After a year of examining many studies concerning whether homework is effective, NYC P. S. Elementary School decided that math worksheets and essay assignments were actually a waste of time. In February, Principal Jane Hsu sent a letter to parents stating that the Pre-K(学前班) through fifth grade students wouldn't be given any traditional homework to encourage kids to free time for reading, playing outside, or doing activities they enjoy.

    “The negative effects of homework have been well established.” Hsu wrote in a note to parents. “They include, children's frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities and family time and, sadly for many, loss of interest in learning.”

    Some parents, however, disagree with the policy change, believing that a lack of focus will cause children to fall behind. Homework has been part of education from the beginning, and has increased in amount in recent years.

    Hsu's advice that children should read and spend time with their families has upset some parents to the point of considering pulling their children out of the school. This group feels that homework gives children a goal to work toward. Others feel so strongly about the importance of homework that they have begun giving their own homework to their children.

    An Australian Childhood Foundation survey finds that 71% of Australian parents feel they don't spend enough quality time with their children mainly because of the time spent running the household or the time spent helping with homework. Education experts in Australia are saying that parents should stop helping. Doing so will give kids more independence, give parents more free time, and help reduce the number of arguments caused by homework in the family.

    While some research suggests that homework has little academic benefit for elementary students, other researches show homework can help kids develop independence, and confidence. It can also contribute to a sense of belonging or control over their lives. When parents try to help their children with homework, the assistance can take away that feeling and can also make working parents more tired.

    New research suggests that there are only four basic facial expressions of emotion. However, how these expressions are understood might depend on where you are from.

    Research by scientists from the University of Glasgow in the UK has challenged the traditional view of how the face expresses emotions. Many scientists had believed that there were six basic emotions that people from all cultures recognized. These were happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust(厌恶). However, the University of Glasgow's work now suggests that the human face only had four basic expressions of emotions. This is because some pairs of emotions are impossible to tell apart, especially when they are first shown on the face. Fear and surprise, both share wide-open eyes. The facial expressions for anger and disgust also look the same.

    So if our faces are only able to express four basic emotions, how do we communicate much more complex feelings? The study found that the way expressions are understood is different in different cultures. Lead researcher Rachael Jack was studying this because “facial expressions were considered to be universal”, she explained. However, while looking at how people from the East and West recognize different parts of the face, they found that although there are some common features across cultures, the six basic facial expressions of emotion are not recognized universally.

    “We said we don't know what a disgust face looks like in China, so the best way to go about that is to make all combinations of facial movements and show the Chinese people and ask them to choose the ones they think are disgust faces.” With the software they developed, they discovered that in the early stages of signaling emotion, fear and surprise, and anger and disgust, were often confused. Jack explained that this development of facial expressions is related to biology and social situations.

    What has caught people's interest is the cross-cultural aspect of the work. “This study shows which emotions we share, and which are different in different cultures,” Jack said. This finding could help us develop new communication technologies, for example ones that use video-calling programs like Skype. When you talk to someone in Japan in the future, a programme could “read” your facial expressions and then “translate” them for the Japanese person. The Japanese person would see the Japanese facial expression on their screen. In this way, people from different cultures could understand each other better.

    If you're planning to go on a diet o1 if you suffer from serious conditions like diabetes( 糖尿病), knowing exactly what and how much you're eating is essential. In this day and age, we have calorie and nutritional calculators even on our smartphones, but they act only as guides, whereas Panasonic's revolutionary new device, CaloRieco, actually analyzes the food on your plate and provides accurate in formation about in just a few seconds.

    You've probably used calorie calculators before,and you know that they only offer general information. For example, a calculator will tell you the average number of calories in a hamburger, but it can't tell you exactly how many calories are in the hamburger. The same goes for nutrients like protein or fats. And this is what makes the new CaloRieco so special.

    Displayed at a recent tech show, CaloRieco is a high-tech device that uses light reflection technology to determine the nutritional values of almost any food and also provide accurate calorie estimates.All you have to do is put your plate in the box-shaped device and wait between 10 and 20 seconds for it tc analyze all the food on there.

    Once it's done analyzing the various ingredients(原料)in your meal, CaloRieco displays the number of calories, as well as the nutritional content on an LED display, According to Panasonic, the device is able to recognize the vast majority of foods, except soups and very dark dishes.

    CaloRieco can also connect to your smartphone via an app, and send all the data about analyzed foods to your handheld, so you car access it whenever you need.

    Panasonic said that its outstanding invention is aimed at dieters and diabetes sufferers, both of which make up a large market.Unfortunately,you'llhave to wait a bit longer to your hands on your very own CaloRieco, as the device presented a the show is just a prototype(样品) which needs to be improved. It 's scheduled to hit the market sometime in the next few years, but the price remains unknown.

It is OK not to be OK

    This is the simple encouragement people often use for themselves or others. But for professional athletes, this can be the hardest sentence to say.

    On March 6, Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love posted an article titled “Everyone is Going Through Something” on the website The Players' Tribune. In the article, the 29-year-old showed how he suffered from his first panic attack on Nov 5 in a game against the Atlanta Hawks and why he was so worried about sharing his story with the public.

    Love identified that what keeps people from speaking up about their mental health challenges is the fear that many people see them as a weakness. “Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act. You learn what it takes to 'be a man'. It's like a play book: Be strong. Don't talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own,” he wrote.

    And being an NBA player made his situation even more difficult. Love was afraid to share his struggles because he didn't want his Cavaliers teammates to think that he was unreliable.

    However, as it turned out, Love's teammates understood and supported him. Cleveland superstar LeBron James even wrote on social media that Love is “even more powerful now than ever before”.

    For Love, it was a journey of empowerment to accept and address his mental illness and share his experience with millions of people who face the same problems. In fact, he was inspired to talk about his situation by Toronto Raptors shooting guard DeMar DeRozan, who had also opened up about his mental health issues.

    Last month, the 28-year-old told the Toronto Sun that despite being a top-performing and wealthy NBA player, he still deals with constant blues. “It's one of the things that no matter how indestructible (坚不可摧的) we look like we are, we're all human at the end of the day, ”he said. “Sometimes…it gets the best of you, when everything in the whole world's on top of you, ” But other times, by admitting who we are, we can get what we want. As Love told Advance Ohio Media, “You have to let some of that stuff bleed out in order to fully recover from it.”

    Students in many countries are learning English. Some of these students are little children. Others are teenagers. Many are adults. Some learn at school, others learn by themselves. A few learn English over the radio, on TV, or in films. One must work hard to learn another language.

    Why do all these people want to learn English? It's difficult to answer this question. Many boys and girls learn English at school because it is one of their subjects for study. They study their own language, math, English, and so on. Some people learn it because it is useful for their work. Many people learn English for their work and higher studies, because at colleges or universities some of their books are in English. Other people learn English because they want to read newspapers or magazines in English.

    People always think men are more skilled than women in driving. Nowadays women appear to have a positive image of themselves as safer drivers than men.

    In a survey done by insurer MetLife, 51% of women said they drive more safely. The evidence is on their side: Men are 3.4 times more likely than women to get a ticket for careless driving and 3.1 times as likely to be punished for drunk driving. "Women are on average less aggressive and more law abiding (手法的) drivers, which leads to fewer accidents," the report says. However, not all male drivers share the same opinion. Of the men surveyed by MetLife, 39% claimed male drivers were safer. The findings did back them up on one point: automotive knowledge. The report showed that more men are familiar with current safety equipment such as electronic stability control, which helps prevent rollover accidents.

    Auto safety unavoidably matters to money. Insurance companies focus on what classes of drivers have the lowest dollar amounts of claims, and for now, that mainly includes women. In general, women pay about 9% less for auto insurance than men. A study by the website Insweb also showed that auto insurance rates are lower for women in most states. Among individual states, women get the greatest advantage in Wyoming (where they pay 20% less), South Dakota and Washington, D.C., where their insurance costs are 16% lower.

    "More than 11, 9000 male drivers died in U.S. traffic accident in 2009, compared with just under 4,900 women drivers," according to the study. "Based on miles traveled, men died at a rate of 2.5 deaths per 100 million miles traveled, vs. 1.7 deaths for women."