Today I went to Berkeley, near our old neighborhood. I was a bit surprised by the increased number of homeless (alternatively housed) people walking around. I remember there are more in certain areas. So the first man who asked me for money got all my single bills. So when the second man asked me two minutes later, I said I was out because I gave all I had to the previous person.

    I was headed to the grocery store for a coffee and after I left the store I walked out to find him as he had asked me for something because he was hungry and I invited him to go into the grocery store with me.

    When I asked him what he wanted to eat, he just asked for vegetable and rice. He talked about how much better the vegetables were as we waited for our number to be called. While we waited he told me that he had slept outside last night on the sidewalk, that it was not good, and that he had come from Rwanda and was alone.

    He was a gentleman. When I asked if he wanted more he said, this bowl of food would last him the whole day.

    I don't know what his circumstances were before he came to California, and wandering and begging on the streets could somehow be better because you just never know what had happened to him. He seemed like a kind soul who just needed some help like we all do. I am grateful I did a little to help him today.

    One of the executives gathered at the Aspen Institute for a day-long leadership workshop using the works of Shakespeare was discussing the role of Brutus in the death of Julius Caesar. “Brutus was not an honorable man,” he said. “He was a traitor（叛徒）. And he murdered someone in cold blood.” The agreement was that Brutus had acted with cruelty when other options were available to him. He made a bad decision, they said—at least as it was presented by Shakespeare—to take the lead in murdering Julius Caesar. And though one of the executives acknowledged that Brutus had the good of the republic in mind, Caesar was nevertheless his superior. “You have to endeavor,” the executives said, “our policy is to obey the chain of command.”

    During the last few years, business executives and book writers looking for a new way to advise corporate America have been exploiting Shakespeare's wisdom for profitable ends. None more so than husband and wife team Kenneth and Carol Adelman, well-known advisers to the White House, who started up a training company called “Movers and Shakespeares”. They are amateur Shakespeare scholars and Shakespeare lovers, and they have combined their passion and their high level contacts into a management training business. They conduct between 30 and 40 workshops annually, focusing on half a dozen different plays, mostly for corporations, but also for government agencies.

    The workshops all take the same form, focusing on a single play as a kind of case study, and using individual scenes as specific lessons. In Julius Caesar , sly provocation（狡诈的挑唆） of Brutus to take up arms against the what was a basis for a discussion of methods of team building and grass roots organism.

Although neither of the Adelmans is academically trained in literature, the programmes, contain plenty of Shakespeare tradition and background. Their workshop on Henry V, for example, includes a helpful explanation of Henry's winning strategy at the Battle of Agincourt. But they do come to the text with a few biases (偏向): their reading of Henry V minimizes his misuse of power. Instead, they emphasize the story of the youth who seizes opportunity and becomes a masterful leader. And at the workshop on Caesar, Mr. Adelmans had little good to say about Brutus, saying “the noblest Roman of them all” couldn't make his mind up about things.

    Many of the participants pointed to very specific elements in the play that they felt related Caesar's pride, which led to his murder, and Brutus's mistakes in leading the  after the murder, they said, raise vital questions for anyone serving as a business when and how do you resist the boss?

    On a hill 600 feet above the surrounding land, we watch the lines of rain move across the scene, the moon rise over the hills, and the stars appear in the sky. The views invite a long look from a comfortable chair in front of the wooden house.

    Every window in our wooden house has a view, and the forest and lakes seldom look the same as the hour before. Each look reminds us where we are.

    There is space for our three boys to play outside, to shoot arrows, collect tree seeds, build earth houses and climb trees.

    Our kids have learned the names of the trees, and with the names have come familiarity and appreciation. As they tell all who show even a passing interest, maple（枫树）makes the best fighting sticks and white pines are the best climbing trees.

    The air is clean and fresh. The water from the well has a pleasant taste, and it is perhaps the healthiest water our kids will ever drink. Though they have one glass a day of juice and the rest is water, they never say anything against that.

    The seasons change just outside the door. We watch the maples turn every shade of yellow and red in the fall and note the poplars'（杨树）putting out the first green leaves of spring. The rainbow smelt fills the local steam as the ice gradually disappears, and the wood frogs start to sing in pools after being frozen for the winter. A family of birds rules our skies and flies over the lake.

    Tiredness, coughing, a runny nose and a sore throat—among all sicknesses there is probably none more common than the flu (流感), which we all get now and then. However, bird flu is a completely different story.

    In 2003, the H5N1 bird flu swept across 15 countries, including China, with sufferers reporting chest pain, difficulty breathing, fever and severe coughing. More than 600 people were infected, and about 60 percent died. Now, another type of bird flu hit Shanghai and three neighboring provinces, and this time the virus is called H7N9. By the afternoon of April 11, the new virus had taken nine lives out of 35 infected, according to Xinhua News Agency.

    The "H" and "N" in the virus' name refer to two kinds of proteins (蛋白质) on the surface of the virus. Any change of the numbers of the two proteins indicates a new mutation(变异). Most of the mutations only affect birds, such as chickens and pigeons, and don't normally spread to humans. But once they do, the results can be disastrous.

    "Any time an animal influenza virus crosses to humans, it is a cause for concern, " Malik Peiris, virologist (病毒学家) at the University of Hong Kong, told Nature magazine. Take the SARS epidemic (传染病) in 2003 as an example. The virus behind the disease is thought to have jumped to humans from animals. The virus was a complete "stranger" to human bodies, which hadn't developed an immunity (免疫力) against it.

    But there is something more about the new H7N9 bird flu. Unlike the H5N1 bird flu, which causes severe sickness in birds, the H7N9 has been evolving under the radar(悄悄地) since it travels between birds without causing noticeable illness. That makes it difficult to keep track of the disease.

    The good news is that there's so far no sign that the virus is spreading from person to person. But since there is no vaccine (疫苗) for the disease yet, the World Health Organization recommends that you wash your hands after meeting with sick people and before and after you eat or prepare food, and they also suggest avoiding contact with birds or their eggs.

    In 1972, a social worker named Sanjit Bunker Roy founded Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan. Today the college trains women from villages for six months to build and maintain solar panels and other instruments. Barefoot College also offers education to the younger generation both during the day and at its solar bridge schools that meet by lamplight at night.

    The philosophy of Barefoot College is largely inspired by the principles of Gandhi, starting with equality beyond caste (种姓), gender or religion. As a matter of fact, women are prioritized (优先考虑) as an underserved population that is essential to bringing villages together. Another central principle of the college is self-reliance, teaching students to support and think for themselves.

    After the college's female students have completed their half-year of training, they return to their villages where they wait for solar panel parts to arrive from the college. Once they have all the pieces they need, they construct the panels and begin collecting solar energy. For each village, the college also provides solar lamps. Villagers can, in addition, order parts for other solar-powered devices, such as water heaters and cooking stoves. Once assembled, they and the lamps are powered by the solar panels.

    The effect on the villages is huge. Before the solar panels and lamps arrived  villagers had only candles to light their homes. This prevented adults from doing serious work at night, and it made studying difficult for children as well. As for physicians, they had difficulty treating patients and performing operations at night because they had to rely on flashlights.

    Now there is power for not only the electrical appliances that the college provides but also devices like televisions, radios and computers. For the first time, the villagers can even connect to the world through the Internet.

Machines work well at a constant speed —and the faster the better.Whether they are spinning cotton {#blank#}1{#/blank#}dealing with numbers,regular,repetitive actions are what they excel at.

Increasingly,our world is being designed by machines and for machines.We adapt to machines and hold ourselves to their standards:People {#blank#}2{#/blank#}(judge)by the speed at which they respond, not the quality of their response."Always on"becomes something to take pride {#blank#}3{#/blank#}.When I ask people {#blank#}4{#/blank#} they are doing,they almost always answer "busy".Ticking things off the "to do"list becomes{#blank#}5{#/blank#}means of defining ourselves. {#blank#}6{#/blank#} (occupy)if not with work then with family or our social networks,most of us feel exhausted.

A few years ago,I became very interested in what it meant {#blank#}7{#/blank#}(pause).I started to notice where pauses show up in my own work and life.For example,I realized when I was writing,a short walk was a(n) {#blank#}8{#/blank#}(effective)way to focus than concentrating harder.The small walk acted as a pause, {#blank#}9{#/blank#}(enable)me to rest,reflect or refresh,appreciate and break a block in my {#blank#}10{#/blank#}(creative).I realized that pause is not nothing!

A minute eating ice-cream is not the same as a minute doing push-ups.Even time itself isn't a uniform raw material —as the physics of Einstein shows.