To whom it may concern, My name is Peter Jackson and I am thinking of applying for the Advanced Licensed Counselor Program that the university provides. I found that the certification for 100 hours of counseling experience is required for the application. However, I do not think I could possibly complete the required counseling experience by the current deadline. So, if possible, I kindly request an extension of the deadline until the end of this summer vacation. I am actively working on obtaining the certification, and I am sure I will be able to submit it by then. I understand the importance of following the application process, and would greatly appreciate your consideration of this request. I look forward to your response. Sincerely,Peter Jackson

Merely convincing your children that worry is senseless and that they would be more content if they didn't worry isn't going to stop them from worrying. For some reason, young people seem to believe that worry is a fact of life over which they have little or no control. Consequently, they don't even try to stop. Therefore, you need to convince them that worry, like guilt and fear, is nothing more than an emotion, and like all emotions, is subject to the power of the will. Tell them that they can eliminate worry from their lives by simply refusing to attend to it. Explain to them that if they refuse to act worried regardless of how they feel, they will eventually stop feeling worried and will begin to experience the contentment that accompanies a worry-free life.

Any new or threatening situation may require us to make decisions and this requires information. So important is communication during a disaster that normal social barriers are often lowered. We will talk to strangers in a way we would never consider normally. Even relatively low grade disruption of our life such as a fire drill or a very late train seems to give us the permission to break normal etiquette and talk to strangers. The more important an event to a particular public, the more detailed and urgent the requirement for news becomes. Without an authoritative source of facts, whether that is a newspaper or trusted broadcast station, rumours often run riot. Rumours start because people believe their group to be in danger and so, although the rumour is unproven, feel they should pass it on. For example, if a worker heard that their employer's business was doing badly and people were going to be made redundant, they would pass that information on to colleagues.

Mental development consists of individuals increasingly mastering social codes and signals themselves, which they can master only in social situations with the support of more competent individuals, typically adults. In this sense, mental development consists of internalizing social patterns and gradually becoming a responsible actor among other responsible actors. In Denmark, the age of criminal responsibility is 15 years, which means that we then say that people have developed sufficient mental maturity to be accountable for their actions at this point. And at the age of 18 people are given the right to vote and are thereby formally included in the basic democratic process. I do not know whether these age boundaries are optimal, but it is clear that mental development takes place at different rates for different individuals, and depends especially on the social and family environment they have been given. Therefore, having formal limits for responsibility from a specific age that apply to everyone is a somewhat questionable practice. But the question, of course, is whether it can be done any differently.

Born in the English city of Liverpool, Charles Elton studied zoology under Julian Huxley at Oxford University from 1918 to 1922. After graduating, he began teaching as a part-time instructor and had a long and distinguished teaching career at Oxford from 1922 to 1967. After a series of arctic expeditions with Huxley, he worked with a fur-collecting and trading company as a biological consultant, and examined the company's records to study animal populations. In 1927, he wrote his first and most important book, Animal Ecology, in which he demonstrated the nature of food chains and cycles. In 1932, he helped establish the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford. In the same year he became the editor of the new Journal of Animal Ecology. Throughout his career, Elton wrote six books and played a major role in shaping the modern science of ecology.

The first human beings probably evolved in tropical regions where survival was possible without clothing. It is likely that they had very dark skin because light skin would have given little protection against the burning rays of the sun. There is a debate about whether these people spread into other parts of the world or, instead, whether people developed independently in various parts of the world. Whichever the case, it is believed that in time they became capable of spreading out from Africa, eventually to most of the world. This was probably because their physical characteristics changed. For instance, early hominids probably did not walk upright, but when they developed that ability, they could travel more efficiently. More important, perhaps, was their development of tool making. With tools, they could hunt other animals, so they could consume more protein and fat than their low-energy vegetarian diet would have provided. Not only their bodies but also their brains would have been changed with more energy. The brain needs lots of energy to grow. As their diet expanded, hominids could physically and intellectually expand their territory.

The well-known American ethnologist Alfred Louis Kroeber made a rich and in-depth study of women's evening dress in the West, stretching back about three centuries and using reproductions of engravings. Having adjusted the dimensions of these plates due to their diverse origins, he was able to analyse the constant elements in fashion features and to come up with a study that was neither intuitive nor approximate, but precise, mathematical and statistical. He reduced women's clothing to a certain number of features: length and size of the skirt, size and depth of the neckline, height of the waistline. He demonstrated unambiguously that fashion is a profoundly regular phenomenon which is not located at the level of annual variations but on the scale of history. For practically 300 years, women's dress was subject to a very precise periodic cycle: forms reach the furthest point in their variations every fifty years. If, at any one moment, skirts are at their longest, fifty years later they will be at their shortest; thus skirts become long again fifty years after being short and a hundred years after being long.

It's often said that those who can't do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can't teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals. Experiments show that skilled golfers and wine aficionados have a hard time describing their putting and tasting techniques—even asking them to explain their approaches is enough to interfere with their performance, so they often stay on autopilot. When I first saw an elite diver do four and a half somersaults, I asked how he managed to spin so fast. His answer: "Just go up in a ball." Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to clearly express all the steps to take. Their brain dump is partially filled with garbage.

It would seem obvious that the more competent someone is, the more we will like that person. By "competence," I mean a cluster of qualities: smartness, the ability to get things done, wise decisions, etc. We stand a better chance of doing well at our life tasks if we surround ourselves with people who know what they're doing and have a lot to teach us. But the research evidence is paradoxical: In problem-solving groups, the participants who are considered the most competent and have the best ideas tend not to be the ones who are best liked. Why? One possibility is that, although we like to be around competent people, those who are too competent make us uncomfortable. They may seem unapproachable, distant, superhuman—and make us look bad (and feel worse) by comparison. If this were true, we might like people more if they reveal some evidence of fallibility. For example, if your friend is a brilliant mathematician, superb athlete, and gourmet cook, you might like him or her better if, every once in a while, they screwed up.

There are deep similarities between viral contagion and behavioral contagion. For example, people in close or extended proximity to others infected by a virus are themselves more likely to become infected, just as people are more likely to drink excessively when they spend more time in the company of heavy drinkers. But there are also important differences between the two types of contagion. One is that visibility promotes behavioral contagion but inhibits the spread of infectious diseases. Solar panels that are visible from the street, for instance, are more likely to stimulate neighboring installations. In contrast, we try to avoid others who are visibly ill. Another important difference is that whereas viral contagion is almost always a bad thing, behavioral contagion is sometimes negative—as in the case of smoking—but sometimes positive, as in the case of solar installations.

The concern about how we appear to others can be seen in children, though work by the psychologist Ervin Staub suggests that the effect may vary with age. In a study where children heard another child in distress, young children (kindergarten through second grade) were more likely to help the child in distress when with another child than when alone. But for older children—in fourth and sixth grade—the effect reversed: they were less likely to help a child in distress when they were with a peer than when they were alone. Staub suggested that younger children might feel more comfortable acting when they have the company of a peer, whereas older children might feel more concern about being judged by their peers and fear feeling embarrassed by overreacting. Staub noted that "older children seemed to discuss the distress sounds less and to react to them less openly than younger children." In other words, the older children were deliberately putting on a poker face in front of their peers.