FOBO, or Fear of a Better Option, is the anxiety that something better will come along, which makes it undesirable to commit to existing choices when making a decision. It's an affliction of abundance that drives you to keep all of your options open and to avoid risks. Rather than assessing your options, choosing one, and moving on with your day, you delay the inevitable. It's not unlike hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock only to pull the covers over your head and fall back asleep. As you probably found out the hard way, if you hit snooze enough times, you'll end up being late and racing for the office, your day and mood ruined. While pressing snooze feels so good at the moment, it ultimately demands a price.

Each species of animals can detect a different range of odours. No species can detect all the molecules that are present in the environment in which it lives ― there are some things that we cannot smell but which some other animals can, and vice versa. There are also differences between individuals, relating to the ability to smell an odour, or how pleasant it seems. For example, some people like the taste of coriander ― known as cilantro in the USA ― while others find it soapy and unpleasant. This effect has an underlying genetic component due to differences in the genes controlling our sense of smell. Ultimately, the selection of scents detected by a given species, and how that odour is perceived, will depend upon the animal's ecology. The response profile of each species will enable it to locate sources of smell that are relevant to it and to respond accordingly.

There is nothing more fundamental to the human spirit than the need to be mobile. It is the intuitive force that sparks our imaginations and opens pathways to life-changing opportunities. It is the catalyst for progress and personal freedom. Public transportation has been vital to that progress and freedom for more than two centuries. The transportation industry has always done more than carry travelers from one destination to another. It connects people, places, and possibilities. It provides access to what people need, what they love, and what they aspire to become. In so doing, it grows communities, creates jobs, strengthens the economy, expands social and commercial networks, saves time and energy, and helps millions of people achieve a better life.

As much as we can learn by examining fossils, it is important to remember that they seldom tell the entire story. Things only fossilize under certain sets of conditions. Modern insect communities are highly diverse in tropical forests, but the recent fossil record captures little of that diversity. Many creatures are consumed entirely or decompose rapidly when they die, so there may be no fossil record at all for important groups. It's a bit similar to a family photo album. Maybe when you were born your parents took lots of pictures, but over the years they took photographs occasionally, and sometimes they got busy and forgot to take pictures at all. Very few of us have a complete photo record of our life. Fossils are just like that. Sometimes you get very clear pictures of the past, while at other times there are big gaps, and you need to notice what they are.

Back in 1996, an American airline was faced with an interesting problem. At a time when most other airlines were losing money or going under, over 100 cities were begging the company to service their locations. However, that's not the interesting part. What's interesting is that the company turned down over 95 percent of those offers and began serving only four new locations. It turned down tremendous growth because company leadership had set an upper limit for growth. Sure, its executives wanted to grow each year, but they didn't want to grow too much. Unlike other famous companies, they wanted to set their own pace, one that could be sustained in the long term. By doing this, they established a safety margin for growth that helped them continue to thrive at a time when the other airlines were flailing.

Even though two variables seem to be related, there may not be a causal relationship. In fact, the two variables may merely seem to be associated with each other due to the effect of some third variable. Sociologists call such misleading relationships spurious. A classic example is the apparent association between children's shoe size and reading ability. It seems that as shoe size increases, reading ability improves. Does this mean that the size of one's feet (independent variable) causes an improvement in reading skills (dependent variable)? Certainly not. This false relationship is caused by a third factor, age, that is related to shoe size as well as reading ability. Hence, when researchers attempt to make causal claims about the relationship between an independent and a dependent variable, they must control for ― or rule out ― other variables that may be creating a spurious relationship.

Daylight isn't the only signal that the brain can use for the purpose of biological clock resetting, though it is the principal and preferential signal, when present. So long as they are reliably repeating, the brain can also use other external cues, such as food, exercise, and even regularly timed social interaction. All of these events have the ability to reset the biological clock, allowing it to strike a precise twenty-four-hour note. It is the reason that individuals with certain forms of blindness do not entirely lose their circadian rhythm. Despite not receiving light cues due to their blindness, other phenomena act as their resetting triggers. Any signal that the brain uses for the purpose of clock resetting is termed a zeitgeber, from the German time giver or synchronizer. Thus, while light is the most reliable and thus the primary zeitgeber, there are many factors that can be used in addition to, or in the absence of, daylight.

Earlier agricultural systems were integrated with and co-evolved with technologies, beliefs, myths and traditions as part of an integrated social system. Generally, people planted a variety of crops in different areas, in the hope of obtaining a reasonably stable food supply. These systems could only be maintained at low population levels, and were relatively non-destructive (but not always). More recently, agriculture has in many places lost its local character, and has become incorporated into the global economy. This has led to increased pressure on agricultural land for exchange commodities and export goods. More land is being diverted from local food production to cash crops for export and exchange; fewer types of crops are raised, and each crop is raised in much greater quantities than before. Thus, ever more land is converted from forest (and other natural systems) for agriculture for export, rather than using land for subsistence crops.

In their study in 2007 Katherine Kinzler and her colleagues at Harvard showed that our tendency to identify with an in-group to a large degree begins in infancy and may be innate. Kinzler and her team took a bunch of five-month-olds whose families only spoke English and showed the babies two videos. In one video, a woman was speaking English. In the other, a woman was speaking Spanish. Then they were shown a screen with both women side by side, not speaking. In infant psychology research, the standard measure for affinity or interest is attention ― babies will apparently stare longer at the things they like more. In Kinzler's study, the babies stared at the English speakers longer. In other studies, researchers have found that infants are more likely to take a toy offered by someone who speaks the same language as them. Psychologists routinely cite these and other experiments as evidence of our built-in evolutionary preference for our own kind.

When you pluck a guitar string it moves back and forth hundreds of times every second. Naturally, this movement is so fast that you cannot see it - you just see the blurred outline of the moving string. Strings vibrating in this way on their own make hardly any noise because strings are very thin and don't push much air about. But if you attach a string to a big hollow box (like a guitar body), then the vibration is amplified and the note is heard loud and clear. The vibration of the string is passed on to the wooden panels of the guitar body, which vibrate back and forth at the same rate as the string. The vibration of the wood creates more powerful waves in the air pressure, which travel away from the guitar. When the waves reach your eardrums they flex in and out the same number of times a second as the original string.

Boundaries between work and home are blurring as portable digital technology makes it increasingly possible to work anywhere, anytime. Individuals differ in how they like to manage their time to meet work and outside responsibilities. Some people prefer to separate or segment roles so that boundary crossings are minimized. For example, these people might keep separate email accounts for work and family and try to conduct work at the workplace and take care of family matters only during breaks and non-work time. We've even noticed more of these segmenters carrying two phones - one for work and one for personal use. Flexible schedules work well for these individuals because they enable greater distinction between time at work and time in other roles. Other individuals prefer integrating work and family roles all day long. This might entail constantly trading text messages with children from the office, or monitoring emails at home and on vacation, rather than returning to work to find hundreds of messages in their inbox.

A complementary good is a product that is often consumed alongside another product. For example, popcorn is a complementary good to a movie, while a travel pillow is a complementary good for a long plane journey. When the popularity of one product increases, the sales of its complementary good also increase. By producing goods that complement other products that are already (or about to be) popular, you can ensure a steady stream of demand for your product. Some products enjoy perfect complementary status - they have to be consumed together, such as a lamp and a lightbulb. However, do not assume that a product is perfectly complementary, as customers may not be completely locked in to the product. For example, although motorists may seem required to purchase gasoline to run their cars, they can switch to electric cars.

It's not news to anyone that we judge others based on their clothes. In general, studies that investigate these judgments find that people prefer clothing that matches expectations - surgeons in scrubs, little boys in blue - with one notable exception. A series of studies published in an article in June 2014 in the Journal of Consumer Research explored observers' reactions to people who broke established norms only slightly. In one scenario, a man at a black-tie affair was viewed as having higher status and competence when wearing a red bow tie. The researchers also found that valuing uniqueness increased audience members' ratings of the status and competence of a professor who wore red sneakers while giving a lecture. The results suggest that people judge these slight deviations from the norm as positive because they suggest that the individual is powerful enough to risk the social costs of such behaviors.

From an organizational viewpoint, one of the most fascinating examples of how any organization may contain many different types of culture is to recognize the functional operations of different departments within the organization. The varying departments and divisions within an organization will inevitably view any given situation from their own biased and prejudiced perspective. A department and its members will acquire tunnel vision which disallows them to see things as others see them. The very structure of organizations can create conflict. The choice of whether the structure is mechanistic or organic can have a profound influence on conflict management. A mechanistic structure has a vertical hierarchy with many rules, many procedures, and many levels of management involved in decision making. Organic structures are more horizontal in nature, where decision making is less centralized and spread across the plane of the organization.

An excellent alternative to calming traffic is removing it. Some cities reserve an extensive network of lanes and streets for bikes, pedestrians, and the occasional service vehicle. This motivates people to travel by bike rather than by car, making streets safer for everyone. As bicycles become more popular in a city, planners can convert more automobile lanes and entire streets to accommodate more of them. Nevertheless, even the most bikeable cities still require motor vehicle lanes for taxis, emergency vehicles, and delivery trucks. Delivery vehicles are frequently a target of animus, but they are actually an essential component to making cities greener. A tightly packed delivery truck is a far more efficient transporter of goods than several hybrids carrying a few shopping bags each. Distributing food and other goods to neighborhood vendors allows them to operate smaller stores close to homes so that residents can walk, rather than drive, to get their groceries.

Every time a new medium comes along - whether it's the invention of the printed book, or TV, or SNS - and you start to use it, it's like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, with their own special colors and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently. So when you start to watch television, before you absorb the message of any particular TV show - whether it's Wheel of Fortune or The Wire - you start to see the world as being shaped like television itself. That's why Marshall McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along - a new way for humans to communicate - it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it's about surfaces and appearances.

While social media attention is potentially an instrument to achieve ends like elite celebrity, some content creators desire ordinary fame as a social end in itself. Not unlike reality television stars, social media celebrities are often criticized for not having skills and talents associated with traditional, elite celebrity, such as acting or singing ability. This criticism highlights the fact that digital content creators face real barriers to crossing over to the sphere of elite celebrity. However, the criticism also misses the point that the phenomenon of ordinary celebrity reconstructs the meaning of fame. The elite celebrity is symbolized by the metaphor of the star, characterized by mystery and hierarchical distance and associated with naturalized qualities of talent and class. The ordinary celebrity attracts attention through regular and frequent interactions with other ordinary people. Achieving ordinary fame as a social media celebrity is like doing well at a game, because in this sphere, fame is nothing more nor less than relatively high scores on attention scales, the metrics of subscribers, followers, Likes, or clicks built into social media applications.

Higher education has grown from an elite to a mass system across the world. In Europe and the USA, increased rates of participation occurred in the decades after the Second World War. Between 2000 and 2014, rates of participation in higher education almost doubled from 19% to 34% across the world among the members of the population in the school-leaving age category (typically 18-23). The dramatic expansion of higher education has been marked by a wider range of institutions of higher learning and a more diverse demographic of students. Changes from an elite system to a mass higher education system are associated with political needs to build a specialized workforce for the economy. In theory, the expansion of higher education to develop a highly skilled workforce should diminish the role of examinations in the selection and control of students, initiating approaches to assessment which enable lifelong learning: assessment for learning and a focus on feedback for development. In reality, sociopolitical changes to expand higher education have set up a 'field of contradictions' for assessment in higher education. Mass higher education requires efficient approaches to assessment, such as examinations and multiple-choice quizzes, with minimalist, impersonal, or standardised feedback, often causing students to focus more on grades than feedback. In contrast, the relatively small numbers of students in elite systems in the past allowed for closer relationships between students and their teachers, with formative feedback shaping the minds, academic skills, and even the characters of students.