Can technology improve your trip? Meet Judy Williams. When she and her husband recently checked into Blu Hotel in Zurich, a clerk asked them to sign the dotted line on a room rate hundreds of dollars higher than their online offer.

    “It was not a cheap stay,” says Williams, a lawyer from Billings, Mont. But it became more of one after her husband fired up the Booking.com app he'd used to book their room on his smart phone. “As soon as we showed him the cost, he honored it,” Williams says.

    Technology may create challenges for travelers but it can also solve them. It's more than making sure of a hotel cost. The latest Booking.com can help users select hotels by location, make a secure booking and view the confirmed (已确认的) cost so they never need to re-discuss their hotel price.

    Another pain point for travelers is traffic that eats away precious vacation time. There's a new app called Commute which is aimed at users who have to make the same trip every day. But if you're headed to Los Angeles or Honolulu, where visitors can easily get stuck in hours of heavy traffic, Commute can help.         

    Just input basic information about your destination and expected leaving time, and the app will start sending you traffic information 15 minutes before you leave. Testing Commute proved to be a challenge for me, because my home address is about 900 miles from my place of work. But if you have only a short distance to travel through a heavily populated area, you can use Commute to avoid traffic jams.

    Another source of travel-related problems is money. That's particularly true when you're dealing with a foreign currency. The latest Travel Money Tracker helps travelers prevent currency mix-ups. It immediately changes a country's native currency to yours, so you know exactly how much that Espresso (浓咖啡) in Milan costs in dollars. It can also warn you when you're overspending, which can sometimes be a problem when you're on vacation. The only catch, of course, is that you have to remember to record all your purchases.

    Taken together, these apps solve some of the most common travel problems. But not all of them. Some things, no smart phone can fix, which means I get to keep my job – for now at least.

    In 2004 ,when my daughter Becky was ten , she and my husband ,Joe, were united in their desire for a dog . As for me , I shared none of their canine lust.

    But why , they pleaded. “Because I don't have time to take care of a dog.” But we'll do it. ” Really? You're going to walk the dog? Feed the dog? Bathe the dog?” Yes, yes , and yes .”I don't believe you .” We will . We promise.

   They didn't . From day two (everyone wanted to walk the cute puppy that first day ) , neither thought to walk the dog . While I was slow to accept that I would be the one to keep track of her shots , to schedule her vet appointments , to feed and clean her , Misty knew this on day one . As she looked up at the three new humans in her life (small, medium, and large) , she calculated ,”The medium one is the sucker in the pack .”

    Quickly, she and I developed something very similar to a Vulcan mind meld (心灵融合) . She'd look at me with those sad brown eyes of hers , beam her need , and then wait , trusting I would understand — which , strangely , I almost always did . In no time , she became my feet as I read , and splaying across my stomach as I watched television .

    Even so , part of me continued to resent walking duty . Joe and Becky had promised. Not fair , I'd balk (不心甘情愿地做) silently as she and I walked . “Not fair , ” I' d loudly remind anyone within earshot upon our return home .

    Then one day — January 1, 2007 , to be exact — my husband ‘ s doctor uttered an unthinkable word : leukemia ( 白血病) .With that , I spent eight to ten hours a day with Joe in the hospital , doing anything and everything I could to ease his discomfort. During those six months of hospitalizations, Becky, 12 at the time, adjusted to other adults being in the house when she returned from school. My work colleagues adjusted to my taking off at a moment's notice for medical emergencies. Every part of my life changed; no part of my old routine remained.

    Save one: Misty still needed walking. At the beginning, when friends offered to take her through her paces, I declined because I knew they had their own households to deal with.

    As the months went by，I began to realize that I actually wanted to walk Misty. The walk in the morning before I headed to the hospital was a quiet, peaceful time to gather my thoughts or to just be before the day's medical drama unfolded. The evening walk was a time to shake off the day's upsets and let the worry tracks in my head go to white noise.

    When serious illness visits your household, it's , not just your daily routine and your assumptions about the future that are no longer familiar. Pretty much everyone you acts differently.

    Not Misty. Take her for a walk, and she had no interest in Joe's blood counts or 'one marrow test results. On the street or in the park, she had only one thing on her mind: squirrels! She Was so joyous that even on the worst days, she could make me smile. On a daily basis she reminded me that life goes on.

After Joe died in 2009，Misty slept on his pillow.

    I'm grateful一to a point. The truth is, after years of balking, I've come to enjoy m' walks with Misty. As I watch her chase after a squirrel, throwing her whole being into the here-and-now of an exercise that has never once ended in victory, she reminds me, too, that no matter how harsh the present or unpredictable the future , there's almost always some measure of joy to be extracted from the moment.

Hollywood's theory that machines with evil(邪恶) minds will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that artificial intelligence(AI) may become extremely good at achieving something other than what we really want. In 1960 a well-known mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics（控制论）, put it this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot effectively interfere(干预), we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

A machine with a specific purpose has another quality, one that we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this quality is not in-born, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine cannot achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the single instruction of fetching coffee, it will have a strong desire to secure success by disabling its own off switch or even killing anyone who might interfere with its task. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chessboard.

The possibility of entering into and losing such a match should concentrate the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super intelligent machines.

Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be possible but not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not possible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just “switch them off” as if super intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super intelligent AI will never happen. On September 11, 1933, famous physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” However, on September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced(中子诱导) nuclear chain reaction.

    My husband David was waiting at the door when our daughter Laura and I pulled in the driveway. It wasn't like him to be home so early. The disbelief on his face told me that something was up.

    "Do you still have a job?"

    "No. Redundant," he answered, looking away from me.

    "OK. We'll figure it out," I replied calmly.

    I actually had no idea how we were going to figure it out. I immediately started to think of how we'd cut costs and who we should start to get in touch with. That night, after David had fallen asleep, I cried myself to sleep, and frequently sobbed in the shower in the days that followed.

    I knew the loss of David's income would have great effect on us. He had worked for the same insurance company for twenty-one years and was our main income. I work at home caring for Laura, and my freelance(自由职业者的)income is uncertain. We have debts, and job hunting takes time.

    Still, I was more concerned about my husband's emotional state than our financial situation. David's sense of identity was tied to his job. He called his parents to tell them about losing his job, but didn't say a word to anyone else for weeks. He told me that he felt like "a failure".

It was tough for me to watch David struggle with unemployment. One night a couple of weeks after he lost his job, David woke me just before midnight, sweating, pacing the bedroom floor and saying he felt funny. We spent the night in the emergency room waiting to see if he had a heart attack. Thankfully, it was just a serious anxiety attack. It was then that I knew I needed to do more to understand what my husband was going through. Here is what I learned from my own experience—and from talking to experts—on how to support your spouse through a job loss.

    The latest IPCC report does not mince words(直言不讳地) about the state of our planet: we must act now to achieve global change at a scale that has “no documented historical precedent(先例)” in order to avoid the climate disaster that would result from a 2 degree C rise in average global temperature. Climate change already affects the world's most helpless people including poor rural communities that depend on the land for their livings and coastal communities. Indeed, we have already seen the clear asymmetry(不对称) of suffering resulting from extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires and more.

    So far, advocates and politicians have tended to focus on reducing fossil fuel(矿物燃料) consumption through technology and/or policy, such as a sharp carbon tax, as climate solutions. These proposals are, of course, essential to reducing manmade carbon emissions(排放)-71 percent of which are produced by just 100 fossil fuel companies.

    Yet the international focus on fossil fuels has overshadowed(使......显得不重要) the most powerful and cost-efficient carbon-capture technology the world has yet seen: forests. Recent scientific research confirms that forests and other “natural climate solutions” are absolutely essential in reducing climate change. In fact, natural climate solutions can help us achieve 37 percent of our climate target, even though they currently receive only 2.5 percent of public climate financing.

    Forests' power to store carbon dioxide through the simple process of tree growth is staggering: one tree can even store an average of about 48 pounds of carbon dioxide in one year. Recent research show undamaged forests are capable of storing the same amount of the carbon dioxide emissions of entire countries such as Peru and Colombia.

    For this reason, policy makers and business leaders must create and strengthen ambitious policies to prevent deforestation, and support the sustainable management of standing forests in the fight against climate change. Protecting the world's forests ensures they can continue to provide essential functions aside from climate stability, including producing oxygen, filtering water and supporting biodiversity. Not only do all the world's people depend on forests to provide clean air, clean water，oxygen, and medicines, but 1.6 billion people rely on them directly for their livelihoods.

Welcome to the Public Transport Guide for Parents where you will find all the information and decisions you need to make to prepare your child for travelling on Trans Link's public transport network in South East Queensland.

We have three planning tools to help you find the most suitable public transport mode and school route for your child: School service finder. Journey planner, and Qconnect journey planner.

My TransLink is the official Queensland Government app for public transport in South East Queensland, Mackay, Cairns. Toowoomba and Townsville.

When using journey planner, make sure you select a date that falls on a school day and choose between 'Depart' or 'Arrive before' to tailor your search.

You can contact your local school bus operator for more information about the school service and student assistance options.

If you live outside South East Queensland, please contact your local Passenger and School Transport Office.

To find the best travel product for your child, visit student ticketing options. The most common concession (特许) is the child and student go cards:

·All primary and secondary school students are qualified for a concession go card.

· Concession fares are 50 percent of an adult fare.

· A further 50 percent is deducted(扣除）after the 8th paid journey within a week (Monday to Sunday).

School students 15 years and older must hold a valid student ID (issued by school) to buy a green go card.