Chinese e-commerce websites fail to pay more attention to older consumers, says a news report.

    There's been a thought that younger consumers have been the driving force of online buying. That may not be the case. According to a statement from Alipay, the average expenditure (支出) of Alipayusers born before the 1960s was 31,000 yuan in 2012, much higher than 14,000 yuan of those born after the 1980s. It shows that online shopping has become akey part of people's daily consumption, for both young and old.

    Besides shopping, people pay bills such as water bill, electricity bill, and credit card repayment online. The middle-aged and senior consumers are also participating in that consumption revolution.

    Liu Chen, 56, said that his online expenditure in 2014 was over 50,000 yuan, about half of the total annual expenditure. He always pays his telephone bill online. Clothes, electrical appliances and kids' snacks are themain items he purchases online.

    Liu's shopping strategy is to find something good online first, then go to shops to check it out, and finally buy it online because it is cheaper. As quality concerns him, Liu only buys items that come with aguarantee.

    Stories such as those from Liu are representative of millions of middle-aged and older Chinese, which show the great potential of the aged inthe Chinese consumption market. Yet, the market seems not to be valued as it should be.

    Some Chinese e-commerce websites such as jd. com, dangdang. comand amazon. cn don't have a category for goods for the elderly on their mainpages. Alibaba's platform does have one, but the goods in it are not as abundant as other categories. Moreover, Taobao's category is not really designed for elders, but their children.

    Despite the seeming lack of commitment to older consumers, the Chinese market for the elderly is clearly huge, and e-commerce websites should takegreat efforts to develop it.

    One night, the first floor of the house suddenly caught fire. The fire was big, and soon became a sea of fire. On the second floor lived a little girl and her grandmother; the little girl's parents had died, and she lived together with her grandma. In order to rescue the little girl, the grandmother was burned to death, leaving the little girl crying for help loudly.

    How could people enter the house? At the very moment, a man carrying a ladder rushed to the flames and entered the house through the window. When he appeared again in the eyes of the people, the little girl was in his arms. He gave the child to the crowd, and then disappeared into the night.

    This little girl had no family. Two months later a meeting was held to find a person to adopt the girl. A teacher was willing to adopt this child, and said she could give her the best education; a farmer wanted to adopt this child, saying that village life would let the child grow up healthily and happily; a rich man said, “I can give the child everything that others can do.”

    A lot of people who wanted to adopt this child said a lot about the benefits of their adopting the child. But the little girl's face had no expression. At this time, a man, through the crowd, walked straight to the little girl, and opened his arms for the little girl. People were puzzled, and they found that the man had terrible scars on his arms. The little girl let out a cry, “This is the man who saved me!” She suddenly jumped up and buried her face in his arms and sobbed. Naturally the man adopted the girl.

    The aggressive spread of market economics and communication technologies~often under the control of Western multinational companies—brings new challenges to local cultures and values in non-Western societies. Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake spill oat and over the planet, with a flavor that is distinctly sweet, sickly and apparently homogeneous (同质的).

    For some, especially the young, change may mean escape from oppressive traditions. It may also bring new opportunities for cultures to be combined in creative ways. However, there is genuine cause for concern about the rate at which cultures are being worn away in such a globalized world.

    Perhaps by far the most important far-reaching effect of cultural globalization is the commercialization of culture, which has a disturbing impact on local people's existing values. They are increasingly bombarded with new images, new music, new clothes and new values. The familiar and old are to be abandoned. While there was cultural change long before globalization, there is a danger that much will be lost simply because it is not valued by global markets. In West Africa for example, traditional values have been overtaken by Coca-Cola culture which the local people don't yet have the values to deal with successfully.

    Another common aspect of the globalized culture is that it pursues (追求) the same “one size fits all" American ideal. The result of this cultural process of homogenization is that a large section of the world's population dreams of living like Cosby & Co. or like the characters in any other stereotype American soap opera. In addition, the dream of living a better life causes thousands of people to move to already overcrowded cities whose population has boomed by millions within the last decades. The majority of these new immigrants end up in slums leading to poverty, pollution and misery.

    Such gradual aggression against people's existing values and cultures has a destructive impact on their sense of who they are, what they want and what they respect. It attacks spiritual values and faith traditions. The accumulative (累积的)effect in non-Western societies is a crisis of cultural confidence, combined with the increased economic uncertainty and crime which global integration (一体化)may bring. This creates real problems for social stability» whether it is at the level of nation, community or family.

    In conclusion, cultural globalization，or worldwide McDonaldization, destroys diversity and displaces the opportunity to sustain decent life through a mixture of many different cultures. It is more a consequence of power concentration in the global media and manufacturing companies than the people's own wish to abandon their cultural identity and diversity,

    Certain activities can be good or bad for our brains, so let's see which of the seven habits you should carry on doing or give up.

Dear 17-year-old self,

    When your Laker dream comes true tomorrow, you need to figure out a way to invest in the future of your family. This sounds simple, and you may think it's a no-brainer, but take some time to think on it further.

    I said INVEST.

    I did not say GIVE

    Let me explain.

    Purely giving material things to your siblings（兄弟姐妹） may appear to be right decision. So you buy them a car, a big house, pay, all of their bill. You want them to live a beautiful comfortable life, right？

    But the day will come when you realize that as much as you believed you were doing the right thing, you were actually holding them back.

    You will come to understand that you were taking care of them because it made YOU feel good, it made YOU happy to see them smiling and without a care in the world﹣and that was extremely selfish of you. While you were feeling satisfied with yourself, you were slowly eating away at their own dreams and ambitions. You were adding material things to their lives, but subtracting the most precious gifts of all.

Invest in their future, don't just give.

    Use your success, wealth and influence to put them in the best position to realize their own dreams and find their true purpose. Put them through school, set them up with job interviews and help them become leaders in their own right. Hold them to the same level of hard work and dedication that it took for you to get to where you are now, and where you will eventually go.

    I'm writing you now so that you can begin this process immediately, and so that you don't have to deal with the hurt and struggle of weaning（断绝） them off of the addiction that you facilitated That addiction only leads to anger, hatred and jealousy from everybody involved, including yourself.

    As time goes on, you will see them grow independently and have their own ambitions and their own lives, and your relationship with all of them will be much better as a result.

    Trust me, setting things up right from the beginning will avoid a ton of tears and headache, some of which remains to this day.

Much love

    It is a question people have been asking for ages—is there a way to turn back the aging process?

    For centuries, people have been looking for a "fountain of youth." The idea is that if you find a magical fountain, and drink from its waters, you will not become old. Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León searched for waters with magical powers in the early 1500s. But what he found instead is the American State of Florida.

    Researchers in New York did not find a fountain of youth in fact, but they may have found a way to turn back the aging process. It appears the answer may be hidden right between your eyes, in an area called the hypothalamus (丘脑下部).The hypothalamus is part of your brain. It controls important activities within the body, including growth, reproduction and the way we process food.

    Researchers at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that hypothalamus stem cells also influence how fast aging takes place in the body. What are stem cells? They are simple cells that can develop into specialized cells, like blood or skin cells. Stem cells can also repair damaged parts in the body.

    Professor Dongsheng Cai was the lead researcher in a study on aging in mice. Cai explains in the Journal Nature what they found. "Aging speed can be controlled by a particular place in the body, which is the hypothalamus. And it can be controlled by a particular type of cells, which are hypothalamus stem cells. I think these findings are quite interesting."

    He adds that when the hypothalamus starts aging, so does the body. "So when hypothalamus function is decreasing, particularly the loss of hypothalamus stem cells, this protection against the aging development is lost. It finally leads to aging."

    Using this information, the researchers began trying to activate (激活) the hypothalamus in mice. They did this by putting stem cells from younger mice into middle-aged animals. Later, the researchers examined mice and tested for changes in behavior. They also looked for changes in the strength of the animals' muscles and the way they worked. The researchers say the results show that the treatment slowed aging in the animals.

    Cai says when hypothalamus stem cells, which were derived from young mice was put into middle-aged mice, the mice aged slowly and they also have increased the length of their lives.

    But these results were just from studying mice in a lab. If the mice can live longer, does that mean people could have longer lives? The next step is to see if the anti-aging effects also work in human beings.