Dear Principal Nolan, My name is Alexis Kerry and I am from a research center called ARKIC. We have recently been working on a project that looks at learning outcomes of children with disabilities. The project aims to build conversation around disability and to push for greater accessibility and inclusion. As part of this project, we are working on a video series, and I wonder if it is possible to film children in classes and around school for a day to show how a special needs school functions. I would greatly appreciate your assistance in this. Please let me know at your earliest convenience if this is possible. I understand that now is a busy time in the school year, but our project would benefit greatly from your cooperation. Best regards, Alexis Kerry

Our class of 1960 was going to be returning for our momentous 50th reunion, but I had sadly stated to one of my four kids that regretfully, I was going to miss the reunion because I just couldn't afford the trip. Then one evening my youngest daughter, Kelly, handed me an envelope and said, Read this later. A letter inside the envelope lectured me all about how important old friendships are at all ages and that I absolutely must attend my 50th reunion since it is a once in a lifetime event. Included within was a round-trip airline ticket to and from Syracuse and roughly $200 cash. The letter stated that all four siblings had met and agreed to pool their money to get me to the reunion. And don't even think about payback! I sat there in stunned silence. And I wept.

Breaks are necessary to revive your energy levels and recharge your mental stamina, but they shouldn't be taken carelessly. If you've planned your schedule effectively, you should already have scheduled breaks at appropriate times throughout the day, so any other breaks in the midst of ongoing work hours are unwarranted. While scheduled breaks keep you on track by being strategic, re-energizing methods of self-reinforcement, unscheduled breaks derail you from your goal, as they offer you opportunities to procrastinate by making you feel as if you've got free time. Taking unscheduled breaks is a sure-fire way to fall into the procrastination trap. You may rationalize that you're only getting a cup of coffee to keep yourself alert, but in reality, you're just trying to avoid having to work on a task at your desk. So to prevent procrastination, commit to having no random breaks instead.

A Princeton study by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found that once a person earns $75,000 per year, the emotional benefits of income wear off. He analyzed more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 U.S. residents conducted by the Gallup Organization, and discovered that emotional well-being rises with income — but not beyond an annual income of $75,000. What is the significance of $75,000? It's not a magic number. It appears to be the income considered adequate to meet people's basic needs. And the researchers found that lower income did not in itself cause sadness, but made people feel more burdened by the problems they already had. In other words, that old saying money can't buy happiness turns out to be true.

It turns out that the secret behind our recently extended life span is not due to genetics or natural selection, but rather to the relentless improvements made to our overall standard of living. From a medical and public health perspective, these developments were nothing less than game changing. For example, major diseases such as smallpox, polio, and measles have been eradicated by mass vaccination. At the same time, better living standards achieved through improvements in education, housing, nutrition, and sanitation systems have substantially reduced malnutrition and infections, preventing many unnecessary deaths among children. Furthermore, technologies designed to improve health have become available to the masses, whether via refrigeration to prevent spoilage or systemized garbage collection, which in and of itself eliminated many common sources of disease. These impressive shifts have not only dramatically affected the ways in which civilizations eat, but also determined how civilizations will live and die.

Do you have a tendency to focus more on what you don't have than on what you do? Unfortunately, many people tend to focus on what they don't have, when in reality they are sitting on a pile of blessings! Unrealistic expectations and comparisons to others lead to jealousy. Being envious of what others have only serves to make you unhappy with what you personally have. It's hard to be grateful when all you can think about is what you don't have or think you should get. Oftentimes frustration and dissatisfaction are actually the result of unrealistic expectations on our part. We think our situation should be this way or that way, or at least different from the way it is. Gratitude is not about expectations, but about being thankful for our situation no matter what our expectations may be.

The above graph shows the percentage of the population in six nations who participated in giving behavior during the month prior to being interviewed in 2013. Over 90 percent of respondents in Myanmar did volunteer work, but the percentage of people who donated money to a charity was the lowest among the given countries. In the United States, nearly 80 percent of respondents donated money to a charity, which was the highest among the six nations. While the percentage of people who helped a stranger was 44 percent both in Canada and in New Zealand, the percentage of people who did volunteer work in Canada was higher than that in New Zealand. In Australia, the percentage of people who donated money to a charity was less than twice that of those who helped a stranger. Meanwhile, the respondents who did volunteer work in the UK represented the second highest percentage among the six countries, but the percentage of those who helped a stranger was the lowest.

An American naturalist and marine biologist, William Beebe was born in 1877 in Brooklyn as the son of newspaper executive Charles Beebe, and although some sources have described William Beebe as an only child, he had a younger brother who died in infancy. During his high school years Beebe developed an interest in animals and published his first article about a bird known as a Brown Creeper. He attended Columbia University, but he never officially graduated. Beebe gradually developed an interest in marine biology and began to consider the possibility of diving with a deep-sea vessel to study marine creatures in their natural habitat. In 1928 he met an American deep-sea diver named Otis Barton, who had been working on a design for a deep diving sphere. After several test dives, in 1934 he and Barton made history with a record descent to 3,028 feet off the coast of Bermuda. In 1949, he founded a tropical research station in Trinidad and continued his research there until his death in 1962.

《Join FAST and Walk Together》 (Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics) The FAST Walk Day raises funds for research to find treatments and a cure for Angelman syndrome, a rare neurogenetic disorder that includes developmental delay, lack of speech, and walking disorders. Date: Saturday, Dec 22, 2018 Time: Sign-in starts at 9:00 am. Walk begins at 10:00 am. Location: Blue Pacific Park, 5030 Beverly Blvd, LA Early bird registration: $30 by Oct 31 and $40 after Park for free at Blue Pacific Parking Lot or Romeo Parking Lot. FAST Walk Day t-shirts will be only available online for purchase, while supplies last. For more information, contact Mary Jackson(maryjackson@fast.org).

《Cyber Security Awareness Contest》 Create a video that explains information security problems and specific actions students can take to safeguard their mobile devices or their personal information. Guidelines: • An individual student or a group of students may submit a video. • Only one video submission per person or group is permissible. • All videos must include subtitles. • Entries will be judged on creativity, content, and overall effectiveness of delivery. Deadline & Winner Announcement: • Videos must be submitted online by November 30. • The winners will be notified on our school website on December 14. Prizes: •1st - $200 •2nd - $150 •3rd - $100 * Winning entries will be used in campus security awareness campaigns.

Application of Buddhist-style mindfulness to Western psychology came primarily from the research of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He initially took on the difficult task of treating chronic-pain patients, many of whom had not responded well to traditional pain-management therapy. In many ways, such treatment seems completely paradoxical — you teach people to deal with pain by helping them to become more aware of it! However, the key is to help people let go of the constant tension that accompanies their fighting of pain, a struggle that actually prolongs their awareness of pain. Mindfulness meditation allowed many of these people to increase their sense of well-being and to experience a better quality of life. How so? Because such meditation is based on the principle that if we try to ignore or repress unpleasant thoughts or sensations, then we only end up increasing their intensity.

The ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians were the Western world's philosophical forebears. In their concept of the world, nature was not an opponent in life's struggles. Rather, man and nature were in the same boat, companions in the same story. Man thought of the natural world in the same terms as he thought of himself and other men. The natural world had thoughts, desires, and emotions, just like humans. Thus, the realms of man and nature were indistinguishable and did not have to be understood in cognitively different ways. Natural phenomena were imagined in the same terms as human experience. These ancients of the Near East did recognize the relation of cause and effect, but when speculating about it they came from a who rather than a what perspective. When the Nile rose, it was because the river wanted to, not because it had rained.

Jesse's best friend Monica, a mother of three, was diagnosed with a rare disease. Unfortunately, she didn't have the money necessary to start her treatment and pay for all the other expenses related to her disease. So Jesse jumped in to help her. She reached out to friends and family and asked them if they could spare $100. If so, they were to bring their contribution to a restaurant downtown at a designated time. Her goal was to get 100 people to give $100. Under false pretenses, Jesse took Monica to the restaurant and asked if she minded answering a few questions on video to share with others about her sickness. She agreed. Soon after the video began, a line formed outside the restaurant. The number grew to hundreds of people, each delivering a $100 bill. The kindness and generosity shown by both friends and strangers made a huge difference for Monica and her family.

A good many scientists and artists have noticed the universality of creativity. At the Sixteenth Nobel Conference, held in 1980, scientists, musicians, and philosophers all agreed, to quote Freeman Dyson, that the analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science. A few years later, at another multidisciplinary conference, physicist Murray Gell-Mann found that everybody agrees on where ideas come from. We had a seminar here, about ten years ago, including several painters, a poet, a couple of writers, and the physicists. Everybody agrees on how it works. All of these people, whether they are doing artistic work or scientific work, are trying to solve a problem.

For several years much research in psychology was based on the assumption that human beings are driven by base motivations such as aggression, egoistic self-interest, and the pursuit of simple pleasures. Since many psychologists began with that assumption, they inadvertently designed research studies that supported their own presuppositions. Consequently, the view of humanity that prevailed in psychology was that of a species barely keeping its aggressive tendencies in check and managing to live in social groups more out of motivated self-interest than out of a genuine affinity for others or a true sense of community. Both Sigmund Freud and the early behaviorists led by John B. Watson believed that humans were motivated primarily by selfish drives. From that perspective, social interaction is possible only by exerting control over those baser emotions and, therefore, it is always vulnerable to eruptions of violence, greed, and selfishness. The fact that humans actually live together in social groups has traditionally been seen as a tenuous arrangement that is always just one step away from violence.

A vast academic literature provides empirical support for the thesis that it pays to be green. Large data sets have been constructed, measuring firm environmental behavior and financial performance across a wide number of industries and over many years. While the results are not unequivocal, there is evidence suggestive of a positive correlation between environmental performance and financial performance. In our own work, we find that, on average, a 10% decrease in a company's toxic emissions as reported in the US Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory — a database of toxic emissions from US manufacturing facilities— results in an average 3% increase in a firm's financial performance as measured by return on assets. Another study suggests that a 10% reduction in emissions could result in a $34 million increase in market value.

Scientific knowledge cannot account for correct aesthetic appreciation of nature because science represents natural objects as members of a specific class, rather than as individual entities. The science-based approach claims that aesthetically relevant properties are only those properties that all members of a natural kind share with each other. But this is not true. When we experience nature, we do not experience it as species, but as individual objects. And as separated into individual objects, nature can have aesthetic properties that are not entailed by its scientific description. Natural science can explain, for instance, the formation of the waterfall, but it has nothing to say about our experience of the majestic Victoria Falls when viewed at sunset, its reds and oranges countless and captivating; geology can explain the formation of the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, but not its painful and breathtaking beauty at sunrise, the fog slowly lifting above the crater and a lone hippopotamus dark and heavy in the lake.

Hygge, term that comes from Danish, is both a noun and a verb and does not have a direct translation into English. The closest word would have to be coziness, but that doesn't really do it justice. While hygge is centered around cozy activities, it also includes a mental state of well-being and togetherness. It's a holistic approach to deliberately creating intimacy, connection, and warmth with ourselves and those around us. When we hygee, we make a conscious decision to find joy in the simple things. For example, lighting candles and drinking wine with a close friend you haven't seen in a while, or sprawling out on a blanket while having a relaxing picnic in the park with a circle of your loved ones in the summertime can both be hygge.

During the late 1800s, printing became cheaper and faster, leading to an explosion in the number of newspapers and magazines and the increased use of images in these publications. Photographs, as well as woodcuts and engravings of them, appeared in newspapers and magazines. The increased number of newspapers and magazines created greater competition — driving some papers to print more salacious articles to attract readers. This yellow journalism sometimes took the form of gossip about public figures, as well as about socialites who considered themselves private figures, and even about those who were not part of high society but had found themselves involved in a scandal, crime, or tragedy that journalists thought would sell papers. Gossip was of course nothing new, but the rise of mass media in the form of widely distributed newspapers and magazines meant that gossip moved from limited (often oral only) distribution to wide, printed dissemination.

Some fad diets might have you running a caloric deficit, and while this might encourage weight loss, it has no effect on improving body composition, and it could actually result in a loss of muscle mass. Calorie restriction can also cause your metabolism to slow down, and significantly reduce energy levels. Controlling caloric intake to deliver the proper amount of calories so that the body has the energy it needs to function and heal is the only proper approach. Your body also needs the right balance of key macronutrients to heal and grow stronger. These macronutrients, which include protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats, can help your body maximize its ability to repair, rebuild, and grow stronger. Timing is also important. By eating the right combinations of these key macronutrients at strategic intervals throughout the day, we can help our bodies heal and grow even faster.

The problem of amino acid deficiency is not unique to the modern world by any means. Preindustrial humanity probably dealt with protein and amino acid insufficiency on a regular basis. Sure, large hunted animals such as mammoths provided protein and amino acids aplenty. However, living off big game in the era before refrigeration meant humans had to endure alternating periods of feast and famine. Droughts, forest fires, superstorms, and ice ages led to long stretches of difficult conditions, and starvation was a constant threat. The human inability to synthesize such basic things as amino acids certainly worsened those crises and made surviving on whatever was available that much harder. During a famine, it's not the lack of calories that is the ultimate cause of death; it's the lack of proteins and the essential amino acids they provide.

Charisma is eminently learnable and teachable, and in many ways, it follows one of Newton's famed laws of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is to say that all of charisma and human interaction is a set of signals and cues that lead to other signals and cues, and there is a science to deciphering which signals and cues work the most in your favor. In other words, charisma can often be simplified as a checklist of what to do at what time. However, it will require brief forays out of your comfort zone. Even though there may be a logically easy set of procedures to follow, it's still an emotional battle to change your habits and introduce new, uncomfortable behaviors that you are not used to. I like to say that it's just a matter of using muscles that have long been dormant. It will take some time to warm them up, but it's only through practice and action that you will achieve your desired goal.

There was an experiment conducted in 1995 by Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University. In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering an assortment of 24 bottles of jam to an assortment of just six bottles of jam. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one jar of jam. Here's the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only three percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar. Effectively, a greater number of people bought jam when the assortment size was 6 than when it was 24.

While complex, blockchains exhibit a set of core characteristics, which flow from the technology's reliance on a peer-to-peer network, public-private key cryptography, and consensus mechanisms. Blockchains are disintermediated and transnational. They are resilient and resistant to change, and enable people to store nonrepudiable data, pseudonymously, in a transparent manner. Most — if not all — blockchain-based networks feature market-based or game-theoretical mechanisms for reaching consensus, which can be used to coordinate people or machines. These characteristics, when combined, enable the deployment of autonomous software and explain why blockchains serve as a powerful new tool to facilitate economic and social activity that otherwise would be difficult to achieve. At the same time, these characteristics represent the technology's greatest limitations. The disintermediated and transnational nature of blockchains makes the technology difficult to govern and makes it difficult to implement changes to a blockchain's underlying software protocol. Because blockchains are pseudonymous and have a tamper-resistant data structure supported by decentralized consensus mechanisms, they can be used to coordinate socially unacceptable or criminal conduct, including conduct facilitated by autonomous software programs. Moreover, because blockchains are transparent and traceable, they are prone to being co-opted by governments or corporations, transforming the technology into a powerful tool for surveillance and control.

It was 1983 and Sloop was entering the sixth grade. The one class she looked forward to was chorus, but something happened early in the semester that is still in her memory. The students were arranged into groups on the risers: altos, sopranos, tenors, and baritones. The music teacher — a woman with a seemingly permanent frown on her face — led the choir in a familiar song, using a pointer to click the rhythm of the song on a music stand. Then the teacher started walking over toward Sloop. Suddenly she stopped the song and addressed her directly. Your voice is not blending in with the other girls at all. Just pretend to sing. For the rest of the year, whenever the choir sang, she mouthed the words. She recalls, Chorus was supposed to be my favorite thing. My family said I could sing, but the teacher said I couldn't. So I started to question everything. She began to act out, hanging out with the wrong crowd at school. It was a dark time. In the summer after her seventh-grade year, Sloop attended a camp for gifted kids and surprised herself by participating in chorus. During practice, she mouthed the words, but the teacher noticed it. After class she invited Sloop to sit next to her on the piano bench and asked her to sing together. Then the teacher looked her in the eyes and said, You have a distinctive, expressive, and beautiful voice. For the rest of that magical summer, Sloop experienced a metamorphosis, shedding her cocoon and emerging as a butterfly looking for light. She became confident in her singing. In high school, she joined the theater department and played the leading role in almost every musical production. She grew comfortable in front of audiences until, in her proudest moment, she sang with her choir at Carnegie Hall! This was the same girl who had once been told to mouth the words.