Earlier this year, the social media website Facebook announced that it would work with several news organizations — including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC — to place news stories directly into users' personal Facebook webpage.  Stories published using Facebook Instant will load more quickly and keep the style of the original publisher, who will keep all the advertising income the stories earn — at least for now. The deal shows how important social media has become to news organizations, and is a clear sign of how the world of news is changing — and has been for a while.

    When Google News began in 2002, many saw it as the death of the newspaper. It had no human editor. Instead Google used, and still uses, a secret computer program that selects and displays news stories according to the reader's personal interests. More recently, Associated Press and Yahoo! have been publishing computer-written articles. Both use special software to automatically produce stories about company financial results and sports reports — areas where the quality of writing is felt to be of secondary importance to the accuracy of the data.

    Should we be worried about such developments? I think we should. One concern is that facebook, Google and other social media websites see journalism as a sideline, a way of putting people in front of advertisements. It isn't their primary function — so if it stops making them lots of money, they're likely to stop doing it.

    There's also a concern that computer-written articles are not actually journalism at all, because what a human news team produces is actually quite complex. A well-written news story puts information in context, offers a voice to each side of an argument and brings the public new knowledge.

    Though economics and speed of delivery mean readers will probably choose a computer-written story over a carefully shaped article — at least for daily news — I don't think the computers will be writing any in-depth articles for a while yet.

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    A five-year-old dog named Kelsey has been praised as a hero for helping to save the life of her owner who slipped in the snow and broke his neck.

The man, Bob, was alone when he left his Michigan farmhouse on New Year's Eve to collect firewood. Expecting a journey of only several meters, Bob was wearing just long johns (秋裤), a shirt and slippers when he went outside, although the temperature was around -4℃.

    After the accident, he was unable to move in the snow. Fortunately, Kelsey came to his assistance.

    “I was shouting for help, but my nearest neighbor is about 400 meters away, and it was 10:30 p.m.,” Bob explained. “But my Kelsey came. By the next morning, my voice was gone and I couldn't yell for help, but Kelsey didn't stop barking.”

    Bob's companion kept him warm by lying on top of him. She licked his face and hands to keep him awake. “Kelsey kept barking but never left my side,” Bob recalled. “She kept me warm. I knew I couldn't give up and that it was my choice to stay alive.”

Bob spent 19 hours in the freezing cold. When he finally lost consciousness, his dog kept barking. Finally, hearing the barking, Bob's neighbor discovered him at 6:30 p.m. on New Year's Day and called the emergency services at once. When Bob arrived in hospital, his body temperature was below 21℃. However, doctors were surprised to find that he didn't have any frostbite (冻疮). They believed it was because of Kelsey's determination to keep him warm. Dr. Chaim Colen, the doctor who treated Bob, said, “Animals can help and his dog really saved him … he was very fortunate.”

    Bob said he was “enormously” grateful for both Dr. Colen and his Kelsey. “They saved my life. They are true heroes!”

    When my vision-challenged daughter was 3, and I was pregnant with my second child, we got her glasses. It was a long process involving many different opticians (配镜师)over the course of a year, because of my daughter's overwhelming desire to scream and fly into a temper any time we tried to have her eyes examined. The fourth optician was amazing while my daughter didn't cooperate, she performed various miracles and managed what she called a “best guess” at her prescription.

    “Start with this,” she said. “When she realizes she can see better, bring her back, and we can try for something more accurate.”

    I didn't want to pay $300 for glasses that might be replaced in a month's time, so I decided to bring her straight to a Walmart optical. Things were going on well, until the optician needed to take an additional measurement, which would involve holding a ruler up to her eyes and measuring the distance between the outer corner of one eye and the inner corner of the other.

    “Are you sure you need the measurement?” I asked. “She's really not cooperative when it comes to the eye-testing stuff.”

    “We definitely need to have it, we can't fill her prescription without it.” the optician said.

    But my daughter would not let the optician anywhere near her face with the small plastic ruler. She started yelling and crying, and we took her off to the side and promised we'd get ice cream afterward if she let the nice lady hold the ruler near her nose! The optician gave us the ruler, thinking we would have an easier time, but when my daughter knew we needed to hold the ruler near her face, which, in toddler logic, meant a life-or-death situation, she prevented us from getting anywhere near her.

    Finally, my husband and I agreed that one of us would have to hold her down and the other would take the measurement. I sat on the floor trying to hold her head still while my husband tried to get an accurate reading on that stupid ruler. Despite her struggle and scream, we finally got it. My daughter stopped crying three seconds later and went back to play as if nothing had happened.

    There is no version of this story where I feel comfortable us even if it was for her own good. I felt awful wondering, if magically know what to say to get her cooperation? The weeks spent with a special book about wearing glasses, telling her how great glasses were... I could feel tears welling up and I thought, “I can't cry. I'm sitting on the floor of a Walmart optical centre. I can't cry here.”

    And there it was the final thing I could not bear. It w already reduced me to sitting on the floor of a Walmart optical p toddler down to press a ruler against her face and do it for the packed Saturday audience of all the Walmart checkout counters. I cried. Big, shoulder-shaking sobs. Sitting right there on the floor of a Walmart, behind the optical counter.

    Five days later, the Walmart optical centre called. They said my daughter's glasses were ready for pickup and I should schedule an appointment with the optician so that we can have them properly fitted. I said I'd be picking up the glasses alone and we would do the fitting another day. She insisted that the fitting was crucial, to which I replied, “I don't know if you were working last Saturday, but my daughter is really not cooperating on this whole glasses thing. I'd prefer to just pick them up.” Silence. Then she said, “I was there last Saturday, I remember you. Absolutely, you can pick them up any time.”

    At first, Michael Surrell didn't see the black smoke or flames shooting from the windows of his neighbors' home. He and his wife had just parked around the corner from their own house in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when they got a call from one of his daughters, "The house next door is on fire!" He went to investigate. That's when he saw two women and a girl hysterical (歇斯底里的)on their porch.

    "The baby's in there!" one of the women cried. Though the fire department had been called, Surrell, then 64, instinctively ran inside. "The baby" was 8-year-old Tiara Roberts, the woman's granddaughter and a playmate of Surrell's three youngest kids, then 8, 10, and 12. The other two on the porch were Tiara's aunt and cousin.

Entering the burning house was like "running into a bucket of black paint," Surrell says. The thick smoke caused him to stumble blindly around, burned his eyes, and made it impossible to breathe. The conditions would have been hazardous for anyone, but for Surrell, who has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (慢性阻塞性肺疾病), they were life-threatening. He was the last person who should have run into a burning building— he has lung disease. But that didn't stop him.

    After a few minutes in the smoke filled house, he retreated outside to catch his breath. "Where is Tiara?" he asked desperately." The second floor." her aunt shouted back.

    Surrell knew he couldn't hold his breath for long. So he uttered a little prayer, "Well, Lord, this is it. You gotta help me, because I'm not coming out without that little girl." Taking a deep breath, he went in a second time.

    The darkness was overwhelming. Yet because the house had a similar layout to his, he found the stairs and made it to the second floor. He turned to the right and was met by intense heat. He was already out of breath.

    "Baby girl, where are you?" His throat and lungs burned as if he'd inhaled fire instead of the smoke and soot in the air. Every blink stung his eyes. All he could hear was the crackling and popping of burning wood. ①.Still unable to see, Surrell fell to his knees on the hot wood floor. He crawled toward the sound, feeling around for any sign of the girl. An ominous thought crossed his mind: I'm probably gonna die up here.

    Finally he touched something. A shoe, then an ankle. He pulled Tiara toward him. ②Her body was limp and she wasn't breathing. He scooped her into his arms and stood. He felt the heat of the flames on his cheeks. Turning, he fought through the smoke and ran blindly into the blackness. The next thing he knew, he was at the front door, then outside. Surrell put Tiara down on the porch.

    ③. A voice told him, "You have to breathe for her." He started CPR -the first time he'd ever done so. The women stood behind him, praying silently. Soon a soot-filled cough came from Tiara's throat. Surrell gave five more breaths. She coughed again. Her eyes flickered. He gave one final breath. She opened her eyes and took a breath on her own.

    ④.Their eyes met. Surrell hugged her tight and said, "Uncle's got you.^" Soon after, his throat closed off.

    Surrell woke up in the hospital a couple of days later, having suffered severe burns to his windpipe and the upper portion of his lungs. He spent over a week in the hospital. Tiara was released from the hospital after a few days. The fire exacerbated Surrell's pulmonary condition, and he feels the effects even two years later. As a result, he takes extra medication that helps open his airways. "It's a small price to pay," he says. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Wouldn't give it a second thought."

    For several decades, there has been an organized campaign intended to produce distrust in science, funded by those whose interests are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things, from the structure of the universe to the relativity of time and space.

    Stressing successes isn't wrong, but for many people it's not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question "Why trust science?" is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. But what is called the scientific method isn't what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and at any particular point, scientists can be found doing many different things. False theories sometimes lead to true results, so even if an experiment works, it doesn't prove that the theory it was designed to test is true.

    If there is no specific scientific method, then what is the basis for trust in science? The answer is the methods by which those claims are evaluated. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a long process of examination by fellow scientists. Scientists draft the initial version of a paper and then send it to colleagues for suggestions. Until this point, scientific feedback is typically fairly friendly. But the next step is different: the revised paper is submitted to a scientific journal, where things get a whole lot tougher. Editors deliberately send scientific papers to people who are not friends or colleagues of the authors, and the job of the reviewer is to find errors or other faults. We call this process "peer review" because the reviewers are scientific peers—experts in the same field—but they act in the role of a superior who has both the right and the responsibility to find fault. It is only after the reviewers and the editor are satisfied that any problems have been fixed that the paper will be printed in the journal and enters the body of "science."

    Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are "always changing their minds." While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that science produces both creativity and stability. New observations, ideas, explanations and attempts to combine competing claims introduce creativity; transformative questioning leads to collective decisions and the stability of scientific knowledge. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.

Workers are returning to their careers, or starting new ones after age 65.

More than ever, work is where many of us get our sense of purpose. That doesn't end at age 65. After being retired for only three months, Sue Ellen King returned to work at the University of Florida Health in Jacksonville, Florida, where she had been a care nurse and nursing educator for 38 years. She is now working part-time in a position created just for her. "It's perfect," she told The New York Times. "I get the satisfaction of having people appreciate what I do." With the average lifespan for those who reach age 64 now getting all the way to 84 years old, those who reach retirement age still have many potential years of work to go.

Job sites connected toward part-timers, temporary positions, and some can also turn up opportunities that may lead to longer-term work. Fred Dodd tried a part-time job after his unemployment as a clerk for large banks at age 63. He'd thought about retiring then. "But part of me just wanted to keep working partly for the money, but more just because I felt I wanted to do more in my career, " he said.

The retired have the advantage of not needing to focus on the earnings potential of whatever jobs they take on, so these older workers are attracted to more meaningful work. And since they are voluntarily putting their skills and experience to good use, they may well have more flexibility than mid-career people. Two-thirds of retirees who'd come back to the work world were doing meaningful work they enjoyed. Legal work and community service were popular choices, as was teaching—all areas in which older workers might have an opportunity to make their own schedules.

Earning more money rarely seems like a bad idea, but it can cause issues for retirees, including effects when they claim Social Security (申请社会保障) benefits early.