As a little child, I was always plump（胖的）. In college I started blowing up. It got out of control when l went to law school.

    I'd made a decision a thousand times: I'm going to lose weight now. But what motivated（激发） me to get serious about it was turning 30.1 weighed 414 pounds.1 was always tired. Some of my family members have suffered from heart disease, and l was frightened. I also wanted to look better.

    So after my birthday, I walked into the office of a weight loss doctor.

    She was very understanding. Her focus was on balanced meals and she wanted me to exercise.

    Walking was all I could do at first. I started by walking a few blocks and gradually increased the distance, until one weekend, I heard myself saying, "Wow, this seems pretty easy." So I started to run.

    I was losing nine or ten pounds a month, and I had more energy. I started to think about the New York City Marathon. For years, I watched the runners and thought, "This looks like fun, but I could never do that." But now I realized that maybe I could. I joined the New York Road Runners. I ran a 10km, then a half marathon.I still wasn't confident I could run a full 26 miles. But I told myself I was going to do it, no matter what.

    By my 33rd birthday, I was down to 180 pounds. I started formally training for the marathon.

    And on the morning of November l, I stood on the Verrazano Bridge in Staten Island with more than 40,000 0ther runners, waiting for the event to start.

    It was unbelievable to have the audience cheering me on, handing me cups of water. And I crossed the finish line. My friends sprayed（向……喷射）me with beer, as if I'd won the Super Bowl.

    And at that moment, I knew: If I set my mind to something, nothing is impossible.

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    I was born in Thailand, where I feel at home. I am used to jumping on to a song taow (red taxi), and squeezing (挤过) in between two strangers. I am used to bargaining at the market to get a shirt that I like. I love telling bilingual (双语的) jokes and I am used to the surprised looks I get from the Thais when I can speak their language fluently.

    Every two years my family goes to America for the summer, and every two years my world is turned upside down. The prices of everything are three times what they were in Thailand, but there is the sweet drink Dr. Pepper! And Bluebell Ice-cream! And everything you could imagine! I am amazed at it all, but the biggest change for me is the people. There are white people everywhere. I am not tall but average (中等的), my yellow hair is no longer out of place, and speaking English no longer draws looks. I should feel comfortable. I'm not out of place anymore, and nobody is looking at me, but I feel like they are. Now I feel out of place and different. I'm not used to giving people handshakes and hugs when I meet them for the first time. I get looks when I have trouble figuring out how much money to pay. I know different music, different places, and different fashion. I can't understand these people who have never left their town or city.

    Still, there are quite a few perks about living overseas. I get to meet people from all over the world, and I know how to adjust to (适应) different cultures and places. I have been to places most people see only in geography books. Still, being so different makes it hard to know who you are. I'm not Thai, but I am not American either. I am a mix of both cultures, a third culture kid.

    After I visited my elder sister's house, I was reminded just how different the apartment living with a child was. She has a nice big house with a few floors, a big backyard and lots of toys. Her house is my son Tom's little piece of heaven. At her house there are little toys, big toys, a doll house, a play house and more! There are bedroom stocked with train tables, ride-on toys and big trucks.

    The main difference about being an apartment mom is that you cannot become a collector of “things”. I continually get rid of anything too large. When Tom was born, we made a rule that there would never be any stuffed animals in our apartment that were larger than him at that time. We also made a rule that we would only ever have at most five stuffed “anything” at one time. So far this had worked out well for us. These rules left Tom with a few special soft creatures to play with, but that can be easily put away.

    Since we want to keep the appearance of being clean city dwellers, we have limited Tom's play things to one toy basket in the main living space and one big storage bin in his bedroom. I am constantly thinking about living space when I buy anything for our little Tom. We love the storage bin in Tom's room. It is filled with fun play things. It is a place to keep his toys and everything gets pulled in and out daily. Anything that doesn't fit is often weeded out to create space.

    Tom absolutely likes going to his aunt's house and pulling out every single toy available to him. Of course, Tom does not notice that when he returns home he only gets one basket of toys instead of many rooms of toys. Right now Tom lives fully in his 1,100-square-foot apartment and seems very satisfied with his basket of toys.

    Young people and older people do not always agree with each other. They sometimes have different ideas about living, working and playing. But in one special program in New York State, adults and teenagers live together in a friendly way.

    Each summer 200 teenagers and 50 adults live together for eight weeks as members of a special work group. Everyone works several hours each day. They do so not just to keep busy but to find meaning and enjoyment in work. Some teenagers work in the woods or on the farms near the village. Some learn to make things like tables and chairs and to build houses. The adults teach them these skills.

    There are several free hours each day. Weekends are free, too. During the free hours some of the teenagers learn photo-taking or painting. Others sit around and talk or sing. Each teenager chooses his own way to spend his free time.

    When people live together, rules are necessary. In this program, the teenagers and the adults make the rules together. If someone breaks a rule, the problem goes before the whole group. They talk about it and ask, “Why did it happen? What should we do about it?”

    One of the teenagers has this to say about the experience, “You stop thinking only about yourself. You learn how to think about the group.”

    Microsoft has developed a new smartphone app that interprets eye signals and translates them into letters, allowing people with motor neurone disease to communicate with others from a phone.

    The GazeSpeak app combines a smartphone's camera with artificial intelligence to recognize eye movements in real time and convert them into letters, words and sentences. For people suffering from ALS（渐冻症）, also known as motor neurone disease, eye movement can be the only way they are able to communicate.

    "Current eye-tracking input systems for people with ALS or other motor impairments are expensive, not robust under sunlight, and require frequent re-calibration and substantial, relatively immobile setups," said Xiaoyi Zhang, a researcher at Microsoft who developed the technology.

    "To mitigate the drawbacks…we created GazeSpeak, an eye-gesture communication system that runs on a smartphone, and is designed to be low-cost, robust, portable and easy to learn."

    The app is used by the listener by pointing their smartphone at the speaker. A chart that can be stuck to the back of the smartphone is then used by the speaker to determine which eye movements to make in order to communicate.

    The sticker shows four grids of letters, which each correspond to a different eye movement. By looking up, down, left or right, the speaker selects which grids the letters they want belong to. The artificial intelligence algorithm is then able to predict the word or sentence they are trying to say.

    Zhang's research, Smartphone-Based Gaze Gesture Communication for People with Motor Disabilities, is set to be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May.

At age 22, Hikari Oberman has already been a lifeguard for four years. Last week, Oberman talked to The Garden Island about how he helped save lives during a recent rescue.

On Dec. 30, Oberman and his coworker Cope were parked in their truck at Anini Beach when two workers ran up to them and said, "I think someone's getting stuck in the channel!"

"I grabbed our equipment. We started rolling out down there," Oberman said. When he got out there, Oberman found a standup paddler, a man in his late 30s, struggling against the current, with an elderly man holding tightly to the back of the paddleboard (冲浪板).

He said, "My coworker grabbed the standup guy. Meanwhile, I'm stuck with the older man. "

Normally, Oberman said he would pull the paddler up, lay him on the surfboard, climb up behind and paddle from there. He tried that technique at first and quickly realized it was not a practicable option. They are not going anywhere.

Waves hit against the extremely sharp reef very hard about 30 yards behind them, and the current was pulling them into it.

"It's right behind us. If I stop paddling, we're definitely going to be in that zone." He said.

They started making progress toward the reef, where they might safely be able to climb out. Oberman just focused on forward movement.

After about five minutes-"even though it felt longer" -Oberman said his partner had gotten the paddleboarder safely to shore and started coming back out to help.

"I look back, and I see our Jet Ski. He's finally coming in the channel. We're not going to have to worry about that now. "

It was a good rescue.

When asked what it feels like to save someone's life, Oberman responded, "I love it! That's why we do it!" But as exciting as it might be to perform a big rescue, he explained that the most important part of his job is to keep people from getting into trouble in the first place.