The Canadian red and white maple leaf (枫叶) flag is officially called the National Flag of Canada. The Canadian flag shows a stylized red maple leaf with 11 points on a white background, with red borders down each side. The Canadian flag is twice as long as it is wide. The white square containing the red maple leaf is the same width as the flag.

    The red and the white used in the National Flag of Canada were proclaimed the official colors of Canada in 1921 by King George Ⅴ. Although the maple leaf did not have its official status as a symbol of Canada until the announcement (宣告) of the national flag in 1965, it had historically been used as a Canadian symbol, and was used in 1860 in decorations for the visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada. The 11 points on the maple leaf have no special significance.

    In the early days，the Royal Union Flag，or the Union Jack, was still flown in British North America. In 1925 and again in 1946, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King tried to get a national flag of Canada adopted, but failed. In 1964，Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed a 15-member, all-party committee to come up with a design for a new flag. The committee was given six weeks to complete its task.

    The committee studied 2,000 submitted(提交的) designs as well as 3,900 that had been gathered as a result of the 1946 committee's study. Those designs with a chance of being accepted were given to the full committee for further study.

    The suggestion of a red and white single maple leaf design for the Canadian flag came from George Stanley, a professor at the Royal Military College. After a heated discussion, they finally decided on his suggestion.

    This year, Facebook, the social media website, announced that it would cooperate with several news organizations —including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC —to place news stories directly into users' personal Facebook webpage. Stories published using Facebook Instant will load more quickly and keep the style of the original publisher, who will keep all the advertising income the stories earn —at least for now. The deal shows how important social media has become to news organizations, and it is a clear sign of how the world of news is changing —and has been for a while.

    Many thought of it as the death of the newspaper, when Google News began in 2002. It had no human editor. Instead, Google used, and still uses, a secret computer program that selects and displays news stories according to the reader's personal interests. More recently, Associated Press and Yahoo have been punishing computer-written articles. Both use special software to automatically produce stories about company financial results and sports reports —areas where the quality of writing is felt to be of secondary importance to the accuracy of the data.

    I think we should be concerned about such developments. One concern is that Facebook, Google and other social media websites see journalism as a sideline(副业), a way of putting people in front of advertisements. It isn't their primary function —so if it stops making them lots of money, they're likely to stop doing it.

    There's another concern that computer-written articles are not actually journalism at all, because what a human news team produces is actually quite complex. A well-written news story puts information in context, offers a voice to each side of an argument and brings the public new knowledge.

    Though economics and speed of delivery mean readers will probably choose a computer-written story over a carefully shaped article — at least for daily news —I don't think the computers will be writing any in-depth articles for a while yet.

    Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman doctor in the United States. Her success opened the way for other women who wanted to do more than nursing. She was born in England in 1821 and her family moved to America when she was eleven years old.

    The Blackwell girls received the same education as their brothers. This was most unusual in those days. Their father died young and they had very little money to live on. Elizabeth and her sisters taught at school. Then a woman dying of cancer urged Elizabeth to study medicine, saying that a woman doctor would have saved her from her worst sufferings. Nearly everyone said a girl should not go to medical school, but she managed to enter Geneva College in New York State. She graduated in 1849 at the head of her class and received the first medical degree ever given to a woman.

    Next, Dr. Blackwell went to Paris. Her only chance of training was in a hospital where women came to have their babies. Four months later, while she was working in the French hospital, her left eye became dangerously infected (感染). She lost the eye. She was very disappointed. But she was soon back at work again, this time in London, England. There she met many famous scientists.

    In 1859, Elizabeth Blackwell was officially recognized as a doctor in Great Britain — the first woman to be honored. She was the inspiration of Elizabeth Garrett, who began the women's medical movement in England. Florence Nightingale, founder of the practice of nursing by women, was another of her friends.

    Dr. Blackwell died in 1910 at the age of 89.

    In an industry with low margins (利润) where the traditional wisdom is led by Walmart, the key to success is lowering operating costs. A big part of those costs are in labor, so it is no surprise that the retail industry has been a leader in using more part-time workers to keep labor costs down, holding the line on wages, not training, and with few exceptions, seeing employees as a cost to be minimized. There is no doubt that these businesses fight for every dollar of margin. Unlike trend-leading hi-tech companies which spend a lot of money on employees to get them innovated, retail industry can spend very limited money on their employees.

    What researchers found was that companies were often staffing their stores far too low, and that many stores tended to perform better with higher staffing levels and were more profitable. Let's let that sink in for a minute. The stores were making more money (with all other things being equal) when they spent more on employees.

    They also found that retailers didn't do a very good job when staffing levels are just the actual demand in those stores. In fact, they set staffing levels identically across stores, even when the needs of the stores varied considerably. The average store did not appear to be understaffed, but there were enough that were understaffed and effect on overall company profitability was substantial.

    Interestingly, the same researchers persuaded the retail chain to run an experiment with them and slightly raise staffing levels to the amount that their analysis of historical data suggests would be ideal. Yes, labor costs obviously jumped when they did that, but so did profits. In retail, labor is a small percentage of costs—the biggest part is the cost of the products they sell. So, the net effect was an increase in profits of $7.4 million across 168 stores on an annual basis.

    What can we learn from this? One question worth thinking of is: How can traditional retail industry survive the increasingly severe market? Especially now with the growth of online retail, the one thing stores still have going for them is one to one customer contact with salespeople. If retailers cut that down to almost nothing, then they have effectively eliminated their competitive advantage against online stores.

    A new study has found that social media could be affecting the sleep of young adults.

    The study is a project of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine. They found that young people who often use social media are more likely to suffer from sleep disorders than those who use social media less. The researchers say doctors should ask young adults about their use of social media when treating sleep issues.

    "This is one of the first pieces of evidence that social media use really can influence your sleep." said Jessica C Levenson. She was the lead author of a report on the study.

    The researchers set out to examine the connection between social media use and sleep among young adults. Levenson noted that these young adults are possibly the first "generation to grow up with social media."

    The researchers wanted to find out how often young people used social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Credit and Tumbler. For the study, they gave questionnaires to nearly 1,800 adults, aged 19 to 32. On average, members of the study group used social media sites one hour a day. They also "visited various social media 30 times per week."

    Thirty percent of the study's participants reported having serious problems with sleeping. Those people who used social media a lot were three times more likely to have a sleep disorder. And those who spent the most time on social media were two times as likely to suffer from sleep disturbances.

    Levenson said the number of times a person visits social media is a better predictor of sleep problems than overall time spent on social media. If this is true, she adds, then practices that stop such behaviors may be the most effective.

    You may have heard that humans only use ten percent of their brain, and that if you could unlock the rest of your brainpower, you could do so much more. You could become a super genius, or acquire psychic powers like mind reading.

    This "ten-percent myth" has inspired many references in the cultural imagination. In the 2014 movie Lucy, for example, a woman develops godlike powers thanks to drugs that release the previously inaccessible 90 percent of her brain.

    Contrary to the ten-percent myth, however, scientists have shown that humans use their entire brain throughout each day.

    Over the years, brain scientists have shown that different parts of the brain are responsible for specific functions, whether it's recognizing colors or problem solving. Contrary to the ten-percent myth, scientists have proven that every part of the brain is integral for our daily functioning.

    Research has yet to find a brain area that is completely inactive. Even studies that measure activity at the level of single neurons(神经元) have not revealed any inactive areas of the brain.

    Many brain imaging studies that measure brain activity when a person is doing a specific task show how different parts of the brain work together. For example, while you are reading this text on your smartphone, some parts of your brain, including those responsible for vision and reading comprehension, will be more active.

    A more direct counter to the ten-percent myth lies in individuals who have suffered brain damage – like through a stroke(中风)– and what they can no longer do, or do as well, as a result of that damage. If the ten percent myth is true, then damage too many parts of our brain shouldn't affect your daily functioning. Studies have shown that damaging a very small part of the brain may have devastating consequences.

    If someone experiences damage to Broca's area(布罗卡氏区), for example, they can understand language but can't speak fluently.

    In one highly publicized case, a woman in Florida permanently lost her" capacity for thoughts, perceptions, memories, and emotions that are the very essence of being human" when a lack of oxygen destroyed half of her brain.