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Happy hours are not necessarily happy, nor do they last for an hour, but they have become a part of the ritual of the office worker and businessman.
On weekdays in pubs and bars throughout America, there is the late afternoon happy hour. The time may vary from place to place, but usually it is held from four to seven. After the workday is finished, office workers in large cities and small towns take a relaxing pause and do not go directly home. They head off instead for the nearest bar or pub to be with friends, coworkers and colleagues. Within minutes the pub is filled to capacity with businessmen and secretaries, office clerks and stock executives. They gather around the bar like birds around a fountain or forest animals around a watering hole and chat about the trifles of office life or matters more personal. This is their desert garden, the place to relieve the day’s stress at the office.
At these happy hours, social binding occurs between people who share the same workplace or similar professions. They may chat about each other or talk about a planned project that has yet to meet a deadline. In this sense, these places become extensions of the workplace and constitute a good portion of one’s social life.
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Lazy? Shy? Live in a cave? Those might not be positive attributes for the average human, but they sure are good for animals trying to survive in a changing environment. According to a new study, beasts that hibernate(冬眠)or crawl into holes are less likely to be listed as endangered than those that don’t.
Following up a previous study on extinct animals, which showed that species exhibiting “sleep or hide“(SLOH)behaviors did better than others, the researchers wanted to see if the same was true of modern creatures like moles and bears. To find out if our more timid animals have a leg up in the survival game, researchers made a master list of 443 sleep-or-hide mammals.
With their list in hand, the team compared their 443 to the “red list“ of endangered species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. As suspected, a sleepy or hiding animal was less likely to be on the red list than a regular animal, and a red-list animal was also less likely to be a SLOH-er.
This makes a lot of sense, as animals that hide away in a cave or a tree hole are protected by their physical shelters from a variable environment outside, while hibernators enjoy a flexible metabolism(新陈代谢)that can help them adapt to a changing climate.
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In computing, passwords are commonly used to limit access to official users. Yet the widespread use of passwords has serious drawbacks. Office workers now have to remember an average of twelve system passwords. In theory they should use different passwords for each site, but in reality these would be impossible to remember, so many people use the same password for all.
An additional problem is that the majority use simple words such as “hello, “ or names of family members, instead of more secure combinations of numbers and letters, such as 6ANV76Y. This permits computer hackers to download dictionaries and quickly find the word that allows them access.
When system users forget their passwords there is extra expense in supplying new ones, while if people are forced to change passwords frequently they often write them down, making systems even less secure. Therefore, it is clear that the idea of passwords, which have been used as security devices for thousands of years, may need rethinking.
One possible alternative has been developed by the American firm Real User, and is called “passfaces. “ In order to access the system a worker has to select a series of photographs of faces from a randomly(随机地)generated sequence. If the pictures are selected in the correct order, access is granted. This concept depends on the human ability to recognize and remember a huge number of different faces, and the advantage is that such a sequence cannot be told to anyone or written down, so is more secure. It is claimed that the picture sequence, which used photographs of university students, is easier to remember than passwords, and it has now been adopted for the United States Senate.
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