Generally speaking, college graduation brings both the satisfaction of academic achievement and the expectation of a well-paid job. But for 6,000 graduates at San Jose State this year, there's uncertainty as they enter one of the worst job markets in decades.

    Ryan Stewart has a freshly minted degree in religious studies, but no job prospects. “You look at everybody's parents and neighbors, and they're getting laid off and don't have jobs,” said Stewart. “Then you look at the young people just coming into the workforce.., it's just scary.”

    When those graduates entered college, the future never looked brighter. But in the four years they've been here, the world outside has changed dramatically. “Those were the exciting times, lots of dot-com opportunities, exploding offers, students getting top dollar with lots of benefits,” said Cheryl Allmen-Vinnidge, of the San Jose State Career Centre. “Times have changed. It's a new market. The job situation is grim (严峻的) now.” Cheryl Allmen-Vinnidge ought to know. She runs the San Jose State Career Centre, (it is) sort of a crossroads between college and the real world. Allmen-Vinnidge says students who do find jobs after college have done their homework. “The typical graduate who does have a job offer started working on it two years ago. They've postured themselves well during the summer. They've had several internships (实习) ,” she said. And they've 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 systems management, computer science, and political science) have seen big declines 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 a bad economy,” he said.

    It is true more students are able to receive college education. It is also true that they will have to face fiercer competition in the job market as they graduate. It becomes harder and harder for the current graduates to get a foothold in job markets, but many of them have no choice but to follow the beaten track. To some students a degree may not be ticket to instant wealth. For now, they can only hope its value will increase over time.

    Each time I see a balloon, my mind flies back to a memory of when I was a six-year-old girl. It was a rainy Sunday and my father had recently died. I asked my mom if Dad had gone to heaven. "Yes, honey. Of course." she said.

    "Can we write him a letter?"

    She paused, the longest pause of my short life, and answered, "Yes."

    My heart jumped. "How? Does the mailman go there?" I asked.

    "No, but I have an idea." Mom drove to a party store and returned with a red balloon. I asked her what it was for.

    "Just wait, honey. You'll see." Mom told me to write my letter. Eagerly, I got my favorite pen, and poured out my six-year-old heart in the form of blue ink. I wrote about my day, what I learned at school, how Mom was doing, and even about what happened in a story I had read. For a few minutes it was as if Dad were still alive. I gave the letter to Mom. She read it over, and a smile crossed her face.

    She made a hole in the corner of the letter where she looped the balloon string. We went outside and she gave me the balloon. It was still raining.

    "Okay, on the count of three, let go. One, two, three."

    The balloon, carrying my letter, darted upward against the rain. We watched until it was swallowed by the mass of clouds.

    Later I realized, like the balloon, that Dad had never let his sickness get him down. He was strong. No matter what he suffered, he'd persevere, hang on, and finally transcend this cold world and his sick body. He rose into sky and became something beautiful. I watched until the balloon disappeared into the gray and white and I prayed that his strength was hereditary. I prayed to be a balloon.

    “Body clocks” are biological methods of controlling body activities. Every living thing has one. In humans, a body clock controls normal periods of sleeping and waking. It controls the times when you are most likely to feel pain. Eating, sleeping and exercising at about the same time each day will help keep body activities normal. But changes in your life—a new job, for example—destroy the balance and thus cause health problems. You could have difficult sleeping, for example. Scientists suggest that early afternoon is the best time of day for physical exercise. They say we are stronger and faster then. Later, about four o'clock, most people feel tired because of the drop of sugar level in the blood. Early afternoon also is a good time to do tasks about memory（记忆） and mathematics. If you must study, however, do it just before going to sleep at night. Scientists say you are more likely to remember information when there is a short delay（耽搁）between study and bed. Body clocks control all the activities from day to day. They also produce changes about every ninety minutes during the day. At the end of such a time period, our ability to think hard begins to become weak. That is the time we are most likely to day-dream. Within fifteen minutes, we are ready to go back to what we were doing.

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    Steven Stein likes to follow garbage trucks. His strange habit makes sense when you consider that he's an environmental scientist who studies how to reduce litter, including things that fall off garbage trucks as they drive down the road. What is even more interesting is that one of Stein's jobs is defending an industry behind the plastic shopping bags.

    Americans use more than 100 billion thin film plastic bags every year. So many end up in tree branches or along highways that a growing number of cities do not allow them at checkouts(收银台). The bags are prohibited in some 90 cities in California, including Los Angeles. Eyeing these headwinds, plastic-bag makers are hiring scientists like Stein to make the case that their products are not as bad for the planet as most people assume.

    Among the bag makers' arguments: many cities with bans still allow shoppers to purchase paper bags, which are easily recycled but require more energy to produce and transport. And while plastic bags may be ugly to look at, they represent a small percentage of all garbage on the ground today.

    The industry has also taken aim at the product that has appeared as its replacement: reusable shopping bags. The stronger a reusable bag is, the longer its life and the more plastic-bag use it cancels out. However, longer-lasting reusable bags often require more energy to make. One study found that a cotton bag must be used at least 131 times to be better for the planet than plastic.

    Environmentalists don't dispute（质疑） these points. They hope paper bags will be banned someday too and want shoppers to use the same reusable bags for years.

    In China, Double Eleven Shopping Day is approaching. And there is a similar case in the United States—Black Friday. It has been regarded as the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Although it's not an official holiday, millions of employers give their employees the day off, and many people use that day to get a jump-start on their holiday shopping. A similar day in Canada and Great Britain is called "Boxing Day".

    Black Friday has become somewhat of a marketing sensation in recent years. Since 2005, it has been the busiest shopping day of the year. To lure shoppers, retailers (零售商) routinely open their doors as early as 4 a.m. and offer special sales and promotions to the shoppers that arrive early. Some of the special deals offered by stores are only available in limited quantities. That is why some shoppers intent on getting the best deals often camp out in front of stores overnight so that they'll be the first in line when the doors open.

    But why is it called Black Friday? Historians believe the name started in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. Bus drivers and police used "Black Friday" to describe the heavy traffic that would block city streets the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers headed to the stores.

    Businesses, however, didn't like the negative tone associated with the "Black Friday" name. In the early 1980s, a more positive explanation of the name began to circulate. According to this alternative explanation, Black Friday is the day when retailers finally begin to turn a profit for the year. In accounting terms (会计行业), operating at a loss is called being "in the red" because accountants traditionally used red ink to show negative amounts. Positive amounts were usually shown in black ink. Thus, being "in the black" is a good thing because it means stores are operating at a profit.

    Recently, for those who are too busy to shop on Black Friday or who just don't want to fight the crowds, the Monday following Black Friday has become known as Cyber Monday (网络星期一) for the many online deals.

    A robot created by Washington State University (WSU) scientists could help elderly people with dementia (痴呆) and other limitations live independently in their own homes.

    The Robot Activity Support System or RAS, uses sensors installed in a WSU smart home to determine where its residents are, what they are doing and when they need assistance with daily activities. It navigates (定位) through rooms and around obstacles to find people on its own, provides video instructions on how to do simple tasks and can even lead its owner to objects like their medication or a snack in the kitchen.

"RAS combines the convenience of a mobile robot with the activity detection technology of a WSU smart home to provide assistance in the moment, as the need for help is detected," said Bryan Minor, a postdoctoral researcher in the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

    Currently, an estimated 50 percent of adults over the age of 85 need assistance with every day activities such as preparing meals and taking medication and the annual cost for this assistance in the US is nearly $2 trillion. With the number of adults over 85 expected to triple by 2050, researchers hope that technologies like RAS and the WSU smart home will relieve some of the financial strain on the healthcare system by making it easier for older adults to live alone.

    RAS is the first robot researchers have tried to incorporate into their smart home environment. They recently published a study in the journal Cognitive Systems Research that demonstrates how RAS could make life easier for older adults struggling to live independently.

    "While we are still in an early stage of development, our initial results with RAS have been promising," Minor said. "The next step in the research will be to test RAS' performance with a group of older adults to get a better idea of what prompts, video reminders and other preferences they have regarding the robot."