Shakespeare's Birthplace and Exhibition of Shakespeare's World. Welcome to the world-famous house where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and where he grew up. The property(房产) remained in the ownership of Shakespeare's family until 1806. The House has welcomed visitors travelling from all over the world，for over 250 years.

◆Enter through the Visitors' Centre and see the highly-praised exhibition Shakespeare's World, a lively and full introduction to the life and work of Shakespeare.

◆Stand in the rooms where Shakespeare grew up.

◆Discover examples of furniture and needlework from Shakespeare's period.

◆Enjoy the traditional(传统的) English garden, planted with trees and flowers mentioned in the poet's works.

    The Birthplace is within easy walking distance of all the car parks shown on the map；nearest is Windsor Street(3 minutes' walk)．

The House may present difficulties but the Visitors' Centre, its exhibition, and the garden are accessible(可进入的) to wheelchair users.

    The Shakespeare Coffee House(opposite the Birthplace).

    Decision-thinking is not unlike poker—it often matters not only what you think, but also what others think you think and what you think they think you think. The mental process is similar. Naturally, this card game has often been of considerable interest to people who are, by any standards, good thinkers.

    The great mathematician John von Neumann was one of the founders of game theory. In particular , he showed that all games fall into two classes : there are what he called games of “ perfect information ”,games like chess where the players can't hide anything or play tricks : they don't win by chance , but by means of logic and skills . Then there are games of “imperfect information”, like poker, in which it is impossible to know in advance that one course of action is better than another.

    One mistaken idea about business is that it can be treated as a game of “perfect information”. Quite the reverse, business, polities, life itself are games which we must normally play with very imperfect information. Business decisions are often made with many unknown and unknowable factors, which would even puzzle the best poker players. But few business people find it comfortable to admit that they are taking a chance, and many still prefer to believe that they are playing chess, not poker.

    Swiss researchers said Monday they have developed a wireless camera system to monitor vital signs in premature babies, a move that could replace uncomfortable and highly inaccurate skin sensors (传感器) which produce false alarms in up to 90 percent of cases, mainly set off by the baby's movement.

    “This is a cause of discomfort for the babies, because we have to check on them every time,” said Jean-Claude Fauchere, a doctor at University Hospital Zurich's newborn clinic.

    His hospital is preparing to begin tests of a new, contactless system created by researchers at the EPFL polytechnical university in Lausanne and at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology.

    The system designed in Switzerland should allow premature babies kept warm in incubators (恒温箱) to be medically monitored using highly sensitive cameras that detect the newborn's pulse by analyzing its skin color, which changes so slightly every time its heart beats.

    “Breathing is monitored by measuring movements of its chest and shoulders. At night, infrared (红外线的) cameras take over, and monitoring can be carried out non-stop,” the statement said.

    The visual system was designed by CSEM researchers, who chose cameras sensitive enough to detect minute changes in skin color, while the EPFL researchers designed algorithms (运算程序) to process the data in real time.

    “We ran an early study on adults, where we looked at a specific part of skin on their foreheads,” EPFL doctoral student Sibylle Fallet said. “With our algorithms we can track this area when the person moves, and use tiny changes in their color to determine the pulse,” she said. “The tests showed that the cameras produced practically the same results as conventional sensors.”

    Once the system has been widely tested on premature babies, it could one day replace skin sensors altogether, the schools said.

    At your next meeting, wait for a pause in conversation and try to measure how long it lasts.

    Among English speakers, chances are that it will be a second or two at most. But while this pattern may be universal, our awareness of silence differs dramatically across cultures.

    What one culture considers a confusing or awkward pause may be seen by others as a valuable moment of reflection and sign of respect for what the last speaker has said. Research in Dutch and also in English found that when a silence in conversation stretches to four seconds, people start to feel uneasy. In contrast, a separate study of business meetings found that Japanese people are happy with silences of 8.2 seconds — nearly twice as long as in Americans' meetings.

    In Japan, it is recognized that the best communication is when you don't speak at all. It's already a failure to understand each other by speaking because you're repairing that failure by using words.

    In the US, it may originate from the history of colonial (殖民地) America as a crossroads of many different races. When you have a complex of difference, it's hard to establish common understanding unless you talk and there's understandably a kind of anxiety unless people are verbally engaged to establish a common life. This applies also to some extent to London.

    In contrast, when there's more homogeneity, perhaps it's easier for some kinds of silence to appear. For example, among your closest friends and family it's easier to sit in silence than with people you're less well acquainted with.

    Something's happening at the lowest point on our planet, some 1,388 feet below sea level. The Dead Sea, a salt lake close to Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, is shrinking at an alarming rate—about 3.3 feet per year, according to the environmentalist group EcoPeace Middle East.

    “It's not just like one country is punishing the Dead Sea; it's more like the whole region,” said photographer Moritz Küstner, who visited the area in February to work on his series “The Dying Dead Sea”.

    The Dead Sea needs water from the other natural sources surrounding it, such as the Jordan River basin. But around the 1960s, the courses of some water sources it relied upon were diverted. Israel, for instance, built a pipeline during that time so it could supply water throughout the country.

    Mineral extraction(提取)industries are another main reason why the water levels are declining, experts say. The Dead Sea's minerals have been popular for their medical power and can often be found in cosmetics(化妆品)and other consumer products.

    And then, of course, there's the Middle East's hot, dry climate, which makes it difficult for the lake to refill itself. Last year, Israel and Jordan signed a $ 900 million deal in an effort to stabilize the Dead Sea's water levels. It involves building a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea which would be able to not only supply water to Israel and Jordan but also to pump much needed water—some 300 million cubic meters annually—into the Dead Sea.

    “This is the most important and significant agreement since the peace treaty with Jordan (in 1994),” said Silvan Shalom, Israel's energy and water resources minister at the time. Whether the canal—estimated to take three years to complete—will work out positively and as planned remains to be seen.

    For now, Küstner shows us that the Dead Sea remains very much a place of interest, with people from all over the world going there to swim in its salty waters.

The Stanford marshmallow (棉花糖) test was originally conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Children aged four to six at a nursery school were placed in a room. A single sugary treat, selected by the child, was placed on a table. Each child was told if they waited for 15 minutes before eating the treat, they would be given a second treat. Then they were left alone in the room. Follow-up studies with the children later in life showed a connect ion between an ability to wait long enough to obtain a second treat and various forms of success.

As adults, we face a version(版本) of the marshmallow test every day. We're not tempted (诱惑) by sugary treats, but by our computers, phones, and tablets — all the devices that connect us to the global delivery system for various types of information that do to us what marshmallows do to preschoolers.

We are tempted by sugary treats because our ancestors lived in a calorie-poor world, and our brains developed a response mechanism(机制) to these treats that reflected their value — a feeling of reward and satisfaction. But as we've reshaped the world around us, dramatically reducing the cost and effort involved in obtaining (获取) calories, we still have the same brains we had thousands of years ago, and this mismatch(不匹配) is at the heart of why so many of us struggle to resist (抵抗) tempting foods that we know we shouldn't eat.

A similar process is at work in our response to information. Our formative (有重大影响的) environment as a species was information-poor, so our brains developed a mechanism that prized (高度重视) new information. But global connectivity has greatly changed our information environment. We are now endlessly bombarded (轰炸) with new information. Therefore, just as we need to be more thoughtful (深思熟虑的) about our caloric consumption (热量消耗), we also need to be more thoughtful about our information consumption, resisting the temptation of the mental "junk food" in order to manage our time most effectively.