Hundreds of years ago，a Roman army came north from England to make war on Scotland. The Scots，a brave people，loved their country very much. They fought hard to drive the enemy out of Scotland，but there were too many Romans. It looked as if the Romans would win.

    One night，the leader of Scots marched his soldiers to the top of a hill. "We will rest here tonight，my men,” he said. "Tomorrow we will fight one more battle. We must win or we will die."

    They were all very tired，so they ate their supper quickly and fell asleep. There were four guards on duty, but they were very tired as well and also fell asleep one by one.

    The Romans were not asleep. Quickly they gathered at the foot of the hill. Slowly they climbed up the hillside, taking care not to make a sound. Closer and closer they came to the sleeping Scots. They were almost at the top. A few minutes more，the war would be over. Suddenly，one of them put his foot on a thistle(蓟). He cried out and his sudden cry woke the Scots. In a moment，they were on their feet and ready for battle. The fighting was hard but it did not last long. The Scots wiped out the Romans and saved their country.

    The thistle is not a beautiful plant. It has sharp needles all over it. Few people like it. But the people of Scotland liked it so much that they made it their national flower.

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    He's an old cobbler（修鞋匠）with a shop in the Marais,a historic area in Paris.When I took him my shoes,he at first told me: “I haven't time.Take them to the other fellow on the main street ; he'll fix them for you right away.”

    But I'd had my eye on his shop for a long time.Just looking at his bench loaded with tools and pieces of leather,I knew he was a skilled craftsman（手艺人）.“No,” I replied,“the other fellow can't do it well.”

     “The other fellow” was one of those shopkeepers who fix shoes and make keys “while-U-wait”-without knowing much about mending shoes or making keys.They work carelessly,and when they have finished sewing back a sandal strap（鞋带）you might as well just throw away the pair.

    The man saw I wouldn't give in,and he smiled.He wiped his hands on his blue apron（围裙）,looked at my shoes, had me write my name on one shoe with a piece of chalk and said,“Come back in a week.”

    I was about to leave when he took a pair of soft leather boots off a shelf.

     “See what I can do?” he said with pride.“Only three of us in Paris can do this kind of work…”

    When I got back out into the street,the world seemed brand-new to me.He was something out of an ancient legend,this old craftsman with his way of speaking familiarly,his very strange,dusty felt hat,his funny accent from who-knows-where and,above all,his pride in his craft.

    There are times when nothing is important but the bottom line,when you can do things any old way as long as it “pays”,when,in short,people look on work as a path to ever-increasing consumption（消费）rather than a way to realize their own abilities.In such a period it is a rare comfort to find a cobbler who gets his greatest satisfaction from pride in a job well done.

    While dog keepers realize their dogs can read their moods accurately,scientists have always been a little doubtful.Now thanks to some researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna,Austria,we finally have some convincing evidence.

    For their study,biologist Corson Miller and his team exposed eleven selected dogs to digital images of women that were either angry or happy.Half the dogs were rewarded for touching the screen when shown a happy face,while the other half got their treat for selecting those that appeared angry.

    Interestingly,the dogs were not provided with the entire face.Some dogs were shown only upper halves while the others observed lower halves.That's because the scientists believe humans show their emotions on their entire face.

    After some training like how to recognize small differences like the wrinkles between the eyes or the changes in their shape that accompany the happy or angry expressions,the dogs were mostly able to identify the correct expression not only on a familiar face but on a strange face.The researchers concluded the dogs were smart enough to read human emotions.

    They also found those being trained to read angry expressions took a longer time to learn.They guess it may be because dogs find angry faces disgusting,causing them to withdraw quickly.However,once the smart dogs realized they were getting rewarded,the trepidation seemed to disappear.In fact,the dogs had such a good time playing the computer "game" that scientists had a hard time keeping them away from the touch screens after the study was completed.

    The researchers also noticed only dogs with a male owner had a harder time understanding the expressions correctl. Since the touchscreen models were all females, this confirmed what has been observed in previous studies-dogs are more efficient at reading facial expressions of people that are the same gender as their owner.

    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?

    If you want to get something done, you might want to put your mobile phone back in your pocket. Researchers have found that the mere presence of a phone is distracting (分心) — even if it is not your own. And the devices (设备) are likely to distract you, even if they are not ringing or “pinging” with text messages. People asked to carry out electronic tests of their attention spans were found to perform worse when a mobile phone was present than other people performing in the presence of a paper notepad.

    Scientists from Hokkaido University in Japan said that their findings show that it is harder to concentrate when one of the electronic devices is present. The effect was most marked on people who are not regular users of phones. In tests on 40 undergraduates. Associate Professor Junichiro Kawahara and a colleague divided the subjects into two groups — one asked to carry out tests in the presence of an Apple iPhone next to a computer monitor, and the other in the presence of a notebook.

    The test involved asking the participant to search for a particular character among a mess of other characters on the screen. Researchers measured the time it took to find the target. The results of the experiment found that those with the mobile phone took longer to find the character, indicating that participants were automatically distracted by the presence of the phone. The researchers suggest that people are drawn to the presence of a mobile phone, although there are individual differences in how one attempts to ignore it. In conclusion. Professor Kawahara said. “The mere presence of a mobile phone was a distraction among infrequent internet users.”

    Another finding is that listening to one half of a mobile phone conversation also distracts people, and other studies have found that placing a mobile phone in view has a negative impact on the quality of face-to-face communications. Holding a mobile phone makes you less likely to get a fair hearing from others.

    When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes(定式)keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, kind, cautious and emotionally enthusiastic. Men tend to be more competitive, confident, rude and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

    What's not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists think that these are natural features from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists argues that both sexes' personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time taking care of children and more time in jobs outside the home.

    To test these hypotheses(假设), a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the change is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal(男权的)Botswanan clan(部族)seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to separate.

    These findings are so unbelievable that some researchers have argued they must be due to cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But according to new data from 40.000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level(使平等)the barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being developed.

    The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women.

    Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less confident and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

    To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his partners from Austria and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note that in some other species, environmental stress tends to extremely affect the larger sex. And, they say, there are examples of stress decreasing biological sex differences in humans.