Dear SJ,

    Losing a best friend is never easy.

    Your problem, is not just that you miss your best friend, it is that you feel empty and lost without her friendship.

    It takes time to get over a lost, and during that time, your mind is getting used to a new way of being. This is usually a good thing, even if it feels like a bad thing.

    Now that you are on your own, you are being forced to learn to be by yourself and to rely upon your own inner voice for guidance. I am sure that this feels strange for you, but if you can hang on for a bit longer, it may work to your advantage.

    Best friends are cool, but it is important to know the difference between missing someone and being too independent upon them.

    At your age, girls do tend to stick together and having a good boyfriend may not yet be the better choice. Your friend is leaving you, her best friend, for a boyfriend. Boyfriends are completely different from best friends. The distinction is that boyfriends come and go, while girl friends often stay in your life throughout high school, and even afterwards. It is a completely different sort of bond.

    I suggest that you take advantage of this period in your life to expand your horizons. Enjoy the freedom of having no best friend for a while, and hang with the group. By the time your former best friend breaks up with her boyfriend, you will be in a completely different place, a far better place.

    And, by the way, next time you feel empty and lost, try to write about it in a diary. In several months, you will look back and read it with curiosity about yourself. “Who was I then, and what could I have been thinking?”

    Trapped under six stories of ruins after the Haiti earthquake leveled his hotel, Dan Woolley believed he was going to die. But rather than give in to despair, the film-maker spent 65 hours beneath the earth looking up ways t treat his injuries on his iPhone. He also wrote a moving diary for his family, thinking they would only read his last message of love and comfort after his death. Instead, he was pulled from the disaster after a week-and will soon be reunited with his family.

    Mr. Woolley had travelled from America to Haiti with his colleague David Hames. Both had been working for charity. He was in the entrance-hall when the earthquake struck and just had time to dive into a comer before the building fell. Buried under tons of ruins, the film-maker downloaded a first aid application to his iPhone. He used the light from the iPhone to show him his injuries and diagnosed it properly as a broken leg. Then, he used the instructions from the app to treat the serious bleeding. The app advised him not to go to sleep if he felt he was going into shock. The resourceful Mr. Woolley set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes to keep him awake. New technology has played a huge part.

Mr. Woolley used a small black notebook to write messages to his family. He had thought his relatives would read them after he was dead. “I was in a big accident. Don't be upset at God,” he wrote, “I'm still praying that God will get me out, but He may not. But He will always take care of you.”

    Mr. Woolley was eventually located by a French rescue team and removed to the U.S. where he was reunited with his wife. Speaking after being flown to Miami for surgery, he said, “Boy, I cried. I wanted to use that time to do everything I could for my family. If it could be just to leave some notes that would help them in life, I would do that.”

He is now looking forward to seeing his family.

    When many people are worried that there are no more heroes in the modern times, two university students who lost their lives to rescue drowning children have shown that heroes still exist (存在).

    According to the Inner Mongolia Morning Post. the tragedy (悲剧) occurred on the afternoon .December 14,2002 when three school students skating on a frozen lake in Qingcheng Park in Hohhot fell through the ice into the freezing water. More than 20 university students who happened to be near the Spot immediately went to the rescue of the children. Two children were quickly rescued, but the third died. The child's body was not found for three hours. Two of the rescuers, Liu Ye and had Longbiao, also died of cold and exhaustion. The body of Hao who took the lead in jumping into the lake was not found until the next day. A student who was unwilling to tell his name said he and his Classmates from the local college were taking photos at the lake. When they heard the children's criestor help, they went to the ice hole hand in hand to rescue the children. But the ice kept breaking, causing most of them to fall into the icy water.

    Local residents held mourning ceremonies (祭莫仪式) at the lake. Eight of the students were seriously affected by the freezing water and were being kept in hospital for further observation, but their lives were no longer in danger.

    Below you will find a profile of each gap year program. If there is a specific program you are interested in or a question you have regarding these programs, please feel free to contact them directly.

    Youth International

    Since 1997, Youth International has been providing many people with the most exciting and educational experience of their life. It is a learning program that combines international travel, inter-cultural exchange, home stays, volunteer community service work and outdoor adventures.

    Phone: 720-270-3323

    Carpe Diem Education

    Through volunteer service, travel and cultural exchange, students of Carpe Diem Education receive a personal insight into themselves and their cultures. We specialize in guiding summer and semester programs for high school students. Each course is carefully crafted to develop leadership and self-awareness within our students, who return home better prepared to be leaders in thought and action.

    Phone: 503-285-1800

    Center for Interim Programs

    Founded in 1980, Center for Interim Programs is the first independent gap-year organization in America. Based on students' interests and budget, our experienced teachers help make individual course choices including: low cost volunteer options, language programs, research trips, and so on. We are committed to helping students find more experiences of formal education and work.

    Phone: 413-585-0980

    EF Gap Year

    EF Gap Year offers students the ability to explore several countries where you will learn a language, volunteer for a good cause, gain international work experience. Choose between a 12-week semester or 26-week academic year. You can then personalize your program to meet your learning goals and interests by deciding where, when, and how you wish to study on your own. Our well-structured curriculum even allows you to place out of college-level classes and earn advanced credits toward graduation.

    Phone: 800-726-9746

    In 2015, a man named Nigel Richards memorized 386, 000 words in the entire French Scrabble Dictionary in just nine weeks. However, he does not speak French. Richards' impressive feat is a useful example to show how artificial intelligence works—real AI. Both of Richard and AI take in massive amounts of data to achieve goals with unlimited memory and superman accuracy in a certain field.

    The potential applications for AI are extremely exciting. Because AI can outperform humans at routine tasks—provided the task is in one field with a lot of data—it is technically capable of replacing hundreds of millions of white and blue collar jobs in the next 15 years or so.

    But not every job will be replaced by AI. In fact  four types of jobs are not at risk at all. First, there are creative jobs. AI needs to be given a goal to optimize. It cannot invent, like scientists, novelists and artists can. Second, the complex, strategic jobs—executives, diplomats, economists — go well beyond the AI limitation of single-field and Big Data. Then there are the as-yet-unknown jobs that will be created by AI.

    Are you worried that these three types of jobs won't employ as many people as AI will replace? Not to worry, as the fourth type is much larger: jobs where emotions are needed, such as teachers, nannies and doctors. These jobs require compassion, trust and sympathy—which AI does not have. And even if AI tried to fake it, nobody would want a robot telling them they have cancer, or a robot to babysit their children.

    So there will still be jobs in the age of AI. The key then must be retraining the workforce so people can do them. This must be the responsibility not just of the government, which can provide funds, but also of corporations and those who benefit most.

    Right in front of the Minneapolis Central Library, a row of green hikes sits parked in a special stand. Each hike is designed with the logo "Nice Ride" the name of the city's bike-share program.

    Nice Ride bikes are a lot like the library books that people come here to borrow. To rent a bike, you simply use your membership card at a Nice Ride bike station. Members can rent one of 1, 200 bikes from 138 stations throughout Minnesota's largest city. People use the Nice Ridebikes to go to work, to go out on business, or just to enjoy the city's many bike paths.

    The rise of bike-share programs like Nice Ride is encouraging more people than ever to choose biking over driving. Skyrocketing gas prices and concerns about the environment have also gotten people to dust off their bike helmets, pump air into flat tires, and hit the road.

    Why ride? Not only is biking good exercise, but switching from a car to a bike also reduces the amount of pollution in the air. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change, is one of the many polluting substances that come out of a car's tailpipe.

    Bike-share systems are found around the world in cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, Australia. The largest program—with 70, 000 bikes—is in Wuhan, China.

    To make roads friendlier to non-motorists, the U. S. Department of Transportation has invested more than a billion dollars in cycling and pedestrian projects in recent years. The money went toward building thousands of miles of on-street bike lanes and bike-and pedestrian-only passages called greenways.