When 12-year-old Taylor Smith wrote a special letter to herself last spring, to be read in 10 years' time, she didn't know it would be opened before even a year had passed— and that it wouldn't be her eyes reading the words.

  “She had told me that she had written a letter to herself, and that she was excited that she was going to open it when she was older,”said Taylor's  mother, Mary Ellen Smith.

    Instead, it was opened by Taylor's parents after she died last spring. They posted the letter to Facebook, hoping it would inspire others.

    It has. “We've gotten letters from lots of parents who have said it has encouraged them to love their kids and love each other,” said Mary Ellen Smith.

    In the letter, Taylor congratulated herself on graduating from high school and asked, “Are you in college?”

    She also wanted to know if she had been on a plane yet and if the show “Doctor Who” was still on the air.

    Taylor also had some words for her future kids. After considering the idea of selling her iPad and getting an iPadmini instead, she told her future self to mention to her kids that “We're older than the tablet.” She included a drawing of an iPad for them to see.

    Taylor died suddenly of pneumonia (肺炎), leaving behind both her parents and an older brother.

  “I just want people to know just what an awesome, awesome person she was,” her father, Tim Smith said.

    Her mother said, “I can't bring her back, but I'm so grateful people have been inspired by her story.”

    Taylor's father read the closing g words of her letter, which said, “It's been years since I wrote this. Stuff has happened, good and bad. That's just how life works, and you have to go with it.”

    The concept of culture has been defined many times, and although no definition has achieved universal acceptance, most of the definitions include three central ideas: that culture is passed on from generation to generation, that a culture represents a ready-made principle for living and for making day-to-day decisions, and, finally, that the components of a culture are accepted by those in the culture as good, and true, and not to be questioned. The eminent anthropologist George Murdock has listed seventy-three items that characterize every known culture, past and present.

    The list begins with Age-grading and Athletic sports, runs to Weaning and Weather Control, and includes on the way such items as Calendar, Fire making, Property Rights, and Tool making. I would submit that even the most extreme advocate of a culture of poverty viewpoint would readily acknowledge that, with respect to almost all of these items, every American, beyond the first generation immigrant, regardless of race or class, is a member of a common culture. We all share pretty much the same sports. Maybe poor kids don't know how to play polo, and rich kids don't spend time with stickball, but we all know baseball, football, and basketball. Despite some misguided efforts to raise minor dialects to the status of separate  tongues, we all, in fact, share the same language.

    There may be differences in diction and usage, but it would be ridiculous to say that all Americans don't speak English. We have the calendar, the law, and large numbers of other cultural items in common. It may well be true that on a few of the seventy-three items there are minor variations between classes, but these kinds of things are really slight variations on a common theme.

    There are other items that show variability, not in relation to class, but in relation to religion and ethnic background — funeral customs and cooking, for example. But if there is one place in America where the melting pot is a reality, it is on the kitchen stove; in the course of one month, half the readers of this sentence have probably eaten pizza, hot pastrami, and chow mein. Specific differences that might be identified as signs of separate cultural identity are relatively insignificant within the general unity of American life; they are cultural commas and semicolons in the paragraphs and pages of American life.

    As more and more people speak the global languages of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6，000～7，000 languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

    In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations—UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

    Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Centre, Yale University, who specializes in the languages and  oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, AGrammarofThangmiwithanEthnolinguisticIntroductiontotheSpeakersandTheirCulture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

    Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.

    At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials—including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes—which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection.

    Now, through the two organizations that he has founded —the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project—Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

    Give shoes, Give Love.

    Mission

    Soles4Souls is a not-for-profit global social enterprise committed to fighting poverty through the collection and distribution of shoes and clothing.

    Host a shoe drive

    You can join hundreds of people of various ages and walks of life who are collecting shoes in their community. Soles4Souls gives you all the tools you need and makes it as easy as possible! You can host a shoe drive from start to finish in just four simple steps:

    ⒈Register

Sign up and Soles4Souls will get in touch with you as soon as possible.

    ⒉Get the resources you need from our Tools &Ideas page

Soles4Souls wants your shoe drive to be successful, so it has gathered some stuff to make your life easier. You'll find the tools you need, as well as the opportunity to spread the word by social media and email.

    ⒊Start a fundraising page

This is a great way to get your friends, family and followers involved. You can raise money to help with the cost of shipping your shoes to Soles4Souls, or for just straight donations. It's fast and easy to sign up and share.

    ⒋Get the shoes to us.

Soles4Souls has collection locations all over the place. When your shoe drive is complete, you can check out our shipping page and find the best option.

    If you see a group of people dancing and singing on the street or in the railway station, you don't need to feel surprised. They are a flash mob(快闪族). Who are they Are they mobs? Don't be confused by their name. Actually, a flash mob is a group of people who gather suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disappear.

    They are usually organized with the help of the Internet or other digital communications networks. The messages may be sent to friends, who send to more people. At a predetermined time, they gather and perform some activities such as exchanging books, coming together to look at the sky, waving their hands and yelling something at the top of their voice for 30 seconds. Then, they quickly disappear before the police can arrive Using mobile phones, the flash mob can change its place if the first one has been cancelled for any reason.

    Bill Wasik, senior editor of Hamper's Magazine, organized the first flash mob in Manhattan in May 2003 and the first successful flash mob gathered on June 3, 2003. Wasik claimed that he created the flash mob as a social experiment designed to laugh at fashion seekers and stress the cultural atmosphere of wanting to be an insider or part of "the next big thing”.

    Flash mob gatherings can sometimes shock people. Such an activity might seem amusing and magical, but it also might frighten people who are not aware of what is taking place. Undoubtedly, flash mob can serve as good political tools and have great potential, such as using flash mob to advertise a product.

    The flash mob is now becoming more and more popular. People use it to do many things. Flash mobs give people from all walks of life an opportunity to come together to create a memory.