Sleep deprivation(缺失)is an important hidden factor in lowering the achievement of school pupils, according to researchers carrying out international education tests.

    It is a particular problem in richer countries with sleep experts linking it to the use of mobile phones and computers in bedroom late at night. Sleep deprivation is such a serious problem that lessons have to be dragged down to a lower level to suit sleep-deprived learners, the study found. The international comparison, carried out by Boston College, found the United States to have the highest number of sleep-deprived students, with 73% of 9- and 10-year-olds and 80% of 13- and 14-year-olds identified by their teachers as being negatively affected.

    In literacy(读写能力) tests there were 76% of 9- and 10-year-olds lacking sleep. This was much higher than the international average of 47% of primary pupils needing more sleep and 57% among the secondary age group.

    Other countries with the most sleep-deprived youngsters were New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Australia, England, Ireland and France. High-performing Finland is also among the most lacking in sleep. Countries with the best records for getting enough sleep include Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Japan and Malta.

    The analysis was part of the huge date-gathering process for global education rankings, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study(TIMSS)and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study(PIRLS)

    “I think we underestimate the impact of sleep. Our data show that across countries internationally, on average, children who have more sleep achieve higher in maths, science and reading. That is exactly what our data show,” says Chad Minnich of the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center.

    “It's the same link for children who are lacking basic nutrition,” says Mr Minnich, based at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. “If you are unable to concentrate, to attend mentally, you are unable to achieve at your best level, because your mind and body are in need of something more basic. Sleep is a fundamental need for all children. If teachers report such large proportions of children suffering from lack of sleep, it's having a significant impact. But worse than that, teachers are having to adjust their instruction based on those children who are suffering from a lack of sleep. The children who are suffering from a lack of sleep are driving down instruction.”

    That means that even the children who are getting enough sleep are still suffering from this sleep-related lowering.

    Valentine's Day, a day traditionally reserved for expressing romantic love, is observed practically all around the world. However, not many people are familiar with Sweetest Day. Actually it is a holiday, especially designed to express love and care for those who were routinely neglected（忽视）by society.

Sweetest Day was the idea of Herbert Birch Kingston, who worked for a company in Cleveland, Ohio. He felt that there were plenty of children, especially orphans and poor kids, who didn't necessarily get the attention they deserved. Thus in 1922, he launched the first Sweetest Day to give out boxes of candy to mainly poor children.

    Since the day picked was the third Saturday in October, this became the traditional time to celebrate Sweetest Day. The tradition was so enjoyed that people often looked beyond kindness to treating their own friends or family to treats on Sweetest Day.

    In the US, Sweetest Day is celebrated primarily in the Northeastern region of the US, still on the third Saturday of October. Yet news of the tradition, which began nearly 100 years ago, has spread to other parts of the country, especially as people who lived in those areas moved elsewhere. People may distribute candy or small gifts to those in patient homes, hospitals, foster homes, or mental institutions, and they may also treat friends and family to little gifts from the heart.

    In keeping with the original tradition, celebrating Sweetest Day should really be most focused on people who ordinarily don't have the good fortune of attention from friends or family, either due to difficult family circumstances or to poverty. This can be a great tradition to start if your community doesn't routinely celebrate the day, and there are many candy manufacturers that are willing to help donate or reduce costs on gifts intended for people in unfortunate circumstances.

    Some people think that success is only for those with talent or those who grow up in the right family, and others believe that success mostly comes down to luck. I'm not going to say luck, talent, and circumstances don't come into play because they do. Some people are born into the right family while others are born with great intelligence, and that's just the reality of how life is.

    However, to succeed in life, one first needs to set a goal and then gradually make it more practical. And, in addition to that, in order to get really good at something, one needs to spend at least 10,000 hours studying and practicing. To become great at certain things, it'll require even more time, time that most people won't put in.

    This is a big reason why many successful people advise you to do something you love. If you don't enjoy what you do, it is going to feel like unbearable pain and will likely make you quit well before you ever become good at it.

    When you see people exhibiting some great skills or having achieved great success, you know that they have put in a huge part of their life to get there at a huge cost. It's sometimes easy to think they got lucky or they were born with some rare talent, but thinking that way does you no good, and there's a huge chance that you're wrong anyway.

    Whatever you do, if you want to become great at it, you need to work day in and day out, almost to the point of addiction（沉迷）, and over a long period of time. If you're not willing to put in the time and work, don't expect to receive any rewards. Consistent, hard work won't guarantee you the level of success you may want, but it will guarantee that you will become really good at whatever it is you put all that work into.

    My timing has always been a little off with Elizabeth Strout. I've read and pretty much admired everything she's written, but, for whatever reason, the books of hers I've picked to review have been the good ones, like Amy and Isabelle andThe Burgess Boys, rather than the extraordinary ones, like Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Anything Is Possible is Strout's latest book and it's gorgeous. Like Olive Kitteridge, Anything Is Possible reads like a novel constructed out of linked stories. In fact, it's hard to know exactly what to call this — a novel or a short story collection. In any case, these stories are animated (栩栩如生) by Strout's signature themes: class humiliation, loneliness, spiritual and, sometimes, reawakening. When Strout is really on her game, as she is here, you feel like you've been carefully lowered into the unquiet depths of quiet lives.

    Strout began working on Anything Is Possible at the same time she was writing her novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was published last year. Lucy, a dirt-poor child who grows up to become a celebrated writer, floats in and out of these interlocking stories. Some characters catch a glimpse of her being interviewed on TV; one travels to see her at a bookstore. An older Lucy even appears “in the flesh” in one story when she returns home to the small town in rural Illinois where most of these tales are set to visit her troubled brother; but Anything Is Possible also stands on its own. Indeed, a few of the characters here would be ticked off if they thought their stories depended in any way on that Barton girl. Strout's writerly eye works like a 360 degree camera, so that a character or place that's on the margins of one tale takes center stage in a later one. This technique sounds contrived, but Strout carries it off lightly.

    ①One of the most powerful stories here is called “Dottie's Bed & Breakfast,” which is an establishment we readers glimpse earlier in the book. Dottie desires to be middle-class and she harbors a grudge (怨恨) against life because she's had to rent out rooms to make a living. Dottie also possesses a sensitive nose for sniffing out the lower-class origins of some of her guests.

    ②“Shoes always gave you away,” comments a woman in a story called “Cracked” about a houseguest's too-high cork wedges(坡跟鞋). And, in the final story here, called “Gift,” a once-poor man made good says, “The sense of apology did not go away, it was a tiring thing to carry.”

    ③But, back to Dottie. When an elderly doctor and his wife come to stay at her guesthouse, Dottie bonds over tea with the wife, Shelley, who shares a story about a long-ago social humiliation.

    ④At breakfast the next morning, however, Shelley obviously regrets that confidence and becomes the Doctor's wife again. She freezes Dottie out and puts her back in her place as the inn-keep.

    There's comic satisfaction in seeing Dottie secretly spitting into the breakfast jam, but the more profound rewards of this story have to do with its recognition of the many varieties of human insecurity — or, as Lucy Barton herself more bluntly puts it, the many ways “people are always looking to feel superior to someone else.”

    Other stories have to do with sexual shame, or with the tragic ways close neighbors or family members misread each other; but I'm making Anything Is Possible sound too grim when, in fact, so many of these stories end in an understated (低调的) gesture of forgiveness. Strout is in that special company of writers like Richard Ford, Stewart O'Nan and Richard Russo, who write simply about ordinary lives and, in so doing, make us readers see the beauty of both their worn and rough surfaces and what lies beneath.

    Would you buy a car that released calming smells into the air when you are stuck in heavy traffic? Would you buy a robot that smells like a human being?

    Many people have seen the 3-D computer-made environments of virtual reality (VR). Now these virtual worlds will not just look and sound real. Researchers have created VR environments that even smell like the real things. With the new technology, users open a virtual door and step into a new environment, like a rainforest. After they enter this virtual world, special equipment releases forest-like smells into the air to make the experience seem more real.

    Suzanne Fisher-Murray said, “it is a really wonderful experience that you have because you're exploring this environment and you have smells with it.”

    In the United States, Smell-O-Vision was designed to provide smells during the showing of a movie. The Smell-0-Vision system was once popular in the 1960s. Now, Emanuela Maggioni says it is close to becoming popular again. “The connection with emotions, memories, and…the sense of smell,” Maggioni said. “It is unbelievable what we can do with technology.”

    The uses for smell technology are not just limited to films and the performing arts. Researchers showed a computer program where users could imagine themselves driving a car. The system included a special smell-spraying machine. Dmitrijs Dmitrenko said, “We want to deliver the smell of lavender（薰衣草）every time the person drives over the speed limit. We choose lavender because it's a very calming smell.”

    Scientists are experimenting with smell instead of sounds or image-based alerts on telecommunications equipment. And businesses are already using smell to influence people's behavior. “Not only.…in stores…But on the other side, you can create and stimulate immediate buying,” Maggioni said. “So you're in a library and you smell coffee and actually you are unconsciously having the need to drink a coffee.”

    College graduation brings both the satisfaction of academic achievement and the expectation of a well-paid job. But for 6, 000 graduates at San Jose State this year, there's uncertainty as they enter one of the worst job markets in decades. Ryan Stewart has a freshly-minted (新兴的) degree in religious studies, but no job prospects.

    "You look at everybody's parents and neighbours, and they're getting laid off and don't have jobs," said Stewart. "Then you look at the young people just coming into the workforce... it's just scary."

    When the class of 2003 entered college, the future never looked brighter. But in the four years they've been here, the world outside has changed dramatically.

    "Those were the exciting times, lots of dot-com opportunities, exploding offers, students getting top dollar with lots of benefits," said Cheryl Allmen-Vinnidge of the San Jose State Career Center. "Times have changed. It's a new market."

    Cheryl Allmen-Vinnidge ought to know. She runs the San Jose State Career Center, sort of a crossroads between college and the real world. Allmen-Vinnidge says students who do find jobs after college have done their homework.

    "The typical graduate who does have a job offer started working on it two years ago. They've postured (定位) themselves well during the summer. They've had several internships (实习)," she said. And they've majored in one of the few fields that are still hot, like chemical engineering, accounting, or nursing, where average starting salaries have actually increased over last year. Other popular fields (like information systems management, computer science, and political science) have seen big declines in starting salaries.

    Ryan Stewart (he had hoped to become a teacher) may just end up going back to school. "I'd like to teach college some day and that requires more schooling, which would be great in a bad economy," he said.

    To some students, a degree may not be a ticket to instant wealth. For now, they can only hope its value will increase over time.