“Our aim is to take our art to the world and make people understand what it is to move,” said David Belle, the founder of parkour ( also called free running－a kind of extreme sport).

    Do you love running? It is a good exercise, yet many people find it boring. But what if making your morning jog a creative one? Like jumping from walls and over gaps, and ground rolls? Just like the James Bond in the movie Casino Royale? Bond jumps down from a roof to a windowsill and then runs several blocks over obstacles on the way. It is just because of Bond's wonderful performances that the sport has become popular worldwide.

    Yes, that's parkour, an extreme street sport aimed at moving from one point to another as quickly as possible, getting over all the obstacles in the path using only the abilities of the human body. Parkour is considered an extreme sport. As its participants dash around a city, they may jump over fences, run up walls and even move from rooftop to rooftop.

    Parkour can be just as exciting and charming as it sounds, but its participants see parkour much more than that.Overcoming all the obstacles on the course and in life is part of the philosophy(理念) behind parkour. This is the same as life. You must determine your destination, go straight, jump over all the barriers as if in parkour and never fall back from them in your life, to reach the destination successfully. A parkour lover said, “I love parkour because its philosophy has become my life, my way to do everything.”

    Another philosophy we've learnt from parkour is freedom. It can be done by anyone, at any time, anywhere in the world. It is a kind of expression of trust in yourself that you earn energy and confidence.

Primary Source Holiday Shopping Night at Ten Thousand Villages

● Shop for your holiday gifts and give back to Primary Source at Ten Thousand Villages on Friday, December 4! 15% of all sales from 3:00 p. m．—7:00 p. m. that day will be donated to Primary Source. Join us for light refreshments and enjoy beautiful handmade gifts from artisans around the world. All are welcome!

Primary Source's Holiday Shopping Night

Friday, December 4, 2014

3:00 p. m．—7:00 p. m.

Ten Thousand Villages

226 Harvard Street, Brookline, Massachusetts (Coolidge Corner)

Download our flyer and tell your friends!

    Ten Thousand Villages provides vital, fair income for the people from developing countries by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories in North America. Learn more and preview toys, home decor, jewelry, and other gifts online.

● Can't join us on Dec. 4? At GoodShop, 30% of your spending will be given to Primary Source. The next time you're ready to make an online purchase(购物), visit www. goodshop. com and enter “Primary Source” in the space provided. Click “verify” and choose from more than seven hundred popular stores and sites, from Apple to Zappos. GoodShop is free and easy to use, and each purchase you make will help Primary Source provide global education materials for schools all over New England.

    In 1869, the Smiley family purchased an area of land about 100 miles north of New York City. Over time, some of their property and much of the surrounding landscape became the Mohonk Preserve, which has since grown to 8,000 acres and attracts visitors and rock climbers.

    But the Mohonk Preserve also has a long scientific legacy. In the 1930s, Dan Smiley, a descendent of the original owners, began keeping track of the plants and animals that lived in the area.

    Megan Napoli is a research ecologist with the Mohonk Preserve in New York. She thinks Smiley's efforts produced a rare long-term data set of observations, which is useful for studying the impacts of climate change. For instance, other research has shown that songbirds are migrating north earlier and earlier in the spring.

    It's important for the birds to arrive at the proper time in the spring, because they need to time their arrival with the insect emergence. So they need to be here to establish their nesting sites, lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, they have their baby birds, so they need to time it when the insects are most abundant.

    Napoli has begun analyzing about 76,000 observations of songbird migration dates collected by Smiley and his team to see if they, too, show that climate change has altered the timing of migrations. Her results suggest that they do.

    Napoli found that short-distance migrants that spend their winters in the southern U. S. now arrive an average of eleven days earlier than they did in the 1930s. Long-distance migrants that overwinter in the tropics arrive roughly a week earlier. Napoli presented her results at a recent Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon.

    Meanwhile, who knows how many other long-term, personal data collections like Smiley's are out there, waiting to be discovered and to help improve official attempts to track the planet's changes.

    I've never been the kind of person to say, “it's the thought that counts” when it comes to gifts. That was until a couple of weeks ago, when my kids gave me a present that blew me away.

    For years now, I've been wanting to sell our home, the place where my husband and I raised our kids. But to me, this house is much more than just a building. In the front room, there's a wall that has hundreds of pencil lines, marking the progress of my children's growth. Every growth stage is marked in grey, with each child's name and the date they were measured. Most people I know have been featured on a wall like this, or at least had a wall like it in their home.

    Of all the objects and all the memories, it's this one thing in a home that's the hardest to leave behind. Friends I know have returned home after work only to discover their wall of heights has been freshly painted over. A new paint job wouldn't normally be greeted by tears, but erasing that evidence of motherhood hurts more than it should. Our kids grow in so many ways, but the wall is physical evidence of their progress, right there for everyone to see.

    Over the years, I've talked about how much I would hate leaving that wall behind when I moved, even though the last marks were made 10 years ago when my kids stopped growing. So one day, while I was at work, my children decided to do something about it.

    They hired Jacquie Manning, a professional photographer whose work is about capturing (捕捉) the beautiful things in life, from clear lakes and skies to diamonds and ballgowns. She came to our house while I was at work, and over several hours, took photos of the hundreds of drawings and lines, little grey fingerprints (手印), and old marks. Somehow, she managed to photograph all those years of memories perfectly. Afterwards, she put all the photos together into one image, transforming them into a beautiful history of my family.

    Three weeks later, my children's wonderful gift made its way to me – a life-size photo of the pencil lines and fingerprints that represents entire lifetimes of love and growth.

    Like a tired marriage, the relationship between libraries and publishers has long been dull. E-books, however, are causing heartache. Libraries know they need digital wares, but many publishers are too cautious about piracy (盗版）and lost sales to co-operate. Among the big six, only Random House and Harper Collins license e-books with most libraries.

    Publishers are wise to be nervous. Owners of e-readers (电子阅读器）are exactly the customers they need: book-lovers with money. If these people switch to borrowing e-books instead of buying them, what then? Electronic borrowing is awfully convenient. Unlike printed books, which must be checked out and returned to a physical library miles from where you live, book files can be downloaded at home. The files disappear from the device when they are due.

    E-lending is not simple, however. There are lots of different and often incompatible (不兼容的)e-book formats, devices and licenses. Most libraries use a company called OverDrive，which secures rights from publishers and provides e-books and audio files in every format. Yet publishers and libraries are worried by OverDrive's global market dominance, as the company can control fees and conditions. Publishers were annoyed when OverDrive cooperated with Amazon, the world's biggest online bookseller，last year. Owners of Amazon's Kindle e-reader who want to borrow e-books from libraries are now redirected to Amazon's website, where they must use their Amazon account to secure a loan.

    According to Pew, an opinion researcher, library users are a perfect for market for Amazon. Late last year Amazon introduced its Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which lets its best customers borrow free one of thousands of popular books each month.

    Library supporters argue that book borrowers arc also book buyers and that libraries are vital spaces for readers to discover new work. Many were cheered by a recent Pew survey, which found that more than half of Americans with library cards say they prefer to buy their e-books.

    So publishers keep adjusting their lending arrangements in search of the right balance.

    Random House raised its licensing prices earlier this year, and Harper Collins limits libraries to lending its titles 26 times.

    Little black taxis, often run-down and falling apart from decades of use, have for a long time been a main feature of Cairo's chaotic urban landscape. But their days may be numbered, thanks to a new taxi replacement programme aimed at knocking out older, potentially unsafe vehicles.

    The government-sponsored action, launched earlier this year, allows drivers of taxis 20 years or older, mostly Fiats and Peugeots, to trade their cars for shiny new all-white ones at generous rates of financing. Drivers can choose between five different locally manufactured car models.

    According to officials, more than 11,000 brand new taxis, sporting trademark checked stripes on the sides, have already hit the streets of the capital, and they've been welcomed enthusiastically by passengers. Many people say that not only are the new taxis more comfortable, but they also make the streets of Cairo far more presentable. Furthermore, taxi fares have only increased by a small amount.

    The poor condition of most black and white taxis is almost legendary. Passengers often have to deal with windows and doors that do not open and close, and heavy, thick petrol gases. Air conditioning is unheard of. The new all-white taxis, meanwhile, are cleaner, more fuel-efficient and provide air conditioning on request. Furthermore, all the new taxis come equipped with functioning fare meters, which avoids arguments and sometimes fights with passengers!

    The government hopes to replace all of the capital's 40,000 elderly black cabs soon, but not everyone in Cairo will be happy to see them go. Hotel manager Ibrahim Al-Toukhy says that the old black cabs were weak and run-down, and maybe even a little dangerous, but they were part of the city, and part of Cairo's character.