The person who set the course of my life was a school teacher named Marjorie Hurd. When I stepped off a ship in New York Harbor in 1949, I was a nine-year-old war refugee, who had lost my mother and was coming to live with the father I did not know. My mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, had been imprisoned and shot for sending my sisters and me to freedom.

I was thirteen years old when I entered Chandler Junior High. Shortly after I arrived, I was told to select a hobby to pursue during "club hours" . The    idea    of hobbies    and    clubs    was    perplexing    to    my immigrant    ears, but I decided to follow the prettiest girl in my class. She led me into the presence of Miss Hurd, the school newspaper adviser and English teacher.

A tough woman with salt-and-pepper hair and determined eyes, Miss Hurd had no patience with lazy bones. She drilled us in grammar, assigned stories for us to read and discuss, and eventually taught us how to put out a newspaper. Her introduction to the literary wealth of Greece gave me a new perspective on my war-torn homeland, making me proud of my origins. Her efforts inspired me to understand the logic and structure of the English language. Owing to her inspiration, during my next twenty-five years, I became a journalist by profession.

Miss Hurd retired at the age of 

62. By then, she had taught for a total of 41 years. Even after her retirement, she continually made a project of unwilling students in whom she spied (发现) a spark of potential. The students were mainly from the most troubled homes, yet she alternately bullied and charmed them with her own special brand of tough love, until the spark caught fire.

Miss Hurd was the one who directed my grief and pain into writing. But for Miss Hurd, I wouldn't have become a reporter. She was the one who sent me into journalism and indirectly caused all the good things that came after.

This year researchers expect the world to snap（按快门）1.35 trillion photographs, or about 3.7 billion per day. All those pixels（像素）take up a lot of room if they are stored on personal computers or phones, which is one reason why many people store their images in the cloud. But unlike a hard on drive which can be encrypted（加密）to protect its data, cloud storage users have to trust that a tech platform will keep their private pictures safe. Now a team of Columbia University computer scientists has developed a tool to encrypt images stored on many popular cloud services while allowing authorized users to browse and display their photographs as usual. 

Malicious（恶意的）attempts to access or leak cloud-based photographs can expose personal information. In November 2019, for example, a bug in the popular photograph storage app Google Photos mistakenly shared some users' private videos with strangers. Security experts also worry about employees at cloud storage companies on purpose accessing users' images. 

So the Columbia researchers came up with a system called Easy Secure Photos（ESP）, which they presented at a recent conference. "We wanted to see if we could make it possible to encrypt data while using existing services," says computer scientist Jason Nieh, one of the developers of ESP. "Everyone wants to stay with Google Photos and not have to register on a new encrypted-image cloud storage service." 

To overcome this problem, they created a tool that preserves blocks of pixels but moves them around to effectively hide the photograph. First, ESP's algorithm（算法）divides a photograph into three separate files, each one containing the image's red, green or blue color data. Then the system hides the pixel blocks around among these three files（allowing a block from the red file, for instance, to hide out in the green or blue ones）. But the program does nothing within the pixel blocks, where all the image processing happens. As a result, the files remain unchanged images but end up looking like grainy black-and-white ones to anyone who accesses them without the decryption key. 

Wang Fang, a Suzhou native, has given her heart and soul to Kunqu Opera. Wang, who has twice won the Plum Performance Award-China's top award for theater and opera performances—started to learn the traditional art form from a young age.

Born with a sweet voice, Wang loved to sing and dance and was selected by the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Troupe when she was in middle school. However, her parents refused the troupe's invitation, insisting that she should concentrate on her studies. After members of the troupe visited the parents repeatedly, Wang's parents finally agreed.

Learning the traditional art form was never easy. She started to learn how to pronounce words, sing them lyrically and make gestures gently. At first, she had to spend extra time practicing kung fu move-ments. Years later, Wang used the word "unimaginable" to describe how hard the days were when she first learned Kunqu. She was soaked（浸泡）in sweat when practicing movements in summer, while in win-ter she often had chilblains（冻疮）on her hands. "But I was determined at the time. No matter how diffi-cult, I always got up early the next morning to practice, " Wang recalls.

Wang says she did not love Kunqu at first, but in her early 20s, when she watched the show Peony Pavilion performed by Zhang Jiqing, a master of the art form, it clicked. "I was shocked, " Wang says. "Her every movement was full of elegance. Each of her lines and songs was perfect. I was struck by the beauty of Kunqu for the first time, and it has stayed with me since. "

"I always believe that ‘Not everything is meant to be, but everything is worth a try. ' First you must be a dreamer, then a doer, and only then can you be a master. I believe in this order —that it should be this way and that I am this way. " Wang once said in an interview. Now, Wang has become a master of Kunqu. Her performances have impressed generations of audiences and helped to promote the art form a-mong young people.