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    A group of cultural calendars, with creative designs, informative content and delicate printing, were hot sellers last year and now posting photos of the calendars has become a new fad on social networks. Many people posted photos of their cultural calendars with their comments to arouse memories of traditional knowledge. Though the cultural calendars are a return to traditions, designers are racking their brains to make the calendars appear more attractive.

    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.

    In colleges around the country, most students are also workers. The reality of college can be pretty different from the images presented in movies and television. Instead of the students who wake up late, party all the time, and study only before exams, many colleges are full of students with pressing schedules of not just classes and activities, but real jobs, too.

    This isn't a temporary phenomenon. The share of working students has been on the rise since the 1970s, and one-fifth of students work year round. About one-quarter of those who work while attending school have both a full-course load and a full-time job. The arrangement can help pay for tuition (学费) and living costs, obviously. And there's value in it beyond the direct cause: such jobs can also be critical for developing important professional and social skills that make it easier to land a job after graduation. With many employers looking for students with already-developed skill sets, on-the-job training while in college can be the best way to ensure a job later on.

    But it's not all upside. Even full-time work may not completely cover the cost of tuition and living expenses. The study notes that if a student worked a full-time job at the federal minimum wage, they would earn just over $15,000 each year, certainly not enough to pay for tuition, room, and board at many colleges without some serious financial aid. That means that though they're sacrificing time away from the classroom, many working students will still graduate with at least some debt. And working full time can reduce the chance that students will graduate at all, by cutting into the time available for studying and attending classes.

    There is little reward for attending but not finishing college. Students who end up leaving school because of difficulty in managing work and class are likely to find themselves stuck in some of the same jobs they might have gotten if they hadn't gone at all. The difficulty of working too much while in school can create a cycle that pushes students further into debt without receiving any of the financial or career benefits.

    Researchers found that walking around with a forced smile and fake happiness simply leads to people feeling unhappier. So, putting a brave face on your sadness could be harmful. The research also found that women suffered more than men when pretending to be happy.

    Dr. Brent Scott, who led the study, said employers should take note because forcing workers to smile when dealing with the public can result in bad outcomes. He said, “Smiling for the sake of smiling can lead to emotional tiredness, and that's bad for the organization.” He also said the research showed customer-service workers who had “fake smiles” throughout the day didn't want to work, so their productivity dropped.

    The study is one of the first of its kind to examine emotional expressions over a period of time and compare the different effects on men and women. Dr. Scott's team examined the effects of “surface acting”, or fake smiling, compared to “deep acting”, or making people smile by thinking of pleasant memories.

    Dr. Scott said, “Women were harmed more by surface acting, meaning their moods worsened even more than men's. However, they were helped more by deep acting, which means their moods improved more by thinking of pleasant memories.”

    According to Dr. Scott women tend to suffer more when pretending to be happy because they are expected to be more emotionally expressive than men. Therefore, forcing a smile while feeling down is more likely to go against their normal behavior and cause more harmful feelings.

    Although deep acting can improve moods a little in the short term, Dr. Scott says it's not a long-term solution to feeling unhappy. There have been some suggestions that if you do this over a long period you start to feel unreal. You're trying to develop positive emotions, but at the end of the day you may not feel like yourself any more.

    One side effect of globalization and the related phenomenon of greatly increased mobility is that the traditional definition of “foreigner” has passed its sell-by date.

    Is a European who has lived in China longer than in his home country, becoming fluent in the language and culture in the process, still a foreigner in China, or has he become more of a foreigner in his own home town? What about a Beijinger who did her schooling in Canada and then lived and worked in mainstream society there for another 20 years while raising a family, who has no intention of returning to China? Does she think and act like a foreigner? What do we mean by this label(标签)?

    When I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the faces you would see during a walk through a local shopping mall back in the 1960s and 1970s included almost none of Asian descent. Today the same malls are full of Asian faces, and a glance at the ranks of top scoring students in local schools reveals lots of Asian surnames.

    To some extent, this is no great surprise in the American context, because America is a land of immigrants, and a cultural melting pot. Apart from the native American Indians, Americans are (or were), in some way, all foreigners anyway. Absorbing a large number of immigrants is an established pattern in American history.

    In most places, the traditional foreigners were people who didn't speak or read the local languages well, were unfamiliar with local customs and lifestyles, often engaged in relatively third-class work, and certainly not the type of people you would want your sons or daughters to marry. But, nowadays, a foreigner down the street may have better SAT scores than you did, or higher degree from a better university. He might also be your son's or daughter's next employer.

    The traditional role models are getting mixed up, and it looks like this is just the beginning of a new chapter. Today, the whole thing has totally changed. It's not about where people are from or what color their skins are. It's about who they are, what values and skills they bring, and how they think.

    High school was a hard time for Me in the beginning because I had just moved to a small town and knew basically no one. I loved to play basketball but was afraid to go to tryout (选拔)for the school's team because I didn't know anyone. One day all that changed when I missed the bus home and decided to shoot baskets on the school playground to kill time. The coach Mr Colbath had been watching me make various baskets and was pretty impressed with my moves.

    He came up to me and asked me who had taught me to play like that. I told him that my dad had taught me how to play basketball. He asked me if he would see me at the tryout on Friday, but I said no and told him why. He told me to have a try because I played very well and would maybe make some friends on the court. After thinking for a few minutes. I finally decided to have a try.

    On the day of the tryout, the coach came, found me and helped me practice before the tryout. He helped me a lot and I did very well at the tryout and many members of the team were quite impressed. I did make the team and over the next few years the coach helped me both on and off the court. He helped me do my math which I had such a difficult time with and he even taught me how to live independently.

    I will never forget Mr Colbath. He really inspired me and changed my life. I would not be the person that I am today if he had not taken such an interest in me when I was in high school.