Hello. I'm Jan from Mrs. Lake's class. My class wants to work together to help the public. We think we have found a great way to do this. Last month we did a class project on the highways near our town. We learned about the Adopt-a-Highway Program. This program brings people together to pick up litter along the roads. We think it would be a great idea for all students in our school to join the program and adopt（收养） a highway.

    Adopting a highway is not like adopting a pet. When a highway is adopted, only part of the highway is cared for by a group of people. The group agrees to work every week to keep its part of the highway clean. Each group gets its own sign that has the name of the group printed on it. The sign is put up at the side of the road. This sign lets drivers know who is keeping that area of the road clean.

    The Adopt-a-Highway Program is a great way for people to help their environment look nicer. Also, the government does not have to send out as many road workers. This saves money. Finally, people may try harder to keep roads clean if they see people, especially teenagers like us, cleaning them up.

    We will need helpers to care for our adopted highway. If you want to feel great and keep our roads clean，please come with your parents to the meeting next week. We will meet in Mrs. Lake's room on Wednesday at 6:00 P.M. At the meeting, we will talk about which roads are the dirtiest as a result of people's unkind acts. Then we'll try to pick an area to adopt and clean.

    I look forward to seeing you at the meeting. Remember to keep our roads clean!

    With the development of science and technology, new inventions, especially new electronic products, have made people's lives easy and convenient. But as the saying puts: A coin has two sides.

    One day, I was walking in the park with a friend and his cell phone rang, interrupting our conversation. There we were, walking and talking on a beautiful sunny day and…I became invisible, absent from the conversation.

    The telephone used to connect you to the absent. Now it makes people sitting next to you feel absent. Why is it that the more connected we get, the more disconnected I feel? Every advance in communications technology is a tragedy to the closeness of human interaction. With email and instant messaging over the Internet, we can now communicate without seeing or talking to one another. With voice mail, you can conduct entire conversations without ever reaching anyone. If my mom has a question, I just leave the answer on her machine.

    As almost every contact we can imagine between human beings gets automated, the alienation(疏远) index goes up. You can't even call a person to get the phone number of another person any more. Directory assistance is almost always fully automated.

    Pumping petrol at the station? Why say good morning to the attendant when you can swipe(刷)your credit card at the pump and save yourself the bother of human contact?

    Making a deposit at the bank? Why talk to a teller who might live in the neighborhood when you can just insert your card into ATM?

    Pretty soon you won't have the burden of making eye contact at the grocery shop. Some supermarket chains are using a self-scanner so you can check yourself out, avoiding those check-out people who look at you and ask how you are doing.

    I am not against modern technology. I own a cell phone, an ATM card, a voice mail system, and an email account. Giving them up isn't wise…they're a great help to us. It's some of their possible consequences that make me feel uneasy.

    More and more, I find myself hiding behind e-mail to do a job meant for conversation. Or being relieved that voice mail picked up a call because I didn't really have time to talk. The communications industry devoted to helping me keep in touch is making me lonelier.

    So I've put myself on technology restriction: no instant messaging, with people who live near me，no cell phoning in the presence of friends, no letting the voice mail pick up when I'm at home.

    Bike Share Toronto is the city's official bike share program, designed to give locals and visitors a fun, affordable and convenient alternative to walking taxis, buses and the subway. There are 200 Bike Share Toronto stations and 2,000 bikes across the city, making Bike Share the most accessible way to get around and explore.

    How it works

    Become an Annual Member or buy a day Pass to access the system.

    Find an available bike nearby, and get a ride code or use your member key to unlock it.

    Take as many short rides as you want while your pass or membership is active.

    Return your bike to any station, and wait for the green light on the dock(停靠点) to make sure it's locked.

    Choose a plan

    For Visitors

    Day Pass: $7. Unlimited 30-minute rides in a 24-hour period.

    3-Day Pass: $15. Unlimited 30-minute rides in a 72-hour period.

    For locals

    Monthly Pass: $25. Unlimited 30-minute rides for a month.

    Annual Membership: $90. Unlimited 30-minute rides for a whole year. The Annual Membership is the best deal for locals of Toronto and other frequent riders.

    The fee of the first 30 minutes of each ride is included with the membership or pass price. Don't charge extra fees if you drop off your bike within 30minutesatany other station. If you keep a bike out for longer than 30 minutes a time, you will be charged an extra fee, $1.50 for the first extra 30 minutes, $4 for the next 30 minute, and $7 for each additional 30 minutes after that.

    Contact us

    Customer Service: (855)898-2388

    Repair Service: (855)-2378

    Corporation Partners: (855)898-2398

    Employment Opportunities:(855)898-2498

It's almost camp season!

    Summer is wonderful. Summer at one of the following awesome camps? Even more wonderful.

Tahosa High Adventure Base

    Location: Ward, Colorado

    People puzzle: Tahosa's ropes courses are some of the nation's best. Use your hands, feet and brains to take up high-flying challenges and overcome your fears. Fly fishing at 9,000 feet? Yes. Fishing licenses or experience needed? No, sir!

    Choose your adventure: Go all-inclusive, where the staff prepares meals and runs the program, or take control and plan your perfect week. The choice is yours.

Camp Raymond

    Location: Parks, Arizona

    Don't look down: When looking up at the stars, light pollution is your enemy. But Camp Raymond's location and elevation (海拔) of 6,700 feet offer perfect conditions for seeing otherwise invisible stars.

    That's cool: Don't forget your camera and a jacket. During the day, you could spot bears and deer. At night, temperatures can fall sharply. Hot cocoa at summer camp? Cool.

Pamlico Sea Base

    Location: Blounts Creek, North Carolina.

    Go coastal: Explore the Carolina coast by boat. You choose the route, and Pamlico provides the equipment. Keep an eye out for wild horses, lighthouses and boatloads of fish.

    Set sail: Even if you don't know the difference between starboard and star-lord, Pamlico's sailing journey will make you a first-rate sailor in no time. You'll even practice finding your way using the stars.

Base Camp

    Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

    Big upgrade: What happens when you change a 1907 cavalry drill hall (骑兵训练场) into an adventure destination in the heart of the city? You get Base Camp for overnight lock-ins, weekend retreats (隐居处) and summer camp.

    Inside out: Most of Base Camp is indoors, meaning the activities like climbing walls can be undertaken on winter's coldest days.

    These days, it seems that almost all of us are too serious. My older daughter often says to me, "Daddy, you've got that serious look again." Even those of us who are committed to non-seriousness are probably too serious. People are frustrated and anxious about almost everything—being five minutes late, witnessing someone look at us wrong or say the wrong thing, paying bills, waiting in line, overcooking a meal, making an honest mistake -- you name it, and we all lose perspective（理性判断）over it.

    The root of being anxious is our unwillingness to accept life as being different, in any way, from our expectation. Very simply, we want things to be a certain way but they're not a certain way. Life is simply as it is. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin said it best: "Our limited perspective, our hopes and fears become our measure of life, and when circumstances don't fit our ideas, they become our difficulties." We spend our lives wanting things, people, and events to be just as we want them to be—and when they're not, we fight and we suffer.

    The first step in recovering from over-seriousness is to admit that you have a problem. You have to want to change, to become more easygoing. You have to see that your own anxiety is largely of your own creation—it's made up of the way you have set up your life and the way you react to it.

    The next step is to understand the link between your expectations and your frustration level. Whenever you expect something to be a certain way and it isn't, you're upset and you suffer. On the other hand, when you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you're free.

    A good exercise is to try to approach a single day without expectation. Don't expect people to be friendly. When they're not, you won't be surprised or bothered; if they are, you'll be delighted. Don't expect your day to be problem-free. Instead, as problems come up, say to yourself, "Ah, another barrier to overcome." As you approach your day in this manner you'll notice how elegant life can be. Rather than fighting against life, you'll be dancing with it. Pretty soon, with practice, you'll lighten up your entire life. And when you lighten up, life is a lot more fun.

    Who cares if people think wrongly that the Internet has had more important influences than the washing machine? Why does it matter that people are more impressed by the most recent changes?

    It would not matter if these misjudgments were just a matter of people's opinions. However, they have real impacts, as they result in misguided use of scarce resources.

    The fascination with the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the Internet, has made some rich countries wrongly conclude that making things is so "yesterday" that they should try to live on ideas. This belief in "post-industrial society" has led those countries to neglect their manufacturing sector (制造业) with negative consequences for their economies.

    Even more worryingly, the fascination with the Internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the "digital divide" between the rich countries and the poor countries. This has led companies and individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and Internet facilities. The question, however, is whether this is what the developing countries need the most. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity networks and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people's lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up Internet centres in rural villages, I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donators have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.

    In yet another example, a fascination with the new has led people to believe that the recent changes in the technologies of communications and transportation are so revolutionary that now we live in a "borderless world". As a result, in the last twenty years or so, many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of great technological progress, going against which will be like trying to turn the clock back. Believing in such a world, many governments have put an end to some of the very necessary regulations on cross-border flows of capital, labour and goods, with poor results.

    Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels, and for making the right career choices at the individual level. However, our fascination with the latest, and our under valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.