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                                                                                                     What's On?

Electric Underground

7.30pm－1.00am   Freeat the Cyclops Theatre

Do you know who's playing in your area? We're bringing you an evening of live rock and pop music from the best local bands. Are you interested in becoming a musician and getting a recording contract(合同)? If so, come early to the talk at 7.30pm by JulesSkye, a successful record producer. He's going to talk about how you can find the right person to produce you music.

Gee Whizz

8.30pm-10.30pm  Comedy at Kaleidoscope

Come and see Gee Whizz perform. He's the funnieststand-up comedian on the comedy scene. This joyful show will please everyone,from the youngest to the oldest. Gee Whizz really knows how to make you laugh!Our bar is open from 7.00pm for drinks and snacks(快餐).

Simon's Workshop

5.00pm-7.30pm   Wednesdays at Victoria Stage

This is a good chance for anyone who wants to learnhow to do comedy. The workshop looks at every kind of comedy, and practicesmany different ways of making people laugh. Simon is a comedian and actor whohas 10 years' experience of teaching comedy. His workshops are exciting andfun. An evening with Simon will give you the confidence to be funny.

Charlotte Stone

8.00pm-11.00pm    Pizza World

Fine food with beautiful jazz music; this is agreat evening out. Charlotte Stone will perform songs from her new best-sellingCD, with James Pickering on the piano. The menu is Italian, with excellent meatand fresh fish, pizzas and pasta(面食). Book early to get atable. Our bar is open all day, and serves cocktails, coffee, beer, and whitewine.

    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?”

    French writer Frantz Fanon once said, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. ” Since the world changes every day, so does our language.

    More than 300 new words and phrases have recently made it into the online OxfordDictionary, and in one way or another they are all reflections of today's changing world.

    After a year that was politically unstable, it's not hard to understand the fact that people's political views are one of the main drives of our expanding vocabulary. One example is “clicktivism”, a compound of “click” and “activism”. It refers to “armchair activists”—people who support a political or social cause, but only show their support from behind a computer or smartphone. And “otherize” is a verb for “other” that means to alienate (使疏远)people who are different from ourselves—whether that be different skin color, religious belief or sexuality.

    Lifestyle is also changing our language. For example, “fitspiration” —a compound of fit and inspiration—refers to a person or thing that encourages one to exercise and stay fit and healthy.

    The phrase “climate refugee”—someone who is forced to leave their home due to climate change—reflects people's concern for the environment.

    According to Stevenson, social media was the main source for the new expressions. “People feel much freer to coin their own words these days, ” he said.

    But still, not all newly-invented words get the chance to make their way into a mainstream (主流的) dictionary. If you want to create your own hit words, Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionaries head of content development,  suggests that you should not only make sure that they are expressive (有表现力的) and meaningful, but also have an attractive sound so that people will enjoy saying them out loud.

    Carrie Gracie is knowledgeable about China and its affairs. She also has a reputation as a generous colleague. She has resigned from her job as China editor because her employers will not pay her at the same rate as they pay the handful of men who do a similarly challenging and important job.

    She has resigned because she refused to go on colluding (共谋) with the BBC's dishonesty about its failure to give women and men equal pay for equal work.

    Gracie was recruited to the job, because she had all the talent and skills the BBC needed to cover the difficult international and domestic story of the rise of China. One of the conditions she set for taking it was equal pay with the BBC's other international editors, familiar names including Jon Sopel in Washington and Jeremy Bowen in the Middle East.

    Last summer, the government forced the BBC to publish which of the familiar names on radio and TV earned over ￡150, 000. The results exposed an astonishing pay gap. They also showed Gracie that her employers had misled her.

    Gracie sets out all her efforts to get her bosses to do what they had originally promised her, but they fail to respond adequately. Instead, they prevaricate (搪塞) and offer her a pay rise that still would not have delivered equality. They thought they could buy her off; they thought that the reputational hazard she was running would scare her away from the fight.

    The BBC is wrong this time! Gracie has chosen to resign rather than give in because she thinks that it is her responsibility to stop the BBC doing something stupid. She is fighting for women's legal rights.

    Gracie said she hoped she wouldn't be remembered as the woman who complained about money, but as a great journalist. She is proving that they are two sides of the same invaluable coin.

    Carrie Gracie's dispute with the BBC isn't about money—it's about dignity!

    Imagine someone who has spent the majority of their life sitting with a sign on the side of the road and that very person giving someone their last 20 dollars. That's exactly what Marine Corps veteran (退伍军人) Johnny Bobbitt, 34, did in October in Philadelphia.

    Bobbitt served in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked as a paramedic (医务辅助人员) in Vance County, N. C. before he became homeless. Nobody knew how he got to where he was because he was discreet about that.

    One night in October, Bobbitt was sitting roadside with a sign in Philadelphia as usual, when Kate McClure of Florence Township, N. J. was driving home down Interstate 95 and ran out of gas. Scared and nervous, she got out of the car to head to the nearest gas station. As McClure was heading to the nearest gas station, she ran into Bobbitt and he told her to get back in the vehicle and lock the door. Minutes later, he appeared with a red gas can. He'd used his last $20 to buy her gas.

    After that unexpected meeting, McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, who both live in New Jersey, visited Bobbitt several times to deliver gift cards, cash, snacks and toiletries. They then decided to create a fund raising page so he wouldn't have to spend the holidays sleeping on the street.

    McClure started the GoFundMe page on November 10. With the page, the couple hoped to raise $10,000, enough money for his rent, a reliable vehicle and up to six months' expenses. Bobbitt's story ran in a local paper. By November 15，more than 10,000 local people had made donations through the GoFundMe page and more than $300,000 had been raised.

    On Thanksgiving, Bobbitt was resting in a hotel, his feet up on the bed, drawing up a grand plan for his new life, thanks to several thousand dollars raised to repay him for a good deed.

    Dear young poets, TIME For Kids has a challenge for you: Write a rhyming poem and enter it in the TFK Poetry Contest. It must be a poem that does not copy another poet's works.

    How to enter: This contest will begin 12 pm on April 14, 2019 and will end 12 pm on June 14, 2019. To enter online, visit timeforkids.com/2019poetrycontest and follow instructions to submit the following: (a) an original and previously unpublished poem; (b) the entrant's first name only and e-mail address; (c) a parent's e-mail address. Limit one entry per person or e-mail account.

    Judging: All entries will be judged by poet Kenn Nesbitt, based on the following criteria: creativity and originality (50%), use of language and rhyme (25%) and appropriateness to contest theme (25%). Winners will be notified by e-mail during the month of July and must respond within five days.

    Eligibility (参赛资格)：Open to legal citizens of the United States who are primary school students and are 8 to 13 years old at time of entry.

    Prizes: Our judge will select four semifinalists, from whom one grand-prize winner and three finalists will be chosen. The one grand-prize winner will receive an online class visit from Kenn Nesbitt. All the semifinalists will receive a signed copy of Bigfoot Is Missing, which is worth about $ 275. The semifinalists' poems will be published at timeforkids.com.