From: Michael Jones, Chief Manager of FootCraft Shoes Factory To: Eric Donovan, Team Leader of System Maintenance We are currently facing the challenge of maintaining our competitive edge in the rapidly evolving market environment. Therefore, the management team and I would like you to explore ways to address this challenge. Specifically, we are looking for a 25% increase in maintenance productivity within your work groups over the next three months. To get started, we would like you to meet with your team to discuss this assignment. Following the discussion, you should outline your thoughts on how to proceed and create a work plan. I would like to see your plan and review it with you in two weeks. This is a very important undertaking for our department and for the company. The management team and I look forward to seeing the innovative solutions you devise. Your contributions are invaluable to our success. Thank you.

Kira was playing with her doll when she heard a voice singing. "Churi, churi. Little girls, come and see." Kira ran to the window and saw a bangle seller with a basket on his head. He saw Kira and said, "Come little girl, come and buy some churis." She wanted to buy some, but she couldn't, because her mother had gone to the local market and there was no one there to give her money. Kira's heart sank at the thought of not being able to buy bangles. When she told the seller about her situation, he said, "Come and choose them at least. I'll take the money some other day." After thinking for a while, Kira went down. The bangle seller asked, "Child, which colour do you like best?" "Orange," said Kira and she selected some bangles. By then, Kira's mother returned from the market and had a few words with the seller before paying for the bangles. Kira was so glad. The sound of the bangles hitting each other sounded like music to her. She hummed her way back to her room.

There has been an effort by some economists to commodify ecosystem services, which refer to benefits and resources that humans obtain from natural ecosystems. Some ecosystem services are rival, such as the waste absorption capacity for greenhouse gases, so rationing is necessary. Making rationing possible requires excludable property rights, for example, through auctionable emission permits. If emissions are limited to absorption capacity and equitably distributed, commodification can be both sustainable and just. However, many ecosystem services are inherently non-excludable and non-rival and therefore cannot and should not be commodified. They should also not be ignored. Public services serve all members of the human community; economists recognize that these services are ill-suited to commodification and market allocation. Ecosystem services should not be defined as nature's benefits to people, but rather as fund-services that benefit all members of the biotic community, not simply humans. Ecosystem services in general are an even worse fit for commodification than public services.

If we think about our feelings as being part of us but not all that we are, then our feelings can feel more manageable. This idea is captured in this metaphor: you are the blue sky; your feelings are the weather. If you are the blue sky and your feelings are the weather, then just as the worst hurricane or tornado can't damage the blue sky, and it eventually ends, your feelings can't damage you, and eventually they will pass. Sometimes we just have to wait out the storm. Does that mean it's fun to live through a tornado or a rainstorm? Of course not! Is it easier to live your life when it's sunny and 80 degrees Fahrenheit compared to when it's rainy and stormy? Of course! But if I let the weather determine what I can get done, I'll forever be at the mercy of something I can't control. Our job is to make space for our feelings, to be the blue sky, so we don't have to engage in unhealthy habits to cope with our feelings and we can continue to do the things that matter to us.

In the lecture on memory, I ask my students to remember a list of words. It includes words like "dream" and "bed." Then I ask them to write down the words they remember. Invariably, they (mis)remember hearing the word "sleep" even though I never said the word "sleep." The idea of "sleep" is activated in the brain because other words in the same semantic network, words that have been associated with sleep through constant repetition, have also been activated. The word "sleep" is retrieved as if it were really heard. When people hear "bed," they cannot help but hear "sleep." When people hear "genes" or "intelligence" they cannot help but hear "race." A reader new to this topic might therefore be surprised to learn that there is zero evidence that genetics explains racial differences in outcomes like education. Currently, stories about genetically rooted racial differences in the complex human traits relevant for social inequality in modern industrialized economies — traits like persistence and conscientiousness and creativity and abstract reasoning — are just that. They are stories.

Simplifying a problem is what opens it up to mathematical analysis, so inevitably some biological details get lost in translation from the real world to the equations. As a result, those who use mathematics are frequently criticized as being too disinterested in those details. In his 1897 book Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (the father of modern neuroscience) wrote about these reality-avoiding theorists in a chapter entitled ‘Diseases of the Will'. He identified their symptoms as a facility for exposition, a creative and restless imagination, an aversion to the laboratory, and an indomitable dislike for concrete science and seemingly unimportant data'. Cajal also complained about the theorist's preference for beauty over facts. Biologists study living things that are abundant with specific traits and subtle exceptions to any rule. Mathematicians — driven by simplicity, elegance and the need to make things manageable — silence that abundance when they put it into equations.

It's important to distinguish what humans are doing, in following norms, from what other animals are doing in their related patterns of behavior. An animal that decides not to pick a fight is, in most cases, simply worried about the risk of getting injured — not about some abstract "norm against violence." Likewise, an animal that shares food with animals outside of its group is typically just trying to get future reciprocity — not following some "norm of food-sharing." The incentives surrounding true norms are more complex. When we do something "wrong," we have to worry about reprisal not just from the wronged party but also from third parties. Frequently, this means the entire rest of our local group, or at least a majority of it. Big strong Albert could easily steal from weak Bob without fearing trouble from Bob himself, but in human groups, Albert would then face punishment from the rest of the community. Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.

Geoffrey Hinton was born in England in 1947. He chose to study psychology as an undergraduate at Cambridge because he wanted to explore his growing interest in neural networks. He quickly realized, however, that his professors didn't actually understand how neurons learned or computed. While the science of the day could explain the mechanics of electrical signals traveling from one neuron to another, no one could offer Hinton a compelling explanation for the emergence of intelligence from these billions of interactions. He felt certain he could better understand the workings of the brain using tools from the growing field of artificial neural networks, so he went on to pursue a doctor's degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1972. In his subsequent research, he sought to create interconnected layers of information using hardware and software, just as the human brain spreads information around its dense web of connected neurons. Throughout his career, Hinton has held positions at various institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Toronto.

The above graph shows global plug-in vehicle sales from February 2020 to December 2022, represented by two-month intervals. In all three years, the sales were the least in February and the most in December. In 2021, each of the months showed an increase of more than 100,000 vehicles compared with the same month in 2020. In 2020, global sales of plug-in vehicles increased to more than 200,000 in June, and in December, they reached around 600,000. In 2021, global plug-in vehicle sales decreased from more than 600,000 in June to less than 600,000 in August, but then rose to more than 600,000 in October. In 2022, August saw a sales decrease from June, but sales increased to more than 1,000,000 in October.

From an evolutionary standpoint, ensuring the continuation of our species (specifically, our genetic descendants) is the meaning and purpose of life. But as intelligent animals, who can make decisions based on morality rather than biology, we could ask whether preserving our genome is worth any cost. Individual humans can and occasionally do make the choice to sacrifice their own lives in order to save the lives of other humans, or even non-human animals. But let's examine that choice, between biology and morality, on a global scale: What if preserving the human species means eliminating or abandoning all other life on Earth? What if it means humankind exists only in a state of misery and deprivation, in an eternally inhospitable and alien environment? This is not to argue that space settlement will definitely result in these worst-case scenarios, but rather to ask whether there is any imaginable case in which allowing or causing humans to become extinct is the more ethical choice.

In most business settings it is desirable to put competitors out of business. Naturally, fewer competitors mean more available customers. However, this is not always the case in sport. In fact, sport organizations that compete in leagues actually rely on the health of their competitors for their own success. For example, fans are often more attracted to a game where there is a close contest, and the winner is unknown in advance. Dominating a league or competition can be self-defeating, because the interest of fans can fade. When it is difficult to predict who will win a match, sport leagues attract higher attendances and viewers. Ironically, in order to remain successful, leagues and competitions need as many of their clubs to be competitive as possible. When the outcome of a match is highly predictable, it will not attract large crowd numbers and eventually it will reduce ticket, media and sponsorship revenue. It is important for sport that there is a healthy, competitive balance between teams. This leads to uncertainty about who will win a contest, and encourages fans to watch.

The fact that the young brain is in a constant state of absorption should give us pause. Regulations are in place to prevent certain types of companies from marketing directly to children. These are good measures, but they also provide a false sense of security. Why? Just like with language learning, young children don't need ads explicitly directed at them to learn about a product, or the consumer world in general. Think about ads on websites, TV, mobile, and social media, and in video games. Children are showered with repeated exposure to thousands of ads for hundreds of brands, and their spongy, malleable brains are constantly taking this information in. In a study, researchers discovered that kids are exposed to so many ads that they will have memorized three hundred to four hundred brands before their tenth birthday. Creepily, children grow up forming relationships with a select number of these brands that last well into the future, like friends you didn't know they had.

People often think that personality traits such as kindness are fixed. But our research with groups suggests something quite different: the tendency to be altruistic or exploitative may depend heavily on how the social world is organized. So if we took the same population of people and assigned them to one social world, we could make them really generous to one another, and if we put them in another sort of world, we could make them really mean or indifferent to one another. Crucially, this indicates that the tendency to cooperate is a property not only of individuals but also of groups. Cooperation depends on the rules governing the formation of friendship ties. Good people can do bad things (and vice versa) simply as a result of the structure of the network which they belong to, regardless of the convictions they hold or that the group shares. It is not just a matter of being connected to "bad" people; the number and pattern of social connections is also crucial. Aspects of the social suite, such as cooperation and social networks, work together.

Our natural survival instinct is to seek comfort in temperatures that keep us around 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (20-22.2 ℃). By getting outside of this comfort zone and stressing the cellular functioning of the body either by using heat and cold in the same session or focusing on one temperature extreme, we strengthen our physiological systems. We lower our daily breathing rate, improve our muscle tissue, and raise our threshold for handling stress. Evidence shows that we are at our best — physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder — after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. The lack of temperature change caused by indoor lifestyles and misalignment with nature has taken us far from our ancestorial upbringing, and it continues to weaken the nervous system. By intentionally placing ourselves into the heat or cold, we become our best physically, mentally, and even spiritually.

Suppose a child plays at make-believe. She barks, crawls on all fours, and says, "I'm a puppy!" In order to make the claim, her brain must construct the key proposition "I'm a puppy" as well as contain the information that puppies bark and walk on all fours. And yet that information exists in a larger context. Her brain contains a vast net of information, including "I'm not really a puppy," "I'm making it up to play a game," "I'm a little girl," and so on. Some of that information is present at a cognitive and linguistic level. Much of it is at a deeper, sensory or perceptual level. Her body schema is constructed automatically, beneath higher cognition, and it describes the physical layout of a human body, not a puppy body. She sees her human hands in front of her, and the visual information confirms her human identity. She remembers eating breakfast cereal with a spoon, going to school, reading a book — all human activities. The claim "I'm a puppy" is a superficial proposition that is inconsistent with her deepest internal models.

Your children establish their social comfort and skills early in their lives by observing you in your own social life and through the social experiences they have. These first social experiences become the defaults that will guide and shape the quality and quantity of their relationships throughout their lives. Genetics clearly has an influence on these defaults; research has demonstrated that children are born with a certain temperament, including where they lie on the continuum of introversion to extraversion. But, as the saying goes, "genetics are not destiny"; the messages that your children get from you early in their lives about how they should interact with others will influence how their genetic predispositions will be expressed. In this interaction of genes and upbringing, your children will develop social defaults that trigger social ease, connectedness, and healthy relationships, or social anxiety, loneliness, and dysfunctional relationships.

When different cultures meet, whether at the societal level or in the company, ideas about how things should be done often clash. To resolve it, we typically make the assumption that others should change to be more like us. And we can enforce this view because we are in power — either as the boss in an organization or as the dominant culture in a country. But assuming that the dominant person or country has the right rules and the right way is, in itself, anathema to innovating. Self-satisfied people are not good innovators. So when you ask people to do something not consistent with their cultural background, ask yourself whether you should be rethinking your assumptions about what works best. For example, free-flowing talk is usually considered the hallmark of a good meeting. Everybody just jumps in whenever they have a thought. However, in some cultures, this is considered rude and pushy, so some people with excellent ideas may not speak up. One solution might be to strengthen their group skills but other methods are to occasionally ask everyone to express an opinion in turn, ask for ideas in writing, or table an idea on someone else's behalf.

Conventional economics uses the phrase "factors of production." Factors of production are the inputs into a production process necessary to create any output. For example, when you make a pizza, you need a cook, a kitchen with an oven, and the raw ingredients. If you think about it carefully, however, you will clearly see that the cook and kitchen are different in some fundamental ways from the raw ingredients. The cook and kitchen are approximately the same after making the pizza as before, though just a bit more worn out. The raw ingredients, however, are used up, transformed first into the pizza itself, then rapidly thereafter into waste. The cook and kitchen are not physically embodied in the pizza, but the raw ingredients are. Thousands of years ago, Aristotle discussed this important distinction and divided causation (factors) into material cause, that which is transformed, and efficient cause, that which causes the transformation without itself being transformed in the process. Raw ingredients are the material cause, and the cook and kitchen are the efficient cause.

A society needs to raise children to replace its members who die, or the society would disappear over a couple of generations. One could, therefore, think of the production of children as a positive externality. Those who do not have children benefit from the child-rearing labors of those who do; they enjoy a society of varied ages in which to live as they grow older, and a labor force of younger people is available to support them in their retirement. Should all then share in the economic costs of raising the children? In the United States, the cost of educating children is borne collectively through the system of public education, but most other costs of raising children are treated as private costs of the parents. In about half of the world's states, however, the full society assumes some of the responsibility for all costs of child rearing by giving direct grants to families with children. These grants are often pegged to the median income of workers in the country: the government might give 10 percent of the country's median income to any family with two children, for example.

Primates are capable of sophisticated forms of reasoning in naturalistic settings, especially when their food — or position in the social hierarchy — is in danger. However, it is unclear how versatile their relational reasoning might be. In the 1940s, the primatologist Harry Harlow made an interesting discovery. In a series of experiments, monkeys learnt to choose between two visual objects, one of which was rewarded and one was not. Harlow noted with surprise that each time the task was restarted with two entirely novel objects, the monkeys learnt slightly faster. In fact, their performance continued to accelerate over hundreds of new object sets, until eventually the monkeys could respond almost perfectly from the second trial onwards. Harlow argued that over the course of repeated pairings, the monkeys had learnt how to learn. It seems that the monkeys learnt something abstract about the relations between the two stimuli in each pairing — that if one was rewarded, the other was not. By generalizing this knowledge to new pairings, they could learn ever faster. Human children tested in a comparable fashion showed the same ability.

In the 1930s, the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett proposed that we gradually build up our knowledge of the world from events we experience, and that these experiences are then clustered in organized mental structures he called "schemata." In turn, these schemata (or "schemas") are used to help us understand new experiences and form frameworks in which to remember them. One potential downside of this arrangement is that it is relatively difficult for us to understand and remember information and events that do not fit our current schemata. One of Bartlett's classic demonstrations was to present an unusual North American folktale to an English university student to learn and recall. The student's written recall differed from the original by being shorter and omitting a number of details. This first student's written recall was then given to a second student to learn and recall with the result that more unusual details were dropped out of his reproduction, but other details were added, apparently to make the story more coherent and comprehensible to English ears. This procedure was repeated until a series of ten students had learned the previous reproduction and produced their own versions. By the end of the series, the reproductions were much shorter, the supernatural details in the original had been lost, and the whole tale was closer to the experience of English university students in the 1930s. This demonstration thus illustrates the constructive nature of remembering, and the effects of beliefs and attitudes on recollection and understanding. Gossip serves as a commonplace example that is similar to Bartlett's findings, with a story progressively changing as it travels across tellings. To return to metaphors for a moment, human memory is not like a tape recorder!

Mary, a young violist, played a slow sarabande by Bach during a presentation Theresa Adams made at the Music Educators National Conference in San Antonio, Texas. The piece requires sustained control of the bow arm, a warm tone, and precise pitch. Being very shy, Mary was noticeably self-conscious playing before this large gathering of educators. While rehearsing for the performance, she had a very hard time controlling her anxiety. Theresa then instructed Mary to imagine there was a video camera above the stage taping her performance. Theresa told Mary it didn't matter whether she played out of tune or missed notes or had poor tone. All that mattered was that she should look the way Martha Katz looked while playing Bach. Theresa told Mary the camera was only recording the way she looked, and that her sound would be replaced by a CD of her role model playing the same piece. Mary had difficulty keeping her bow from shaking, and her tone was thin and scratchy. Theresa could see that Mary had a warm feeling for the music she was playing but that she felt too inhibited to express it. Theresa spoke to Mary privately for a few moments so that the audience wouldn't know what instruction she had given to Mary. Theresa asked Mary who her favorite Bach violist was, and she replied that it was Martha Katz and she wanted to play the sarabande like her. Since Mary no longer had to worry about how she played, she felt free to throw herself into the role of Martha Katz during the playing session. She not only looked confident, relaxed, and dignified — she also played with bow control, accuracy, and fine phrasing. She effectively "became" Martha Katz as she performed the Bach sarabande. The audience was shocked by her playing and curious to know what instructions Theresa had given her that had produced such a marked effect. And Mary realized that although she had been imagining she was Martha Katz, she was still the one playing the viola.