You may have heard of the American Dream, an ideal that has powered the hopes of Americans for generations.

    It began as a belief that the US was a land of opportunity, and that anyone could achieve success through hard work. At times, the dream has referred to home ownership, a good job, retirement security or each generation doing better than the last.

    Yet today, this concept seems to have greatly changed. As Time magazine pointed out, quite different from the older generation, many Millennials (the generation born after 1980) redefine(重新定义) the American Dream as “day-to-day control of your life”. They “prize job mobility, flexible schedules, any work that is more interesting than typing, and the ability to travel”, said the magazine.

    Home ownership, once the cornerstone of the American Dream, is becoming a smaller priority for this generation. Meanwhile, nearly 40% of them choose travel as part of their dream. And entrepreneurship(创业) is a rising favorite, as nearly 26% of Millennials consider self-employment as part of their dream.

    So what has led to this huge change?

    Many point fingers at the poor economy. “Modern young Americans seem bound to face a world stamped by ever narrowing opportunity and social stagnation(停滞),”noted The Daily Beast.

    “The rate of 16-to 24-year-olds out of school and out of work is unusually high at 15%. Many college graduates have taken jobs that don't require a degree,” Time reported.

    The magazine worries that these difficulties may lead to a lost generation who are “unable to ever truly find their feet on the corporation's ladder”.

    Dan Kadlec, a reporter of Time, sees Millennials as resetting their expectations.”This situation is different for young adults today,” he wrote. “A true American dream has to feel attainable, and many Millennias are feeling they can only attain a day-today lifestyle that suits them.”

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    Two weeks ago, Ray Johnstone, an elderly man living alone in South Australia, posted a classified advertisement in search of a friend. Specifically, he was on the hunt for a fishing partner, as he no longer had anyone to share his hobby with. “I'm a widowed retired man who is looking for a fishing mate,” he wrote on Gumtree, “My previous fishing mate is now deceased. He will never accompany me to go fishing. I am a land-based fisherman. I have all the gear for all types of fish that is required for land-based fishing.”

    Like all of us, 22-year-old Mati Batsinilas was touched by the man's advertisement, so he reached out to him and arranged an outing. Rather than simply spend the day with Johnstone somewhere local, however, he and his family offered to take him on an all-inclusive weekend fishing trip of Stradbroke Island in Queensland. And, as expected, they had a good time. “Whilst on the island we covered four-wheel driving, site-seeing, fishing, swimming, chats with the locals and the best of all... just relaxing and chatting like mates,” Batsinilas wrote in a Facebook post. “Once you reach a level of maturity in life, age should only be a number. My respect for Johostone is obviously very high, but I treated him exactly the way I would have treated one of my 22-year-old mates.”

    Fortunately, it sounds like Johnstone won't have to place more classified advertisements any time soon. In addition to finding a friend, the pensioner has become a star on the Internet, with many social media users voicing their interests in meeting the now-famous fisherman.

Evening Workshops

    Optional evening workshops will be held at small restaurants or other meeting places near the conference hotel. Meals and other costs are not included but are also optional. Locations will be announced at the conference site. Workshops are very loosely organized and most represent discussions that have been held at Society for Economic Botany (SEB) meetings over a series of years.

    Workshop 1: Student Network

    Date: Wednesday evening, Feb. 5^th

    Chairs: Hugo de Boer and Arika Virapongse Sponsor: Society for Economic Botany

    Description: Student members of the SEB hold a networking mixer each year in order to meet each other and to become familiar with a variety of educational programs and faculty advisors(大学指导老师). Faculty members who are part of training programs are encouraged to join the mixer to meet and talk with students.
     Workshop 2: Botanical Film Making
    Date : Wednesday evening, Feb. 5^th Chair : David Strauch

    Sponsor : University of Hawaii

    Description : Digit al film making is a particularly useful tool of linking cultural information to recognizable plants. This workshop is aimed towards increasing the quality of material recorded by giving participants greater control over the medium. We will cover technical aspects (e.g. camera settings, audio), technical aspects (framing, lighting, focus), and some ways of presenting the material. Experienced filmmakers are encouraged to attend, and participants are welcome to bring their own camera equipment.

    Workshop 3: Collections for Botany

    — Collections Development and Management Date: Friday evening, Feb. 7^th

    Chair: Jan Salick

    Sponsor: Society for Economic Botany

    Description: SEB is a network of researchers who have been developing standards for the development of collections of artifacts, plant samples and related materials. Participants discuss successes, problems, and funding sources for solving management issues.

    A year after graduation, I was offered a position teaching a writing class. Teaching was a profession I had never seriously considered, though several of my stories had been published. I accepted the job without hesitation, as it would allow me to wear a tie and go by the name of Mr. Davis. My father went by the same name, and I liked to imagine people getting the two of us confused. "Wait a minute," someone might say, "are you talking about Mr. Davis the retired man, or Mr. Davis the respectable scholar?"

    The position was offered at the last minute, and I was given two weeks to prepare, a period I spent searching for briefcase and standing before my full-length mirror, repeating the words, "Hello, class. I'm Mr. Davis." Sometimes I would give myself an aggressive voice. Sometimes I would sound experienced. But when the day eventually came, my nerves kicked in and the true Mr. Davis was there. I sounded not like a thoughtful professor, but rather a 12-year-old boy.

    I arrived in the classroom with paper cards designed in the shape of maple leaves. I had cut them myself out of orange construction paper. I saw nine students along a long table. I handed out the cards, and the students wrote down their names and fastened them to their breast pockets as I required.

    "All right then,'' I said." Okay, here we go." Then I opened my briefcase and realized that I had never thought beyond this moment. I had been thinking that the students would be the first to talk, offering their thoughts and opinions on the events of the day. I had imagined that I would sit at the edge of the desk, overlooking a forest of hands. Every student would shout. "Calm down, you'll all get your turn. One at a time, one at a time!"

    A terrible silence ruled the room, and seeing no other opinions, I asked the students to pull out their notebooks and write a brief essay related to the theme of deep disappointment.

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."