Joseph Francis Charles Rock (1884–1962) was an Austrian-American explorer, botanist, and anthropologist(人类学家). For more than 25 years, he travelled extensively through Tibet and Yunnan, Gansu, and Sichuan provinces in China before finally leaving in 1949.

    In 1924, Harvard sent Joseph Francis Rock on a treasure hunt through China's southwestern provinces—the Wild West of their day. But gold and silver weren't his task: Rock, a distinguished botanist, sought only to fill his bags with all the seeds, saplings, and shrubs he could find. During his three-year expedition, he collected 20,000 specimens for the Arnold Arboretum(阿诺德植物园).

    Botany, though, was just one of Rock's strengths. As an ethnologist(民族学者), he took hundreds of photographs of the Naxi, a tribe in Yunnan province, recording their now-lost way of life for both Harvard and National Geographic, and took notes for an eventual 500-page dictionary of their language. His hand-drawn map of his travels through China's “Cho-Ni” territory, in the Harvard Map Collection, includes more than a thousand rivers, towns, and mountains indicated in both English and Chinese, and was so well made that the U.S. government used it to plan aerial missions in World War II.

    Scientist, linguist, cartographer, photographer, writer—Rock was not a wallflower in any sense. Arrogant and self-possessed, he would walk into a village or warlord's place “as if he owned the place,” said Lisa Pearson, the Arboretum's head librarian.

    In declaring his successful return under the headline “Seeking Strange Flowers, in the Far Reaches of the World,” the Boston Evening Transcript ran a large photo of the daring explorer wearing in a woolly coat and fox-skin hat. “In discussing his heroism including hair-raising escapes from death either from mountain slides, snow slides and robber armies, he waves the idea away as if it is of no importance.”

    The Arboretum and Rock parted ways after 1927, mainly because his trip cost Harvard a fortune—about $900,000 in today's dollars. Fortunately, many of his specimens, many of his amazing photos, and his great stories remain.

    Even before my father left us, my mother had to go back to work to support our family. Once I came out of the kitchen, complaining, “Mom, I can't peel potatoes. I have only one hand.”

    Mom never looked up from sewing. “You get yourself into that kitchen and peel those potatoes,” she told me. “And don't ever use that as an excuse for anything again!”

    In the second grade, our teacher lined up my class on the playground and had each of us race across the monkey bars, swinging from one high steel rod to the next. When it was my turn, I shook my head. Some kids behind me laughed, and I went home crying.

    That night I told Mom about it. She hugged me, and I saw her “we'll see about that” look. The next afternoon, she took me back to school. At the deserted playground, Mom looked carefully at the bars.

    “Now, pull up with your right arm,” she advised. She stood by as I struggled to lift myself with my right hand until I could hook the bar with my other elbow. Day after day we practiced, and she praised me for every rung I reached.

     I'll never forget the next time, crossing the rungs; I looked down at the kids who were standing with their mouths open.

    One night, after a dance at my new junior high, I lay in bed sobbing. I could hear Mom come into my room. “Mom,” I said, weeping, “none of the boys would dance with me.”

    For a long time, I didn't hear anything. Then she said, “Oh, honey, someday you'll be beating those boys off with a bat.” Her voice was faint and cracking. I peeked out from my covers to see tears running down her cheeks. Then I knew how much she suffered on my behalf. She had never let me see her tears.

    For years, there has been a prejudice against science among clinical psychologists (临床心理学家). In a two-year analysis to be published in November in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists charge that many clinical psychologists fail to “provide the treatments which are given the strongest evidence of effectiveness” and “give more weight to their personal experiences than to science.” As a result, patients have no guarantee that their “treatment will be informed by science.” Walter Mischel of Columbia University is even crueler in his judgment. “The disconnect between what clinical psychologists do and what science has discovered is an extreme embarrassment,” he told me, and “there is a widening gap between clinical practice and science.”

    The “widening” reflects the great progress that psychological research has made in identifying the most effective treatments. Thanks to strict clinical trials, we now know that teaching patients to think about their thoughts in new, healthier ways and to act on those new ways of thinking are effective against depression, panic disorder and other problems, with multiple trials showing that these treatments the tools of psychology bring more lasting benefits than drugs.

    You wouldn't know this if you sought help from a typical clinical psychologist. Although many treatments are effective, relatively few psychologists learn or practice them.

    Why in the world not? For one thing, says Baker from the University of Wisconsin, clinical psychologists are “very doubtful about the role of science” and “lack solid science training”. Also, one third of patients get better no matter what treatment (if any) they have, “and psychologists remember these successes, believing, wrongly, that they are the result of the treatment.”

    When faced with evidence that treatments they offer are not supported by science, clinical psychologists argue that they know better than some study that works. A 2008 study of 591 psychologists in private practice(诊所) found that they rely more on their own and colleagues' experience than on science when deciding how to treat a patient. If they keep on this path despite the fact that insurance companies demand evidence-based medicine, warns Mischel, psychology will “discredit itself.”

    According to official government figures, there are more than twice as many kangaroos as people in Australia, and many Australians consider them pests(有害动物). Landholding farmers say that the country's estimated 50 million kangaroos damage their crops and compete with livestock for scarce resources. Australia's insurance industry says that kangaroos are involved in more than 80 percent of the 20,000-plus vehicle-animal collisions reported each year. In the country's underpopulated region, the common belief is that kangaroo numbers have swollen to “plague proportions."

    In the absence of traditional hunters, the thinking goes, killing kangaroos is critical to balancing the ecology and boosting the rural economy. A government-sanctioned(政府认可的) industry, based on the commercial harvest of kangaroo meat and hides, exported $29 million in products in 2017 and supports about 4,000 jobs. Today meat, hides, and leather from kangaroos have been exported to 56 countries. Global brands such as Nike, Puma, and Adidas buy strong, supple “k-leather" to make athletic gear. And kangaroo meat is finding its way into more and more grocery stores.

    Advocates point out that low-fat, high-protein kangaroo meat comes from an animal more environmentally friendly than greenhouse gas-emitting sheep and cattle. John Kelly, former executive director of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, says, “Harvesting our food and fibers from animals adapted to Australia's fragile rangelands is extremely wise and sustainable. Many ecologists will tell you that there is no more humane way of producing red meat."

    Opponents(反对者) of the industry call the killing inhumane, unsustainable, and unnecessary. Population estimates are highly debatable, they say, but “plague proportions" are biologically implausible. Little kangaroos grow slowly, and many die, so kangaroo populations can expand by only 10 to 15 percent a year, and then only under the best of circumstances. Dwayne Bannon-Harrison, a member of the Yuin people of New South Wales, says the idea that kangaroos are destroying the country is laughable. “They've been walking this land a lot longer than people have," he says. “How could something that's been here for thousands of years be 'destroying' the country? I don't understand the logic in that."

    Can Australians' conflicting attitudes toward kangaroos be reconciled(和解)? George Wilson says that if kangaroos were privately owned, then graziers(放牧人)—working independently or through wildlife conservancies—would protect the animals, treating them as possessions. They could feed them, lease them, breed them and charge hunter a fee for access. “If you want to conserve something," Wilson says, “you have to give it a value. Animals that are considered pests don't have value."

    Privatization could also help reduce grazing pressures. If kangaroos were more valuable than cattle or sheep, farmers would keep less live-stock, which could be good for the environment. Under this scheme, landholders would work with the kangaroo industry on branding, marketing and quality control. The government's role would be oversight and regulation.

    I'm a single person and live with my dog. Jed isn't just my dog. He is my family. He goes everywhere with me. So I was overjoyed last year to hear that Bunnings was allowing dogs on a leash(皮带)- into their stores.

    But no sooner had the rule come in than it was quickly repealed(撤销). A little girl in Victoria had walked up to a Jack Russell in a store and been bitten(咬伤). That was it. No more dogs.

    I don't know the whole story. But here's what I have to say: dogs bite sometimes and kids are sometimes difficult to control.

    There is nothing I love more than a kid who wants to touch Jed. But what's even better is when they ask permission first.

    I was at my local dog park last week. It's huge, with an off-leash dog area to one side and a fenced-off kids' playground a good distance away. There was a family there that morning —parents and two young girls playing near the dog area. The elder girl started crying at the sight of Jed—" puppy! There a puppy! "Jed went right up and started licking(舔)her, which only made her cry louder.

    My dog was frightened and tried to get away. The little girl ran after him, shouting loudly. The parents did nothing; they just let their kid frighten my dog and then said I should have stopped him from licking her.

    While they had a choice to play elsewhere, I did not. So I had to walk Jed away.

    "I just don't want to have to meet a dog when I go shopping," said one caller on a radio show yesterday. Look, I get that. But the thing is, I don't always want to have your kid kick the back of my seat for two hours on a plane.

    When I lived in the UK and the US, I couldn't walk through the stores without stopping to pat dogs. Why can't we follow their practice?

    FaceApp has taken the world by storm, giving users the chance to see themselves age through its algorithm. 12.7 million people—some three million more than the population of New York City—reportedly downloaded it in one seven-day period last month.

    Although the Russian app has become known for its privacy issues, the more interesting lesson of our FaceApp fling (尽情玩乐)is what it tells us about our society—and our future lives. It turns out we are more interested in aging than we realized. I'm surprised by this. Most younger people are in denial (否认)about old age, doing almost nothing to prepare for it. We rarely have a chance to plan for the future, with increasing time and financial pressures. Those pressures bring sacrifices that we may not always want to make: we can no longer afford to spend the time or the money needed to look after our elderly parents.

    As a family doctor, I can see the loneliness epidemic developing. Elderly patients come to see me with no particular illness, no clear medical issue. After a few minutes of the consultation, I understand why: they're not sick, and often they don't feel sick. They just need someone—anyone-to talk to.

    Although loneliness has no medical classification, the health effects are real: the result of loneliness and isolation can be as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and is more damaging than obesity. But loneliness does not come with nearly enough health warnings.

    So what next? Since 1980, we are living on average 10 years longer. At the same time, people are having fewer and fewer children, and they are having them much later in life. The snake of a world class health service is eating its own tail; its care is prolonging (延长) people's lives, but as the ratio of pensioners(退休人员)to working -age people increases, there are fewer taxpayers to fund that very health service.

    Into this void have stepped NGOs, charities and volunteers. But in the long term, the only way to truly help the oldest meters of our society is to go back to the traditional values of intergenerational(两代间的) cooperation—often under same roof. Ultimately, we will need to evolve towards a culture where elderly care is treated the same as childcare, where employers recognize the duty of someone with an elderly parent the same way they recognize those of someone with a newborn child.