Whales are highly efficient at carbon storage. When they die, each whale sequesters an average of 30 tons of carbon dioxide, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries. For comparison, the average tree absorbs only 48 pounds of CO₂ a year. From a climate perspective, each whale is the marine equivalent of thousands of trees. Whales also help sequester carbon by fertilizing the ocean as they release nutrient-rich waste, in turn increasing phytoplankton populations, which also sequester carbon—leading some scientists to call them the "engineers of marine ecosystems." In 2019, economists from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the value of the ecosystem services provided by each whale at over $2 million USD. They called for a new global program of economic incentives to return whale populations to preindustrial whaling levels as one example of a "nature-based solution" to climate change. Calls are now being made for a global whale restoration program, to slow down climate change.

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.

You hear again and again that some of the greatest composers were misunderstood in their own day. Not everyone could understand the compositions of Beethoven, Brahms, or Stravinsky in their day. The reason for this initial lack of acceptance is unfamiliarity. The musical forms, or ideas expressed within them, were completely new. And yet, this is exactly one of the things that makes them so great. Effective composers have their own ideas. Have you ever seen the classic movie Amadeus? The composer Antonio Salieri is the "host" of this movie; he's depicted as one of the most famous non-great composers—he lived at the time of Mozart and was completely overshadowed by him. Now, Salieri wasn't a bad composer; in fact, he was a very good one. But he wasn't one of the world's great composers because his work wasn't original. What he wrote sounded just like what everyone else was composing at the time.

Both mammals and birds are noisy creatures. They commonly make their presence felt, and communicate, by sound, but birds are far better at it. Many mammals produce different sounds for different objects, but few can match the range of meaningful sounds that birds may give voice to. Apart from human beings, mammals on the whole are not melodious and there is little evidence that they intend to be. Some mammals bellow, but few sing, apart from human beings and perhaps whales. Yet many birds are famed for their songs and some of the most glorious songsters are the ones we encounter most often.

Tourism is one of many contributors to changes in the climate system. As with other human activities, there are many ways and spatial scales at which tourism contributes to climate change. For example, changes in land cover and use, such as replacing forest with resort buildings and other structures, can modify the local climate. Local climate changes may also be caused when air pollutants are emitted by the structures' incinerators, by stationary and mobile engines, and during land-clearing activities. Gradually, over space and time, even these locally focused human activities are known to change the climate, regionally and globally. They work together with more global scale forces such as those related to emissions from aircraft carrying tourists to and from their destinations.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe turned its eyes toward Africa. Colonial expansion in Africa is one example (China was another) of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. These European imperialists needed colonies for trade and raw materials for their new factories built during the Industrial Revolution. They also needed new markets in which to sell their manufactured goods. Their crowded populations needed new territory to overflow into. Africa, with its untouched mineral and agricultural resources, presented a valuable source of materials, offered opportunities for new markets, and provided new frontiers for adventurous colonists.

Perhaps the most widespread stress from technology that most people experience is the perpetual distraction of email and the replacement of face-to-face conversation with digital communications. In one of a series of articles in 2010 for the New York Times, technology investigative reporter Matt Richtel noted that people check email up to 37 times an hour on average. Furthermore, some people feel an urge to respond to emails immediately and feel guilty if they don't. How many emails can push one over the edge, past the threshold of exhaustion? According to a Harris Interactive poll, respondents said that more than 50 emails per day caused stress, many using the phrase "email stress" to explain their frustrations.

Flipped Learning allows for a variety of learning modes. Educators often physically rearrange their learning spaces to support either group work or independent study. They create flexible spaces in which students choose when and where they learn. Furthermore, educators who flip their classes are flexible in their expectations of student timelines for learning and in their assessments of student learning. In the traditional teacher-centered model, the teacher is the primary source of information. By contrast, the Flipped Learning model shifts instruction to a learner-centered approach, where in-class time is spent exploring topics in greater depth. As a result, students are actively involved in knowledge construction as they participate in and evaluate their learning in a personally meaningful manner.

Obedience training involves teaching a dog to perform certain behaviors at a given signal from the handler. These behaviors may be as simple as sitting at the owner's side or as complex as retrieving a selected object after dealing with a series of obstacles or barriers. The signals may be verbal or non-verbal or a combination of the two. Novice obedience instruction involves teaching the dog to respond to a verbal command and an accompanying hand signal. Later, as the dog learns, the spoken word can be eliminated. Some handlers have so expertly trained their animals that the dog responds to the slightest non-verbal signal, a roll of the eye or the slight flex of a finger. These signals may be imperceptible to the human audience, but are easily picked up by the trained dog whose full attention is focused on his owner.

One of the most frequent problems in groupwork is that not everyone puts the same amount of effort into the task. Group members may have a different work ethic or standards for the quality of their work, and this will probably result in different levels of commitment to the group work. While different levels of commitment to the task could be partly influenced by individual workloads, there are wider factors such as individual attitudes to study. Another aspect of the same problem, however, is where one member chooses to do more work than the others. An overeager member can be irritating to the other members who then reduce their commitment to the work leaving the overeager member to get on with most of the work. By taking on more than her fair share, the overeager member may eventually come to feel resentful with her increased workload, even if she volunteered for extra tasks. This will change the group dynamics and perhaps cause conflicts within the group.

For most of the history of our species, in most parts of the world, bathing has been a collective act. In ancient Asia, it was a religious ritual believed to have medical benefits related to the purification of the soul and body. For the Greeks, the baths were associated with self-expression, song, dance and sport, while in Rome they served as community centres, places to eat, exercise, read and debate it. But communal bathing is rare in the modern world. While there are places where it remains an important part of social life—in Japan, Sweden and Turkey, for example—for those living in major cities, particularly in the Anglosphere, it is virtually extinct. The eclipse of it is one symptom of a wider global transformation, away from small ritualistic societies to vast urban metropolises populated by loose networks of private individuals.

Semiotics is the theory of signs. Simply put, a sign is something that represents something else. Here's an example: look out of the window and find a tree. There are all sorts of signs for that thing you're looking at. One of them is the word tree itself, four letters spelled out on the page: t-r-e-e. A different sign is the spoken word, "tree." Another sign is a drawing of a tree. A little plastic toy tree is also a sign for ‘tree'. Yet another sign is gestural: if you were playing charades and stood straight with your legs together and your arms spread out in a V-shape over your head, your team might guess that you were representing a tree. So signs take the form of words, images, sounds, gestures, objects, even ideas—the thought "tree" generated in your head by looking out of the window is also a sign. But although almost anything has the potential to be a sign, it can only function as a sign if it is interpreted as a sign.

People often think that they can accomplish more than they actually end up accomplishing, and that any costs incurred will be as expected. In reality, many of us fall short of our work goal. And, budget overruns are a common feature of large public projects. The Sydney Opera House, for instance, was supposed to be completed in 1963 at a cost of $7 million. Instead, it was finished 10 years later at a cost of $102 million. Such lack of realism is not without cost. The inability to meet one's goals can lead to disappointment, loss of self-esteem, and reduced social regard. Also, time and money can be wasted pursuing unrealistic goals. Think of someone enrolling in a program of study that to neutral observers is beyond his capability. Should he fail, a significant amount of time and money will have been wasted. And, because of disappointment, he might be hesitant in the future to strive for other goals that are truly within his grasp.

In today's marketing and advertising-soaked world, people cannot escape brands. The younger they are when they start using a brand or product, the more likely they are to keep using it for years to come. But that's not the only reason companies are aiming their marketing and advertising at younger consumers. As James U. McNeal, a professor at Texas A&M University, puts it, "Seventy-five percent of spontaneous food purchases can be traced to a nagging child. And one out of two mothers will buy a food simply because her child requests it. To trigger desire in a child is to trigger desire in the whole family." In other words, kids have power over spending in their households, they have power over their grandparents and they have power over their babysitters. That's why companies use tricks to manipulate their minds.

You'd think that whenever more than one person makes a decision, they'd draw on collective wisdom. Surely, a group of minds can do better than an individual. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. The wisdom of a crowd partly relies on the fact that all judgments are independent. If people guess the weight of a cow and put it on a slip of paper, or estimate the likelihood of a revolution in Pakistan and enter it into a website, the average of their views is highly accurate. But, surprisingly, if those people talk about these questions in a group, the answers that they come to are increasingly incorrect. More specifically, researchers have found an effect of group polarization. Whatever bias people may have as individuals gets multiplied when they discuss things as a group. If individuals lean slightly toward taking a risk, the group leaps toward it.

In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams wrote his science fiction novel, subsequently a movie, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In it, he identifies one problem facing space travelers: the inability to communicate clearly with one another because of the wide variety of languages spoken. Yet a little creature that came to be called Babel Fish evolved that, when placed in the ear, would automatically and clearly translate what a person was saying into the listener's own language. Surprisingly, rather than helping relationships among different races by promoting clear understanding, the end results of using Babel Fish were some of the bloodiest wars known to the universe. Once people clearly understood one another and assigned similar meanings to words, this clarity sharply defined their differences and led to war.

One study brought in a large group of students to do "market research on high-tech headphones." The students were told that the researchers wanted to test how well the headphones worked while they were in motion. Following the songs, the researchers played an argument about how the university's tuition should be raised from $587 per semester to $750 per semester. One group of students had been told to move their heads up and down throughout the music and the speaking. Another group was told to move their heads from side to side. A last group was told to make no movements at all. After "testing the headsets," the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire about not only the headsets, but also the university's tuition. Those nodding their heads up and down (yes motion) overall rated a jump in tuition as favorable. Those shaking their heads side to side (no motion) overall wanted the tuition to be lowered. Those who had not moved their heads didn't really seem to be persuaded one way or the other.

People have a need to maintain an image of self-integrity. In an early demonstration of this, Steele (1975) threatened women's self-images by telling them that, as members of their community, it was common knowledge that they either were cooperative with community projects, uncooperative with community projects, or not concerned about driving safely. (A fourth, control group received no information relevant to their self-images.) Two days later, a fellow researcher called each woman, asking her to list every food item in her kitchen to help a food cooperative. Women who had been told they were uncooperative people or careless drivers two days earlier helped the researcher almost twice as much as women in the other groups. Steele explains this effect in terms of the women's motive to reestablish their self-concepts as cooperative people. Thus, threats to people's self-images induce a desire to reestablish their self-integrity.