English Conversation

Leader: Mandi Ashmore

english@ iwc-lausanne. org

    We meet on Mondays at 14：30 at the IWC clubhouse. We chat for about an hour and discuss everything. Mandi asks “students” to contact her on Monday to confirm the class as sometimes she needs to cancel for various reasons or occasionally she may choose to hold the class at a different venue(举办地点) or at an earlier time for us to be able to have lunch together.

French Conversation, Advanced Beginner

Leader: Marielle Sulmoni

frenchconvo@ iwc-lausanne. org

    I'm French (born in Bordeaux) and Swiss by marriage. I hold an advanced beginners' French conversation class on Tuesday afternoons from 14：30 - 16：00. We meet weekly at the clubhouse in a friendly atmosphere. I hope to help you use your knowledge of French, allowing you to speak with no fear of making mistakes, which in time will become fewer and fewer.

French Language Lab, Beginner

Leader: Maija Remlinger

frenchlab@ iwc-lausanne. org

    The group meets on Thursday afternoons from 15：00－16：30 at the clubhouse. The first half of the class is devoted to reading out loud from the book “Easy French Reader”, working on pronunciation and phrasing. During the second half, we listen to audio recordings from “New French with Ease” and work on oral comprehension.

French Conversation, Advanced

Leader: Juliette Brull

french@ iwc-lausanne, org

    We meet every Tuesday at the IWC clubhouse from 9：30－11：00. Most of our time is devoted to very lively discussions about current events and various topics. We also read a book written by a French author and sometimes we see a French movie.

    Obama, Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs—what do they have in common? They are, of course, all Americans. And according to a survey by social networking site baidu. com, they all best illustrate(举例说明) the word “cool”.

    But just what does it mean to say someone is “cool”? Most would answer that it is something to do with being independent-minded and not following the crowd.

    Yale University art professor Robert Farris Thompson says that the term “cool” goes back to 15th century West African philosophy. “Cool” relates to ideas of grace under pressure.

    “In Africa, ” he writes, “coolness is a positive quality which combines calmness, silence, and life.”

    The modern idea of “cool” developed largely in the US in the period after World War II. “Post-war ‘cool' was in part an expression of war-weariness (厌战情绪), ... it went against the strict social rules of the time,” write sociologists Dick Pountain and David Robins in Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude.

    But it was the American actor James Dean who became the symbol for “cool” in the hugely successful 1955 movie Rebel without a Cause. Dean plays a tough guy who disobeys his parents and the authorities. He always gets the girl, smokes cigarettes, wears a leather jacket and beats up bullies. In the movie, Dean showed what “cool” would mean to American young people for the next 60 years.

    Today the focus of “cool” has changed to athletics (体育运动) stars. Often in movies about schools, students gain popularity on the athletics field more than in the classroom. This can be seen quite clearly in movies like Varsity Blues and John Tucker Must Die.

    But many teenagers also think being smart is cool. Chess and other thinking games have been becoming more popular in schools.

    “Call it the Harry Potterization of America—a time when being smart is the new cool,” writes journalist Joe Sunnen.

    Exposing living tissue to subfreezing temperatures for long can cause permanent damage. Microscopic ice crystals (结晶体) cut cells and seize moisture (潮气), making donor organs unsuitable for transplantation. Thus, organs can be made cold for only a few hours ahead of a procedure. But a set of lasting new antifreeze compounds (化合物)—similar to those found in particularly hardy (耐寒的) animals—could lengthen organs' shelf life.

    Scientists at the University of Warwick in England were inspired by proteins in some species of Arctic fish, wood frogs and other organisms that prevent blood from freezing, allowing them to flourish in extreme cold. Previous research had shown these natural antifreeze molecules (分子) could preserve rat hearts at -1.3 degrees Celsius for up to 24 hours. But these proteins are expensive to extract (提取) and highly poisonous to some species. “For a long time everyone assumed you had to make synthetic (人造的) alternatives that looked exactly like antifreeze proteins to solve this problem, ”says Matthew Gibson, a chemist at Warwick who co-authored the new research. “But we found that you can design new molecules that function like antifreeze proteins but do not necessarily look like them.”

    Most natural antifreeze molecules have a mixture of regions that either attract or repel water. Scientists do not know exactly how this process prevents ice crystal formation, but Gibson thinks it might throw water molecules into push-pull chaos that prevents them from tuning into ice. To copy this mechanism, he and his colleagues synthesized spiral-shaped molecules that were mostly water-repellent—but had iron atoms at their centers that made them hydrophilic, or water-loving. The resulting compounds were surprisingly effective at stopping ice crystals from forming. Some were also harmless to the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, indicating they might be safe for other animals.

    “These compounds are really cool because they are not proteins—they are other types of molecules that nonetheless can do at least part of what natural antifreeze proteins do, ”says Clara do Amaral, a biologist at Mount St. Joseph University, who was not involved in the research. Gibson's antifreeze compounds will still need to be tested in humans, however, and may be only part of a solution. “We don't have the whole picture yet,”do Amaral adds. “It's not just one magical compound that helps freeze-tolerant organisms survive. It's a whole suite of adaptations.

    When Kim Chil-doo was young, he says, he wanted to be a model. But he gave up that idea to make money. Now, at age 65, he appears in television advertisements and fashion magazines. With his gray beard and long hair, he is South Korea's first senior model.

    Kim is one of many older people in South Korea the country has the world's fastest growing ageing population. Almost half of the country's older people live in poverty. Some take low-paying jobs to support themselves after retiring. But Kim and some other seniors have shown how older South Koreans can find unusual job opportunities later in life.

    You Sung-lae is 59. When she was a child, she wanted to be an actress. But instead, she says, she got married and had children. Now she is training to appear on a catwalk to show clothes. She was wearing a bright blue jacket, orange high heeled shoes and designer sunglasses.

    You is also helping the fashion business by attracting older buyers. Older buyers have become big players. While many older people do not have much money, others have bought their homes and built savings. Now, those seniors are ready to spend some of their money on themselves.

    Some businesses are also trying to use older people's skills and experiences. For example, Cho Young-min started a company using Skype to connect older instructors in Korea with students around the world. The students are interested in learning Korean, and the instructors are interested in sharing their knowledge.

    Another man, Ji Byung-soo found success by performing a dance song on a televised singing contest. He is 77. Now he earns enough money to donate to a local support center. Last month, he danced nonstop at a youth festival in Seoul while young people called his name. "Life begins in your 70s," Ji said. "Let's be happy and have fun."

We credit Socrates with the insight that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and that to "know thyself" is the path to true wisdom.

But when it comes to introspection (内省), you might easily slip into the "rumination" (沉思) mode. This pattern is likely to cause you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and absorbed in the emotions that might lead you to a wrong way. Research has also shown that people who are likely to ruminate are often at a substantially increased risk of depression.

Instead, scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient method favored by the likes of Julius Caesar, known as "illeism" which was coined in 1809 from the Latin "ille" meaning "he". The point of adopting this third person thinking is that such a small change can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see your biases and helping you know the limits of your understanding of the problem at hand.

A study finds that illeism can also bring long-term benefits to wise reasoning (including elements like taking the perspective of others, recognizing uncertainty, and so on). The finding is the brainchild of Igor Grossmann, a psychologist. According to Grossmann, wise reasoning had long been considered too vague for scientific enquiry. In one of his earlier experiments, he established that as with IQ, the scores of wise reasoning could be achieved and were meaningful.

Grossmann's latest research team asked nearly 300 participants to describe a challenging social situation, and two psychologists graded them on different aspects of wise reasoning. The participants then had to keep a diary for four weeks. Each day, they had to describe a situation they'd just experienced, such as a disagreement with someone. Half were prompted to do so in the first person, while the others were encouraged to describe their situations from a third person perspective. At the end of the study, all participants repeated the wise reasoning test.

While the control group showed no overall change in their wise reasoning scores, those using illeism improved on their perspective taking and capacity to find a compromise.

Grossmann's work continues to prove that the subject of wisdom is worthy of experimental studies, indicating wiser reasoning is within everyone's power.