We once had a poster competition in our fifth grade art class.

    “You could win prizes,'' our teacher told us as she wrote the poster information on the blackboard. She passed out sheets of construction paper while continuing, “The first prize is ten dollars. You just have to make sure that the words on the blackboard appear somewhere on your poster.”

    We studied the board critically. Some of us looked with one eye and held up certain colors against the blackboard, rocking the sheets to the right or left while we conjured up our designs. Others twisted their hair around their fingers or chewed their erasers while deep in thought. We had plans for that ten-dollar grand prize, each and every one of us. I'm going to spend mine on candies, one hopeful would announce, while another practiced looking serious, wise and rich.

    Everyone in the class made a poster. Some of us used parts of those fancy paper napkins, while others used nothing but colored construction paper. Some of us used big designs, and some of us preferred to gather our art tidily down in one corner of our poster and let the space draw the viewer's attention to it. Some of us would wander past the good students' desks and then return to our own projects with a growing sense of hopelessness. It was yet another grown-up trick of the sort they seemed especially fond of, making all of us believe we had a fair chance, and then always — always — rewarding the same old winners.

    I believe I drew a sailboat, but I can't say that with any certainty. I made it. I admired it. I determined it to be the very best of all of the posters I had seen, and then I turned it in.

    Minutes passed.

    No one came along to give me the grand prize, and then someone distracted me, and I probably never would have thought about that poster again.

    I was still sitting at my desk, thinking, What poster? when the teacher gave me an envelope with a ten-dollar bill in it and everyone in the class applauded for me.

    Earlier this month, blogger Lisa Henderson announced that she and her husband John had decided not to have Christmas. The family, who lives in Utah, will still put up decorations, but presents from Santa are a no-go this year.

    “John and I feel like we are fighting a very hard uphill battle with our kids when it comes to their rights,” Henderson wrote on her blog. “It is one of the biggest struggles as a parent these days in middle class America. Our kids have been acting so ungrateful lately. ... John said, “We shouldn't just celebrate Christmas. And, so that's what we did.”

    Instead, the Hendersons are putting the money they would have spent on gifts toward service projects in order to teach their three sons the “pleasure of giving.” The children will still receive gifts from grandparents and other family members, but this year, she said, their letters to Santa will be asking him to find someone who needs presents more than they do.

    In an interview with ABC News, 11-year-old Caleb Henderson admitted that he and his brothers had been behaving badly. “We would hit each other. We were fighting and crying,” he admitted, and Lisa said that when she broke the news to her sons, they cried pretty hard.

    But so far, Henderson told Fox News last week, the family is having a sudden turning this into a different kind of gift. They have already held a clothing drive and sent boxes of clothes and candy to a village in the Philippines that was hit hard last year by Typhoon Haiyan.

    “The children were excited and kept wanting to give more and more,” she reported on her blog.

    Many readers responded positively to Henderson's post. Some sharing their own stories of limiting Christmas in order to teach their children to be charitable(仁慈的) or grateful. “As parents you're giving your kids something so much more special than a bunch of gifts on Christmas,” one wrote.

    But Henderson received negative follow-ups as well on her blog. Responding to critics, she updated her blog with a statement that reads, in part:

I just wanted to explain a couple of things. First, my kids are in no way hurt for things.... They have reacted by making gifts for each other and packing them into each other's stockings stealthily(偷偷地). They are learning exactly what we wanted them to learn, because they are not moving around feeling sorry for themselves. They are thinking of others.

    The second thing I wanted to explain is why I wrote this post. Some people seem to think I wrote this for attention. Ummm, the attention you get from posts like this is not good and actually extremely difficult to deal with.... The reason I wrote this post is I want to empower parents to feel like it's okay to take a stand. ... I wanted to share what we are doing, so any parents that feel they are struggling with the same issues in their home can see what others are doing and get ideas for their family. My intention is to help support other parents and to raise amazing kids.

    They aren't great artists like Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent van Gogh, but their paintings are just as popular on Chinese social media, with millions of Chinese people willing to pay for them.

The 36 works were painted by ordinary Chinese people who live with autism (自闭症) or cerebral palsy (脑瘫), aged from their early teens to late thirties. They all studied art at World of Art Brut Culture (WABC), which is a Shanghai-based non-profit organization (非赢利组织) for art education. The project was started by WABC and supported by the Tencent Charitable Foundation. Users could buy a digital copy of each painting by donating (捐赠) 1 yuan or more. By Aug 29, donations totaled more than 15 million yuan, with about 5.8 million people participating (参与).

    “The paintings by these autistic kids and adults are beautiful: the style is similar to that of the Dutch artist Van Gogh. I'm really impressed by their talent,” Feng Li, a customer service officer in Shanghai, told the South China Morning Post.

    However, the popular campaign also led to certain questions.

    Li Laoxi, an experienced special education teacher in Hangzhou, said that based on his experience, people with autism could only draw a few lines or fill in colors under the guidance of their trainers. “Maybe there are some geniuses out there, but I've never met them”. Others questioned where the money would go, as the donations went to WABC instead of the painters. In response to these concerns, Miao Shiming, founder of WABC, said the money would be used to employ art teachers, buy supplies, and rent facilities. Meanwhile, Tencent said that all donation information would be open to the public.

    Half a century ago, Japan built the world's first high-speed rail network—a network that remains the gold standard in train travel today. Currently the country is now helping Texas build its own bullet train, a potential game-changer for transportation in the state.

    When it launched on October 1, 1964, the world's first high-speed rail network was known as the “super-express of dreams.” The first line in Japan's now world-famous shinkansen network was built against all odds, in the face of fierce public opposition, technical difficulties and astronomical costs.

    Half a century ago, the system was far humbler. In 1964, the first track was a 320-mile-long link between Tokyo and Osaka that reduced the trip from six-and-a-half hours (on conventional trains) to three hours and 10 minutes, traveling at a maximum speed of 200 miles per hour. For the first time, workers could get to meetings in one city during the day and be back home drinking a beer in the local pub that night.

    Not only did the train expand mobility profoundly, but also businesses appeared around the major stops as a growing emphasis on productivity swept across Japan. Today, the shinkansen network has 1,487 miles of track, with more set to open in the coming years. It seems that everything the shinkansen touches turns to city, and regions that are off the beaten track, so to speak, benefit greatly from the economic jumpstart brought by the train. New shinkansen lines are often proceeded by aggressive marketing campaigns promoting tourism in those areas, a strategy that seems to work.

    Despite its astronomical costs, it actually has saved more. Today, over 350,000 annual trips transport tens of millions of passengers all over Japan with efficiency—the average delay time is less than a minute. A research report titled 30 Years of High-Speed Railways: Features and Economic and Social Effects of The Shinkansen by Hiroshi Okada, estimates that the economic impact from the shinkansen train network, based on the time saved from faster travel, is approximately ¥500 billion ($4.8 billion USD) per year. Okada stresses that the cultural impact is also significant, a shinkansen offers people living far from urban centers “easy access to concerts, exhibitions, theaters, etc., enabling them to lead fuller lives.”

    Japan has a plan, known as the One-Day Travel Initiative. Its goal: regardless of where you are in Japan, it should only take you three hours to get to the nearest major regional city (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo or Fukuoka). The planned impact of this hyper-mobility is to discourage the tide of migration toward urban centers, like Tokyo, and encourage decentralization.

    Latrice Brown was excited about starting her junior year. She had volunteered to take part in the Lincoln High School Friendship Program. As an upperclassman, she would be assigned a “freshman(新生) friend”. Her duties would include helping her friend get used to high school life by offering friendship. Latrice thought it was important to have someone with whom to talk and share concerns. She knew that the friendship program was likely to make the freshman year of high school a positive experience. On August 2nd Latrice received a notice in the mail about the schedule of events for the freshman orientation (适应指导).

Freshman Orientation

    Please call your freshman friend and introduce yourself over the telephone.

    Confirm that he or she will be attending the orientation.