A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.

    A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.

    There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two - headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar (奇怪的, 异常的) that I do not know how to argue with them. If their cases were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girl -friend.

    No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.

    Galdwell's book, Blink, is all about first impressions and what he calls “rapid cognition（认知）”. In his own words, “It's a book about the kind of thinking that happens in a short time. When you meet someone for the first time or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions.”

    Galdwell points out that most scientific tradition is based on a great deal more than two seconds' thought though years of scientific study can come from a quick observation. As for rapid cognition, Gladwell realizes some first impressions don't seem to be based on anything. He noticed that Americans support taller candidates（候选人）. In fact, since 1900, only four candidates have beaten men who are taller than themselves. With this in mind Gladwell got in touch with 500 companies in the US and found that almost all of their managers were tall. Gladwell said, “That's weird. There is no connection between height and intelligence or height and decision-making…But for some reason companies chose tall people for leadership roles. I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition.”

    As an example of good rapid cognition, he tells the story of the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. A few years ago, the hospital changed the way they diagnosed（诊断）heart attacks. Their doctors took no notice of the patient's age, weight and medical history and gave most of their attention to a few really important pieces of information, such as blood pressure and heart rate. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States for diagnosing chest pain.

    Gladwell believes the power of first impressions should be studied further. “The first task of Blink is to show the fact: decisions made very quickly can be as good as decisions made slowly and carefully.”

    Do you know the difference between a food chain anda food web? Food chains show how a living thing such as a plant or an animal gets its energy. A food web consists of multiple food chains and includes many more plants and animals than a food chain includes. This diagram shows a food chain within a food web of the African savanna.

    Lovell Camps Kids' Club in Switzerland

    Lovell Camps Kids' Club is an English language Montessori（蒙台梭利）style club. Children will enjoy a wonderful and safe learning experience which includes language activities, cooking, arts and crafts, singing, dancing, etc.

    Learning outside the classroom plays a necessary role at Lovell Camps, making children experience the outdoors. During the summer months this can include visits to local playgrounds, farms and indoor or outdoor swimming pools. Winter time gives children the chance to go skiing and play outside in the snow.

    Admission:

    The Lovell Camps Kids' Club is for pre-school children aged between 2 and 5.

    What's included:

    Fees include: Healthy snacks and school equipment. If you choose the skiing activity, fees include transportation to and from the ski hill and professional ski instructions.

    Fees do not include: Ski rentals, round-trip transportation from Kids' Club to home and medical insurance.

    Time:

    Kids' Club is open from December to March and in July and August. It is closed on Mondays during the year.

    Life's greatest joys and its greatest sorrows often come from the relationships we have developed with others. In fact, our existence is quite dependent upon this interaction with other individuals (个人) and groups of individuals.

    In our world today, it seems that most people struggle for happiness through pleasant physical surroundings and economic security. These are great, but if there is conflict in human relations, these things do not bring happiness. Think about the last time you were having an argument or a disagreement with one of your co­workers, your boss, your friend, or a family member. Even though you might have been having some success in many areas of your life, did you find yourself still feeling some discomfort due to the stress in that particular relationship? On the contrary, you may know people who are happy in great poverty and with physical stress if they have meaningful, pleasant relations with people around them.

    Consider the best relationship that you have ever had with any individual. To some degree it probably is or was marked by absolute honesty, deep levels of trust, respect for that person's skills, knowledge, or capabilities, open communication, acceptance of different views, and little concern for images.

    In effort to make the relationships we currently have the best that they can be, remember that persuasion usually cannot take place unless there is some sort of close, meaningful connection between the two people involved. The result will be a relationship of respect and progression.

    Many of us have difficulty in accepting the faults and weaknesses of others: co­workers, work leaders, family members, or members of our social or religious groups. Our tendency to demand perfection of others can cause us to lose sight that we, ourselves, are less than perfect.       
    Undoubtedly, there are differences among us. Some of us are even cruel and unpleasant. Others may have cultural differences that are blocks that affect us. But learning to look for the similarities instead of those things that set us apart, bearing differences, and seeing the best in others rather than the worst will lead to relationships of deep respect and lasting value.

A new study reveals that pigeons (鸽子) can tackle some problems just like artificial intelligence, enabling them to solve difficult tasks that might challenge humans. Previous research has theorized that pigeons employ a problem-solving strategy, involving a trial-and- error approach, which is similar to the approach used in AI models but differs from humans' reliance on selective attention and rule use. To examine it, Brandon Turner, a psychology professor at the Ohio State University, and his colleagues conducted the new study. 

In the study, the pigeons were presented with various visual images, including lines of different widths and angles, and different types of rings. The pigeons had to peck (啄) a button on the right or left to indicate the category to which the image belonged. If they got it correct, they received food; if they were wrong, they received nothing. Results showed that, through trial and error, the pigeons improved their accuracy in categorization tasks, increasing their correct choices from about 55% to 95%. 

Researchers believed pigeons used associative learning, which is linking two phenomena with each other. For example, it is easy to understand the link. between "water" and "wet". "Associative learning is frequently assumed to be far too primitive to. explain complex visual categorization like what we saw the pigeons do," Turner said. But that's exactly what the researchers found. 

The researchers' AI model tackled the same tasks using just the two simple mechanisms that pigeons were assumed to use: associative learning and error correction. And, like the pigeons, the AI model learned to make the right predictions to significantly increase the number of correct answers. For humans, the challenge when given tasks like those given to pigeons is that they would try to come up with rules that could make the task easier. But in this case, there were no rules, which upsets humans. 

What's interesting, though, is that pigeons use this method of learning that is very similar to AI designed by humans, Turner said. "We celebrate how smart we are that we designed artificial intelligence: at the same time, we regard pigeons as not clever animals," he said.