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STANFORD UNIVERSITY

    I was born in Thailand, where I feel at home. I am used to jumping on to a song taow (red taxi), and squeezing (挤过) in between two strangers. I am used to bargaining at the market to get a shirt that I like. I love telling bilingual (双语的) jokes and I am used to the surprised looks I get from the Thais when I can speak their language fluently.

    Every two years my family goes to America for the summer, and every two years my world is turned upside down. The prices of everything are three times what they were in Thailand, but there is the sweet drink Dr. Pepper! And Bluebell Ice-cream! And everything you could imagine! I am amazed at it all, but the biggest change for me is the people. There are white people everywhere. I am not tall but average (中等的), my yellow hair is no longer out of place, and speaking English no longer draws looks. I should feel comfortable. I'm not out of place anymore, and nobody is looking at me, but I feel like they are. Now I feel out of place and different. I'm not used to giving people handshakes and hugs when I meet them for the first time. I get looks when I have trouble figuring out how much money to pay. I know different music, different places, and different fashion. I can't understand these people who have never left their town or city.

    Still, there are quite a few perks about living overseas. I get to meet people from all over the world, and I know how to adjust to (适应) different cultures and places. I have been to places most people see only in geography books. Still, being so different makes it hard to know who you are. I'm not Thai, but I am not American either. I am a mix of both cultures, a third culture kid.

    Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music. He created electronic tools so that people could use computers as musical instruments. He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played.

    In 1957, Max Mathews wrote the first computer program that enabled a computer to create sound and play it back. At the time, he was working as an engineer at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. His computer program was called Music. It enabled a large IBM computer to play a seventeen-second piece of music that he had written.

    The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in seventeen seconds. For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed. He later said that the sound quality of the music notes was not great, but the technical importance of the music was huge.

    The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke visited Bell Laboratories in the 1960s. He heard a computer “sing” the song "Daisy Bell" on devices and programs developed by Max Mathews andother engineers. Clarke noted this technology in his book “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was later made into a movie.

    Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program. He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios.

    Max Mathews had a long and productive career. He worked with composers like John Cage and Edgard Varese. He helped create a center for research in computer music in Paris. And he taught at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in Stanford University in California.

    Mathews believed modern musicians were not making full use of the power of computer music. He said a violin always sounds like a violin, but with a computer, the way a violin sounds is unlimited. He said he did not want computer sounds to replace live music. But he said he hoped laptop computers would one day be considered serious instruments

    Shop with Your Doc is part of a broader and still growing movement in US medicine to shift the focus away from simply treating disease toward caring for the whole person. It is meant to help people make educated, healthy choices one grocery cart at a time. Across the country, hospitals are setting up food banks and medical schools are putting cooking classes on the curriculum. Nonprofits are connecting medical centers with community resources to ensure that low-income Americans have access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

    For centuries, Western medicine's mission was to cure disease. But over the past generation, two generation, two significant trends are of concern to the medical community, says Timothy Harlan, executive director of Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans. Healthcare costs began to soar (激增), and relatively inexpensive, poor-quality food became more common. "There's a very straightforward link between people improving their diets and improving the condition that they have," Dr. Harlan says.

    The connection drove the medical and nonprofit communities to rethink their approach to health. What emerged was the concept of the "social determinants of health"—the notion of taking into account the biological, physical, and socioeconomic circumstances surrounding a patient. A healthy person isn't just someone who is free from disease, the theory goes; he or she also enjoys "a state of complete mental, physical and social well-being."

    The question the medical community now faces is how to get patients—especially low-income families—to recognize these determinants and make it possible for them to eat and live healthier. In Boston, medical experts responded by creating an on-site pantry (食品室) at Boston Medical Center. Since its founding in 2002, the pantry has evolved into a kind of nutrition center where primary care providers at BMC send patients for food. Today the pantry, which gets 95 percent of its stock from the Greater Boston Food bank, hosts free cooking classes and serves about 7,000 people a month. The Greater Boston Food Bank has also launched its own initiatives, striking partnerships with four community health centers across the state to offer free mobile produce markets. The organization also helped develop toolkits (软件包) that map local pantries, markets that accept government food vouchers, and other resources.

    At Tulane in New Orleans, Harlan is leading the development of a curriculum that combines medicine with the art of food preparation. His philosophy: Doctors who know their way around a kitchen are better at helping their patients. And empowering patients to take charge of their own diets is one way to help them deal with the incredible costs of health care, Harlan says. The curriculum has since been adopted at 35 medical schools around the United States. Chipping away at bad habits is a good place to start getting patients to think about the choices they make for themselves and their families, say Dr Maureen Villasenor, the Orange County pediatrician (儿科医生).

    Move over, helicopter parents. "Snowplow(扫雪机) parents" are the newest reflection of an intensive(强化的) parenting style that can include parents booking their adult children haircuts, texting their college kids to wake them up so they don't sleep through a test, and even calling their kids' employers.

    Helicopter parenting, the practice of wandering anxiously near one's children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some rich mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines moving ahead, clearing any difficulties in their children's path to success, so they don't have to suffer failure, frustration(挫折)or lose opportunities.

    It starts early, when parents get on wait lists for excellent preschools before their babies are born and try to make sure their kids never do anything that may frustrate them. It gets more intense when school starts: running forgotten homework to school or calling a coach to request that their children make the team.

    Rich parents may have more time and money to devote to making sure their children don't ever meet with failure, but it's not only rich parents practicing snowplow parenting. This intensive parenting has become the most welcome way to raise children, regardless of income, education, or race.

    Yes it's a parent's job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren't mature enough to do so. That's why parents hide certain toys from babies to avoid getting angry or take away a teenager's car keys until he finishes his college applications.

    But snowplow parents can take it too far, some experts say. If children have never faced a difficulty, what happens when they get into the real world?

    "Solving problems, taking risks and overcoming frustration are key life skills," many child development experts say, "and if parents don't let their children experience failure, the children don't acquire them."

When learning a new language, speakers often have non-native accents. Linguistic research suggests such accent is shaped by the speaker's first language that they learned when growing up. Schepens' team's research puts new light on just how strong these effects can be.

There're similar researches from other scientists, but Schepens' team analyzed a data set of more than 50,000 adults, who learned Dutch as their second or third languages. Besides, these adults came from more than 60 different first language backgrounds. These data were collected through a state exam administered by the Dutch government for foreigners that enter Holland. The exam rated each test taker's Dutch speaking proficiency(熟练，水平)

The team found that about half of the individual difference in the proficiency of learners could be accounted for by a handful of reasons: the learner's education and sex (women had higher scores than men), the learner's age when they arrived in Holland, the time they spent in Holland, and the learner's first language. This last reason was the most prominent one since it accounts for 50 percent of the explained difference in learners' proficiency.

What leads to this? Working with professor Hout, Schepens's team studied the linguistic similarity between Dutch and the 62 first languages spoken by different learners in the database. The huge majority—about 80 percent—of the effect of the language background was explained by linguistic similarity. Of the test takers who grew up speaking Arabic, only about 5 percent scored higher in Dutch speaking proficiency than the worst 50 percent of the test takers that grew up speaking German.

"Our results suggest this is largely due to the fact that German shares many linguistic characteristics with Dutch, but Arabic does not," says Schepens.

"This suggests a large part of the non-nativeness of a learner is simply due to the language they grew up with, and this reason is entirely out of their control," says Florian Jaeger." The result can play a part in language teaching."