Where To Go On Spring Break, Based On Your Zodiac Sign (星座)
Spring break is just around the corner. It's time to get your travel plans in order. Here is a simple guide that tells you exactly where to go on spring break this year, all based on your zodiac sign.
Pisces, You Love To Be By The Water
Go to Pisces—the water! You can simply sit, relax, and enjoy the salty air and some delicious Mediterranean food. Elafonisos, an island off the coast of Greece with unbelievable beaches, is your ideal destination. The population is small, but it gets very crowded during the summer months, so spring is your best opportunity to take it all in.
Taurus, Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico Will Be Your Jam
Yes, Truth or Consequences is the real name of this ridiculously affordable spa town.
Indulge in your love of all things luxury by simply spending a few days being pampered. Rooms at Blackstone Hot Springs begin at a very reasonable $ 85 a night. That's relaxing in and of itself.
Gemini, Nairobi Literally Has It All
Gemini, when it comes to planning a trip, you often have a difficult time choosing between a city and some wildlife. Well, if you head to capital city Nairobi, Kenya, you won't have to decide. Along with a rich nightlife, you can head to Nairobi National Park, a breeding ground for black rhinos that also happens to be known as Africa's safari capital.
Plan Your Way To Paris, Virgo
You run a tight ship, Virgo, but the gorgeous city of Paris will have enough history and art to keep you walking and shopping until your heart's content. Sit back and delight in the delectable cuisine for which "the city of lights" is known.
Enjoy your trips, my friends!
Eliana Yi dreamed of pursuing piano performance in college, never mind that her fingers could barely reach the length of an octave (八度音阶). Unable to fully play many works by Romantic-era composers, including Beethoven and Brahms, she tried anyway—and in her determination to spend hours practicing one of Chopin's compositions which is known for being "stretchy", wound up injuring herself.
"I would just go to pieces," the Southern Methodist University junior recalled. "There were just too many octaves. I wondered whether I was just going to play Bach and Mozart for the rest of my life."
The efforts of SMU keyboard studies chair Carol Leone are changing all that. Twenty years ago, the school became the first major university in the U.S. to incorporate smaller keyboards into its music program, leveling the playing field for Yi and other piano majors.
Yi reflected on the first time she tried one of the smaller keyboards: "I remember being really excited because my hands could actually reach and play all the right notes," she said. Ever since, "I haven't had a single injury, and I can practice as long as I want."
For decades, few questioned the size of the conventional piano. If someone's hand span was less than 8.5 inches—the distance considered ideal to comfortably play an octave—well, that's just how it was.
Those who attempt "stretchy" passages either get used to omitting notes or risk tendon (腱) injury with repeated play. Leone is familiar with such challenges. Born into a family of jazz musicians, she instead favored classical music and pursued piano despite her small hand span and earned a doctorate in musical arts.
A few years after joining SMU's music faculty in 1996, the decorated pianist read an article in Piano and Keyboard magazine about the smaller keyboards. As Leone would later write, the discovery would completely renew her life and career.
In 2000, she received a grant to retrofit a department Steinway to accommodate a smaller keyboard, and the benefits were immediate. In addition to relieving injury caused by overextended fingers, she said, it gave those with smaller spans the ability to play classic compositions taken for granted by larger-handed counterparts.
Smaller keyboards instill many with new confidence. It's not their own limitations that have held them back, they realize; it's the limitations of the instruments themselves. For those devoted to a life of making music, it's as if a cloud has suddenly lifted.
After a day's labor, Andreas Fichtner and his colleagues have spliced (绞接) together three segments of fibers, creating a 12.5-kilometer-long fiber-optic (光学的) cable. It will stay buried in the snow to spy on the activity of Grfmsvotn, a dangerous, glacier-covered volcano.
Fichtner, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, is one of the researchers using fiber optics to take the pulse of our planet. Much of their work is done in remote places, from the tops of volcanoes to the bottoms of seas, where traditional monitoring is too costly or difficult.
The technique used by Fichtner's team is called distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. "It's almost like radar in the fiber," says the physicist Giuseppe Marra of the United Kingdom's National Physical Laboratory, in Teddington. While radar uses reflected radio waves to locate objects, DAS uses reflected light to detect events as varied as earthquake activity and moving traffic, and to determine where they occurred. Inside the cables are optical fibers. DAS involves shooting quick pulses of laser light down the fiber and detecting bits of light that scatter back to the laser source due to disturbances in the environment. When the earth's surface vibrates and shifts, it pulls the cables, so a detector can identify these small changes.
The New York Times points out that although wireless and satellite technology are booming, good old-fashioned cables are still the most efficient way to send information across oceans. Repurposing cables could give scientists the ability to monitor high-risk zones that were previously hard to reach. They could help detect earthquakes and tsunamis a few seconds earlier than traditional warning systems.
In addition, fiber-optic cables could also help solve some of the biggest challenges for humans. In the recent years, scientists have started to use them to measure ocean waves and access fault (断层) information. It is believed that fiber-optic cables will serve to benefit us greatly in the future.
Excessive (过度的) smartphone use is a distinctly 21st century issue, but that doesn't make it any less problematic. Countless people spend their days endlessly scrolling from one social media feed or app to the next. Many argue there's an easy solution: place it in silent mode (模式).
Now, however, researchers from Penn State find that this approach can actually backfire for certain people. Study authors report people checked their phones more often when their devices were in silent mode. Notably, participants who scored high in "fear of missing out" and "need to belong" personality tests checked their phones the most after placing them on silent. In some cases, these individuals stayed on their phones for longer as well.
This work is based on data collected from the screen time monitoring tool of 138 iPhone users. Researchers focused on how two distinct psychological traits may influence how people act in response to placing their phones on either silence or vibrate. More specifically, study authors analyzed people who tend to be especially preoccupied (专注) with gathering information from others(fear of missing out, or FOMO), and people with a strong desire to maintain interpersonal relationships(need to belong).
Incredibly, in comparison to audio-alert or vibrate modes, each participant checked their phones more often when it was in silent mode. When the phone's sound and vibration was on, the groups checked their devices 52.9 times daily on average. When their phones were silent, that average rate nearly doubled to 98.2 times a day. Volunteers identified as having high levels of FOMO checked their phones roughly 50 times daily when their device was on vibrate, while in silent mode, they checked their phones about 120 times daily, and they also tended to keep scrolling significantly longer if their phones were in silent mode.
Participants with high levels of the need-to-belong trait actually didn't check their phones more in silent mode, however, they did stay on their phones longer if the devices were in either silent or vibration-only mode.
At the end of the day, smartphone use habits come down to the individual. Researchers conclude the first step toward developing healthier tech habits for everyone is understanding that different people react to apps, notifications, and various tech features differently.
Ways to improve Innovation Skills
In your professional life, innovation skills play a vital role. Here are steps and tips to improve them.
Improve reasoning (推理) skills. Reasoning skills form the ability to think about a particular way to work in a sensible and result-oriented manner. You can implement reasoning for innovative ideas and enhance them further. You will also be able to come up with the ideas that have higher chances to become result-driven.
Be a good listener. You should listen to others and try to think about their ideas and concepts. Also, adaptability increases innovation. It would help if you tried adopting newer versions of solutions for the betterment of your company.
Actively participate in team activities. A team is a body that functions the best in togetherness. Team activities like brainstorming sessions are conducted to enhance the team spirit and develop the thinking skills of the team members. Such activities will improve the innovation skills.
Make decisions based on judgments. From the inferences of team activities or other tasks, you can make judgments about the current situations. These will help with innovation. Innovative ideas must be useful, and decisions based on judgments help in ensuring this.
Problems are faced at every point, and every problem has a solution. So, if you develop the desire to solve every problem by a strategic plan, you will aim to find a best solution that is new and innovative. With problem-solving skills, you will always long for new and effective ways to solve a problem in lesser time.
A. Develop problem-solving skills.
B. Be open to absorbing other points of view.
C. But if some ideas do turn true, they can be miraculous.
D. Decisions based on these judgments should be realistic.
E. You will get to know about different other forms. of ideas and possibilities.
F. If you successfully create an efficient design, that will stand as your innovation.
G. These skills are instrumental in enabling you to be more productive with your decision making.
After twenty-two years raising three children, I was introduced to a concept: the empty nest. Apparently, this was now my time to 1 into new experiences. Why, then was I not excited, but 2 ?
For a job opportunity, my husband and I moved to another state. One day, I discovered a trail only a short 3 from our apartment, I was thrilled and began to use it regularly. The trail meandered along a river lined with bushes and towering trees. Ducks 4 on the riverbanks; Canada geese flew overhead; small rabbits bounded across the pathway, 5 into the bushes. These small peaceful scenes provided me with a(n) 6 , but only slightly lifted me out of my loneliness.
Still, I continued to walk the path. I 7 something new: couples, young and old, holding hands, chatting as they walked; a father 8 his daughter to ride her two-wheeler; a woman doing Tai Chi. They all 9 the trail. I became fascinated with the lives of these strangers, yet still wondering if any of them feel 10 ?
One morning, an elderly woman holding the handles of her walker came into view. She sailed by me in the 11 direction like a marathon runner. I turned around to catch another glimpse of this one-woman wonder. She was 12 moving forward, not letting anything hold her back. That's when it 13 me. Nobody was.
As I walked toward my car, remembering the elderly woman's energy and 14 , I made a decision. I would fill my empty nest with 15 . I was ready for the bright future that stretched before me.
