In the United States and several other countries , 2.5 million children play baseball in an organization called Little League . They play on teams in their hometowns . Their parents and other adults in the community coach or instruct them and serve as umpires（裁判员）to make sure that everyone follows the rules . Local businesses give money for the ball fields and the uniforms . Local teams compete against each other and the winners get to play teams that are more distant . Eventually , the top teams go to the Little League World Series .

    One hundred years after Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown , New York , in 1839 , Little League got started in Pennsylvania . Three men started the game for neighborhood boys with a smaller playing field and fewer innings（局）than adult baseball . Little League became popular after World War II when the game spread across the United States . By 1955 it was played throughout North America and within five years it had spread to Europe. Children's baseball really caught on in Japan and Taiwan of China and teams from those areas won the World Series seven out of eight years . After this , the organization tried banning foreign teams from the World Series , but the ban came to an end after one year .

    At first , Little League was only for boys aged nine to twelve . However , in 1974 , the parents of girl baseball players brought a law suit . The courts ruled that Little League had to include both boys and girls . Later Little League added on softball and other games for teenagers up to age eighteen . Occasionally , a Little Leaguer becomes a professional player . For example , Gary Carter went from Little League to play nineteen seasons in the Major Leagues , ten of them as an All-Star player . By and large , youngsters play baseball for fun , but their parents are pround of them .

    Scottish pupils recently were part of a new scheme that allowed them to take their exams online. Those examinations provided a glimpse of the future in May when 120 candidates in 10 centers in Scotland sat in front of computers to take a multiple-choice online exam. Although candidates were using a computer mouse instead of a pen, in all other ways the exam was the same as normal.

    Exam rooms were set out to ensure that only the candidates and the teachers were able to see the individual screens. The online answers were sent directly to a safe area. According to the students at St Ninian's in East Renfrewshire who took an online French exam, it was definitely the most motivated they had ever felt when taking an exam.

    “I could go as fast as I wanted to, rather than as slow as everyone else wanted to,” said one. “It was better than looking back and forth between the questions,” said another. One pupil even described it as fun.

    Their head teacher, Dorothy Graham, was not so surprised, “They are so used to doing things on computers that it seems natural for them. The boys liked it because they didn't have to worry about how neat their work was.” The only things that worried her were power cuts and systems' crashing.

    It's thought that online exams could be the norm (常态) in about five years. However, last year there were warnings about computerizing exams in England and Wales. It's thought that it could be unfair to some students if they come from homes without access to a computer.

    My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

    Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin's freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

    Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi'an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BC, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

    At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn't look very realistic to me at the time. 'Mountains aren't like that,' I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

    These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting!

    As the days get shorter and the chilly weather rolls in, we all want to curl up in a blanket and hibernate until spring rolls around. But making time to get outside in the sun, even when it's cold out, could have bigger mood benefits than you might realize.

    While the link between sunshine and mental health is nothing new, new research from Brigham Young University (BYU) has shown that the association may be even stronger than previously realized. It finds that sunlight exposure is by far the greatest weather-related factor determining mental health outcomes. In other words: more sunshine, more happiness.

    For the study, a psychologist, a physicist and a statistician from BYU teamed up to compare daily environmental data from the university's Physics and Astronomy Weather Station with emotional health data archived by day for 16,452 adult therapy patients who were being treated at the BYU Counseling and Psychological Services Center.

    Exposure to sunlight is a significant factor in seasonal affective disorder. Research has shown that the brain produces more of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin on sunny days than it does on darker days. What's more, lack of sunlight is linked with lower vitamin D levels, which in turn has been correlated with depression and low energy.

    If you're getting enough sun, your emotions should remain relatively stable, the researchers found. But as the amount of sunlight in the day is reduced, levels of emotional pain can soar. Other weather variables including temperature, pollution and rain were not found to have an impact on mental health.

    “We were surprised that many of the weather and pollution variables we included in the study were not significantly correlated with clients' scores on the distress measure once we had accounted for suntime," Dr. Mark Beecher, a professor of psychology at the university and the study's lead author, told The Huffington Post. “People tend to associate rainy days, pollution, and other meteorological phenomena with sadness or depression, but we did not find that.”

    Who cares if people think wrongly that the Internet has had more important influences than the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?

    It would not matter if these misjudgments were just a matter of people's opinions. However, they have real impacts, as they result in misguided use of scarce resources.

    The fascination with the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the Internet, has made some rich countries wrongly conclude that making things is so "yesterday" that they should try to live on ideas. This belief in "post-industrial society" has led those countries to neglect their manufacturing sector (制造业) with negative consequences for their economies.

    Even more worryingly, the fascination with the Internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the "digital divide" between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and Internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity networks and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people's lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up Internet centres in rural villages, I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donators have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.

    In yet another example, a fascination with the new has led people to believe that the recent changes in the technologies of communications and transportation are so revolutionary that now we live in a "borderless world". As a result, in the last twenty years or so, many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of great technological progress, going against which will be like trying to turn the clock back. Believing in such a world, many governments have put an end to some of the very necessary regulations on cross-border flows of capital, labour and goods, with poor results.

    Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels, and for making the right career choices at the individual level. However, our fascination with the latest, and our under valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.

    In Western countries people have been using the installment plan since the first half of the twentieth century. Today, a large number of families in Great Britain buy furniture, household goods and cars by installments In the U. S. A, the figure is much higher than in Great Britain, and people there spend over 10 percent of their income on the installment plan.

    The price of an article bought on installments is always higher than the price that would be paid by cash. There is a charge for interest. The buyer pays one quarter or one third of the price as a down payment when the goods are delivered to him. He then makes regular payments, weekly or monthly, until the full price is paid up. The legal ownership of the goods remains with the seller until the final payment has been made.

    Installment buying has advantages and disadvantages. It can help couples with small incomes to furnish their homes and star housekeeping. It increases the demand for goods, and in this way helps business and employment. There is, however, the danger that when business is bad, installment buying may end suddenly, making business much worse. This may result in a great increase in unemployment. If the people on the installment plan lose their jobs, they will probably not be able to make their payments. If great numbers of people are not able to pay their installment debts, there is a possibility that businessmen cannot collect their debts and will therefore lose money. If businessmen lose money or fail to make a satisfactory profit, it becomes more likely to have a depression. This is why, in some countries,the government controls the installment plan by fixing the amount of the down payment and installments to discourage people from buying more than they can pay for on the installment plan.