Everyone would like to assume that their wonderful, creative ideas will sell themselves. But as Galileo, Edvard Munch, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and millions of others have discovered, they do not. On the contrary, creative ideas are usually viewed with suspicion and distrust. Thus, students need to learn how to persuade other people of the value of their ideas. This selling is part of the practical aspect of creative thinking. If students do a science project, it is a good idea for them to present it and demonstrate why it makes an important contribution. If they develop a plan for a new form of government, they should explain why it is better than the existing form of government.

In the nineteenth century, a decisive moment occurred when people in advertising and journalism discovered that if they framed their stories and appeals with fear, they could capture our attention. It is an emotion we find hard to resist or control, and so they constantly shifted our focus to new possible sources of anxiety: the latest health scare, the new crime wave, and endless hazards in the environment of which we were not aware. With the increasing sophistication of the media and the haunting quality of the imagery, they have been able to give us the feeling that we are fragile creatures in an environment full of danger ― even though we live in a world infinitely safer and more predictable than anything our ancestors knew. With their help, our anxieties have only increased.

In the past, many public-sector recreation providers allowed people free access or charged for permits to control the amount or season for different recreational activities such as fishing or horse-riding. However, governments and other public agencies are finding that funding to maintain sites and facilities, to cope with increased demand on the landscape, is becoming difficult to maintain. Opportunities to charge visitors for appropriate services to help compensate for these costs are being considered as one solution. This is a sensitive matter, as free access for all people to the outdoors is a much cherished right. There is also an additional dilemma for public agencies where recreation facilities are already provided from public money, and it could be argued that the taxpayer is being charged twice. Thus, care is needed by public bodies to ensure that charges are only made for services that are clearly additional to the provision of free access.

Zaynab Fawwaz was born into a poor family in South Lebanon. As a young girl she went to Alexandria with the Egyptian family for whom she worked. Her mistress was intrigued by her maid' native intelligence and introduced Zaynab to her literate friend, Fatima. She, in turn, taught her reading, writing and arithmetic. Zaynab quickly learned what her teacher had to offer and in time went on to study with Egyptian scholars. Eventually, she became very active in women' issues and she wrote some pioneering poetry and essays focused on women' rights. The most famous of her essays was The Zaynab Letters.

Given that music appears to enhance physical and mental skills, are there circumstances where music is damaging to performance? One domain where this is of considerable significance is music' potentially damaging effects on the ability to drive safely. Evidence suggests an association between loud, fast music and reckless driving, but how might music' ability to influence driving in this way be explained? One possibility is that drivers adjust to temporal regularities in music, and that their speed is influenced accordingly. In other words, just as faster music causes people to eat faster, so it causes people to drive at faster speeds, as they engage mentally and physically with ongoing repeated structures in the music.

England' plan to establish colonies in North America, starting in the late sixteenth century, was founded on a false idea. It was generally assumed that Virginia, the region of the North American continent to which England laid claim, would have the same climate as the Mediterranean region of Europe, since it lay at similar latitudes. As a result, the English hoped that the American colonies, once established, would be able to supply Mediterranean goods such as olives and fruit and reduce England' dependence on imports from continental Europe. One prospectus claimed that the colonies would provide he wines, fruit and salt of France and Spain ... the silks of Persia and Italy. Similarly, abundant timber would do away with the need to import wood from Scandinavia. In short, America was mistakenly expected to be a land of plenty that would quickly turn a profit.

The above graph shows the comparison between the allocated budget and actual spending for six departments at Triton Ventures in 2012. The Customer Service department was allocated 60,000 dollars, which was greater than the amount allocated to any other department. On the other hand, in terms of actual spending, the top two departments that spent the most were Marketing and Development. The Customer Service and Information Technology departments spent the same amount of money, which was 20,000 dollars. The actual spending by the Administration department was less than half the allocated budget. The Sales department showed the smallest gap between the allocated budget and its actual spending among the six departments.

In her art, Georgia O'Keeffe clearly showed a pioneering spirit and an intensely individual style. At age twenty-seven, while teaching art in South Carolina, O'Keeffe began a series of simple, abstract charcoal drawings that expressed her own ideas and feelings. She sent these drawings to a friend in New York, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, the owner of the influential gallery 291. Stieglitz hailed them as the purest, finest, sincerest things. O'Keeffe' greatest source of inspiration was nature. Her best-known paintings are large, extreme close-ups of flowers; the simplified and magnified views compel us to look at them in a new way and to discover their inner essence. At the same time, the paintings become abstract arrangements of color and line, light and shadow. While in New Mexico, she was also fascinated by the simple geometric grace of adobe churches and the majesty of the desert.

Appearance creates the first impression customers have of food, and first impressions are important. No matter how appealing the taste, an unattractive appearance is hard to overlook. As humans, we do at with our eyes because our sense of sight is more highly developed than the other senses. The sense of sight is so highly developed in humans that messages received from other senses are often ignored if they conflict with what is seen. Yellow candy is expected to be lemon-flavored, and if it is grape-flavored, many people cannot correctly identify the flavor. Strawberry ice cream tinted with red food coloring seems to have a stronger strawberry flavor than one that has no added food coloring, even when there is no real difference.

The Rust Belt is notorious for its poor air quality. For decades, coal plants, steel production, and auto emissions have pumped particulates like sulfate into the atmosphere over the eastern U.S. Especially before air quality laws began appearing in the 1970s, particulate pollution was behind acid rain, respiratory disease, and ozone depletion. But a new study from Harvard University suggests that the Rust Belt' thick particulate fog may have helped slow down the effects of climate change, particularly when it was thickest. Throughout the 20th century, global temperatures have gone up by just under one degree Celsius. But in the U.S., eastern and central states haven' seen the same rise. In fact, temperatures there actually decreased over the same period. The reason seems to be particulate pollution. Instead of trapping warm air in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide, fine particles like sulfate reflect the sun' light and heat. They may even group with watery cloud droplets, which do the same thing. The effect is a net cooling across entire regions.

Suppose a survivor from an airplane crash with severe injuries struggles for days through the jungle but dies just before reaching a village. It is tempting to think if only he had managed to walk to the village, he would have been rescued. But suppose you must try to console the victim' relatives. What might you say? Or suppose you wish to defend the rescue team who got as far as the village but no further. Your motivation to console or defend may influence the alternative you imagine. You may decide to emphasize the severity of the victim' injuries and suggest even if he had managed to walk to the village, he still would have died. Sometimes thoughts about what might have been change an antecedent event (the victim walked to the village) but leave the outcome unchanged (he still died). Even if... conditionals have been called semifactual because they combine a counterfactual antecedent and a factual consequence. Imagined semifactual alternatives are intriguing because, unlike other thoughts about what might have been, they suggest that the outcome is inevitable.

The so-called Mozart effect ㅡ listening to Mozart will make your child smarter ㅡ is a good example of a scientific finding being distorted by the media through hype not warranted by the research. It all started when researchers reported that after exposure to a selection of Mozart' music, college students showed an increase in spatial reasoning for about 10 minutes on tasks like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Note first that the research was done on college students, not infants, and that the effect was very brief. In addition, no one' been able to replicate the research. The increase in spatial reasoning, it turns out, can be generated by any auditory stimulation (e.g., listening to a short story or other types of music) that keeps people alert while being tested. However, none of this has stopped eager parents ㅡ spurred on by fantastic claims from unethical companies ― from purchasing Mozart CDs for their babies.

As the structures of our world and the conditions of certainty have yielded to an avalanche of change, the extent of our longing for stable, definitive leadership has been exceeded only by the impossibility of finding it. The fault lies not with leadership but rather with ourselves and our expectations. In the old days, leaders were supposed to make sense of chaos, to make certainty out of doubt, and to create positive action plans for the resolution of paradoxes. Good leaders straightened things out. Should chaos rear its ugly head, the leader was expected to restore normality immediately. But chaos is now considered normal, paradoxes cannot be resolved, and certainty is possible only to the level of high probability. Leadership that attempts to deliver in terms of fixing any of these can only fail. And that is exactly what is happening.

When a company comes out with a new product, its competitors typically go on the defensive, doing whatever they can to reduce the odds that the offering will eat into their sales. Responses might include increasing marketing efforts, offering discounts to channel partners, and even lobbying for regulations that would hinder the rival' expansion. In many cases, though, such actions are misguided. Although the conventional wisdom that a rival' launch will hurt profits is often correct, my research shows that companies sometimes see profits increase after a rival' launch. The underlying mechanism is pretty simple: When a company comes out with a new product, it often raises the prices of its existing products. This might be designed to make the new product look cheaper and thus more attractive by comparison. As that company adjusts its pricing, its competitors can do the same without risking customer defections over price.

All human societies have economic systems within which goods and services are produced, distributed, and consumed. In one sense, the economic aspect of culture is simply the sum of the choices people make regarding these areas of their lives. These choices critically determine much of people' lives. For example, choosing to become a farmer rather than an insurance broker may determine where you live, who you are likely to meet, the sorts of behaviors you will expect in your spouse and offspring, and so on. However, such choices are not unlimited; rather, they are limited by our cultures, traditions, and technologies. Furthermore, our environments set the boundaries within which choices about the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services are made. To the extent that economic systems are part of culture, people in different cultures have different sorts of economic behavior.

Organic farmers grow crops that are no less plagued by pests than those of conventional farmers; insects generally do not discriminate between organic and conventional as well as we do. It is true that they are far more likely than conventional farmers to practice environmentally beneficial forms of biological control, and that they are also more likely to sensibly diversify their crops to reduce infestation. However, most organic farmers have no choice but to rely on chemicals as necessary supplements to their operations. With pests often consuming up to 40 percent of the crops grown in the United States, they do so as a matter of course. They might refer to these substances as botanical extracts. But according to Ned Groth, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, these toxins are not necessarily less worrisome because they are natural.

Jason always seemed to have a tough time in classes, except in the ones where he could do something. In the classes in which the teachers just stood and talked, or told everyone to read, he seemed to get bored and restless. But the ones in which he could get up and do things like industrial arts, drama, science projects, or P.E. were always his favorites. He soon realized that he was not a slow or unmotivated learner; he was a kinesthetic learner. Once he figured this out, he started to use this information to his advantage. He would draw out what he learned from class on notes, posters, and doodles. He would act out things and work with other students on projects using role play and drama. This helped his learning come alive, and he was less bored. As a result, he not only enjoyed school more, but his grades also went up.

A narrative is not a myth the first time it is told, but only a story or an account. What makes a story a myth is the fact that it is received by a given society and that a given society participates in its transmission. Obviously, it is difficult to determine just when any story becomes a myth, but it is clear that a narrative is not a myth when it is first told. The intentions of the first narrator and the last narrator can be the same, but this still does not give any special status to the creator of a myth. It is far more important to realize that the intentions of a given society in transmitting a narrative may have nothing to do with the purposes of its author. Thus we can never identify any individual creator of a myth. So long as myth is a collective narrative by definition, the only relevant consideration are the mentality and purposes of the society for which the myth is a myth.

Carrying capacity is the number of individuals that the local resources can sustain. Individuals in a population that has exceeded the carrying capacity of its habitat may have poor health and suffer from malnutrition because of the compromised living conditions. When this happens, the weakest individuals may die, or the population as a whole may become more vulnerable to further environmental stress or disease. Sometimes a large number of individuals in a population die as a result of overshooting the carrying capacity of their habitat. This is known as a die-off. Certain animals and plants have a built-in sense of carrying capacity, so that instead of overshooting and having a die-off, they remain within the limits of their habitat' ability to support them. Lake trout, for instance, stop breeding as prolifically when the population density increases too dramatically. Although this is the result of individual responses to chemical signals from other trout rather than a thought-out response on the part of the trout, the result is that population numbers may remain steady for extended periods. The trout will produce more offspring and mature to a reproductive size at a faster rate when populations are threatened, such as when aggressive fishing takes place. When space and food are scarce, such as when a lot of fish are living together in a small pond, the trout remain smaller and reproduce more slowly. Experiments have shown that no matter what number of lake trout a pond is stocked with in the beginning, the population will increase until it reaches a particular density, then level off at about the same number.

In Australia a few years ago, I met a remarkable man named John Walton. He has since become a close friend. He told me that when he started out in life he seemed to be caught in a peculiar failure pattern. Whatever he tried would start out well and then end up badly. As a schoolboy he dropped out of several schools for this reason. He became convinced that it was his destiny in life to make good beginnings and then watch them fade away. At one point, John got a job with the Australian division of a famous American company. The same dreary pattern seemed to be unfolding: He started out well, and then things began to slide. This didn' surprise him much; it was what he expected to happen. Then the company sent a motivational speaker out to give some talks to their Australian employees, and John was in the audience. The visitor told his listeners to visualize themselves moving up in the company, receiving promotions, gaining energy as they went, right up to the very top. The speaker also said, Most of you are letting the fear of failure hold you back. All the ingredients of success are right there inside you, if you'l just turn your thinking around. Don' keep telling yourself you can' do this or you can' do that. You can do ANYTHING if you think you can! John had never heard anything like this in his whole life. He realized for the first time that his image of himself as a person who started well and then faded away was all in his head, a state of mind that could be altered any time he made a firm decision to alter it. John went back to work with tremendous enthusiasm and confidence and energy. He received promotions. He became the manager of a branch in New South Wales. Finally he became the head of the company for all of Australia. Where once he had been dogged by failure, now everything he did was crowned by success. He told me, t was that one talk that changed my self-image by giving it a little twist. It made me see myself differently, and so I was different.