Most people acknowledge that being ethical means being fair and reasonable and not being ________. 

Can you imagine anyone choosing to live without money in our consumer society? Well, that's exactly what Franz Schmidt has been doing since he quit his job as a psychotherapist and gave away all his possessions. This 75-year-old father of three and grandfather of four has chosen to live a simple life without the pressure to buy and own. Schmidt has thought about possession and value since he was a young boy. Schmidt and his family had to leave all their possessions during World War Ⅱ to flee from the Russian forces in Memel. They could not take anything with them, and this made a great impression on him. Schmidt knew what it was like to be penniless and he learned from experience that possessions are not what give a person value. Schmidt moved to Heidelberg, a major city in Germany, with his wife and three children in the nineties, and was so shocked by the homelessness of the poor in the neighborhood that he decided to open a swap shop called Share. Members of this group swap things and skills without money. What amazed Schmidt was not only how people's needs could be met, but also how much the participants benefited from the social aspect of their contact. This experience deeply moved not only Schmidt, but other people as well. 

A new study reports that the cleaner air has been accompanied by a significant decrease in childhood lung problems. The study used data on ozone, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter for each year. Parents also provided regular updates about symptoms like coughing and phlegm production in their children. Among children with asthma, air-pollution reduction was consistently associated with reductions in respiratory symptoms. For example, in children with asthma, reductions in fine particulate matter were associated with a 32-percent reduction in symptoms, while lower levels of ozone were linked to a 21-percent reduction. The associations were weaker, but still significant, in children without asthma. “Clearly, the reduction in air pollution levels have translated into improvements in respiratory health,” said Kiros Berhane, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. “Especially for parents of children with asthma, this is very good news, but we see significant improvement in children without asthma as well.” 

On November 2, 1988, thousands of computers connected to the Internet began to slow down. Many eventually ground to a temporary halt. No data were destroyed, but a lot of computing time was lost as computer system administrators fought to regain control of their machines.


[A] There it hid itself and passed around misleading information that made it harder to detect and counteract. Within a few days The New York Times identified the hacker as Robert Morris, Jr., a twenty-three-year old graduate student at Cornell University.

[B] The cause turned out to be a mischievous computer program called a “worm” that was spreading from one computer to another on the network, replicating as it went. The worm used an unnoticed “back door” in the system's software to directly access the memory of the computers it was attacking.

[C] He later testified that he had designed and then unleashed the worm to see how many computers it would reach but that a mistake in his programming had caused the worm to replicate far faster than he had expected. 

Eating seasonally and locally is a great way to maintain a healthy diet, observes a veteran food consultant and Korea's first accredited vegetable sommelier. “To me, superfoods are local foods grown in season. They taste better, are cheaper and rich in nutrition,” E. K. Kim, president of the Korea Vegetable Sommelier Association, said. ㉠If consumers buy produce which is not in season, it is likely to have been grown in artificial conditions, or picked prematurely and transported long distances. ㉡ All these factors not only affect the taste, but also the nutritional content. “Imagine how an apple tree grows. It starts to bud first, bears fruits and then its root remains in the end. It is a good example of seasonal food. Spring is the time for leafy vegetables, summer for fruit vegetables and winter for root crops,” the food expert said. ㉢ She emphasized the health benefits of local foods in comparison with exotic superfoods introduced by foreign food experts. “For example, Korean spring greens help to cure spring fever as they are rich in vitamin B-1 and C,” she said. ㉣ Since sommeliers help consumers understand the intricacies of selection, preparation and nutritional value of vegetables, the government needs to promote their role to the public. “People tend to think that superfoods should be exotic and imported from overseas. In fact, there are various kinds of local foods which are packed with an equivalent or even higher level of nutrients,” she added. 

If you're faced with a complicated problem, it is very tempting to chop it up into a lot of simple problems, and then knock them off one by one. It is sometimes claimed that if you have solved all the simple problems you've solved the whole thing. That's reductionism in a nutshell. And as a methodology it works extremely well. In my discipline, which is physics, it's had some amazing successes. Look at the world about us, just see how complicated it is, the richness and diversity of nature. How are we ever to come to understand it? Well, a good way to start is by breaking it up into small bite-sized pieces. One example is atomism. The belief that the entire universe is made up of atoms, or some sort of fundamental particles, and that everything that happens in nature is just the rearrangement of these particles, has proved extraordinarily fruitful. Once you focus down to the level of individual atoms you can work out all the laws and principles that govern them. You can figure out in detail what they are doing. It's then tempting to believe that if you understand individual atoms and the way they interact, you understand everything.