Is beauty something always positive? Almost everyone thinks attractive people are happier and healthier, have better marriages and have more respectable jobs. Personal advisors give them better advice for finding jobs. Even judges are softer on attractive defendants. But in the executive（主管的） circle, beauty can become a disadvantage.

    While attractiveness is a positive factor for a man on his way up the executive ladder, it is harmful to a woman. Handsome male executives were considered having more honesty than plainer men; effort and ability were thought to lead to their success. Attractive female executives were considered to have less honesty than unattractive ones; their success was connected not with ability but with factors such as luck.

    All unattractive women executives were thought to have more honesty and to be more capable than the attractive female executives. Why are attractive women not thought to be able? An attractive woman has an advantage in traditionally female jobs, but an attractive woman in a traditionally manly position appears to lack the manly qualities required.

    This is true even in politics, “When the only clue is how he or she looks, people treat men and women differently, ” says Anne Bowman, who recently published a study on the effects of attractiveness on political candidates（候选人）. She asked 125 college students to rank two groups of photographs, one of men and one of women, in order of attractiveness. The students were told the photographs were of candidates for political offices. They were asked to rank them again, in the order they would vote for them.

    The results showed that attractive males completely defeated unattractive men, but the women who had ranked most attractive unchangeably received the fewest votes.

    I have an interest in photography and follow many photography Instagram accounts. Just like me, a friend of mine has a similar interest. The only difference is that he is a traveller and has taken hundreds of beautiful photos. He is really talented.

    Having returned from one trip, he shared some of his latest photos. Blown away by the images, I asked him why he hadn't started his own Instagram account of shots.

    “It's hard to start when there are already so many other websites devoted to travel photography with thousands of followers”, he explained. “What if I don't get any followers or what if people don't like my shots?”

    “Yet how will you ever know if you don't try?” I asked.

    He just shrugged and quickly changed the subject. I knew this feeling well. The feeling of self-doubt.

    That was when I was ten years old. I participated in a guitar competition. My grandfather helped me write a short speech to address the crowd and judges. But as the competition began, doubt consumed me and questions flooded my head. I thought to myself, “If I do say the speech, will the other girls laugh at me? Will the judges think I'm being silly for doing my own talk?”

    Then with a shake in my voice I said, “My name is Heidi Ceci. I live in St. Catharines and I play the guitar.” Nothing more... and nothing less.

    But the next girl walked up to the microphone and actually said a speech. I just stared at her in complete disbelief. No one seemed to be judging her for doing something different. In fact, they applauded louder for her than any other girl.

    From then on, I never let fear and doubt rule my decisions. Whatever happens, I always take chances and have a try.

    In an effort to avoid a coming storm, Ronnie Stewart and Krystal Stewart were running to their car in the parking lot of Refuge Church when they noticed two young homeless boys with their parents on the sidewalk. The Stewarts approached the boys' parents asking to take them home for a night for a bath and warm bed. They didn't know what their response would be, but as it turned out, they were thrilled.

    The Stewarts took the two boys, who are 1 and 2 years old, home, where they slept for over a straight 10 hours.,

    “I don't think they've ever slept in a bed before,” Krystal said.

    The next day, the Stewarts gave the parents their phone numbers and told them to call if they ever wanted the boys to have a warm bed.

    It wasn't long before the Stewarts headed to pick the boys up after receiving a call from their parents at midnight.

    They brought them back the next morning and a few hours later, they were greeted by the Department of Social Services and police officers, who had been discussing living arrangements for the boys with their parents.

    “They asked if we could take them, in. Next, thing I knew, the boys were in my backseat with my kids on their way home with us. They may not have known at that time, but our three kids were already calling the two young boys their brothers,” Krystal said.

    A few days later, the Stewarts sat down with two social workers and the boys' parents. They had many choices to choose from, but felt strongly about wanting the boys to join the Stewarts' family.

    The agreement has been signed and adoption procedure（程序）should be finished before long.

    Photos of eight-year-old Wang Fuman, nicknamed by “Snowflake Boy” in Yun Nan, shared by his principal on Tuesday, showed the boy has a red face from the low temperatures and apparently did not wear enough clothes to keep warm. He also suffered from frostbite. He stood alone with his white hair and eyebrows while other classmates behind were clearly amused and laughing. The picture drew widespread attention around the whole world. Many netizens (网民) were sympathetic to the boy's difficulties, with many Mircoblog users giving comments under the report.

    Just after the report, a donation of 100,000 yuan was sent to his Primary School. Constantly, help still pours in for the Chinese boy. But the local authorities call on others to pay attention to other similar rural areas and give them timely aid. In China, there are still so many children just like Fuman living by himself with parents migrating to cities to make a living.

    It began as a game: High school and college students studying computer technology figured out they could use personal computers to break into telephone company computers and make free, long-distance telephone calls. These young computer talents soon gained the name "hackers".

    Police arrested a few hackers, but many went on to even more complex hacking. One of them was arrested for making illegal telephone calls and later he used a phone to change a police officer's credit records to get back at the officer for arresting him. He also used a computer to change his college records to give himself better grades.

    As hackers gained experience, they began invading computers at banks, airlines and other businesses. In one case a hacker instructed an airline's computer to give him free airplane tickets.

    The U.S. government is worried that hackers may break into its networks of defense computers. The government's secrets are easily attacked because thousands of government computers are connected by telephone lines that hackers can get into.

    In November 1988, a college student entered a U.S. Defense Department computer network called Arpanet. The hacker injected a computer program that made copies of itself throughout Arpanet. Some hackers use viruses to destroy all the data in a computer. But in this case, government officials shut down the network before the program reached every computer in the system. Shutting down the system angered many researchers who were using the computers. The hacker turned himself in to the police and he was charged with a crime.

    The incident put the spotlight on computer hacking in the United States. Many companies have hired experts to protect their computers from hackers, and many computer experts now advise companies on how to protect their computers.

    The U.S. government believes foreign governments have hired hackers to try to break into top-secret defense computers.

    Experts disagree over whether a computer network can ever be safe from hacking. But in the future, some of the most outstanding minds in the U.S. will be working to frustrate the attempts of computer hackers.

    Like infectious diseases, ideas in the academic world are epidemic (传染的). But why some travel far and wide while equally good ones has been a mystery? Now a team of computer scientists has used an epidemiological model to simulate (模仿) how ideas move from one academic institution to another. The model showed that ideas originating at famous institutions caused bigger "epidemics" than equally good ideas from less famous places, explains Allison Morgan, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

    "This implies that where an idea is born shapes how far it spreads," says senior author Aaron Clauset.

    Not only is this unfair— "it reveals a big weakness in how we're doing science," says Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon university, who was not involved in the study. "There are many highly trained people with good ideas who do not end up at top institutions. They are producing good ideas, and we know those ideas are getting lost," DeDeo says. "Our science, our scholarships, is not as good because of this."

    The Colorado researchers first looked at how five big ideas in computer science spread to new institutions. They found that hiring a new faculty member accounted for this movement a little more than a third of the time--and in 81 percent of those cases, transmissions took place from higher – to lower-prestige (声望) universities. Then the team simulated the spread of ideas using an infectious disease model and found that the size of an idea "epidemic" depended on the prestige of the originating institution.

    The researchers' model suggests that there "may be a number of quite good ideas that originate in the middle of the pack, in terms of universities." Clauset says. There is a lot of good work coming out of less famous places, he says: "You can learn a huge amount from it, and you can learn things that other people don't know because they're not even paying attention."