Attractions

Do you：

◆Love the National Park，value it and hope to safeguard its future?

◆Wish to see the beautiful landscape(风景) of the Park protected?

◆Like to enjoy peaceful，informal recreation within the Park?

Aims

    The Friends organization aims are to help protect and improve the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park for all to enjoy．We are a voluntary organization and registered charity without financial links to the National Park Authority．

Activities

    We encourage everyone to enjoy the National Park through regular talks and visits to interesting places in the Park with expert guides．

    We keep an eye on planning applications，Park Authority policies and threats to the National Park such as massive leisure complexes．We work with like-minded organizations such as the Campaign for National Parks to make our voice more effective．

    We help children to understand the National Park by sponsoring publications such as an adventure booklet and projects in local schools．

Benefits：

◆Guided visits to places of interest which may not always be available to the general public．

◆All members receive our regular News and Views．

◆Talks by experts in their fields on current issues．

◆A discount is available on Friends items for sale．

◆Satisfaction of participation in work parties，for those willing and able to be involved．

If interested，please complete the Application Form at www. fpnp.org.uk．

    The Healthy Habits Survey shows that only about one third of American seniors have correct habits. Here are some findings and expert advice.

    ⒈How many times did you brush your teeth yesterday?

    Finding: A full 33% of seniors brush their teeth only once a day.

    Step: Remove the 300 types of bacteria in your mouth each morning with a battery-operated toothbrush. Brush gently for 2 minutes, at least twice a day.

    ⒉How many times did you wash your hands or bathe yesterday?

Finding: Seniors, on average, bathe fewer than 3 days a week. And nearly 30% wash their hands only 4 times a day—half of the number which doctors recommend.

    Step: We touch our faces around 3,000 times a day-often inviting germs（病菌）to enter our mouth, nose, and eyes. Use toilet paper to avoid touching the door handle. And, most important, wash your hands often with hot running water and soap for 20 seconds.

    ⒊How often do you think about fighting germs?

    Finding: Seniors are not fighting germs as well as they should.

    Step: Do you know it is not your toilet but your kitchen sponge（海绵）that can carry more germs than anything else? To kill these germs, keep your sponge in the microwave for 10 seconds.

    In the fight to conserve tropical rainforests, here's a tool you don't often hear about orange peels. Specifically, 12,000 tons of them, dumped (倾倒) on the land. “You don't usually associate waste treatment with biodiversity benefits, something that's good for the environment.

    Tim Treuer is an ecologist at Princeton University, and he's talking about a unique conservation story. It started in the early 1990s, when an orange juice producer called Del Oro set up a company near the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica, a region that contains several national parks and a wildlife protection zone.

    Del Oro needed somewhere to dump the orange peels, and the company also owned forested land next to the parkland that it had no intention of growing crops on. So a deal was struck: if Del Oro donated its forested land, it could dump orange peel waste on degraded(退化的) land within the conservation area. Then a thousand dump trucks' worth of orange peels were lying on the land in 1998. “And within about six months the orange peels had been turned from orange peels into this thick black rich soil.”

    “I couldn't even find the site the first time I saw it.” He couldn't find it because, over 16 years, the orange peel waste had sent the land on a journey to become a vine-choked jungle, with three times the diversity of tree species of the neighboring control plot, richer soil and a much thicker covering. In other words, the experiment was a success. The results appear in the journal Restoration Ecology.

    Treuer says perhaps this lesson could be applied elsewhere. “It's a shame that we live in a world with nutrient-limited degraded ecosystems and also nutrient-rich waste streams. We'd like to see those things come together a little bit. That's not license for any agricultural company to just start dumping their waste products on protected areas, but it does mean that land managers, people involved with industrial-scale agricultural operations should start thinking about ways to do thoughtful experimentation to see if in their particular system they can have similar win-win-win results.”

Black Box Thinking

—By Matthew Syed

    This book is a new approach to high performance, a means of finding all edge in a complex and fast-changing world. It is not just about sport, but has powerful implications for business and politics, as well as parents and students, in other words, all of us. Drawing on a dizzying series of case studies and real-world examples, together with cutting-edge research on small gains, creativity and courage, Matthew Syed tells the inside story of how success really happens—and how we cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes.

Map Stories

—By Francisca Matteoli

    In the book, the author tells 20 surprising stories on the geography of the world and, using beautiful maps from all countries and times, she explains the birth of the most magical places on Earth. The book is a journey through space and time, and a lesson about the world as it is and our place in it.

Making it up as I Go Along

—By Marian Keyes

    It is a funny look at the absurdity of modern life and recognizes that we are all clearly making it up as we go along. It includes Keyes, guide to breaking up you're your hairdresser, and her warning about the dangers of fake tan（古铜色）.And there is some secret truth about writers, or at least about Keyes.

Mog and Me and Other Stories

—By Judith Kerr

    Judith Kerr was born on June 14, 1923 in Berlin but escaped from Hitler's Germany with her parents and brother in 1933 when she was nine years old. Judith went to 11 different schools and worked with the Red Cross during the war. For the past 30 years, she's worked as an author and illustrator of children's books. Come and play with everyone's favorite family pet, in this huge board book collection of stories especially for younger readers.

    Freedom of the press is rightly protected in most societies, yet it is just this protection that sometimes allows this freedom to be made bad use of. The press has a strong influence which can bring about significant changes to the lives of ordinary people. The story of the first quintuplets(五胞胎) in America clearly showed the power of the press.

    There was a poor family living in Aberdeen, a small town in the U. S. A. Raising five children was already a struggle for the poor parents of this family. When the mother learned that it was another four girls and one more boy that were on the way, she and her husband were shocked beyond belief. Without a doubt, they were going to face even more urgent money problems.

    However, this event changed their lives in ways they had never expected. The day after the birth of the five babies, there were sixty reporters and photographers waiting outside their door. The couple soon made national headlines, for they had become the parents of the first quintuplets in America.

    The family gained fame and money overnight. Newspapers and magazines offered them huge sums of money for the rights to publish their stories as well as their photos. Gifts poured in not only from unknown people, but also from baby food and soap manufacturers who wanted to advertise their products. Though their lives were indeed improved, reporters kept pressing for interviews, which forced the family to hire lawyers to act as spokespeople for them at news conferences.

    Moreover, the birth also brought great changes to Aberdeen. A new highway had been developed, since this town was likely to attract thousands of visitors. Even the name of the town on the road signs was changed to "Quint-City, U.S.A." Locals also discussed the possibility of setting up a "quint museum" to satisfy the curiosity of the public and to protect the family from gossipy visitors at the same time.

    While the babies were still quietly sleeping in the hospital, their parents began paying the price for fame. It would never again be possible for them to lead normal lives. The town itself received so much attention that almost each of the locals there was affected more or less. This was the power of the press, but such power could easily be misapplied.

    Here is a record of the discussion about AI (artificial intelligence) conducted by several scientists.

    Scientist A: I would say that we are quite a long way off developing the AI, though I do think it will happen within the next thirty or forty years. We will probably remain in control of technology and it will help us solve many of the world's problems. However, no one really knows what will happen if machines become more intelligent than humans. They may help us, ignore us or destroy us. I tend to believe AI will have a positive influence on our future lives, but whether that is true will be partly up to us.

    Scientists B: I have to admit that the potential consequences of creating something that can match or go beyond human intelligence frighten me. Even now, scientists are teaching computers how to learn on their own. At some point in the near future, their intelligence may well take off and develop at an ever-increasing speed. Human beings evolve biologically very slowly and we could be quickly substituted. In the short term, there is the danger that robots will take over millions of human jobs, creating a large underclass of unemployed people. This could mean large-scale poverty and social unrest. In the long term machines might decide the world would be better without humans.

    Scientists C: I'm a member of the campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Forget the movie image of a terrifying Terminator stamping on human skulls and think of what's happening right now: military machines like drones, gun turrets and sentry robots are already being used to kill with very little human input. The next step will be autonomous “murderbots” following orders but finally deciding who to kill on their own. It seems clear to me that this would be extremely dangerous for humans. We need to be very cautious indeed about what we ask machines to do.