Some travelers are itching to escape the season's bitter weather. If you want to find the locale that best suits your winter vacation, use these ideas to start planning your getaway.
Honolulu-Oahu
As temperatures begin to drop in other parts of the world, Hawaii's capital city remains comfortable thanks to average highs in the low to 80 degrees. Visit Chinatown for festive Chinese New Year celebrations, or marvel at the Honolulu City Lights, a month-long Christmas display at Honolulu's city hall. Keep in mind that winter is the island's high season, so make your reservations early and expect to share the sand with lots of other sun-seeking travelers.
Sydney
Sydney's summer begins in December and lasts through February, making this a popular destination for tourists escaping the Northern Hemisphere's chilly winter weather. Average daytime temperatures hover between the mid-70s and low 80s. This time of year also features a packed events calendar with can't-miss sporting events and celebrations like the KPMG Australia Sail Grand Prix and Sydney's famed New Year's Eve fireworks display. Remember to book your tickets early as this can be a pricey and popular time to visit Australia.
Galápagos Islands
Winter in the Galápagos Islands is marked by warm weather and ample opportunities to view wildlife, snorkel and scuba dive. Although this is technically the wet season, the sun shines most days and rain showers are brief. Plan on visiting in December to see newly hatched giant tortoises and male marine lizards displaying vivid colors. For a bit more action, arrive in February to celebrate Carnival on Santa Cruz Island. To read more, click here.
Voices offer lots of information. It turns out that they can even help diagnose an illness and researchers are working on an app for that. The National Institutes of Health is funding a research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech.
Everything such as your breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida's Health Voice Center and a leader on the study. "We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?" says Bensoussan. "And that's where we got all our information." Someone who speaks low and slowly might have Parkinson's disease. Depression or cancer could even be diagnosed.
The project is part of the NIH's Bridge to AI program, which was launched over a year ago with more than $100 million in funding from the government, with the goal of creating large-scale health care databases for precision medicine. "We were really lacking what we call open source databases," says Bensoussan. "Every institution has their own database. But to create these networks was really important to allow researchers from other generations to use this data."
The ultimate goal of the project is an app that could help bridge access to rural or underserved communities, by helping general practitioners (行医者) refer patients to specialists. To get there, researchers have to start by amassing data, since the AI can only get as good as the database it's learning from. By the end of the four years, they hope to collect about 30,000 voices.
There are a few roadblocks, however. HIPAA, the law that regulates medical privacy, isn't really clear on whether researchers can share voices. Every institution has different rules on what can be shared, and that opens all sorts of moral and legal questions.
Most paper receipts (发票) are not recyclable. This is because they're on thermal paper (热 敏纸) , which contains a chemical called BPA or sometimes BPS that cannot be easily removed from the paper during the recycling process. So we need a safe method of dealing with paper receipts.
Thermal printing uses heat from a printer head to print letters and numbers; no ink is used. This process requires the addition of BPA or BPS in the "free form", which means that the chemicals are not bound to the soft paper. According to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, "The chemicals can easily transfer to anything a receipt touches." They can be transferred from fingers to the mouth via food, or absorbed directly into the skin when held. BPA or BPS can affect brain development, the heart, lungs and reproductive abilities.
If thermal paper were to be recycled, it would contaminate other products in the recycling stream with BPA or BPS. These products are often turned into items such as facial tissues, paper towels and shopping bags and having BPA or BPS in them would mean our coming into even closer contact with the chemicals. Burning and composting are not an option either, as they would release BPA and BPS into the atmosphere or soil.
The only safe place to throw thermal paper receipts is in the rubbish, followed by immediate hand washing. It's not ideal, but it is the most effective way to separate BPA and BPS from the environment. Sierra magazine offers a small bit of relief: "Throwing receipts is not the severest of wrong behaviors, since they amount to a tiny part of all paper consumed, according to industry sources."
If you require a paper record for business purposes and if you often go to the same shops, ask if they consider switching to BPA- and BPS-free thermal paper. The best solution is to ask for receipts to be emailed, rather than printed. Not only will you avoid chemical exposure, but you will also decrease the demand for a paper product that drives deforestation every year; do away with that demand altogether and recycling becomes far less urgent.
Is there a single word that motivates us more than "weekend"? It's like the promise of a sweet holiday following what seems like long-time exhaustion. It's the spring in our step that gets bouncier with each passing day—until by Friday, we're practically bumping our heads against the ceiling.
The trouble is that the weekend is a rip-off. You think you're getting 48 hours of unconditional downtime, but reality takes a discount. In fact, it takes most of Sunday. That's when anxiety comes creeping in and another countdown begins: 12 hours until Monday. Sure, the weekend is free time. But the mounting stress of an incoming Monday can ease any joy you might get from a Sunday evening.
That feeling is so common among the Monday-to-Friday crowd that there's even more than one name for it: the Sunday Scaries, or Sunday Fear Syndrome. Going from a countdown to the weekend to a countdown to Monday can be difficult. Even Monster.com — a website that specializes in binding humans to the Monday-to-Friday cycle—admits it's a problem. In a survey, Monster found that 76% of Americans have "really had" Sunday night blues.
For most people, Sunday is no holiday at all. It may all come down to the same problem: We can't stop thinking about tomorrow. Even worse, we may develop some downright unhealthy coping strategies for that transition from weekends to Monday. Some might resists — staying up late, milking every minute of a fleeting Sunday in the form of mind-numbing distractions.
But why should Monday cast such a long and fearful shadow on our lives? Maybe it's because the counter is reset and the weekend, or happiness, seems at furthest point. If, like most of us, you have a tolerable job, but don't much like the whole idea of working, there are plenty of ways to make Mondays a little less stressful. Most importantly, don't leave any unsettled Friday business hanging over the weekend. So, clear the decks and tie up loose ends.
|
Cloud storage is a flexible and convenient way to store data with complete peace of mind. This means you can store all your digital things remotely, without taking up space on your computer. There are two options available: public cloud storage allows you to share hosting space with other users; private cloud storage is the ideal choice for companies who want to have their data stored in their own environment.
Once you have registered and set up your account, you simply save your files via the internet using your username and password. This ensures your data remains secure and inaccessible to anyone else. Should you choose, you can put certain permissions in place, which makes it easy to share your data with your colleagues or your family.
When you sign up to cloud storage, you can choose the amount of space you need. You can store anything digital: all your files, videos and pictures. Whether you want to use this storage solution to store your family photographs or you want to use it to store your work documentation, you will find it quite convenient.
Is it better than your computer or an external drive? The answer is a definite yes. Computers crash all the time. This is the most common cause of lost work and memories. Here you also have the added risk of misplacing it or having it stolen. There are so many advantages to cloud computing, from the ability to access your data from wherever, whenever, to not needing expensive external storage devices.
A. Cloud storage is very simple to use.
B. You will find cloud storage very cheap.
C. External hard drives can still break, or fail.
D. It enables you to store your data on hosted servers.
E. Cloud storage providers offer multiple layers of data security.
F. The only disadvantage, however, is that you need internet to access files.
G. You can start with a small amount and increase the storage size later on.
Since finishing my studies at Harvard and Oxford, I've watched one friend after another land high-ranking, high-paying Wall Street jobs. As executives with banks, consulting firms, established law firms, and major
corporations, many are now1 on their way to impressive careers. By society's standards, they seem to have it made.
On the surface, these people seem to be very lucky in life. As they left student life behind, many had a2 drink at their cheap but friendly local bar, shook hands with longtime roommates, and moved out of small apartments into high buildings. They made reservations at restaurants where the cost of a bottle of wine3 a college year's monthly rent. They replaced their beloved old cars with expensive new sports cars.
The thing is, a number of them have4 that despite their success, they aren't happy. Some5 of unfriendly coworkers and feel sad for eight-hour workweeks devoted to tasks they hated. Some do not respect the companies they work for and talk of feeling tired and6 . However, instead of devoting themselves to their work, they find themselves working to support the lifestyle to which they have so quickly become 7 .
People often speak of trying a more satisfying path, and8 in the end the idea of leaving their jobs to work for something they9 or finding a position that would give them more time with their families almost always leads them to the same conclusion: it's10 . They have loans, bills, a mortgage to11 , retirement to save for. They recognize there's something12 in their lives, but it's hard to step off the track.
In a society that tends to13 everything in terms of dollars and cents, we learn from a young age to consider the costs of our14 in financial terms. But what about the personal and social costs15 in pursuing money over meaning? These are exactly the kinds of costs many of us tend to ignore—and the very ones we need to consider most.
The education training company New Oriental set a trend on China's social media platforms recently, after its teachers started live-streaming the selling of agricultural products, books and daily (necessity) using both Chinese and English. Anchors (主播) combine useful English the selling of products, such as providing the English translation of the product and commonly used sentences.
The anchors' excellent (pronounce) and grammar have earned the channel an enthusiastic fan base and attracted millions of views. The (knowledge) and oftentimes amusing approaches to selling products have led to "netizens" (post) comments such as "It's a good way to spend money where you get a product and also some extra knowledge".
New Oriental used to be tutoring giant in the domestic market, but it faced the (mass) challenge of transforming its business model after authorities tightened up the management of off-campus tutoring in July, 2021.
The company's founder, Yu Minhong, (say) in a letter to the company's employees on January 1 that the firm experienced great difficulty in its financial year of 2022.
The (late) figures from Economic View, a financial media outlet of China News Service, show that the Dongfang Zhenxuan account (have) 1.57 million new followers by last Friday.
1）作品要求；
2）你对作品的设想。 注意：
1）写作词数为 80 左右；
2）可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Dear Thomas,
……
Yours,
Li Hua
Counting the votes took about five minutes, but it seemed like hours. At last, after three long years, the "PCHS" letters on my uniform would soon be edged with gold cording( 金线 ), identifying me as the important Captain of Polk County High School cheerleaders(拉拉队队员) , which was quite an accomplishment before I ended my school days in a blaze of glory.
"Girls," she began, "it is my pleasure to announce that Terry Shaw has been elected Captain of Polk County High School cheerleading team." A resounding cheer was heard throughout the gym. How could this be? I hadn't missed a practice or a game in three years. Terry couldn't claim this flawless record.
Everyone gathered around Terry with congratulations, but I was glued to my seat that only moments before was the springboard to my throne(宝座). She had stolen my thunder and swept my dream right out from under me. Finally, I walked over to Terry on shaky legs and managed a "Good luck, Terry" in a whisper that barely masked my urge to cry. Terry hugged me close and said, "I wasn't expecting this, Annie. What a shock." I didn't reply to her with mean words but deep inside I wanted to do just that.
All the way home, I sobbed. There was no way I was going to stay on a team so blind that they couldn't see the one most deserving of being named captain. I slammed the front door, stomped up the steps and threw myself onto my bed in a dramatic display of sobs and sighs that eventually gave way to sleep.
The next morning I marched over to my closet and took out my uniform. Once it was in my hands and I held it close to me, I knew I couldn't quit. Heartbroken as I was, my true love was cheering with my teammates.
How hard it was to go to that first practice after Terry had been named captain. The moment I arrived, Coach Maguire asked me to take three of the new girls and work with them on our basic practice. Terry was assigned three as well.
注意：1）续写词数应为 150 左右；2. 请按如下格式在答题纸的相应位置作答。
Paragraph 1:
Just then Terry asked me if we could gather all the girls and work with them together.
……
Paragraph 2:
At the end of the year, the Annual Sports Award Ceremony was held to honor the valuable players and cheerleaders.
