For kids and many adults,a San Diego vacation means theme parks and other attractions.Before heading to a park,call or check its website for updated hours of operation; many parks have seasonal or holiday hours.Ticket prices listed here are for general admission（入场费）,single-day use only.

Sea World San Diego

    A 6-minute ride called Journey to Atlantis,which is to open in late May,tells the legend of the island nation. After the ride of Greek fishing boats,folks can visit a new exhibit of dolphins,which have not been on display at the park since 1998.

    DETAILS: General admission is $46.95 for adults,$37.95 for children aged 3-9,free for children 2 and younger. 1-800-380-3203 or www.seaworld.com.

San Diego Zoo

    There's not much in the way of new attractions.The zoo has a new panda cub（幼兽）,Mei Sheng.Nighttime Zoo, a program popular with families,starts June 26.

    DETAILS: General admission is $21 for adults,$14 for children aged 3-11,free for children 2 and younger. 1-619-234-3153 or www.Sandiegozoo.com

Maritime（海的）Museum of San Diego

    The HMS Surprise,the 18th-century British warship featured in the film Master and Commander,is on exhibit through Nov.30.

    DETAILS: The ship is available for tours from 9 am to 8 pm daily.Admission is $8 for adults,$6 for seniors and children aged 13-17,$5 for kids aged 6-12,and free for kids 5 and younger.1-619-234-9153 or www.sdmaritime.org.

Old Town Trolley Tours

    Visiting relatives or friends in San Diego? They can get a hometown pass and ride for free with your paid admission.

    DETAILS: The main ticket booth（售票亭）is in Old Town at 4010 Twiggs St.Hours are from 9 am to 5 pm, daily $25.www.historictours.com.

    One of the problems with passwords (密码) is that users forget them. In an effort to remember them, people use simple things like their dog's names and their birth dates — anything that will give them a clue to remember what their passwords are. But for a hacker(黑客), this is the same as locking your door and leaving the key under the doormat(门口地垫).

    To create a safe password that is easy to remember, follow these simple steps:

    You should never use personal information as part of your password. It is very easy for someone to guess things like your last name and your pet's name.

    With the help of today's computing power, it doesn't take long to try every word in the dictionary and find your password, so you'd better not use real words for your password.

    You can make a password much safer by mixing different types of characters. Use some capital letters along with small letters, numbers and even special characters such as & and %.

    In order not to create a password using different character types that is hard to remember or using a word from the dictionary, you can use a "passphrase(代码)". Think of a sentence from a song or a poem that you like and create a password using the first letters from each word. For example, instead of just setting a password like "yr$1Hes", you can take a sentence such as "I like to read the about.com Internet network security website" and make it a password like "il2rta!nsw" by using the number "2" for the word "to" and using "!" in place of "Internet". You can use many characters types and create a safe password that is hard to guess, but much easier for you to remember.

    SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND — Student engagement (参与) is a goal in schools everywhere. A teacher in the Washington suburbs has found a way to engage and motivate students — by ringing rhythm and fun to mathematics. The approach works well especially for students who speak English as a second language.

Making math fun

The voice heard in the video belongs to mathematics teacher Jake Scott. Most of the performers are his students. "I use rap because it is something that appeals to the students, and also because music aids memory," Scott explains.

    Scott started using rap videos three years ago. So far he has produced nine, including

Scott started using rap videos three years ago. So far he has produced nine, including YouTube favorites Triangle Experts and Quadratic Formulatic, which have been viewed tens of thousands of times. "It is fun and the whole process is something that students appreciate," Scott says.

    Empowering students

    Blair High School principal Renay Johnson is a big supporter. She even appears in Scott's latest video, Undefined Expressions.

"Mr. Scott is very motivating and engaging for students," Johnson notes. "He enjoys what he does. As you know he engages students and mathematics through music. But he is also our wrestling coach. He also sponsors National Honor Society. And he is also a director of after school sports academy. I am lucky to have him here as a teacher."

    Scott was recognized as an outstanding educator last year by the Montgomery County Council. He was also honored as 2011 teacher of the year by an African-American civil rights organization.

    Jake Scott says he wants mathematics to be something that students look forward to learning. And he says the results will help them on a path to college and a career.

    Five thousand square meters of old damaged cars, motorcycles and boats fill this junkyard. For a casual onlooker, this might be a very sad sight. But for Andy, it's a real treasure. “I've been a junk hoarder(囤积者)for my whole life and I like fixing up what shouldn't be thrown away. Around 200 old cars end up in this junkyard every week. Some of them are sold for parts, others get repaired, and still others are beyond repair.”

    His father Bobby started the business some 50 years ago and still spends every morning there. The father and son have very different approaches to their work. They got a Dean cab that was getting thrown away and that was the father's project, which Andy did not want him to do.“ He did basically the opposite of everything I told him and I think he did it just to make me mad. He dumped a ton of money into this car, but in the end it wouldn't run.” Andy said jokingly.

    The unusual family business attracted the attention of a TV crew. That's how the show Janka Empire came to be featured on a network of the Discovery Channel. This show, five years of shooting, five seasons and 60 episodes(集), is popular. “There are hundreds of junkyards throughout the United States. I think what's interesting is that it is a family business. My father and I started the business and we joke very well back and forth and I think that's what people like. The cars that end up at the junkyard come out with endless surprises. See, this was a junk car and we restored it with a blown motor. Yet I don't get a chance to ride around it too often. Because despite its shining appearance, the noise of the engine is truly deafening and I worry my neighbors will not put up with it.”

A study of 500,000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015 showed that pop music had decreased in happiness and increased in sadness.

In a report published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers at the University of California examined hundreds of thousands of songs and classified them by their mood. "‘Happiness' is going down, 'sadness' is going up, and at the same time, the songs are becoming more 'danceable' and more 'party-like'," co-author Natalia L. Komarova told The Associated Press.

The study found songs in 2014 like Stay With Me by Sam Smith, Whispers by Passenger and Unmissable by Gorgon City have a "low happiness" trend. However, tracks from 1984 like Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen, "Would I Lie To You?" by Eurythmics and "Freedom" by Wham had a "high happiness" trend. "The public seems to prefer happier songs, even though more and more unhappy songs are being released each year," the researchers wrote.

Apart from the emotional trends, researchers discovered that dances and pop were the most successful styles of music and that there was a "clear downward" trend, with the popularity of rock beginning in the early 2000s. "So it looks like, while the overall mood is becoming less happy, people seem to want to forget it all and dance," Komarova wrote in an email.

It was also found that the "maleness" of songs—the frequency of male singers in popular music-had decreased during the last 30 years. "Successful songs are characterised by a larger percentage of female artists compared to all songs," they wrote.

This discovery appears at a time when the conversation around sex equality in the music industry is at its height, with more male artists and songwriters.

This was no ordinary class. The students who came together were all science or engineering professors at Cornell University. They had interrupted their research to accept an invitation to take part in an unusual experiment: "an interesting week of poetry". This class was part of a study to answer the questions: Why is science difficult for many non-science students? What can teachers learn about teaching if they take a class that is not in their field? 

The students in the poetry class listened to lectures and took notes. They had reading tasks and had to write three short papers. All students noticed one thing—the importance of spoken words. In science and engineering classes, the instructors put tables and drawings on the blackboard. But in this poetry class, the instructors just talked. They didn't write anything on the board.

The scientists and engineers noticed one similarity between science and poetry. In both subjects, students need to find layers of meaning. Some layers are simple, clean, and on the surface;   other layers are deeper and more difficult. This search for different levels of meaning doesn't happen much in undergraduate science classes, but it is important later, in a graduate school. And it is always important in humanities (人文学科).

Both the poetry instructors and their students learned something about teaching from this experience. One poetry instructor, for example, now sees the importance of using careful, clear definitions when he explains a poem. He also plans to be more informative as he teaches. Most of the scientists agreed on several points. Firstly, humanities classes might help science students to see patterns and decide which information is important. Secondly, the poetry class was fun. One engineer decided, "We need to change the way we teach engineering to make it an enjoyable experience for students."

But perhaps the most important result of the experience was this: all of the professors began to think about how they teach and how they can teach better.