Dear Mr. Coleman, I'm Aaron Brown, the director of TAC company. To celebrate our company's 10th anniversary and to boost further growth, we have arranged a small event. It will be an informative afternoon with enlightening discussions on business trends. I recently attended your lecture about recent issues in business and it was really impressive. I am writing this letter to request that you be our guest speaker for the afternoon. Your experience and knowledge will benefit our businesses in many ways. It would be a pleasure to have you with us. The planned schedule includes a guest speaker's speech and a question and answer session on Thursday, the 21st of November, 2019 at 3:00 p.m. We would sincerely appreciate it if you could make some time for us. We will be looking forward to hearing from you soon. Yours Sincerely, Aaron Brown

One night, my family was having a party with a couple from another city who had two daughters. The girls were just a few years older than I, and I played lots of fun games together with them. The father of the family had an amusing, jolly, witty character, and I had a memorable night full of laughter and joy. While we laughed, joked, and had our dinner, the TV suddenly broadcast an air attack, and a screeching siren started to scream, announcing the red situation. We all stopped dinner, and we squeezed into the basement. The siren kept screaming and the roar of planes was heard in the sky. The terror of war was overwhelming. Shivering with fear, I murmured a panicked prayer that this desperate situation would end quickly.

Over the years, memory has been given a bad name. It has been associated with rote learning and cramming information into your brain. Educators have said that understanding is the key to learning, but how can you understand something if you can't remember it? We have all had this experience: we recognize and understand information but can't recall it when we need it. For example, how many jokes do you know? You've probably heard thousands, but you can only recall about four or five right now. There is a big difference between remembering your four jokes and recognizing or understanding thousands. Understanding doesn't create use: only when you can instantly recall what you understand, and practice using your remembered understanding, do you achieve mastery. Memory means storing what you have learned; otherwise, why would we bother learning in the first place?

Crowdfunding is a new and more collaborative way to secure funding for projects. It can be used in different ways such as requesting donations for a worthy cause anywhere in the world and generating funding for a project with the contributors then becoming partners in the project. In essence, crowdfunding is the fusion of social networking and venture capitalism. In just the same way as social networks have rewritten the conventional rules about how people communicate and interact with each other, crowdfunding in all its variations has the potential to rewrite the rules on how businesses and other projects get funded in the future. Crowdfunding can be viewed as the democratization of business financing. Instead of restricting capital sourcing and allocation to a relatively small and fixed minority, crowdfunding empowers everyone connected to the Internet to access both the collective wisdom and the pocket money of everyone else who connects to the Internet.

You meet many different kinds of people in your life. Sometimes you run into those who are full of energy, and you wonder if they are from the same planet as you. After a closer look, you realize that they too face challenges and problems. They are under the same amount of pressure and stress as you. One word makes a world of difference: attitude! Attitude is your psychological disposition, a proactive way to approach life. It is a personal predetermination not to let anything or anyone take control of your life or manipulate your mood. Attitude allows you to anticipate, excuse, forgive and forget, without being naive or stupid. It is a personal decision to stay in control and not to lose your temper. Attitude provides safe conduct through all kinds of storms. It helps you to get up every morning happy and determined to get the most out of a brand new day. Whatever happens ― good or bad ― the proper attitude makes the difference. It may not always be easy to have a positive attitude; nevertheless, you need to remember you can face a kind or cruel world based on your perception and your actions.

Our world today is comparatively harmless. We don't have to be careful every moment that a tiger is behind us. We do not have to worry about starving. Our dangers today are, for example, high blood pressure or diabetes. To be clear, we have a Stone Age brain that lives in a modern world. Because of this, many situations are considered a threat by our brains, although they are harmless to our survival. In the past, danger meant we either had to flee or fight. If we have an appointment but are stuck in a traffic jam, that does not really threaten our lives. However, our brain considers this a danger. That is the point. There is no danger, but our brain rates it as such. If we have an unpleasant conversation with our partner, it does not threaten our lives, and we do not have to flee or fight. The danger is an illusion. Our Stone Age brain sees a mortal danger that is not there.

There has been a general belief that sport is a way of reducing violence. Anthropologist Richard Sipes tests this notion in a classic study of the relationship between sport and violence. Focusing on what he calls combative sports, those sports including actual body contact between opponents or simulated warfare, he hypothesizes that if sport is an alternative to violence, then one would expect to find an inverse correlation between the popularity of combative sports and the frequency and intensity of warfare. In other words, the more combative sports (e.g., football, boxing) the less likely warfare. Using the Human Relations Area Files and a sample of 20 societies, Sipes tests the hypothesis and discovers a significant relationship between combative sports and violence, but a direct one, not the inverse correlation of his hypothesis. According to Sipes' analysis, the more pervasive and popular combative sports are in a society, the more likely that society is to engage in war. So, Sipes draws the obvious conclusion that combative sports are not alternatives to war but rather are reflections of the same aggressive impulses in human society.

The tables above show the number of jobs in renewable energy technology around the world in 2014 and 2015. The total number of jobs was larger in 2015 than in 2014. In both years, solar photovoltaic had the largest number of jobs, and the number of jobs increased in 2015. The rank of liquid biofuels remained the same in both years though the number of jobs decreased in 2015. Solar heating/cooling ranked higher in 2015 than in 2014, but still had more than 900 thousand jobs. Among the lowest three ranks in 2014, only small hydropower showed a decrease in the number of jobs in 2015.

Lotte Laserstein was born into a Jewish family in East Prussia. One of her relatives ran a private painting school, which allowed Lotte to learn painting and drawing at a young age. Later, she earned admission to the Berlin Academy of Arts and completed her master studies as one of the first women in the school. In 1928 her career skyrocketed as she gained widespread recognition, but after the seizure of power by the Nazi Party, she was forbidden to exhibit her artwork in Germany. In 1937 she emigrated to Sweden. She continued to work in Sweden but never recaptured the fame she had enjoyed before. In her work, Lotte repeatedly portrayed Gertrud Rose, her closest friend. To Lotte, she embodied the type of the New Woman and was so represented.

《Springfield Photo Contest》 Show off your pictures taken in this beautiful town. All the winning entries will be included in the official Springfield tour guide book! Prizes: • 1st Place: $500 / • 2nd Place: $250 / • 3rd Place: $150 Contest Rules: • Limit of 5 photos per entrant • Photos must be taken in Springfield. • Photos must be submitted digitally as JPEG files. • Photos should be in color (black-and-white photos are not accepted). The submission must be completed on our website (www.visitspringfield.org) by December 27, 2019. Please email us at info@visitspringfield.org for further information.

《2019 Upcycling Festival》 The Riverside Art Center is proud to announce the 2019 Upcycling Festival, a festival for the whole family to create, see and learn about the art of upcycling. There is no admission fee and booking is not needed. Date & Time: Saturday, November 23, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Location: The Riverside Art Center Programs: • Hands-on activities for children: making art pieces utilizing used or waste materials at the center's garden • Exhibition: famous upcycled artwork in the lobby • Movie: documentaries on environmental topics in the meeting room Parking: • The parking lot is open from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm. • The parking fee is $5. For more information, please call 123-456-0987.

There is a reason why so many of us are attracted to recorded music these days, especially considering personal music players are common and people are listening to music through headphones a lot. Recording engineers and musicians have learned to create special effects that tickle our brains by exploiting neural circuits that evolved to discern important features of our auditory environment. These special effects are similar in principle to 3-D art, motion pictures, or visual illusions, none of which have been around long enough for our brains to have evolved special mechanisms to perceive them. Rather, 3-D art, motion pictures, and visual illusions leverage perceptual systems that are in place to accomplish other things. Because they use these neural circuits in novel ways, we find them especially interesting. The same is true of the way that modern recordings are made.

A story is only as believable as the storyteller. For story to be effective, trust must be established. Yes, trust. Whenever someone stops to listen to you, an element of unspoken trust exists. Your listener unconsciously trusts you to say something worthwhile to him, something that will not waste his time. The few minutes of attention he is giving you is sacrificial. He could choose to spend his time elsewhere, yet he has stopped to respect your part in a conversation. This is where story comes in. Because a story illustrates points clearly and often bridges topics easily, trust can be established quickly, and recognizing this time element to story is essential to trust. Respecting your listener's time is the capital letter at the beginning of your sentence ― it leads the conversation into a sentence worth listening to if trust is earned and not taken for granted.

Once we own something, we're far more likely to overvalue it. In a study conducted at Duke University, students who won basketball tickets in an extremely onerous lottery (one that they had to wait in line to enter for more than a day) said they wouldn't sell their tickets for less than, on average, $2,400. But students who had waited and hadn't won said they would only pay, on average, $170 per ticket. Once a student owned the tickets, he or she saw them as being worth much more in the market than they were. In another example, during the housing market crash of 2008, a real estate website conducted a survey to see how homeowners felt the crash affected the price of their homes. 92% of respondents, aware of nearby foreclosures, asserted these had hurt the price of homes in their neighborhood. However, when asked about the price of their own home, 62% believed it had increased.

Are the different types of mobile device, smartphones and tablets, substitutes or complements? Let's explore this question by considering the case of Madeleine and Alexandra, two users of these devices. Madeleine uses her tablet to take notes in class. These notes are synced to her smartphone wirelessly, via a cloud computing service, allowing Madeleine to review her notes on her phone during the bus trip home. Alexandra uses both her phone and tablet to surf the Internet, write emails and check social media. Both of these devices allow Alexandra to access online services when she is away from her desktop computer. For Madeleine, smartphones and tablets are complements. She gets greater functionality out of her two devices when they are used together. For Alexandra, they are substitutes. Both smartphones and tablets fulfil more or less the same function in Alexandra's life. This case illustrates the role that an individual consumer's behavior plays in determining the nature of the relationship between two goods or services.

Thomas Edison was indeed a creative genius, but it was not until he discovered some of the principles of marketing that he found increased success. One of his first inventions was, although much needed, a failure. In 1869, he created and patented an electronic vote recorder, which recorded and totalled the votes in the Massachusetts state legislature faster than the chamber's old manual system. To Edison's astonishment, it failed. Edison had not taken into account legislators' habits. They didn't like to vote quickly and efficiently. They liked to lobby their fellow legislators as voting took place. Edison had a great idea, but he completely misunderstood the needs of his customers. He learned from his failure the relationship between invention and marketing. Edison learned that marketing and invention must be integrated. Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent, he said. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success. He realized he needed to put the customers' needs first and tailor his thinking accordingly.

Attitude has been conceptualized into four main components: affective (feelings of liking or disliking), cognitive (beliefs and evaluation of those beliefs), behavioral intention (a statement of how one would behave in a certain situation), and behavior. Public attitudes toward a wildlife species and its management are generated based on the interaction of those components. In forming our attitudes toward wolves, people strive to keep their affective components of attitude consistent with their cognitive component. For example, I could dislike wolves; I believe they have killed people (cognitive belief), and having people killed is of course bad (evaluation of belief). The behavioral intention that could result from this is to support a wolf control program and actual behavior may be a history of shooting wolves. In this example, all aspects of attitude are consistent with each other, producing a negative overall attitude toward wolves.

Cultural globalization has multiple centers in Asia like Bollywood movies made in India and Kung Fu movies made in Hong Kong. They are subtitled in as many as 17 languages and distributed to specific diasporas. These cultural spaces, which are dominated by languages like Hindi and Mandarin, ignore and challenge the spread of English. Professor Vaish has shown how Chinese and Indian children in Singapore are networked into the pan-Chinese and pan-Indian culture through their engagement with Chinese pop music and Indian movies respectively. She thus empirically challenges the idea that Asian youth are passive victims of cultural globalization, or world culture that comes out of the West.

The lotus plant (a white water lily) grows in the dirty, muddy bottom of lakes and ponds, yet despite this, its leaves are always clean. That is because whenever the smallest particle of dust lands on the plant, it immediately waves the leaf, directing the dust particles to one particular spot. Raindrops falling on the leaves are sent to that same place, to thus wash the dirt away. This property of the lotus led researchers to design a new house paint. Researchers began working on how to develop paints that wash clean in the rain, in much the same way as lotus leaves do. As a result of this investigation, a German company produced a house paint. On the market in Europe and Asia, the product even came with a guarantee that it would stay clean for five years without detergents or sandblasting.

Like the physiological discoveries of the late nineteenth century, today's biological breakthrough has fundamentally altered our understanding of how the human organism works and will change medical practice fundamentally and thoroughly. The word breakthrough, however, seems to imply in many people's minds an amazing, unprecedented revelation that, in an instant, makes everything clear. Science doesn't actually work that way. Remember the scientific method, which you probably first learned about back in elementary school? It has a long and difficult process of observation, hypothesis, experiment, testing, modifying, retesting, and retesting again and again and again. That's how science works, and the breakthrough understanding of the relationship between our genes and chronic disease happened in just that way, building on the work of scientists from decades ― even centuries ― ago. In fact, it is still happening; the story continues to unfold as the research presses on.

Car-sharing is now a familiar concept, but creative companies are making it possible for their clients to share ownership and access to just about everything, such as villas, handbags and even diamond necklaces. According to a Portuguese saying, You should never have a yacht; you should have a friend with a yacht. By joining a yacht sharing service, members can live the Portuguese dream by sharing a yacht with up to seven other people. In describing the service, a recent newspaper article warned consumers that sharing the yacht means there is no guarantee you will always be able to use it when you want. This apparent limitation is precisely what helps consumers make it a treat. Limiting your access to everything from sandwiches to luxury cars helps to reset your cheerometer. That is, knowing you can't have access to something all the time may help you appreciate it more when you do.

In the US, regional styles of speech have always been associated with regional styles of building: the Midwestern farmhouse, the Southern plantation mansion, and the Cape Cod cottage all have their equivalent in spoken dialect. These buildings may be old and genuine, or they may be recent reproductions, the equivalent of an assumed rather than a native accent. As James Kunstler says, half-baked versions of Scarlett O'Hara's Tara now stand replicated in countless suburban subdivisions around the United States. In some cities and towns, especially where tourism is an important part of the economy, zoning codes may make a sort of artificial authenticity compulsory. Houses in the historic district of Key West, Florida, for example, whether new or remodeled, must be built of wood in a traditional style, and there are only a few permissible colors of paint, white being preferred. From the street these houses may look like the simple sea captains' mansions they imitate. Inside, however, where zoning does not reach, they often contain modern lighting and state-of-the-art kitchens and bathrooms.

Psychologist John Bargh did an experiment showing human perception and behavior can be influenced by external factors. He told a bunch of healthy undergraduates that he was testing their language abilities. He presented them with a list of words and asked them to create a coherent sentence from it. One of the lists was DOWN SAT LONELY THE MAN WRINKLED BITTERLY THE WITH FACE OLD. Bitterly, the lonely old man with the wrinkled face sat down is one possible solution. But this was no linguistics test. Bargh was interested in how long it took the students to leave the lab and walk down the hall after they were exposed to the words. What he found was extraordinary. Those students who had been exposed to an elderly mix of words took almost 40 percent longer to walk down the hall than those who had been exposed to random words. Some students even walked with their shoulders bent forwards, dragging their feet as they left, as if they were 50 years older than they actually were.

We're creatures who live and die by the energy stores we've built up in our bodies. Navigating the world is a difficult job that requires moving around and using a lot of brainpower ― an energy-expensive endeavor. When we make correct predictions, that saves energy. When you know that edible bugs can be found beneath certain types of rocks, it saves turning over all the rocks. The better we predict, the less energy it costs us. Repetition makes us more confident in our forecasts and more efficient in our actions. So there's something appealing about predictability. But if our brains are going to all this effort to make the world predictable, that begs the question: if we love predictability so much, why don't we, for example, just replace our televisions with machines that emit a rhythmic beep twenty-four hours a day, predictably? The answer is that there's a problem with a lack of surprise. The better we understand something, the less effort we put into thinking about it. Familiarity increases indifference. Repetition suppression sets in and our attention diminishes. This is why ― no matter how much you enjoyed watching the World Series ― you aren't going to be satisfied watching that same game over and over. Although predictability is reassuring, the brain strives to incorporate new facts into its model of the world. It always seeks novelty.

Bahati lived in a small village, where baking bread for a hungry passerby is a custom when one misses someone. She had an only son living far away and missed him a lot, so she baked an extra loaf of bread and put it on the window sill every day, for anyone to take away. Every day, a poor old woman took away the bread, just muttering The good you do, comes back to you! instead of expressing gratitude. Not a word of gratitude, Bahati said to herself. One day, irritated, she was tempted to stop baking extra bread, but soon changed her mind. She baked an extra loaf and kept doing good because the words of the poor old woman kept coming back to her. She placed the bread on the window sill. The poor old woman took away the loaf as usual, muttering the same words. This time, instead of being irritated, Bahati decided to offer a prayer. For years, she had got no news of her son. She prayed for his safety. That night, there was a knock on the door. As she opened it, she was surprised to find her son standing in the doorway. He had grown thin and lean. His clothes were torn. Crying and hugging her son, she gave him clothes to change into and some food. After taking some rest, Bahati's son said, On my way home, I was so starved that I collapsed. I saw an old woman with a loaf of bread. I begged her for a small piece of bread. But she gave me the whole loaf saying my need was greater than hers. It was then that Bahati finally realized the meaning of the words of the poor old woman: The good you do, comes back to you!