Dear Mr. Stevens, This is the chief editor of Novel Flash Fiction. As you were informed by our staff last week, your short story will be published in the December issue of Novel Flash Fiction. We thought hearing how you came up with your story would be meaningful to our readers. We would thus like to ask if you could give a speech about your writing process. This speech is expected to last for about an hour, and it will take place at Star Bookstore downtown. You can choose a specific date and time depending on your schedule. If you have any questions, please contact us by e-mail at editors@nff.com. We look forward to hearing how you wrote your story. Sincerely, Susanna Martinez

Sipping coffee leisurely at a café, Kate was enjoying the view of the Ponte Vecchio across the Arno. As an architect and professor, she had taught about the historical significance of the bridge to her students for years. A smile crept across her face. It was her first time to actually see it in person. Though not as old as the bridges of Rome, it was absolutely a work of art. If the fleeing Nazis had destroyed it during World War II, she would have never seen it. She was happy that she could view the bridge in the twilight. Free from her daily concerns, her mind began to wander from the unforgettable views of the still Arno to all the unexpected but pleasant encounters with other tourists. The trip was a rare liberating experience. Kate felt that all her concerns had melted away.

Sure, we've all heard the advice: Follow your passion. It's great when you hit the jackpot and find a career that melds your strengths and passions, and where there is demand in the highly competitive global marketplace of today. But if your goal is to get a job at the end of the rainbow, you must distinguish between your major, your passions, your strengths, and your career path. Your strengths are more important than your passions. Studies show that the best career choices tend to be grounded in things you're good at, more so than your interests and passions. Ideally, you want to find a convergence of your strengths and your values with a career path that is in demand. Interests can come and go. Your strengths are your core, your hard-wired assets.

Parents are quick to inform friends and relatives as soon as their infant holds her head up, reaches for objects, sits by herself, and walks alone. Parental enthusiasm for these motor accomplishments is not at all misplaced, for they are, indeed, milestones of development. With each additional skill, babies gain control over their bodies and the environment in a new way. Infants who are able to sit alone are granted an entirely different perspective on the world than are those who spend much of their day on their backs or stomachs. Coordinated reaching opens up a whole new avenue for exploration of objects, and when babies can move about, their opportunities for independent exploration and manipulation are multiplied. No longer are they restricted to their immediate locale and to objects that others place before them. As new ways of controlling the environment are achieved, motor development provides the infant with a growing sense of competence and mastery, and it contributes in important ways to the infant's perceptual and cognitive understanding of the world.

It is a strategic and tactical mistake to give an offensive position away to those who will use it to attack, criticize, and blame. Since opponents will undoubtedly attack, criticize, and blame, anyway, the advantages of being proactive, airing one's own dirty laundry, and telling on oneself are too significant to ignore. Chief among these advantages is the ability to control the first messages and how a story is first framed. That leaves others having to respond to you instead of the other way around. This approach is appropriately termed stealing thunder. When an organization steals thunder, it breaks the news about its own crisis before the crisis is discovered by the media or other interested parties. In experimental research by Arpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen, stealing thunder in a crisis situation, as opposed to allowing the information to be first disclosed by another party, resulted in substantially higher credibility ratings. As significant, the authors found that credibility ratings associated with stealing thunder directly predicted perceptions of the crisis as less severe.

If you've ever seen the bank of flashing screens at a broker's desk, you have a sense of the information overload they are up against. When deciding whether to invest in a company, for example, they may take into account the people at the helm; the current and potential size of its market; net profits; and its past, present, and future stock value, among other pieces of information. Weighing all of these factors can take up so much of your working memory that it becomes overwhelmed. Think of having piles and piles of papers, sticky notes, and spreadsheets strewn about your desk, and you get a picture of what's going on inside the brain. When information overloads working memory this way, it can make brokers ― and the rest of us ― scrap all the strategizing and analyses and go for emotional, or gut, decisions.

The above graph shows direct expenditures on education as a percentage of GDP for the five OECD countries with the highest percentages in 2011, by level of education. All the five countries spent over seven percent of their GDP on direct expenditures on education for all institutions combined. Of the five countries, Denmark spent the highest percentage of GDP for all institutions combined. In terms of direct expenditures on elementary and secondary education, New Zealand spent the highest percentage of GDP among the five countries. As for direct expenditures on postsecondary education, Iceland spent a lower percentage of GDP than the other four countries. Compared with the Republic of Korea, Israel spent a lower percentage of GDP on postsecondary education.

Born into a working-class family in 1872, Albert C. Barnes grew up in Philadelphia. He became interested in art when he became friends with future artist William Glackens in high school. He earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and qualified as a doctor in 1892. Barnes decided not to work as a doctor, and after further study he entered the business world. In 1901, he invented the antiseptic Argyrol with a German chemist and made a fortune. Using his wealth, he began purchasing hundreds of paintings. In 1922, he established the Barnes Foundation to promote the education of fine arts. There he displayed his huge collection without detailed explanation. He died in a car accident in 1951.

《Mountaintop Yodeling Contest》 Show off your yodeling skills with the backdrop of the beautiful Alps. ∙ Place: special outdoor stage set up at Mt. Billatus (2,545 m) ∙ Time & Date: 2:00 p.m. on June 12, 2017 ∙ Registration (online only): until June 1 (www.yodel.net) ∙Requirements: - All contestants should sing a 2-minute yodel of their choice. - All yodels should be sung either in French or in English. ∙ Prizes: - 1st place: a round-trip airplane ticket to London - 2nd place: a Swiss watch * The contest will be canceled if the weather is unfavorable.

《Summerville Forest Trail Tour》 Just five miles away from the big city, you can enjoy the huge variety of plants and wildlife at Summerville Forest. We offer a trail tour every Saturday from June to September. Come and join us! Tickets: ∙ $10 (for 8 and older) ∙ $5 (for children under 8) * Snacks and water will be provided. Tour Schedule: ∙ 8:30 a.m.－ 9:00 a.m. Introduction to Summerville Forest ∙ 9:00a.m.－11:00 a.m. Trail Walking Tour Reservations should be made online (www.summerville.net) at least one week in advance of your visit.

Though most bees fill their days visiting flowers and collecting pollen, some bees take advantage of the hard work of others. These thieving bees sneak into the nest of an unsuspecting normal bee (known as the host), lay an egg near the pollen mass being gathered by the host bee for her own offspring, and then sneak back out. When the egg of the thief hatches, it kills the host's offspring and then eats the pollen meant for its victim. Sometimes called brood parasites, these bees are also referred to as cuckoo bees, because they are similar to cuckoo birds, which lay an egg in the nest of another bird and leave it for that bird to raise. They are more technically called cleptoparasites. Clepto means thief in Greek, and the term cleptoparasite refers specifically to an organism that lives off another by stealing its food. In this case the cleptoparasite feeds on the host's hard-earned pollen stores.

Some coaches erroneously believe that mental skills training (MST) can only help perfect the performance of highly skilled competitors. As a result, they shy away from MST, rationalizing that because they are not coaching elite athletes, mental skills training is less important. It is true that mental skills become increasingly important at high levels of competition. As athletes move up the competitive ladder, they become more homogeneous in terms of physical skills. In fact, at high levels of competition, all athletes have the physical skills to be successful. Consequently, any small difference in mental factors can play a huge role in determining performance outcomes. However, we can anticipate that personal growth and performance will progress faster in young, developing athletes who are given mental skills training than in athletes not exposed to MST. In fact, the optimal time for introducing MST may be when athletes are first beginning their sport. Introducing MST early in athletes' careers may lay the foundation that will help them develop to their full potential.

Medicine became big business with the expansion of new, higher-cost treatments and the increased numbers of health care providers in the United States. As more health care providers entered the market, competition increased among them. Interestingly, the increase in competition led health care providers to recommend more services to the persons they served. This phenomenon reflects a unique feature in the health care industry ― provider-induced demand, which allows health care providers to maintain their income even as competition increases. Average consumers of health care do not know how to diagnose their medical conditions and do not have a license to order services or prescribe medications. So consumers rely on the knowledge of health care providers to determine what services are needed, even though they stand to make more money by ordering more services.

Interest in extremely long periods of time sets geology and astronomy apart from other sciences. Geologists think in terms of billions of years for the age of Earth and its oldest rocks ― numbers that, like the national debt, are not easily comprehended. Nevertheless, the time scales of geological activity are important for environmental geologists because they provide a way to measure human impacts on the natural world. For example, we would like to know the rate of natural soil formation from solid rock to determine whether topsoil erosion from agriculture is too great. Likewise, understanding how climate has changed over millions of years is vital to properly assess current global warming trends. Clues to past environmental change are well preserved in many different kinds of rocks.

Politics cannot be suppressed, whichever policy process is employed and however sensitive and respectful of differences it might be. In other words, there is no end to politics. It is wrong to think that proper institutions, knowledge, methods of consultation, or participatory mechanisms can make disagreement go away. Theories of all sorts promote the view that there are ways by which disagreement can be processed or managed so as to make it disappear. The assumption behind those theories is that disagreement is wrong and consensus is the desirable state of things. In fact, consensus rarely comes without some forms of subtle coercion and the absence of fear in expressing a disagreement is a source of genuine freedom. Debates cause disagreements to evolve, often for the better, but a positively evolving debate does not have to equal a reduction in disagreement. The suppression of disagreement should never be made into a goal in political deliberation. A defense is required against any suggestion that political disagreement is not the normal state of things.

To make plans for the future, the brain must have an ability to take certain elements of prior experiences and reconfigure them in a way that does not copy any actual past experience or present reality exactly. To accomplish that, the organism must go beyond the mere ability to form internal representations, the models of the world outside. It must acquire the ability to manipulate and transform these models. We can argue that tool-making, one of the fundamental distinguishing features of primate cognition, depends on this ability, since a tool does not exist in a ready-made form in the natural environment and has to be imagined in order to be made. The neural machinery for creating and holding 'images of the future' was a necessary prerequisite for tool-making, and thus for launching human civilization.

Since life began in the oceans, most life, including freshwater life, has a chemical composition more like the ocean than fresh water. It appears that most freshwater life did not originate in fresh water, but is secondarily adapted, having passed from ocean to land and then back again to fresh water. As improbable as this may seem, the bodily fluids of aquatic animals show a strong similarity to oceans, and indeed, most studies of ion balance in freshwater physiology document the complex regulatory mechanisms by which fish, amphibians and invertebrates attempt to maintain an inner ocean in spite of surrounding fresh water. It is these sorts of unexpected complexities and apparent contradictions that make ecology so interesting. The idea of a fish in a freshwater lake struggling to accumulate salts inside its body to mimic the ocean reminds one of the other great contradiction of the biosphere: plants are bathed in an atmosphere composed of roughly three-quarters nitrogen, yet their growth is frequently restricted by lack of nitrogen.

Since the concept of a teddy bear is very obviously not a genetically inherited trait, we can be confident that we are looking at a cultural trait. However, it is a cultural trait that seems to be under the guidance of another, genuinely biological trait: the cues that attract us to babies (high foreheads and small faces). Cute, baby-like features are inherently appealing, producing a nurturing response in most humans. Teddy bears that had a more baby-like appearance ― however slight this may have been initially ― were thus more popular with customers. Teddy bear manufacturers obviously noticed which bears were selling best and so made more of these and fewer of the less popular models, to maximize their profits. In this way, the selection pressure built up by the customers resulted in the evolution of a more baby-like bear by the manufacturers.

It takes time to develop and launch products. Consequently, many companies know 6—12 months ahead of time that they will be launching a new product. In order to create interest in the product, companies will often launch pre-market advertising campaigns. In the nutrition industry, articles are often written discussing a new nutrient under investigation. Over a series of issues, you begin to see more articles discussing this new nutrient and potential to enhance training and/or performance. Then, after 4—6 months, a new product is coincidentally launched that contains the ingredient that has been discussed in previous issues. Books and supplement reviews have also been used as vehicles to promote the sale of fitness and nutrition products. This marketing technique is called demand creation. It involves creating a buzz about a new potentially revolutionary nutrient or training technique through publishing articles and/or books that stimulate the reader's interest. Once this is done, a new product is launched.

There's a direct counterpart to pop music in the classical song, more commonly called an art song, which does not focus on the development of melodic material. Both the pop song and the art song tend to follow tried-and-true structural patterns. And both will be published in the same way ― with a vocal line and a basic piano part written out underneath. But the pop song will rarely be sung and played exactly as written; the singer is apt to embellish that vocal line to give it a styling, just as the accompanist will fill out the piano part to make it more interesting and personal. The performers might change the original tempo and mood completely. You won't find such extremes of approach by the performers of songs by Franz Schubert or Richard Strauss. These will be performed note for note because both the vocal and piano parts have been painstakingly written down by the composer with an ear for how each relates to the other.

In mature markets, breakthroughs that lead to a major change in competitive positions and to the growth of the market are rare. Because of this, competition becomes a zero sum game in which one organization can only win at the expense of others. However, where the degree of competition is particularly intense a zero sum game can quickly become a negative sum game, in that everyone in the market is faced with additional costs. As an example of this, when one of the major high street banks in Britain tried to gain a competitive advantage by opening on Saturday mornings, it attracted a number of new customers who found the traditional Monday-Friday bank opening hours to be a constraint. However, faced with a loss of customers, the competition responded by opening on Saturdays as well. The net effect of this was that, although customers benefited, the banks lost out as their costs increased but the total number of customers stayed the same. In essence, this proved to be a negative sum game.

In fiber processing the word 'spinning' means two quite different things. One is the formation of individual fibers by squeezing a liquid through one or more small openings in a nozzle called a spinneret and letting it harden. Spiders and silkworms have been spinning fibers in this way for millions of years, but chemists and engineers learned the procedure from them only about a century ago. In the other kind of spinning ― sometimes called throwing to prevent confusion with the first kind ― two or more fibers are twisted together to form a thread. Human beings discovered this art thousands of years ago, and they have invented several devices to make it easier and faster. The ancient distaff and spindle are examples that were replaced by the spinning wheel in the Middle Ages. Later came the spinning jenny, the water frame, and Crompton's mule ― spinning machines that became symbols of the Industrial Revolution.

When considered in terms of evolutionary success, many of the seemingly irrational choices that people make do not seem so foolish after all. Most animals, including our ancestors and modern-day capuchin monkeys, lived very close to the margin of survival. Paleontologists who study early human civilizations have uncovered evidence that our ancestors faced frequent periods of drought and freezing. When you are living on the verge of starvation, a slight downturn in your food reserves makes a lot more difference than a slight upturn. Anthropologists who study people still living in hunter-gatherer societies have discovered that they regularly make choices designed to produce not the best opportunity for obtaining a hyperabundant supply of food but, instead, the least danger of ending up with an insufficient supply. In other words, people everywhere have a strong motivation to avoid falling below the level that will feed themselves and their families. If our ancestors hadn't agonized over losses and instead had taken too many chances in going after the big gains, they'd have been more likely to lose out and never become anyone's ancestor.

According to many sociologists, the study of what our society calls 'art' can only really progress if we drop the highly specific and ideologically loaded terminology of 'art', 'artworks' and 'artists', and replace these with the more neutral and less historically specific terms 'cultural forms', 'cultural products' and 'cultural producers'. These cultural products ― be they paintings, sculptures, forms of music or whatever ― should be regarded as being made by certain types of cultural producer, and as being used by particular groups of people in particular ways in specific social contexts. By using the more neutral term 'cultural products' for particular objects, and 'cultural producers' for the people who make those objects, the sociologist seeks to break with a view that she/he sees as having dominated the study of cultural forms for too long, namely trying to understand everything in terms of the category 'art'. This is a category that is too limited and context-specific to encompass all the different cultural products that people in different societies make and use. It is a term that is also too loaded to take at face value and to use naively in study of our own society. Since it is in the interests of certain social groups to define some things as 'art' and others as not, the very term 'art' itself cannot be uncritically used by the sociologist who wishes to understand how and why such labelling processes occur. Quite simply, then, in order to study cultural matters, many sociologists believe one has to reject the terms 'art', 'artwork' and 'artist' as the basis for our analysis. Instead, these terms become important objects of analysis themselves.

Andrew steadied his eyes upon the black and white squares. He thought awhile before pushing his knight to an unbeatable position. Now Andrew was sure he had beaten Timothy Tandon, the winner of the 2016 National Chess Championship. Andrew, whom nobody had noticed before the tournament this year, came to progress to the final match. After enjoying this memorable victory, Andrew headed straight to the nursing home where his sick grandad was staying. When Andrew reached the nursing home, Grandad was sitting up in bed. You won the semi-final? he asked, offering up a weak smile. Andrew nodded his head. Indeed, Andrew's grandad was his chess master. As a kid, Andrew liked to observe Grandad play chess and often predicted his moves even before he began to move the pieces. Andrew, said Grandad, inspired by his grandson's superb victory, you are now all set to fulfill my dream. Tomorrow you will surely win the National Chess Championship. It was the day of the final match. That morning Andrew had received a call from the nursing home informing him that Grandad's condition had become serious. The news played upon Andrew's mind as he started to play. After several fierce battles, Andrew's concentration wavered for a moment. His mind travelled to his grandad, who was in another battle for his life. It was then that Andrew made a big mistake! The mistake was a fatal one, and it was all over. He had lost. Andrew arrived at the nursing home in a gloomy mood, but he was blessed with good news. His grandad was recovering. Andrew was greatly delighted, but he could not help being disappointed in a corner of his mind. I tried my best to fulfill your dream but I couldn't make it, Andrew said in disappointment. That's all right, said Grandad. The real lesson of chess is learning how to tame your mind. See, my mind has won the battle over my body. I will recover soon and see you become champion one day in perfect health. Andrew was relieved and smiled with joy.