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To control the nation's growing problem with food wastage, the South Korean government has started a special initiative (倡议) —“Pay as You Trash”. According to the initiative, the South Korean government has three methods in place to charge citizens for the food thrown away. One is through an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card — when users tap this card over a specially designed food waste bin, the lid will open. This waste is automatically weighed and recorded in the user's account. The user needs to settle this bill every month.

    The second billing method is through pre-paid garbage bags. These specially designed bags are priced based on the amount of space. For instance, in Seoul, a 10-liter garbage bag costs around 190 won (less than $1). There's also a bar code management system in place, in which residents (居民) throw food waste directly into dustbins and pay for it by buying bar code stickers attached to the bin.

    Even before the pay-by-weight system was introduced, South Koreans were still being charged for food waste — the cost was simply divided equally among the residents of each apartment block. The new system is not only fair, but is also designed to make consumers really feel the pinch of too much waste. The more food they throw out, the more they end up paying.

    Thanks to the initiative, residents like Seoul housewife Ms. Kwan are now adopting creative methods to avoid food waste. She makes sure to pour all the liquid out of leftover food before throwing it away. While preparing vegetables, she tries to use as much as the eatable parts as possible in order to reduce waste.

    Obviously, most people who try to lose weight generally focus all or most of their attention on the food they eat. But what about their behavior? Are there habits they could be breaking that would also help them lose weight?

    According to the Ohio State University Extension, which summarized the findings, the researchers learned people who routinely ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners tended to have more success losing weight than people whose eating schedules were irregular. As a bonus, they were also more likely to eat a larger quantity of fruits and vegetables.

    One activity that brought a disaster to people who wanted to lose weight was watching television, particularly if they ate while watching TV--especially if they ate while watching TV after 7 p.m. People who did these things, including simply watching a lot of television, tended to have a higher body mass index (BMI), as well as a higher intake of fat and sugars.

    Those who ate out a lot also tended to take in more fat and sugars, while eating fewer fruits and vegetables. For the purposes of the study, eating away from home was defined not only as eating in restaurants but also eating food provided by an employer or colleagues at work, buying food at convenience stores or gas stations, or buying food for fund-raisers.

    Finally, the best results were achieved by those motivated people who kept writing the track of the amount and type of exercise they did and how many calories they ate, who planned meals, and used meal replacements. Those who did these things the most generally lost more weight, ate less fat and sugars, ate more fruits and vegetables, and engaged in more physical activities.

So cutting out all those high-calorie snacks will help you lose weight. If so, apparently, will change some of your habits and behavior.

    Picasso Blue and Rose' at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris

    Through Jan.6.2019

    In its first major partnership with the Musée National Picasso﹣Paris, the Mus6e d'Orsay presents a show about Pablo Picasso's "Blue and Rose periods. "Some iconic（标志性的）Picasso works from this period in 1900～1906 ﹣﹣which experts consider a key point in his career—will make their first appearance in France for this exhibit. The show features over 300 works, including 80 paintings, 150 drawings, sculptures and prints, alongside photographs and letters from this time in the artist's life.

    'Hodler Parallelism' at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland

    Through Jan. 13, 2019

    This year marks a century since the death of one of Switzerland's most famous painters: Ferdinand Hodler. To honor his great achievements, the Kunstmuseum Bem and Geneva's Museum of Art and History have joined forces for a show focused on his theory of parallelism. Hodler considered parallelism a key principle of his work and employed it through the use of repetition, patterns, symmetry（对称） and mirror images, The show features 99 of Holder' s works.

    Claude Monet' at the Albertina in Vienna

    Through Jan. 6, 2019

    For the first time in over 20 years, a large﹣scale Monet exhibit can be seen in Austria. The Alhertina has gathered 100 paintings from more than 40 international museums and private collections, including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.  Highlights include the works: "On the Boat," "Boulevard des Capucines," "Grainstack in Sunlight," and "The Japanese Bridge."

    What are two things that make humans different from animals? One is language, and the other is music. It is true that some animals can sing (and many birds sing. better than a lot of people). However, the songs of animals, such as birds and whales, are very limited. It is also true that humans, not animals, have developed musical instruments.

    Music is strange stuff. It is clearly different from language. However, people can use music to communicate things—especially their emotions. When music is combined with speech in a song, it is a very powerful form of communication.

    If music is truly different from speech, then we should process music and language in different parts of the brain. The scientific evidence suggests that this is true. Sometimes people who suffer brain damage lose their ability to process language. However, they don't automatically lose their musical abilities. For example, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, had a stroke in 1953. It injured the left side of his brain. He could no longer speak or understand speech. He could, however, still compose music until his death ten years later. On the other hand, sometimes strokes cause people to lose their musical ability, but they can still speak and understand speech.

    Why does music have such a strong effect on us? That is a harder question to answer. Geoffrey Miller, a researcher at University College, London, thinks that music and love have a strong connection. Music requires special talent, practice, and physical ability. That's why it may be a way of showing your fitness to be someone's mate. For example, singing in tune or playing a musical instrument requires fine muscular control. You also need a good memory to remember the notes. And playing or singing those notes correctly suggests that your hearing is in excellent condition. Finally, when a man sings to the woman he loves, it may be a way of showing off.

    However, Miller's theory still doesn't explain why certain combinations of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research.

    With the explosion of consumer choices in recent history, the latest must-haves would surely need to be upgraded more often than every 10 years. In 2002 a computer and basic mobile phone would have been enough for most people, but now? The public need a trendy notebook computer and a smart phone with WiFi connection to feel they are up-to-date. So when will we have enough things? When will we finally be happy? Well, it looks like the things we buy today will barely keep us satisfied for a few months.

    In the eyes of some psychologists, far from making us happy, greater consumer choice creates many serious psychological problems. A fundamental principle of the society is that more freedom is better and more choice in the marketplace means more freedom. Therefore more choice leads to more happiness. This is not the case, however.

    Imagine you go to a café offering chocolate and vanilla ice cream. You choose the chocolate and eat it happily. But what if the café serves 50 kinds of ice cream? You choose chocolate and then start to worry, "maybe blueberry would have been better, perhaps the half-fat ice cream would have been healthier. Stupid me, all these choices and I didn't make the best one! "

    In China's major cities we have now passed the point where more consumer choice is making us happier. We are annoyed by all the options we have, disappointed because our expectations are so high and angered at ourselves when we don't make a perfect choice every time.

    A newspaper reporter tells a story about traveling on a plane with high-speed Internet access. He thought this was amazing—the newest piece of technology he had heard of. Then the service went down. The man next to him was angry and swore. The reporter thought, "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago!"

At school, I was in the top set for maths. My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts.

In fact, I was a victim of a gender stereotype made stronger since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages. Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects.

Reality struck hard when I began attending job interviews and interviewers would say: "It's great that you speak foreign languages, but what else do you do?" Nobody asked my friends who had studied science or technology those questions.

A survey recently showed that three of the best-paid jobs for women are in the technology sector. It's a sector that really can change the world. We must show girls that technology has an effect on every industry out there, from fashion to architecture to journalism. Anybody can learn to code and these days it's as important as reading and writing. I've realized that at university I'd achieved the wrong kind of literacy. Not being able to code limit your impact on the world far more than an ignorance of great literature.

Now I have a five-year-old daughter. I don't want her to blindly follow gender roles the way I did. I want her to know the fact that a science or technical degree will not limit her creativity but expand it and broaden her horizons far more than my arts background could. I'm exposing her to Minecraft and apps, which help improve analytical thinking and problem solving skills. I'm hoping that my daughter will discover and accept her potentials in science and want to change the world.