Guided Walking Week April 2016

          Dates: April 30th-May 7th 2016

          Location: Abdet, Costa Blanca

         A week of guided walking in the mountains around Abdet. Highlights include the climbing of Valencia's highest summit (Sierra de Aitana), traveling completely around the impressive Puig Campana, and several explorations in the Sierra de Aitana. Ancient trails lead through spectacular canyons(峡谷) to abandoned settlements situated high in the mountains. You will discover the snow trader routes which lead from the incredible snow holes high in the mountains down to the villages and towns on the coast. These years, golden eagles have made a return to this area, and you may also see other animals—wild goats, foxes, wild pigs and red squirrels.

         As part of the week you are invited to help clear some local walking paths. This involves clearing collapsed walls and rocks, cutting back fallen trees. This is of course optional and is just for half a day, it's actually great fun!

Price:$499

Includes:

  Accommodation in the beautiful mountain village of Abdet

  All food-good home cooking

  Beer, wine, soft drinks

  Snacks and post walk treats

  Packed lunches & drinks(except café/bar visits)

  Expert guiding

  Photos/Videos of your days in the mountains

  Airport pick-up/return $25 each way(fly to Alicante)

  Single room supplement $75

  To book or get further information, please contact info@abdet. com.

    Astronauts on shorter shuttle missions（使命）often work very long days. Tasks are scheduled so tightly that break times are often used to finish the day's work.  This type of schedule is far too demanding for long missions on the International  Space Station（ISS）.  ISS crewmembers usually live in space for at least a quarter of a year. They work five days on and two days off to mimic the normal way they do things on Earth as much as possible . Weekends give the crew valuable.  Weekends give the crew valuable time to rest and do a few hours of  housework.  They can communicate with family and friends by email , internet phone and through Private video conferences.

    While astronauts cannot go to a baseball game or a movie in orbit, there are many familiar activities that they can still enjoy . Before a mission. The family and friends of each ISS crewmember put together a collection of family photos, messages, videos and reading material for

    The astronauts to look at when they will be floating 370 kilometers above the Earth.  During their mission, the crew also receives care packages with CDs, books, magazines, photos and letters . And as from early 2010, the internet became available on the ISS , giving astronauts the chance to do some “web surfing （冲浪）”in  their personal time.  Besides relaxing with these more common entertainments, astronauts can simply enjoy the experience of living in space.

    Many astronauts say that one of the most relaxing things to do in space is to look out the window and stare at the universe and the Earth's vast land mass and oceans.

    Do you drink water that's been left sitting out overnight or even for another day? Have you noticed it tastes different?

    Tap water that has been left to sit out slowly begins to acquire(获得) off taste. Many people think that this is because of microorganisms. But that's not what makes old water taste not fresh. For that we can thank carbon dioxide. After about 12 hours, tap water starts to go flat as carbon dioxide in the air starts to mix with the water in the glass, lowering its pH and giving it an off taste. But it's most likely safe to drink.

    However, back to those microorganisms. If you use a dirty glass day after day, there is more of a chance of bacteria making themselves known; a risk that increases if you share the glass with another mouth as well. But assuming(假设) you use a fresh glass every few days, you probably won't have a problem unless the glass has been touched by dirty fingers, and especially if those dirty fingers went unwashed after using the bathroom.

    As for plastic water bottles that have been left out in the sun or in the car, step away from the bottle, warns Dr. Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins University Water Institute. "A chemical called biphenyl-A, or BPA, along with other things used to make plastic can leach(过滤) into your water if the bottle heats up or sits in the sun," he explains. BPA, as you probably know, has been linked to everything from heart disease to cancer. Schwab also adds that plastic used for commercial bottled water isn't meant to be washed or refilled, so use only one time and recycle. Or don't buy them at all; use refillable water bottles instead.

    That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who's worked in automotive manufacturing. But MIT business scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them.

    They believe that technology increases productivity and makes societies wealthier, but it became clear to them that the same technologies making many jobs safer, easier, and more productive were also reducing the demand for many types of human workers. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, and big data are automating many routine tasks. Countless traditional white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and in customer service, have disappeared.

    As evidence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point to a chart on which separate lines represent productivity and total employment in the United States. For years after World War II, the two lines closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity. Then, beginning in 2000, the lines diverge; productivity continues to rise steadily, but employment suddenly shrinks. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation.

United States Productivity and Employment

    But are these new technologies really responsible for a decade of lackluster (无生气) job growth? David Autor, an economist at MIT who has studied the connections between jobs and technology, doubts that technology could account for such a sudden change in total employment. Moreover, he also doubts that productivity has, in fact, risen steadily in the United States in the past decade. If he's right, it raises the possibility that poor job growth could be simply a result of a depressed economy. The sudden slowdown in job creation “is a big puzzle,” he says, “but there's not a lot of evidence that it's linked to computers.” “To be sure, computer technologies are changing the types of jobs available, but that is very different from saying technology is affecting the total number of jobs,” he adds. “Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in employment rates.”

    Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says that while technological changes can be painful for workers whose skills no longer match the needs of employers, no historical pattern shows these shifts leading to a net decrease in jobs over an extended period. Still, Katz doesn't dismiss the notion that there is something different about today's digital technologies. Though he expects the historical pattern to hold, it is “genuinely a question,” he says. “If technology disrupts enough, who knows what will happen?”

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. "The woods" was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance. It's similar to the tone people sometimes use now a days to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even "away from his desk". For us ten-year-olds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though seemed to have less system than the historic kind something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical; the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.