When I was a kid, I always used to wonder how in the world my father worked outside in the winter without a coat. It could be minus 20 degrees centigrade and there'd be Dad, removing snow, or perhaps chopping(砍) some wood — his coat thrown aside — wearing a shirt, a cap, and a pair of gloves.

    “Aren't you cold, Dad?” I'd ask. “No,” Dad would reply. “I'm not cold—working too hard to be cold.”

    Many times I wondered whether my father was an extremely tough man, or whether he was foolish.

    One time when I was quite young, perhaps five or so, I went ice fishing with Dad. It was a bright, clear day—and bitterly cold.

    After we'd been out on the ice for a little while, my feet started getting cold.

    “Daddy, my feet are cold.” I said.

    “Yeah, it's cold out here today,” he replied.

    “Tell you what,” he said. “Walk around. Make some circles in the snow. See how many different patterns you can make. That will get your feet warm.”

    I was just a little girl at the time but I remember thinking, “How in the world will walking around in the snow make my feet warm? Dad must be out of mind.”

    But he was my father, after all. I made circles in the snow. I made squares. Pretty soon I was having so much fun making patterns in the snow. I forgot about my feet being cold.

    Now, all these years later, I know, too, from personal experience how my father was able to take his coat off and work outside in the winter wearing just a shirt, a cap and gloves. Because I do it, too. “Aren't you cold?” my husband asked one winter day. “No,” I replied. “I'm not cold—working too hard to be cold.”

    I hope my husband has decided I'm both tough and smart. But I guess quite a bit of the time he thinks I'm foolish.

    Wherever Dad is on that great big farm in the sky—I'm sure he can't help but smile whenever I take my coat off while I'm working outside in the winter.

    It seems that no one can live a happy life without friendship. While a great number of people expect others to be their friends, they don't give friendship back. That is why some friendships don't last long. To have a friend, you must learn to be one. You must learn to treat your friend the way you want your friend to treat you. Learning to be a good friend means learning three rules: be honest; be generous; be understanding.

    Honesty is where a good friendship starts. Friends must be able to trust one another. If you do not tell the truth, people usually find out. If a friend finds out that you haven't been honest, you may lose your friend's trust. Good friends always depend on one another to speak and act honestly.

    Generosity means sharing and sharing makes a friendship grow. You do not have to give your lunch money or your clothes. Naturally you will want to share your ideas and feelings. These can be very valuable to a friend. They tell your friend what is important to you. By sharing them, you help your friend know better.

    Sooner or later everyone needs understanding and help with each other. Something may go wrong at school. Talking about the problem can make it easier to solve. Turning to a friend can be a first step in solving the problem. So to be a friend you must listen and understand. You must try to put yourself in your friend's place so that you can understand the problem better.

    No two friendships are exactly alike. But all true friendships have three things in common. If you plan to keep your friends, you must practice honesty, generosity and understanding.

    Japan has made a lot of noise in recent years about removing the traditional view that women should stay at home while men go out to work. So it was shocking when, on August 7th, Tokyo Medical University (TMU), a distinguished medical school, admitted marking down the test scores of female applicants to keep the ratio of women in each class below 30%.

    Their defence was that women are more likely to drop out to marry and have children. To judge female applicants to medical school purely on their academic performance would leave Japan with a shortage of doctors, they said. The admission has caused outrage.

    "Doctoring has long been a male field. But it is not the only one. Discrimination is common in banks and trading firms, where stamina (耐力) and loyalty, qualities somehow associated with men, are prized," says Mari Miura, a political scientist at Sophia University. All this embarrasses a government that has promised to make women "shine". The policy seems based on the need for more workers rather than on genuine concern for women.

    Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, says he wants to bring millions more women into the workforce to make up for a labour shortfall caused by its ageing and declining population. In the field of politics, the record under Mr. Abe's premiership (首相任期) is disappointing. Just two members of his 20-strong cabinet are women, including Seiko Noda, in charge of women's rights. Ms. Noda, who makes little secret of her ambition to beat Mr. Abe in a leadership contest next month, has just published a book called "Grab the Future", her public declaration for pulling Japan into line with "global standards". She has almost no chance of winning.

    The Healthy Habits Survey shows that only about one third of American seniors have correct habits. Here are some findings and expert advice.

    ⒈How many times did you brush your teeth yesterday?

Finding: A full 33% of seniors brush their teeth only once a day.

Step: Remove the 300 types of bacteria in your mouth each morning with a battery-operated toothbrush. Brush gently for 2 minutes, at least twice a day.

    ⒉How many times did you wash your hands or bathe yesterday?

Finding: Seniors, on average, bathe fewer than 3 days a week. And nearly 30% wash their hands only 4 times a day—half of the number doctors recommend.

Step: We touch our faces around 3,000 times a day—often inviting germs(病菌）to enter our mouth, nose, and eyes. Use toilet paper to avoid touching the door handle. And, most important, wash your hands often with running water and soap for 20 seconds.

    ⒊How often do you think about fighting germs?

    Finding: Seniors are not fighting germs as well as they should.

    Step: Be aware of germs. Do you know it is not your toilet but your kitchen sponge (海绵）that can carry more germs than anything else? To kill these germs, keep your sponge in the microwave for 10 seconds.

    I was shopping in the supermarket when I heard a young voice.

    "Mom, come here！There's this lady here my size！"

    The mother rushed to her son；then she turned to me to apologize. I smiled and told her, "It's okay."

    Then I talked to the boy, "Hi, I'm Darryl Kramer. How are you?"

    He studied me from head to toe，and asked, "Are you a little mommy？"

    "Yes, I have a son," I answered.

    "Why are you so little？" he asked. "It's the way I was born," I said. "Some people are little. Some are tall. I'm just not going to grow any bigger." After I answered his other questions, I shook the boy's hand and left.

    My life as a little person is filled with stories like that. I enjoy talking to children and explaining why I look different from their parents.

    It takes only one glance to see my uniqueness. I stand three feet nine inches tall. I was born an achondroplasia dwarf(侏儒). Despite this, I did all the things other kids did when I was growing up.

    I didn't realize how short I was until I started school. Some kids joked on me, calling me dwarsf. Then I knew. I began to hate the first day of school each year. New students would always stare at me as I struggled to climb the school bus stairs.

    But I learned to smile and accept the fact that I was going to be noticed my whole life. I decided to make my uniqueness an advantage rather than a disadvantage. What I lacked in height, I made up for in personality.

    I'm 47 now, and the stares have not diminished as I've grown older. People are amazed when they see me driving. I try to keep a good attitude. When people are rude, I remind myself, "Look what else I have－a great family, nice friends. "

    It's the children's questions that make my life special. I enjoy answering their questions. My hope is that I will encourage them to accept their peers(a person of the same age, class, position, etc.), whatever size and shape they come in, and treat them with respect.

"Assume you are wrong." The advice came from Brian Nosek, a psychology professor, who was offering a strategy for pursuing better science.

To understand the context for Nosek's advice, we need to take a step back to the nature of science itself. You see despite what many of us learned in elementary school, there is no single scientific method. Just as scientific theories become elaborated and change, so do scientific methods.

But methodological reform hasn't come without some fretting and friction. Nasty things have been said by and about methodological reformers. Few people like having the value of their life's work called into question. On the other side, few people are good at voicing criticisms in kind and constructive ways. So, part of the challenge is figuring out how to bake critical self-reflection into the culture of science itself, so it unfolds as a welcome and integrated part of the process, and not an embarrassing sideshow.

What Nosek recommended was a strategy for changing the way we offer and respond to critique. Assuming you are right might be a motivating force, sustaining the enormous effort that conducting scientific work requires. But it also makes it easy to interpret criticisms as personal attacks. Beginning, instead, from the assumption you are wrong, a criticism is easier to interpret as a constructive suggestion for how to be less wrong—a goal that your critic presumably shares.

One worry about this approach is that it could be demoralizing for scientists. Striving to be less wrong might be a less effective motivation than the promise of being right. Another concern is that a strategy that works well within science could backfire when it comes to communicating science with the public. Without an appreciation for how science works, it's easy to take uncertainty or disagreements as marks against science, when in fact they reflect some of the very features of science that make it our best approach to reaching reliable conclusions about the world. Science is reliable because it responds to evidence: as the quantity and quality of our evidence improves, our theories can and should change, too.

Despite these worries, I like Nosek's suggestion because it builds in cognitive humility along with a sense that we can do better. It also builds in a sense of community—we're all in the same boat when it comes to falling short of getting things right.

Unfortunately, this still leaves us with an untested hypothesis （假说）: that assuming one is wrong can change community norms for the better, and ultimately support better science and even, perhaps, better decisions in life. I don't know if that's true. In fact, I should probably assume that it's wrong. But with the benefit of the scientific community and our best methodological tools, I hope we can get it less wrong, together.