Dear Ms. Larson, I am writing to you with new information about your current membership. Last year, you signed up for our museum membership that provides special discounts. As stated in the last newsletter, this year we are happy to be celebrating our 50th anniversary. So we would like to offer you further benefits. These include free admission for up to ten people and 20% off museum merchandise on your next visit. You will also be invited to all new exhibition openings this year at discounted prices. We hope you enjoy these offers. For any questions, please feel free to contact us. Best regards, Stella Harrison

As Natalie was logging in to her first online counseling session, she wondered, How can I open my heart to the counselor through a computer screen? Since the counseling center was a long drive away, she knew that this would save her a lot of time. Natalie just wasn't sure if it would be as helpful as meeting her counselor in person. Once the session began, however, her concerns went away. She actually started thinking that it was much more convenient than expected. She felt as if the counselor were in the room with her. As the session closed, she told him with a smile, I'll definitely see you online again!

New ideas, such as those inspired by scientific developments, are often aired and critiqued in our popular culture as part of a healthy process of public debate, and scientists sometimes deserve the criticism they get. But the popularization of science would be greatly enhanced by improving the widespread images of the scientist. Part of the problem may be that the majority of the people who are most likely to write novels, plays, and film scripts were educated in the humanities, not in the sciences. Furthermore, the few scientists-turned-writers have used their scientific training as the source material for thrillers that further damage the image of science and scientists. We need more screenplays and novels that present scientists in a positive light. In our contemporary world, television and film are particularly influential media, and it is likely that the introduction of more scientist-heroes would help to make science more attractive.

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off. I used to be a frustrated writer. Making this switch turned me into a productive writer. Yet there wasn't a single day when I sat down to write an article, blog post, or book chapter without a string of people waiting for me to get back to them. It wasn't easy, and it still isn't, particularly when I get phone messages beginning I sent you an e-mail two hours ago...! By definition, this approach goes against the grain of others' expectations and the pressures they put on you. It takes willpower to switch off the world, even for an hour. It feels uncomfortable, and sometimes people get upset. But it's better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to abandon your dreams for an empty inbox. Otherwise, you're sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism.

Contractors that will construct a project may place more weight on the planning process. Proper planning forces detailed thinking about the project. It allows the project manager (or team) to build the project in his or her head. The project manager (or team) can consider different methodologies thereby deciding what works best or what does not work at all. This detailed thinking may be the only way to discover restrictions or risks that were not addressed in the estimating process. It would be far better to discover in the planning phase that a particular technology or material will not work than in the execution process. The goal of the planning process for the contractor is to produce a workable scheme that uses the resources efficiently within the allowable time and given budget. A well-developed plan does not guarantee that the executing process will proceed flawlessly or that the project will even succeed in meeting its objectives. It does, however, greatly improve its chances.

Children can move effortlessly between play and absorption in a story, as if both are forms of the same activity. The taking of roles in a narratively structured game of pirates is not very different than the taking of roles in identifying with characters as one watches a movie. It might be thought that, as they grow towards adolescence, people give up childhood play, but this is not so. Instead, the bases and interests of this activity change and develop to playing and watching sports, to the fiction of plays, novels, and movies, and nowadays to video games. In fiction, one can enter possible worlds. When we experience emotions in such worlds, this is not a sign that we are being incoherent or regressed. It derives from trying out metaphorical transformations of our selves in new ways, in new worlds, in ways that can be moving and important to us.

Although cognitive and neuropsychological approaches emphasize the losses with age that might impair social perception, motivational theories indicate that there may be some gains or qualitative changes. Charles and Carstensen review a considerable body of evidence indicating that, as people get older, they tend to prioritize close social relationships, focus more on achieving emotional well-being, and attend more to positive emotional information while ignoring negative information. These changing motivational goals in old age have implications for attention to and processing of social cues from the environment. Of particular importance in considering emotional changes in old age is the presence of a positivity bias: that is, a tendency to notice, attend to, and remember more positive compared to negative information. The role of life experience in social skills also indicates that older adults might show gains in some aspects of social perception.

The above graph, which was based on a survey conducted in 2019, shows the percentages of U.S. adults by age group who said they had read (or listened to) a book in one or more of the formats ― print books, e-books, and audiobooks ― in the previous 12 months. The percentage of people in the 18-29 group who said they had read a print book was 74%, which was the highest among the four groups. The percentage of people who said they had read a print book in the 50-64 group was lower than that in the 65 and up group. While 34% of people in the 18-29 group said they had read an e-book, the percentage of people who said so was below 20% in the 65 and up group. In all age groups, the percentage of people who said they had read an e-book was higher than that of people who said they had listened to an audiobook. Among the four age groups, the 30-49 group had the highest percentage of people who said they had listened to an audiobook.

Emil Zátopek, a former Czech athlete, is considered one of the greatest long-distance runners ever. He was also famous for his distinctive running style. While working in a shoe factory, he participated in a 1,500-meter race and won second place. After that event, he took a more serious interest in running and devoted himself to it. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, he won three gold medals in the 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter races and in the marathon, breaking Olympic records in each. He was married to Dana Zátopková, who was an Olympic gold medalist, too. Zátopek was also noted for his friendly personality. In 1966, Zátopek invited Ron Clarke, a great Australian runner who had never won an Olympic gold medal, to an athletic meeting in Prague. After the meeting, he gave Clarke one of his gold medals as a gift.

《Wing Cheese Factory Tour》 Attention, all cheese lovers! Come and experience our historic cheese-making process at the Wing Cheese Factory. Look around, taste, and make! Participation ∙ Adults: $30, Children: $10 (Ages 3 and under: Free) ∙ The fee includes cheese tasting and making. ∙ Sign up for the tour at www.cheesewcf.com by June 30. Tour Schedule ∙ 10:00 a.m.: Watch a video about the factory's history ∙ 10:30 a.m.: Factory tour and cheese tasting ∙ 11:30 a.m.: Cheese making Note ∙ Participants can buy a cheese-shaped key chain for $15. ∙ No photography is allowed inside the factory. ∙ We are closed on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

《Treehouse Drive-in Movie Night》 Looking for a fun night out with the family? Come with your loved ones and enjoy our first drive-in movie night of 2021! All money from ticket sales will be donated to the local children's hospital. Featured Film: Dream Story Date: June 13, 2021 Place: Treehouse Parking Lot Showtimes ∙ First Screening: 7:30 p.m. ∙ Second Screening: 10:00 p.m. Tickets: $30 per car Additional Information ∙ 50 parking spots are available (The gate opens at 6 p.m.). ∙ Ice cream and hot dogs are sold on site. ∙ Make your reservation online at www.tdimn.com.

Most historians of science point to the need for a reliable calendar to regulate agricultural activity as the motivation for learning about what we now call astronomy, the study of stars and planets. Early astronomy provided information about when to plant crops and gave humans their first formal method of recording the passage of time. Stonehenge, the 4,000-year-old ring of stones in southern Britain, is perhaps the best-known monument to the discovery of regularity and predictability in the world we inhabit. The great markers of Stonehenge point to the spots on the horizon where the sun rises at the solstices and equinoxes ― the dates we still use to mark the beginnings of the seasons. The stones may even have been used to predict eclipses. The existence of Stonehenge, built by people without writing, bears silent testimony both to the regularity of nature and to the ability of the human mind to see behind immediate appearances and discover deeper meanings in events.

Sport can trigger an emotional response in its consumers of the kind rarely brought forth by other products. Imagine bank customers buying memorabilia to show loyalty to their bank, or consumers identifying so strongly with their car insurance company that they get a tattoo with its logo. We know that some sport followers are so passionate about players, teams and the sport itself that their interest borders on obsession. This addiction provides the emotional glue that binds fans to teams, and maintains loyalty even in the face of on-field failure. While most managers can only dream of having customers that are as passionate about their products as sport fans, the emotion triggered by sport can also have a negative impact. Sport's emotional intensity can mean that organisations have strong attachments to the past through nostalgia and club tradition. As a result, they may ignore efficiency, productivity and the need to respond quickly to changing market conditions. For example, a proposal to change club colours in order to project a more attractive image may be defeated because it breaks a link with tradition.

The growth of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines, such as art history or palaeontology, and of particular figures such as the art critic, helped produce principles and practices for selecting and organizing what was worthy of keeping, though it remained a struggle. Moreover, as museums and universities drew further apart toward the end of the nineteenth century, and as the idea of objects as a highly valued route to knowing the world went into decline, collecting began to lose its status as a worthy intellectual pursuit, especially in the sciences. The really interesting and important aspects of science were increasingly those invisible to the naked eye, and the classification of things collected no longer promised to produce cutting-edge knowledge. The term butterfly collecting could come to be used with the adjective mere to indicate a pursuit of secondary academic status.

Some of the most insightful work on information seeking emphasizes strategic self-ignorance, understood as the use of ignorance as an excuse to engage excessively in pleasurable activities that may be harmful to one's future self. The idea here is that if people are present-biased, they might avoid information that would make current activities less attractive ― perhaps because it would produce guilt or shame, perhaps because it would suggest an aggregate trade-off that would counsel against engaging in such activities. St. Augustine famously said, God give me chastity ― tomorrow. Present-biased agents think: Please let me know the risks ― tomorrow. Whenever people are thinking about engaging in an activity with short-term benefits but long-term costs, they might prefer to delay receipt of important information. The same point might hold about information that could make people sad or mad: Please tell me what I need to know ― tomorrow.

Concepts of nature are always cultural statements. This may not strike Europeans as much of an insight, for Europe's landscape is so much of a blend. But in the new worlds ― 'new' at least to Europeans ― the distinction appeared much clearer not only to European settlers and visitors but also to their descendants. For that reason, they had the fond conceit of primeval nature uncontrolled by human associations which could later find expression in an admiration for wilderness. Ecological relationships certainly have their own logic and in this sense 'nature' can be seen to have a self-regulating but not necessarily stable dynamic independent of human intervention. But the context for ecological interactions has increasingly been set by humanity. We may not determine how or what a lion eats but we certainly can regulate where the lion feeds.

Emma Brindley has investigated the responses of European robins to the songs of neighbors and strangers. Despite the large and complex song repertoire of European robins, they were able to discriminate between the songs of neighbors and strangers. When they heard a tape recording of a stranger, they began to sing sooner, sang more songs, and overlapped their songs with the playback more often than they did on hearing a neighbor's song. As Brindley suggests, the overlapping of song may be an aggressive response. However, this difference in responding to neighbor versus stranger occurred only when the neighbor's song was played by a loudspeaker placed at the boundary between that neighbor's territory and the territory of the bird being tested. If the same neighbor's song was played at another boundary, one separating the territory of the test subject from another neighbor, it was treated as the call of a stranger. Not only does this result demonstrate that the robins associate locality with familiar songs, but it also shows that the choice of songs used in playback experiments is highly important.

Kinship ties continue to be important today. In modern societies such as the United States people frequently have family get-togethers, they telephone their relatives regularly, and they provide their kin with a wide variety of services. Eugene Litwak has referred to this pattern of behaviour as the 'modified extended family'. It is an extended family structure because multigenerational ties are maintained, but it is modified because it does not usually rest on co-residence between the generations and most extended families do not act as corporate groups. Although modified extended family members often live close by, the modified extended family does not require geographical proximity and ties are maintained even when kin are separated by considerable distances. In contrast to the traditional extended family where kin always live in close proximity, the members of modified extended families may freely move away from kin to seek opportunities for occupational advancement.

Spatial reference points are larger than themselves. This isn't really a paradox: landmarks are themselves, but they also define neighborhoods around themselves. In a paradigm that has been repeated on many campuses, researchers first collect a list of campus landmarks from students. Then they ask another group of students to estimate the distances between pairs of locations, some to landmarks, some to ordinary buildings on campus. The remarkable finding is that distances from an ordinary location to a landmark are judged shorter than distances from a landmark to an ordinary location. So, people would judge the distance from Pierre's house to the Eiffel Tower to be shorter than the distance from the Eiffel Tower to Pierre's house. Like black holes, landmarks seem to pull ordinary locations toward themselves, but ordinary places do not. This asymmetry of distance estimates violates the most elementary principles of Euclidean distance, that the distance from A to B must be the same as the distance from B to A. Judgments of distance, then, are not necessarily coherent.

A firm is deciding whether to invest in shipbuilding. If it can produce at sufficiently large scale, it knows the venture will be profitable. But one key input is low-cost steel, and it must be produced nearby. The company's decision boils down to this: if there is a steel factory close by, invest in shipbuilding; otherwise, don't invest. Now consider the thinking of potential steel investors in the region. Assume that shipyards are the only potential customers of steel. Steel producers figure they'll make money if there's a shipyard to buy their steel, but not otherwise. Now we have two possible outcomes ― what economists call multiple equilibria. There is a good outcome, in which both types of investments are made, and both the shipyard and the steelmakers end up profitable and happy. Equilibrium is reached. Then there is a bad outcome, in which neither type of investment is made. This second outcome also is an equilibrium because the decisions not to invest reinforce each other.

In most organizations, the employee's immediate supervisor evaluates the employee's performance. This is because the supervisor is responsible for the employee's performance, providing supervision, handing out assignments, and developing the employee. A problem, however, is that supervisors often work in locations apart from their employees and therefore are not able to observe their subordinates' performance. Should supervisors rate employees on performance dimensions they cannot observe? To eliminate this dilemma, more and more organizations are implementing assessments referred to as 360-degree evaluations. Employees are rated not only by their supervisors but by coworkers, clients or citizens, professionals in other agencies with whom they work, and subordinates. The reason for this approach is that often coworkers and clients or citizens have a greater opportunity to observe an employee's performance and are in a better position to evaluate many performance dimensions.

The role that sleep plays in evolution is still under study. One possibility is that it is an advantageous adaptive state of decreased metabolism for an animal when there are no more pressing activities. This seems true for deeper states of inactivity such as hibernation during the winter when there are few food supplies, and a high metabolic cost to maintaining adequate temperature. It may be true in daily situations as well, for instance for a prey species to avoid predators after dark. On the other hand, the apparent universality of sleep, and the observation that mammals such as cetaceans have developed such highly complex mechanisms to preserve sleep on at least one side of the brain at a time, suggests that sleep additionally provides some vital service(s) for the organism. This is particularly true since one aspect of sleep is decreased responsiveness to the environment. If sleep is universal even when this potential price must be paid, the implication may be that it has important functions that cannot be obtained just by quiet, wakeful resting.

The idea that planting trees could have a social or political significance appears to have been invented by the English, though it has since spread widely. According to Keith Thomas's history Man and the Natural World, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocrats began planting hardwood trees, usually in lines, to declare the extent of their property and the permanence of their claim to it. What can be more pleasant, the editor of a magazine for gentlemen asked his readers, than to have the bounds and limits of your own property preserved and continued from age to age by the testimony of such living and growing witnesses? Planting trees had the additional advantage of being regarded as a patriotic act, for the Crown had declared a severe shortage of the hardwood on which the Royal Navy depended.

The right to privacy may extend only to the point where it does not restrict someone else's right to freedom of expression or right to information. The scope of the right to privacy is similarly restricted by the general interest in preventing crime or in promoting public health. However, when we move away from the property-based notion of a right (where the right to privacy would protect, for example, images and personality), to modern notions of private and family life, we find it harder to establish the limits of the right. This is, of course, the strength of the notion of privacy, in that it can adapt to meet changing expectations and technological advances. In sum, what is privacy today? The concept includes a claim that we should be unobserved, and that certain information and images about us should not be circulated without our permission. Why did these privacy claims arise? They arose because powerful people took offence at such observation. Furthermore, privacy incorporated the need to protect the family, home, and correspondence from arbitrary interference and, in addition, there has been a determination to protect honour and reputation. How is privacy protected? Historically, privacy was protected by restricting circulation of the damaging material. But if the concept of privacy first became interesting legally as a response to reproductions of images through photography and newspapers, more recent technological advances, such as data storage, digital images, and the Internet, pose new threats to privacy. The right to privacy is now being reinterpreted to meet those challenges.