A guiding principle for master cellist Yo-Yo Ma is that “the intersection(交汇) of cultures is where new things appear.” Certainly his biography is an intersection of cultures. He was born to Chinese parents in Paris, France; both his parents were musicians. When he was seven, his family moved to the United States. Gifted for his age, Ma attended Juilliard, the world famous music institute. He then chose to earn a liberal arts degree at Harvard rather than focusing only on music.

    Even in his earliest performing years, Yo-Yo Ma had a strong belief that it was important to share music with all kinds of people. Stories are told about how he once performed in the hallway of a large building for people who were unable to get tickets to his concert. He remained interested in making music accessible to diverse audiences and furthered his interest in different cultures when he visited the Bushmen of the Kalahari. He developed a vehicle to further these ideals when he founded the Silk Road Project.

    As he has said, the Silk Road is a metaphor(隐喻) for a number of things: as the Internet of ancient times, the routes were used for trade, by religious people, adventurers, scientists, storytellers. Everything from algebra to Islam moved along the Silk Road. It's the local-global thing. In the cultural world, you want to make sure that voices don't get lost, that rich traditions continue to live, without becoming common.

    This lesson explores the philosophy behind Yo-Yo Ma's founding of the Silk Road Ensemble(乐团), his belief that the arts, and particularly music, can make the world better, and that through cooperation, one can both preserve tradition and shape cultural evolution. Students also explore their own attitudes toward the arts, writing reflective essays on how the arts have played a role in their own lives.

B

    In the 1760s, Mathurin Roze opened a series of shops that boasted(享有）a special meat soup called consomme. Although the main attraction was the soup, Roze's chain shops also set a new standard for dining out, which helped to establish Roze as the inventor of the modern restaurant.

    Today, scholars have generated large amounts of instructive research about restaurants. Take visual hints that influence what we eat: diners served themselves about 20 percent more pasta(意大利面食）when their plates matched their food.  When a dark-colored cake was served on a black plate rather than a white one, customers recognized it as sweeter and more tasty.

    Lighting matters, too. When Berlin restaurant customers ate in darkness, they couldn't tell how much they'd had: those given extra-large shares ate more than everyone else, but were none the wiser—they didn't feel fuller, and they were just as ready for dessert.

    Time is money, but that principle means different things for different types of restaurants. Unlike fast-food places, fine dining shops prefer customers to stay longer and spend. One way to encourage customers to stay and order that extra round: put on some Mozart(莫扎特）.When classical, rather than pop, music was playing, diners spent more. Fast music hurried diners out. Particular scents also have an effect: diners who got the scent of lavender(薰衣草）stayed longer and spent more than those who smelled lemon, or no scent.

    Meanwhile, things that you might expect to discourage spending—"bad" tables, crowding, high prices — don't necessarily. Diners at bad tables — next to the kitchen door, say — spent nearly as much as others but soon fled. It can be concluded that restaurant keepers need not "be overly concerned about 'bad' tables," given that they're profitable. As for crowds, a Hong Kong study found that they increased a restaurant's reputation, suggesting great food at fair prices. And doubling a buffet's price led customers to say that its pizza was 11 percent tastier.

    In the past, people who graduated from college felt proud of their academic achievement and confident that their degree would help them find a good job.

     However, in the past four years the job market has changed dramatically. This year's college graduates are facing one of the worst job markets in years. For example, Ryan Stewart, a graduate of San Jose University, got a degree in religious studies, but no job prospects. He points out that many people already working are getting laid off and don't have jobs, so it's even harder for new college graduates to find jobs.

    Four years ago, the future looked bright for the class of 2013. There were many high-tech job opportunities. Graduates received many job offers, and they were able to get jobs with high salaries and benefits such as insurance and paid vacations. However, “Times have changed and it's a new market,” according to Cheryl Allmen- Vinnidge of the San Jose State Career Center.

    Allmen-Vinniage says students who do find jobs started preparing two years ago. They worked during summer vacations, they have had several internships（实习）, and they have majored in one of the few fields that are still hot, like chemical engineering, accounting, or nursing, where average starting salaries have actually increased over last year. Other popular fields (like information system management, computer science, and political science) have seen big reduction in starting salaries.

    Ryan Stewart (he had hoped to become a teacher) may just end up going back to school. “I'd like to teach college some day and that requires more schooling, which would be great in bad economy.” he said.

    In conclusion, these days, to some students a degree may not be a ticket to instant wealth. For now, they can only hope its value will increase over time.

    Children grow quickly, especially their feet. But many families cannot buy new shoes each time a child needs them. As a result, about 300 million children around the world go barefoot. Those children risk picking up diseases and parasites from the soil.

    Kenton Lee, an American man invented The Shoe That Grows. He explains, “It grows in three places: the front, on the side and on the back. It can last up to five years. The bottom is rubber like tire rubber. The top is just high-quality leather. ”

    Lee says he got the idea for the shoe while working as a volunteer in an orphanage in Kenya. “I just remember a little girl who wore a pair of small shoes. The shoes were so small that she had to cut open the front of her shoes to let her toes stick out. And I just remember thinking, wouldn't it be nice if there were a pair of shoes that could grow with her feet？”

    However, Lee says it was not easy to turn his idea into a reality. Finally, in 2009 Lee founded a non-profit organization called Because International. In the office of Because International, Lee keeps a pair of his own shoes to help him remember his promise.

    A pair of shoes, he says, gives more than protection. It gives a child self-worth and more chances to succeed. “Because it's a small thing that really does make a big difference to keep them healthy and happy and having more chances to succeed.”

    Kenton Lee adds that his goal is to help get The Shoe That Grows to as many children as he can around the world.

    As free as they make us, mobile phones still need to stay close to a power source. Soon that may change with "green" power.

    Three Chilean students got the idea for a plant-powered device(装置) to charge（使……充电） their cellphones, while sitting in their school's outdoor courtyard during a break from exams, with dead mobile phones. Then, one of them had an "aha" moment.

    “It occurred to Camila to say about plants,” said inventor Evelyn Aravena. “'Why don't you have a socket, if there are so many plants? 'After that, we thought, 'why don't they have a charging outlet（插座）? Because there are so many plants and living things that have the potential to produce energy, why not?'”

    Their invention—a small biological circuit called E-Kaia—uses the energy plants to produce during photosynthesis(光合作用). A plant uses only a small part of that energy and the rest goes into the soil, and that's where the E-Kaia collects it. The device plugs into the ground and then into your phone.

    "It's the most amazing project I've ever seen in my life, plain and simple. They brought this original model, and it worked — and that's when it all changed, at least from my personal point of view and I began to support them." said Mauricio Cifuentes.

    The device solved two problems for the engineering students — they needed an idea for a class project, and an outlet to plug in their phones.

    "Looking for a place to charge the notebook, which had no power, and the mobile phones, we weren't able to find anything because all the other students were in the same state of madness trying to find a place to charge their devices," said Aravena.

    But plants are everywhere, and the bio－circuit makes good use of their excess(过多的) power.

    The E-Kaia doesn't carry much charge but it's powerful enough to completely recharge a mobile phone in less than two hours.

    The student inventors have applied for patents（专利） on their technology, and expect the E-Kaia to go on sale in the near future.

    You know those nutrition guidelines the government issues every few years? It turns out that following them isn't just good for your health. It's good for the planet, too.

    " What we found is that impacts vary across nations, but in the high­impact nations, in general, you can see that, if you follow a nationally recommended diet, despite the fact that these diets don't mention explicitly—or most of them don't explicitly mention—environmental impacts, that you are going to have lower environmental impacts due to that. So that's sort of fairly clear across all the high­income nations." said Paul Behrens, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

    The food we eat takes a big toll on the environment. A third of the ice­free land on Earth is used for agriculture, and according to some estimates, producing food accounts for roughly a fifth of all human­caused greenhouse gas emissions. Fertilizer runoff also leads to other problems, like the algae blooms in Lake Eerie and the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

    However, following dietary guidelines would reduce those impacts, especially in wealthy countries like the US. "Most of the reductions come from meat and dairy," which have an outsized impact on land use and pollution, and are a major source of greenhouse gases.(That's partly due to cow farts. Seriously.) Following the suggestions would also mean eating fewer calories, since many people here eat more than they need.

    Overall, in high­income countries, Behren's team estimates that following the rules could result in as much as a 17 percent reduction in land use, a 21 percent reduction in nutrient pollution, and a 25 percent drop in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting down on how much food we waste—which is roughly a third in the US—could help even more. The results are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Of course, people are notoriously bad at following diets. But: "These nationally recommended guidelines do actually have a knock­on effect on other areas of policy making. So if I'm developing a new healthy­eating­for­schools program then that's going to be based off a lot of detail that I get from the nationally recommended guidelines. So while it might not necessarily be the case that people follow directly …they actually are quite influential on the preparation of other advice."

    It seems that a smaller environmental footprint and a healthier lifestyle could go hand in hand.