People are being lured(引诱)onto Facebook with the promise of a fun and free service without realizing they're paying for it by giving up large amounts of personal information. Facebook then attempts to make money by selling their data to advertisers that want to send targeted messages.

    Most Facebook users don't realize this is happening. Even if they know what the company is up to, they still have no idea what they're paying for Facebook, because people don't really know what their personal details are worth.

    The biggest problem, however, is that the company keeps changing the rules. Early on, you could keep everything private. That was the great thing about Facebook—you could create your own little private network. Last year, the company changed its privacy rules so that many things—your city, your photo, your friends' names—were set, by default(默认), to be shared with everyone on the Internet.

    According to Facebook's vice-- president Elliot Schrage, the company is simply making changes to improve its service, and if people don't share information, they have a “less satisfying experience.”

    Some critics think this is more about Facebook looking to make more money. Its original business model, which involved selling ads and putting them at the side of the page, totally failed. Who wants to look at ads when they're online connecting with their friends?

    The privacy issue has already landed Facebook in hot water in Washington. In April, Senator(议员) Charles Schumer called on Facebook to change its privacy policy. He also urged the Commission to set guidelines for social-networking sites. “I think the senators rightly communicated that we had not been clear about what the new products were and how people could choose to use them or not to use them,” Schrage admits.

    I suspect that whatever Facebook has done so far to invade our privacy, it's only the beginning, which is why I'm considering deactivating(撤销)my account. Facebook is a handy site, but I'm upset by the idea that my information is in the hands of people I don't know. That is too high a price to pay.

    In life, we will succeed and fail often for reasons that are entirely out of our control. For instance, we can be incredibly nice and love someone deeply, and they may not love us back. We can work harder than anyone else in the office and still not be promoted to management. We can eat healthy food, exercise and stay away from alcohol and cigarettes, and still get sick.

    The bottom line is that life is not fair.

    That is a tough pill to swallow for many of us. As a result, some people shut down after being hit by even one unfair blow from life. They can't handle the fact that our efforts don't always get the results that we expect. But if we let life's unfairness defeat us, we will never receive the beautiful blessings (幸事) that life has in store for us.

    For example, my first marriage ended in divorce. To me, it felt very unfair. I had worked hard to be a good wife and mother. However, no matter what I did, I could not make the relationship work.

    I could have been shut down by that experience. I could have decided that if one person didn't appreciate me as a wife, then no one would. I could have given up. But I knew that I wanted to be married. I knew that I wanted to experience traditional family life. So I didn't let one seemingly unfair experience stop me from believing that I could one day be happily married. And then one day, I met this kind, thoughtful, generous man with whom I now have a wonderful friendship and marriage. But that wouldn't have happened if I had decided to give up after one failed marriage.

    What I've learned over the years is that we can do all the things that deserve a good outcome, but get bad things in return instead.

    When we are faced with life's seeming unfairness, our faith needs to jump in. When life doesn't go according to plan, we have to let go of the outcome that we are looking forward to and keep trying, working hard and doing the right thing. Please don't be discouraged. Accept that life is neither fair nor straightforward. And by knowing that if we remain confident, we can drive our unfair experiences away and use them for our benefit.

    Elizabeth Blackwell was born in England in 1821, and moved to New York City when she was ten years old. One day she decided that she wanted to become a doctor. That was nearly impossible for a woman in the middle of the nineteenth century. After writing many letters asking for admission(录取) to medical schools, she was finally accepted by a doctor in Philadelphia. She was so determined that she taught school and gave music lessons to get money for the cost of schooling.

    In 1849, after graduation from medical school, she decided to further her education in Paris. She wanted to be a surgeon(外科医师), but a serious eye problem forced her to give up the idea.

    Upon returning to the United States, she found it difficult to start her own practice because she was a woman. By 1857 Elizabeth and her sister, also a doctor, along with another woman doctor, managed to open a new hospital, the first for women and children Besides being the first woman physician and founding her own hospital, she also set up the first medical school for women.

    Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small, tightly knit(联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech, independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.

    Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialization, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalization and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

    At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have fewer languages spoken by many people while hot, wet zones have more, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 Languages: the Americas about 1,000, Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number(中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

    Now over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction(消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. None of these seems to have chances of survival.

    I never planned to be a teacher. I was headed for a law school, for a real career. Teaching was something to "get out of my system". I would teach a couple of years and then go to get a real job. After the first couple of years, I promised myself I would leave if I didn't love my job any more. Twenty-nine years later, that day still has not come.

    So, why do I stay? I stay because I laugh and learn every day. The children are funny, insightful, and honest. If my shoes don't match my outfit, they tell me. If my argument that Invisible Man is an important twentieth century classics doesn't convince them, they tell me.

    I stay because every single day is different. Some days, my lessons are great, and I have classes of students who are engaged in reading, writing and thinking. Some days, my lessons fall flat, and I realize that I need to start from scratch — even after 29 years.

    I stay because I love to see the children realize that they have learned something — whether it's how to craft an argumentative thesis sentence or how to understand the effect of repetition in The Declaration of Independence. I love to see the children write well; I love the feeling of reading a well-argued essay, and I love smiling as I write a final "Awesome job!" on a paper on which a student has worked hard.

    I stay because what I've learned in 29 years is that I do have a "real" job — the most real job there is. It's the one that leads to other jobs, that helps to create good thinkers who go on to be productive in our society, and that supports our community as it grows and times change. My job is among the ones that matter most.

Tips for Writing Short Stories

    I was reading an article with David Vann's top tips for writing short stories -- he is a published writer, his most famous book being, "Legends of a Suicide." First of all he stats that there are no rules, but if he were forced to create rules for short stores, then they would be something like the following.

    He says there is no room for anything that is not related to the protagonist -- the main character of the story -- or indeed the problem of the protagonist. He makes it clear that the protagonist must have a problem, and this problem must divide the protagonist: he doesn't know what he is going to do to solve the problem. There is no point, then, in having a short story about a man who says he is hungry and then just goes to the shops to buy food. Nothing exciting happens. But if the man is hungry and he has a child who is hungry, then he has a problem; who does he give the food to?

    There should also be an antagonist, that is, somebody who works against the protagonist. The antagonist should ideally have the same problem as the protagonist but will have a totally different way of looking at it. This presents the possibility of having battles in the short story.

    Furthermore, the antagonist and the protagonist must know each other. But because they are viewing the same problem from different angles, they will probably drive each other crazy.

    Finally, the short story has to acknowledge a change in the protagonist. We must then, as a reader, see how the character will continue their life differently as a result of the events of the story. There is no point in going back to the beginning; the short story is a waste of time if nothing actually happens that is significant.

    It is very hard to create a character whom a reader cares about and a plot that a reader is interested in with just a few hundred words. But it is possible: Edgar Allen Poe, Anton Chekhov, and JG Ballard -- amongst many others -- have proved repeatedly that short stores can be little pieces of perfection. The best don't just see the protagonist change; they see the reader change, too.