The more hours young children spend in child care, the more likely they are to turn out aggressive and disobedient by the time they are in kindergarten, according to the largest study of child care and development ever conducted. Researchers said this correlation(相关性) held true regardless of whether the children came from rich or poor homes, were looked after by a relative or at a center, and whether they were girls or boys.

    What is uncertain, however, is whether the child care actually causes the problem or whether children likely to turn out aggressive happen to be those who spend more hours in child care. It also remains unclear whether reducing the amount of time in child care will reduce the risk that a child will turn into a mean person. What's more, quality child care is associated with increased skills in intellectual ability such as language and memory, leading some academics to suggest that child care turns out children who are "smart and naughty".

    The government-sponsored research, which has tracked more than 1,300 children at 10 sites across the country since 1991, is bound to cause the debate over child care again: How should people balance work and family? And how should parents, especially mothers, resolve the demands that are placed on them to be both breadwinners and supermoms?

    That debate was already on display at a new briefing yesterday, where researchers themselves had different opinions about the data and its implications（含义）. "There is a constant relationship between time in care and problem behavior, especially those involving aggression and behavior," said Jay Belsky of Birkbeck College in London, one of the lead investigators of the study who has previously annoyed women's groups because of his criticisms of child care. "On behalf of fathers or mothers?" interrupted Sarah Friedman, a developmental psychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and one of the other lead scientists on the study. "On behalf of parents and families," responded Belsky.

    "NICHD is not willing to get into policy recommendations," said Friedman, contradicting her colleague. "There are other possibilities that can be entertained. Yes it is a quick solution—more hours in child care is associated with more problems. The easy solution is to cut the number of hours but that may have implications for the family that may not be beneficial for the development of the children in terms of economics." In an interview after the briefing, Friedman said that asking parents to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children usually meant a loss of family income, which adversely（不利地）affects children.

    Scientists said that the study was highly reliable. But the researchers said they had no whether the behavioral difficulties persisted as the children moved to higher grades.

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    What makes a gift special? Is it the price you see on the gift receipt? Or is it the look on the recipient's face when they receive it that determines the true value? What gift is worth the most?

    This Christmas I was debating what to give my father. My dad is a hard person to buy for because he never wants anything. I pulled out my phone to read a text message from my mom saying that we were leaving for Christmas shopping for him when I came across a message on my phone that I had locked. The message was from my father. My eyes fell on a photo of a flower taken in Wyoming. and underneath a poem by William Blake. The flower, a lone dandelion standing against the bright blue sky, inspired me. My dad had been reciting those words to me since I was a kid. That may even be the reason why I love writing. I decided that those words would be my gift to my father.

    I called back. I told my mom to go without me and that I already created my gift. I sent the photo of the cream-colored flower to my computer and typed the poem on top of it. As I was arranging the details another poem came to mind. The poem was written by Edgar Allan Poe; my dad recited it as much as he did the other. I typed that out as well and searched online for a background to the words of it. The poem was focused around dreaming, and after searching I found the perfect picture. The image was painted with blues and greens and purples, twisting together to create the theme and wonder of a dream. As I watched both poems passing through the printer, the white paper coloring with words that shaped my childhood. I felt that this was a gift that my father would truly appreciate.

    Christmas soon arrived. The minute I saw the look on my dad's face as he unwrapped those swirling black letters carefully placed in a cheap frame, I knew I had given the perfect gift.

    In business, there's a speed difference: It's the difference between how important a firm's leaders say speed is to their competitive strategy and how fast the company actually moves. The difference is important regardless of industry and company size. Companies fearful of losing their competitive advantage spend much time and money looking for ways to pick up the speed.

In our study of 343 businesses, the companies that chose to go, go, go to try to gain an edge ended up with lower sales and operating incomes than those that paused at key moments to make sure they were on the right track. What's more, the firms that “slowed down to speed up” improved their top and bottom lines, averaging 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating incomes over a three-year period.

    How did they disobey the laws of business physics, taking more time than competitors yet performing better? They thought differently about what “slower” and “faster” mean. Firms sometimes fail to understand the difference between operational speed (moving quickly) and strategic speed (reducing the time it takes to deliver value). Simply increasing the speed of production, for example, may be one way to try to reduce the speed difference. But that often leads to reduced value over time, in the form of lower-quality products and services.

    In our study, higher-companies with strategic speed always made changes when necessary. They became more open to ideas and discussion. They encouraged new ways of thinking. And they allowed time to look back and learn. By contrast, performance suffered at firms that moved fast all the time, paid too much attention to improving efficiency, stuck to tested methods, didn't develop team spirit among their employees, and had little time thinking about changes.

    Strategic speed serves as a kind of leadership. Teams that regularly take time to get things right, rather than plough ahead full bore, are more successful in meeting their business goals. That kind of strategy must come from the top.

    This contest from the Winchester Poetry Festival is intended for “surprise and delight”. However, don't try to surprise and delight them with a short story or a photo of your cat dancing in a Tutu. Stick to a poem of up to 40 lines.

    Closing: Quarterly.

    Prizes: £1,000, £500, £250.

    Entry Fee: £5.

    Starts Theatre One-Act Play Competition

    This annual contest from Strerts Theatre in Cornwall is for plays for up to four adult actors, with a running time of between 25 and 35 minutes. Plays can be on any theme; you need to be 18 or over to enter.

    Closing: Annually.

    Prizes: £100 plus performance of your play in Sterns Studio.

    Entry Fee: £7.

    Artificium Short Stories & Poetry Prizes

    This one from Artificium, a journal of new fiction and poetry, has two categories: Short Stories and In Brief. The former is for stories of between 2,000 and 8,000 words in any genre（体裁）. The latter is for poetry of between 500 and 1,000 words.

    Closing: End of each month.

    Prizes: £200, £100, £50.

    Entry Fee: £5 for one, £9 for two.

    PENfro Open Poetry Competition.

    This contest from the PENfro Book Festival is for poems of up to 40 lines on any subject and in any style. Costa Award winning poet Jonathan Edwards, whose taste in poetry is broad-ranging, will be judging.

    Closing: End of each month. Prizes: £300, £100, £75. The top ten winners will be invited to read their works at a spoken word event at which Jonathan Edwards will present the prizes.

    Entry Fee: £4.

    I'll never forget the day when Mary came into my office and said, I am too old to learn how to use a computer. I shook my head. Here was a woman who had raised 6 children and who had made great progress in her career telling me that she was too old to learn something new. I told her that I always believed people were never too old to learn.

    Mary followed my advice and did learn how to use the computer. Now, she is retired and leading a very active life volunteering in her community( 社区 ),using her computer skills and helping anyone that needs help.

    When she was in her sixties, one day she called me and said she had played the piano for others all her life, and now she was going to make a CD of her own. My mind flashed back to the day when she told me she was too old to learn. You can imagine my surprise and delight.

    To produce the CD, she had a lot of things to learn. It was not just sitting at the piano and playing. She had to research the songs, learn about copyright(版权),and learn about marketing. It was pretty amazing for someone who once said she was too old to learn. And finally she made it. Now she has her own CD-Mixed Blessings.

    Most of you probably have heard about some people who have gone back to university in their seventies and have also graduated. They are on their way again to charging themselves with a new skill and a new attitude towards life. The point is you are unable to learn anything at any age if you believe you are too old. On the contrary, you can achieve anything at any age if you believe you can.

The Secret to Happiness

    A new report makes it clear that when it comes to the life satisfaction of UK citizens, the ball is in the government's court. For some time, sensible people have been arguing that governments need to focus less on economic growth and more on the wellbeing（幸福）of citizens. Be careful what you wish for.

    In response to this demand, from 2011 David Cameron instructed the Office for National Statistics to gather data on people's self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. Little practical good has come from this so far, but a new report by George Bangham for the Resolution Foundation is one of the best attempts to make useful sense of the data. He concludes: "The best prospects for policymakers targeting future increases in national wellbeing lie in raising job quality, raising incomes, particularly at the lower end, and policies to improve security in the housing market."

    The age correlation（相关）turns out to be certainly linked to politics, despite the fact that no political party can make a difference to your date of birth. The happiness of pensioners is not just a function of their age, but of policy. On average, 70-year-old boomers today are the most affluent retirees in history, often owning their own homes and in receipt of generous pensions. People of 70 are not going to be as content in 30 or 40 years' time if they are unable to retire, don't own their homes and have small incomes.

    However, there is one respect in which teens and recent retirees are remarkably similar. Compared to other age groups, they tend to inhabit a sweet spot of having high degrees of freedom. The typical 16-year-old has new freedoms without ever having had any serious responsibilities. The typical 70-year-old, having experienced a lifetime of work and family duties, has a very different kind of freedom, one born from relief.

    Besides, it should not surprise us to find that people tend to be happier when they have fewer worries. But this, too, has important political implications. If the government is really interested in raising overall national happiness, it has to make sure as many citizens as possible feel secure in their health, their housing and their incomes. Different states' records in achieving this is one important reason why Nordic countries repeatedly score highly in international life satisfaction surveys and North America underperforms relative to its GDP.

    Whichever way you look at it, there is no escaping the conclusion that increasing wellbeing across society requires joined-up, long-term policy efforts. This is exactly what the Resolution Foundation recommends.