It's generally believed that people act the way they do because of their personalities and attitudes. They recycle their garbage because they care about the environment. They pay $5 for a caramel brulee latte because they like expensive coffee drinks.

    It's undeniable that behavior comes from our inner dispositions（性情）,but in many instances we also draw inferences about who we are,as suggested by the social psychologist Daryl Bern,by observing our own behavior.We can be strangers to ourselves.If we knew our own minds,why would we need to guess what our preferences are from our behavior?If our minds were an open book,we would know exactly how much we care about the environment or like lattes.Actually,we often need to look to our behavior to figure out who we are.

    Moreover,we don't just use our behavior to learn about our particular types of character—we infer characters that weren't there before.Our behavior is often shaped by little pressures around us,which we fail to recognize.Maybe we recycle because our wives and neighbors would disapprove if we didn't.Maybe we buy lattes in order to impress the people around us.We should not mistakenly believe that we always behave as a result of some inner disposition.

    Whatever pressures there can be or inferences one can make,people become what they do,though it may not be in compliance（符合）with their true desires.Therefore,we should all bear in mind Kurt Vonnegut's advice:"We are what we pretend to be,so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

    Hold your smartphone, smile at the front camera, and click! You get a selfie. There is no doubt that this photo is yours. But if a monkey takes a selfie, does the camera owner have the right to decide how to use it?

    Recently, this question has caused a problem between Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, and British wildlife photographer David J. Slater.

    In 2011, Slater was visiting a park in Indonesia when a macaque(猕猴) got hold of one of his cameras. “They were quite naughty, jumping all over my equipment,” Slater told The Telegraph, “and it looked like they were already posing for the  camera when one hit the button.” The result was hundreds of monkey selfies. The best of images was a female macaque grinning toothily into the lens.

    This week, the grinning monkey selfie returned to the news when Wikimedia refused Slater's request to take the photos down from Wikimedia Commons, a website that is run by the organization and offers free images.   5

According to Wikimedia, anyone who downloads the monkey selfie, or any of the millions of images on the site, can “copy and use any works here freely as long as they follow what the author says.” The question that arose here was whether Slater, who had not held the camera, set up the shot, or pressed the shutter(快门) button, could be considered the photographer of the monkey selfie. Wikimedia's position on this was clear: as the work of a non-human animal, this photo has no human author who owns the copyright.”

    Only authors of creative works, like a piece of writing or a song, own copyrights. In terms of photos, US copyright law says whoever pushes the button on the camera owns the copyright to the image produced, which means that if tourists ask you to take a photo of them, and you happen to hit the shutter button at the exact moment that Justin Bieber, a Canadian singer, made faces behind them. You, as the photographer, would have the photo's copyright and sell it. The tourists, who own the camera on which the photo was taken and asked you to take the photo don't get the right to use it without you allowing them to. All this has been complicated by the appearance of surveillance cameras(监控摄像头), smart phones, and large-scale photography projects for which assistants often press the shutter button to produce works whose copyrights belong to their boss.

    Slater seems to be thinking along these lines. He says that buying the cameras, spending thousands of pounds to transport himself to Indonesia, and allowing the monkeys to “steal” his cameras makes him the author of the image, regardless of who pushed the button. “In law, if I have an assistant then I still own the copyright,” he told the “Today” Show. “I believe in this case, the monkey was my assistant.”

    If that seems unfair, think about this. If a person left her laptop in a café, and a poet picked it up, opened up a word-processing program, and typed out a poem which turned out to be the best poem of this generation, could she ask for much more than her laptop back?

    Business administration is the most popular undergraduate major in U.S. colleges and universities, accounting for as much as one-fifth of all bachelor degrees awarded each year. Students naturally think of a business degree as the surest way to land a good job after graduation. Many international students agree. Twenty percent studied business last year-the second most popular major after engineering, according to the Institute of International Education.

    Below are descriptions of three of U.S. colleges and universities with strong offerings in business.

    Bentley College    Waltham, Massachusetts

    Bentley offers its 4,000 undergraduates a top-flight business education and an equally strong liberal-arts program that leaves them well-prepared to join the ranks of future business leaders. The college occupies a scenic campus only a shuttle-bus ride from Boston's Harvard Square. More than 90 percent of students seek career-oriented internships（实习）.

    Bucknell University    Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

    Bucknell's 3,500 undergraduates benefit from small classes and an engaging staff at this liberal-arts institution in a remote but beautiful campus in central Pennsylvania. Accounting and financial management are specialties in the introductory management course that create and sell a product and then donate their profits to charity（慈善）.

    University of Cincinnati        Cincinnati, Ohio

    This urban university with 21,000 undergraduates, located a mile from downtown Cincinnati, was the-birthplace of cooperative education over a century ago. Under this five-year “earn while you learn” program, more than 3,000 students alternate academic study with internships in local businesses and other organizations.

    When I was 19 years old, I was at a dance club. As we were walking to my car one cold night, a man walked up to us. Behind him was a woman carrying a small child. The child had a jacket on but it wasn't buttoned up（扣上）. The man began to tell us he wanted to borrow some money for the night to get his wife and kid into a hotel. He had a job but no place to live in and was waiting for the first paycheck. He said he could get our mailing address and mail the money back.

    The guy I was with reached into his pocket to give this man a $20 bill. As the other man was extending his hand out to take the money, I put my hand on my new friends' hand and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute？"

    I told him that every day people asked my mother for money on her way to work. She said they made more money than she did, simply begging for money. These people were scamming those with soft hearts. And if they were truly worried about their child suffering from the cold, they would have at least buttoned his jacket or covered him with his blanket.

    My new friend looked at me with disappointment and said, “Michelle, I know there are people out there that take advantage of others. I also know there are people out there that are one paycheck away from being homeless. If I give $ 20 to 10 people and only one of them really needs it and uses it for the right thing, it is worth it.”

    I am now 37 years old and have never forgotten what he said to me. I don't even remember his name. But I do remember that that experience changed the way I look at different situations.

    One advantage of the Internet is shopping conveniently online for clothes; one disadvantage of the Internet is also shopping conveniently online for clothes.

    "Nothing fits," said Lam Yuk Wong, a senior in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University. "Everyone says this. They order clothes and they don't fit. People get very unhappy."

    Wong and her design partner, Xuaner "Cecilia" Zhang, are Team White Mirror, creators of what they call a "virtual (虚拟)fitting room". Their goal is simple and consumer-friendly: to let online clothing shoppers have a perfect fit and a perfect look when shopping every time. Both women are from China, Wong from Hong Kong and Zhang from Beijing. They both order most of their clothing online. They got the idea from their own experience as consumers and from listening to the complaints of friends and relatives. They say, 'The color is wrong' or 'I got the right size but it still does not fit.' We want to make it like you're in the store trying on the clothes," Zhang said.

    Using a Kinect developed by Microsoft for use with its Xbox 360 video game player, Zhang scans Wong and turns her image into, in effect, a virtual model, keeping Wong's dimensions (尺寸), and even her skin and hair color.

    "We put the clothes on the shopper's 3-D body models and show how they look when they are dressed," Wong said. So far, Wong and Zhang have adapted the software to show dresses and shirts, and they are now working on shorts.

    Asked if she thought men as well as women might be interested in using their virtual fitting room, Wong said, "I think their wives will care about this, so it will also be important to men."

When we meet someone for the first time, we usually get a vague sense of what kind of person they are by the way they shake hands, talk, or walk. In the age of social networking, however, first impressions are sometimes made even before we actually meet someone in person—that is, by looking at their profile photo.

    According to a recent study, these social images say a lot about our personality. In the study, presented in a paper at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in the US used software to analyze the profile pictures of 66,000 users of US social platform Twitter and 3,200 of their tweets. At the same time, about 434 participants were asked to complete a survey about their personality type. The researchers wanted to find out if there was a connection between personality traits—like openness, extroversion, and neuroticism(神经质)—and a person's profile picture.

    According to the results, open people are more likely to pose in an unusual way and use objects such as glasses or a guitar in their profile photo because they enjoy new and exciting experiences. Meanwhile, neurotic people often hold back their negative emotions. They try to avoid showing their face；Instead, they use an image of something like a pet, a car or a building.

    Apart from the objects in profile pictures, the colors used in them also give us some hints about the photo's owner. For example, extraverts were found to have the most colorful profile images, as they want to emphasize their personality and show themselves off, the researchers wrote.

    Although social media photos "usually represent an extension of one's self, they also allow a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view," according to the researchers. So, when choosing a profile photo, maybe we should ask ourselves first what kind of image we'd like to convey. After all, first impressions always last.