In Washington, Virginia and Maryland, the final months of the year have many festivals. Whether you are into a theatre environment, medieval times or a book festival, there is an event for you.

1). Maryland Renaissance Festival

    The festival, now in its 38th season, features 12 stages and hundreds of costumed actors offering entertainment such as music and theatre performance, sword swallowing and a human chess match. Sept. 21 through Oct.19.

2). Baltimore Book Festival in Maryland

    This three-day fair features talks and book signings from more than 275 locally and nationally known authors, including Alice McDermott and Andre Dubus III. The festival also includes live music and literary hands-on projects for kids. Sept. 26-28.

3). Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia

    The festival offers a relaxed theatre environment, and the events include a dancing party, an orchestra performance of horror film music by Marco Beltrami, and a discussion with Colleen Atwood, who is a famous costume designer. Oct. 30 through Nov.2.

4). Temple Hall Corn Maize and Fall Festival in Virginia

    The 286-acre farm offers a lot of family-friendly entertainment, including pig races, farm animals and camel rides. Grab seasonal goods at the farmers' market, take part in the corn harvest, and hear live bluegrass and folk music. Friday through Sunday, Sept. 26 through Nov.2.

5). Kids Euro Festival in Washington

    Here is a chance to celebrate and experience European arts and Culture, no passports required. Twenty-eight European countries will be represented during the multicultural children's event, which features more than 200 performances and workshops. The festival is for children ages 2 through 12, librarians and educators. Activities include puppet shows, cooking and theatre workshops. “It really brings Europe to the children, ” said organizer Sandi Auman. Oct. 24 through Nov. 9

    Since Brandon was a kid, he has loved playing baseball. For him, baseball, was and still is his life and his impetus and drive for staying in school.

    But as Brandon got older, he started making bad choices. He cut classes, hung out with the wrong friends and got suspended(被停学)often. His grandmother took care of the family and his mom worked 12-hour shifts at a car lot, doing everything she could to provide for the family.

    Dr. Decmona Warren, a teacher of a Communities In Schools(CIS), saw the signs but when she tried to help, Brandon wouldn't take it. “When I heard her call my name, I would nearly run away. ”Brandon said later.

    His GPA(平均成绩)fell to a 1. 4 and Brandon was kicked out of the baseball team. He knew if he wanted to play baseball, he had to stop acting like that. Determined to become successful both on the field and in the classroom, Brandon decided to embrace the support from Communities In Schools. He turned to Dr. Warren, who welcomed him as a CIS student with open arms. From tutoring to parent-teacher conferences, he allowed Dr. Warren to become his“school mom”, and slowly, things started to turn around.

    “CIS of Atlanta has made a big difference in my life. This program has taught me to think before I act and make better choices in choosing friends. Before CIS it seemed like every week I was either out of school or in school suspension. Once when I was an honor student in middle school, I found myself failing miserably in almost all of my classes as a freshman in high school. But with the help of CIS I am now back on track, more focused and determined to do better in my academics and behavior. ”

    He's back on the team now playing in the Catcher position, with a 2. 8 GPA. He is already looking at colleges for baseball scholarships.

    “The world feels anxious and divided, and Facebook has a lot of work to do whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is well spent,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook in January.

    If the tech firm succeeded, Facebook would end 2018 on a much better path. But the cracks in Zuckerberg's social media empire only grew as scandals(丑闻)about data misuse, security and even Facebook's leadership piled up.

    The social network has faced criticism many times since launching 14 years ago, but the public uproar reached new heights in 2018. Facebook's missteps, even as it tried to fix its problems, were yet another reminder of what happens when a company grows rapidly with little oversight(监管). They also set the stage for another showdown between the tech powerhouse and lawmakers who have their own ideas on how to manage a platform used by 2.3 billion people every month.

    “I think there's just a general growing consensus from both parties in Congress that self-policing is not going to work,” Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia said in an interview. Facebook pointed to a series of notes Zuckerberg published this year outlining what the tech firm has done to combat(战斗，争论)election meddling(好干预的), as well as hate speech, misinformation and other offensive content. The social network pulled down more than 1.5 billion fake accounts, launched a database of political ads and announced the creation of a Supreme Court like independent body to oversee content appals.

    But in many ways, Zuckerberg fell short of his New Year's resolution(决议). UN investigators said Facebook played a role in spreading hate speech that fueled ethnic cleansing(清洗)in Myanmar. Media outlets found loopholes(漏洞)and errors in Facebook's political ads database. Users questioned whether they should delete Facebook after learning that Cambridge Analytical, a UK political consulting firm with ties to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, gathered data on as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

    In short, Facebook's problems ballooned out of the company's control.

“They created a platform where sharing was mindlessly easy and interacting with each other required almost no forethought at all,” said Woodrow Hertzog, a law and computer science professor at Northeastern University. “As a result, there was massive sharing, including leaking of personal information that put lots of people at risk.”

    We can video chat with astronauts aboard the International Space Station and watch live footage from the frozen heights of Everest. But communicating with a submarine (潜艇）or a diver is not so easy. The lack of practical methods for sharing data between underwater and airborne devices has long been a frustration for scientists. The difficulty stems from the fact that radio signals work perfectly in air travel but poorly in water. Sonar (声呐）signals used by underwater sensors reflect off the surface of the water rather than reaching the air.

    Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method with the potential to revolutionize underwater communication. "What we've shown is that it's actually feasible to communicate from underwater to the air," says Fadel Adib, a professor at MJT's Media Lab, who led the research.

    The MIT researchers designed a system that uses an underwater machine to send sonar signals to the surface, making vibrations (震动)corresponding to the ls and Os of the data. A surface receiver then reads and decodes these tiny vibrations. The researchers call the system TARF. It has any number of potential real-world uses, Adib says. It could be used to find downed planes underwater by reading signals from sonar devices in a plane's black box and it could allow submarines to communicate with the surface.

    Right now the technology is low-resolution. The initial study was conducted in the MIT swimming pool at maximum depths of around 11 or 12 feet. The next steps for the researchers are to see if TARF is workable at much greater depths and under varying conditions—high waves, storms, schools of fish. They also want to see if they can make the technology work in the other direction— air to water.

    If the technology proves successful in real-world conditions, expect "texting while diving" to be the latest underwater fashion.

    Not many years ago, a wealthy and rather strange old man named Johnson lived alone in a village in the south of England. He had made a lot of money in trading with foreign countries. When he was seventy – five, he gave $ 60,000 to the village school to buy land and equipment for a children's ground.

    As a result of his kindness, he became famous. Many people came to visit him. Among them was a newspaperman. During their talk, Johnson remarked that he was seventy-five and expected to live to be hundred. The newspaperman asked him how he managed to be healthy at seventy-five. Johnson had a sense of humor. He liked whisky and drank some each day. "I have an injection (注射) in my neck each evening," he told the newspaperman, thinking of his evening glass of whisky.

    The newspaperman did not understand what Johnson meant. In his newspaper he reported that Johnson was seventy-five and had daily injection in his neck. Within a week Johnson received thousands of letters from all over Britain, asking him for the secret of his daily injection.