What are American high schools like? Well, I'm happy to tell you what I know.

    When I started school here, it had already been a week since the school opened. At this school, freshmen usually go on a trip for about three days at the beginning of school. Unfortunately I missed that wonderful trip, which would have been the best time to get to know my classmates. I was really sad. I wished I'd known about it earlier.

    Despite the disappointment, however, I gradually adapted to my new life and school.

    There is a space in the basement of the teaching building where students chat and meet each other. As we do not always have the same classrooms and classmates, the school wants us to get to know each other there. Students usually come to school early, sit in that space and have fun. Around the space, there are many lockers for students to leave their books in, so that students do not have to carry a heavy schoolbag everywhere.

    It really surprises me that we have almost no textbooks. We only have textbooks for World History and Algebra 2 and they are big and heavy, like bricks. For other classes, we only need binders (活页夹) with paper in them. Without textbooks, students learn things freely and actively. For example, my humanities teacher just teaches us what is in her mind at the time. We never know what we will learn.

    Another difference between American schools and Chinese schools is that American schools care about students' morality more than their academic studies. For example, if you do not finish your homework, you will just be asked to do it later, but if you cheat or lie, you will get a warning or even be kicked out.

    I think that most students here are good at schoolwork as well, but compared to Chinese students, they can make learning a more joyful experience. I think we should take the good points from our two different kinds of education to perfect our approach to studying.

    Although English is not as old as Chinese, it is spoken by many people around the world every day. English speakers are always creating new words, and we are often able to know where most words come from.

    Sometimes, however, no one may really know where a word comes from. Did you ever think about why hamburgers are called hamburgers, especially when they are not made with ham? About a hundred years ago, some men went to America from Europe. They came from a big city in Germany called Hamburger. They did not speak good English, but they ate good food. When some Americans saw them eating round pieces of beef, they asked the Germans what it was. The Germans did not understand the question and answered. "We came from Hamburger." One of these Americans owned a restaurant, and had an idea. He cooked some round pieces of beef like those which the men from Hamburger ate. Then he put each between two pieces of bread and started selling them. Such bread came to be called "hamburgers". Today "hamburgers" are sold in many countries around the world.

    Whether this story is true or not, it is certainly is interesting. Knowing why any word has a certain meaning is interesting, too. The reason, for most English words, can be found in any large English dictionary.

    With only about 1,000 pandas left in the world, China is desperately trying to clone (克隆) the animal and save the endangered species (物种). That's a move similar to what a Texas A & M University researchers have been undertaking for the past five years in a project called "Noah's Ark".

    Noah's Ark is aimed at collecting eggs, embryos(胚胎), semen and DNA of endangered animals and storing them in liquid nitrogen. If certain species should become extinct, Dr. Duane Kraemer, a professor in Texas A& M's College of Veterinary Medicine, says there would be enough of the basic building blocks to reintroduce the species in the future.

    It is estimated that as many as 2,000 species of mammals, birds reptiles will become extinct in over 100 years. The panda, native only to China, is in danger of becoming extinct in the next 25 years.

    This week, Chinese scientists said they grew an embryo by introducing cells from a dead female panda into the egg cells of a Japanese white rabbit. They are now trying to implant the embryo into a host animal.

    The entire procedure could take from three to five years to complete.

    "The nuclear transfer (核子移植) of one species to another is not easy, and the lack of available (capable of being used) panda eggs could be a major problem," Kraemer believes. "They will probably have to do several hundred transfers to result in one pregnancy (having a baby). It takes a long time and ifs difficult, but this could be groundbreaking science if it works. They are certainly not putting any live pandas at risk, so it is worth the effort, adds Kraemer, who is one of the leaders of the Project at Texas A& M, the first-ever attempt at cloning a dog.

    "They are trying to do something that's never been done, and this is very similar to our work in Noah's Ark. We're both trying to save animals that face extinction. I certainly appreciate their effort and there's a lot we can learn from what they are attempting to do. It's a research that is very much needed."

    Twenty years ago, most experts believed that differences in how boys and girls behaved were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. It's hard to cling to that belief today. Recent research has shown that there are biological differences between boys and girls. Understanding these differences is important in raising and educating children.

    For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and the difference increases as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely (反过来), boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away too hear the teacher.

    Likewise, girls are better in their expression of feelings. Studies reveal that negative emotions are seated in an area of the brain called the amygdala. Girls develop all early connection between this area and the cerebral cortex (大脑皮层), enabling them to talk about their feelings. In boys these links develop later. So if you ask a troubled adolescent boy to tell you what his feelings are, he often cannot say much.

    Dr. Sax, an advocate of single-sex education, points out that keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom has yielded striking educational, social, and interpersonal benefits. Therefore, parents and teachers should try to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl, and a boy a boy.

    On my first day of high school, I asked an eleventh grader where my class was. And he told me it was "on the fourth floor, next to the pool." I found out five minutes later that we don't even have a fourth floor and there's no pool either! Besides that, I didn't have any trouble with the older kid.

    I think the biggest difference between middle and high school is the homework load (工作量) and size of the school. I went from maybe fifteen minutes of homework a night to several hours, so I had to learn how to make full use of time! Our class size is around 550, but joining in clubs, sports, music, and other activities at school makes it easier to get to know people in every grade.

    The best advice I can give about the years you spend in high school is to learn things for yourself, not just to get a good grade. There have been so many tests that I've prepared for the night before, gotten an A, and not remembered anything later. I've changed that this year, and I enjoy school so much more. Don't take easy classes just to have a simple year. If you have a choice between chemistry and sports, the first will prove to be a lot more useful!

    While drinking and smoking might be present in some middle schools, they're also around in high school. I have a lot of friends who promised they'd never drink or smoke, but are now partying every weekend. If you have "fun" and spend your nights wasted instead of studying, you will regret it when you're applying for (申请) college. The "friends" who say you're a loser for not partying are really not your friends at all. It's hard to see your closest friends grow apart and go in different directions, but don't follow their footsteps. Create your own path in life and make your own decisions.

    Microsoft announced this week that its facial-recognition system is now more accurate in identifying people of color, touting (吹嘘)its progress at tackling one of the technology's biggest biases (偏见).

    But critics, citing Microsoft's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly seized on how that improved technology might be used. The agency contracts with Microsoft for cloud-computing tools that the tech giant says is largely limited to office work but can also include face recognition.

    Columbia University professor Alondra Nelson tweeted, "We must stop confusing 'inclusion' in more 'diverse' surveillance (监管)systems with justice and equality."

    Facial-recognition systems more often misidentify people of color because of a long-running data problem: The massive sets of facial images they train on skew heavily toward white men. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study this year of the face-recognition systems designed by Microsoft, IBM and the China-based Face++ found that facial-recognition systems consistently giving the wrong gender for famous women of color including Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Shirley Chisholm, the first black female member of Congress.

    The companies have responded in recent months by pouring many more photos into the mix, hoping to train the systems to better tell the differences among more than just white faces. IBM said Wednesday it used 1 million facial images, taken from the photo-sharing site Flickr, to build the "world's largest facial data-set" which it will release publicly for other companies to use.

    IBM and Microsoft say that allowed its systems to recognize gender and skin tone with much more precision. Microsoft said its improved system reduced the error rates for darker-skinned men and women by "up to 20 times," and reduced error rates for all women by nine times.

    Those improvements were heralded(宣布)by some for taking aim at the prejudices in a rapidly spreading technology, including potentially reducing the kinds of false positives that could lead police officers misidentify a criminal suspect.

    But others suggested that the technology's increasing accuracy could also make it more marketable. The system should be accurate, "but that's just the beginning, not the end, of their ethical obligation," said David Robinson, managing director of the think tank Upturn.

    At the center of that debate is Microsoft, whose multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE came under fire amid the agency's separation of migrant parents and children at the Mexican border.

    In an open letter to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella urging the company to cancel that contract, Microsoft workers pointed to a company blog post in January that said Azure Government would help ICE "accelerate recognition and identification." "We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits," the letter said.

    A Microsoft spokesman, pointing to a statement last week from Nadella, said the company's "current cloud engagement" with ICE supports relatively anodyne(温和的)office work such as "mail, calendar, massaging and document management workloads." The company said in a statement that its facial-recognition improvements are "part of our going work to address the industry-wide and societal issues on bias."

    Criticism of face recognition will probably expand as the technology finds its way into more arenas, including airports, stores and schools. The Orlando police department said this week that it would not renew its use of Amazon. com's Rekognition system.

    Companies "have to acknowledge their moral involvement in the downstream use of their technology,"

    Robinson said. "The impulse is that they're going to put a product out there and wash their hands of the consequences. That's unacceptable."