The higher prevalence of environmental consciousness among younger generations means that a company’s environmental reputation may affect its ability to recruit talent. , “We know that it makes a hiring difference when we’re out recruiting at universities. , People ask about sustainability, and our recruiters do talk about our packaging, so it is a draw for talent,” said Oliver Campbell, director of procurement at Dell. , A Rutgers University study of worker priorities found that nearly half of college students (45 percent) said in 2012 that they would give up a 15 percent higher salary to have a job “that seeks to make a social or environmental difference in the world.” , Naturally, such responses to surveys may or may not correlate with actual behavior, but they may be an indicator.

We can all become vulnerable to doubts about our belonging at any given moment, depending on the situations we find ourselves in and how we interpret them. , Greg Walton and I coined the term “belonging uncertainty” to refer to the state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be., We can experience it in the workplace, at school, at a fancy restaurant, or even in a brief social encounter. , Belonging uncertainty has adverse effects. , When we perceive threats to our sense of belonging, our horizon of possibility shrinks. , We tend to interpret ourselves, other people, and the situation in a defensive and self-protective way. , We more readily infer that we are incapable or that we aren’t meant to be there, that we will not understand or be understood. , We’re less likely to express our views, especially if they differ from those of others. , We’re more sensitive to perceived criticism. We’re less inclined to accept challenges that pose a risk of failure.

A group of psychologists looked at the effects of everyday good and bad events —getting a compliment from your boss, bad weather, getting stuck in traffic, etc. , Not surprisingly, good events had a positive impact on people’s mood and negative events brought people down. , But the duration of the experiences differed dramatically. Positive events were short-lived. , The negative events stayed longer. , In one study, having a good day did not have any noticeable impact on the subsequent day. , That is, a good Monday didn’t carry over to Tuesday. , But negative events had a sustained impact—a bad Monday predicted a gloomy Tuesday. , This pattern is so strong that it is considered a “law” of human behavior. , Specifically, the law of hedonic asymmetry states that “pleasure is always dependent on change and disappears with continuous satisfaction, whereas pain persists under persisting unpleasant conditions.”

People have a strong desire to define categories using rules. , It is a natural human goal to impose order and sense on the world, to be able to know what boxes everything should go into, with no ambiguity. , The disappointing aspect is that this urge has failed in almost every attempt. , Most natural categories simply do not have a definition or rule that comes close to working. , Even human-made categories in systems of rules, like games, legal systems, official diagnostic categories, and the like can put only so much order into the universe. , There are always test cases that seem to break the rules — unclear category membership, not fitting into any category, or just giving the wrong answer. , This is not due to any human failing, I believe, but simply to the natural complexity and messiness of the world. , No religion, legal system, or bureaucracy can completely control the variation and weird events that occur even in limited worlds like baseball or disease classification.

We think it’s important to overcome any tendency to not talk about climate change for fear that other people might not feel the same way. , If you agree that changes need to happen to address climate change, you are not on the fringe of society, but in line with the 97 percent of scientists that agree climate change is happening. , Talking about climate change and environmental concerns can be a prompt to working together with others. , Incorporating sustainable habits into our lives can be the most fun when we are doing it with the people that surround us. , By sharing interesting facts or strategies with family, friends, neighbors, or coworkers on how to live more sustainably, we can also spread the impetus for change. , Suggest some healthy competition on waste or energy reduction efforts to get your close network involved in reducing their impact as well.

When setting writing tasks, either at home or school, think about how you would set yourself up if you had to write something for a period of time. , Would you grab a cup of tea, clear some space on a tabletop, sit on a comfy desk chair, use your best pen? , What else would you do? , And whatever it is, minus perhaps the cup of tea, see if you can allow children similar luxuries. , Are they thirsty, are they warm enough, is the desk/table at the right height, is the sun in their eyes, are they hungry, is their pencil sharp? , And ask them what they need to write more comfortably. , All these simple checks might be frustrating and delay the start of the task, but they are so important for enabling children to gain success in reading and writing and to see it in a positive light. , You’ll also find that children will get quicker at these checks and take control of them themselves over time, providing them with a toolkit to ensure their own well-being when writing.

Engineering serves society, and engineering and engineers are part of society. , It is essential therefore that they represent the society they are part of and meet the needs of. , The Royal Academy of Engineering has focused on promoting diversity, making equality, diversity and inclusion a ‘critical thread’ running through their strategy for the next 5 years. , Dame Wendy Hall, whose review into Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Jerome Pesenti is shaping the UK strategy on AI, insists that establishing ethics in AI must mean tackling the challenge of diversity— and is frequently quoted as saying that if a system is not diverse, it is not ethical. , AI will underpin engineering systems of the future, and developing AI systems is a key challenge for engineers. , As with all areas of engineering, to serve society it is essential that society is understood, involved, and represented, across its breadth.

The ethos of the American mind includes the belief that people who overcome a crisis are tough and unemotional, almost like the US version of the English expression “keep a stiff upper lip.” , Yet, the body of research exploring the most productive ways to respond to adversity and stress (which crises have in spades) contradicts this view. , The findings indicate that emotional expression (i.e., talking about your feelings rather than bottling them up) is associated with increased adaptation and growth. , So, whether you’re experiencing fear, frustration, anger, despair, or any other emotion, share them with others. , You’ll feel better from having an emotional release and feel support from those with whom you share. , Plus, the opportunity to process your emotions with a trusted friend will put you in a better space from which to tackle the crisis. , As Nelson Mandela put it, “Live life as though nobody is watching, and express yourself as though everyone is listening.”

There’s a saying that there are no cultural relativists at thirty thousand feet. , The laws of aerodynamics work regardless of political or social prejudices, and they are indisputably true. , Yes, you can discuss to what extent they are an approximation, what are their limits of validity, do they take into account such details as quantum entanglement or unified field theory (of course they don’t). , But the most basic scientific concept that is clearly and disturbingly missing from today’s social and political discourse is the concept that some questions have correct and clear answers. , Such questions can be called “scientific” and their answers represent truth. , Scientific questions are not easy to ask. , Their answers can be validated by experiment or observation, and they can be used to improve your life, create jobs and technologies, save the planet. , You don’t need pollsters or randomized trials to determine if a parachute works. , You need an understanding of the facts of aerodynamics and the methodology to do experiments.

When a community stopped hunting female wild cattle, those herds would, over time, tolerate the closer presence of humans. , By watching the wild cattle, as our deep ancestors watched predators and learned about their lives, these more recent ancestors could have begun to understand the life cycle of the wild cattle and made a few risky, but creative, ventures. , They started bringing a few, as youngsters, into the villages, building pens and trying to keep them alive, and they succeeded. , They’d been watching the cattle across generations—they knew about their life cycles, shared that information with one another, and collaboratively came up with ideas about raising their own cattle — and thus prey domestication was born. , Once cattle, sheep, pigs, llamas, and goats were living with humans, it was a simple task to do, like with dogs, a bit of behavioral and morphological shaping via direct manipulation (for wool, milk production, or rapid growth for meat). , The selection of specific individuals to breed was an initial step toward modern domestic animals. , And hamburgers.

The primary impetus of scientific and technical innovation has been our increased ability to reach out and exchange ideas with others, as well as to borrow other people’s ideas, and blend them with our own to create something new. , Combinatorial creativity is the acknowledgment that nothing is genuinely unique, at least not in the sense of being constructed entirely from scratch. , That notion is met with considerable resistance in creative spaces. , To create is to start with a blank canvas. , However, much data exists to support this ecosystem of influences and inspirations. , Nina Paley, an artist, shot and animated ancient relics from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to illustrate her point that all creation is derivative. , Every work of art is a derivative work. In animation, Oliver Laric examines the reappropriation of images in his video essay “Versions” by looking at how Disney recycles animation. , Creativity is the original open-source code.

Freud long ago distinguished between the conscious and the unconscious minds. , But today’s understanding of the unconscious mind is not Freud’s seething unconsciousness, with its repressed impulses and instincts. , It’s a cooler and bigger information processing system. , Our memory, thinking, language, attitudes, and perceptions all operate on these two tracks — a conscious, deliberate “high road” and an unconscious, automatic “low road.” , Our high-road mind is reflective; our low-road mind is intuitive. , Consider driving: Your brain and hands know how to move into the right lane. , But if you are like most drivers, you can’t consciously explain how you do it. , Most drivers say they would turn right, then straighten out. , But that would steer them off the road. , Actually, after moving right, you reverse the steering wheel equally to the left of center, and only then return to the center position. , But no worries, your low-road-guided hands know how to do it.

In marketing research, consumers commonly participate in interviews, focus groups, or the like, during which they indicate their desires, preferences, or in marketing terms, their wants. , Some methods also try to detect the consumers’ (subconscious) emotions, however with varying rates of success. , Such behavioural methods, where humans watch how fellow humans react when, e.g., exposed to a certain brand or product, manually coding and categorizing their emotions, are labour intensive, and consequently are rarely applied or applied in small sample sizes. , Human-inspired AI makes such methods possible on large scale, and even delivering instantaneous results will be possible. , For example, via facial recognition in a supermarket, one might detect shoppers’ emotions facing a shelf displaying the products of a new product launch. , Collecting a vast amount of data from all supermarkets participating in the respective launch nationwide would yield quite solid results.

Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre’s study of representations of chefs in US food media finds significant differences between how male and female chefs are portrayed. , Great male chefs are repeatedly represented as dedicated, creative and highly trained professionals and often depicted as ‘iconoclastic’ rule breakers with a unique vision or style. , In contrast, female professional chefs are often judged in terms of homestyle cooking which ‘devalues the training and skill required’ and, by representing their food as ‘amateur and homely’, links them to a domestic tradition rather than the professional standards which are crucial to recognition in the culinary field. , In this way, the operations of the culinary field reproduce gender inequalities by valuing qualities associated with a masculine tradition more highly and excluding women from criteria used to classify ‘great chefs’. , This limits a female chef’s ability to gain recognition and to accrue the economic, cultural and symbolic rewards that recognition generates.

It is sometimes argued that the spread of digital technology will serve to equalize opportunity for small companies as well as established media giants. , Digitization and the growth of the Internet are indeed reducing many barriers to market entry and creating opportunities for smaller enterprises and firms offering skills in new forms of content creation (such as computer games). , However, the digital environment favours strong and recognizable brands. , In the words of one UK publishing executive, ‘brands make it easier for the customer to make choices as the world gets more complicated’. , Without recognizable brands and worthwhile levels of consumer awareness, potential newcomers to the online universe may well find that the high initial costs involved in establishing an online presence (typically involving extensive campaigns on conventional media) represent an effective deterrent to market entry. , Large and established media content providers with strong brands and access to valuable back catalogues of images, text and sound have several advantages when it comes to exploitation of the additional scale economies made possible by digitization.

People are confronted with the cognitive dissonance aroused by the thought that one has stereotypes of others that guide one’s social judgments, and the thought that one is a good, fair, and rational thinker. , According to dissonance theory, one of these cognitions must change in order for dissonance to be eased. , Which one changes? , It is almost always the cognition that is most open to change, and in this case it is one’s cognitions about stereotyping. , Rather than think that we use stereotypes to evaluate others, we simply do not allow ourselves to come to such a conclusion, and we instead convince ourselves that we are indeed a fair, logical thinker by making our social judgments after a considered assessment of the information about the target individual. , In other words, we often either do not realize, or do not consciously acknowledge, that we do indeed stereotype others, or that our stereotype-derived impressions of them might be inaccurate. , This self-delusion helps us maintain our stereotypes while reducing the possibility for cognitive dissonance related to our self-concept.

Green marketing tries to overcome consumer distrust to induce positive associations between businesses and the natural environment. , Such marketers often make claims that are vague, irrelevant, misleading, or unprovable. , Common techniques include using words that ① imply sustainability (clean, clear, natural, pure), images of nature, brown and green color schemes, and recycled- or organic-looking content. , Companies sometimes promote a green image by sponsoring Earth Day events and making donations to ecological charities, or ② facilitating customers doing so. , Some of these practices, aesthetics, and vocabulary were once emblematic of alternative media, many of ③ them are driven by a sincere green ethos. , Green marketing has become so suspect ④ that some businesses avoid the term. , Instead, they label their activities “sustainability communication,” which ⑤ ideally engages audiences in supporting operational changes that substantially decrease a business’s environmental footprint and contribute to solving social problems.

Both poetry and mathematics are hard to understand. , The reason for students’ difficulties ① is almost always the same: the teacher doesn’t say all that he knows. , He skips things. Even if he is aware of everything that came before, he doesn’t have the time to spell them all out. , ② Conveying a lot of information in a single statement is what compression is all about. , And it is this type of compression ③ that is responsible for the difficulty in understanding poetry and mathematics. , But there is a significant difference between the two: the compression in mathematics is vertical, while poetical compression is horizontal. , In other words, in mathematics many stages, built like floors one upon the other, ④ hidden within a single statement. , In poetry, many distinct ideas, not necessarily vertically ordered, are compressed into one expression. , This is why the vague understanding of poetry causes no harm, while a hazy comprehension of mathematics gets back at us in a later stage, ⑤ when the next floor is built.

We do not recollect events exactly as we experienced them. , Most often, our recollection of an event differs ① substantially from the actual event. , This is because the way the brain processes and stores information differs from ② how a computer works. , For example, we tend to extract the gist and meaning from our experiences so that what we infer may be mixed up with what we actually experience. , If we hear a list of words related to sleep (e.g., bed, rest, awake, etc.), we tend to recollect “sleep” as being on the list, even though it ③ does not. , Also, unlike a computer ④ recovering a file, some memories can interfere with the retrieval of other memories. , If a long time has elapsed since experiencing a particular event, and if you have experienced similar events several times since the original experience, chances are you would find it difficult ⑤ to recollect the original event exactly as it happened; your memory of the original event may get mixed up with memories of related events.

Power is a common form of the urge for control. , There is an entire social science, political science, devoted to studying power— and that is a persuasive sign that it is an important and fundamental aspect of human life. , Power essentially involves control over other people. , Researcher David G. Winter defined it as the ability ① to produce intended effects on another person’s actions or emotions. , Some may seek power as a means to an end, such as on the assumption ② that once one is elected, one will be able to bring about certain much-wanted changes. , But others probably seek power for its own sake and derive satisfaction directly from being able to make other people ③ change the way they act. , Actually, the specific goal of people with a high craving for power ④ appear to be that they want to have an impact on other people’s lives, which does not necessarily mean making people do things. , Having an impact can be for good or ill, and a person with a high desire for power may enjoy giving money to a struggling family simply because it is ⑤ satisfying to see how much she was able to change that family’s life.

We learnt to cut wood and plough the earth once we had acquired the ability to attach a stone tip to a wooden handle. , Wood was abundant, but rare flint was needed for the tip. , In axes, raw and unrefined stone was ① replaced with flint in about 4000 BCE. , Found all over Europe, flint axes and knives were produced in great quantities — about half a million every year. , But there were very ② few flint mines. , Axe heads originating from one flint deposit in the Alps have been found all over Western Europe. , Axes from central Poland have been discovered 800 kilometres away. , So the earliest human tool, the flint axe, already ③ combined two types of raw material— the easily replaceable stick and the precious flint, which was handed down from one generation to another, travelling huge distances on its way. , The owners had to ④ abandon the sites where flint was found, and the first property rights developed. , Others had to produce something of value to ⑤ exchange: a flock of sheep, for example, or cured hides. , This is how trade began.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book Outliers, shows not only how a culture’s history can influence a child’s development and, thus, adult accomplishments, but also that such influences can extend back many generations and over different continents. , Did one’s ancestors make a living as independent farmers tending rice paddies, which required planning and persistent labor, or did they make a living as serfs growing potatoes, which required planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall, with little attention necessary in between? , Are you a descendant of farmers, whose crops were relatively immune to theft, or of ranchers, whose livelihoods could be stolen from under one’s nose? , Were people born in a time of economic plenty or hardship? , Exceptional people (the “outliers” in the title of his book), Gladwell asserts, are not simply the product of hard work and native intelligence. , They are the result of the practices of their culture at a particular time in history. , Although Gladwell never mentions Vygotsky or sociocultural theory, his book illustrates the importance of sociohistorical influences on development.

Seeing geography as a decisive factor in the course of human history can be construed as a bleak view of the world, which is why it is disliked in some intellectual circles. , It suggests that nature is more powerful than man and that we can go only so far in determining our own fate. ( ① ) , However, other factors clearly have an influence on events, too. ( ② ) , Any sensible person can see that technology is now bending the iron rules of geography. ( ③ ) , It has found ways over, under, or through some of the barriers., The Americans can now fly a plane all the way from Missouri to Mosul on a bombing mission without needing to land to refuel., That, along with their great aircraft carrier battle groups, means they no longer absolutely have to have an ally or a colony in order to extend their global reach around the world. ( ⑤ ) , Of course, if they do have an air base on the island of Diego Garcia, or permanent access to the port in Bahrain, then they have more options; but it is less essential.

Milk is mostly water. , For every unit of milk she produces, a dairy cow must consume an equivalent unit of water. , Commercial dairy operations convert millions of gallons of water into milk. , They use thousands of gallons of water daily to keep their herds and megafacilities clean enough to pass inspections. , This water becomes waste that contaminates surrounding aquifers. , Production of methane gas is also problematic. , Agribusiness dairies employ advanced technologies (animal genetics, food microbiology, biophysics, and biochemistry) and gigantic housing and production facilities stocked with specialized equipment (milking machines, piping, sprinklers, and sprayers) that are manufactured by other industries that also produce waste. , Infrastructure must be disposed of as newer industry standards make it outdated. , Transporting milk long distances requires refrigeration and fuel. , Milk used to be packaged in reusable glass containers, but it is now typically sold in plastic, most of which becomes solid waste, although much of it is recyclable.

Corporate social responsibility requires businesses to be accountable for their actions and recognize the impact they have on society and the environment. , Managing waste responsibly is part of this responsibility. , Companies can improve their waste management practices by evaluating their waste production and ① finding ways to reduce it. , They can also implement recycling and composting programmes, which can reduce the amount of waste ② sent to landfills. , By being conscious of their waste management practices, businesses can prove to consumers ③ what they are committed to being sustainable and environmentally responsible. , In addition to reducing ④ their own waste, companies can also contribute to waste reduction on a larger scale. , They can work with suppliers to reduce packaging and find ways to use more sustainable materials. , They can also partner with organizations that promote recycling and waste reduction and support legislation aimed at reducing waste. , By taking these steps, businesses can help ⑤ to reduce waste throughout the entire supply chain and promote sustainability on a larger scale.

Redesigning products and changing consumer preferences may need to be supported by new business models that reshape the means by which consumers obtain products and services. , Stahel and Jackson have criticized the prevailing ‘fast replacement’ production system and propose that ‘commercial innovations are necessary to decouple the profitability of commercial enterprises from the throughput of goods for consumption.’ , They suggest that the source of future company profitability should be the sale of services rather than products. , Nieuwenhuis has similarly presumed that in a more sustainable system ‘car producers might make their money not primarily by making and selling new cars, but by selling spares, repair and afterware through their dealer networks to keep their own products on the road for a long time.’ , Such examples of reshaping the product-service mix represent a systems-based approach through which material throughput is reduced while the service provided is maintained (or increased).

There is a problem from biology called “the paradox of enrichment.” , Intuitively, one would think that a population of predators would tend to do better if the amount of food available to its prey were to increase. , More food for the prey means that more prey is available to the predator, and hence the predators’ population should expand as well. , Yet, in fact, sometimes the opposite happens. , An increase in the food available to rabbits, for example, in a given area might lead to an overabundance of rabbits, and increase the population of its predator — say, wolves — until the population of wolves becomes unsustainably large and is destabilized. , So, more food for the rabbits can actually pose a threat to the population of wolves. , This example shows that our ordinary intuition— that more food and hence more prey is always good for a predatory group— is flawed. , More is not always more, at least in the case of predators and prey. , The paradox of enrichment shows that our intuitions about abundance and enrichment do not always conform to observable facts.

Our planet is about 4.6 billion years old. , Much of the Sahara is underlain by rocks that date back to between 2.5 billion and 500 million years ago. , These rocks have been greatly altered by extreme heat and pressure and have long been known by the very general term Basement Complex. , The Basement Complex rocks have undergone periodic intervals of uplift and deformation followed by intervals of prolonged erosion. , They are overlain by more or less undeformed sedimentary rocks that were laid down by water, wind, and ice. , This sedimentary cover is up to ten kilometres thick and occupies well over half of the present Sahara. , As a result, Basement Complex rocks are only visible at the surface of the Sahara in about 15 percent of its total area. , The contact between Basement Complex and sedimentary cover is often very sharp and is sometimes evident as a line of springs, some still active, some long dry.

The drive toward equilibrium, a minimum energy state where there is no further tendency to change, is one of the fundamental principles of chemistry and physics. , Falling objects come to ① rest at the lowest energy state; chemical reactions proceed to completion where no further reaction occurs. , While this driving force is manifest everywhere, natural systems, even when they are at a steady state, are usually ② far from equilibrium. , At equilibrium, properties such as temperature and pressure are constant throughout the system, and the system is isolated from external influences. , That is not the natural world! , One of the benefits of laboratory experiences is that when we actually try to measure properties at equilibrium, it becomes ③ evident that controlling the conditions for such perfection to appear is very difficult indeed. , Natural systems are not ④ inseparable. , Matter flows in and out; properties such as temperature and pressure change continuously. , Natural phenomena do not exist in static equilibrium states, but are in ⑤ movement at all scales.

Sport reflects the norms and values of the general culture of a society. , In most world cultures, winning and success are highly valued qualities. , Sport can serve as an excellent exemplar of the valued “win-at-all-costs” philosophy. , This prevailing attitude often leads to elitism, sexism, racism, nationalism, extreme competitiveness, abuse of drugs (including performance-enhancing drugs), gambling, and a number of other deviant behaviors. , However, the true spirit of sport often reveals itself as well. , The notions of cooperation and teamwork, fair play, sportsmanship, hard work, dedication, reaching to achieve personal excellence, obedience to rules, commitment and loyalty are also revered values of the society, and that is, perhaps, the primary reason that people love sport so much. , Despite the highly publicized negative sport stories that are often sensationalized by the mass media, including social media, there are far more positive sport-related stories which help to justify that our support of our favorite teams and athletes is not a wasted endeavor.

In tourism, demonstration effect refers to local residents adapting the styles and manners of visiting tourists. , Locals notice the ① superior material possessions of the visitors and wish to have the same. , One of the positive effects of demonstration effect is that it ② encourages residents to better work and productivity. , Particularly, in developing countries, hosts can be motivated to perform better because they can see in tourists the standard of living they want to ③ follow. , However, the expensive cameras and watches carried by tourists can not only be the objects of admiration and motivation to work harder, but also a source of anger and even threat. , Demonstration effect can be disruptive; locals can become resentful of visitors because they are ④ unable to obtain the goods and lifestyle demonstrated by them. , The exposure of the host society to tourists’ goods or ways of living can create unhappiness of hosts with what they previously regarded as ⑤ unacceptable. , Demonstration effect can often generate jealousy, resentment, and even hatred of tourists in the developing host countries, especially when locals see they cannot be as wealthy as tourists and have the same standard of living.