Each summer, no matter how pressing my work schedule, I take off one day exclusively for my son. We call it dad-son day. This year our third stop was the amusement park, where be discovered that he was tall enough to ride one of the fastest roller coasters (过山车) in the world. We blasted through face-stretching turns and loops for ninety seconds. Then, as we stepped off the ride, be shrugged and, in a distressingly calm voice, remarked that it was not as exciting as other rides he’d been on. As I listened, I began to sense something seriously out of balance.
    Throughout the season, I noticed similar events all around me. Parents seemed hard pressed to find new thrills for indifferent kids. Surrounded by ever-greater stimulation, their young faces were looking disappointed and bored.
    Facing their children’s complaints of “nothing to do“, parents were shelling out large numbers of dollars for various forms of entertainment. In many cases the money seemed to do little more than buy transient relief from the terrible moans of their bored children. This set me pondering the obvious question:“ How can it be so hard for kids to find something to do when there’s never been such a range of stimulating entertainment available to them?”
    What really worries me is the intensity of the stimulation. I watch my little daughter’s face as she absorbs the powerful onslaught (冲击) of arousing visuals and bloody special effects in movies.
    Why do children immersed in this much excitement seem starved for more? That was, I realized, the point. I discovered during my own reckless adolescence that what creates excitement is not going fast, but going faster. Thrills have less to do with speed than changes in speed.
    I’m concerned about the cumulative effect of years at these levels of feverish activity. It is no mystery to me why many teenagers appear apathetic (麻木的) and burned out, with a “been there, done that” air of indifference toward much of life. As increasing numbers of friends’ children are prescribed medications-stimulants to deal with inattentiveness at school or anti-depressants to help with the loss of interest and joy in their lives-I question the role of kids’ boredom in some of the diagnoses.
My own work is focused on the chemical imbalances and biological factors related to behavioral and emotional disorders. These are complex problems. Yet I’ve been reflecting more and more on how the pace of life and the intensity of stimulation may be contributing to the rising rates of psychiatric problems among children and adolescents in our society.

    It used to be that people were proud to work for the same company for the whole of their working lives. They’d get a gold watch at the end of their productive years and a dinner featuring speeches by their bosses praising their loyalty. But today’s rich capitalists have regressed (倒退) to the “survival of the fittest” ideas and their loyalty extends not to their workers or even to their stockholders but only to themselves. Instead of giving out gold watches worth a hundred or so dollars for forty or so years of word, they grab tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars as they sell for their own profit the company they may have been with for only a few years.
    The new rich selfishly act on their own to unfairly grab the wealth that the country as a whole has produced. The top 1 percent of the population now has wealth equal to the whole bottom 95 percent and they want more. Their selfishness is most shamelessly expressed in downsizing and outsourcing (将产品包给分公司做) because these business maneuvers don’t act to created new jobs as the founder of new industries used to do, but only out jobs while keeping the money value of what those jobs produced for themselves.
    To keep the money machine working smoothly the rich have bought all the politicians from the top down. The president himself is constantly leaving Washington and the business at the nation because he is summoned to “fundraising dinners” where fat cats pay a thousand or so dollars a plate to worm their way into government not through service but through donations of vast amounts of money. Once on the inside they have both political parties busily tearing up all the regulations that protect the rest of us from the greed of the rich.
    The middle class used to be loyal to the free enterprise system. In the past, the people of the middle class mostly thought they’d be rich themselves someday or have a good shot at becoming rich. But nowadays income is being distributed more and more unevenly and corporate loyalty is a thing of the past. The middle class may also wake up to forget its loyalty to the so-called free enterprise system altogether and the government which governs only the rest of us while letting the corporations do what they please with our jobs. As things stand, if somebody doesn’t wake up, the middle class is on a path to being downsized all the way to the bottom of society.

    Intel chairman Andy Grove has decided to cut the Gordian knot of controversy surrounding stem cell research by simply writing a check.
    The check, which he pledged last week, could be for as much as 55 million, depending on how many donors make gifts of between 550,000 and 5,500,000, which he has promised to match. It will be made out to the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF).
    Thanks in part to such private donations, university research into uses for human stem cells—the cells at the earliest stages of development that can form any body part—will continue in California. With private financial support, the state will be less likely to lose talented scientists who would be tempted to leave the field or even leave the country as research dependent on federal money slows to glacial (极其缓慢的) pace.
    Hindered by limits President Bush placed on stem cell research a year age, scientists are turning to laboratories that can carry out work without using federal money. This is awkward for universities, which must spend extra money building separate labs and keeping rigor cots records proving no federal funds were involved. Grove’s donation, a first step toward a $20 million target at UCSF, will ease the burden.
    The president’s decision a year ago to allow research on already existing stem cell lines was portrayed as a reasonable compromise between scientists’ needs for cells to work with, and concerns that this kind of research could lead to wholesale creation and destruction of human embryos (胚胎), cloned infants and a general contempt for human life.
    But Bush’s effort to please both sides ended up pleasing neither. And it certainly didn’t provide the basis for cutting edge research. Of the 78 existing stem cell lines which Bush said are all that science would ever need, only one is in this country (at the University of Wisconsin) and only five are ready for distribution to researchers. All were grown in conjunction with mouse cells, making future therapeutic (治疗的) uses unlikely.
    The Bush administration seems bent on satisfying the small but vocal group of Americans who oppose stem cell research under any conditions. Fortunately, Grove and others are more interested in advancing scientific research that could benefit the large number of Americans who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, nerve injuries, heart diseases and many other problems.

    This looks like the year that hard-pressed tenants in California will relief-not just in the marketplace, where tents have eased, but from the state capital Sacramento.
    Two significant tenant reforms stand a good chance of passage. One bill, which will give more time to tenants being evicted (逐出), will soon be heading to the governor’s desk. The other, protecting security deposits, faces a vote in the Senate on Monday.
    For more than a century, landlords in California have been able to force tenants out with only 30 days’ notice. That will now double under SB 1403, which got through the Assembly recently. The new protection will apply only to renters who have been in an apartment for at least a year.
    Even 60 days in a tight housing market won’t be long enough for some families to find an apartment near where their kids go to school. But is will be an improvement in cities like San Jose, where renters rights groups charge that unscrupulous (不择手段的) landlords have kicked out tenants on short notice to put up tents.
    The California Landlords Association argued that landlords shouldn’t have to wait 60 days to get rid of problem tenants. But the bill gained support when a Japanese real estate investor sent out 30-day eviction notices to 550 families renting homes in Sacramento and Santa Rosa. The landlords lobby eventually dropped its opposition and instead turned its forces against AB 2330, regarding security deposits.
    Sponsored by Assemblywoman Carole Migden of San Francisco, the bill would establish a procedure and a timetable for tenants to get back security deposits.
    Some landlords view security deposits as a free month’s rent, theirs for the taking. In most cases, though, there are honest disputes over damages-what constitutes ordinary wear and tear
    AB 2330 would give a tenant the right to request a walk-through with the landlord and to make the repairs before moving out; reputable landlords already do this. It would increase the penalty for failing to return a deposit.
    The original bill would have required the landlord to pay interest on the deposit. The landlords lobby protested that it would involve too much paperwork over too little money-less than $10 a year on a $1,000 deposit, at current rates. On Wednesday, the sponsor dropped the interest section to increase the chance of passage.
    Even in its amended form, AB 2330 is, like SB 1403, vitally important for tenants and should be made state law.

    The most important starting point for improving the understanding of silence is undoubtedly an adequate scientific education at school. Public attitudes towards science owe much the way science is taught in these (S1)institutions. Today, school is what most people come into (S2) contact with a formal instruction and explanation of science for the first time, at least in a systematic way. It is at this point which the foundations are laid for an interest in science. (S3) What is taught (and how) in this first encounter will largely determine an individual’s view of the subject in adult life.
    Understanding the original of the negative attitudes (S4) towards science may help us to modify them. Most education system neglect exploration, understanding and reflection. (S5) Teachers in schools tend to present science as a collection of facts, often by more detail than necessary. As a result, (S6) children memorize processes such as mathematical formulas or the periodic table, only to forget it shortly afterwards. The (S7) task of learning facts and concepts, one at a time, makes learning laborious, boring and efficient. Such a purely (S8) empirical approach, which consists of observation and description, is also, in a sense, unscientific or incomplete. There is therefore a need for resources and methods of teaching that facilitates a deep understanding of science in (S9) an enjoyable way. Science should not only be “fun” in the same way as playing a video game, but ‘hard fun’—deep feeling of connection made possibly only imaginative (S10) engagement.

The Celebration of Western Festivals.