Tulips(郁金香) are the national flower of Iran and Turkey. The European name for the flower is a misuse of the Persian word for turban(头巾), a mistake probably arising in the common Turkish custom of wearing flowers in the folds of the turban. Alternatively, the misuse may have arisen because this eastern flower, when not yet in full bloom, looks like a turban. In Persia, to give a red tulip was to declare your love for someone. The black center of the red tulip was said to represent the lover's heart, burned to a coal by love's passion.

    Originally growing in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), tulips were imported into Holland in the sixteenth century. When Carolus Clusius wrote the first major book on tulips in 1592, they became so popular that the tulips in his garden were stolen from time to time. As the Dutch Golden Age grew, so did this colorful flower. They were commonly seen in paintings and at festivals. In the mid-seventeenth century, tulips even created the first economics bubble（泡沫经济）, known as “Tulip Mania”. At that time, tulips were so expensive that they were used as money until the market for them crashed.

    Today, Holland is still known for its tulips and other flowers, often sincerely called “the flower shop of the world.” Tulips are planted in great fields of beautiful color, and transform the landscape into a sea of different colors. Tulip festivals are held throughout the country in spring. However, the most well-known tulip festival is organized in the Noordoostpolder, a province in the central Netherlands, each year. Held in the middle of the tulip fields, this flower festival runs from late April to early May. The Dutch people took their love of tulips abroad when they settled, and tulips and tulip festivals are now found in New York and Michigan, where the connection to their Dutch roots is still very strong.

Three Boys and a Dad

    Brad closed the door slowly as Sue left home to visit her mother. Expecting a whole day to relax, he was thinking whether to read the newspaper or watch his favorite TV talk show on his first day off in months. “This will be like a walk in the park,” he'd told his wife. “I'll look after the kids, and you can go and visit your mom.”

    Things started well, but just after eight o'clock, his three little “good kids”—Mike, Randy, and Alex—came down the stairs in their night clothes and shouted “breakfast, daddy.” When food had not appeared within thirty seconds, Randy began using his spoon on Alex's head as if it were a drum. Alex started to shout loudly in time to the beat（节拍）. Mike chanted “Where's my toast, where's my toast” in the background. Brad realized his newspaper would have to wait for a few seconds.

    Life became worse after breakfast. Mike wore Randy's underwear on his head. Randy locked himself in the bathroom, while Alex shouted again because he was going to wet his pants. Nobody could find clean socks, although they were before their very eyes. Someone named “Not Me” had spilled a whole glass of orange juice into the basket of clean clothes. Brad knew the talk show had already started.

    By ten o'clock, things were out of control. Alex was wondering why the fish in the jar refused his bread and butter. Mike was trying to show off his talent by decorating the kitchen wall with his colour pencils. Randy, thankfully, appeared to be reading quietly in the family room，but closer examination showed that he was eating apple jam straight from the bottle with his hands. Brad realised that the talk show was over and reading would be impossible.

    At exactly 11:17, Brad called the daycare centre (日托所）.“I suddenly have to go into work and my wife's away. Can I bring the boys over in a few minutes?” The answer was obviously “yes” because Brad was smiling.

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    A woman was sitting by herself in a movie theatre. The movie she was about to set was a musical version(版本)of a very successful book that had sold a million copies that year.

    As the woman was waiting for the movie to begin, she noticed that the theatre was very crowded but the two seats next to her were empty.

    Suddenly a large man carrying a big fur coat walked down the aisle(走廊) and sat down, placing the fur coat on the seat next to her.

    When the lights went out, the fur coat bean to move, and the woman realized it was not a coat but a large furry dog. He was sitting up in the seat, watching the movie screen with great interest. As soon as the movie started, the dog began to nod his head and beat his paws (爪) in perfect time to the music.

    When the movie was over, the woman turned to the man and said, “Excuse me, sir, but I've never seen Such a well-behaved dog in a movie theatre before. Does he go to the movies often?”

    “Oh, yes,” replied the man.

    “And he seemed to enjoy everything so much,” she said, “It was just amazing!”

    “As a matter of fact, it surprised me too.” said the man. “He hated the books！”

    On October 23, 2016, David Pologruto, a high school physics teacher, was stabbed by his smart student Jason Haffizulla. Jason got straight A's and was determined to study medicine at Harvard, yet this was his downfall. His physics teacher gave Jason a B, a mark Jason believed would undermine his entrance to Harvard. After receiving his B, Jason took a butcher knife to school and stabbed his physics teacher.

    How can someone as smart as Jason do something so dumb? Studies show there is little or no connection between IQ and emotional intelligence.

    During my early university years, I regarded myself as an intelligent guy. I got good marks in mathematics, physics, and other subjects. I thought such skills would surely give me a bright future. After one year of study with decent marks, I began to see two major classes of students. The first category of students turned up to few lectures, partied every weekend, enjoyed a great social life, and did minimal work to pass courses. The second category of students were intelligent and hard workers who got good grades and were very focused on their studies. Surely would these intelligent and hard-working students find the great jobs before the other lazier class of students?

    Not so. Students are often shocked upon graduation that their qualifications are not as important as they once thought. Graduates enter the workforce only to realize that co-workers hate them and less intelligent people are the ones receiving promotions (晋升).

    Educational skills are useless in some industries when interpersonal skills are absent. You can have great ideas, theories, and solve complex problems, but if you cannot effectively communicate with your colleagues, you will face difficult situations. It's not that people dislike you because of your intelligence; it's that people dislike you because you're rude and not understanding. The intelligent person with poor communication skills is unaware of others' emotions.

    Self-driving cars have been backed by the hope that they will save lives by getting involved in fewer crashes with fewer injuries and deaths than human-driven cars. But so far, most comparisons between human drivers and automated vehicles have been unfair. Crash statistics for human-driven cars arc gathered from all sorts of driving situations and all types of roads. However, most of the data on self-driving cars' safety have been recorded often in good weather and on highways, where the most important tasks are staying in the car's own lane and not getting too close to the vehicle-ahead. Automated cars are good at those tasks, but so are humans.

    It is true that self-driving cars don't get tired, angry, frustrated or drunk .But neither can they yet react to uncertain situations with the same skill or anticipation of an attentive Unban driver. Nor do they possess the foresight to avoid potential dangers. They largely drive from moment to moment, rather than think ahead to possible events literally down the road.

    To a self-driving car, a bus full of people might appear quite similar to an uninhabited field. Indeed, deciding what action to take in an emergency is difficult for humans, but drivers have sacrificed themselves for the greater good of others. An automated system's limited understanding of the world means it will almost never evaluate (评估)a Situation the same way a human would. And machines can't be programmed in advance to handle every imaginable set of events.

    Some people may argue that the promise of simply reducing the number of injuries and deaths is enough to support driverless cars. But experience from aviation(航空)shows that as new automated systems are introduced, there is often an increase in the rate of disasters.

    Therefore, comparisons between humans and automated vehicles have to be performed carefully. To fairly evaluate driverless cars on how well they fulfill their promise of improved safety, it's important to ensure the data being presented actually provide a true comparison. After all, choosing to replace humans with automation has more effects than simply a one-for-one exchange.

By now you've probably heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the uproar was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their very incapability prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill": the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors note: "The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain." In other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.