Men are spending more and more time in the kitchen encouraged by celebrity (名人) chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, according to a report from Oxford University.

    The effect of the celebrity role models, who have given cooking a more mainly picture, has combined with a more general drive towards sexual equality and men now spend more than twice the amount of time preparing meals than they did in 1961.

    According to the research by Prof. Jonatahn Gershuny, who runs the Centre for Time Research at Oxford, men now spend more than half an hour a day cooking, up from just 12 minutes a day in 1961.

Prof. Gershuny said, “The man in the kitchen is part of a much wider social trend. There has been 40 years of sexual equality, but there is another 40 years probably to come.”

    Women, who a generation ago spent nearly two hours a day cooking, now spend just one hour and seven minutes—a great fall, but they still spend far more time in the kitchen than men.

    Some experts have named these men in aprons as “Gastrosexuals (men using cooking skills to impress friends)”, who have been inspired to pick up a kitchen knife by the success of Ramsay, Oliver as well as other male celebrity chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White and Keith Floyd.

    “I was married in 1974. When my father came to visit me a few weeks later, I was wearing an apron when I opened the door. He laughed,” said Prof. Gershuny. “That would never happen now.”

    Two-thirds of adults say that they come together to share at least three times a week, even if it is not necessarily around a kitchen or dining room table. Prof. Gershuny pointed out that the family meal was now rarely eaten by all of its members around a table—with many “family meals” in fact taken on the sofa in the sitting room, and shared by family members. “The family meal has changed a lot, and few of us eat—as I did when I was a child—at least two meals a day together as a family. But it has survived in a different format.” 

    Smart phones are so common these days. It's a wonder that our pets don't own one. But they don't necessarily have to. These four apps will help you take care of your best furry friend from dog training to first aid.

Pet First Aid

Price: $3.99

    Pet First Aid helps you provide the basic care and attention that your four-legged friend might need in a medical emergency. The application shows owners how to treat illnesses with helpful videos, pictures and articles on subjects like cuts, wound treatment and more. A section called Pet Info lets you enter in information about your pets including when they had their last vaccinations, any medicines they take, or information about any diseases or conditions your animal suffers from.

Paw Card Pet Tracker

Price: Free

    Paw Card helps you keep a record of your loved one's important information. Use it to record your pet's medical contacts, vaccinations, identity cards, medical conditions and medicines. Additional characteristics include a drawing showing your dog's weight over time.

Dog Park Finder

Price: Free

    Dog Park Finder helps you locate dog-friendly parks and training locations in your area(USA)locations only). The app includes in formation on more than 2,200 off-leash(无需给狗拴链的) areas, user photos and more than 6，500 reviews, so you can have fun with your dog off the leash.

Dog Book

Price: Free

    Dog Book is a social networking application for dogs. Like Face book, users can share with other people what's going on in their dog's life, share photos, and find great animal-friendly places to meet up.

    Wealth starts with a goal saving a dollar at a time. Call it the piggy bank strategy(策略). There are lessons in that time-honored coin-saving container.

    Any huge task seems easier when reduced to baby steps. I f you wished to climb a 12,000-foot mountain, and could do it a day at a time, you would only have to climb 33 feet daily to reach the top in a year. If you want to take a really nice trip in 10 years for a special occasion, to collect the $15,000 cost, you have to save $3.93 a day. If you drop that into a piggy bank and then once a year put $1,434 in a savings account at 1% interest rate after-tax, you will have your trip money.

    When I was a child, my parents gave me a piggy bank to teach me that, if I wanted something, I should save money to buy it. We associate piggy banks with children, but in many countries, the little containers are also popular with adults. Europeans see a piggy bank as a sign of good fortune and wealth. Around the world, many believe a gift of a piggy bank on New Year's Day brings good luck and financial success. Ah, but you have to putsomethingin it.

    Why is a pig used as a symbol of saving? Why not an elephant bank, which is bigger and holds more coins? In the Middle Ages, before modern banking and credit instruments, people saved money at home, a few coins at a time dropped into a jar or dish. Potters(制陶工) made these inexpensive containers from an orange-colored clay(黏土) called “pygg,” and folks saved coins in pygg jars.The Middle English word

    for pig was “pigge”. While the Saxons pronounced pygg, referring to the clay, as “pug”, eventually the two words changed into the same pronunciation, sounding the “i” as in pig or piggy. As the word became less associated with the orange clay and more with the animal, a clever potter fashioned a pygg jar in the shape of a pig, delighting children and adults. The piggy bank was born.

Originally you had to break the bank to get to the money, bringing in a sense of seriousness into savings. While piggy banks teach children the wisdom of saving, adults often need to relearn childhood lessons. Think about the things in life that require large amounts of money— college education, weddings, cars, medical care, starting a business, buying a home, and fun stuff like great trips. So when you have money, take off the top 10%, put it aside, save and invest wisely.

    Nancy Ballard, 60, went for a routine checkup that turned into something extraordinary. She had just completed her master's in botanical illustration. In fact, she was canting a painting of a plant she'd done when she arrived at her doctor's San Francisco office. “It would be great if we had artwork like that for our chemotherapy(化疗)rooms, ”the nurse said. Ballard asked to see one.

    She was shocked by what she found. The walls were bare, and the paint was chipping(剥落).She could tell where old artwork had hung because of the naked nails. It was a depressing room for a depressing routine—patients had chemo drips for perhaps several hours, often with nothing to look at other than those sad walls. She couldn't imagine how anyone could even think about getting healthy in a room like that. As it happened, Ballard's physician, Stephen Hufford was ill with cancer himself, so finding time to decorate the rooms was low on his to-do list. So Ballard made it her mission to brighten up the place.

    She wrote to 20 local interior designers and asked whether they would donate their time and money to transform just one of Dr. Hufford's rooms each. Six of them wrote back almost immediately. Each of them ultimately chose a theme: The dragonfly room, for example, now features bright artwork and dragonfly wall ornaments. Most rooms got new paint, light fixtures, artwork, and furniture. Each room cost about $5, 000.

    Dr. Hufford was delighted.“ All the patients feel soothed by it.” he noted. He even said that his own tone of voice was different in the rooms and that he was better able to connect with his patients.

    Ballard was so encouraged that she created a nonprofit to raise money and decorate more spaces. Since then, she has worked on 20 projects, including one in Pennsylvania. She once went to Philadelphia for a ribbon cutting, and a woman there was on her third battle with cancer. When she saw what Ballard had done, she said, “I'm gonna beat it this time.I thought I wasn't going to, but now I know I'm gonna beat it.”

    There was a time in the 1960's and 1970's when some people believed that coffee would replace tea as Britain's favourite drink, but that did not happen, and today, tea remains Britain's favourite drink.

    To say that the British are fond of tea is something of an understatement. From the Royal(皇室的) Family down to the homeless and the out-of-work, tea is more than just a pleasure. It is an important part of life!

    The popularity of tea in the United Kingdom has a long history. It was in 1657 that Thomas Garway, the owner of a coffee house, sold the first tea in London. The drink soon became popular as another choice besides coffee.

    In those days, however, tea was not something for anyone. For a century and a half, it remained an expensive drink. Many bosses served a cup of it to their workers in the middle of the morning, thus inventing a lasting British tradition, the “tea break”. But as a social drink outside the workplace, tea was served for the nobility(贵族) and for the growing middle classes. Among those who had the money for tea, it became very popular as a drink to be enjoyed in cafés and “tea gardens”.

    It was the 7th Duchess of Bedford who, in around 1800, started the popular “afternoon tea”, which took place at about four o'clock. At about the same time, the Earl of Sandwich popularized a new way of eating bread with something (e. g. jam) between them, and before long, a small meal at the end of the afternoon with tea and sandwiches had become part of a way of life.

    As tea became much cheaper during the nineteenth century, its popularity spread right through British society. In working-class households, it was served with the main meal of the day, eaten when workers returned home after a day's labour. This meal has become known as “high tea”.

    Today, tea can be drunk at any time of day. Most people in Britain drink tea for breakfast. The mid-morning “tea break” is an institution in British offices and factories. Later in the day, “afternoon tea” is still a way of life in the south of England and among the middle classes, while “high tea” has remained a tradition in the north of Britain.

    The Internet has completely changed the workplace over the past three decades. Artificial Intelligence is now all set to do the same, and businesses that don't take advantage of the technology risk being left behind.

    Global tech giants (巨头) like Amazon have been leading the change, and businesses of all sizes are now using the technology for employing and managing their staff.

    Among them is L'Oreal. With about a million applicants for roughly 15,000 new positions each year, the company is using AI to hire.

    “We really wanted to save time and focus more on quality, diversity and candidate experience. And AI solutions were the best way to go faster on these challenges, said Eva Azoulay, global vice-president of L'Oreal's Human Resources Department.

    The company uses Mya, a chatbot, to save employers' time during the first stage of the process. It handles routine questions from candidates, and checks details such as availability and visa requirements. Should candidates make it to the next round, they'll run into Seedlink, an AI software that scores applicants based on their answers to open-ended interview questions. These scores don't replace human judgment, said Azoulay, but they do pick out candidates who might not seem like obvious choices.

    Early results have been promising. For one internship program, where 12,000 people apply for about 80 spots, employers claim they saved 200 hours of time while hiring the most diverse group to date.

    Other businesses have gone beyond employment and are using AI to help manage employees. Some UK firms have started using Isaak, a system designed by the London-based company StatusToday, to track how many hours staff spend online and the number of emails they receive. London real estate agent JBrown has been using this system since March. CEO James Brown said it helps the firm understand employees' habits and prevent them from overworking. "It enables us to solve bottleneck problems and relieve overburdened employees," he said.

    Despite these examples of good practice, there is still a long way for AI to reach its full potential (潜力), and the technology comes with risks. Another AI danger could be its impact on jobs through automation (自动化). McKinsey predicts AI could add $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with early adopters doubling their cash flow over that period. But the demand for repetitive (重复的) or digitally-unskilled jobs could drop by around 10%, the consulting firm said in a 2018 report.