Globalization is often seen as a unidirectional and unidimensional process driven by a Western-dominated global market economy and tending to standardize, modernize and transnationalize in ways harmful to cultural diversity. The focus is on the threat posed to local cultural products and practices by globalized consumer goods and services-on how television and video productions are tending to overtake traditional forms of entertainment, how pop and rock music are drowning out indigenous music, or how convenience food is dulling the appetite for local cuisine. Some forms of cultural diversity are clearly more vulnerable than others. Vernacular languages are recognized as being particularly at risk, notably from the continuing expansion of English but also from the advance of vehicular languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and Swahili. This process tends to be extremely rapid -as illustrated by the emphasis placed by many parents on schooling their children in vehicular languages at the expense of mastery of their mother tongue.

Causality shapes the way we understand the world, and the way we structure much of our knowledge. We start early to ask 'why' questions, and the urge to find causal explanations continues to be strong throughout life. When observation fails to provide them we often invent them, and we may even invent entirely false memories to support them—all entirely unconsciously, of course. Memory is anything but the mental video recording we tend to imagine it to be: research has shown that we re-create our past every time we recall it, often slightly differently. And our behaviour is not controlled as much by the conscious, rational part of our brain as we usually assume. Our unconscious mind determines much more of our behaviour than most of us like to believe-it does well over 90% of our thinking, according to recent research. Sometimes our unconscious mind reinforces our conscious mind and sometimes it overrides it. It gives us intuitions that, research shows, are often remarkably accurate, gives experts abilities that they are unable to explain, and makes most of us avoid doing things we know we should.

Archaeologists can make a valuable contribution to discussions about the effects of climate change by examining shifts in living conditions that affected humans in the past. Archaeologists themselves are also affected by climate change because the archaeological heritage is vulnerable both to the effects of global warming and to measures aimed at coping with it. Rising sea levels are endangering sites in many areas, for example the Mesolithic sites of California's Channel Islands. Elsewhere, severe storms have increased coastal erosion that is destroying archaeological sites, notably prehistoric sites in Scotland. Warmer temperatures will also lead to shrinking glaciers, already very evident in the Swiss Alps, and the thawing of permafrost in Siberia. Although these changes will reveal long-hidden archaeological remains (such as the famous prehistoric Ice Man), many more will be destroyed without record. Heritage management bodies around the world are drawing up reports to assess which threats are likely to have the most impact, but the scale and pace of these is currently far from clear.

In the past, wetlands were considered wastelands because people could not build homes or other buildings on them. During the early settlements, people drained many swamps in order to build railroads and roads or to develop farmland, thereby destroying the natural wetland environment. As conservation practices have become more widely accepted, and people have learned more about their natural environment, the true value of wetland resources has begun to be recognized. Wetlands have the ability to help control flooding. Because they act like giant, shallow bowls, water collects in them and slows down as it spreads out, making flood management much easier. They then slowly release floodwaters back into streams, lakes, and groundwater, making flooding impacts less damaging. One acre of wetlands can store more than 360,000 gallons (1,362,748 liters) of water if flooded to a depth of one foot (0.3 m). This helps reduce property damage and loss of life in the United States when winter snow melts and becomes spring runoff.

In the fast-paced and digitally connected twenty-first century, we, as a reporter, often think that remote access, or communicating by email, is good enough — but it's not really. Quite often the emotional tone of a conversation is lost in an email; the excitement or fear that we experience under certain circumstances does not translate well to bits and bytes. A good reporter must connect with sources face to face. If your beat is a local neighbourhood, you cannot cover it adequately from in front of a computer screen; if residents are complaining about rubbish being left in a park and they say it's piled 3 metres high, you need to go and look for yourself. You will need a photograph or even video footage. The best way to get the story would be for you to arrange to meet the residents at the park and talk to them there; if you rely on their version of the story without checking the facts, you could be wrong and then get into trouble with the city council. Even worse, you would be misleading your audience.

Not all genres are created equal in the feature film world; nor are they defined in mainstream or traditional ways. When most of us think of genre headers, we go for the typical ones: drama, comedy, horror, family, etc. But this isn't how distributors or producers classify genre (which is yet another vital clue in your pitch approach). For those on the business side, much more specific language is used. A "horror" title might instead be pitched as a "creature feature" or as a "female-driven thriller." Family content can vary in terms of age skew and content approach-for example, a feature aimed at five-year-olds will be drastically different in terms of subject, style and theme than a title aimed at 12-year-olds. Even though all genres are theoretically open for feature film development discussions, select genre headers — and select styles of genre-are far more likely to gain popularity. The story must be excellent, but it must be a great story built within a genre category most likely to attract eyeballs.

Homeowners have strong incentives to lobby state and federal elected officials for local place-based policies that enhance their assets' value. Such lobbying can be socially beneficial if officials enact public goods policies such as reducing air pollution and crime using regulations that are cost effective. Such lobbying can be socially costly if such lobbying seeks to obtain local subsidies at the expense of general taxpayers. The existing rules actually hinder climate change adaptation while boosting the asset values of properties in areas facing fire, drought, and flooding. For example, the federal government's expenditure for providing fire protection in the wildlife-urban interface encourages more development in fire zones. Today, the federal government subsidizes fire protection. In recent years the US Forest Service has spent over half of its budget on fighting wildfires. This share is expected to rise in the coming years. This agency is spending more than $1 billion annually to fight fires.

Science has grown more than exponentially since the 1600s, but the basic idea has remained the same: scientific ideas must be supported by evidence and subject to acceptance, or rejected. The evidence could be experimental or observational; it could be a logical argument or a theoretical proof. But whatever the body of evidence is, both the idea and the evidence used to support it must be judged by a jury of one's scientific peers. Until a claim passes that judgment —that peer review—it is only that, just a claim. What counts as knowledge are the ideas that are accepted by the fellowship of experts (which is why members of these societies are often called "fellows"). Conversely, if the claim is rejected, the honest scientist is expected to accept that judgment, and move on to other things. In science, you don't get to keep harping on a subject until your opponents just give up in exhaustion.