Alibaba started taking the lead in China, simply enough, by connecting big Chinese, manufacturers(制造商)with big buyers across the world. Its business-to-business site, Alibaba.com allowed business to buy almost everything. Alibaba's advantage wasn't hard to identify: size.

    Alibaba is just big, even by Chinese standards. Its marketplaces attract 231 million active buyers, 8 million sellers, 11.3 billion orders a year—and Alibaba is just the middleman. It encourages people to use its markets—not charging small sellers a percentage of the sale.

    If you want a quick look into the influence of Alibaba on daily Chinese life, take my experience. I moved to Beijing almost a year ago and quickly got tired of visiting small stores across the crowded, polluted city of 20 million people in search of new electronics, bathroom furnishings. “You're looking for what exactly? Why not try it? ” my Chinese teacher asked me one day. With that, my wonderful new relationship with Alibaba began.

    Alibaba's original business-to-business model now is secondary to consumer buying. Chinese retail（零售）buying makes up 80% of Alibaba's profit, and leading that group is Taobao, with 800 million items for sale and the most unbelievable selection of things you'll ever find. TMall.com is Alibaba's other big site, where you can find brand name goods from Nike and Unilever near the lowest prices.

What I have a hard time explaining to friends and family back in the U. S. is how China has gone beyond traditional shopping—big-box retailers(零售商)especially—in favor of online purchases on Taobao and a few other sites. In smaller towns than Beijing, where big retailers have not yet traveled, shopping online is shopping, and shopping is Taobao.

    I have a list of some of my recent purchases on Taobao for a sense of how extensive(广泛的) the marketplace is. Almost everything arrived a day or two after ordering with free shipping. I'm not even a big buyer, because I need friends to help me search the Chinese-language site. When I was searching my purchase history on my Chinese teacher's iPad, which helps me buy goods, I looked through with great difficulty about 10 of her purchases for every one of mine.

    I was born and raised in Minnesota, the USA, but as an adult I have mostly lived in Europe and Africa. I teach cross-cultural management at the International Business School near Paris. For the last 15 years, I've studied how people in different parts of the world build trust, communicate, and make decisions especially in the workplace.

    While traveling in Tokyo recently with a colleague, I gave a short talk to a group of 20 managers. At the end, I asked whether there were any questions or comments. No hands went up, so I went to sit down. My colleague whispered to me, “I think there actually were some comments, Erin. Do you mind if I fry?” I agreed, but I guessed it a waste of breath. He asked the group again. “Any comments or questions?”

    Still, no one raised a hand, but this time he looked very carefully at each person in the silent audience. Gesturing to one of them, he said, “Do you have something to add?” To my amazement, she responded “Yes, thank you.” and asked me a very interesting question. My colleague repeated this several times, looking directly at the audience and asking for more questions or comments.

After the session, I asked my colleague, “How do you know that those people had questions?” He hesitated, not sure how to explain it, and then said, “it has to do with how bright their eyes are.”

    He continued, “In Japan, we don't make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West. So when you asked if there were any comments, most people were not looking directly at you. But a few people in the group were looking right at you, and their eyes were bright. That indicates that they would be happy to have you call on them.”

    I thought to myself I would never have learned from my upbringing in Minnesota. Since then, I try to focus on understanding behavior in other cultures I encounter, and keep finding the bright eyes in the room.

    Have you ever been faced with trying to stay positive when others around you are negative? A negative person can bring you down and throw your positive plans out of the window. Whether you deal with a family member, friend or co-worker who is negative, there are things you can do to remain positive in the face of negativity?

    Whatever you do, don't argue with a negative person. Arguing only adds fuel to the fire. I have noticed when my children are crabby, it is best to avoid trying to convince them to analyze and adjust their attitude. As soon as I take the approach of being in opposition to them, the situation gets worse before it gets better. Sometimes the best thing to do is remain silent and let negativity pass.

    You know how difficult it can be to give love and positive attention to negative people. Unfortunately, that is often exactly what they need. A negative person is usually afraid he is unlovable. How do you show love when someone is negative? You must listen to what he is trying to tell you. Acknowledge the feelings he has by saying something like, “You sound very angry right now.” How might you help a negative person? Offer a hug even if you get rejected. A negative person often has difficulty accepting love from others.

If you have negative people on your life who are affecting your mental and physical health, you need to decide whether or not you want these people in your life. Some people are so negative that you have no other choice but to remove them from your life. However, some people, such as your children, are difficult to remove from your life, in this case, professional counseling(咨询) may be the answer.

    We all know cameras. But have you heard of Google's new camera? It is a small, smart device, called Clips. It comes with a case that has a clip (夹子), but it's not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own.

    This roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera, with a three-hour battery life and Gorilla Glass for toughness, is intended for candid moments, like when a child does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smart phone.

    Onboard the Clips device, it uses machine learning algorithms (计算程序) to help capture scenes. Those algorithms include face recognition. “Once it learns that there's a face you see frequently, it'll try to get nice photos of those faces,” said Juston Payne, the device's product manager. And they also want it to recognize facial expressions, which involved “training it to know what happiness looks like”. The Google team also trained it to recognize what not to shoot—like when a child's hand is over the lens, or if it is tossed in a dark purse.

    The only way to see the images is by connecting the camera with your phone, as it has no screen for viewing or editing.

    Did people think it was strange? Yes, Payne admitted. But they said they addressed that by making it obvious what it is. A green light on the front signals that the device is on. Besides, unlike a camera meant to monitor your home, it is not connected to the Internet.

    “This product is only possible because of the way that technology has advanced,” Payne said. It was only in the past year or so that they could squeeze the technology down into a device this size. Going forward, we're likely to get more assistance from the artificial intelligence packed into our apps and gadgets.

    Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May the 14th, 1984. He is the creator of the social media site Facebook. He was a star student at school, winning prizes in astronomy, maths and physics. He was also good at Classical studies. He studied Psychology and Computer Science at Harvard University, which is where he created Facebook. His invention led to his becoming Time magazine's Person Of the Year for 2010.

    Zuckerberg excelled in everything he did in his youth. He was captain of the school fencing team, spoke many languages and was a highly skilled computer programmer. While other kids played computer games, he designed them. He created his first network while in high school to connect all of the computers - in his father's dental surgery. He also built a media player which attracted the interest of Microsoft and AOL.

    Zuckerberg started at Harvard in September 2002. In his first year, he created Facemash, a Facebook predecessor (前身), which let students select the college's best looking people from a selection of photos.

    He launched Facebook from his Harvard room in February 2004. It was the start of a rollercoaster ride that would connect half a billion people worldwide and make him the world's youngest billionaire.

    Mark Zuckerberg is now one of the most influential people on the planet. He has dined with the president of the USA and regularly attends global economic summits and technology conferences. He stated: "The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open." In 2010, Zuckerberg signed a promise, in which he promised to donate at least half of his life wealth to charity.

    Grown-ups are often surprised by how well they remember something they learned as children but have never practiced ever since. A man who has not had a chance to go swimming for years can still swim as well as ever when he gets back in the water. He can get on a bicycle after many years and still ride away. He can play, catch and hit a ball as well as his son. A mother who has not thought about the words for years can teach her daughter the poem that begins "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" or remember the story of Cinderella or Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

    One explanation is the law of overlearning, which can be stated as follows: Once we have learned something, extra learning trials (尝试) increase the length of time we will remember it.

    In childhood we usually continue to practice such skills as swimming, bicycle riding, and playing baseball long after we have learned them. We continue to listen to and remind ourselves of words such as "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" and childhood tales such as Cinderella and Goldilocks. We not only learn but overlearn.

    The multiplication tables (乘法口诀表) are an exception (例外) to the general rule that we forget rather quickly the things that we learn in school, because they are another of the things we overlearn in childhood.

The law of overlearning explains why cramming (突击学习) for an examination, though it may result in a passing grade, is not a satisfactory way to learn a college course. By cramming, a student may learn the subject well enough to get by on the examination, but he is likely soon to forget almost everything he learned. A little overlearning, on the other hand, is really necessary for one's future development.