If you're planning a trip the first thing to do is find your travel companion. We went with my old friend's family to Thailand this summer.

One of the highlights of our Thailand trip is the visit of Kaeng Krachan National Park. Eleven of us, as young as four years and up to ten times the youngest one’s age, trekked to Pala-U, one of the highest waterfalls in Thailand. Step by step, we plodded next to a stream, surrounded by forest over 1

One way of writing travel memoir is to recollect what's inside the luggage of that trip.

An enormously clear-eyed and quite personal look at how we travel. And a chronicle of how my daughter grows. Absolutely. Do you know we still packed a can of milk powder and a milk bottle for my five-year-old? We did so for our recent trip to Hua Hin in Thailand, as has always been the case. I meant it. The truth is, my girl hasn't

There must have been a page that somehow goes missing in our children's school book. It's the page or lesson about separation. That very page has been either torne by a nursery-age kid or got eaten by a dog before any teacher noticed it.

What if we can't teach our kids how to deal with separation? (Often we can't.) What if your kid (like mine) attends a school where turnover of classmates is as high as the staff attrition rate in

Most of our day-to-day tasks - buying birthday gifts, getting an annual check, writing thank-you cards to teachers before the end of the school term, filling of tax return, applying ethical approval for clinical trials, redeeming rebate - are set with deadlines. Such deadline always looms large when it's around the corner. We begin to become a little edgy. Okay, we panic. We sigh and moan and wish we had more time.

Deadlines, by definition, are deadly .As

Psychologists coined the phrase word leap to describe how we solve a puzzle by a shift of mind, such as the experience of seeing two faces instead of that picture of a vase.

When I observed two big carton boxes of milk powder in my wife's car, I was thinking of my sister-in-law who has recently moved in with her twin babies (when her helper is on leave). Clearly this is just common sense; I'd been enjoying the babysitting those two little boys.

But

It's one thing to look darn cool to solve a intellectually challenging case like Sherlock Holmes, and quite another to meet a mysterious patient when you have only half day to sort out the riddle.

When my registrar told me the story of a young chap who had dizzy spell and blackout after climbing four flights, I knew this is tricky. I quickly brought my students to see him, only to find my patient having a seizure in front of us.

This is a good example to tell my students tests don

I'm sure there are times when we do something for the very first time, and that something seems familiar to most people around.

Well, I'm not sure how many times you have set foot in London. This is my first time.

After going to Edinburgh for my postgraduate examination almost twenty years ago, I still kept some of those United Kingdom bank notes and now found out they're outdated when I arrived in London to attend a medical conference this week. Although I had no time to

Read the opening page of David Schwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big and the story of his six-year-old son's ambition to become a Professor of Happiness will leave you energetic.

Now that I've brought with me this self-help classic on my conference leave, I'm halfway through the book. If there was one lesson learned from this book, it was this: think big, smile big, and grow big.

Let's see an example put up by the author

Never in the history of our country has any illegal immigrant made the headlines more than a 12-year-old boy who has lived in Hong Kong with his grandma since the age of three.

When I picked up a copy of South China Morning Post on my flight to London, I noticed that his story appeared at least twice in the news today.

But the distance between this mainland boy and me, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. I'd be more interested in the education of

Everyone fears the ideas of losing. Students fear it. Gamblers fear it. Investors fear it. As long as we own something, we fear the chance of losing it.

The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the phrase loss aversion to describe how we feel the pain of loss more intensely than we feel the pleasure of gain.

What are the differences between losing a deposit of $150 and not getting a reward of $150? What are the differences between a 5-cent levy on