The first person in the world to receive two facial transplants says he is feeling well, three months after his latest groundbreaking operation.

    Jerame Hamon had his first transplanted face removed last year after signs of rejection following a treatment with an antibiotic (抗生素) during a cold.

    The 43 year old remained in a hospital in Paris without a face for two months while a compatible donor was sought.

    He said: “The first face I accepted immediately. This time it's the same.”

    Mr. Hamon suffers from neurofibromatosis (多发性神经纤维瘤), a genetic condition that spoiled his face severely.

    His first transplant, in 2010, was a success, but he caught a common cold in 2015 and was given antibiotics. The drug was incompatible with the immunosuppressive (免疫制疫的) treatment he was having to prevent a rejection of the transplanted material.

    The first signs of rejection came in 2016 and last November, the face, suffering from the death of most of cells, had to be removed.

    Mr. Hamon lived without a face in a room at Georges-Pompidou hospital in Paris without being able to see, speak or hear until January, when a face donor was found and the second transplant carried out.

    To avoid further rejection, Mr. Hamon—dubbed “the man with three faces” by French media ―had special treatment to clean the blood prior to the transplant.

    His new face remains smooth and motionless, and his skull, skin and features are yet to be fully matched. But he is positive about his recovery.

    “If I hadn't accepted this new face it would have been terrible. It's a question of identity… But here we are, it's good, it's me,” he told AFP news agency from the hospital, where he is still recovering.

    The hours-long operation was led by Prof Laurent Lantieri, a specialist in hand and face transplants who carried out Mr. Hamon's initial surgery eight years ago.

    “Today, we know that a double transplant is practicable, it's no longer in the field of research,” he told Le Parisien newspaper.

    Anaesthetist Bernard Cholley said: “Anyone who loses their face and then has to wait for a possible and imagined transplant for an unknown length of time—that's something that nobody has ever had to go through here.”

    “I'm amazed by the courage of a patient who has been able to get through such a different experience.”

    The first face transplant was carried out in 2005 in northern France. Since then, some 40 operations have been performed around the world.

    In China, Double Eleven Shopping Day is approaching. And there is a similar case in the United States—Black Friday. It has been regarded as the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Although it's not an official holiday, millions of employers give their employees the day off, and many people use that day to get a jump-start on their holiday shopping. A similar day in Canada and Great Britain is called "Boxing Day".

    Black Friday has become somewhat of a marketing sensation in recent years. Since 2005, it has been the busiest shopping day of the year. To lure shoppers, retailers (零售商) routinely open their doors as early as 4 a.m. and offer special sales and promotions to the shoppers that arrive early. Some of the special deals offered by stores are only available in limited quantities. That is why some shoppers intent on getting the best deals often camp out in front of stores overnight so that they'll be the first in line when the doors open.

    But why is it called Black Friday? Historians believe the name started in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. Bus drivers and police used "Black Friday" to describe the heavy traffic that would block city streets the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers headed to the stores.

    Businesses, however, didn't like the negative tone associated with the "Black Friday" name. In the early 1980s, a more positive explanation of the name began to circulate. According to this alternative explanation, Black Friday is the day when retailers finally begin to turn a profit for the year. In accounting terms (会计行业), operating at a loss is called being "in the red" because accountants traditionally used red ink to show negative amounts. Positive amounts were usually shown in black ink. Thus, being "in the black" is a good thing because it means stores are operating at a profit.

    Recently, for those who are too busy to shop on Black Friday or who just don't want to fight the crowds, the Monday following Black Friday has become known as Cyber Monday (网络星期一) for the many online deals.

    A popular TV host has reportedly invested about US$ 740,000 in a project to research, preserve and promote the Hunan provincial dialect (方言). Chinese TV presenters are required to speak Mandarin, or Putonghua, as part of their work, but should dialects be allowed on air?

    Bcnu (China): TV and radio stations have the right to decide whether dialects or Mandarin will be used in their programs. The popularity of some dialects in some areas will not challenge the leading role of Mandarin in the whole country.

    Rick N (US): TV and radio broadcasters should take the lead in popularizing Mandarin. To require hosts to speak standard Mandarin is not to oppress (压制) dialects, but it only aims to restrict irresponsible use of language. I think it is unprofessional for some hosts particularly to imitate the pronunciation of dialects.

    Cooper (UK): Dialects are an important part of local culture and now many kids even don't know how to speak their dialects because of the main use of Mandarin around them. It would be a pity if future generations were unable to understand the local dialects. It would be a terrible break in cultural traditions.

    Steve (France): To attract viewers or make more money, some hosts casually use dialects. Demanding TV and radio programs use Mandarin is a move to limit strange and irresponsible use of language, whether it is Mandarin or other dialects. In this way, the decision is also a form of protection for dialects. Hearing standard Mandarin on TV and radio programs is also a basic right of audiences around the country.

By now you've probably heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the uproar was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their very incapability prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill": the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors note: "The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain." In other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.

The text from my son said it all: "Dad, there's an article you were born to write that the world is finally ready for: Bring Back the Handkerchief!" As my son knows, there's no "bring back" for me. For me, the handkerchief never left. 

My mother raised me with several fixed rules. One was that a gentleman always has a clean handkerchief in his right rear pocket, a piece of simple cotton, roughly 15 inches square and less than four inches when folded. I was a dutiful son, but as a child, I had been wondering what it was there for. After 60 years, my body weight now feels wrong if I'm heading out of the house with an empty back pocket. 

I am sure this habit has sometimes struck friends but in polite company nobody comments on somebody else's business. Children like my kids think of my hankie ridiculously old-fashioned and they have their arguments. If you have to be prepared every day for allergies or a cold, why not choose a little packet of tissues, which saves you from that disgusting business of blowing your nose in the thing and then stuffing it back in your pants?

Point taken. But a handkerchief is more durable and has a far wider variety of uses. Can you grab the handle of a pot that's boiling over with a Kleenex? Or do you recall the cases of skinned knees and drippy noses that hankie wiped? In fact, my wife gave me several new handkerchiefs as gifts. Neither of us can count the number of times her eyes have welled up at a movie, or, as happens, she's needed to blow her nose. 

Yet not even my mother could have anticipated the hankie's new role as an Essential Public Health Appliance. All of us have learnt how hard it is to follow advice from medical experts about not touching your face. Here is an answer. Use your hankie. In case of emergency, your handkerchief can become a makeshift DIY mask that can be pulled over your lower face like a robber entering a bank. 

And it will certainly give me the chance to lift my chin and look at my adult children through one eye, asking in her good-hearted way, "What do you have to say now, smarty-pants?"