Harold Allen, Manager Smalltown Transit Authority Dear Mr. Allen: On behalf of the Lakeview Senior Apartment Complex, I want to thank the Smalltown Transit Authority for adding a stop on Route 16 to serve the residents. Since you accepted our petition, the bus company will initiate the service to the front door of our complex every day between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M. heading into town, and from 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. returning from Smalltown. We very much appreciate the chance to travel independently to town for shopping and entertainment, and plan to support the bus service as best we can. Sincerely, Ron Miller

Anna received a cute handkerchief as a gift for her tenth birthday. Accidentally an inkpot fell onto her beloved handkerchief causing a huge ugly spot. Anna was heartbroken when she saw the hideous stain. When her uncle saw that she was gloomy, he took the stained handkerchief and by retouching the inky spot changed it into a beautiful design of a flower. Now the handkerchief was more gorgeous than before. As he handed it back to Anna, she exclaimed with joy, Oh! Is that my handkerchief? Yes, it is, assured her uncle. It is really yours. I have changed the stain into a beautiful rose.

In business school they teach an approach to management decisions that is designed to overcome our natural tendency to cling to the familiar, whether or not it works. If an executive wants to examine a company policy, he or she first puts aside whatever has been done historically, and focuses instead on what the policy should be. Follow the same approach as you examine how you should look, speak and act to best achieve your objectives. Don't assume that there is some inherent value to the way you have always done things. Keep focused on becoming the best you can be, not how you have always been.

Competition makes the world go round. It is the engine of evolution and the foundation of democracy. It prompts innovation, drives global markets, and puts money in the pocket. Still, there are those who have argued that competition is a source of evil. They see competition in terms of destructiveness: they don't believe it's a constructive activity. They assert that competition kills off more prosocial behaviors, such as cooperation and respect. The assumption that competition is the opposite of cooperation is missing something crucial. To compete, both opponents have to cooperate on the rules: there's a mutual agreement of cooperation that governs the competition. As well, competitions are commonly among teams; each individual needs to cooperate with team members in order to compete effectively. Healthy competition can't happen without cooperation. In fact, the hormones that drive us to compete are the same hormones that drive us to collaborate.

The concept of 'degrowth' asks: do I really need this object, or am I buying it because I like the feeling of buying something? It originated from the ideas of ecological economics and anti-consumerism. The key to the concept is that reducing your consumption will not reduce your wellbeing; rather, it will maximize your happiness by allowing you to have more time and savings to spend on things like art, music, family, and community. Today we consume 26 times more stuff than we did 60 years ago. But ask yourself: are we 26 times happier? Consider what Mahatma Gandhi said: Not all our gold and jewelry could satisfy our hunger and quench our thirst.

The extraordinary expansion of food production by aquafarming has come with high costs to the environment and human health. As with industrialized agriculture, most commercial aquafarming relies on high energy and chemical inputs, including antibiotics and artificial feeds made from the wastes of poultry processing. Such production practices tend to concentrate toxins in farmed fish, creating a potential health threat to consumers. The discharge from fish farms, which can be equivalent to the sewage from a small city, can pollute nearby natural aquatic ecosystems. Around the tropics, especially tropical Asia, the expansion of commercial shrimp farms is contributing to the loss of highly biodiverse coastal mangrove forests.

The graph above shows the preferences of Americans for what media to use to find out about new music in 2010 and 2015. The most preferred medium in 2015 was the Internet, taking up 44 percent, while in 2010 the radio was the most preferred medium, accounting for 39 percent. In each of the following categories: Radio, Television, and Newspaper, there was a preference decrease in 2015 compared to 2010. The gap in the radio preference between 2010 and 2015 was larger than the television preference gap in the same period. Newspaper was the least preferred medium among Internet, Radio, Television and Newspaper in both 2010 and 2015. The percentage of those who chose other than Internet, Radio, Television, and Newspaper was the same in both years.

Elephant Butte Reservoir is the 84th largest man-made lake in the United States and the largest in New Mexico by total surface area. It is the only place in New Mexico where one can find pelicans resting alongside the lake. The reservoir is also part of the largest state park in New Mexico, Elephant Butte Lake State Park. Elephant Butte Reservoir derives its name from an island in the lake, a flat-topped, eroded volcanic core in the shape of an elephant. The reservoir is part of the Rio Grande Project, a project to provide power to south-central New Mexico and west Texas. There has been a decrease in the water level because of years of drought. However, fishing is still a popular recreational activity on the reservoir, which mainly contains different types of bass.

《13th Annual Green Youth Forum》 The 13th Annual Green Youth Forum will provide the opportunity to discuss environmental issues with local leaders. The forum is open only to high school students of Bradford City. • Place: City Community Center • Date & Time: Saturday, December 19th, 2015 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. •Featured Speeches by: - Mayor Bob Ross - Environmentalist Todd Gloria Pre-registration is required. For more information, visit www.greenyouthforum.org.

《Ski & Snowboard Camps》 ■ Sessions: Week 1: January 3rd – January 9th Week 2: January 10th – January 16th ■ Time: The training on snow starts at 10:00 a.m. and ends at 5:00 p.m. every day. To rent your skis/snowboard and helmet, you must arrive by 9:30 a.m. ■ Campers: Our camps are available for ages 12–17. ■ Fee: The registration fee is $250 per week (not including equipment rental and lift pass). ■ Registration: Registration should be made online or by calling 717-123-5678.

If we create a routine, we don't have to expend precious energy every day prioritizing everything. We must simply expend a small amount of initial energy to create the routine, and then all that is left to do is follow it. There is a huge body of scientific research to explain the mechanism by which routine enables difficult things to become easy. One simplified explanation is that as we repeatedly do a certain task the neurons, or nerve cells, make new connections through communication gateways called 'synapses.' With repetition, the connections strengthen and it becomes easier for the brain to activate them. For example, when you learn a new word it takes several repetitions at various intervals for the word to be mastered. To recall the word later you will need to activate the same synapses until eventually you know the word without consciously thinking about it.

Traditionally, most ecologists assumed that community stability―the ability of a community to withstand environmental disturbances―is a consequence of community complexity. That is, a community with considerable species richness may function better and be more stable than a community with less species richness. According to this view, the greater the species richness, the less critically important any single species should be. With many possible interactions within the community, it is unlikely that any single disturbance could affect enough components of the system to make a significant difference in its functioning. Evidence for this hypothesis includes the fact that destructive outbreaks of pests are more common in cultivated fields, which are low-diversity communities, than in natural communities with greater species richness.

On a spring day in New York's Central Park, a balloon salesman was busy trying to sellhis balloons. In order to gain the attention of those walking in the park, from time to time he would release a brightly colored balloon and let it rise into the sky. In the sunny afternoon, a little African-American boy approached him. The boy was shy and had a poor self-image. He had been watching the man and had a question for him. Mister, if you let a black balloon go, will it rise too? The balloon salesman knew what he was asking. Sweetheart, he explained. It doesn't matter what color the balloon is. It's not what's on the outside that makes it rise; it's what's on the inside that makes it go up.

Today it often seems we remember very little. When I wake up, the first thing I do is check my day planner, which remembers my schedule so that I don't have to. When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into the GPS, whose spatial memory supplants my own. When I sit down to work, I open up a notebook that holds the contents of my interviews. Now, thanks to the Internet, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory. Growing up, in the days when you still had to press seven buttons, or turn a clunky rotary dial, to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most people do. Our gadgets eliminate the need to remember such things.

When children are very young, you first say no to protect them from danger. You say it because you love your child and because you must teach him to protect himself. Just as saying no is a tool to help ensure your child's physical safety, it also contributes to his emotional security. When you set limits on your child's behavior, whether it's telling a five-year-old he can't hit the baby or telling a teenager he can't stay out past midnight, you're letting him know that his actions don't happen in a vacuum. He is connected to someone(you) who watches and cares what he does. All children need a safe space in which to grow and develop. While it's a child's nature to test the limits of that space, by climbing higher, venturing farther, or asking for more of what he wants, it's also comforting for him to know he is not out there alone.

Imagine tossing a coin over and over, and let's say that the coin has landed heads up six times in a row. Many people believe that in this situation the coin is more likely to come up tails than heads on the next toss. But this conclusion is wrong, and this belief is commonly referred to as the gambler's fallacy. The logic leading to this fallacy seems to be that if the coin is fair, then a series of tosses should contain equal numbers of heads and tails. If no tails have appeared for a while, then some are overdue to bring about this balance. But how could this be? The coin has no memory, so it has no way of knowing how long it has been since the last tails. More generally, there simply is no mechanism through which the history of the previous tosses could influence the current one. Therefore, the likelihood of a tail on toss number 7 is 50-50, just as it was on the first toss, and just as it is on every toss.

One of the underlying principles of investing is based upon the relationship between risk and return. The risk associated with an investment can be defined as the probability of earning an expected profit. For example, if you deposit $1,000 into a savings account at your local bank, you would expect this to be a low-risk investment. Banks are generally conservative, and savings accounts are guaranteed by the federal government up to a certain dollar amount. If the bank promises to pay you a 2 percent annual interest rate, the chances are great that at the end of one year you will have $1,020. Thus, there is a high probability that you will earn a 2 percent annual profit, and this would be considered a low-risk investment.

To name is to call into existence ― to call out of nothingness, wrote French philosopher Georges Gusdorf. Words give you a tool to create how you perceive the world by naming and labeling what you experience. You undoubtedly learned in your elementary science class that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity. It would be more accurate to say that he labeled rather than discovered it. His use of the word gravity gave us a cognitive category; we now converse about the pull of the earth's forces that keeps us from flying into space. Words give us the symbolic vehicles to communicate our creations and discoveries to others.

Applying a single plan to everything can be inefficient and sometimes comical. Perhaps you remember the folktale about the lazy son who gets scolded by his mother for losing the money he received as payment from a farmer. Next time you get paid, his mother says sternly, be sure to carry it home in your pocket. But the following day the boy goes to work for a dairy farmer, who pays him with a pail of milk instead of money. Anxious not to anger his mother, the boy dutifully pours the milk into his pocket. Although his mother's plan was good, it could work only when used in the right circumstance. The same idea applies to your study plans. For example, writing out your notes in full sentences makes sense if the goal is to study a textbook. But if you used the same plan for taking lecture notes, you'd move so slowly that you'd miss most of what the instructor said. The secret is to find a plan that fits your goal.

Composition is not just about framing the picture, it is also pressing the camera shutter at exactly the right moment. Get the timing wrong, and the picture may well lose some of its energy. For some subjects, the key times at which to take pictures are obvious, such as the moment when a winner crosses the finishing line. On such occasions, preparation and practice count as much as good luck. But with other, less predictable, events there can be magical moments ― when constantly changing conditions and people suddenly come together to create a strong, beautiful, energetic composition. Such moments might be when two or more elements combine in a certain way. On a stormy day, for example, a beautiful building might suddenly be illuminated by a shaft of light, creating a moody scene that might never be recaptured. To make the most of these decisive moments requires patience and the vision to see what might happen, even before it presents itself in the viewfinder.

When you are stressed out, you may not even realize all of the ways in which your mind and body are affected. However, you can easily recognize this connection between tension and memory, if you stop and think about a time when your memory failed because you were overly anxious. For example, your boss suddenly asks you for a key fact or number during a big, highly anticipated meeting. You freeze up and can't remember it even though you knew it well the night before. But if a co-worker asks you the same question while passing in the hall, you easily recall the information and immediately provide the right answer. Reducing stress and tension will help you improve your memory dramatically. Just by maintaining a calm, focused attitude toward whatever you are doing, you will be able to reduce the negative effects of intense anxiety so you can perform at your best.

Throughout history, people have changed their behavior to avoid taxes. Centuries ago, the Duke of Tuscany imposed a tax on salt. Tuscan bakers responded by eliminating salt in their recipes and giving us the delicious Tuscan bread we enjoy today. If you visit Amsterdam, you will notice that almost all the old houses are narrow and tall. They were constructed that way to minimize property taxes, which were based on the width of a house. Consider another architectural example, the invention of the mansard roof in France. Property taxes were often imposed on the number of rooms in a house and, therefore, rooms on the second or third floor were considered just as ratable as those on the ground floor. But if a mansard roof was constructed on the third floor, those rooms were considered to be part of an attic and not taxed.

An experiment was conducted by Amos Tversky at Harvard Medical School in 1982. The physicians were asked to decide to recommend either surgery or radiation for their patients with lung cancer. Half of the physicians were told, The one-month survival rate for surgery is 90%. Given this information, 84% of the physicians chose to recommend surgery over radiation. The other physicians were provided with this information about surgery outcomes: There is a 10% mortality rate in the first month. Given this latter information, only 50% of the physicians recommended surgery. As you may have realized, the two statements describe the same outcome. However, when the same outcome statistics are framed in terms of 'survival,' substantially more physicians choose the surgery. But when the outcomes are framed in terms of 'mortality,' the percentage of physicians who choose surgery drops greatly. This effect has been demonstrated in politics, medicine, advertising, and all areas in which people make decisions.

As an expert in the area of neuroeconomics, Baba Shiv carried out a fantastic experiment. He thought that 'cognitive load' (having lots to hold in your head ― a situation most professionals find themselves in) might influence self-control. He gave half his volunteers a two-digit number to remember (representing a low cognitive load) and gave the other half a seven-digit number (a high load). The volunteers were then told to walk to another room in the building and in so doing pass a table where they had to choose between chocolate cake (high fat and sugary food) or fruit salad (low fat and nutritious food). Of the people with the high load, 59 percent opted for cake whereas only 37 percent of the people with the low load did. Shiv thinks that remembering seven numbers required cognitive resources that had to come from somewhere, and in this case were taken from our ability to control our urges! Anatomically this is reasonable because working memory (where we 'store' the seven or two numbers) and self-control are both located in the same part of our brain. The brain cells that would normally be helping us make healthy food choices were otherwise engaged in remembering seven numbers. In those instances we have to rely on our more impulsive emotions, such as 'Mmmm yummy! Chocolate cake please.'

Henry's father was a house painter. In his lifetime, he must have painted hundreds of houses, inside and out. He was a happy, outgoing man who made friends easily. It wasn't hard to tell that he loved his work as well as his life. He was also an excellent painter. No one could paint a wall like him, which is why his services were always in demand. Once, while in college, Henry went to help his father paint a house. Henry was working inside and noticed how skilled his father was at quickly applying a quality coat of paint to a wall. As a matter of fact, while carrying on a conversation with the homeowner, laughing the whole time, his father applied generous amounts of paint to the wall. He painted three walls compared to Henry's one. At one point, Henry's father stopped working and watched him. He noticed how Henry took his time dipping the brush in the paint bucket and how he carefully wiped off both sides of the brush as he pulled it out in order not to waste any paint. Henry then spread a thin coat of paint on the wall without spilling a drop. It was a slow, tedious process, but he dared not laugh or kid around for fear of making a mess and embarrassing his father. Finally, his father offered Henry some advice. Don't worry about spills and messes. They can always be cleaned up. Treat a wall the way you treat people ― be generous, have fun. Always put enough paint on the brush. With that, he turned and applied a thick coat of paint to the wall, resuming his conversation with the homeowner. His father did spill a few drops but made a better-looking wall while having fun.