Researchers from France and Italy discovered that Canadian parents are less strict with their children than mothers and fathers in France and Italy.

    “Our most important finding was the difference between Canadians and the others,” said Professor Michel Claes, the lead author of the study. “Canadians focus on independence and negotiation. On the other hand, Italians, for example, exercise more control. We found Canadians seem to focus on negotiation in case of a conflict.”

    Claes said Canada, France and Italy were selected for the study because they share important cultural and social factors. “We chose French­Canadians because they share the same language as France, and originally came from France and share certain values. Italy was included because it was considered to have similar, strong and important family values,” he explained.

    The researchers examined the emotional ties between parents and their children by questioning 1,256 students aged 11 to 19 years old.

    Canadian students reported less control and more free actions, according to the study. Italian parents were stricter and French parents were somewhere in the middle.

    Claes explains that the differences lie in education in Canada, France and Italy.

    “North America has its own educational values, which promote individualization. Tolerance and comprehension are encouraged. Italy, on the other hand, promotes respect of authority, control, and the need for permission.” he said.

    Children from all three countries described their mothers as warm and communicative. Italian and Canadian children had similar feelings about their fathers, and reported high levels of emotional ties. But French fathers were generally thought by their children to be more distant and cold.

    “We were surprised by this,” Claes admitted.“It seems as though the relationships between French mothers and their children were becoming closer over time, while fathers maintain a form of distance and coldness, which is more of a source of conflict in France than in the other countries.”

    Attention from strangers is nothing new to me. Questions about my height is the center of almost every public interaction. My friends say my height is just a physical quality and not a personality aspect. However, when I reflect on my life, I realize that, my height has shaped my character in many ways and has helped to make me who I am.

    I learned how to be kind. When I was younger, some parents in my neighborhood regarded me kind of dangerous because I was so much larger than other children my age. I had to be extra welcoming and gentle simply to play with other children. Of course, now my coaches wish I weren't quite so kind on the basketball court.

    I learned the quality of not being too proud about myself. At 7 feet tall, everyone expects me to be an amazing basketball player. They come expecting to see Dirk Nowitzki, and instead they might see a performance more like Will Ferrell(successfully starred a professional basketball player). I have learned to be modest and to work even harder than my fellows to meet their (and my) expectations.

    I developed a sense of lightheartedness. When people playfully make fun of my height, 1laugh at myself too. On my first day of high school, a girl dropped her books in a busy hallway. I got down to her level and gathered some of her notebooks. As we both stood up, her eyes widened as I kept rising over her. Astonished, she dropped her books again. Embarrassed, we both laughed and picked up the books a second time.

    All of these lessons have defined me. Looking back, I realize that through years of such experiences, I have become a confident, expressive person. Being a 7-footer is both a blessing and a curse, but in the end, accepting who you are is the first step to happiness.

    BEIJING—Lu Na thinks that the 4,000 yuan ($630) she spent in traveling to the Republic of Korea(ROK) was worth every penny.

    “Apart from the exotic outfits and tasty kimchi, I really appreciated local people's friendliness and the convenient language environment there,” said the 27-year-old woman, who traveled to the country in October 2011 and came back with bags of fashionable dresses and cosmetics.

    “We have provided many services to Chinese visitors, including free transport cards, handbooks for individual tourists, and more liberal visa policies.”

    “We believe that no country can compare with the ROK in providing services for individual Chinese travelers,” said Zhu Linlin, media manager of the Korea Tourism Organization's Beijing branch.

    Favorable visa policies contribute to the popularity of the ROK as a destination for Chinese tourists. Only a passport and an ID card are needed for a Chinese citizen to get a visa to the ROK.

    However, some suggest that ROK hotels should provide special dining rooms for Chinese customers due to different eating habits. “ROK people often cross their legs when they have meals, but for most Chinese people, especially those who are elderly or fat, it's very hard for them to sit cross-legged without feeling numb.”

    In 1998, China granted the ROK approved destination status, which allowed Chinese citizens to travel to the country in tour groups.

    According to statistics from China Tourism Academy, the number of Chinese tourists visiting the ROK reached more than 2 million by the end of October 2011, up 19. 9 percent compared with that of the same period last year. China recently became the Republic of Korea's main source of foreign tourists in both number and spending.

    Some of the world's most significant problems never hit headlines. One example comes from agriculture. Food riots（暴动）and hunger make news. But the trend lying behind these matters is rarely talked about. This is the decrease in the growth in production of some of the world's major crops. A new study by the University of Minnesota and McGill University in Montreal looks at where, and how far, this decline is occurring.

    The authors take a vast number of data points for the four most important crops: rice, wheat, corn and soyabeans. They find that on between 24% and 39% of all harvested areas, the improvement inproduction that took place before the 1980s slowed down in the 1990s and 2000s.

    There are two worrying features of the slowdown. One is that it has been particularly sharp in the world's most populous countries, India and China. Their ability to feed themselves has been an important source of relative stability both within the countries and on world food markets. That self-sufficiency (自给自足) cannot be taken for granted if productions continue to slow down.

    Second, production growth has been lower in wheat and rice than in corn and soyabeans. This is problematic because wheat and rice are more important as foods, accounting for around half of all calories consumed. Corn and soyabeans are more important as feed grains. The authors note that "we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars rather than on crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world."

    The report also states the more optimistic findings of another new paper which suggests that the world will not have to dig up a lot more land for farming in order to feed 9 billion people in 2050, as the Food and Agriculture Organisation has argued.

    Instead, it says, thanks to slowing population growth, land currently ploughed（犁）up for crops might be able to revert (回返) to forest or wilderness. This could happen. The trouble is that the prediction assumes continued improvements in productions, which may not actually happen.

    Reducing plastic waste isn't easy because the cheap material is found in almost every household item. Now, a delicious and nutritious solution has come up to help reduce our dependence on this environmental hazard.

    David Christian, the co-founder of Evoware, says the idea of creating the biodegradable (生物降解的) products came from concern at the country's high pollution rate. Indonesia is home to four of the world's worst polluted rivers. Since single-use packaging is a large contributor to the problem, Evoware decided to deal with that first.

    After investigating various materials, the company settled on seaweed. Unlike corn, commonly used for biodegradable containers, seaweed does not require resources like water or large amounts of space. Since Indonesian farmers already harvest more seaweed than they can sell, it's easy for the company to find the material.

    Though they will not reveal their production process, Evoware says the seaweed packaging contains no chemicals and is safe to consume. The company has also invented single-use cups, which can break down 30 days after they're thrown away.

    While replacing plastic with the seaweed products may seem appealing to most of us, it is a hard-sell in Indonesia. According to Christian, "The awareness to reduce single-use plastic is still very low. This makes our bioplastic unnecessary." Also a factor is the cost, which is higher than using plastic. Hopefully, Evoware will succeed in convincing Indonesians and people worldwide that switching to their products will be helpful to protecting our beautiful planet.

    In 2019, a big revolutionary technology shift will finally occur, which is called 5g. It is a once-in a-decade upgrade(升级)to our wireless systems that will start reaching mobile phone users in a matter of months. This new times will leap ahead of current wireless known as 4g by offering mobile internet speeds that will let people download an entire 120-minute movie within a second

    But this is not only about faster smart phones, but also will affect many other kinds of devices, including industrial robots, security cameras, drones(无人机), automatic cars, video games, sports, shopping and traffic data. With 5g technology, a clearer and truer 3D images will be formed and it can be off-loaded to other machines wirelessly, freeing users to move and making it easier to develop goggles(目镜)the size of eyeglasses. People can point a smart phone camera to a football game and see both live video on the display and player statistics or other data. Moreover 5g powerful effects extend to remote medical surgery and other fields that increasingly rely on high-speed connections.

    Officials in the United States and China regard 5g networks as a heated competitive edge. It can help spread the use of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies. Meanwhile, to get the benefits of 5g, users will have to buy new phones, while carriers will need to install new communication services, which will create a huge future market. In order to occupy it first, the famous world wireless service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Samsung, Huawei have already declared that they will enter 5g business and showed their 5g new smart phones.

    However, in the United States, Verizon and AT&T will offer their 5g service with first use of high frequencies known as millimeter waves that can pump data at high speeds, but their signals don't travel as far. Instead Sprint and T-Mobile plan to start with lower frequencies, whose result may be somewhat slower initial speed, but wider range, although they all claim that they have mastered 5g technology. Thus they only first target the areas with large population. So 5g's full benefit to all are not expected until the main US key carriers upgrade their key switching equipment, which may happen in late 2019 or early 2020.