If you've ever owned a chimney, you know that it can get pretty dirty. There's a whole lot of soot(烟灰) that gets stuck on the inside. That stuff has to get cleaned, or you could have a serious fire risk. While nowadays we have easier ways of doing this dirty job, in the way back days somebody used to climb up the chimney and clean all that soot. And the thing is, not just anybody could do it.

    You had to be really small to fit up in the chimney, so they used to give the task to kids – some as young as four or five years old. They worked for their boss known as a master-sweep. They were often covered in soot, and were very likely to get burned. They often developed what became known as soot wart, a form of cancer.

    Are your unfairness bells ringing? William Blake's certainly were. The physical dangers and widespread unfairness of the chimney-sweeping job really stuck in his throat, so much so that he wrote not one, but two poems called “The Chimney Sweeper”.

    The first poem (the one we're discussing here)was published in 1789 in a book called Songs of Innocence. These little poems took children and the joys of childhood innocence as their subject. As you've probably guessed by now, many of the poems in Songs of Innocence, like “The Chimney Sweeper”, are about the ways in which childhood innocence is destroyed by unkind old adults. For Blake, innocence is, in many ways, a total joke. It doesn't exist, because it's always taken away by the realistic world – chimney-sweeping, death, poverty, etc.

    What does a five-year-old chimney sweeper in 18th-century England have to do with you? More than you might think. It is reported that 150 million kids are in child labor in developing countries. Many of them work long hours and face dangerous health risks. Like Blake's chimney sweeper, these kids are not even given a chance at innocence because experience keeps getting in the way.

    The kids in a village in Ethiopia wear dirty, ragged clothes. They sleep beside cows and sheep in huts made of sticks and mud. They have no school. Yet they all can chant the English alphabet, and some can make words.

    The key to their success: 20 tablet computers(平板电脑) dropped off in their Ethiopian village in February by a U.S. group called One Laptop Per Child.

The goal is to find out whether kids using today's new technology can teach themselves to read in places where there are no schools or teachers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers analyzing the project data say they're already amazed. “What I think has already happened is that the kids have already learned more than they would have in one year of kindergarten,” said Matt Keller, who runs the Ethiopia program.

    The fastest learner—and the first to turn on one of the tablets—is 8-year-old Kelbesa Negusse. The device's camera was disabled to save memory, yet within weeks Kelbesa had figured out its workings and made the camera work. He called himself a lion, a marker of accomplishment in Ethiopia.

With his tablet, Kelbasa rearranged the letters HSROE into one of the many English animal names he knows. Then he spelled words on his own. “Seven months ago he didn't know any English. That's unbelievable,” said Keller.

    The project aims to get kids to a stage called “deep reading,” where they can read to learn. It won't be in Amharic, Ethiopia's first language, but in English, which is widely seen as the ticket to higher paying jobs.

    Once upon a time there were two friends who lived in a palace and worked in the service of the king. One of the two boys knew a girl he liked so much that he wanted to give her a present.

    One day, when he was walking with his friend in the main palace hall, he saw a big vase filled with the most beautiful flowers. He decided to take one to give to the girl, thinking that no one would see him do so except his friend. He did the same thing the next day, and the next, and the next... until, one day, the king noticed how few flowers were left in the vase. He was so angry that he called everyone in the palace to come together in the hall.

    When they were all before the king, the boy thought he should say it was he who had taken the flowers. However, his friend told him to be quiet, because the king would be terribly angry with him. The boy was filled with fear, but when the king came near, he decided to confess.

    As soon as the boy said that he had done it, the king went red with anger, but on hearing what the boy had done with the flowers, a smile appeared on the king's face, and he said, “I couldn't have thought of a better use for my flowers.”

    And from that day, the boy and the king became great friends. They went to the vase and took two of those wonderful flowers, one for the girl, and the other for the queen.

    It's Friday morning in the year 2050, and you're running late. You got carried away watching the music video that is playing in the corner of your bathroom mirror while you were brushing your teeth. How will you get to your office at Mega Giga Industries on time?

    A quick check of your Internet-connected refrigerator tells you your train is a bit behind schedule, too. So you decide to drive your environmentally hydrogen fuel（环保氢燃料）car instead-or rather, let your car drive you. It's programmed to know the way and it will get you there without getting lost.

    Settling into your office chair, which changes color to match what you're wearing, you pick up yesterday morning's newspaper. Printed on reusable electronic paper, it rewrites itself. Now it's time for your big meeting. Uh-oh! You've left your handwritten notes at home. No problem. The smartpen you used has stored an electronic copy of what you wrote.

    Your wristwatch videophone（可视电话）suddenly rings. Your best friend's face pops up on the screen asking what you're doing this weekend. Will you play virtual soccer with the U.S. Olympic team? No, no. Your friend says, so you have to take the new elevator (made of microscopic fibers many times stronger than steel) 60000 miles into space.

    Could this scene really take place in just a couple of decades? The researchers who are now developing all these things think so. These high-tech products（高科技产品）may be as common in 20 years as cell phones today.

    I began cycling in 2004 when I was a poor student. It was dangerous, sure, but cycling is the fastest, cheapest point-to-point form of transport in Melbourne. I own a car now, but that's just for transporting the baby or groceries.

    I hate driving. So it's been quite encouraging watching the growth in cyclist numbers over the past decade. It is estimated that 10,000-plus cyclists enter the CBD (Central Business District) each day, taking pressure off public transport. But as more people take to cycling as a mode of transport, the number of cyclists seriously injured or killed keeps climbing. And that is a sign that our infrastructure (基础设施) is still not good enough.

    Melbourne was once a dream for cyclists-flat, long, wide roads, with plenty of paths along rivers. Now, cycling can be deadly, with roads dominated by cars. I have a friend who broke her back and was lucky to escape paralysis, and others with broken bones. In my time riding, I've been forced off the road by a truck, cut off by four-wheel drives, and told to get off the road.

    These things don't exactly happen to trams and buses, those other slow coaches on Melbourne's roads. No—drivers reserve a particular savagery (残暴行为) for cyclists. And that's a sign of exactly one thing: inadequate infrastructure.

    We shouldn't need to be taught how to coexist in the same narrow space. Drivers and cyclists should be kept apart. The present debate over how to minimize “dooring” is a distraction.

    Dooring is not a legal problem. You cannot legislate (制定法律) it away. Designing bike paths so riders are channelled between moving cars and parked cars is deadly. All it takes is one daydreaming driver to fling open the door and you are gone. That's what happened to the young university student James Cross.

    This year, there are to be new anti-dooring lanes (车道) built on Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn, where Cross died in 2010. But these lanes are not safe. Cyclists must still pass between two rows of cars.

    When athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics collect their medals, they'll not only be wearing something that celebrates their sporting performance, but something that symbolizes lastingness. For both the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, organizers aim to make all of the gold, silver, and bronze medals out of used electronics. This strong message about how to make use of e-waste has gotten a lot of Japan involved.

    Starting in April 2017, the Japanese Olympic Committee began collecting old laptops, digital cameras, smartphones, and other abandoned electronics. The initiative(倡议)has achieved great  success. Already, the quantity needed for bronze medals has been met, and they're in the homestretch for silver and gold medals, meaning the collection process can pack up at the end of March.

    When looking just at the number of cell phones collected, the amount of waste is shocking. In a period of about 18 months, a little over 5 million smartphones were collected thanks to cooperation with NTT DOCOMO.

Japan's largest mobile phone operator allowed the public to turn in phones at their shops, which counted a lot in the project's success.

    After being taken apart and sorted, the small electronics underwent a smelting process to extract(提炼)all the gold, silver, and bronze elements. Thanks to this initiative, the worldwide struggle with e-waste will have a global platform. According to a study published by the United Nations University—44.7 million metric tons of e-waste were made in 2016. Only 20% of that was actually recycled. Unfortunately, this figure is set to rise significantly in the coming years, moving to 52.2 million metric tons by 2021. So while the Tokyo Olympics initiative might be just a drop in the bucket, it's a good start in showing what the public can do if they're made more aware of the issue.