Certain hindrances to multifaceted creative activity may lie in premature specialization, i.e., having to choose the direction of education or to focus on developing one ability too early in life. However, development of creative ability in one domain may enhance effectiveness in other domains that require similar skills, and flexible switching between generality and specificity is helpful to productivity in many domains. Excessive specificity may result in information from outside the domain being underestimated and unavailable, which leads to fixedness of thinking, whereas excessive generality causes chaos, vagueness, and shallowness. Both tendencies pose a threat to the transfer of knowledge and skills between domains. What should therefore be optimal for the development of cross-domain creativity is support for young people in taking up creative challenges in a specific domain and coupling it with encouragement to apply knowledge and skills in, as well as from, other domains, disciplines, and tasks.

The need to assimilate values and lifestyle of the host culture has become a growing conflict. Multiculturalists suggest that there should be a model of partial assimilation in which immigrants retain some of their customs, beliefs, and language. There is pressure to conform rather than to maintain their cultural identities, however, and these conflicts are greatly determined by the community to which one migrates. These experiences are not new; many Europeans experienced exclusion and poverty during the first two waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries. Eventually, these immigrants transformed this country with significant changes that included enlightenment and acceptance of diversity. People of color, however, continue to struggle for acceptance. Once again, the challenge is to recognize that other cultures think and act differently and that they have the right to do so. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, immigrants will no longer be strangers among us.

When it comes to the Internet, it just pays to be a little paranoid (but not a lot). Given the level of anonymity with all that resides on the Internet, it's sensible to question the validity of any data that you may receive. Typically it's to our natural instinct when we meet someone coming down a sidewalk to place yourself in some manner of protective position, especially when they introduce themselves as having known you, much to your surprise. By design, we set up challenges in which the individual must validate how they know us by presenting scenarios, names or acquaintances, or evidence by which to validate (that is, photographs). Once we have received that information and it has gone through a cognitive validation, we accept that person as more trustworthy. All this happens in a matter of minutes but is a natural defense mechanism that we perform in the real world. However, in the virtual world, we have a tendency to be less defensive, as there appears to be no physical threat to our well-being.

Managers of natural resources typically face market incentives that provide financial rewards for exploitation. For example, owners of forest lands have a market incentive to cut down trees rather than manage the forest for carbon capture, wildlife habitat, flood protection, and other ecosystem services. These services provide the owner with no financial benefits, and thus are unlikely to inf luence management decisions. But the economic benefits provided by these services, based on their non-market values, may exceed the economic value of the timber. For example, a United Nations initiative has estimated that the economic benefits of ecosystem services provided by tropical forests, including climate regulation, water purification, and erosion prevention, are over three times greater per hectare than the market benefits. Thus cutting down the trees is economically inefficient, and markets are not sending the correct "signal" to favor ecosystem services over extractive uses.

The primary purpose of commercial music radio broadcasting is to deliver an audience to a group of advertisers and sponsors. To achieve commercial success, that audience must be as large as possible. More than any other characteristics (such as demographic or psychographic profile, purchasing power, level of interest, degree of satisfaction, quality of attention or emotional state), the quantity of an audience aggregated as a mass is the most significant metric for broadcasters seeking to make music radio for profitable ends. As a result, broadcasters attempt to maximise their audience size by playing music that is popular, or — at the very least — music that can be relied upon not to cause audiences to switch off their radio or change the station. Audience retention is a key value (if not the key value) for many music programmers and for radio station management. In consequence, a high degree of risk aversion frequently marks out the ‘successful' radio music programmer. Playlists are restricted, and often very small.

There are pressures within the museum that cause it to emphasise what happens in the galleries over the activities that take place in its unseen zones. In an era when museums are forced to increase their earnings, they often focus their energies on modernising their galleries or mounting temporary exhibitions to bring more and more audiences through the door. In other words, as museums struggle to survive in a competitive economy, their budgets often prioritise those parts of themselves that are consumable: infotainment in the galleries, goods and services in the cafes and the shops. The unlit, unglamorous storerooms, if they are ever discussed, are at best presented as service areas that process objects for the exhibition halls. And at worst, as museums pour more and more resources into their publicly visible faces, the spaces of storage may even suffer, their modernisation being kept on hold or being given less and less space to house the expanding collections and serve their complex conservation needs.

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.

Environmental learning occurs when farmers base decisions on observations of "payoff" information. They may observe their own or neighbors' farms, but it is the empirical results they are using as a guide, not the neighbors themselves. They are looking at farming activities as experiments and assessing such factors as relative advantage, compatibility with existing resources, difficulty of use, and "trialability" — how well can it be experimented with. But that criterion of "trialability" turns out to be a real problem; it's true that farmers are always experimenting, but working farms are very flawed laboratories. Farmers cannot set up the controlled conditions of professional test plots in research facilities. Farmers also often confront complex and difficult-to-observe phenomena that would be hard to manage even if they could run controlled experiments. Moreover farmers can rarely acquire payoff information on more than a few of the production methods they might use, which makes the criterion of "relative advantage" hard to measure.

Considerable work by cultural psychologists and anthropologists has shown that there are indeed large and sometimes surprising differences in the words and concepts that different cultures have for describing emotions, as well as in the social circumstances that draw out the expression of particular emotions. However, those data do not actually show that different cultures have different emotions, if we think of emotions as central, neurally implemented states. As for, say, color vision, they just say that, despite the same internal processing architecture, how we interpret, categorize, and name emotions varies according to culture and that we learn in a particular culture the social context in which it is appropriate to express emotions. However, the emotional states themselves are likely to be quite invariant across cultures. In a sense, we can think of a basic, culturally universal emotion set that is shaped by evolution and implemented in the brain, but the links between such emotional states and stimuli, behavior, and other cognitive states are plastic and can be modified by learning in a specific cultural context.

The concept of overtourism rests on a particular assumption about people and places common in tourism studies and the social sciences in general. Both are seen as clearly defined and demarcated. People are framed as bounded social actors either playing the role of hosts or guests. Places, in a similar way, are treated as stable containers with clear boundaries. Hence, places can be full of tourists and thus suffer from overtourism. But what does it mean for a place to be full of people? Indeed, there are examples of particular attractions that have limited capacity and where there is actually no room for more visitors. This is not least the case with some man-made constructions such as the Eiffel Tower. However, with places such as cities, regions or even whole countries being promoted as destinations and described as victims of overtourism, things become more complex. What is excessive or out of proportion is highly relative and might be more related to other aspects than physical capacity, such as natural degradation and economic leakages (not to mention politics and local power dynamics).

Before the web, newspaper archives were largely the musty domain of professional researchers and journalism students. Journalism was, by definition, current. The general accessibility of archives has greatly extended the shelf life of journalism, with older stories now regularly cited to provide context for more current ones. With regard to how meaning is made of complex issues encountered in the news, this departure can be understood as a readiness by online news consumers to engage with the underlying issues and contexts of the news that was not apparent in, or even possible for, print consumers. One of the emergent qualities of online news, determined in part by the depth of readily accessible online archives, seems to be the possibility of understanding news stories as the manifest outcomes of larger economic, social and cultural issues rather than short-lived and unconnected media spectacles.

Hyper-mobility — the notion that more travel at faster speeds covering longer distances generates greater economic success — seems to be a distinguishing feature of urban areas, where more than half of the world's population currently reside. By 2005, approximately 7.5 billion trips were made each day in cities worldwide. In 2050, there may be three to four times as many passenger-kilometres travelled as in the year 2000, infrastructure and energy prices permitting. Freight movement could also rise more than threefold during the same period. Mobility flows have become a key dynamic of urbanization, with the associated infrastructure invariably constituting the backbone of urban form. Yet, despite the increasing level of urban mobility worldwide, access to places, activities and services has become increasingly difficult. Not only is it less convenient — in terms of time, cost and comfort — to access locations in cities, but the very process of moving around in cities generates a number of negative externalities. Accordingly, many of the world's cities face an unprecedented accessibility crisis, and are characterized by unsustainable mobility systems.

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.

Not only musicians and psychologists, but also committed music enthusiasts and experts often voice the opinion that the beauty of music lies in an expressive deviation from the exactly defined score. Concert performances become interesting and gain in attraction from the fact that they go far beyond the information printed in the score. In his early studies on musical performance, Carl Seashore discovered that musicians only rarely play two equal notes in exactly the same way. Within the same metric structure, there is a wide potential of variations in tempo, volume, tonal quality and intonation. Such variation is based on the composition but diverges from it individually. We generally call this ‘expressivity'. This explains why we do not lose interest when we hear different artists perform the same piece of music. It also explains why it is worthwhile for following generations to repeat the same repertoire. New, inspiring interpretations help us to expand our understanding, which serves to enrich and animate the music scene.

The approach, joint cognitive systems, treats a robot as part of a human-machine team where the intelligence is synergistic, arising from the contributions of each agent. The team consists of at least one robot and one human and is often called a mixed team because it is a mixture of human and robot agents. Self-driving cars, where a person turns on and off the driving, is an example of a joint cognitive system. Entertainment robots are examples of mixed teams as are robots for telecommuting. The design process concentrates on how the agents will cooperate and coordinate with each other to accomplish the team goals. Rather than treating robots as peer agents with their own completely independent agenda, joint cognitive systems approaches treat robots as helpers such as service animals or sheep dogs. In joint cognitive system designs, artificial intelligence is used along with human-robot interaction principles to create robots that can be intelligent enough to be good team members.