Three miles is short by car, but when the three miles consists of an old wooden fence on a cattle farm that requires a fresh coat of paint, it's not a short distance any more. For the final week of summer heading into my first year of college, painting this fence was a disaster for me. At first it seemed like the most boring way to spend the last week of my wonderful freedom from school, but it actually turned out to be something intriguing.

    Luckily, I wasn't alone in this task; I got the help of Rob, the farm manager. When two people were stuck under the sun of August in the middle of rural Kentucky for ten hours a day, there wasn't much to do to help pass the time. Standing in front of this fence was the last thing on Earth I wanted to do. I worked with Rob all these days, spending over hours with him with nothing to do but a boring task, and all we had for amusement was conversation. In a society filled with constant entertainment, this was a huge contrast.

    It started out simply, and we talked about the weather, sports, and how annoying it was to get the fence painted. As the week progressed, so did our topics of discussion. From family and funny childhood stories to our hobbies and dreams, we began to know more about each other. We shared personal stories with each other, little pieces of our past and ourselves. I had spent plenty of time with people whether it was about sporting events, movies, or concerts, but never had I spent so much time with one person with absolutely nothing to break the silence. It was uncomfortable at first, but things changed.

    Sometimes we tried to keep ourselves busy, entertained, or from getting bored. There is a deeper connection you get with people when all you're doing is talking. For a moment, you get an inside look into their mind, heart and soul. This is what humans are good at—sharing themselves. Whether we realize it or not, this is happening all the time all around us.

    Membership

    All you need to do is fill out the order form at the bottom of the page, select your first order from our book list and then post the completed form back to us.

    Special offers for new members

    As a special offer, you may choose any reduced-price books from our new members' book list, to the value of 100 yuan in total. Tick the box on your form to order a free watch. Join before the end of this month and you receive another free book carefully chosen by our staff. Order an audio-book from the many on offer, at half the recommended retail price.

    When you've joined

    As a member you get around 50% off the publisher's price of every book you buy, and what's more, they come straight to your door. Your free club magazine arrives once a month to keep you up to date with the latest best-sellers we've added to our list. On the Internet, you can find all our titles for the year at our exclusive members' website. Our website also has a book swap service where members can request or offer books for exchange.

    Being a member

    All you have to do is order four books during your first year. After that, you can decide on the number of books you wish to take. In each of your monthly club magazines, our experienced staff choose a "Book of the Month" for you, which is offered at an extra-special price. If you do not want this book, just say so in the space provided on the form and send it back to us. We always send the book if we do not receive this form.

    Once we receive your order, your books are delivered within one week. And remember, you have up to a fortnight to decide if you wish to keep the books you have ordered. If they aren't what you expected just end them back!

    In Africa, Christmas Day begins with groups of carolers (欢唱颂歌的人) walking to and from through the village, along the roadway, by the houses of the missionaries (传教士), singing the lovely carols known to the world around. Often people may be awakened by a group of carolers beginning to gather at the house of worship(敬神活动). They return home to make final preparations as to the clothes one must wear and also as to their offering for the Christmas service.

    The most important part of their Christmas worship service is the love offering. This is the gift in honor of Jesus. At about 8 or 9 o'clock everyone goes to the celebration of the birthday of Jesus. Everyone who attends the service goes forward to lay down their gift upon the raised platform near the Communion table. No one will attend the service without giving a gift.

    Christmas in South Africa is a summer holiday. There is no snow, but it has many flowers, many beautiful varieties of wild flowers being in their full pride.

    In Ghana, most churches show the coming of Christmas by decorating the church and homes beginning with the first week in Advent, four weeks before Christmas. This season happens to be the time of cocoa harvest, so it is a time of wealth. Everyone returns home from wherever they might be such as farms or mines.

    In Africa, it is the traditional dinner of turkey, roast beef, mince pies, or suckling pig, yellow rice with raisins, vegetables, and plum pudding, crackers. In the afternoon, families go out into the country and usually there are games or bathing in the warm sunshine, and then home in the cool of the evening. Boxing Day is also a proclaimed (正式宣布的) public holiday usually spent in the open air. It falls on December 26 and is a day of real relaxation.

    There is a popular belief among parents that schools are no longer interested in spelling. No school I have ever taught in has ever ignored spelling or considered it unimportant as a basic skill. There are, however, different ideas about how to teach it, or how much priority (优先) it must be given over general language development and writing ability. The problem is how to encourage a child to express himself freely and confidently in writing without holding him back with the complexities (复杂性) of spelling. That's why teachers often encourage the early use of dictionaries and pay attention to content (内容) rather than spelling.

    If spelling becomes the only focus of his teacher's interest, clearly a bright child will be likely to "play safe". He will tend to write only words within his spelling range, choosing to avoid adventurous language.

    I was once shocked to read on the bottom of a piece of writing about a personal experience. "This work is terrible! There are far too many spelling mistakes and your writing is terrible." It may have been a sharp comment on the pupil's spelling in writing, but it was also a sad sign that the teacher had failed to read the composition, which contained some beautiful expressions of the child's deep feelings. The teacher was not wrong to draw attention to the mistakes, but if his priorities had centered on the child's ideas, an expression of his disappointment with the spelling would have given the pupil more encouragement to seek improvement.

    If you're encouraged by the tiny house movement and think 160 square feet is just enough for your needs, you may want to contact the Academy of Construction and Design (ACAD) at IDEA Public Charter School in northeast Washington.

    Students in the program built a micro house with a kitchen, a bathroom, a sleeping loft with space for a queen-size bed and a storage loft, all set on a trailer for mobility. The exterior (外部) of the house was part of a continuous living exhibit in 2015and was moved to the IDEA campus so students could work with builders to complete the interior earlier this year.

    McMahon said the D.C. government's approval to push companies to hire District residents (居民) was at odds with the school system not preparing students for careers in construction, exploring or electrical work. McMahon gathered industry and community leaders to establish ACAD in 2005 and he said 100 percent of the companies he contacted responded positively to the idea, including major firms such as JBG, Clark Construction, Hines Construction and Boston Properties.

    "When students make the connection between what they are learning and a potential career, their academics improve dramatically," said Carol Randolph, chief operating officer of the D.C. Students Construction Trades Foundation. "Some of them who didn't think college was an choice now have a better chance because their classes have become relevant to a job."

    "We teach them life skills and explain that even if you start as a laborer, there are opportunities to move up quickly," he said. "We rewrite the story for them and explain that they can work for a few years, make good money, get promoted, and start their own business or go to school with less debts."

    "Parents and school advisors can be the biggest obstacles because of the negative idea of construction as a blue-collar career," Karriem said. "I get middle-school advisors on board to talk about the opportunities this education provides. These kids are learning lifelong skills that can help them in other fields, provide them with income and allow them to take care of their homes."

    Microsoft announced this week that its facial-recognition system is now more accurate in identifying people of color, touting (吹嘘)its progress at tackling one of the technology's biggest biases (偏见).

    But critics, citing Microsoft's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly seized on how that improved technology might be used. The agency contracts with Microsoft for cloud-computing tools that the tech giant says is largely limited to office work but can also include face recognition.

    Columbia University professor Alondra Nelson tweeted, "We must stop confusing 'inclusion' in more 'diverse' surveillance (监管)systems with justice and equality."

    Facial-recognition systems more often misidentify people of color because of a long-running data problem: The massive sets of facial images they train on skew heavily toward white men. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study this year of the face-recognition systems designed by Microsoft, IBM and the China-based Face++ found that facial-recognition systems consistently giving the wrong gender for famous women of color including Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Shirley Chisholm, the first black female member of Congress.

    The companies have responded in recent months by pouring many more photos into the mix, hoping to train the systems to better tell the differences among more than just white faces. IBM said Wednesday it used 1 million facial images, taken from the photo-sharing site Flickr, to build the "world's largest facial data-set" which it will release publicly for other companies to use.

    IBM and Microsoft say that allowed its systems to recognize gender and skin tone with much more precision. Microsoft said its improved system reduced the error rates for darker-skinned men and women by "up to 20 times," and reduced error rates for all women by nine times.

    Those improvements were heralded(宣布)by some for taking aim at the prejudices in a rapidly spreading technology, including potentially reducing the kinds of false positives that could lead police officers misidentify a criminal suspect.

    But others suggested that the technology's increasing accuracy could also make it more marketable. The system should be accurate, "but that's just the beginning, not the end, of their ethical obligation," said David Robinson, managing director of the think tank Upturn.

    At the center of that debate is Microsoft, whose multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE came under fire amid the agency's separation of migrant parents and children at the Mexican border.

    In an open letter to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella urging the company to cancel that contract, Microsoft workers pointed to a company blog post in January that said Azure Government would help ICE "accelerate recognition and identification." "We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits," the letter said.

    A Microsoft spokesman, pointing to a statement last week from Nadella, said the company's "current cloud engagement" with ICE supports relatively anodyne(温和的)office work such as "mail, calendar, massaging and document management workloads." The company said in a statement that its facial-recognition improvements are "part of our going work to address the industry-wide and societal issues on bias."

    Criticism of face recognition will probably expand as the technology finds its way into more arenas, including airports, stores and schools. The Orlando police department said this week that it would not renew its use of Amazon. com's Rekognition system.

    Companies "have to acknowledge their moral involvement in the downstream use of their technology,"

    Robinson said. "The impulse is that they're going to put a product out there and wash their hands of the consequences. That's unacceptable."