Dear Mr. Cole, Thank you for your offer of the pharmacist position. The position is attractive to me because I have a strong passion for healthcare and a desire to make a positive impact on patients' lives. As I indicated in our last interview, however, I was disappointed to learn that your company would not be in a position to reimburse tuition costs for my ongoing study toward a Doctor of Pharmacy degree, currently a primary professional goal of mine. On March 14, I was offered another position by a company whose benefits package includes tuition reimbursement. Because I expect these costs to be substantial in the next two years, I have decided to accept this position. I sincerely appreciate the time you have taken and the special interest you have shown in me during the interview. Thank you again for your consideration. Best regards,Julie Robinson

One day, Captain Hall, the famous Arctic explorer, went in a small boat to visit a certain island which he wanted to explore. The boat was fastened to a piece of rock on the shore. When he returned from his expedition, he discovered the tide had risen and floated his boat, which was quite out of reach. Captain Hall feared the extreme danger in which he was placed. The boat was the only connecting link between him and the living world, and it was beyond his reach. What was to be done? To swim towards the boat was out of the question in such a climate. He did the only thing that seemed possible. He unwound the thongs that fastened his boots to create a line about twenty feet long. He attached a heavy stone to its end and threw it into the boat, pulling the boat to the shore. It was with unspeakable comfort that Captain Hall once more entered it and felt he was saved from inevitable starvation — saved by a shoe-string!

Think about the changes that have taken place in our world over the past 100 years. The first to come to mind are probably the spectacular scientific and technological achievements of the past century — motor vehicles, aircraft, the telephone, radio and TV, computers and genetic engineering. Each new development creates its own demand for legal change. Consider, for example, the vast body of law which has grown up around the motor vehicle: there are regulations governing such matters as the construction and maintenance of motor vehicles, the conduct of drivers on the road and even where vehicles may be parked. Indeed, almost half of the criminal cases tried by magistrates' courts are directly related to the use of motor vehicles. The increasing volume of traffic on the roads and the resulting inexorable rise in traffic accidents have also led to developments in the civil law, especially in the areas of the law of tort and insurance.

Sometimes pursuing the truth about some question would be morally worse than not pursuing it. This may be because, as in the case of nuclear weapons research, the answer itself may prove dangerous or harmful. But it may also be because the manner of pursuing that truth is dangerous or harmful, or simply morally wrong independently of its consequences. Consider the Nazi or Tuskegee experiments: it is not the information pursued that is morally bad here, but the manner in which that information is pursued. And we need not resort to such dramatic cases. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation heavily monitor contemporary scientific research that involves any sort of experiment involving human subjects. In cases where the only way in which we can obtain certain scientific information is harmful to other people, we generally feel — rightly — that the information is not worth pursuing, all things considered. So in deciding whether to pursue a particular line of inquiry, we must first determine whether pursuing that line might conflict with our other values, moral or otherwise.

As parents, we spend countless hours debating on the freedoms we should allow our children. Too much freedom may lead to mischief while not enough may stifle their growth. How much should be allowed? I am always reminded of a circus elephant when in a discussion on freedom. When the elephant is a baby, it learns restriction by being tethered to a small stake with a four-foot piece of chain. The elephant is trained to know that its individual freedom is restricted to that small four feet. As the elephant grows stronger and larger, it still thinks that it has no more freedom outside of those four feet. Although the power to move that stake and run free is immense, it will not attempt to break the stake or the chains because of what it perceives as being able to. Are you a victim of your own restraints as well? Do you not move beyond your four feet circle because you think you are not allowed to? Be bold. Step outside your circle and see if you can grow. Without breakthroughs, there cannot be change.

The most effective way to defuse racial ideology is to bring people from different ethnic backgrounds together under conditions that enable them to deal with one another as individuals and discover that ideologies obscure important aspects of people and the realities of their lives. However, this is difficult when teachers, coaches and employers maintain a belief in the myth of black natural physical talent and a lack of cognitive skills. Social scientist Ellis Cashmore illustrates this with an experience of receiving a telephone call from a black journalist writing for a major newspaper. The journalist asked why no one actually expressed what he believed to be an absolute truth: that black athletes have a ‘natural edge'. The very fact that a talented black journalist believed this defective theory is evidence to its power and the difficulties in escaping expectations based on racial ideology. When such myths maintain credibility in society, black people are regarded as unsuited to, or unwanted for, study, work and other activities that demand mental rather than physical skills.

Negotiators can make options more palatable by enhancing the attractiveness of accepting them. This is a matter of placing emphasis on the positive rather than the negative. In the language of traditional canot-and-stick tactics for motivating workers, the approach should make the carrot more attractive rather than enlarging the stick. Promises and offers can be made more attractive in several ways: maximizing the attractive qualities and minimizing the negative ones, showing how the offer meets the other party's needs, reducing the disadvantages of accepting the offer, making offers more credible by providing third-party references or factual support, or setting deadlines on offers so they expire if not accepted quickly. Many would argue that these are common sales tricks similar to discount coupons, two-for-the-price-of-one offers, "today only" sales, and extra-added-attraction elements. They are! Negotiators can and should use the same techniques that salespeople use to move their products.

Benny Goodman is one of the greatest clarinetists of all time. Born in 1909 in Chicago, he began taking lessons at the age of 10. With a natural inborn talent, he made rapid progress and was soon playing professionally. He was strongly influenced by New Orleans jazz, and it played an important role in his music throughout his life. At 16, he joined the Ben Pollack Orchestra in Chicago, which at the time was one of the top bands in the United States. He was soon making recordings, and it wasn't long before he formed his own band. Although Goodman was relatively well known before 1935, it was the change in his style that occurred in the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles that really caused his career to take off. And a few years later, he was playing in Carnegie Hall in New York City. At the time, this was something new for a jazz orchestra. The concert was a tremendous success. After years of appealing only to specialized audiences, jazz had finally broken through and was being accepted by mainstream audiences.

The graph above shows the share (%) of American adults in each income tier by age group in 1971 and 2021. Among American adults ages 18 to 29, the share in the upper-income tier increased by 5 percentage points from 1971 to 2021, whereas their share in the middle-income tier decreased by 12 percentage points during the same period. Among the 1971 middle-income tiers, the share of American adults ages 30 to 44 was higher than that of any other age group. In 1971, more than two-thirds of American adults ages 45 to 64 were in the middle-income tier, and in 2021, more than half of the people in that age group were in the same income tier. The share of American adults ages 65 and older in the lower-income tier fell from 54% in 1971 to 37% in 2021, while their share in the middle income tier rose from 39% to 47% during the same period. However, American adults 65 and older were the only age group in which more than one-in-three adults were in the lower-income tier in 2021.

In the worldview of the Cree hunter, humans do not control the hunt. The fish and game are not there simply to be taken. Rather it is the animals who control the success of the hunt by offering themselves willingly to people (or, conversely, choosing to withhold themselves from a hunter). The Cree credit animals with knowing the same things that people know and being able to communicate and share that knowledge with people. Humans and animals are in a relationship of reciprocity, just as humans are in relationship with other humans. Indeed, anthropologists argue even more generally that in all cultures, including those that are modern and postmodern, there are profound connections between the ways that people engage with each other and with other species.

Stay-at-home parents have new employment options in our internet economy. Over the last few decades many women have been self-employed. Such an arrangement gives them greater flexibility over their hours and days of work. The rise of remote work could further increase opportunities for them. Internet platforms such as Withinwork are two-sided platforms as workers seeking employment post their resumes and employers seeking workers post their tasks. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms play a key matchmaking role here by gathering and presenting the set of job opportunities a person sees. I set up my profile on Withinwork and was impressed with the alternative tasks that I was offered by the AI. As with any two-sided matching platform, the more job offerings an applicant sees, the more likely that person will find value in the platform. In this sense, as remote work grows as a socially high-status activity, this process will gain its own momentum.

Considerable debate exists as to the appropriate beneficiaries of affirmative action. In the United States, supporters of affirmative action hoped that, by expanding the coverage to apply to many minority groups, they would broaden the political base favoring such programs. In practice, however, the wider coverage has diluted, in the minds of some, the moral argument in favor of a program intended to help the most obvious victims of governmental discrimination: African Americans and Native Americans. Some argue that the context matters. Thus, because Asian Americans and women are generally not under-represented among university student bodies, affirmative action admissions for them would now be inappropriate (though they should not be singled out for restrictions). On the other hand, among corporate executives or university faculties, blacks, Asians, Latinos, and women all faced exclusion in the past and remain under-represented today; therefore, in these areas all four groups ought to be beneficiaries of affirmative action.

Predictions of technological unemployment have recurred since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. But the recurring reality was one of economic growth through creative destruction. Yes, machines destroyed lots of jobs, often with devastating effects on displaced workers for whom new jobs were often too late or out of reach. Over time, however, job destruction freed up labor and capital that went into new and usually better jobs and higher incomes. That is because technology both substitutes for labor — in particular, less-skilled labor — and complements labor, or makes it more productive, thus generating new demand for labor. Casual observers have often tended "to overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor," which was readily observable; they "repeatedly underestimated the demand for the work of human beings that would remain."

The most common situation in which musical equipment becomes an instrument is in live performance. Playing the piano is generally associated with performance in realtime, and computer-based musical instruments are increasingly being played in real-time. For example, laptop computers are increasingly used in performance by live electronic musicians even in preference to keyboard synthesizers, groove boxes, and turntables. One thing that changes in computer performances is that the gestural relationship with sound is sometimes less direct. In acoustic instrument performance the musician's gestures are translated into sound. Many instruments have a one-to-one gesture-to-sound relationship, including the press of the piano or synthesizer key, or the slide of the finger of the guitar fretboard; each translates gesture into a direct audible result. Many electronic and computer-based instruments have a one-to-many gesture-to-sound relationship when a mouse gesture or parameter movement changes the complexity of a rhythmic part, or the timbre and volume of an entire ensemble of musical voices.

Two Northwestern University marketing researchers, David Gal and Derek Rucker, conducted research using framing techniques to make people feel uncertain. For example, they told one group to remember a time when they were full of certainty, and the other group to remember a time when they were full of doubt. Then they asked the participants whether they were meat eaters, vegetarians, vegans, or otherwise, how important this was to them, and how confident they were in their opinions. People who were asked to remember a time of uncertainty were less confident of their eating choices. However, when asked to write their beliefs to persuade someone else to eat the way they did, they would write more and stronger arguments than those who were certain of their choice. Gal and Rucker performed the research with different topics (for example, preferences for a Mac versus a Windows computer) and found similar results. When people were less certain, they would dig in and argue even harder.

In the same way that it is sometimes advisable to take a momentary break, or "fast," from some of our food, beverages, and habits, a media fast may be good for your system. Spending a set period of time unplugged can clarify for you the advantages and disadvantages of your media practices. Life without electronic devices momentarily separates you from constant distraction, online advertisements, and artificial blue light. You'll have more time for other things, like physical activity, face-to-face interaction, and even solitude. You'll also have the opportunity to reflect critically on how life in the Communication Age differs from older modes of living and connecting and engaging with the world.

To the extent that one can distinguish self-esteem from public esteem, the latter seems to be more important. The overriding motive of narcissists seems to be to obtain social approval from others. That is, they spend much of their time and energy seeking ways to get others to admire them. In terms of being liked by others rather than admired, they are somewhat indifferent. That is, narcissists are no more nor less interested than anyone else in being liked. Being admired, however, is extremely important to them. In general, they do not seem overly concerned with proving something to themselves (possibly because they are already privately persuaded of their own good qualities), but they are quite interested in demonstrating their superiority to others. For example, if given a chance to tackle a difficult task and find out how good they are, narcissists put forth minimal effort if no one is looking, which is a sign that they do not really care about demonstrating their brilliance to themselves, whereas if others are watching, they put forth maximum effort in order to shine.

One obvious area where climbing and philosophy intersect is with regard to the normative dimension of climbing — the ethical or unethical behavior of climbers. Some of the ethical issues in climbing involve a straightforward extension of more general moral principles. For example, it is wrong to lie about your climbing accomplishments because it is generally wrong to lie about accomplishments; it is wrong to needlessly endanger others at the cliff because, more generally, it is always wrong to needlessly endanger others. However, other ethical issues involve factors that are unique to climbing and thus cannot be resolved by invoking broader moral rules. Is it wrong to place bolts on rappel? Is it cheating to use pre-placed gear on a traditional pitch? For these sorts of questions, broader moral rules do not apply in any straightforward way, and climbers must work out for themselves what is right or wrong within the context of climbing.

Sensation and perception almost always happen together. Researchers, however, have studied each process separately to determine how the two work together. Perception can occur through bottom-up processing, which begins with the physical stimuli from the environment, and proceeds through transduction of those stimuli into neural impulses. The signals are passed along to successively more complex brain regions, and ultimately result in the recognition of a visual stimulus. For example, when you look at the face of your best friend, your eyes convert light energy into neural impulses, which travel into the brain to visual regions. This information forms the basis for sensing the visual stimulus and ultimately its perception. Equally important to perception, however, is top-down processing, which involves previously acquired knowledge. As a result, when you look at your best friend's face, brain regions that store information about what faces look like, particularly those that are familiar to you, can help you to perceive and recognize the specific visual stimulus.

The European Union, since the late 1990s, has embraced gender mainstreaming as its main strategy for addressing gender inequality in policy making. It is defined as the integration of the gender perspective into every stage of the policy process (design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation). Gender mainstreaming is based on the understanding that all policies have the potential to impact social and demographic groups differently, thus creating and sustaining unequal power relations. For example, gender mainstreaming may explicitly consider the experiences of men, such as parental leave as a legal claim for men or labor policies for men in female-dominated occupations (e.g., nursing). Gender mainstreaming can also apply to health care, equally promoting women's and men's health care needs. In many countries, coronary heart disease is defined through a masculine lens, influencing all areas of medical care from prevention to recovery. Not only does this lead to overlooking women's heart health needs, but it also may negatively impact men who do not seem to fit the model of hegemonic masculinity.

Although a traditional textbook drawing suggests that neurons in the brain are happily packed next to one another like jelly beans in ajar, don't let the cartoon fool you: neurons are locked in competition for survival. Just like neighboring nations, neurons stake out their territories and persistently defend them. They fight for territory and survival at every level of the system: each neuron and each connection between neurons fights for resources. As the border wars rage through the lifetime of a brain, maps are redrawn in such a way that the experiences and goals of a person are always reflected in the brain's structure. If an accountant drops her career to become a pianist, the neural territory devoted to her fingers will expand; if she becomes a microscopist, her visual cortex will develop higher resolution for the small details she seeks; if she becomes a perfumer, her brain regions assigned to smell will enlarge.

In Singapore, due to road pricing, one can always expect to be able to achieve a speed of 40 miles per hour on the road. While the rich are more likely to afford this, buses can also achieve these speeds, and with the economies of scale of a bus this lowers the per-person trip price for achieving this speed. The full cost of commuting includes not only the out-of-pocket expenditure on gasoline, parking, and road use fees but the value of the lost time. If a commute takes thirty minutes rather than fifteen minutes because of traffic congestion, then the commuter has lost fifteen minutes. Economists have adopted the rule of thumb of valuing such lost time by half of the person's hourly wage. For example, if I earn $80 an hour and I lose fifteen minutes stuck in traffic, then this costs me $10 in lost time (.25 x 80 x .5). To conserve on such lost time due to congestion, cities such as Stockholm, London, and Singapore have adopted road pricing. Drivers in such cities move at higher speeds and save time but must pay more money out of pocket to travel at peak use times. One explanation for why so few cities have adopted road pricing focuses on behavioral economics: people are used to the roads being free. To an economist, this is a puzzling explanation because congested roads cost us valuable time. This time cost means that free roads are not free to use. A second explanation for the opposition to road pricing is that many poor people drive and they prefer to pay for their commute using their time rather than paying a road use fee.

One hot afternoon, little William and his dad were passing through a dusty village road. It was a dry season, so little William thought the whole village road looked lonely and deserted. After walking for a long while, he asked his dad to stop somewhere for a short rest. Looking around, little William and his dad could not find a comfortable place to relax. Unable to find anywhere to rest, they were forced to keep walking under the hot bright sun. After a few minutes' walk, little William and his dad saw a huge coconut tree far off in the distance that could provide shade from the burning sun, so they started walking faster to reach the tree. "Dad, why don't you race me to the tree?" little William asked his dad. After letting out a short smile, he agreed to the race and, at the count of three, he watched little William take off like a runner. Unknowingly to little William, his dad let him win. He jumped for joy because he reached the huge coconut tree first. Little William and his dad breathed a deep sigh of relief because they were so exhausted from walking all day. They dropped all that they had with them on the ground and lay down under the huge coconut tree, which protected them from the sun. And they embraced the cool breeze in the air. Then, they began to feel hungry. Little William looked up towards the huge coconut tree and said, "This huge coconut tree is useless. It doesn't have any coconuts we can eat." "My dear little William," his dad responded, "it is not good to be ungrateful to people and things around us. This tree, which you are calling useless, saved us from the hot sun." Little William gently stood from where he lay and turned towards the tree. He thanked it for protecting them from the sun. The coconut tree began to give little William and his dad a more pleasant wind.