We are surrounded by mixed messages about mistakes: we're told we earn by making them, but we work hard to avoid them. So the result is that most of us know that we are going to make mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.

    Experiments with schoolchildren who did well on a given test show that those who were praised for being smart and then offered a more challenging or less challenging task afterward usually chose the easier one. On the other hand, children praised for trying hard-rather than being smart-far more often selected the more difficult task.

    If we try hard to avoid mistakes, we aren't open to getting the information we need in order to do better. In a writing study, experiments showed that those who are so scared to make mistakes perform worse in writing tasks than those who aren't as worried about being perfect. They fear receiving any kind of negative feedback, so they don't learn where they went wrong and how to get better.

    We don't just learn more when we're open to mistakes, we learn deeper. Research tells us that if we're only concerned about getting the right answer, we don't always learn the underlying concepts that help us truly understand whatever we're trying to figure out. Mistakes

need to be seen not as a failure to learn, but as a guide to what still needs to be learned. As Thomas Edison said, “I am not discouraged, because every abandoned wrong attempt is another step forward. "

    Furthermore, we often make mistakes because we try new things-we wander away from accepted paths. Teflon, penicillin-these are examples of great discoveries made by mistake. Take a page from Albert Einstein, who said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. "

    You are a new manager at the American branch of your German firm in Chicago. With a few minutes to spare between meetings, you go to get a quick cup of coffee.

    “Hey, David, how are you?” one of the senior partners at the firm asks you.

    “Good, thank you, Dr. Greer,” you reply. You've really been wanting to make a connection with the senior leadership at the firm, and this seems like a great opportunity. But as you start to think of something to say, your American colleague breaks in to steal your spotlight.

    “So Arnold”, your colleague says to your boss, in such a casual manner that it makes your German soul cringe(畏缩), “So what's your Super bowl prediction? I mean, you're a Niners fan, right?”

    The conversation moves on, and you walk silently back to your desk with your coffee. You know how important small talk is in the U.S., and you feel jealous of people who can do it well.

    There's nothing small about the role that small talk plays in American professional culture. People from other countries are often surprised at how important small talk is in the U.S. and how naturally and comfortably people seem to do it — with peers, men, women, and even with superiors. You can be the most technically skilled worker in the world, but your ability to progress in your job in the United States is highly dependent on your ability to build and maintain positive relationships with people at work. And guess what skill is critical for building and maintaining these relationships? Small talk.

    What can you do if you are from another culture and want to learn to use small talk in the U.S. to build relationships and establish trust? Work hard to hone(磨练) your own version of American-style small talk. Watch how others do it. You don't have to mimic what they do; in fact, that would likely backfire because people would see you as inauthentic. But if you can develop your own personal version, that can go a long way toward making you feel comfortable and competence．

    1990 was an important year in world events. In February, Nelson Mandela was set free after 27 years in prison. In October, East and West Germany became one country again. Then at the end of 1990, the World Wide Web was born. For this final event we have one man to thank. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web.

    Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955 in London, England. His parents, both computer designers, encouraged him to think and work creatively as he grew up. He was an excellent student and naturally took an interest in computers and science.

    After graduating from Oxford University, Tim went to work at a science research centre in Switzerland. There he developed some of the different systems（系统）that would later become the Web. The first was HTML, the computer language used to make web pages. The second was an address system that let computers anywhere find each other and send and receive information. In 1990 he put them together to make the first Internet browser（浏览器）.

    Tim knew that the more people used the Web, the more useful it would be. He wasn't interested in money but knowledge, so he gave out his invention for free to anyone who was interested. Many were interested an the growth of the Internet began.

    Today Tim works as a professor at the MIT in America, studying new ways to use the Web. He has received many awards from governments and organizations for his efforts. He is still not very interested in money. That is why he is so liked by his students and workmates. It may also be one of the reasons that few people outside the world of technology know his name.

    “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.

Cara Jumper loves the giant saltwater pond on her grandparents Swansea, South Carolina, property(房产). One January afternoon, her grandfather Coy Jumper piled ten-year-old Cara and her sister, Claire, six, and Emma, five, into his Pontiac Sunfire and took them down to the pond. He and the girls walked happily through the pines, checking traps. No luck—they were empty.

    As the sun disappeared gradually toward the horizon, the group turned back to head home. But as Coy walked along the bank, he was suddenly unable to put one foot in front of the other. Then Cara saw Coy walk unsteadily and fall backward into the pond's deep water.

    When her grandfather didn't surface immediately, Cara jumped in. With one hand, Cara grabbed the bank. With the other, she reached for her grandfather, making contact in the dark water.

    Coy had suffered a stroke(中风) the year before. Now Cara wondered if he'd had one again. Just 80 pounds to her grandfather's 230, she held his head and pulled his face out of the water. That woke him, but he was still dead weight. She managed to move Coy towards the three-foot bank and pulled him up onto solid ground.

    The winter sun had almost disappeared, and they were all trembling. Cara knew she'd have to get Coy to the car, a quarter mile away. She helped him to his feet. Coy slowly moved forward.

    Sixty feet from the car, Coy fell. From there, he crawled, dragging himself under a gate, to the car. His granddaughters helped him into the passenger's side, and Cara got into the driver's seat.

"I used to sit on my dad's lap and drive," she says now. Coy, too, she says, had let the fifth grader drive through the fields around the house. Still, she felt nervous, but she pushed on the gas and steered(驾驶) them the three miles home. "I was trying to get there fast, but I didn't want to get us hurt," Cara says. When she pulled the Sunfire into the garage, her grandmother, Esca was there to meet them.

Coy spent six days in the hospital recovering from a stroke. Says Esca, "If Cara hadn't helped, she might not have a grandpa anymore."

    Climate change is perhaps the key issue of our time. Often, however, it is presented to us as being so abstract that it seems impossibly distant. For those of you looking for something a little more concrete, a new report suggests that the effects of climate change may significantly affect coffee.

    The report, put out by The Climate Institute, describes the effects of climate change on various coffee-growing nations and the resultant effects on the plants and those who grow them.

    Coffee Arabica plants, which produce 70% of all commercial coffee, can be adversely affected by even a half-degree change in typical weather conditions. This sensitivity to temperature puts the plant at increased risk of the effects of climate change.

    In Central America the average temperature has risen by a full degree Celsius since 1960. In Ethiopia the average temperature has increased by 1. 3 degrees. This increase is enough to have notable effects on the plants. In Tanzania the productivity per hectare of coffee has fallen by half since the 1960s due to changes in temperature.

    Indeed, studies claim that by 2050 the area of the world suitable for growing coffee will be cut by half. Coffee production is likely to then be pushed to higher elevations (海拔) to take advantage of lower temperatures, but this will not be enough to make up for lost lowland areas.

    Coffee is the second most traded goods by developing nations, and the inability of producer nations to export it could cause dramatic chain reactions in their economies. Millions of people make a living in the production, processing, transport, and sale of coffee; their livelihoods would stand to take a blow as growing areas decrease and prices rise.

    As the temperature keeps rising, your cup of coffee will become much more expensive, and it may also carry an aftertaste bitterer than usual, for all those workers in the coffee belt left without the means to make a living as conditions worsen. Not only that, but the economic effects will cost the West millions in increased foreign aid.