I grew up poor. We had little money, butplenty of love and attention. I understood that no matter how poor a person was, they could still afford a dream. My dream was athletics.

    By the time I was sixteen, I was good at baseball and football. My high-school coach was Ollie Jarvis. He not only believed in me, but taught me the difference between having a dream and showing conviction（信念）.

    One summer a friend recommended me for asummer job. This meant a chance for money in my pocket — cash for dates withgirls, certainly, money for a new bike and new clothes, and the start of savings for a house for my mother.

Then I realized I would have to give up summer baseball to handle the work schedule, and that meant I would have to tell Coach Jarvis I wouldn't be playing. I was dreading（害怕）this, but my mother said: "If you make your bed, you have to lie in it."

When I told Coach Jarvis, he was as madas I expected him to be. "Your playing days are limited. You can't afford to waste them," he said.

   I stood before him with my head hanging, trying to think of the words that would explain to him why my dream of buying my mom a house.

"How much are you going to make at this job, son?" he demanded.

"Three twenty-five an hour," I replied.

"Well," he asked, "is $3.25 an hour the price of a dream?"

    That question laidbare for me the difference between wanting something right now and having agoal. I devoted myself to sports that summer, and within the year I was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates to play rookie-league ball, and offered a $20,000 contract. I signed with the Denver Broncos in 1984 for $1.7 million, and boughtmy mother the house of my dream.

    Most of us have quite good memories, butour memories are limited. For example, we cannot remember everyone we have evermet or what we did on every single day of our lives. However, there are some people who do have prodigious memories. These people have a rare condition known as savant syndrome (学者症候群). Savants suffer from a developmental disorder, but they also exhibit great talents that contrast(显出差异) sharply with their physical and mental disabilities.

    Kim Peek (1951-2009) was a savant wholived in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States. He was born with damage to parts of his brain, but it seemed that other parts of his brain, particularly those relating to memory, became over-developed.

Peek's unique abilities appeared at avery early age. When he was just 20 months old, he could already remember every book that was read to him. Peek could read two pages of a book at the same time—one page with the right eye and one with the left—in less than 10 seconds and remember everything he read. By the time he died, Peek had memorized more than 9, 000 books. He could remember all the names and numbers ina variety of telephone books. He could remember thousands of facts about history, literature, geography and sports.

    Dr. David Treffert, an expert on savantsyndrome, once described Peek as “a living Google” because of his astonishing ability to memorize and connect facts. However, at the same time, Peek was unable to carry out simple tasks, such as brushing his hair or getting dressed, and he needed others to help him. In 1989, the movie Rain Man won the Oscar forbest Picture. The main character in the movie, played by Dustin Hoffman, wasbased on Kim Peek's life. He started to appear on television, where he would amaze audiences by correctly answering difficult questions on different topics. Peek became world famous, and he and his father began touring widely to talk about overcoming disabilities. He inspired a great many people with his words.“Recognizing and respecting differences in others, and treating everyone in the way you want them to treat you, will make our world a better place foreveryone. Everyone is different.”

    Are you content with the shape of your nose? If not, the climate may be to blame, not your parents.

This is according to a recent study carried out by scientists from Pennsylvania State University, US. They found that climate played a key role in shaping our noses. The findings were based on an examination of the size and shape of noses of 476 people from four regions—West Africa, East Asia, South Asia and Northern Europe, using 3-D facial imaging technology.

     “People have thought for a long time the difference in nose shape among humans across the world may have arisen as a result of natural selection because of climate,” Arslan Zaidi, one of the lead authors of the study, told The Guardian. But while previous studies were based on measurements from human skulls, Zaidi and his team looked at nose shape itself.

    The result showed that wider noses are more common in warm and humid climates, while narrower noses are more common in cold and dry climates. That, Zaidi said, could be because narrower nasal passages help to increase the moisture (潮湿) content of air and warm it，which is easier on our lungs. This, in turn, led to a gradual decrease in nose width in populations living far away from the equator.

    More study is still needed to test the link between climate and nose shape, but Zaidi believes the current findings are valuable in understanding potential health issue. “As we become more of a global community, we are going to come across climates that we are not adapt to,” he told the Guardian. This means moving to a very different climate might increase the risk of breathing problems.

    However, he added, “This may not be necessarily true for various reasons such as of modern medicine and the fact that our current climate is very different from what it used to be.”

    Most of us have friends as close as family, who, when necessary, we'd call at 3 a.m. for comfort or congratulations because we know they won't get angry about us. They're almost part of us, and we share with them with our troubles and successes. But although I love these Pour Your Heart Out friends, I also need the energy of my Let's Party friends. These friends care on a different level—less stressful, less deep—but they still care.

    And such friendships are important. 'With some friends, you want to be playful rather than deeply opening your heart,' says psychotherapist (心理治疗师) Susie Orbach. 'They feel relaxed and easy that you won't keep talking about your problems or stories, and you also feel the same way. It's healthy to have lots of different friends at different levels of closeness because not only is it impossible to be close to everyone, it's also unnecessary. You need to look at yourself from different angles (角度). This is the only way you can experiment with different parts of yourself.'

    Of course, it's upsetting to be with friends who can't-or-won't -allow you to open up your heart when you really need to find someone to listen to. But if we accept our Let's Party friends for what they want to offer us—fun, laughter, full stop—then we enrich our lives greatly.

    Machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) have performed better than human beings in a high-level test of reading comprehension. Two natural language processing tools received higher test scores than humans in recent exams.

    One of the tools is a product of the American software maker Microsoft. The other was created by the Chinese online seller Alibaba Group. The company said that a deep-learning model developed by its Institute of Data Science of Technologies was the first to beat a human score in the reading comprehension test.

    The test is called the Stanford Question Answering Dataset. It was developed by researchers at Stanford University in California. It has over 100,000 questions and answers. They are based on information found in over 500 stories from the Wikipedia website. The answers to all the questions come from the reading material.

    The AI-powered machines were tested on whether they could provide exact answers to the questions after processing large amounts of information.

    Alibaba said its deep neural (神经的) network model received an “Exact Match” score of 82.44 on the Stanford test. Microsoft reported that a team at Microsoft Research Asia had a score of 82.65. It said the human score on the same questions and answers was 82.304. Many research organizations also appeared on the list—all with scores below 82.

    Alibaba said it has already used its reading comprehension model in different parts of its business. For example, the company is using machines to answer many incoming telephone calls from customers. The company says in the future, the technology could enable machines to guide visitors through museums or provide advice to medical patients.

    Microsoft noted that, overall, people are still much better than machines at understanding the complexity and nuances (细微差别) of language.

    In many aspects, nowadays business environment has changed greatly since the late 1980s. The end of the cold war completely altered the very nature of the world's politics and economics. In just a few short years, globalization has started a variety of trends with profound consequences: the opening of markets, true global competition, widespread deregulation (解除政府对……的控制) of industry, and an abundance of accessible capital. we have experienced both the benefits and risks of a truly global economy, with both wall street and main street (平民百姓) feeling the pains of economic disorder half a world away.

    At the same time, we have fully entered the information age, starting breakthroughs in information technology, which have irreversibly altered the ability to conduct business unconstrained by the traditional limitations of time or space. Today, it's almost impossible to imagine a world without intranets, e-mail, and portable computers. With amazing speed, the internet is profoundly changing the way we work, shop, do business, and communicate.

    As a consequence, we have truly entered the post-industrial economy. We are rapidly shifting from an economy based on manufacturing and commodities to one that places the greatest value on information, services, support, and distribution. That shift, in turn, attaches great importance to "knowledge workers," a new class of wealthy, educated, and mobile people who view themselves as free agents in a seller's market.

Beyond the field of information technology, the increasing pace of technological change in virtually every industry has created entirely new business, wiped out others, and produced a great demand for continuous innovation (创新).New product, process, and distribution technologies provide powerful levers for creating competitive value. More companies are learning the importance of destructive technologies—innovations that hold the potential to make a product line, or even an entire business segment, virtually outdated.

    Another major trend has been the consumer and business markets. There's a growing appreciation that superficially similar groups of customers may have very different preferences in terms of what they want to buy and how they want to buy it. Now, new technology makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to identify and serve targeted micro-markets in ways that were physically impossible or prohibitively expensive in the past. Moreover, the trend feeds on itself, a business's ability to serve sub-markets fuels customers' appetites for more and more specialized offerings.