To whom it may concern, My name is Michael Brown. I have been a bird-watcher since childhood. I have always enjoyed watching birds in my yard and identifying them by sight and sound. Yesterday, I happened to read an article about your club. I was surprised and excited to find out about a community of passionate bird-watchers who travel annually to go birding. I would love to join your club, but your website appears to be under construction. I could not find any information except for this contact email address. I would like to know how to sign up for the club. I look forward to your reply. Sincerely, Michael Brown

Putting all of her energy into her last steps of the running race, Jamie crossed the finish line. To her disappointment, she had failed to beat her personal best time, again. Jamie had pushed herself for months to finally break her record, but it was all for nothing. Recognizing how she felt about her failure, Ken, her teammate, approached her and said, Jamie, even though you didn't set a personal best time today, your performances have improved dramatically. Your running skills have progressed so much! You'll definitely break your personal best time in the next race! After hearing his comments, she felt confident about herself. Jamie, now motivated to keep pushing for her goal, replied with a smile. You're right! Next race, I'll beat my best time for sure!

At every step in our journey through life we encounter junctions with many different pathways leading into the distance. Each choice involves uncertainty about which path will get you to your destination. Trusting our intuition to make the choice often ends up with us making a suboptimal choice. Turning the uncertainty into numbers has proved a potent way of analyzing the paths and finding the shortcut to your destination. The mathematical theory of probability hasn't eliminated risk, but it allows us to manage that risk more effectively. The strategy is to analyze all the possible scenarios that the future holds and then to see what proportion of them lead to success or failure. This gives you a much better map of the future on which to base your decisions about which path to choose.

Coming of age in the 18th and 19th centuries, the personal diary became a centerpiece in the construction of a modern subjectivity, at the heart of which is the application of reason and critique to the understanding of world and self, which allowed the creation of a new kind of knowledge. Diaries were central media through which enlightened and free subjects could be constructed. They provided a space where one could write daily about her whereabouts, feelings, and thoughts. Over time and with rereading, disparate entries, events, and happenstances could be rendered into insights and narratives about the self, and allowed for the formation of subjectivity. It is in that context that the idea of the self [as] both made and explored with words emerges. Diaries were personal and private; one would write for oneself, or, in Habermas's formulation, one would make oneself public to oneself. By making the self public in a private sphere, the self also became an object for self-inspection and self-critique.

Urban delivery vehicles can be adapted to better suit the density of urban distribution, which often involves smaller vehicles such as vans, including bicycles. The latter have the potential to become a preferred 'last-mile' vehicle, particularly in high-density and congested areas. In locations where bicycle use is high, such as the Netherlands, delivery bicycles are also used to carry personal cargo (e.g. groceries). Due to their low acquisition and maintenance costs, cargo bicycles convey much potential in developed and developing countries alike, such as the becak (a three-wheeled bicycle) in Indonesia. Services using electrically assisted delivery tricycles have been successfully implemented in France and are gradually being adopted across Europe for services as varied as parcel and catering deliveries. Using bicycles as cargo vehicles is particularly encouraged when combined with policies that restrict motor vehicle access to specific areas of a city, such as downtown or commercial districts, or with the extension of dedicated bike lanes.

An important advantage of disclosure, as opposed to more aggressive forms of regulation, is its flexibility and respect for the operation of free markets. Regulatory mandates are blunt swords; they tend to neglect diversity and may have serious unintended adverse effects. For example, energy efficiency requirements for appliances may produce goods that work less well or that have characteristics that consumers do not want. Information provision, by contrast, respects freedom of choice. If automobile manufacturers are required to measure and publicize the safety characteristics of cars, potential car purchasers can trade safety concerns against other attributes, such as price and styling. If restaurant customers are informed of the calories in their meals, those who want to lose weight can make use of the information, leaving those who are unconcerned about calories unaffected. Disclosure does not interfere with, and should even promote, the autonomy (and quality) of individual decision-making.

Different parts of the brain's visual system get information on a need-to-know basis. Cells that help your hand muscles reach out to an object need to know the size and location of the object, but they don't need to know about color. They need to know a little about shape, but not in great detail. Cells that help you recognize people's faces need to be extremely sensitive to details of shape, but they can pay less attention to location. It is natural to assume that anyone who sees an object sees everything about it ― the shape, color, location, and movement. However, one part of your brain sees its shape, another sees color, another detects location, and another perceives movement. Consequently, after localized brain damage, it is possible to see certain aspects of an object and not others. Centuries ago, people found it difficult to imagine how someone could see an object without seeing what color it is. Even today, you might find it surprising to learn about people who see an object without seeing where it is, or see it without seeing whether it is moving.

The above graph shows the percentages of Americans' preferred type of place to live by age group, based on a 2020 survey. In each of the three age groups, Town/Rural Area was the most preferred type of place to live. In the 18-34 year-olds group, the percentage of those who preferred Big/Small City was higher than that of those who preferred Suburb of Big/Small City. In the 35-54 year-olds group, the percentage of those who preferred Suburb of Big/Small City exceeded that of those who preferred Big/Small City. In the 55 year-olds and older group, the percentage of those who chose Big/Small City among the three preferred types of place to live was the lowest. Each percentage of the three preferred types of place to live was higher than 20% across the three age groups.

Niklas Luhmann, a renowned sociologist of the twentieth century, was born in Luneburg, Germany in 1927. After World War II, he studied law at the University of Freiburg until 1949. Early in his career, he worked for the State of Lower Saxony, where he was in charge of educational reform. In 1960 - 1961, Luhmann had the chance to study sociology at Harvard University, where he was influenced by Talcott Parsons, one of the most famous social system theorists. Later, Luhmann developed his own social system theory. In 1968, he became a professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld. He researched a variety of subjects, including mass media and law. Although his books are known to be difficult to translate, they have in fact been widely translated into other languages.

<Renovation Notice> At the Natural Jade Resort, we are continually improving our facilities to better serve our guests. Therefore, we will be renovating some areas of the resort, according to the schedule below. # Renovation Period: November 21 to December 18, 2022 ∙ Renovations will take place every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. # Areas to be Closed: Gym and indoor swimming pool # Further Information ∙ All outdoor leisure activities will be available as usual. ∙ Guests will receive a 15% discount for all meals in the restaurant. ∙ Guests may use the tennis courts for free. We will take all possible measures to minimize noise and any other inconvenience. We sincerely appreciate your understanding.

<2022 Valestown Recycles Poster Contest> Join this year's Valestown Recycles Poster Contest and show off your artistic talent! # Guidelines - Participation is only for high school students in Valestown. - Participants should use the theme of Recycling for the Future. # Submission Format - File type: PDF only - Maximum file size: 40MB # Judging Criteria - Use of theme - Creativity - Artistic skill # Details - Submissions are limited to one poster per person. - Submissions should be uploaded to the website by 6 p.m., December 19. - Winners will be announced on the website on December 28. For more information, please visit www.vtco.org.

Trends constantly suggest new opportunities for individuals to restage themselves, representing occasions for change. To understand how trends can ultimately give individuals power and freedom, one must first discuss fashion's importance as a basis for change. The most common explanation offered by my informants as to why fashion is so appealing is that it constitutes a kind of theatrical costumery. Clothes are part of how people present themselves to the world, and fashion locates them in the present, relative to what is happening in society and to fashion's own history. As a form of expression, fashion contains a host of ambiguities, enabling individuals to recreate the meanings associated with specific pieces of clothing. Fashion is among the simplest and cheapest methods of self-expression: clothes can be inexpensively purchased while making it easy to convey notions of wealth, intellectual stature, relaxation or environmental consciousness, even if none of these is true. Fashion can also strengthen agency in various ways, opening up space for action.

Everywhere we turn we hear about almighty cyberspace! The hype promises that we will leave our boring lives, put on goggles and body suits, and enter some metallic, three-dimensional, multimedia otherworld. When the Industrial Revolution arrived with its great innovation, the motor, we didn't leave our world to go to some remote motorspace! On the contrary, we brought the motors into our lives, as automobiles, refrigerators, drill presses, and pencil sharpeners. This absorption has been so complete that we refer to all these tools with names that declare their usage, not their motorness. These innovations led to a major socioeconomic movement precisely because they entered and affected profoundly our everyday lives. People have not changed fundamentally in thousands of years. Technology changes constantly. It's the one that must adapt to us. That's exactly what will happen with information technology and its devices under human-centric computing. The longer we continue to believe that computers will take us to a magical new world, the longer we will delay their natural fusion with our lives, the hallmark of every major movement that aspires to be called a socioeconomic revolution.

There is something deeply paradoxical about the professional status of sports journalism, especially in the medium of print. In discharging their usual responsibilities of description and commentary, reporters' accounts of sports events are eagerly consulted by sports fans, while in their broader journalistic role of covering sport in its many forms, sports journalists are among the most visible of all contemporary writers. The ruminations of the elite class of 'celebrity' sports journalists are much sought after by the major newspapers, their lucrative contracts being the envy of colleagues in other 'disciplines' of journalism. Yet sports journalists do not have a standing in their profession that corresponds to the size of their readerships or of their pay packets, with the old saying (now reaching the status of cliche) that sport is the 'toy department of the news media' still readily to hand as a dismissal of the worth of what sports journalists do. This reluctance to take sports journalism seriously produces the paradoxical outcome that sports newspaper writers are much read but little admired.

People have always wanted to be around other people and to learn from them. Cities have long been dynamos of social possibility, foundries of art, music, and fashion. Slang, or, if you prefer, lexical innovation, has always started in cities ― an outgrowth of all those different people so frequently exposed to one another. It spreads outward, in a manner not unlike trans-missible disease, which itself typically takes off in cities. If, as the noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield argued, the way a person talks is a composite result of what he has heard before, then language innovation would happen where the most people heard and talked to the most other people. Cities drive taste change because they offer the greatest exposure to other people, who not surprisingly are often the creative people cities seem to attract. Media, ever more global, ever more far-reaching, spread language faster to more people.

The entrance to a honeybee colony, often referred to as the dancefloor, is a market place for information about the state of the colony and the environment outside the hive. Studying interactions on the dancefloor provides us with a number of illustrative examples of how individuals changing their own behavior in response to local information allow the colony to regulate its workforce. For example, upon returning to their hive honeybees that have collected water search out a receiver bee to unload their water to within the hive. If this search time is short then the returning bee is more likely to perform a waggle dance to recruit others to the water source. Conversely, if this search time is long then the bee is more likely to give up collecting water. Since receiver bees will only accept water if they require it, either for themselves or to pass on to other bees and brood, this unloading time is correlated with the colony's overall need of water. Thus the individual water forager's response to unloading time (up or down) regulates water collection in response to the colony's need.

We understand that the segregation of our consciousness into present, past, and future is both a fiction and an oddly self-referential framework; your present was part of your mother's future, and your children's past will be in part your present. Nothing is generally wrong with structuring our consciousness of time in this conventional manner, and it often works well enough. In the case of climate change, however, the sharp division of time into past, present, and future has been desperately misleading and has, most importantly, hidden from view the extent of the responsibility of those of us alive now. The narrowing of our consciousness of time smooths the way to divorcing ourselves from responsibility for developments in the past and the future with which our lives are in fact deeply intertwined. In the climate case, it is not that we face the facts but then deny our responsibility. It is that the realities are obscured from view by the partitioning of time, and so questions of responsibility toward the past and future do not arise naturally.

Actors, singers, politicians and countless others recognise the power of the human voice as a means of communication beyond the simple decoding of the words that are used. Learning to control your voice and use it for different purposes is, therefore, one of the most important skills to develop as an early career teacher. The more confidently you give instructions, the higher the chance of a positive class response. There are times when being able to project your voice loudly will be very useful when working in school, and knowing that you can cut through a noisy classroom, dinner hall or playground is a great skill to have. However, I would always advise that you use your loudest voice incredibly sparingly and avoid shouting as much as possible. A quiet, authoritative and measured tone has so much more impact than slightly panicked shouting.

A fascinating species of water flea exhibits a kind of flexibility that evolutionary biologists call adaptive plasticity. If the baby water flea is developing into an adult in water that includes the chemical signatures of creatures that prey on water fleas, it develops a helmet and spines to defend itself against predators. If the water around it doesn't include the chemical signatures of predators, the water flea doesn't develop these protective devices. That's a clever trick, because producing spines and a helmet is costly, in terms of energy, and conserving energy is essential for an organism's ability to survive and reproduce. The water flea only expends the energy needed to produce spines and a helmet when it needs to. So it may well be that this plasticity is an adaptation: a trait that came to exist in a species because it contributed to reproductive fitness. There are many cases, across many species, of adaptive plasticity. Plasticity is conducive to fitness if there is sufficient variation in the environment.

The most commonly known form of results-based pricing is a practice called contingency pricing, used by lawyers. Contingency pricing is the major way that personal injury and certain consumer cases are billed. In this approach, lawyers do not receive fees or payment until the case is settled, when they are paid a percentage of the money that the client receives. Therefore, only an outcome in the client's favor is compensated. From the client's point of view, the pricing makes sense in part because most clients in these cases are unfamiliar with and possibly intimidated by law firms. Their biggest fears are high fees for a case that may take years to settle. By using contingency pricing, clients are ensured that they pay no fees until they receive a settlement. In these and other instances of contingency pricing, the economic value of the service is hard to determine before the service, and providers develop a price that allows them to share the risks and rewards of delivering value to the buyer.

Parks take the shape demanded by the cultural concerns of their time. Once parks are in place, they are no inert stage ― their purposes and meanings are made and remade by planners and by park users. Moments of park creation are particularly telling, however, for they reveal and actualize ideas about nature and its relationship to urban society. Indeed, what distinguishes a park from the broader category of public space is the representation of nature that parks are meant to embody. Public spaces include parks, concrete plazas, sidewalks, even indoor atriums. Parks typically have trees, grass, and other plants as their central features. When entering a city park, people often imagine a sharp separation from streets, cars, and buildings. There's a reason for that: traditionally, park designers attempted to create such a feeling by planting tall trees at park boundaries, building stone walls, and constructing other means of partition. What's behind this idea is not only landscape architects' desire to design aesthetically suggestive park spaces, but a much longer history of Western thought that envisions cities and nature as antithetical spaces and oppositional forces.

Negotiators should try to find ways to slice a large issue into smaller pieces, known as using salami tactics. Issues that can be expressed in quantitative, measurable units are easy to slice. For example, compensation demands can be divided into cents-per-hour increments or lease rates can be quoted as dollars per square foot. When working to fractionate issues of principle or precedent, parties may use the time horizon (when the principle goes into effect or how long it will last) as a way to fractionate the issue. It may be easier to reach an agreement when settlement terms don't have to be implemented until months in the future. Another approach is to vary the number of ways that the principle may be applied. For example, a company may devise a family emergency leave plan that allows employees the opportunity to be away from the company for a period of no longer than three hours, and no more than once a month, for illness in the employee's immediate family.

Craftsmanship may suggest a way of life that declined with the arrival of industrial society - but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality. And though craftsmanship can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be weakened by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession.

There is evidence that even very simple algorithms can outperform expert judgement on simple prediction problems. For example, algorithms have proved more accurate than humans in predicting whether a prisoner released on parole will go on to commit another crime, or in predicting whether a potential candidate will perform well in a job in future. In over 100 studies across many different domains, half of all cases show simple formulas make better significant predictions than human experts, and the remainder (except a very small handful), show a tie between the two. When there are a lot of different factors involved and a situation is very uncertain, simple formulas can win out by focusing on the most important factors and being consistent, while human judgement is too easily influenced by particularly salient and perhaps irrelevant considerations. A similar idea is supported by further evidence that 'checklists' can improve the quality of expert decisions in a range of domains by ensuring that important steps or considerations aren't missed when people are feeling overloaded. For example, treating patients in intensive care can require hundreds of small actions per day, and one small error could cost a life. Using checklists to ensure that no crucial steps are missed has proved to be remarkably effective in a range of medical contexts, from preventing live infections to reducing pneumonia.

Hailey, be careful! Camila yelled uneasily, watching her sister carrying a huge cake to the table. Don't worry, Camila, Hailey responded, smiling. Camila relaxed only when Hailey had safely placed the cake on the party table. Dad will be here shortly. What gift did you buy for his birthday? Camila asked out of interest. Dad will be surprised to find out what it is! Hailey answered with a wink. I bet you bought a wallet or a watch for him, Camila said. In reply, Hailey answered, No. I bought something much more personal. By the way, there's something you should know about Dad... They were suddenly interrupted by the doorbell ringing. It was their dad and they were overjoyed to see him. My lovely ladies, thank you for inviting me to your place for my birthday. He walked in joyfully, hugging his daughters. They all walked into the dining room, where he was greeted with a rainbow-colored birthday cake and fifty red roses. Happy birthday! You're fifty today, Dad. We love you! Camila said before her sister handed him a small parcel. When he opened it, he discovered a pair of glasses inside. Hailey, Dad doesn't have eyesight problems, Camila said, puzzled. Actually Camila, I recently found out he has long been suffering from color blindness. He's kept it a secret so as not to worry us, Hailey explained. Dad, these glasses can help correct your red-green color blindness, said Hailey. He slowly put them on, and stared at the birthday presents on the table. Seeing vivid red and green colors for the first time ever, he started to cry. Incredible! Look at those wonderful colors! He shouted in amazement. Hailey told him in tears, Dad, I'm glad you can now finally enjoy the true beauty of rainbows and roses. Red represents love and green represents health. You deserve both. Camila nodded, seeing how happy her gift of the glasses had made their dad.