Running your small business requires good staff. Once you find them, you don't want to let them go elsewhere.

    During an employee's time with a company, there are a number of forces that influence his or her behavior. I like to refer to them as "push" and "pull". You're either pushing an employee towards the door, or pulling them deeper into your organization.

    Suppose that you've made a good hire and you want to keep the employees, the trick is to recognize individual needs of employees and satisfy those needs, within reason, in order to keep pulling them away from the door. Even if you can't pull them away from the door, at least don't do things to push them out of the door.

    Recognize that some employees will lose interest and need something fresh to keep their interest. If you can't continually provide challenges, opportunities for promotion and other interesting and rewarding opportunities, then you'll have some employees leave through no fault of your own.

    The important thing is to identify your key employees and make certain they are being treated well. Communicate with them on a regular basis to make certain that you understand what makes them behave in a particular way, and be aware of concerns they may have about job satisfaction.

    Dubai(迪拜)is one of the economically richest places in the world. With its numerous malls, hotels, and beautiful beaches, Dubai has always been a popular holiday destination. This city was visited by around 5 million tourists each year. The government wanted to increase this number to 15 million. However, Dubai has only 45 miles of coastline, which is nowhere enough for so many people. To solve this problem, an island that looked like a palm tree was built in 2006, and named the Palm Jumeirah.

    The plan for the island was extraordinary. It was to host several hotels, shopping malls, restaurants, and homes. Although the initial plan was to build the island from concrete(水泥), a decision was taken to create it from sand and gravel(砾石), so as to give it a natural look.

    To make sure that this project was a success, the best engineers from across the world were employed. Engineers from Holland formed the majority in this group. To begin with, the engineers calculated the strength of storms at sea, and also the expected amount of rise in water levels due to global warming. And then they found that, the proposed location for the island was neither very wide nor deep.

    One of the difficulties the engineers came across was to put sand on the sea bed to create the breakwater(防浪堤).Finding the right sand for the project was also a daunting task, as the sand from Dubai's deserts was too fine. Instead, sand from the sea was used, as it was coarser(粗糙). Once the breakwater was built, construction of the island began.

    The Palm Island are really impressive in terms of engineering. However, these projects are so large that they may have changed the ecology of the region. Also, an immense amount of money and resources go into maintaining the islands, which is a major concern at the moment. Only time will tell if building the Palm Islands was actually a good decision.

    I began cycling in 2004 when I was a poor student. It was dangerous, sure, but cycling is the fastest, cheapest point-to-point form of transport in Melbourne. I own a car now, but that's just for transporting the baby or groceries.

    I hate driving. So it's been quite encouraging watching the growth in cyclist numbers over the past decade. It is said that over 10,000 cyclists enter the CBD (Central Business District) each day, taking pressure off public transport. But as more people take to cycling as a way of transport, the number of cyclists seriously injured or killed keeps increasing. And that is a sign that our infrastructure (基础设施) is still not good enough.

    Melbourne was once a dream for cyclists—flat, long, wide roads, with plenty of paths along rivers. Now, cycling can be deadly, with roads taken up by cars. I have a friend who broke her back and was lucky to escape death and others with broken bones. In my time riding, I've been forced off the road by a truck, cut off by four-wheel drives, and told to get off the road. Drivers are a particularly rude to cyclists. And that's a sign of exactly one thing: inadequate infrastructure.

    We shouldn't need to be taught how to coexist in the same narrow space. Drivers and cyclists should be kept apart. Designing bike paths so riders are channelled between moving cars and parked cars is deadly. All it takes is one daydreaming driver to fling open the door and you are gone. That's what happened to the young university student James.

    This year, there are to be new cycling lanes (车道) built on Glen Road, where James died in 2010. But these lanes are not safe. Cyclists must still pass between two rows of cars.

    In modern society there is a great deal of argument about competition. Some value it highly, believing that it is responsible for social progress and prosperity(繁荣). Others say that competition is bad; that it sets one person against another; that it leads to unfriendly relationship between people.

    I have taught many children who held the belief that their self-worth relied on how well they performed at tennis and other skills. For them, playing well and winning are often life-and-death affairs. In their single-minded pursuit of success, the development of many other human qualities is sadly forgotten.

    However, while some seem to be lost in the desire to succeed, others take an opposite attitude. In a culture which values only the winner and pays no attention to the ordinary players, they strongly blame competition. Among the most vocal are youngsters who have suffered under competitive pressures from their parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by not trying to win or achieve success. By not trying, they always have an excuse: "I may have lost, but it doesn't matter because I really didn't try."What is not usually admitted by themselves is the belief that if they had really tried and lost, that would mean a lot. Such a loss would be a measure of their worth. Clearly, this belief is the same as that of the true competitors who try to prove themselves. Both are based on the mistaken belief that one's self-respect relies on how well one performs in comparison with others. Both are afraid of not being valued. Only as this basic and often troublesome fear begins to dissolve(缓解)can we discover a new meaning in competition.

    A new study has found the amount of antibiotics(抗生素)given to farm animals is expected to increase by two-thirds over the next 15 years. Researchers are linking the growing dependence on the drugs to the increasing need for meat, milk and eggs. However, the drugs could quicken the development of antibiotic-resistant infections(感染). Such infections are already a major public, health concern in the United States.

    The World Health Organization notes when people stop living in poverty(贫困), the first thing they want to do is eat better, rather than earn more money. For most people, that means their diet should contain more meat. With the rapid development of Asia, people there are eating nearly four times as much meat, milk and other milk products as they did 50 year ago.

    To meet the need, farmers have put many animals into smaller spaces. As the animals are crowded together, the easiest way to deal with some of the problems of crowding is to give them antibiotics. It's clear that antibiotics help animals stay healthy in a crowded environment and grow faster. But bacteria can develop resistance to the drugs gradually.

    Nowadays, doctors find antibiotics that once worked against the infections no longer work. The bacteria have learned ways to fight against the drugs. The heavy use of antibiotics in animals is responsible for the growth of antibiotic resistance worldwide. In the United States, at least two million people get drug-resistant infections each year and at least 23,000 die from an infection.

    Europe has banned the use of antibiotics to increase animal growth. And the United States is hoping to persuade farmers to stop using antibiotics for that purpose.