(1) Do you realize that every time you take a step, the bones in your hip are subjected to forces between four and five times your body weight? When you are running, this force is increased further still. What happens if through disease a hip-joint ceases to be able to resist such forces? For many years hip-joints and other body joints have been replaceable either partially or completely. It is after all a simple ball and socket joint; it has certain loads imposed on it; it needs reliability over a defined life; it must contain materials suitable for the working environment. Any engineer will recognize these as characteristic of a typical engineering problem, which doctors and engineers have worked together to solve, in order to bring a fresh lease of life to people who would otherwise be disabled.

(2) This typifies the way in which engineers work to help people and create a better quality of life. The fact that this country has the most efficient agricultural industry in the world is another good example. Mechanical engineers have worked with fanners and biologists to produce fertilizers, machinery and harvesting systems.This team efforthas now produced crops uniformly waist high or less so that they are better suited to mechanical harvesting. Similar advances with other crops have released people from hard and boring jobs for more creative work, whilst machines harvest crops more efficiently with less waste. Providing more food for the rapidly increasing population is yet another role for the mechanical engineer.

(1) When the sun is up in Amsterdam, the largest city in the Netherlands sits quietly on the Amstel River. You can rent a bicycle, visit the Van Gogh or Anne Frank museum, or take a water taxi.

(2) But when the sun goes down, the partying begins. In the big clubs and in coffee shops, tourists gather to hang out, talk politics and smoke.

(3) Several areas of the city clearly show the two worlds that rule Amsterdam. And they’re all within a short cab ride of each other.

(4) For example, Dam Square attracts daytime sightseers to its festivals, open markets, concerts and other events. Several beautiful and very popular hotels can be found there. And there is the Royal Palace and the Magna Plaza shopping mall.

(5) But as evening descends on Dam Square so do the party-seekers. Hip pop or funk music begins blaring from Club Paradiso and Club Melkweg. These are two of the most popular clubs in Europe. So if you come, be ready to dance. The clubs don’t shut down until 4 a.m.

(6) And while you are there, check out the various inexpensive ways to tour the city. Don’t worry about getting lost. Although Dutch is the official language, most people in Amsterdam speak English and are happy to help you with directions.

(7) And you’ll notice that half the people in the streets are on bicycles. They rent for US $17 to $20 for a whole day.

(8) Amsterdam also has a good canal system. From anywhere between US $2 and $9.50, you can use the canal bus or a water taxi to cruise the “Venice of the North”.

(9) You can take in the picturesque canal house architecture: The rows of neat, narrow four-story dwellings of brownstone with large windows are well worth seeing. Many of them are several centuries old.

(10) You might also want to jump out of the canal bus at the Museum Quarter and start walking. Masterpieces by Dutch artists such as Rembrandt, Bruegel, Van Gogh and others are on display at the Van Gogh Museum, Rembrandt House and others.

(11) The city has an appreciation of its historic past. One place to visit is the Anne Frank House in Nine Streets. It was there that the young Jewish girl wrote her famous diary during World War II. Visitors can view Anne’s original diary and climb behind the bookcase to the room where she and her family hid from the Nazis for two years.

(1) Psychologists agree that I.Q. contributes only about 20 percent of the factors that determine success. A full 80 percent comes from other factors, including what I call emotional intelligence. Following are two of the major qualities that make up emotional intelligence, and how they can be developed:

(2) 1. Self-awareness. The ability to recognize a feeling as it happens is the keystone of emotional intelligence. People with greater certainty about their emotions are better pilots of their lives.

(3) Developing self-awareness requires tuning in to what neurologist Antonio Damasio calls “gut feelings”. Gut feelings can occur without a person being consciously aware of them. For example, when people who fear snakes are shown a picture of a snake, sensors on their skin will detect sweat, a sign of anxiety, even though the people say they do not feel fear. The sweat shows up even when a picture is presented so rapidly that the subject has no conscious awareness of seeing it.

(4) Through deliberate effort we can become more aware of our gut feelings. Take someone who is annoyed by a rude encounter for hours after it occurred. He may be unaware of his irritability and surprised when someone calls attention to it. But if he evaluates his feelings, he can change them.

(5) Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental of emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.

(6) 2. Mood Management. Bad as well as good moodsspicelife and build character. The key is balance. We often have little control over when we are swept by emotion. But we can have some say in how long that emotion will last. Psychologist Dianne Tice asked more than 400 men and women about their strategies for escaping foul moods. Her research, along with that of other psychologists, provides valuable information on how to change a bad mood.

(7) Of all the moods that people want to escape, rage seems to be the hardest to deal with. When someone in another car cuts you off on the highway, your reflexive thought may be, That jerk! He could have hit me! I can’t let him get away with that! The more you stew, the angrier you get. Such is the stuff of hypertension and reckless driving.

(8) What should you do to relieve rage? One myth is that ventilating will make you feel better. In fact, researchers have found that’s one of the worst strategies. A more effective technique is “refraining”, which means consciously reinterpreting a situation in a more positive light. In the case of the driver who cuts you off, you might tell yourself: Maybe he had some emergency. This is one of the most potent ways, Tice found, to put anger to rest.

(9) Going off alone to cool down is also an effective way to refuse anger, especially if you can’t think clearly. Tice found that a large proportion of men cool down by going for a drive—a finding that inspired her to drive more defensively. A safer alternative is exercise, such as taking a long walk. Whatever you do, don’t waste the time pursuing your train of angry thoughts. Your aim should be to distract yourself.

(10) The techniques of reframing and distraction can alleviate depression and anxiety as well as anger. Add to them such relaxation techniques as deep breathing and meditation and you have an arsenal of weapons against bad moods.

(1) As I write this, I have half an eye on an old James Bond film that is showing on my computer. But this is a story about how I stopped watching TV and began reading again for pleasure, after ten years in which I hardly turned a page.

(2) I suppose I was an avid reader of “literature” between the ages of nine and fourteen. I had enough time to be White Fang, Robinson Crusoe, and Bilbo Baggins and Jeeves. Of course there was room in the schoolboy’s imagination for some real historical figures: Scott of the Antarctic, all of the Vikings, and Benjamin Franklin were good friends of mine.

(3) Then, in adolescence, I began a long search for strange and radical ideas. I wanted to challenge my elders and betters, and stir up my peers with amazing points of view. Of course, the only place to look was in books. I hunted out the longest titles and the authors with the funniest names, and scoured the library for completely unread books. Then I found one which became my bible for the whole of 1982. It had a title composed of eleven long words and an author whose name I didn’t know how to pronounce. It was really thick and looked dead serious. Even better, it put forward a whole world-view that would take days to explain. Perfect. I took it out of the library three times, proud to see the date-stamps lined up on the empty library insert.

(4) Later, I went to university. Expecting to spend long evenings in learned discussion with clever people, I started reading philosophy. For some reason I never found the deep-thinking intellectuals I hoped to meet, Anyway, I was ready to impress with my profound knowledge of post-structuralism and existentialism. These things are usually explained in rather short books, but they take a long time to get through. They were the end of my youthful reading.

(5) Working life was hard to get used to after so much theory. It was the end of books for me. There didn’t seem to be much in books that would actually get things done. To do things you had to answer the telephone and work a computer. You had to travel about and speak to people who weren’t at all interested in philosophy. I didn’t stop reading; you can’t avoid that. I read all day. But no books came my way, only manuals and pamphlets and contracts and documents. Maybe most people satisfy their need for stories and ideas with TV and, to tell the truth, it was all I needed for ten years. In those days I only had a book “on the go” for the duration of plane flights. At first I would come home and watch TV over dinner. Then, I moved the TV so I could watch it from bed. I even rigged up a switch so I could turn it off without getting out of bed. Then, one fateful day, my TV broke and my landlady took it away.

(6) My new TV is an extra circuit board inside my computer. It’s on a desk in front of a working chair and I can’t see it from the bed. I still use it for the weather forecasts and it’s nice to have it on while I’m typing this…but what to do last thing at night? Well, have another go with books.

(7) Now, I just like books. I have a pile of nice ones by my bed and I’m reading about six simultaneously I don’t want to BE any of the characters. I don’t care if a thousand people have already read them. I don’t have to search through libraries. There are books everywhere and all of them have something to read in them. I have the strange feeling that they’ve been there all along, waiting for me to pick them up.

(1) I’ve written this article and you’re reading it. So we are members of the same club. We’re both literate—we can read and write. And we both probably feel that literacy is essential to our lives. But millions of people all over the world are illiterate. Even in industrialised Western countries, such as the UK and the USA, approximately 20% of the population have “low literacy levels”. But what exactly does that mean?

(2) My parents both left school at 14. They could read and write, but except for a quick look at the daily newspaper, reading and writing didn’t play a big part in their lives. There were very few books in the house. My mother was amazed because the woman who lived next door always wrote a list of what she needed before she went to the supermarket. Why couldn’t she remember? We laughed about that for weeks. Our family didn’t write lists! And when I was only 14 years old my father gave me an important letter that he’d written to the bank and asked me to check it for grammar and spelling mistakes. And there were quite a lot. He never usually wrote letters or postcards or even Christmas cards. So when he had to write he wasn’t comfortable or confident. Does that mean that my father had a “low level of literacy”? I don’t think so.

(3) There are lots of different definitions of literacy. Some experts define it as having the reading and writing skills that you need to be independent in your everyday life. So, for example, if you can read instructions, write a cheque, fill in a form,—anything that you need to do in everyday life—then you are “functionally literate”.

(4) Other people say that you are illiterate if you think that you are illiterate. In other words, if you feel that you can’t read or write as well as you would like to.

(5) If you live in a society where most people are literate, then you will feel ashamed or embarrassed and avoid situations in which you have to read or write. The father of a friend of mine finally admitted to his family that he couldn’t read when he was 45 years old. He bought the newspaper every day and pretended to read it—and believe it or not, his family had no idea.

(6) We often forget that writing is a recent invention. Many years ago, the word “literate” meant being able to communicate well in speaking, in other words what we now call “articulate”. Story telling was an important activity in the past and still is today in some societies. Reading was often a co-operative activity—someone would read aloud to a group, often from a religious text such as the Koran or the Bible.

(7) Only a hundred years ago, in the United States, you were considered to be literate if you could sign your name to a piece of paper. It was an important skill. You were not allowed to vote if you couldn’t sign the voting register, so literacy was connected with political rights, and many people were excluded from the democratic process.

(8) Nowadays we see reading and writing as being connected, but that wasn’t so in the past. Many people could read, but not write. Writing was a skilled profession. If you needed something written then you paid in expert to write it for you.

(9) And of course, rich and important people have always employed people to write things for them. Important company bosses dictated letters to their secretaries or personal assistants. And now with new computer software you can dictate directly to your computer.

(10) Being illiterate can have a big effect on people’s lives. For example, a study in the UK showed that people who write and spell badly are seen as careless, immature and unreliable, and often unintelligent. So it is more difficult for them to find jobs, even when reading and writing are not necessary for the work.

(11) World-wide statistics show that literacy problems are associated with poverty and a lack of political power. More women than men are illiterate. Illiterate people have worse health, bigger families and are more likely to go to prison. So literacy campaigns must be a good thing. But don’t forget that an illiterate person, or someone with a low level of literacy, isn’t necessarily stupid or ignorant, and may not be unhappy at all. Knowledge and wisdom isn’t only found in writing.

(1) Life can be tough for immigrants in America. As a Romanian bank clerk in Atlanta puts it, to find a good job “you have to be like a wolf in the forest—able to smell out the best meat.” And if you can’t find work, don’t expect the taxpayer to bail you out. Unlike in some European countries, it is extremely hard for an able-bodied immigrant to live off the state. A law passed in 1996 explicitly bars most immigrants, even those with legal status, from receiving almost any federal benefits.

(2) That is one reason why America absorbs immigrants better than many other rich countries, according to a new study by the University of California. The researchers sought to measure the effect of immigration on the native-born in 20 rich countries, taking into account differences in skills between immigrants and natives, imperfect labor markets and the size of the welfare state in each country.

(3) Their results offer ammunition for fans of more open borders. In 19 out of 20 countries, the authors calculated that shutting the doors entirely to foreign workers would make the native-born worse off. Never mind what it would do to the immigrants themselves, who benefit far more than anyone else from being allowed to cross borders to find work.

(4) The study also suggests that most countries could handle more immigration than they currently allow. In America, a one-percentage point increase in the proportion of immigrants in the population made the native-born 0.05% better off. [⁴¹⁄₄₃] The opposite was true in some countries with generous or ill-designed welfare states, however. A one-point rise in immigration made the native-born slightly worse off in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. In Belgium, immigrants who lose jobs can receive almost two-thirds of their most recent wage in state benefits, which must make the hunt for a new job less urgent.

(5) None of these effects was large, but the study undermines the claim that immigrants steal jobs from natives or drag down their wages. Many immigrants take jobs that Americans do not want, the study finds. This “smooths” the labor market and ultimately creates more jobs for locals. Native-owned grocery stores do better business because there are immigrants to pick the fruit they sell. Indian computer scientists help American software firms expand. A previous study found that because immigrants typically earn less than locals with similar skills, they boost corporate profits, prompting companies to grow and hire more locals.

(1) One of our most firmly entrenched ideas of masculinity is that a real man doesn’t cry. Although he might shed a discreet tear at a funeral, he is expected to quickly regain control. Sobbing openly is for girls.

(2) This isn’t just a social expectation. One study found that women report crying significantly more than men do—five times as often, on average, and almost twice as long per episode.

(3) So it’s perhaps surprising to learn that the gender gap in crying seems to be a recent development. Historically, men routinely wept, and no one saw it as feminine or shameful.

(4) For example, in chronicles of the Middle Ages, we find one ambassador repeatedly bursting into tears when addressing Philip the Good, and the entire audience at a peace congress throwing themselves on the ground, sobbing and groaning as they listen to the speeches. In medieval romances, knights cried purely because they missed their girlfriends. In Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, or, The Knight of the Cart, no less a hero than Lancelot weeps at a brief separation from Guinevere. At another point, he cries on a lady’s shoulder at the thought that he won’t get to go to a big tournament because of his captivity. What’s more, instead of being disgusted by this sniveling (哭泣), the lady is moved to help.

(5) There’s no mention of the men in these stories trying to restrain or hide their tears. No one pretends to have something in his eye. No one makes an excuse to leave the room. They cry in a crowded hall with their heads held high. Nor do their companions make fun of this public blubbering (大声哭); it’s universally regarded as an admirable expression of feeling.

(6) So where did all the male tears go? There was no anti-crying movement. No leaders of church or state introduced measures to discourage them. Nevertheless, by the Romantic period, masculine tears were reserved for poets. From there, it was just a short leap to the poker-faced heroes of Ernest Hemingway, who, despite their poetic leanings, could not express grief by any means but drinking and shooting the occasional buffalo.

(7) The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes that took place as we moved from a feudal agrarian society to one that was urban and industrial. In the Middle Ages, most people spent their lives among those they had known since birth. A typical village had around 250 to 300 inhabitants, most of them related by blood or marriage. If men cried, they did so with people who would empathize.

(8) But from the 18th to 20th centuries, the population became increasingly urbanized, and people were living in the midst of thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression and even private conversation were discouraged as time wasting. As Tom Lutz writes in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, “You don’t want emotions interfering with the smooth running of things.”

(9) Yet human beings weren’t designed to swallow their emotions, and there’s reason to believe that suppressing tears can be hazardous to your well-being. Research from the 1980s has suggested a relationship between stress-related illnesses and inadequate crying. Weeping is also, somewhat counterintuitively, correlated with happiness and wealth. Countries where people cry the most tend to be more democratic and their populations more extroverted.

(10) It’s time to open the floodgates. Time for men to give up emulating the stone-faced heroes of action movies and be more like the emotive heroes of Homer, like the weeping kings, saints, and statesmen of thousands of years of human history. When misfortune strikes, let us all—men and women—join together and cry until our sleeves are drenched. As the Old Testament has it: “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.”