Notting Hill Carnival is held in London each August bank holiday, and is the largest and most colourful street event in Britain. The festival celebrates the traditions of the British black community, who emigrated to Great Britain from the West Indies in the 1950s. They brought with them the Caribbean idea of the carnival, with […]
Nearly all religions include the belief that human beings survive death in some form. For many people, such as the Balinese, a funeral symbolizes the passage from one life to another, rather than the end of a person’s existence. In Bali, a cremation is therefore a time of joy and celebration. On the morning of […]
Statistics show that rapid population growth creates problems for developing countries. So why don’t people have fewer children? Statistics from the developed countries suggest that it is only when people’s living standards begin to rise that birth rates begin to fall. There are good reasons for this. Poor countries cannot afford social services and old […]
Most headset stereos have one thing in common: they can cause hearing loss. Studies have shown that sound levels from the machines can reach 115 decibels or more – roughly equivalent to standing 100 feet from a commercial jet at the moment of take-off. At that level, permanent hearing damage can occur after just 15 […]
Psychologists believe that the combative and aggressive instinct is permanent in all human beings; but it is probable that, with a correct understanding of children, the instinct for aggression need not survive childhood. It’s certain that to repress the aggressiveness of a child will make him later more aggressive and anti-social; he will later on […]
In 1911 a penniless young music-hall artist left England for America. His future was uncertain, but he did not believe it could be unhappier than his past. He had grown up in the slums of London’s East End and had experienced great poverty. His mother’s life had been so hard that she had finally gone […]
The children who are cared for by the Chain of Hope come from countries which are stricken by poverty or torn by conflict. They are children who have been injured by a mine or an exploding shell, who have been born with deformities, who have caught diseases or who suffer from the after-effects of injuries. […]
In most societies differences in play between boys and girls are not merely expected, but actively encouraged. In our own culture, only very young boys may be allowed to play with their sisters’ dolls occasionally without ridicule or remonstrance. And even they are rarely given dolls of their own, although teddies and stuffed animals may […]
Perhaps more swimmers have been drowned by cramp than by anything else, and only those who have suffered from it can conceive its fatal power. Even good swimmers, when seized with cramp, have been known to sink instantly, overcome with the sudden pain, and nothing can save the victim but the greatest presence of mind. […]
The computer is basically a device for ingesting, judging, and otherwise processing or usefully modifying knowledge. Thus it enlarges brainpower in the same way that other man-made machines enlarge muscle power. Like man, the computer expresses knowledge in terms of symbols; man’s symbols are letters and numbers, and the machine’s symbols are electromagnetic impulses that […]