On a Saturday night at home while relaxing with friends, a dog showed up at the house. In an attempt to find the legal owner and return the dog, we knocked on the door of the legal owner and an old man opened the door. This was the start of an interesting week.

    The old man sat down, made himself at home, and gifted us the dog. After a brief visit, he left, and we were now the proud owners of this dog. It takes experience and knowledge to know that our lifestyle can't satisfy the needs of this dog; the owner that gifted us the dog was mismatched for him as well.

    Three attempts to return the dog to his old owner failed. (I think he was avoiding us.) Because our lifestyle didn't allow us to give this poor dog the attention he needed, he disturbed the neighbors. They got involved. After we shared the story, they gained a new perspective and wisely stepped in to help us find a solution.

    One week later it was decided that dog would be picked up from us by the old neighbor. He would then return it to the previous owner who was more equipped to care for it.

    When faced with unexpected challenges in life, it helps to see everyone's perspective. We have to look at one another's perspective to solve a problem with honesty, experience and knowledge. That's the sign of a leader. Although the old neighbor typically has little to do with leadership, it did bring a neighborhood together to understand one another and work as a team to solve a problem.

    Fighting racial stereotypes（模式化）on US campuses often begins by putting students of different ethnic backgrounds together — under one dormitory roof.

    Sam Boakye was a freshman at Ohio State University and the only black student on his floor. He was determined to get good grades — in part to make sure his white roommate had no basis for negative racial views. "You're pushed to do better, to challenge the stereotype that black people are not that smart," he told the New York Times.

    Several recent studies have found that having a roommate of a different race can reduce prejudice(偏见), diversify(使多样化) friendships and even promote students' academic performance. In a study by Ohio State psychology professor Russell Fazio, black freshmen who came to college with high test scores earned better grades if they had a white roommate—even if the roommate's test scores were low. Another study on student interaction by Duke University suggests that freshmen with roommates of a different race were the most likely to diversif“y their friendships. Just having diversity in classrooms doesn't do anything to increase interracial friendships," said Claudia Buchman, an author of the Duke study. “But living together with a different-race roommate does lead to more interracial friendships."

    There are, however, some problems with such room assignments. Fazio's study found that three times as many randomly(随机地) assigned interracial roommates weren't living together at the end of the semester, compared with white roommates. Interracial roommates also spent less time together, had fewer joint activities and were less involved with each other's friends than white pairs.

    As for Boakye, this is not the case. "A lot of white students come without much exposure（暴露）to diversity, so when their first interaction with a black guy isn't bad, they will make more black friends. I think I made a good impression on my freshman roommate. I saw him this year, and he said, "Hey dude, you're not the only black friend I have. That felt good."

    In business, there's a speed difference: It's the difference between how important a firm's leaders say speed is to their competitive strategy and how fast the company actually moves. The difference is important regardless of industry and company size. Companies fearful of losing their competitive advantage spend much time and money looking for ways to pick up the speed.

In our study of 343 businesses, the companies that chose to go, go, go to try to gain an edge ended up with lower sales and operating incomes than those that paused at key moments to make sure they were on the right track. What's more, the firms that “slowed down to speed up” improved their top and bottom lines, averaging 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating incomes over a three-year period.

    How did they disobey the laws of business physics, taking more time than competitors yet performing better? They thought differently about what “slower” and “faster” mean. Firms sometimes fail to understand the difference between operational speed (moving quickly) and strategic speed (reducing the time it takes to deliver value). Simply increasing the speed of production, for example, may be one way to try to reduce the speed difference. But that often leads to reduced value over time, in the form of lower-quality products and services.

    In our study, higher-companies with strategic speed always made changes when necessary. They became more open to ideas and discussion. They encouraged new ways of thinking. And they allowed time to look back and learn. By contrast, performance suffered at firms that moved fast all the time, paid too much attention to improving efficiency, stuck to tested methods, didn't develop team spirit among their employees, and had little time thinking about changes.

    Strategic speed serves as a kind of leadership. Teams that regularly take time to get things right, rather than plough ahead full bore, are more successful in meeting their business goals. That kind of strategy must come from the top.

    First, I want to tell you how proud we are. Getting into Columbia shows what a great well-rounded student you are. Your academic, artistic, and social skills have truly blossomed（开花）in the last few years. You have become a talented and accomplished young woman. You should be as proud of yourself as we are.

    College will be the most important years in your life. It is in college that you will truly discover what learning is about. I want to tell you: “education is what you have left after all that is taught is forgotten”. What I mean by that is the materials taught isn't as important as you gaining the ability to learn a new subject, and the ability to analyze a new problem. That is really what learning in college is about—this will be the period where you go from teacher-taught to master-inspired, after which you must become self-learner.

    Follow your passion in college. Take courses you think you will enjoy. Steve Jobs says when you are in college, your passion will create many dots, and later in your life you will connect them. In his great speech given at Stanford, he gave the great example where he took calligraphy（书法）, and a decade later, it became the basis of the beautiful letters in Microsoft Word. So don't worry too much about what job you will have, and don't be too utilitarian（功利的）, and if you like Japanese or Korean, go for it! Enjoy picking your dots, and be assured one day you will find your calling, and connect a beautiful curve through the dots.

    Most importantly, make friends and be happy. College friends are often the best in life, because during college you are closer to them physically than to your mom and I. Pick a few friends and become really close to them-pick the ones who are honest and sincere to you. Don't worry about their hobbies, grades, looks, or even personalities. You have developed some real friendships in high school in your last two years, so trust your instinct, and make new friends.

    College is the four years where you have the greatest amount of free time, the first chance to be independent, the most possibilities to change and the lowest risk for making mistakes. So please treasure your college years! May Columbia become the happiest four years in your life, and may you blossom into just what you dream to be.

    It is estimated that more than half the world's population is bilingual (双语的), and in an increasingly globalised world, there are obvious benefits of speaking more than one language. However, for many years, parents were advised not to teach their children to speak more than one language from birth. Learning two or more languages simultaneously (同时) was believed to cause confusion and slow down academic development. While it is certainly true that children who are learning to speak more than one language as their mother tongue will often mix the languages up or speak a little later, these are temporary problems, and there is no reason to avoid teaching a child more than one language.

    In fact, there are plenty of reasons to encourage your child to become bilingual from birth. As well as the obvious benefits of being able to communicate with more people, and the possibility of earning more money, children who speak more than one language have been shown to score more highly in achievement tests at school. This is true for mathematics as well as tests of verbal (言语的) skills.

    And in later life it has been found that bilinguals, on average, will tend to develop Alzheimer's disease five years later than monolingual speakers. Speaking three or more languages offers even more protection. It seems that the increased number of connections within the brain allows bilinguals to cope better with brain damage.

    But is it too late if you haven't already learned a second language in childhood? It used to be thought that the adult brain was very fixed, but recent research has shown that we continue to develop new connections in the brain throughout our lives, meaning that it's perfectly possible to learn another language to a high standard. Older learners are less likely to have native-like pronunciation, but they are better at learning vocabulary as they are able to use far more skills and strategies than children. And learning a language is like using a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets, meaning that you will find your third language easier than your second, and so on.

    American families are accustomed to settling in faraway places, which has been a national phenomenon. Decades of data, including a more recent Gallup study, characterizes the US as one of the most geographically mobile countries in the world. "About one in four US adults(24 percent) has reported moving within the country in the past five years." the reported noted. With the exception of Finns(23 percent) and Norwegians(22 percent), Americans move considerably more than their European peers.

    Though some may move for love or family, the major reason why Americans choose to move around is, unsurprisingly, related to work. Citing data from the Current Population Survey, a post on the blog of the New York Fed noted that between 1998 and 2013, "slightly more than half of interstate(州际的) migrants said they moved for employment­related reasons—a category that includes moves undertaken for new jobs, job transfers, and easier commutes(通勤)."

    The seeking of opportunity, particularly for an immigrant nation, is a national mythology(神话) as well as an emotional attachment to work. A new working paper analyzed by Ben Steverman at Bloomberg suggests that workers in the US now" put in almost 25 percent more hours than Europeans" in a given year. This figure has steadily risen since the 1970s, when the hours logged by workers in Western Europe and the US were roughly the same.

    There are, of course, some internal factors. The US is much vaster than most European countries, plus it boasts(拥有) a common language. It is considered to be a sign of an efficient labor market that US workers can be persuaded to move to regions where there is a steady growth in jobs, such as the Sun Belt in recent years. And while American workers often have fewer labor protections than their European counterparts, as a report by the World Bank noted in 2012, American "labor laws give employers the power to fire, hire, or relocate(重新安置) workers according to their needs", a flexibility that is thought to aid economic growth. The World Band report added that the occupation of the average US employee in 2006 was 4 years, compared to 10 years in the European Union.

    Nevertheless, while Americans remain excessively mobile, FaithKarahan and Darious Li at the New York Fed are the latest to note that US workers are moving around less than before. During the 1980s, 3 percent of working­age Americans relocated to a different state each year; that figure had been cut in half by 2010." While part of the decline can be attributed to the Great Recession," the authors suggest," thisphenomenon took place over the course of several decades and is not necessarily related to the economic conditions."

    So what accounts for this phenomenon? A round­up of theories by Brad Plumer at The Washington Post included the aging of the US workforce, the further rise of two­income households, the burdens of real estate, evolving workplace culture, as well as the flat line of wages, which makes moving away for a job, on average, a less rewarding financial proposition.

    Karahan and Li put much stock in the effects of an aging workforce, to which they attribute at least half of the decline in interstate migration. "In short, a young individual today is moving less than a young person did in the 1980s because of the higher presence of older workers," they write, suggesting that employers have shifted their employment tactics(策略) to adapt to the changing demographics(人口统计数据) of the workforce. Needless to say, movies about this era in American life, in which fewer people set out to start lives in wide­ranging places, will probably be much less exciting.