Well, parents, surprise! Lots of us are using Twitter and Facebook to thumb rides, and not just to school. It's awkward to be refused when you call a friend and ask for a ride. But with Twitter, you just look for other people heading the same way.

    It may sound risky, so many teens stay within their own social circles to find rides, and don't branch out beyond friends when asking on Twitter just like me, but to some young people, especially those taking longer trips, stranger danger is less of a concern.

    “I think the digital connection of young people is really important, because younger generations grew up sharing things on line, sharing files, photos, music, etc, so they've been very used to sharing,” said Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College.

    The sharing economy got big during the recession (经济衰退), allowing people to access more goods, services using technology and even to share costs. And that technology, for me, is what the car was for my mom, a gateway to more freedom, like what my friend Earl says, “The symbol of freedom isn't the car any more because there's technology out there connecting you to a car.”

    According to the researchers at the University of Michigan, 30 years ago, eight in ten American 18-year-olds had a driver's license compared to six in ten today. So it's not that surprising that on my 16th birthday I wasn't rushing to get a license but an iPhone.

“Driving, for young people, does mean they have to disconnect from their technology, and that's a negative. So if they could sit in the passage side and still be connected, that's going to be a plus.” Schor continued.

    To me, another plus is that ridesharing represents something, something much bigger than trying to save money. I see it as evidence that people still depend on each other. My generation shares their cars and apartments the way neighbors used to share cups of sugar. For the system to work, some of us still need our own cars. But until I get my own version of the silver Super Beetle, you can find me on Twitter.

    Below is a web page from http://www.parents.com.

    Kid of the Year Photo Contest

    Enter your kid's photo today and win! We're giving away 52 weekly $250 prizes from Readers' Choice votes. PLUS our editors will select one entry(参赛作品) to win our grand prize of $7,000.

    Official Contest Rules

    No purchase necessary to enter or win. The Kid of the Year Photo Contest entry period begins at 12:00 a.m. January 23, 2014, and ends January 21, 2016( the “Entry Period”). Entries must be arrived by 9:00 p.m. on January 21, 2016 (“Entry Deadline”). Entries will not be acknowledged or returned.

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    ENTRY: There will be two methods of entry.

    Share My Entry:

    Visit http://www.parents.com/photos/photo-contests-l/kid-of-the-year/and click the button to enter. Then complete the registration form and follow the instructions to upload one album of up to six photos of your child aged three months to eight years. Photos must be taken by entrant, non-professional, unpublished and may not have won any prize or award. Photos must be .jpeg or .bmp image formats(格式) and cannot exceed 3 MB.

    Facebook Entry:

    Visit http://www.Facebook.com / Parents Magazine and click the Kid of 2015 tab. Fill out the registration form and upload one album of up to six photos of your child aged three months to eight years. You may provide one description and one album title that will be applied to all photos. Photos must be taken by entrants, non-professional, unpublished and may not have won any prize or award. Photos must be .jpeg or .bmp image formats and cannot exceed 3 MB.

    This promotion is in no way sponsored, supported or run by, or associated with Facebook. You are providing your information to Parents Magazine and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used to run the promotion and register for Parents.com.

    Photos must not contain material that infringes the rights of another, including but not limited to privacy, publicity or intellectual property rights, or that constitutes copyright violation. Photos must not contain brand names or trademarks.

    LIMIT: One entry per household, per eligible(有资格的) child, per week. One weekly prize per child. For entries of more than one eligible child in the household, the entry process must be completed separately for each child. No group entries.

    No student of a foreign language needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs (助动词) and suffixes (后缀), we can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks to convey different meanings. However, the question which many language experts can't understand and explain is—who created grammar?

    Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. Since the slaves didn't know each other's languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. They have little in the way of grammar, and speakers need to use too many words to make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children didn't simply copy the strings of words used by their elders. They adapted their words to create an expressive language. In this way complex grammar systems which come from pidgins were invented.

    Further evidence can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a group of gestures; they use the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, although deaf children were taught speech and lip reading in the classrooms, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures they used at home. It was basically a pidgin and there was no consistent grammar. However, a new system was born when children who joined the school later developed a quite different sign language. It was based on the signs of the older children, but it was shorter and easier to understand, and it had a large range of special use of grammar to clarify the meaning. What's more, they all used the signs in the same way. So the original pidgin was greatly improved.

    Most experts believe that many of the languages were pidgins at first. They were initially used in different groups of people without standardization and gradually evolved into a widely accepted system. The English past tense—“ed” ending— may have evolved from the verb “do”. “It ended” may once have been “It end-did”. It seems that children have grammatical machinery in their brains. Their minds can serve to create logical and complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

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    It's 2035. You have a job, a family and you're about 40 years old. Welcome to our future life.

    Getting ready for work, you pause in front of the mirror. “Turn red,” you say. Your shirt changes from sky blue to deep red. Tiny preprogrammed electronics (智能电子元件) are rearranged in your shirt to change its color. Looking into the mirror, you find it hard to believe you're 40. You look much younger. With amazing advances in medicine, people in your generation may live to be 150 years old. You're not even middle aged!

    As you go into the kitchen and prepare to pour your breakfast cereal（谷物） into a bowl, you hear, “To lose weight, you shouldn't eat that,” from your shoes. They read the tiny electronic code on the cereal box to find out the nutrition details. You decide to listen to your shoes. “Kitchen, what can I have for breakfast?” A list of possible foods appears on the counter as the kitchen cheeks its food supplies.

“Ready for your trip to space,” you ask your son and daughter. In 2005 only specially-trained astronauts went into space—and very few of them. Today anyone can go to space for daytrips or longer vacations. Your best friend even works in space. Handing your children three strawberries each, you add, “The doctor said you need these for space travel.” Thanks to medical advances, vaccination shots (防疫针) are a thing of the past. Ordinary foods contain specific vaccines(疫苗). With the strawberries in their mouths, the kids head for the front door.

    It's time for you to go to work. Your car checks your fingerprints and unlocks the doors. “My office, autopilot,” you command. Your car drives itself down the road and move smoothly into traffic on the highway. You sit back and unroll your e-newspaper. The latest news downloads and fills the viewer. Looking through the pages, you watch the news as video film rather than read it.

Unhealthy health care bills, long emergency-room waits and inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.

Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and costs. The U.S. takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialists rather than the primary care physician.

A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare Beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors — two primary care physicians and five specialists — in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more physicians taking care of you don't guarantee better care. Actually increasing breakup of care results in a corresponding rise in costs and medical errors.

How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he's reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount of a physician receives leans heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient's disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.

Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.

Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.

How do we fix this problem?

It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive food to medical students by forgiving students loans for those who choose primary care as a career and harmonizing the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.

We're at the point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of 76 million Baby Boomers will become qualified for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.

Who will be there to treat  them？