My son Cameron who was 16 years old came up with this crazy idea to make his own survival show. Well I thought it was just another one of his “phases” but he began to sound more and more serious about it. He's a big outdoors man and has always loved the idea of surviving in the woods by himself, but he has never done anything like this. Anyway, he somehow raised $4,000 for his idea. With the money he bought a nice camcorder(摄像机) ;that's when I realized that he was really serious about this whole thing.

    Cameron organized the trip all by himself. I just put out a few rules that he had to follow and rented a satellite phone so that he could contact us on his journey. My son traveled nearly 50 miles, while surviving for four days and three nights alone in the wilderness. He had no food or water, only his knife, and a camera. The journey was difficult as he traveled through valleys, up and down big waterfalls, all while he was filming his entire journey. The wilderness we dropped him off in was a wild forest that is made up of untouched land; he found his way to the beautiful lake where we picked him up. In the end he made the most amazing movie that I have ever seen in all my life.

    My son's courage should be recognized. That is why I am trying my hardest to get him seen by the rest of the world. Cameron recently turned 17. He already has plans for his next adventure and I have no hope in stopping him from completing it. This next summer he plans on surviving for two or three weeks on a desert island in Fiji or Tonga. No teenage kid has ever done anything close to what my son Cameron has done.

    In life, we will succeed and fail often for reasons that are entirely out of our control. For instance, we can be incredibly nice and love someone deeply, and they may not love us back. We can work harder than anyone else in the office and still not be promoted to management. We can eat healthy food, exercise and stay away from alcohol and cigarettes, and still get sick.

    The bottom line is that life is not fair.

    That is a tough pill to swallow for many of us. As a result, some people shut down after being hit by even one unfair blow from life. They can't handle the fact that our efforts don't always get the results that we expect. But if we let life's unfairness defeat us, we will never receive the beautiful blessings (幸事) that life has in store for us.

    For example, my first marriage ended in divorce. To me, it felt very unfair. I had worked hard to be a good wife and mother. However, no matter what I did, I could not make the relationship work.

    I could have been shut down by that experience. I could have decided that if one person didn't appreciate me as a wife, then no one would. I could have given up. But I knew that I wanted to be married. I knew that I wanted to experience traditional family life. So I didn't let one seemingly unfair experience stop me from believing that I could one day be happily married. And then one day, I met this kind, thoughtful, generous man with whom I now have a wonderful friendship and marriage. But that wouldn't have happened if I had decided to give up after one failed marriage.

    What I've learned over the years is that we can do all the things that deserve a good outcome, but get bad things in return instead.

    When we are faced with life's seeming unfairness, our faith needs to jump in. When life doesn't go according to plan, we have to let go of the outcome that we are looking forward to and keep trying, working hard and doing the right thing. Please don't be discouraged. Accept that life is neither fair nor straightforward. And by knowing that if we remain confident, we can drive our unfair experiences away and use them for our benefit.

    Play time is in short supply for young children these days and the lifelong consequences for developing children can be more serious than many people realize.

    An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children's play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control. “Since about 1955, children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have applied ever-increasing control over children's activities.” says the author Peter Gray, Ph. D, Professor of Psychology at Boston College.

    We can describe the unstructured freely-chosen play as a testing ground for life. It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults. So kids need more of it, not less. Because play is how young children learn important social and emotional skills such as sharing, cooperating, communicating, and empathizing. It helps them develop fit bodies, strong minds, and brave hearts, so they can take on new challenges and risky situations.

    Gray's article is meant to serve as a wake-up call regarding the effects of lost play. We must know that lack of childhood free play time is a huge loss that must be paid attention to for the sake of our children and society. But parents who keep a lookout over and disturb their children's play are a big part of the problem. It is hard to find groups of children outdoors at all, and, if you do find them, they are likely to be wearing school uniforms and following the directions of coaches while their parents dutifully watch and cheer.

    Actually, when children are in charge of their own play, it provides a foundation for their future mental health as older children and adults. Play gives children a chance to find and develop a connection to their own self-identified and self-guided interest. It is through play that children first learn to make decisions, solve problems, improve self-control, and follow rules. Play helps children make friends and learn to get along with each other as equals. Most importantly, play is a source of happiness.

When parents realize the major role that free play can take in the development of emotionally healthy children and adults, they may wish to reassess the priorities ruling their children's lives. The needs for childcare, academic and athletic success and children's safety is important. But perhaps parents can begin to identify small changes——such as openings in the schedule, backing off from quite so many supervised (有监督的) activities, and possibly slightly less keeping watch on the playground that would start the slow returning to the direction of free, imaginative-directed play.

My First Day of School

    Fear started taking over, I was walking into my first school in America. I had traveled a long distance from India in order to join my parents, who had been for three years, hoping America would help my future. My father decided that I would be better off going to school here, so I enrolled(登记)in the local high school in my new town.

    I was afraid how I would do. On the first day, I went to my second period class after I had missed my first. With anxiety, I reached for the door, opening it slowly. Without paying attention to my classmates, I went straight to the teacher and asked if this was the right class. With a soft voice he answered. "Yes." His voice comforted me a little. He gave me a sheet called Course Requirements, which I would never get in India because we didn't have anything like that. Then he asked me to choose where I would sit. I didn't actually want to pick a seat. In India we had fixed seats, so I never needed to worry about that. I spent the rest of the class taking notes from the image produced by the overhead projector. In Indian schools, we didn't use the technology we had. We had to take notes as the teacher spoke.

    It was noon. I was very confused about when I would have lunch. I went to my next class and the bell rang as I entered. I went through the regular process of asking the teacher if I was in the right class. She said, "It's still fourth period."

    "But the bell just rang," I said.

    Changing from a gentle tone to a harsher(刺耳的)one, she said, "That is the lunch bell, young man."

    I apologized. Without another word I headed for the cafeteria. I felt lucky because we didn't have this in India. Every confusion seemed like a barrier I had to get through to reach my goal. At the end of the day, I was on my way to the bus which we didn't have in India either. I spotted my bus and sat down inside happily. I was thinking, today wasn't so bad.

    Nottingham Goose (鹅) Fair started on the first Thursday in October and lasted 3 days. However, nowadays you won't find any geese there.

    The fair opened at 12: 00 on the Thursday by the Lord Mayor of Nottingham, but it has an interesting and shocking history.

    For starters, it wasn't always the largest fair in the area. And the main fair for the people of Nottingham in terms of trade and economy was the Lenton Fair held at Lenton Priory.

    In the Middle Ages the Lenton Fair overshadowed (使显得逊色) the Goose Fair in size and importance. Harrisons Calendar of Fairs for 1587 mentions the Lenton Fair but not the Goose Fair. However the Goose Fair competed with its local competitors and every year over 20, 000 geese from the Fens in Lincolnshire arrived to be sold to provide the traditional Michaelmas dish.

    It wasn't just for geese either. All kinds of things were sold at the Goose Fair: sheep, horses and cattle were also sold.

    The fair has been under threat of closure many times over the years. In 1764, they actually had cheese riots (暴乱) due to an increase of a third on the price of cheese compared with the previous year, which resulted in an attack on the stallholders (摊主) at the fair.

    By 1880 the fair was reduced to a three-day event, which started on the first Thursday of October. In 1928, the fair was moved from the market square to its present site in the forest which is far away from the city centre. Despite attempts throughout its history to prevent the fair, the income from rents paid by the stallholders is financially beneficial to the local government. So regardless of the cheese riots and the various attempts to prohibit it, Nottingham Goose Fair has survived to celebrate over eight centuries of fun.

The Ebola virus is an infectious disease that for years had almost no treatments, and it kill s about half the people it infects. Now a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases shows that a promising vaccine （疫苗）, named rVSV△G-ZEBOV-GP, doesn't just help to reduce infections, it also can cut those death numbers in half.

The vaccine is a single-dose （单剂） muscular one that causes cells to produce one of the virus's proteins. "Later, if the person is exposed to Ebola,"explains Rebecca Coulborn, a scientist with Epicentre, the medical research arm of Doctors Without Borders, "their immune system will recognize the viral protein. This recognition allows the immune system to be prepared to attack the virus and protect the person from Ebola virus disease."

Researchers showed rVSV△G-ZEBOV-GP was effective at reducing the risk of infection, but no one knew how capable it was of preventing death in someone who was vaccinated after becoming infected during an epidemic （流行病）. To figure it out, Coulborn and her colleagues focused their efforts on the second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, which occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2018 and 2020.

"Every single Ebola health facility across the entire Ebola epidemic had a standardized list of all admissions," says Coulborn. This list included 2,279 confirmed Ebola patients, and it recorded whether or not each person had been vaccinated before they got sick—and if so, when they'd received the vaccine.

Coulborn found the death rate was 56% among the unvaccinated. But for those who'd received the vaccine, that rate was cut in half. This was true no matter when someone got vaccinated before the appearance of symptoms. Additionally, those who'd been vaccinated had less virus circulating in their bodies than those who hadn't. So the vaccine played an important role.

Rebecca Coulborn says she feels buoyed by the results—since they offer clear evidence that people who're at risk of contracting Ebola should be vaccinated early. It's an opportunity to cut chains of transmission （传播） and prevent an outbreak before it gains speed.