New Orleans, Louisiana, was established as part of the French Empire in 1718.

    Its location on the east bank of the Mississippi River gave it control of the American hinerland and it became strategically important to many nations. It was transferred from France to Spain, returned to France, and finally sold by Napoleon to the United States in 1803. The city was the site of a famous battle fought in 1815 between the British, who hoped to control it, and the Americans under General Andrew Jackson.

    The riverbed of the Mississippi is constantly silting（淤积）and the river is now actually higher than the city. Levees hold back the river and giant pumps are used to move water from the city into the river.

    Although New Orleans has been a part of the United States for almost two centuries, its population takes great pride in its French heritage. Louisiana still retains parts of the Code Napoleon which, for many years, was its only law.

    New Orleans is carefree city and it boasts its hot, spicy Creole seafood and its native Dixieland Jazz. The Jackson Square neighborhood maintains its French colonial homes and in other sections are pre-Civil War mansions. Visitors are surprised to find that behind this interesting surface of yesteryear is a busy industrial and port city. Grain and coal come from the Midwest and foreign goods are unloaded here. New Orleans is no longer a sleepy Southern town—but it's still fun to visit.

    Laws that would have ensured pupils from five to 16 received a full financial education got lost in the 'wash up'. An application is calling on the next government to bring it back.

    At school the children are taught to add up and subtract(减法) but, extraordinarily ,are not routinely shown how to open a bank account — let alone how to manage their finances in an increasingly complex and demanding world.

    Today the parenting website Mumsnet and the consumer campaigner Martin Lewis have joined forces to launch an online application to make financial education a compulsory element of the school curriculum in England. Children from five to 16 should be taught about everything from pocket money to pensions, they say. And that was exactly the plan preserved in the Children, Schools and Families bill that was shelved by the government in the so-called “wash-up” earlier this month — the rush to legislation before parliament was dismissed.Consumer and parent groups believe financial education has always been one of the most frustrating omissions of the curriculum.

    As the Personal Finance Education Group (Pfeg) points out, the good habits of young children do not last long. Over 75% of seven- to 11-year-olds are savers but by the time they get to 17,over half of them are in debt to family and friends.By this age,26% see a credit card or overdraft(透支) as a way of extending their spending power.Pfeg predicts that these young people will “find it much harder to avoid the serious unexpected dangers that have befallen many of their parents' generation unless they receive good quality financial education while at school.”

    The UK has been in the worst financial recession(衰退)for generations.It does seem odd that — unless parents step in — young people are left in the dark until they are cruelly introduced to the world of debt when they turn up at university. In a recent poll of over 8,000 people, 97% supported financial education in schools,while 3% said it was a job for parents.

    Navajo was the perfect choice for a secret language. It is very complex. One vowel (元音）can have up to ten different pronunciations, changing the meaning of any word. In the 1940s, Navajo was unwritten language. No one outside of the reservation could speak it or understand it.

    The Navajo Code team had to invent new words to describe military equipment. For example, they named ships after fish: lotso-whale (battleship), calo-shark (destroyer), beshloiron-fish (submarine). When a Code Talker received a message via radio, he heard a series of unrelated Navajo words. He would then translate the words into English and use the first letter of each English word to spell the message. The Navajo words tsah (needle), wol-la-chee (ant), ah-kh-di-glini (victor), and tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca) spelled NAVY.

    The Code Talker kept the code a secret. They memorized everything. There were no code books. As a result, no ordinary Navajo soldiers, if captured by the enemy, could understand the code. More than 3,600 Navajos served in World War II, but only 420 were Code Talkers with the US Marines. They coded and decoded battlefield messages better and faster than any machine. They could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds. Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job.

    Even after the war the code remained top secret. When they were asked about their role, Code Talkers just said: “I was a radioman.” War movies and histories came out without mentioning them. The code was never used again and was finally declassified in 1968. Only then did the secret came out.

    Lucy, whose skeleton（骨骼） was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, died shortly after she fell out of a tree, according to a new study published Monday in the British journal Nature.

    For their research, Kappelman and Dr. Richard Ketcham used a CT scanner to create more than 35,000 "slices" of Lucy's skeleton. Scientists named her Lucy from the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was played at the camp the night of her discovery.

    The following analysis of the slices showed sharp, clean breaks seen at the end of Lucy's right humerus （肱骨） are similar to bone breaks seen in victims of falls.

    The researchers concluded that these and other breaks in her skeleton show that Lucy, who is believed to have stood about 3 feet 6 inches and weighed about 60 pounds, fell feet first and used her arms to support herself﹣but that the injury was too severe to have been survivable.

    The researchers estimate that Lucy was going about 35 miles an hour when she hit the ground after falling from a height of roughly 40 feet, according to the statement.

    That sounds plausible. But other scientists are doubtful. "There are countless explanations for bone breaks," Dr, Donald C, Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins and one of the scientists who discovered Lucy, said, "The suggestion that she fell out of a tree is largely a just﹣so story and therefore unprovable." Johanson said it was more likely that Lucy's breaks occurred long after she died, saying that "elephant bones appear to have the same kind of breaks, It's unlikely they fell out of a tree.

    But the new research focused on "a small number of breaks" that are consistent with "high﹣energy bone﹣to﹣bone influences" and which differ from the sorts of breaks commonly seen in other collected bones. Kappelman responded in an email, "These appear to have occurred at or near the time of death."

    University of Pennsylvania researchers say that for the first time they have linked social media use to increases in depression and loneliness. The idea that social media is anything but social when it comes to mental health has been talked about for years, but not many studies have managed to actually link the two. To do that, Penn researchers, led by psychologist Melissa Hunt, designed a study that focused on WeChat, Snapchat and Instagram.

    The study was conducted with 143 participants, who before they began, completed a mood survey and sent along photos of their battery screens, showing how often they were using their phones to access social media. "we set out to do a study which attempts to imitate real life." Hunt said.

    The study divided the participants into two groups: The first group was allowed to maintain their normal social media habits. The other, the control group, was restricted to 10 minutes per day on social media. The restrictions were put in place for three weeks and then tested for now comes such as fear of missing out, anxiety, depression and loneliness.

    The results showed a very clear link between social media use and increased levels of depression and loneliness." Using less social media then you normally do would lead to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness " Hunt said.

    Social media invites what Hunt calls "downward social comparison." "When you're online, it can sometimes seem that everyone else is cooler and having more fun and included in more things and you're left out," Hunt said. And that's just generally discouraging. "Every minute you spend online is a minute you are not doing your work or not meeting a friend for dinner or having a deep conversation with your roommate." And these real life activities are the ones that you can encourage self-esteem and self-worth, Hunt added.

    "People are on their devices, and that's not going to change," she said. But as in life, a bit of control goes a long way.

In 1835, William Talbot finally succeeded in producing a photograph of his country house. He declared that his was the first house ever known to have drawn its own picture. The drawing was formed "by the action of light upon sensitive paper." Photography offered nature a "pencil" to paint herself through optical （光学的） and chemical means alone.

By the mid-nineteenth century, people no longer needed to hire a draftsman to draw detailed images because the process could be completed instantly with a camera. Advocates for the technology stated that not only was it more precise than the human hand-it was faster and cheaper.

The removal of human fallibility in the creating process was one of photography's biggest selling points, but this also started debates about the new medium's implications for visual culture. Could images made largely by a machine be considered art? If so, where did human creativity, fit in this process?

As the twenty-first century becomes increasingly automated （自动化的）, more and more people attempt to identify where human agency exists in the technologically driven world. Images generated with artificial intelligence by companies like OpenAI are stimulating questions like those that emerged with the coming of the photograph. By typing a sentence, users can generate "new" images composed from images collected across the internet. The result has been a flood of Al-generated images in places that are previously unique to human authors. Painting competitions, commercial graphic design and the fashion of portraiture（肖像） have all since collided with the technology in troubling ways.

The fine arts were thought to be a final hold-out of human creativity, but the surprisingly high quality of Al-generated images is producing deeper questions about the nature of originality. If the history of photography tells us anything, it's that the debate won't be settled quickly; straightforwardly or by the institutions we typically associate with cultural gate-keeping.