To whom it may concern, I would like to draw your attention to a problem that frequently occurs with the No. 35 buses. There is a bus stop about halfway along Fenny Road, at which the No. 35 buses are supposed to stop. It would appear, however, that some of your drivers are either unaware of this bus stop or for some reason choose to ignore it, driving past even though the buses are not full. I would be grateful if you could remind your drivers that this bus stop exists and that they should be prepared to stop at it. I look forward to seeing an improvement in this service soon. Yours faithfully, John Williams

My 10-year-old appeared, in desperate need of a quarter. A quarter? What on earth do you need a quarter for? My tone bordered on irritation. I didn't want to be bothered with such a trivial demand. There's a garage sale up the street, and there's something I just gotta have! It only costs a quarter. Please? I placed a quarter in my son's hand. Moments later, a little voice said, Here, Mommy, this is for you. I glanced down at the hands of my little son and saw a four-inch cream-colored statue of two small children hugging one another. Inscribed at their feet were words that read It starts with 'L' ends with 'E' and in between are 'O' and 'V.' As I watched him race back to the garage sale, I smiled with a heart full of happiness. That 25-cent garage sale purchase brought me a lot of joy.

Managers frequently try to play psychologist, to figure out why an employee has acted in a certain way. Empathizing with employees in order to understand their point of view can be very helpful. However, when dealing with a problem area, in particular, remember that it is not the person who is bad, but the actions exhibited on the job. Avoid making suggestions to employees about personal traits they should change; instead suggest more acceptable ways of performing. For example, instead of focusing on a person's unreliability, a manager might focus on the fact that the employee has been late to work seven times this month. It is difficult for employees to change who they are; it is usually much easier for them to change how they act.

I suspect fungi are a little more forward thinking than their larger partners. Among trees, each species fights other species. Let's assume the beeches native to Central Europe could emerge victorious in most forests there. Would this really be an advantage? What would happen if a new pathogen came along that infected most of the beeches and killed them? In that case, wouldn't it be more advantageous if there were a certain number of other species around ― oaks, maples, or firs ― that would continue to grow and provide the shade needed for a new generation of young beeches to sprout and grow up? Diversity provides security for ancient forests. Because fungi are also very dependent on stable conditions, they support other species underground and protect them from complete collapse to ensure that one species of tree doesn't manage to dominate.

It's remarkable that positive fantasies help us relax to such an extent that it shows up in physiological tests. If you want to unwind, you can take some deep breaths, get a massage, or go for a walk ― but you can also try simply closing your eyes and fantasizing about some future outcome that you might enjoy. But what about when your objective is to make your wish a reality? The last thing you want to be is relaxed. You want to be energized enough to get off the couch and lose those pounds or find that job or study for that test, and you want to be motivated enough to stay engaged even when the inevitable obstacles or challenges arise. The principle of Dream it. Wish it. Do it. does not hold true, and now we know why: in dreaming it, you undercut the energy you need to do it. You put yourself in a temporary state of complete happiness, calmness ― and inactivity.

If cooking is as central to human identity, biology, and culture as the biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggests, it stands to reason that the decline of cooking in our time would have serious consequences for modern life, and so it has. Are they all bad? Not at all. The outsourcing of much of the work of cooking to corporations has relieved women of what has traditionally been their exclusive responsibility for feeding the family, making it easier for them to work outside the home and have careers. It has headed off many of the domestic conflicts that such a large shift in gender roles and family dynamics was bound to spark. It has relieved other pressures in the household, including longer workdays and overscheduled children, and saved us time that we can now invest in other pursuits. It has also allowed us to diversify our diets substantially, making it possible even for people with no cooking skills and little money to enjoy a whole different cuisine. All that's required is a microwave.

As you may already know, what and how you buy can be political. To whom do you want to give your money? Which companies and corporations do you value and respect? Be mindful about every purchase by carefully researching the corporations that are taking our money to decide if they deserve our support. Do they have a record of polluting the environment, or do they have fair-trade practices and an end-of-life plan for the products they make? Are they committed to bringing about good in the world? For instance, my family has found a company producing recycled, plastic-packaging-free toilet paper with a social conscience. They contribute 50 percent of their profits to the construction of toilets around the world, and we're genuinely happy to spend our money on this special toilet paper each month. Remember that the corporate world is built on consumers, so as a consumer you have the power to vote with your wallet and encourage companies to embrace healthier and more sustainable practices with every purchase you choose to make.

The graph above shows the findings of a survey on the use of smart TVs to go online in the UK from 2013 to 2020, by gender. In each year from 2013 to 2020, the percentage of male respondents who used smart TVs to access the Internet was higher than that of female respondents. The percentage gap between the two genders was the largest in 2016 and in 2020, which both had an 8 percentage point difference. In 2020, the percentage of respondents who reported using smart TVs to go online was higher than 30% for both males and females. For male respondents, 2017 was the only year that saw a decrease in the percentage of those accessing the Internet via smart TVs compared to the previous year, during the given period. In 2014, the percentage of females using smart TVs to access the Internet was the lowest during the given period at 6%, and it was still below 10% in 2015.

Camille Flammarion was born at Montigny-le-Roi, France. He became interested in astronomy at an early age, and when he was only sixteen he wrote a book on the origin of the world. The manuscript was not published at the time, but it came to the attention of Urbain Le Verrier, the director of the Paris Observatory. He became an assistant to Le Verrier in 1858 and worked as a calculator. At nineteen, he wrote another book called The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, in which he passionately claimed that life exists outside the planet Earth. His most successful work, Popular Astronomy, was published in 1880, and eventually sold 130,000 copies. With his own funds, he built an observatory at Juvisy and spent May to November of each year there. In 1887, he founded the French Astronomical Society and served as editor of its monthly publication.

《Roselands Virtual Sports Day》 Roselands Virtual Sports Day is an athletic competition that you can participate in from anywhere. When: October 16th - 22nd, 2023 How the event works ㆍThere are 10 challenges in total. ㆍYou can see videos explaining each challenge on our school website. ㆍThe more challenges you complete, the more points you will gain for your class. ㆍThe class with the most points will get a prize. ㆍParents and teachers can also participate. How to submit your entry ㆍEmail us videos of you completing the challenges at virtualsportsday@roselands.com. ㆍThe size of the video file must not exceed 500MB.

《Back-to-school Giveaway Event》 The City of Easton will host a free back-to-school giveaway event. Join us for this fun event to help children of all ages prepare to go back to school after summer vacation. When: Saturday, September 2nd, 9 a.m. - 11 a.m. Location: City of Easton Central Park (This event will be held rain or shine.) Participation requirements ㆍOpen to City of Easton residents only ㆍMust bring a valid ID Note ㆍ500 backpacks will be given out on a first-come, first-served basis. ㆍA parent or a guardian must come with their child to receive the backpack. For more information, call the City Council at 612-248-6633.

There is little doubt that we are driven by the sell-by date. Once an item is past that date it goes into the waste stream, further increasing its carbon footprint. Remember those items have already travelled hundreds of miles to reach the shelves and once they go into waste they start a new carbon mile journey. But we all make our own judgement about sell-by dates; those brought up during the Second World War are often scornful of the terrible waste they believe such caution encourages. The manufacturer of the food has a view when making or growing something that by the time the product reaches the shelves it has already been travelling for so many days and possibly many miles. The manufacturer then decides that a product can reasonably be consumed within say 90 days and 90 days minus so many days for travelling gives the sell-by date. But whether it becomes toxic is something each individual can decide. It would seem to make sense not to buy large packs of perishable goods but non-perishable items may become cost-effective.

The jolt of caffeine does wear off. Caffeine is removed from your system by an enzyme within your liver, which gradually degrades it over time. Based in large part on genetics, some people have a more efficient version of the enzyme that degrades caffeine, allowing the liver to rapidly clear it from the bloodstream. These rare individuals can drink an espresso with dinner and fall fast asleep at midnight without a problem. Others, however, have a slower-acting version of the enzyme. It takes far longer for their system to eliminate the same amount of caffeine. As a result, they are very sensitive to caffeine's effects. One cup of tea or coffee in the morning will last much of the day, and should they have a second cup, even early in the afternoon, they will find it difficult to fall asleep in the evening. Aging also alters the speed of caffeine clearance: the older we are, the longer it takes our brain and body to remove caffeine, and thus the more sensitive we become in later life to caffeine's sleep-disrupting influence.

Rebels may think they're rebels, but clever marketers influence them just like the rest of us. Saying, Everyone is doing it may turn some people off from an idea. These people will look for alternatives, which (if cleverly planned) can be exactly what a marketer or persuader wants you to believe. If I want you to consider an idea, and know you strongly reject popular opinion in favor of maintaining your independence and uniqueness, I would present the majority option first, which you would reject in favor of my actual preference. We are often tricked when we try to maintain a position of defiance. People use this reversal to make us independently choose an option which suits their purposes. Some brands have taken full effect of our defiance towards the mainstream and positioned themselves as rebels; which has created even stronger brand loyalty.

A typical soap opera creates an abstract world, in which a highly complex web of relationships connects fictional characters that exist first only in the minds of the program's creators and are then recreated in the minds of the viewer. If you were to think about how much human psychology, law, and even everyday physics the viewer must know in order to follow and speculate about the plot, you would discover it is considerable - at least as much as the knowledge required to follow and speculate about a piece of modern mathematics, and in most cases, much more. Yet viewers follow soap operas with ease. How are they able to cope with such abstraction? Because, of course, the abstraction is built on an extremely familiar framework. The characters in a soap opera and the relationships between them are very much like the real people and relationships we experience every day. The abstraction of a soap opera is only a step removed from the real world. The mental training required to follow a soap opera is provided by our everyday lives.

As always happens with natural selection, bats and their prey have been engaged in a life-or-death sensory arms race for millions of years. It's believed that hearing in moths arose specifically in response to the threat of being eaten by bats. (Not all insects can hear.) Over millions of years, moths have evolved the ability to detect sounds at ever higher frequencies, and, as they have, the frequencies of bats' vocalizations have risen, too. Some moth species have also evolved scales on their wings and a fur-like coat on their bodies; both act as acoustic camouflage, by absorbing sound waves in the frequencies emitted by bats, thereby preventing those sound waves from bouncing back. The B-2 bomber and other stealth aircraft have fuselages made of materials that do something similar with radar beams.

Much of human thought is designed to screen out information and to sort the rest into a manageable condition. The inflow of data from our senses could create an overwhelming chaos, especially given the enormous amount of information available in culture and society. Out of all the sensory impressions and possible information, it is vital to find a small amount that is most relevant to our individual needs and to organize that into a usable stock of knowledge. Expectancies accomplish some of this work, helping to screen out information that is irrelevant to what is expected, and focusing our attention on clear contradictions. The processes of learning and memory are marked by a steady elimination of information. People notice only a part of the world around them. Then, only a fraction of what they notice gets processed and stored into memory. And only part of what gets committed to memory can be retrieved.

The irony of early democracy in Europe is that it thrived and prospered precisely because European rulers for a very long time were remarkably weak. For more than a millennium after the fall of Rome, European rulers lacked the ability to assess what their people were producing and to levy substantial taxes based on this. The most striking way to illustrate European weakness is to show how little revenue they collected. Europeans would eventually develop strong systems of revenue collection, but it took them an awfully long time to do so. In medieval times, and for part of the early modern era, Chinese emperors and Muslim caliphs were able to extract much more of economic production than any European ruler with the exception of small city-states.

If you drive down a busy street, you will find many competing businesses, often right next to one another. For example, in most places a consumer in search of a quick meal has many choices, and more fast-food restaurants appear all the time. These competing firms advertise heavily. The temptation is to see advertising as driving up the price of a product without any benefit to the consumer. However, this misconception doesn't account for why firms advertise. In markets where competitors sell slightly differentiated products, advertising enables firms to inform their customers about new products and services. Yes, costs rise, but consumers also gain information to help make purchasing decisions. Consumers also benefit from added variety, and we all get a product that's pretty close to our vision of a perfect good - and no other market structure delivers that outcome.

Architects might say a machine can never design an innovative or impressive building because a computer cannot be creative. Yet consider the Elbphilharmonie, a new concert hall in Hamburg, which contains a remarkably beautiful auditorium composed of ten thousand interlocking acoustic panels. It is the sort of space that makes one instinctively think that only a human being - and a human with a remarkably refined creative sensibility, at that - could design something so aesthetically impressive. Yet the auditorium was, in fact, designed algorithmically, using a technique known as parametric design. The architects gave the system a set of criteria, and it generated a set of possible designs for the architects to choose from. Similar software has been used to design lightweight bicycle frames and sturdier chairs, among much else. Are these systems behaving creatively? No, they are using lots of processing power to blindly generate varied possible designs, working in a very different way from a human being.

The brain is a high-energy consumer of glucose, which is its fuel. Although the brain accounts for merely 3 percent of a person's body weight, it consumes 20 percent of the available fuel. Your brain can't store fuel, however, so it has to pay as it goes. Since your brain is incredibly adaptive, it economizes its fuel resources. Thus, during a period of high stress, it shifts away from the analysis of the nuances of a situation to a singular and fixed focus on the stressful situation at hand. You don't sit back and speculate about the meaning of life when you are stressed. Instead, you devote all your energy to trying to figure out what action to take. Sometimes, however, this shift from the higher-thinking parts of the brain to the automatic and reflexive parts of the brain can lead you to do something too quickly, without thinking.

Much research has been carried out on the causes of engagement, an issue that is important from both a theoretical and practical standpoint: identifying the drivers of work engagement may enable us to manipulate or influence it. The causes of engagement fall into two major camps: situational and personal. The most influential situational causes are job resources, feedback and leadership, the latter, of course, being responsible for job resources and feedback. Indeed, leaders influence engagement by giving their employees honest and constructive feedback on their performance, and by providing them with the necessary resources that enable them to perform their job well. It is, however, noteworthy that although engagement drives job performance, job performance also drives engagement. In other words, when employees are able to do their jobs well - to the point that they match or exceed their own expectations and ambitions - they will engage more, be proud of their achievements, and find work more meaningful. This is especially evident when people are employed in jobs that align with their values.

In 2006, researchers conducted a study on the motivations for helping after the September 11th terrorist attacks against the United States. In the study, they found that individuals who gave money, blood, goods, or other forms of assistance because of other-focused motives (giving to reduce another's discomfort) were almost four times more likely to still be giving support one year later than those whose original motivation was to reduce personal distress. This effect likely stems from differences in emotional arousal. The events of September 11th emotionally affected people throughout the United States. Those who gave to reduce their own distress reduced their emotional arousal with their initial gift, discharging that emotional distress. However, those who gave to reduce others' distress did not stop empathizing with victims who continued to struggle long after the attacks. -> A study found that the act of giving was less likely to be sustained when driven by self-centered motives rather than by other-focused motives, possibly because of the decline in emotional arousal.

In England in the 1680s, it was unusual to live to the age of fifty. This was a period when knowledge was not spread widely, there were few books and most people could not read. As a consequence, knowledge passed down through the oral traditions of stories and shared experiences. And since older people had accumulated more knowledge, the social norm was that to be over fifty was to be wise. This social perception of age began to shift with the advent of new technologies such as the printing press. Over time, as more books were printed, literacy increased, and the oral traditions of knowledge transfer began to fade. With the fading of oral traditions, the wisdom of the old became less important and as a consequence being over fifty was no longer seen as signifying wisdom. We are living in a period when the gap between chronological and biological age is changing fast and where social norms are struggling to adapt. In a video produced by the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), young people were asked to do various activities 'just like an old person'. When older people joined them in the video, the gap between the stereotype and the older people's actual behaviour was striking. It is clear that in today's world our social norms need to be updated quickly.

When Jack was a young man in his early twenties during the 1960s, he had tried to work in his father's insurance business, as was expected of him. His two older brothers fit in easily and seemed to enjoy their work. But Jack was bored with the insurance industry. It was worse than being bored, he said. I felt like I was dying inside. Jack felt drawn to hair styling and dreamed of owning a hair shop with a lively environment. He was sure that he would enjoy the creative and social aspects of it and that he'd be successful. When he was twenty-six, Jack approached his father and expressed his intentions of leaving the business to become a hairstylist. As Jack anticipated, his father raged and accused Jack of being selfish, ungrateful, and unmanly. In the face of his father's fury, Jack felt confusion and fear. His resolve became weak. But then a force filled his chest and he stood firm in his decision. In following his path, Jack not only ran three flourishing hair shops, but also helped his clients experience their inner beauty by listening and encouraging them when they faced dark times. His love for his work led to donating time and talent at nursing homes, which in turn led to becoming a hospice volunteer, and eventually to starting fundraising efforts for the hospice program in his community. And all this laid a strong stepping stone for another courageous move in his life. When, after having two healthy children of their own, Jack and his wife, Michele, decided to bring an orphaned child into their family, his father threatened to disown them. Jack understood that his father feared adoption, in this case especially because the child was of a different racial background than their family. Jack and Michele risked rejection and went ahead with the adoption. It took years but eventually Jack's father loved the little girl and accepted his son's independent choices. Jack realized that, although he often felt fear and still does, he has always had courage. In fact, courage was the scaffolding around which he had built richness into his life.