart phone and zombie — was born in Germany. It was voted “youth word of the year” in 2017, but the serious consequences of this behaviour are no laughing matter.

    The latest IPCC report does not mince words(直言不讳地) about the state of our planet: we must act now to achieve global change at a scale that has “no documented historical precedent(先例)” in order to avoid the climate disaster that would result from a 2 degree C rise in average global temperature. Climate change already affects the world's most helpless people including poor rural communities that depend on the land for their livings and coastal communities. Indeed, we have already seen the clear asymmetry(不对称) of suffering resulting from extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires and more.

    So far, advocates and politicians have tended to focus on reducing fossil fuel(矿物燃料) consumption through technology and/or policy, such as a sharp carbon tax, as climate solutions. These proposals are, of course, essential to reducing manmade carbon emissions(排放)-71 percent of which are produced by just 100 fossil fuel companies.

    Yet the international focus on fossil fuels has overshadowed(使......显得不重要) the most powerful and cost-efficient carbon-capture technology the world has yet seen: forests. Recent scientific research confirms that forests and other “natural climate solutions” are absolutely essential in reducing climate change. In fact, natural climate solutions can help us achieve 37 percent of our climate target, even though they currently receive only 2.5 percent of public climate financing.

    Forests' power to store carbon dioxide through the simple process of tree growth is staggering: one tree can even store an average of about 48 pounds of carbon dioxide in one year. Recent research show undamaged forests are capable of storing the same amount of the carbon dioxide emissions of entire countries such as Peru and Colombia.

    For this reason, policy makers and business leaders must create and strengthen ambitious policies to prevent deforestation, and support the sustainable management of standing forests in the fight against climate change. Protecting the world's forests ensures they can continue to provide essential functions aside from climate stability, including producing oxygen, filtering water and supporting biodiversity. Not only do all the world's people depend on forests to provide clean air, clean water，oxygen, and medicines, but 1.6 billion people rely on them directly for their livelihoods.

    Who cares if people think wrongly that the Internet has had more important influences than the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?

    It would not matter if these misjudgments were just a matter of people's opinions. However, they have real impacts, as they result in misguided use of scarce resources.

    The fascination with the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the Internet, has made some rich countries wrongly conclude that making things is so "yesterday" that they should try to live on ideas. This belief in "post-industrial society" has led those countries to neglect their manufacturing sector (制造业) with negative consequences for their economies.

    Even more worryingly, the fascination with the Internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the "digital divide" between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and Internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity networks and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people's lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up Internet centres in rural villages, I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donators have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.

    In yet another example, a fascination with the new has led people to believe that the recent changes in the technologies of communications and transportation are so revolutionary that now we live in a "borderless world". As a result, in the last twenty years or so, many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of great technological progress, going against which will be like trying to turn the clock back. Believing in such a world, many governments have put an end to some of the very necessary regulations on cross-border flows of capital, labour and goods, with poor results.

    Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels, and for making the right career choices at the individual level. However, our fascination with the latest, and our under valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.

    Mr. King lived with six hundred wild animals on the Greek Island of Kyklos. Ever since he left school, he had traveled all over the world collecting animals for his own zoo. He hoped to collect two examples of every kind of animal on his island. But he was afraid that people would find him someday.

    He wrote books about his travels and about his animals that he collected. The money from the books helped to pay for all the food those animals ate.

    One day, when Mr. King was out looking for drinking water, he found oil. He needed money for his travels and for his zoo, and a little oil would buy enough water for what he needed all his life, but he knew that if he told anyone else about it, it would be the end of his zoo and his life's work. So he decided not to tell anyone else about what he had found, because oil and water couldn't mix.