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Hello, my name is Richard and I am an ego surfer. The habit began about five years ago, and now I need help. Like most journalists, I can’t deny that one of my private joys is seeing my byline in print. Now the Intemet is allowing me to feed this vanity to an ever greater extent, and the occasional sneaky web search has grown into a full-blown obsession with how high up Google’s ranking my articles appear when I put my name into the search box. When I last looked, my best effort was a rather humiliating 47th place. You know you have a problem when you find yourself competing for ranking with a retired basketball player from the 1970s.Not that I’m alone in suffering from a disfunctional techno-habit. New technologies have revealed a whole raft of hitherto unsuspected personality problems: think crackberry, powerpointlessness or cheesepodding. Most of us are familiar with sending an email to a colleague sitting a couple of feet away instead of talking to them. Some go onto the web to snoop on old friends, colleagues or even first dates. More of us than ever reveal highly personal information on blogs or My Space entries. A few will even use Intemet anonymity to fool others into believing they are someone else altogether. So are these web syndromes and technological tics new versions of old afflictions, or are we developing fresh mind bugsDeveloping a bad habit is easier than many might think. "You can become addicted to potentially anything you do," says Mark Griffiths, an addiction researcher at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, "because addictions rely on constant rewards." Indeed, although definitions of addiction vary, there is a body of evidence that suggests drug addictions and non-drug habits share the same neural pathways. While only a hardcore few can be considered true technology addicts, an entirely unscientific survey of the web, and of New Scientist staff, has revealed how prevalent techno-addictions may have become.The web in particular has opened up a host of opportunities for overindulgence. Take Wikipedia. Updating the entries--something anyone can do--has become almost a way of life for some. There are more than 2,400 "Wikipedians", who have edited more than 4,000 pages each. "It’s clearly like crack for some people," says Dan Closely at Cornell University in New York, who has studied how websites such as Wikipedia foster a community. To committed Wikipedians, he says, the site is more than a useful information resource; it’s the embodiment of an ideology of free information for all.Then there are photolog sites like Flickr. While most of us would rather die than be caught surreptitiously browsing through someone else’s photos, there need be no such qualms about the private PICS people put up on these sites. Most people using Flickr and similar sites spent time each day browsing albums owned by people they had never met. They do this for emotional kicks. Khalid and Dix suggest: flicking through someone else’s wedding photos, for example, allows people to daydream about their own nuptials.Email is another area where things can get out of hand. While email has led to a revival of the habit of penning short notes to friends and acquaintances, the ease with which we can do this means that we don’t always think hard enough about where our casual comments could end up. This was the undoing of US broadcaster Keith Olbermann,who earlier this year sent a private email in which he described a fellow MSNBC reporter as "dumber than a suitcase of rocks". Unfortunately for Olbermann, the words found their way into the New York Daily News.Pam Briggs, a specialist in human-computer interaction at the University of Northumbria, UK, says the lack of cues such as facial expressions or body language when communicating electronically can lead us to overcompensate in what we say. "The medium is so thin, there’s little room for projecting ourselves into it," says Briggs. "When all the social cues disappear, we feel we have to put something else into the void, which is often an overemotional or over-intimate message."The habit of forwarding jokey emails or YouTube videos- think Diet Coke and Mentos fountains- can also say a lot about how people want to be perceived, Briggs adds. "We rarely want to be seen as too serious, so we try to project more of our personality into email." This could also explain why many bloggers expose private information that they would never shout out to a crowded room. Browsing Flicks and similar sites shows that().

A. people do not care to be care to be caught while browsing through other’s PICS
B. people worry about uploading those personal albums
C. people can make better arrangement of their own wedding
D. people flick through other’s photo to stimulate their own emotion

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It is interesting to reflect for a moment upon the differences in the areas of moral feeling and standards in the peoples of Japan and the United States. The Americans divide these areas somewhat rigidly into spirit and flesh, the two being in opposition in the life of a human being. Ideally, spirit should prevail but all too often it is the flesh that does prevail. The Japanese make no such division, at least between one as good and the other as evil. They believe that a person has two souls, each necessary. One is the "gentle" soul, the other is the "rough" soul. Sometimes the person uses his gentle soul, sometimes he must use his rough soul.He does not favor his gentle soul, neither does he fight his rough soul. Human nature in itself is good, Japanese philosophers insist, and a human being does not need to fight any part of himself. He has only to learn how to use each soul properly at the appropriate times. Virtue for the Japanese consists in fulfilling one’s obligations to others. Happy endings, either in life or in fiction, are neither necessary nor expected, since the fulfillment of duty provides the satisfying end, whatever the tragedy it inflicts. And duty includes a person’s obligations to those who have conferred benefits upon him and to himself as an individual of honor.He develops through this double sense of duty a self-discipline which is at once permissive and rigid, depending upon the area in which it is functioning.The process of acquiring this self-discipline begins in childhood. Indeed, one may say it begins at birth--how early the Japanese child is given his own identity! If I were to define in a word the attitude of the Japanese toward their children I would put it in one succinct word. Love Yes, abundance of love, warmly expressed from the moment he is put to his mother’s breast. For a mother this nursing of her child is important psychologically.Rewards are frequent, a bit of candy bestowed at the right moment, an inexpensive toy. As time comes to enter school, however, discipline becomes firmer. To bring shame to the family is the greatest shame for the child.What is the secret of the Japanese teaching of self-discipline It lies, I think, in the fact that the aim of all teaching is the establishment of habit. Rules are repeated over and over, and continually practiced until obedience becomes instinctive. This repetition is enhanced by the expectation of the elders.They expect a child to obey and to learn through obedience. The demand is gentle at first and tempered to the child’s tender age. It is no gentle as time goes on, but certainly it is increasingly inexorable.Now, far away from that warm Japanese home, I reflect upon what I learned there. What, I wonder, will take the place of the web of love and discipline which for so many centuries has surrounded the life and thinking of the people of Japan To the Japanese, the aim of existence is().

A. the pursuit of happiness
B. reward in the afterlife
C. a happy ending to one’s activities
D. fulfilling one’s duty

You invest in the equity market to provide yourself with stream of future dividends which will hopefully () inflation.

A. outpace
B. outface
C. outgrow
D. outlaw

Free will allows us to indulge our()passions; freedom leads us in the higher path to unlock life’s mystic secrets.

A. discharging
B. fleeting
C. colluding
D. displacing

But like many, Turner is growing a little fired as Florida’s busy hurricane season continues to () nerves and extend hardships.

A. sprain
B. fray
C. distort
D. scuffle

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