

Writing Ethics

Description:

A strategy that will allow you to write and distinguish between the main two subjects that book presents, which are The Article and The Essay. Authoring methods are so easy to handle just by practice, and those ethics exist in the main strategy. What will one predict to read when feelings order the pen to note all what person live in?

Note:

Reading is considered the key of writing ethics.

There is a part in yourself let it help you firstly then find those people who you think they can offer the help.

Sincere Words

What is written on those papers are not only my individual work, some of what present in the content of the book excerpted from many links and websites like: Wikipedia, brainy quotes, Teen ink, SAT Essay, help me study, Life without Pants, Los Angeles times, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Psychology today, Custom article writing, pro-papers/essay, Copyblogger, Australian national university website, The WAC Clearing house, Vanity fair, Deadline Hollywood, Biography, The Balance and others.

I gathered some article, sentences, and ideas beside my words and decided to arrange all these data in a book instead of being useless and instead of being read by people carelessly. There may be spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes and I am so sorry for those, but I hope that all what you will read could present a complete reliable help for you.

Although I wish I did my best, I am very sorry for not describing all the references used to create that book.

I really apologize for using the word (I) many times.

Remember:

. If you found that all those topics or data combined here are too abundant to accommodate all, keep an insight care on the index to find what is related to the strategy you follow.

. There are 4 main assisting parts that will really have a great impact on your writings:

A) Topics B) Events

C) Dignitaries D) Proverbs

Way of Writing

Article is a paper that is printed or published online. The main purposes of article writing are spreading the news that people are usually interested in, research results and academic analysis that are important to humanity, and debate.

Basically, the key element of a good article is its abilities to persuade, inform, and argue, but at the same time, in order to attract more readers, it should be interesting, captivating, and lively.

As a rule, this kind of academic writing consists of 3 main sections:

Introduction, body, and conclusion.

There also should be no long sentences, since an article contains a message that has to be crystal clear to everyone.

Essays are papers that require a thorough investigation of a topic that is most commonly done in 3 steps:

Gathering information, processing the facts, and evaluating the evidence.

Basically, writing essays means collecting valuable data through as many kinds of sources as possible, including articles, interviews, experiments, etc. The main reason for that is a need to completely understand a particular topic since essays are based on theses that require a lot of brainstorming and explanations.

The structure of an essay contains:

  * A well-defined thesis statement in the first paragraph.

  * Logical connection between paragraphs.

  * Well-researched information from reliable sources.

  * A conclusion – synthesis of an essay.

# Article

. First thing you have to keen on showing it is the objective of the article and that is mainly one of the most important steps you have to make to guide the reader to your intentions.

Objectives: What does the article set out to do?

. In the second step your evidence shows your basic knowledge and how far it is so if you are talking about something it is hard to achieve write about something more pragmatic and if you are talking about something pragmatic show the fanciful story or example to let the receiver believe that the unexpected can happen. Remember also that the body doesn't have to be one paragraph only it can be more and have the same content or form.

Evidence: How adequate is it?

. At the end you pick all the things that the reader can get benefit of because by the time he may forget one of your important sentences so to conclude your words in the last paragraph is to prepare the best guidance principals he can walk on when think about the core of that topic again.

Conclusion: A brief overall assessment.

Principles you must follow:

1) Keep an idea-list means that you have to write all what your mind picked up when it started to think about your topic, sometimes each one of these ideas can be used in paragraphs and some of them can be combined in one paragraph it's all depends on their content.

2) Incubate your ideas may be they are brilliant but you just can't remember more information to support your persuasion to the reader so try to search for the specific points that you are sure they will affect the kind of reader's mind who care about your topic

3) Edit the form before starting write of course you will find some of those information and perspectives you collected the same so you have to trim what is repeated to not present the article as a mundane repeated event

4) The surprising parts are the basic holder of your words you have to be careful when you put it in your article and that depends on the way you started writing. If you started with a weak manner try to put it at the first just to capture the reader energy to continue reading your words, if you started in a normal way just put that part in the middle, and if you are started with specific word and intention sentences present it at the end to be the lasting important idea.

5) If you forgot something to write that is not a problem just be honest and write it at the end as a note or an example just let the reader know how important it is, remember that all you need is to help who cares to know what is new.

6) Do not leave an idea without using it because day by day information are amplified and truly there is no idea can be kept safe in a long margin of time.

Four major things you want people to get attention at are: Theory, concept, argument, and literally.

. Theory is that you present new hypotheses supported with evidence and you choose the best idealistic ways of using words and examples to completely prove it

. Concept is to present a perspective you just discovered by yourself or may be a tradition some people you lived with believed in it before and sometimes people accept it due to your using of the eloquent words.

. Argument is to present your view just with statistics that you are not obliged to present with tables, but you can do it only while comparing the others view by presenting the time, tools, place, and way of dealing with the thing you debate about.

. Literally means that the point you talk about is ideal or accepted by intellectual minds but you try with a new and easy way to present it without getting out of the ornate manner. Put words in the exact place without using awkward meanings because sometimes you can write your point with slang words that are effectively will be accepted.

# Essay

. When you start writing an essay the first thing you have to do is to put a sentence from your own words but it has to attract the reader attention with a starting word like:

Today, since, Rarely, In our daily life, The purpose of the topic itself, or....

Of course you read something about the question before so to remember it you have to know how many specific words you will write on the introduction that have to be appropriate to the topic. The most important thing at the end of the introduction is to write a quote or a sentence that can persuade the reader that the idea he/she read about is absolutely important.

. Using many quotes affects the reader and let him want to read more so start your second paragraph with quote or a specific word that help you to continue writing your details Just like:

The foremost reason for...., In the past..., Firstly, or....

Then tell the name of the characters or the event that you will talk about and start writing your details and what you know and remember from what you had chosen. At the end of this paragraph write a conclusion as if it is a part of the story or write it from your own words as if you are writing an own advice.

. In the Third paragraph you have to start it with a linking word like:

However, moreover, oppositely, In some situations, on the other hand, or....

Then write about the character or event but here try to write about someone in a different era not like the same time of the previous paragraph to persuade the reader that you understand your and his point of view and also to be able to end this paragraph with a sentence that is suitable to the details.

. Fourth paragraph is always a small paragraph but you have to write in it a small event using some vocabulary words with only one sentence conclusion to it. Start it with entering to the details, write the important information and then write what happened or the feedbacks of that event that you wrote about.

. In the Fifth paragraph we all know that this is the conclusion of the whole topic it's even more important than the details you wrote in the second, third, and fourth paragraphs, so you have to write your perspective view about that subject and depend on your own words, quotes, and effective vocabulary. Do not forget to write in the beginning of the paragraph:

In conclusion, Consequently, All in all, After a careful analyzes about, At the end, To summarize, To sum up, or...

Remember that there is no objection to write a small quote said by a famous person between those sentences you wrote.

Some of the important linking words you can use when moving from paragraph to the other:

After – despite – afterward – it follow that – yet – therefore – similarly –

Then – simultaneously – on the contrary – next though – in addition –

Conversely – another – after this – as a result.

First main part:

Topics

. Those are kinds of what you will find yourself heading to write about and search for their contents. You can follow up the form, style, and field of each of the following subjects.

Note:

Though the form of writing an article sometimes can be the same as the form of an essay but not the reverse, it's like the tomato which can be used as the ketchup but not the reverse.

Advice

Essay:

Throughout my life I've gotten advice from so many people for different situations. After time, more serious issues started coming along, issues that could ruin my life. The biggest problem that I couldn't handle was getting my girlfriend pregnant.

I have hope of becoming a father one day with a lovely wife, but when I thought about being a father at 13, it made me sick to my stomach. It all happened one month after having unprotected sex with my girlfriend. Everything was fine that day until she called me at night. We talked like any other day and then she broke down crying. I thought I had done something wrong during the day. Then things got quiet. I asked, "What's wrong?" She told me she was pregnant. I had no idea what to say so I hung up for the night. I didn't sleep until six in the morning.

For the next three weeks I didn't talk to anyone. My dad noticed my change and he confronted me one day after school. He asked me what was wrong and I stayed quiet because I was embarrassed to tell him. I knew I could tell my dad anything but this was just too much for me. I started to break down crying on his shoulder telling him I had ruined my life. My father stayed calm and looked me in my eyes. I told him my girl was pregnant and I could see the surprise in his eyes. He went to his room.

I stayed in my room looking out the window thinking about what I was going to do. My dad came in and sat next to me. I could tell he had been crying by the tone of his voice. My dad told me that he loved me no matter what but that this was my problem and I had to take full responsibility for it. My dad telling me this was shocking because for once he treated me like an adult. My dad told me that he would still respect me and love me if I keep the child or not, but that I would have to become more of a man. Those few words made me see that I wasn't a kid anymore. I had grown up and didn't even know it.

I decided to stay with my girlfriend and keep the baby. I knew it was my responsibility. I knew no matter how much it would affect me, it was my choice. Sadly the baby died and my girl and I broke up. To this day I still think about the choices I made and now I try to make smarter decisions. I now see because of my dad's few words that no matter what, I have to think like an adult and make my own life, not blame my actions on others and fail to take responsibility. A few words my dad told me changed me completely. I respect myself more now and I'm enjoying my life more and more because of the good outcome of my decisions.

Article:

People love to tell you how to live your life, don't they? There is no shortage of family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, businesses, and of course, magazines and websites offering plenty of guidance about what you should or shouldn't do. Others want to tell you what or how you should (or shouldn't) eat, drink, shop, vote, believe in (or not believe in), dress, exercise—you name it. But while everyone thinks that telling others what they should do will work, very few actually rely on the proven, research-based strategies that actually do typically result in behavior change.

Think about it for a moment: Has there ever been a conversation between a Democrat and a Republican, between a believer and a non-believer, between a meat-eater and a vegetarian, between a Fox News viewer and a MSNBC viewer, or between a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan that ended with one saying, "You know what? You're right! I'll change right away!"

And honestly, while people encourage you to change your ways to accommodate their suggestions what are you privately thinking? Probably something like "Mind your own business!" or "Why don't you leave me alone?" You might politely listen but privately most of us resent being told what to do and how to do it.

In a nutshell: Advice giving usually doesn't work, and often completely backfires.

For example, it often makes me laugh when someone knocks on my door to engage in religious proselytizing. I happen to be an engaged Catholic, and my wife is an engaged Jew. Our respective families have been very active participants in our respective religious traditions for centuries. We are happy and comfortable with them, and we learn a lot from each other. And yet, some random stranger knocking on the door thinks that they can change all of that with a brief conversation? Really?

At a recent dinner party, the host (a dear and gracious friend) decided to lecture her guests on a new diet that she was enthusiastic about, which challenges almost everything you likely believe and understand about healthy eating. It also challenges state-of-the-artnutrition science. But she insisted that we all read some popular press book about this diet and then change our lives accordingly. Yeah, right. Of course, no one did as she demanded; all she accomplished was alienating a number of her friends. Probably not what she had planned.

Why Advice Fails

To be fair, we all find ways to tell others how to live. We can't help it. We all have strong points of view and believe that others should do or think as we do. And most of us are all too comfortable expressing those views to others, whether they're interested or not.

Yet, research using reactance theory informs us that whenever someone tells us what to do and how to do it, we respond with a defensive defiance because we want to maximize our personal freedom and decision making.

So we know that telling others what they should do, even if it is reasonable advice, rarely (if ever) works, though you'd never know this by the endless roster of self-help books and advice gurus out there.

What Does Work?

If we really want to encourage behavior (or belief) change in others we actually need to move away from advice giving (especially when our advice is unsolicited) and toward modeling. In other words, we need to be an example for others rather than telling them what to do.

Research on observational learning (in conjunction with an understanding of reactance theory) suggests that while people will resist unsolicited advice and instruction, they will follow the behaviors of others—especially when there appear to be good and reinforcing outcomes from these behaviors (or beliefs).

Here's a good recent example: One of the most delightful families I met at my son's high school are evangelical Christians. But I had no clue what their religious affiliation was for about 3 years, after spending lots of time with them at track meets and other events. They modeled friendliness, graciousness, and caring better than anyone else I knew at this large public high school. Only during a casual conversation at one of our children's last track meets did I even have any idea of their beliefs and traditions. They modeled wonderful and appealing behaviors without a word and set an excellent example for others—very different than the folks knocking on the door telling you what you should do and believe.

If you really want to encourage behavior change in those around you, model the behavior that you want and keep your advice-giving instincts in check. I know—I'm giving advice here, and perhaps contradicting myself, but still, just consider this strategy and see how it works out for you.

Betrayal

Essay:

Betrayal is a word from Middle English and it was originally bitrayen. There are many forms of betrayal, and it is common within a culture to have varying degrees of punishment for betrayal, most of which are rather severe as it is considered one of the more painful and unsympathetic acts a person may do.

Almost all betrayal involves some sort of premeditation, including if the betrayal is through an act of admittance. It involves using the trust that has been built up and earned for personal use or gain. The trust is often broken once the betrayal is clearly visible.

It is considered a severe act because it is more than just lying. People may lie to gain trust in order to betray it, but the fact is that lying on its own merit is not as bad as betrayal. A person may lie to another without any form of trust existing, and the more trust that has built then the bigger the betrayal. There is often an amount of lying involved in a betrayal, though this is not always the case.

A person may murder out of revenge or in order to help ease suffering, but since betrayal requires trust and the breaking of that trust, it is considered more unsympathetic. A person may understand a theft in order to feed a family, but people rarely understand a premeditated act of building trust in order to break that trust for personal gain.

If trust has been established, then even aiding the enemy of the one that trusts is still betrayal. It is also betrayal if one uses the trust of one person (or thing) in order to gain the trust of another person (or thing); the thing may be a company or even a country. The longer the trust is maintained after the betrayal, then the more severe the act of betrayal is.

After six years of marriage a woman may sleep with another man. This is a betrayal because there was a promise of monogamy, plus the implied emotions and feelings that are tied with the woman claiming she is in love are all part of promises based on trust. The woman says she has certain feelings of love to the point where she marries in a large symbolic gesture implying she intends to spend her live with just one man–both emotionally, physically and sexually. These are all the trust building elements, and the actual affair is the point of betrayal. Whether the man finds out or not, he has still been betrayed. The betrayal grows ever worse the longer the woman denies telling the man about her infidelity.

Betrayal is the act of building trust and then using that trust for personal gain. It often involves breaking the trust and often involves lying. Betrayal is anything that acts out of the interest of a something or someone when that something or someone has been lead to believe that would not happen.

Article:

In 1989, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm published her famous essay, "The Journalist and the Murderer," with its notoriously overheated opening sentence: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

This was back in the era when the New Yorker specialized in overheated and overhyped essays, including "The Fate of the Earth" by Jonathan Schell, which argued that all normal life must cease until we eliminate nuclear weapons. Malcolm had a more modest target: journalists who get their information by misleading their sources. But from her rage, you would think it was nuclear war.

I always thought Malcolm's complaint was ludicrous. An arrangement between a journalist and a source is a business deal like any other, I reasoned: mutually exploitative. Both parties must believe they are better off, or they wouldn't make a deal. There is no reason to suppose that deals between journalists and sources are uniquely exploitative or inherently one-sided. A source usually has his or her own agenda. Journalists don't have subpoena power. People talk because they want to.

I still feel that way, pretty much. But I've been taken aback by a little study I've conducted over the last few weeks.

It involves the use of anonymous sources. In the Age of Transparency, when government officials and business executives are supposed to fill out a form and put it on the Internet every time they scratch their behinds, why should journalists expect to be able to say simply, "Trust us," when they report controversial information?

Acknowledging that this is a legitimate question, the higher-toned media have attempted to establish rules about when it is permissible to use an anonymous source, to hold these occasions to a minimum and to require the reporter to explain why a source was permitted to remain anonymous.

These explanations can be hilarious. But they also tend to prove Malcolm right. Journalism is about betrayal — betrayal of sources by reporters, and also betrayal of friends, colleagues, family members by sources.

I did a database search of two newspapers — the Washington Post and the New York Times —for the phrases "requested anonymity" and "asked not to be identified because" for just a few weeks each, and I got a flood of examples.

People talked to reporters but requested and received a promise of anonymity:

• "because they feared being ostracized";

• "for fear of retribution" or "repercussions" or "reprisals";

• "to discuss private matters";

• "because the Colts had not yet announced the move";

• "to speak frankly" or "candidly";

And so on. These all seem like excellent reasons not to talk to a journalist. But they all amount to the same reason: because I'm not supposed to. And yet all these people did in fact talk, along with dozens more every day. They did so risking Mr. Khan's revenge and their friendship with Mr. Smith, violating their own promises of privacy or confidentiality, ignoring the delicacy of the situation or their lack of authorization.

Why do people answer questions they shouldn't? Sometimes it really is in their organization's or their own self-interest, whatever the official policy may be. Sometimes it's a craven hope of currying favor with the reporter for the next time. Sometimes it's because they're flattered to be asked or simply because they were asked, flatteringly or not. It's amazing how many people don't realize, or forget, that they can tell a reporter to just go away.

And why do reporters rely so heavily on unnamed sources? Sometimes that's the only way to get important information. But sometimes it's a bluff on the part of the reporter: An anonymous source inside the administration sounds more impressive than Joe Blow, assistant secretary of Transportation.

Anyway, I've had to conclude that the real world is much closer to the one Malcolm described 22 years ago — a film-noir nightmare of betrayals and broken promises — than the sunny landscape of mutually beneficial transactions that I had previously imagined.

Children

Essay:

The Wealth of a nation is not so much in its of economical and natural resources but it lies more decidedly in the kind and quality of the wealth of its children and youth. It is they who will be the creators and shapers of a nation's tomorrow.

The Children of today will be adults of tomorrow. Today's leaders and activists quality and personality will determine the kind of destiny that beacons the nation.

It, therefore, become mandatory for every nation and every society to nurture a strong, healthy and intellectual youth. It is the responsibility of the adults to direct the youth in desired direction. The youth of a nation is its power-house. They have boundless stores of energy, will, capability, zeal, and enthusiasm and have the power to mold the destiny of the nation. This infinite storehouse of energy has to be properly molded and needs to be given appropriate direction. The youth has to train to use their talents needs to give appropriate direction. The youth has to be trained to use their talents and abilities in constructive ways and help in nation-building and strengthening of it.

Without harnessing this vast store of energy, a nation and a society cannot think of developing economically, politically, socially and intellectually. The best way to engage the youth into playing such a constructive role is to educate them with proper training in the desired direction.

If a society is careless and carefree about its youth and fails to educate them in a productive manner, then the society is in danger of facing a destructive and violent youth. The trees and flowers of a garden have to be trimmed in order to make it look beautiful and appealing. Otherwise, the plants and bushes will go haywire and spoil the beauty of the garden and will not reap proper blossoms. Similarly, a child has to be pruned of its baser instincts and trained in a proper manner in order to beneficial to society. If proper and timely attention is not paid to the grooming of the youth, it can turn haywire and become unproductive.

For this, society should provide its youth with the right kind of education. The education provided should be progressive, in keeping with the needs of the society and should not only create great professionals excelling in their fields but also good human beings. Proper facilities and a conducive environment should be taken care along with the adequate and enhancement of creativity. Academics should be taken care along with the adequate emphasis on sports, technical areas and other as per the interests of the students.

The government also does a lot to help build its youth into anchors of tomorrow. It provides many facilities regarding education, healthcare, sports, creative areas etc. But the ever-increasing population nullifies the efforts of the government. Moreover, poverty, illiteracy and belief in superstitions also hinder the spread of education to all. Those who are educated fail to acquire proper employment. Resultantly, crime rate increases which is an alarming situation for any society.

Moreover, social evils like child labor, drug addiction, child marriage, beggary, child abuse hamper the proper development of children. These rampant evils if remain unchecked will jeopardize and endanger the future of the country. The government should take strict measures to ensure that children are enrolled in primary and secondary schools and should try to reduce the drop-out percentage. Child labor too should be strictly prohibited.

We often hear of children from poverty-stricken or extremely poor backgrounds achieving outstanding performances in secondary and senior secondary examinations. This just proves once again that the youth is capable of many feats and accomplishments. All they need is proper channelization of abilities, right guidance and training and a desired environment. Given this, the posterity is sure to lead the nation to greater heights and newer worlds.

Article:

The right to life is a universally recognized right for all human beings. It is a fundamental right which governs all other existing rights. In its absence, all other fundamental rights have no reason to exist.

For children, the right to life is the chance to be able to live and have the possibility to grow, to develop and become adults. This right comprises two essential aspects: the right to have one's life protected from birth and the right to be able to survive and develop appropriately.

The right to life is an inherent right for each and every person. From his or her birth, the individual is considered a living being who must be protected. In effect, the human character implies that the dignity of the person must be respected, something which proceeds, above all, from the protection of one's right to live. Thus, from birth, all children have the right to have their life protected.

The right to life is the right not to be killed:

The right to life means also the right not to be killed. It is the formal interdiction against intentionally causing the death of a person. For children, this right implies, on the one hand, that countries will not subject children to the death penalty, and equally that countries will effectively protect the lives of children by actively fighting against and condemning acts of infanticide.

The right of survival and of child development:

The child's right to life also proceeds through the necessity of assuring that children have the possibility to grow and develop under favorable conditions. It is then necessary for children to be able to benefit from appropriate healthcare, a balanced diet, and a quality education, as well as being able to live in a healthy environment.

Countries' role in promoting the survival and development of each child.

It is the role of countries, beyond the responsibility of parents, to ensure that children have the possibility to develop in a healthy and normal fashion, under all circumstances (peace, war, natural catastrophe. . .). They must guarantee a protection that is suitable for all children, regardless of their social or ethnic origins.

Decisions

Essay:

Making decisions is an important part of maturity, as the need to differentiate between right and wrong grows ever more important. Whether the decision leads to a positive or negative outcome depends upon how and where the decision was made. Decisions can either have consequences or benefits. As demonstrated by Hindley's treatment of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, small decisions can ultimately lead to major consequences.

Hindley's poor treatment of Heathcliff is an excellent example of how small decisions can lead to major consequences. The enmity between the two characters starts in their childhood, caused by Hindley's jealously of how his father treats Heathcliff. Time and time again, Hindley abuses and bullies Heathcliff, only building up the anger inside him. Mr. Earnshaw dies and the rightful ownership of the Heights goes to Hindley, who uses his power as the man of the household to degrade Heathcliff. Heathcliff returns years later after disappearing and finds that Hindley has gambled all his money away. Taking advantage of the situation, Heathcliff lends him money and becomes the new owner of the Heights. Taking revenge on Hindley, Heathcliff degrades Hindley's own son, preventing him from becoming a gentleman.

As seen with Hindley's treatment of Heathcliff, it evidently illustrates that small decisions lead to major consequences. Hindley's mistreatment led Heathcliff to feel unwanted and out of place at the Heights. He was constantly called a "dark skinned gypsy", further isolating himself from the norm and creating a sense of cruelty within Heathcliff. Heathcliff's ownership of the Heights represents how Heathcliff was able to claim his enemy's property and ultimately obtain more power as the man of the household. As Hindley can do nothing to Heathcliff, his own son is given no education and grows up laboring in the fields. Heathcliff treats Hareton exactly like how Hindley treated Heathcliff; this is Heathcliff's way of exacting revenge on Hindley for mistreating him as a child. As a child, Hindley would have had no consideration of how his actions could cause Heathcliff to retaliate in the future.

The feud between Heathcliff and Hindley in Wuthering Heights is a prime example of how a small decision can lead to a major consequence. Heathcliff's rough childhood resulted in repercussions to Hindley's future. Although many argue that small decisions can have no backlash, it is clear that small decisions can have major consequences in the way that Hindley suffered consequences.

Article:

Your typical day is full of decisions! What time do I get up this morning? Should I wear black shoes or brown shoes? What will I have for breakfast? Do I fill up the car with gas this morning or do it on the way home from work? When I get to work, what do I do first: respond to e-mail, go through my in-basket, listen to my voicemail, meet with colleagues?

Throughout your workday, you're confronted with dozens more of these mundane decisions. And afterwork, you get no rest from making choices: Do I make dinner at home or eat out? When will I read the news online and go through my personal mail? Do I want to watch TV tonight and, if so, what shows do I watch? Should I make a few calls to family and friends?

Every once in a while, your unrelenting life of routine decisions is interrupted by the need to make a major decision. For instance, your car's transmission goes out and you have to decide whether to spend $2500 to repair it or go looking for a new car. The person you've been dating wants you to give up your apartment and move in together. Your employer is making cutbacks, your boss advises you that your position is being eliminated, and suddenly you've got to find a new job.

Who you are and what you'll become (or have become) is largely determined by your decision choices.

Few activities are more encompassing and characteristic of mankind than making decisions. None of us have the option to live a life void of making choices. In fact, one of the primary tasks parents have in raising children is preparing them to make decisions on their own.

Decision making covers a wide territory. It encompasses everything from major decisions, such as accepting a marriage proposal, to the routine choices of everyday life, such as selecting among food items at the grocery store. Interestingly, most people think of decision making in the context of the bigchoices—college, marriage, children, jobs, home purchases, and so on. Yet the dozens of day-to-daydecisions we all make can be powerful forces in shaping our lives. The person who has trouble scheduling his or her time often ends up being chronically late to work, to meetings, and to social events. It begins to interfere with job performance ratings and personal relationships. What appears on the surface to be minor decisions—what time do I get up in the morning or leave for a date—leads to losing a job or alienating a friend. In many cases, a person "down on his luck" is really just a person who has made some bad choices. He dropped out of school; tried drugs, believing he couldn't become addicted; made some foolish investments; failed to develop marketable job skills or keep those skills current; procrastinated too long and missed out on a great business opportunity; didn't think it necessary to read the "small print" in the contract; or thought there was nothing wrong with drinking and driving. The choices we make—the small ones as well as the large ones—shouldn't be taken lightly. To do so places our future in the hands of fate.

A lot of us overlook the obvious fact that the choices we make shape our lives. Who you are and what you'll become (or have become) is largely determined by your decision choices. It's not luck that Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, Steven Spielberg, and Peyton Manning excel in their professions. And it's not chance that smokers significantly increase the likelihood that they'll die of lung cancer or that people who save money on a regular basis are less likely to be destitute in their old age than people who don't. A lot of well-educated people, with talent and connections, have screwed up their lives because they've made bad choices. And a lot of people with average talent and minimal opportunities have lived full and rich lives because they learned how to make smart decisions. What we often attribute to luck is nothing more than making the right choice at the right time. A large component of luck is good decision making. The point is: For the most part, the quality of your life is a result of the quality of your decisions.

The good news is that you can improve your decision skills. Even though these skills are critical for success in life, and most of us have had little or no formal training in how to make decisions, you're not captive to learn only through experience. The basic knowledge you need to have to become more effective at decision making can be condensed and summarized into a short, easy-to-read book. And here it is! In the following pages, you learn the steps toward making optimum decisions and the roadblocks you need to be aware of that can detour this goal.

One caveat before you begin your journey: Perfecting your decision skills doesn't guarantee that all your decisions will come out the way you had hoped. Good decision skills focus on the means you use to reach a decision, not on the ends. You can't control outcomes. You can only control the process for arriving at those outcomes. As the old adage goes, however, the race doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. Improving your decision skills just increases your chances of winning life's races and battles.

Experiences

Essay:

A faint twinge of excitement floated through my body that night. A hint of anticipation of the coming day could not be suppressed; yet to be overcome with anxiety would not do at all. I arduously forced those pernicious thoughts from seeping in and overcoming my body and mind. I still wonder that I slept at all that night. But I did. I slept soundly and comfortably as those nervous deliberations crept into my defenseless, unsuspecting mind, pilfering my calm composure. When I awoke refreshed, I found my mind swarming with jumbled exhilaration. The adrenaline was flowing already.

After a quick breakfast, I pulled some of my gear together and headed out. The car ride of two hours seemed only a few moments as I struggled to reinstate order in my chaotic consciousness and focus my mind on the day before me. My thoughts drifted to the indistinct shadows of my memory.

My opponent's name was John Doe. There were other competitors at the tournament, but they had never posed any threat to my title. For as long as I had competed in this tournament, I had easily taken the black belt championship in my division. John, however, was the most phenomenal martial artist I had ever had the honor of witnessing at my young age of thirteen. And he was in my division. Although he was the same rank, age, size, and weight as I, he surpassed me in almost every aspect of our training. His feet were lightning, and his hands were virtually invisible in their agile swiftness. He wielded the power of a bear while appearing no larger than I. His form and techniques were executed with near perfection. Although I had never defeated his flawlessness before, victory did not seem unattainable. Even though he was extraordinary not much more talented than me. I am not saying that he was not skilled or even that he was not more skilled than I, for he most certainly was, but just not much more than I. I still had one hope, however little, of vanquishing this incredible adversary, for John had one weakness: he was lazy. He didn't enjoy practicing long hours or working hard. He didn't have to. Nevertheless, I had found my passage to triumph.

My mind raced even farther back to all my other failures. I must admit that my record was not very impressive. Never before had I completed anything. I played soccer. I quit. I was a Cub Scout. I quit. I played trumpet. I quit. Karate was all I had left. The championship meant so much because I had never persevered with anything else. In the last months, I had trained with unearthly stamina and determination. I had focused all my energies into practicing for this sole aspiration. Every day of the week I trained. Every evening, I could be found kicking, blocking, and punching at an imaginary opponent in my room. Hours of constant drilling had improved my techniques and speed. All my techniques were ingrained to the point where they were instinctive. Days and weeks passed too swiftly. . . .

I was abruptly jolted back into the present. The car was pulling into the parking lot. The tournament had too quickly arrived, and I still did not feel prepared for the trial which I was to confront. I stepped out of the car into the bright sun in the morning, and with my equipment bag in hand, walked into the towering building.

The day was a blur. After warming up and stretching, I sat down on the cold wooden floor, closed my eyes, and focused. I cleared my mind of every thought, every worry, and every insecurity. When I opened my eyes, every sense and nerve had become sharp and attentive, every motion finely tuned and deliberate. The preliminary rounds were quiet and painless, and the championship fight was suddenly before me. I could see that John looked as calm and as confident as ever. Adrenaline raced through my body as I stepped into the ring. We bowed to each other and to the instructor, and the match began.

I apologize, but I do not recall most of the fight. I do faintly remember that when time ran out the score was tied, and we were forced to go into Sudden Death: whoever scored the next point would win. That, however, I do recall. I was tired. The grueling two points that I had won already had not been enough. I needed one more before I could taste triumph. I was determined to win, though I had little energy remaining. John appeared unfazed, but I couldn't allow him to discourage me. I focused my entire being, my entire consciousness, on overcoming this invincible nemesis. I charged. All my strenuous training, every molecule in my body, every last drop of desire was directed, concentrated on that single purpose as I exploded through his defenses and drove a solitary fist to its mark. I was not aware that I would never fight John again, but I would not have cared. Never before had I held this prize in my hands, but through pure, salty sweat and vicious determination, the achievement that I had desired so dearly and which meant so much to me was mine at last. This was the first time that I had ever really made a notable accomplishment in anything. This one experience, this one instant, changed me forever. That day I found self-confidence and discovered that perseverance yields its own sweet fruit. That day a sense of invincibility permeated the air. Mountains were nothing. The sun wasn't so bright and brilliant anymore. For a moment, I was the best.

Article:

Forty-seven percent of the time, the average mind is wandering. It wanders about a third of the time while a person is reading, talking with other people, or taking care of children. It wanders 10 percent of the time, even, during sex. And that wandering, according to psychologist Matthew Killingsworth, is not good for well-being. A mind belongs in one place. During his training at Harvard, Killingsworth compiled those numbers and built a scientific case for every cliché about living in the moment. In a 2010 Science.pdf) paper co-authored with psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, the two wrote that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

For Killingsworth, happiness is in the content of moment-to-moment experiences. Nothing material is intrinsically valuable, except in whatever promise of happiness it carries. Satisfaction in owning a thing does not have to come during the moment it's acquired, of course. It can come as anticipation or nostalgic longing. Overall, though, the achievement of the human brain to contemplate events past and future at great, tedious length has, these psychologists believe, come at the expense of happiness. Minds tend to wander to dark, not whimsical, places. Unless that mind has something exciting to anticipate or sweet to remember.

Over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than do possessions. The idea that experiential purchases are more satisfying than material purchases has long been the domain of Cornell psychology professor Thomas Gilovich. Since 2003, he has been trying to figure out exactly how and why experiential purchases are so much better than material purchases. In the journal Psychological Science last month, Gilovich and Killingsworth, along with Cornell doctoral candidate Amit Kumar, expanded on the current understanding that spending money on experiences "provide[s] more enduring happiness." They looked specifically at anticipation as a driver of that happiness; whether the benefit of spending money on an experience accrues before the purchase has been made, in addition to after. And, yes, it does.

Essentially, when you can't live in a moment, they say, it's best to live in anticipation of an experience. Experiential purchases like trips, concerts, movies, et cetera, tend to trump material purchases because the utility of buying anything really starts accruing before you buy it.

Waiting for an experience apparently elicits more happiness and excitement than waiting for a material good (and more "pleasantness" too—an eerie metric). By contrast, waiting for a possession is more likely fraught with impatience than anticipation. "You can think about waiting for a delicious meal at a nice restaurant or looking forward to a vacation," Kumar told me, "and how different that feels from waiting for, say, your pre-ordered iPhone to arrive. Or when the two-day shipping on Amazon Prime doesn't seem fast enough."

Gilovich's prior work has shown that experiences tend to make people happier because they are less likely to measure the value of their experiences by comparing them to those of others. For example, Gilbert and company note in their new paper, many people are unsure if they would rather have a high salary that is lower than that of their peers, or a lower salary that is higher than that of their peers. With an experiential good like vacation, that dilemma doesn't hold. Would you rather have two weeks of vacation when your peers only get one? Or four weeks when your peers get eight? People choose four weeks with little hesitation.

Experiential purchases are also more associated with identity, connection, and social behavior. Looking back on purchases made, experiences make people happier than do possessions. It's kind of counter to the logic that if you pay for an experience, like a vacation, it will be over and gone; but if you buy a tangible thing, a couch, at least you'll have it for a long time. Actually most of us have a pretty intense capacity for tolerance, or hedonic adaptation, where we stop appreciating things to which we're constantly exposed. iPhones, clothes, couches, et cetera, just become background. They deteriorate or become obsolete. It's the fleetingness of experiential purchases that endears us to them. Either they're not around long enough to become imperfect, or they are imperfect, but our memories and stories of them get sweet with time. Even a bad experience becomes a good story.

When it rains through a beach vacation, as Kumar put it, "People will say, well, you know, we stayed in and we played board games and it was a great family bonding experience or something." Even if it was negative in the moment, it becomes positive after the fact. That's a lot harder to do with material purchases because they're right there in front of you. "When my Macbook has the colorful pinwheel show up," he said, "I can't say, well, at least my computer is malfunctioning!"

"At least my computer and I get to spend more time together because it's working so slowly," I offered.

"Yes, exactly."

"Maybe we should destroy our material possessions at their peak, so they will live on in an idealized state in our memories?"

"I don't know if I'd go that far," he said. "The possibility of making material purchases more experiential is sort of interesting."

That means making purchasing an experience, which is terrible marketing-speak, but in practical terms might mean buying something on a special occasion or on vacation or while wearing a truly unique hat. Or tying that purchase to subsequent social interaction. Buy this and you can talk about buying it, and people will talk about you because you have it.

"Turns out people don't like hearing about other people's possessions very much," Kumar said, "but they do like hearing about that time you saw Vampire Weekend."

I can't imagine ever wanting to hear about someone seeing Vampire Weekend, but I get the point. Reasonable people are just more likely to talk about their experiential purchases than their material purchases. It's a nidus for social connection. ("What did you do this weekend?" "Well! I'm so glad you asked..")

The most interesting part of the new research, to Kumar, was the part that "implies that there might be notable real-world consequences to this study." It involved analysis of news stories about people waiting in long lines to make a consumer transaction. Those waiting for experiences were in better moods than those waiting for material goods. "You read these stories about people rioting, pepper-spraying, treating each other badly when they have to wait," he said. It turns out, those sorts of stories are much more likely to occur when people are waiting to acquire a possession than an experience. When people are waiting to get concert tickets or in line at a new food truck, their moods tend to be much more positive.

Even a bad experience becomes a good story

"There are actually instances of positivity when people are waiting for experiences," Kumar said, like talking to other people in the concert line about what songs Vampire Weekend might play. So there is opportunity to connect with other people. "We know that social interaction is one of the most important determinants of human happiness, so if people are talking with each other, being nice to one another in the line, it's going to be a lot more pleasant experience than if they're being mean to each other which is what's (more) likely to happen when people are waiting for material goods."

Research has also found that people tend to be more generous to others when they've just thought about an experiential purchase as opposed to a material purchase. They're also more likely to pursue social activities. So, buying those plane tickets is good for society. (Of course, maximal good to society and personal happiness comes from pursuing not happiness but meaning. All of this behavioral economics-happiness research probably assumes you've already given away 99 percent of your income to things bigger than yourself, and there's just a very modest amount left to maximally utilize.)

What is it about the nature of imagining experiential purchases that's different from thinking about future material purchases? The most interesting hypothesis is that you can imagine all sort of possibilities for what an experience is going to be. "That's what's fun," Kumar said. "It could turn out a whole host of ways." With a material possession, you kind of know what you're going to get. Instead of whetting your appetite by imagining various outcomes, Kumar put it, people sort of think, Just give it to me now.

It could turn out that to get the maximum utility out of an experiential purchase, it's really best to plan far in advance. Savoring future consumption for days, weeks, years only makes the experience more valuable. It definitely trumps impulse buying, where that anticipation is completely squandered. (Never impulse-buy anything ever.)

That sort of benefit would likely be a lot stronger in an optimistic person as opposed to a pessimistic person. Some people hate surprises. Some people don't anticipate experiences because they dwell on what could—no, will—go wrong. But we needn't dwell in their heads. Everyone can decide on the right mix of material and experiential consumption to maximize their well-being. The broader implications, according to Gilovich in a press statement, are that "well-being can be advanced by providing infrastructure that affords experiences, such as parks, trails, and beaches, as much as it does material consumption." Or at least the promise of that infrastructure, so we can all look forward to using it. And when our minds wander, that's where they'll go.

Failure

Essay:

Learning the lessons taught by failure is a sure route to success. The United States of America can be seen as a success that emerged from failure: by learning from the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, the founding fathers were able to create the Constitution, the document on which America is built. Google Inc., the popular Internet search engine, is another example of a success that arose from learning from failure, though in this case Google learned from the failures of its competitors. Another example that shows how success can arise from failure is the story of Rod Johnson, who started a recruiting firm that arose from Johnson's personal experience of being laid off.

The United States, the first great democracy of the modern world, is also one of the best examples of a success achieved by studying and learning from earlier failures. After just five years of living under the Articles of Confederation, which established the United States of America as a single country for the first time, the states realized that they needed a new document and a new more powerful government. In 1786, the Annapolis convention was convened. The result, three years later, was the Constitution, which created a more powerful central government while also maintaining the integrity of the states. By learning from the failure of the Articles, the founding fathers created the founding document of a country that has become both the most powerful country in the world and a beacon of democracy.

Unlike the United States, which had its fair share of ups and downs over the years, the Internet search engine company, Google Inc., has suffered few setbacks since it went into business in the late 1990s. Google has succeeded by studying the failures of other companies in order to help it innovates its technology and business model. Google identified and solved the problem of assessing the quality of search results by using the number of links pointing to a page as an indicator of the number of people who find the page valuable. Suddenly, Google's search results became far more accurate and reliable than those from other companies, and now Google's dominance in the field of Internet search is almost absolute.

The example of Rod Johnson's success as an entrepreneur in the recruiting field also shows how effective learning from mistakes and failure can be. Rather than accept his failure after being laid off, Johnson decided to study it. After a month of research, Johnson realized that his failure to find a new job resulted primarily from the inefficiency of the local job placement agencies, not from his own deficiencies. A month later, Johnson created Johnson Staffing to correct this weakness in the job placement sector. Today Johnson Staffing is the largest job placement agency in South Carolina, and is in the process of expanding into a national corporation.

Failure is often seen as embarrassing, something to be denied and hidden. But as the examples of the U.S. Constitution, Google, and Rod Johnson prove, if an individual, organization, or even a nation is strong enough to face and study its failure, then that failure can become a powerful teacher. The examples of history and business demonstrate that failure can be the best catalyst of success, but only if people have the courage to face it head on.

Article:

Trial and error are usually the prime means of solving life's problems. Yet many people are afraid to undertake the trial because they're too afraid of experiencing the error. They make the mistake of believing that all error is wrong and harmful, when most of it is both helpful and necessary. Error provides the feedback that points the way to success. Only error pushes people to put together a new and better trial, leading through yet more errors and trials until they can ultimately find a viable and creative solution. To meet with an error is not to fail, but to take one more step on the path to final success. No errors means no successes either.

In fact, one of the greatest misfortunes you can meet early in a project is premature—yet inevitably still partial—success. When that happens, the temptation is to fix on what seemed to work so quickly and easily and look no further. Later, maybe, a competitor will come along and continue the exploration process that you aborted, pushing on to find a much better solution that will quickly push your partial one aside.

Cultures of perfection  
Too many organizations today have cultures of perfection: a set of organizational beliefs that any failure is unacceptable. Only pure, untainted success will do. To retain your reputation as an achiever, you must reach every goal and never, ever make a mistake that you can't hide or blame on someone else.

Imagine the stress and terror in an organization like that. The constant covering up of the smallest blemishes. The wild finger-pointing as everyone tries to shift the blame for the inevitable cock-ups and messes onto someone else. The rapid turnover as people rise high, then fall abruptly from grace. The lying, cheating, falsification of data, and hiding of problems—until they become crises that defy being hidden any longer.

Clinging to the past  
If some people fail to reach a complete answer because of the lure of some early success, many more fail because of their ego-driven commitment to what worked in the past. You often see this with senior people, especially those who made their names by introducing some critical change years ago. They shy away from further innovation, afraid that this time they might fail, diminishing the luster they try to keep around their names from past triumph. Besides, they reason, the success of something new might even prove that those achievements they made in the past weren't so great after all. Why take the risk when you can hang on to your reputation by doing nothing?

Such people are so deeply invested in their egos and the glories of their past that they prefer to set aside opportunities for future glory rather than risk even the possibility of failure.

Why high achievers fail  
Every strength can become a weakness. Every talent contains an opposite that sometimes makes it into a handicap. Successful people like to win and achieve high standards. This can make them so terrified of failure it ruins their lives. When a positive trait, like achievement, becomes too strong in someone's life, it's on the way to becoming a major handicap.

Achievement is a powerful value for many successful people. They've built their lives on it. They achieve at everything they do: school, college, sports, the arts, hobbies, work. Each fresh achievement adds to the power of the value in their lives.

Gradually, failure becomes unthinkable. Maybe they've never failed yet in anything that they've done, so have no experience of rising above it. Failure becomes the supreme nightmare: a frightful horror they must avoid at any cost. The simplest way to do this is never to take a risk. Stick rigidly to what you know you can do. Protect your butt. Work the longest hours. Double and triple check everything. Be the most conscientious and conservative person in the universe.

And if constant hard work, diligence, brutal working schedules, and harrying subordinates won't ward off the possibility of failing, use every other possible means to to keep it away. Falsify numbers, hide anything negative, conceal errors, avoid customer feedback, constantly shift the blame for errors onto anyone too weak to fight back. The problems with ethical standards in major US corporations has, I believe, more to do with fear of failure among long-term high achievers than any criminal intent. Many of those guys at Enron and Arthur Andersen were supreme high-fliers, basking in the flattery of the media. Failure was an impossible prospect, worth doing just about anything to avoid.

Why balance is essential  
Beware of unbalanced values in your life. Beware when any one value—however benign in itself—becomes too powerful. Over-achievers destroy their own peace of mind and the lives of those who work for them. People too attached to "goodness" and morality become self-righteous bigots. Those whose values for building close relationships become unbalanced slide into smothering their friends and family with constant expressions of affection and demands for love in return.

Everyone likes to succeed. The problem comes when fear of failure is dominant. When you can no longer accept the inevitability of making mistakes, nor recognize the importance of trial and error in finding the best and most creative solution. The more creative you are, the more errors you are going to make. Get used to it. Deciding to avoid the errors will destroy your creativity too.

Balance counts more than you think. Some tartness must season the sweetest dish. A little selfishness is valuable even in the most caring person. And a little failure is essential to preserve everyone's perspective on success.

We hear a lot about being positive. Maybe we also need to recognize that the negative parts of our lives and experience have just as important a role to play in finding success, in work and in life.

Individualism

Essay:

"I got sick and tired of seeing people not being themselves and seeing people try to be other people. it is pathetic."

"In the United States, each individual is seen as completely a marvelously unique."(Kohls) I agree with this statement because I also think that individualism is important in our society today. How does individualism affect society? Individualism is very important in our society. It tells us who is who. It lets people be themselves and express themselves freely as they are. Being an individual is probably one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves. "In the United States, each individual is seen as completely a marvelously unique." I agree with this statement from "The Values Americans Live By" because I also think that individualism is important in our society today.

The influence of early American thinking was greatly persuaded by individualism. This importance, expressed by early leaders and the American public, is still widely viewed as the most important part of American political culture today. This belief system is a natural, desire. Perhaps evident in all mankind, Others think that individualism was the direct effect of proper government establishment. Whatever the case may be, feelings of individualism were apparent in early American minds. Evidence of early Americans commitment to individualism can be found throughout early texts and documents. These documents are proof that many early influential leaders attempting to satisfy the needs of the American public have expressed devotions to individualism. Early American attempts to formulate a democracy were founded on responding to the wants of "free" people. The individualistic views noted in this early period are rights that modern Americans sometimes take for granted. The widespread passion for individualism had helped to build one of the most successful ruling institutions, meeting the concerns and requests of the American people. However, it is also clear that the early thought of individualism is not directly similar to the individualistic views we carry today.

Individualists are the people this nation is built around. I believe that people need to be themselves. Some people just follow the flow of what their friends are doing or what their friends want them to do. Being an individual is probably one of the most important things you can do for yourself. You need to let go of what people think of you or what people want you to be and do what you feel you want to do. Some people dress certain ways because they don't want to be made fun of. I say if their friends are making fun of them for what their wearing or what they doing then they are not real friends at all. If you like what you're doing you should go with it and not be influenced by the opinions of others. In a society people look more highly upon people who are individuals.

I know people who have parents that pretty much re-live their childhood or their dreams threw their children and that is just wrong. There are people on my swim team that are only swimming because their parents make them do it, and that is just pathetic. If your child doesn't want to do a sport then you should not make them. Also organizations do not like groups. Society is affected greatly by individualism. When you are joining a club, or a team, or starting a new job, the people who run the whole deal don't want to see you joining with a group of friends or sending applications with a group of friends. They want you to be independent and if you can't do something on your own, it shows them that you are too lazy or lack the motivation to be successful on your own.

A lot of Americans are viewed as a very individualistic people. So what really is individualism? Individualism is the overall perception of how one sees one another. There are good cases of Individualism and bad cases of individualism. There are also many different theories and stereotypes. Individualism is what makes all of us different and what makes us who we are and made America what it is today.

"I got sick and tired of seeing people not being themselves and seeing people try to be other people. That is pathetic."

Article:

IN the future, it seems, there will be only one "ism" — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook.

That's the implication, at least, of what the polling industry keeps telling us about the rising American generation, the so-called millennials. (Full disclosure: I am not quite one of them, having entered the world in the penultimate year of Generation X.) A new Pew survey, the latest dispatch from the land of young adulthood, describes a generation that's socially liberal on issues like immigration and marijuana and same-sex marriage, proudly independent of either political party, less likely to be married and religious than earlier generations, less likely to identify as patriotic and less likely — by a striking margin — to say that one's fellow human beings can be trusted.

In political terms, the millennials are liberals on the surface, which is why the Pew report inspired a round of discussion about whether they're likely to transform electoral politics in the short run (no, because cohort replacement is slow, and it's Generation X that's actually moving into positions of influence right now), whether they will push our political debates leftward in the long run (probably, because youthful voting patterns tend to persist across the life cycle), and whether this gives the Democratic Party a hammerlock on the future (it doesn't, because political coalitions always adapt and fracture in unexpected ways).

But the millennials' skepticism of parties, programs and people runs deeper than their allegiance to a particular ideology. Their left-wing commitments are ardent on a few issues but blur into libertarianism and indifferentism on others. The common denominator is individualism, not left-wing politics: it explains both the personal optimism and the social mistrust, the passion about causes like gay marriage and the declining interest in collective-action crusades like environmentalism, even the fact that religious affiliation has declined but personal belief is still widespread.

So the really interesting question about the millennials isn't whether they'll all be voting Democratic when Chelsea Clinton runs for president. It's whether this level of individualism — postpatriotic, postfamilial, disaffiliated — is actually sustainable across the life cycle, and whether it can become a culture's dominant way of life.

One can answer "yes" to this question cheerfully or pessimistically — with the optimism of a libertarian who sees such individualism as a liberation from every form of oppression and control, or the pessimism of a communitarian who sees social isolation, atomization and unhappiness trailing in its wake.

But one can also answer "no," and argue that the human desire for community and authority cannot be permanently buried — in which case the most important question in an era of individualism might be what form of submission it presages.

This was the point raised in 1953 by Robert Nisbet's "Quest for Community," arguably the 20th century's most important work of conservative sociology. (I wrote the introduction when it was reissued.) Trying to explain modern totalitarianism's dark allure, Nisbet argued that it was precisely the emancipation of the individual in modernity — from clan, church and guild — that had enabled the rise of fascism and Communism.

In the increasing absence of local, personal forms of fellowship and solidarity, he suggested, people were naturally drawn to mass movements, cults of personality, nationalistic fantasias. The advance of individualism thus eventually produced its own antithesis — conformism, submission and control.

You don't have to see a fascist or Communist revival on the horizon (I certainly don't) to see this argument's potential relevance for our apparently individualistic future. You only have to look at the place where millennials — and indeed, most of us — are clearly seeking new forms of community today.

That place is the online realm, which offers a fascinating variation on Nisbet's theme. Like modernity writ large, it promises emancipation and offers new forms of community that transcend the particular and local. But it requires a price, in terms of privacy surrendered, that past tyrannies could have only dreamed of exacting from their subjects.

This surrender could prove to be benign. But it's still noteworthy that today's vaguely totalitarian arguments don't usually come from political demagogues. They come from enthusiasts for the online Panoptic on, the uploaded world where everyone will be transparent to everyone else.

That kind of future is far from inevitable. But as Nisbet would argue, and as the rising generation of Americans may yet need to learn, it probably cannot be successfully resisted by individualism alone.

Leadership

Essay:

An efficient leader is defined as a person who is followed by the others. Besides that, a leader has to know about the human nature, and be able to direct people reducing the group's doubts about succeeding. Some people believe that a leader is born that way and there is no way, practicing or studying, to create a leader. They are wrong because inside of each and every one of us there is a leader waiting to be awake and holding on an opportunity to come out. A leader is capable of influencing and inspiring the people around him to voluntarily commit towards accomplishing a certain goal. There are different types of leadership people who specialize in trying to understand this important phenomenon. The only kind of leadership in which a person communicates true self are by way resonates with other people. This behavior is highly individual and situational for both the leader and follower and therefore there are a huge variety of ways in which effective leadership occurs. On top of that, when we think about the characteristic of a leader, we often think of leaders that are dynamic, which makes each of us to follow. We could take an example, such as Hitler. He did not have the values that we should follow, but he had that inspiration for the country to follow. If we also stop to think about the leaders today, we do not get the same vision of a leader that has a dynamism that is hard to resist, but rather a leader that has a good quality. The characteristics of a leader are not behaviors that will be new to those that strive to master them. Developing a good leadership skills take time, just like perfecting an idea or delivering on a project. Without an investment of time, very few people will have the skills to become the great leaders. Thus, there are many types of characteristic of being a good and efficient leader. A good leader is confident in doing everything.

In order to lead and set direction a leader needs to appear confidently as a person and in the leadership role so that this person inspires confidence in others and brings out the trust and best efforts of the team to complete their work well. A leader who conveys confidence towards the proposed objective inspires the best effort from team members. Believing in their abilities is an essential way of a good leader. The next character of an efficient and good leader is responsible leader. A leader influences people and has a lot of power to move his team and followers. An irresponsible leader can create a disaster if he does not act responsibly. A leader must know that he is responsible for the team's achievements. If his team fails, he must have the courage of taking responsibility for that, and should then take steps to solve it. He also should not blame his team members unnecessarily if they have failed. Honesty is also one of the characters of an efficient and good leader. People nowadays want to trust their leader. The best way to gain trust in a leader is through the honest and trustworthy. In order to gain that attribute of honesty, you must go out of your way to display that honesty as an individual. When you don't admit that something didn't work, you are making a mistake. When you are honest you turn into an influence to other people. A good leader, as well as keeping the main goal in focus, is able to think analytically. Not only does a good leader view a situation as a whole, but is able to break it down into sub parts for closer inspection. While keeping the goal in view, a good leader can break it down into manageable steps and make progress towards it. No one likes a slack leader. It goes without saying that the best performer or the person who is most passionate and committed should be made the leader. This ensures that a level of professionalism is maintained, and that no one starts taking it easy at any point in time.

It's easy to get carried away with a position of power, so the best leaders are those who use their power for the betterment of everyone, not abuse their power for their own personal betterment. Furthermore, effective communication is also one of the characteristic of a good and efficient leader. He should be able to put across what needs to be done and how. At the same time, he should be willing to accept relevant suggestions from his subordinates. He should have the ability to listen, question, analyze and observe effectively. He should believe that actions speak louder than words. A leader who constantly changes his or her tune will confuse the team members and this will lower their productivity. A leader must therefore be consistent in his actions, his words, and in his thoughts as well.

Leaders who are biased never make good leaders, so he should be completely neutral and should display consistency that amazes everyone. Thus, an efficient and good leader must also know how to co–operate with his team. He should get to know his team members should not appear as an overly strict and rigid personality. Finally as a good and efficient leader, a leader must have passion. They should not make the necessary courageous and difficult decisions and carry them into action. So, the people around the world should give respect for all the leaders. Thus, we also should encourage the leaders by giving importance to them and also become their followers.

Article:

Throughout history, much has been written about what it means to be a leader. Ancient Chinese military general and "Art of War" author Sun Tzu described a leader as one who "cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to proper methods and discipline." Nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle believed leaders were born and not made, while English philosopher Herbert Spencer argued that leaders were the result of the society in which they lived.

The decades that followed brought countless studies and research reports that detailed a wide variety of leadership skills, styles and characteristics, with researchers identifying distinct leader "types." Some authors even devoted their work to all the personal factors that influence an individual's approach to management.

With all of these differing schools of thought, it's clear that there's no single definition of leadership. What works for one leader may not necessarily work for another, depending on the circumstances and personality type. But there's one thing that nearly every academic, historian and even leaders themselves agree upon: A true leader must be able to inspire his or her team.

Business News Daily spoke with current business leaders about what leadership means to them, and how leaders can achieve the ultimate goal of inspiring others.

Leaders can get the best out of people. "Today's top leaders are consistent with their approach, get their hands dirty and create a company culture that will last long after he or she has left]. 'Comfort zones' are almost nonexistent under strong leadership, because each team member is pushed to their full potential. Great leaders also hire and inspire other great leaders, whom they trust to carry out the company mission and instill a sense of purpose that touches each and every staff member." – Tom Villante, co-founder, chairman and CEO of payment processing company [YapStone

Leadership is all about giving and serving. "It is lonely at the top, but that's no excuse for not giving generously of your time, your experience and your encouragement to your team — and never expecting any of that in return. You are the person in the unique position of finding or uncovering strengths in people, leveraging them and celebrating them. If you're going to lead, and lead well, you have to put it all out there every day, regardless of the outcome. Leaders who hold back will eventually hold their teams back." – Tricia Sciortino, president of eaHELP, a provider of virtual assistant services

Leadership requires ambition. "Leaders are described with a mouthful of adjectives, such as passionate, visionary, charismatic, motivational and encouraging. However, I propose leadership is something simpler. It is ambition. Ambition creates hard work, determination and an unconditional desire to achieve. It generates an absolutely contagious energy that people follow and join naturally. If you are a leader in your organization, there is only one thing you need to understand about your role: never let your ambition fade." – Corey Baggett, co-founder of ad technology firm AddBoom Group.

Good leaders have a good attitude. "A good leader can hold his or her emotions in check, especially in tough situations. For example, maybe you lost your best client, or a deal you've been working on falls through. Regardless, it's important for leaders to guide a team through challenging times, encouraging them and remaining positive along the way. Team morale is heavily contingent upon a leader's attitude." – David Moore, founding partner and regional vice president of Addison Group staffing firm

Leadership means being in touch with your people. "A leader places the people around him or her in a position that sets them up for success. This is a difficult task, because a leader must have an in-depth understanding of each individual, such as understanding their career goals and knowing what motivates them. By being committed to helping each person achieve their own personal goals, the leader sets the organization up for greatness. Leaders are also] good listeners. They listen to verbal and nonverbal cues to understand [what is] occurring in the organization. This allows you to address problems before they become big issues." – Andor Kovacs, CEO and founder of property restoration brand [Restoration 1

Leaders set the right example. "Leadership is setting an example in the way you act each day, while focusing on the bigger picture. It's about setting the tone for your team and organization in the way you interact with your own staff, your business partners and your customers. As a leader, it is your responsibility to establish goals, innovate, motivate and trust. A passionate and compassionate leader can energize a company. Set an example of cooperation, trust and openness. Focus on solutions and positivity instead of finding faults and blame for actions." – Richard Kissane, president and CEO of Premium Franchise Brands, parent company of JAN-PRO and Maid Right Franchising

Leaders can't stand alone. "The out-and-out leader in today's volatile and uncertain business environment had better not distance him or herself from the heat of the action. Demonstrating the competence to assess, decide and execute in a growing business drives confidence in the leader. Similarly, a great leader of an enterprise stands on the shoulders not of 'managerial Muppets' who obediently do as they are directed, but of other leadership giants who have different and complementary leadership skills. A business with only one leader will remain forever a small business." – Richard Hytner, deputy chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide and author of "Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows" (Profile Books, 2014)

Opportunity

Essay:

Though nothing certain about such a big gap can be said, yet much more depends on how we answer the opportunity that has knocked at our door.

A proverb runs, 'Opportunity knocks at every door but only once.' The proverb clearly clarifies that God has given us an opportunity of living in this world but only once. How best we can use this opportunity depends on us. Lily Tomlin says: 'The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes their way.' Your mind is the soul author of your destiny and success. R.W.Emerson says: 'Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.' What I mean to say is that the opportunity of living is there in the life of everyone but the opportunity that knocks at every door but only once is the opportunity that can bring a big and amazing change in a person's life if is prudently and courageously utilized. But one has to become very cautious and aware of hearing the knock of the opportunity. Sometimes it so happens that we go deaf to the knock. Opportunity comes to us and goes away but we are so lazy and unaware that we don't care to welcome the opportunity. Some opportunities seem to be too small for us to heed. But the fact is: 'Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.'(Demosthenes)

In the life of a person so many opportunities come but he ignores or gives little importance to them, sometimes unknowingly and sometimes knowingly. The result is that he suffers or repents all his life. There runs a story that teaches us that we should always be aware of the chance that comes in our way. The story is: A few passengers were sailing in a boat. In the meantime the boat they were in was caught in a storm and was going to sink. They were all yelling for help. Another boat came and took some of the passengers. Some passengers swam across the river safely. Some passengers were saved by some divers. All the passengers but one was saved as they all got the opportunity in some way or the other and they greeted it. But one of the passengers could not be saved only because he did not greet the opportunity that came to him. In the 'Yamlok' he asked the King of Death (Yamraj) why he was not saved from being drowned to death. The King answered: 'I gave you the opportunities three times but you ignored every time thinking foolishly that God would save you.' God has given us life endowed with prudence, wisdom, intelligence, courage so that we may understand how to live our life. Alfred Einstein says: 'God made us not because He knew what we would do but to find out what we would do.' God undoubtedly stands by us all the time but He has given us the most unique thing, i.e. mind/heart. 'I asked God to give me happiness. God said, 'No! I give you blessings, happiness is up to you.' I asked for all things so that I might enjoy life. God said, 'No!' I will give you life so that you may enjoy all things.'

If you want to lead your life successfully and happily, be alert and prepared to hear the call of the opportunity that may come at any moment. We all know 'time and tide wait for none.' Even if you do not have any opportunity in your life, never lose the hope you have cherished. It is up to you to realize your hope. What you must have is the 'will power' that can overcome any hurdle. Milton Berley says: 'If opportunity does not knock, build a door.' And it is only possible if you have 'will power' and do not blame anyone or anything for not having any opportunity in your life. Make the door and opportunity itself would like to knock at that door. All problems contain the seeds of opportunity and this awareness allows you to take the moment and transform it to a better situation or thing.

Article:

People sometimes ask me when I plan to retire. They seem to think that I "deserve" to take it easy and put my feet up at this stage in my life. Maybe they believe retirement is a prize you win at the end of a long and healthy career.

The truth is that I can't imagine retirement. My prize is finding more ways to impact others: I just turned 67, and I'm more conscious of the opportunities to do that than ever. It's a good thing, too, because the possibilities keep coming. There's a phenomenon I call "success momentum"—the ability to see an opportunity, seize it, capitalize on the success and then jump at the next chance.

Here's a good way to think about life: Picture yourself walking through a maze. You'll test all sorts of doors, some of which might take you to new and interesting avenues, some of which might dead-end. If you just keep opening doors and moving forward, eventually you will arrive someplace worthwhile.

You can build success momentum, too. The open doors of opportunity are all around you, but they won't do you much good unless you learn to see them and recognize when to walk through them. Let's consider how you can align yourself with the opportunities coming your way, and open doors for yourself.

Keep walking.

On your journey, you won't find lights illuminating your path or signs stating that your destination nears. You could be on the verge of success and not even know it. Push forward! Perseverance pays. Most people don't get to the open door because they don't walk far enough. As Norman Vincent Peale said, "It's always too early to quit!"

Keep searching.

Try new things. Watch to see what works for others.

Keep clarifying.

It is easy to miss an opportunity if you don't know what you are looking for. The most successful people wake up each morning with a clear sense of what they want to create in their lives. That clarity of purpose makes it easy to identify a good opportunity.

Keep working.

As Thomas Edison said, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." I love that! Nothing worthwhile in life comes free. If you want bigger and better things, you have to be willing to work for them.

Keep opening.

Too many people get to one door, go through it, and say, "Whew!" They don't realize that taste of success is really just a nibble. The only advantage of going through the first door is that it leads to a second door. A dozen doors later you are really starting to experience success.

Once you conquer the maze, you can turn around and guide others. To me, that is the highest form of success. I enjoy maximizing my own opportunities, but I find more satisfaction in helping others grow and achieve. Here are four ways you can become a mentor who opens doors for people to reach their own potential.

Push them to grow.

How often have you known people with remarkable gifts but no idea how to tap into them? Sometimes people don't recognize their potential until someone points it out. Be that motivator. Help your colleagues identify their strengths, hone their talents and recognize their capabilities. It's the greatest gift you can give.

Be open to their questions.

Let others gain from your wisdom and experience. Good leaders are accessible to their top performers and take time to answer their questions. Your wins and losses can be a gold mine for developing leaders. When you share how you think, your people gain insight that makes them productive beyond their personal experience.

Give them chances to change.

Are your people innovative? Do they like to develop new ideas? Give people ownership and allow them to problem-solve, create new products, or interview new team members. When people contribute to meaningful change, they feel pride in the organization's success and responsibility for it.

Provide opportunities for them to win.

Momentum is a leader's best friend. Your team needs regular opportunities to win together. I like to encourage friendly competition among my team. I offer incentives based on measurable results and watch my people push each other to victory. It's a fun way to improve performance, increase profits and build team unity.

Opening doors for yourself and others builds a culture that celebrates growth, change and risk-taking. Opportunity-seeking can, in fact, become a habit. Tell your team members to be on the lookout for opportunities to improve themselves, the team and the company. Ask people to look at your processes, products and procedures with fresh eyes.

By doing so, you'll take your business to a whole new level. You may find that team members begin to come to you with their new ideas and opportunities. When you communicate that you value, appreciate and implement good ideas from any source, you set your team up for success and encourage individual contributions.

Author Orison Swett Marden once said, "Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them." That is great advice. Start opening doors and never stop. Life is full of opportunity for those who are willing to look for it.

Peace

Essay:

Every leader in the world aims to find a lasting solution to the problems that beset our planet but so far, peace on earth has continued to be an elusive dream. There are many movements, conferences, brotherhoods and fraternities all over the world that promotes the idea of world peace. Philosophers, theologians, politicians, and other great thinkers from the past up to the present have offered so many formulas and ideas for achieving peace but no one has yet came up with a solid answer to the question.

Why is world peace so difficult to achieve? Perhaps the answer lies within our self. What have we done to make the world a better place to live in? How have we treated our brothers and our neighbors? If we look at the philosophies and teachings of great men and the number of world peace movements that have risen out of nowhere, the issue assumes even more layers and textures than the original idea.

Is it possible to achieve world peace? Some great thinkers believe so. But if you are asking whether it can possibly happen in our lifetime, then that is something no one can answer. Only time can tell. But as long as everybody makes a conscious effort to work for it, then maybe we stand a chance of seeing the first signs of world peace happening.

There are different ideas as to what constitutes world peace. Some people think it is the resolution of conflict that will bring about world peace. Others think that absence of hunger, deprivation or social justice would be a sign that world peace is finally happening. It is like looking at the forest without seeing the trees instead of the other way around. The perennial question will always be where to start.

If we take time to read the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi or take a few minutes to look at the Bible, the common denominator lies with the "Golden Rule" which teaches "not to do unto others what we do not want others to do unto us". This teaching rings true even today when we look at how people are treated in some parts of the world. War, violence, famine and social injustices are all handmaids of the devil.

If we strive to treat other people like a brother, living harmoniously with one another, treating each other justly and fairly, there would be no conflict and the rest follows. For this reason, in order to achieve world peace, we have to start with ourselves. We have to be agents of change and ambassadors of good will. We should learn to live with our neighbors peacefully and do business with each other fairly and honestly.

When we start with doing the best to other people, we can inspire others to do the same. By paying the good deeds forward, we can multiply the number of people we touch with our goodwill and eventually it will spread and infect others. We cannot expect peace in the world unless we give that which in our heart we are prepared to sacrifice.

Article:

Everything is evaluated not according to what it looks like at a certain moment, but by the degree of its development.

All there is in reality, good, bad and even most harmful in the world has a right to exist. It should by no means be completely destroyed. Our task is to merely correct it and return it to the Source.

It is enough to take an attentive look at the process of the creation to realize the greatness and perfection of the act and the One Who performs it. Therefore we should understand and be extremely careful to neglect any part of the creation and say that it is superfluous and unnecessary. Because it is slander with regards to the act of the creation.

However, it is well-known that the Creator did not complete the creation at the moment of its making. We see that our reality is governed by the laws of step-by-step development that begins with the stage preceding conception and continues up to the end of growth. This is why we do not perceive a bitter taste of a fruit as a flaw in the beginning of its growth.

The same applies to the other elements of reality: if something seems bad and harmful, it only means that this element is in a transitional stage of its development. Hence we have no right to define it as bad and neglect it, because it is unwise.

Those who "correct the world" err

This conclusion enables us to understand that the people who have tried "correct the world" in every generation erroneously perceive man as a machine, which does not function properly and requires improvement, i.e. replacement of defective parts with better ones.

All their efforts were focused on destroying the evil that exists in the human race. truth to tell, unless the Creator had opposed them, they would have certainly succeeded in "sifting humanity through a sieve" and leaving in it only what is good and useful.

However, the Creator takes utmost care of every tiny particle of His creation, allowing no one to destroy anything in His domain. In accordance with it, all such "correctors" will disappear; while evil will remain in the world. It exists and counts the stages of development of every element of the creation until they reach their final state.

Evil properties will then turn into good and useful ones the way the Creator initially conceived them. This resembles a fruit hanging on a tree branch for days and months until it ripens so that every person will discover its taste and sweetness.

Good and evil are evaluated according to an individual's actions with regards to the society

Before we set about researching the correction of evil in the human race, we should first determine the value of such abstract notions as good and evil. In other words, while analyzing the actions or properties of good and evil, we should clarify with regards to whom they can be considered as such. To understand that one should know the relative value of the particular compared with the whole, i.e. an individual with respect to the society in which he lives and from which he receives both material and spiritual sustenance.

Reality clearly demonstrates that an individual has no right to exist if he isolates himself from the society, which would serve him and satisfy his needs. From this it follows that man is initially created to live within a society. Every individual is like a tiny wheel inside one mechanism. No individual wheel has any freedom of movement. It is involved in the general motion of all the wheels in a certain direction so that the entire mechanism would be able to complete the given task. If one of the wheels breaks down, it is not considered as breakage of one particular wheel. It is estimated from the view point of its role in the entire mechanism.

Similarly, every individual's value in the society is determined not by how good he is by himself, but by the extent of his contribution to the society as a whole. And vice versa, we do not evaluate each individual's degree of evil. We rather estimate the damage he causes to his society.

It is clear as noonday both from the standpoint of truth and goodness, because the whole contains only what is present in the particular and the benefit of the society is the benefit of each individual. One who causes harm to the society harms himself. He who is of benefit to the society receives his share, since the particular is always a part of the whole. The value of the whole is a sum total of its parts.

It turns out that the society and an individual are one and the same. There is nothing negative in the fact that an individual is subordinate to the society, because both an individual's and the society's freedom constitute the same. Good or bad properties and actions are only estimated according to their usefulness to the society.

Needless to say, the above-said only refers to the individuals who do their duty in the society, receive as much as they need and do not encroach on their comrades' share. However, if certain members of the society behave differently, they cause harm both to the society and to themselves.

All the aforesaid is but highlighting the weak point that requires correction. This way everyone can understand that his personal benefit and the benefit of the society are the same thing and in this manner the world will achieve its complete correction.

Life conditions of the last generation

...First of all, everyone should properly understand and explain it to his immediate circle of acquaintances that there exists an absolute interdependency between peace in the society (which means peace in the state) and peace on the planet. As long as social laws do not satisfy all and as long as there is a minority which is unhappy with the way the state is ruled, it will try to defy the state rule and demand a change of government.

In case this minority is insufficiently strong to openly struggle with the regime, there is an alternative, roundabout way to throw it off. For example, two states can be provoked and led to war, because quite naturally there will be many more dissatisfied people during the war. The dissident minority will then have an opportunity to become a decisive majority, overthrow the government and organize a new one that would better serve its own needs. So peace for an individual turns out to be a factor that directly affects peace in the state. Furthermore, if we take into account the ever-present part of the society, for which war is a trade and a hope for a career advancement, i.e. professional military and armaments experts with a lot of clout and add to it another minority dissatisfied with existing laws, we will come up with an ever-ready overwhelming majority, which aspires to wars and bloodshed.

Since peace in the world and peace in a particular state are interdependent, even those citizens (intelligent and enterprising ones) who are currently content with the status quo are seriously concerned about their own security due to the tension maintained by the destructive elements of the society. So if they could understand the value of peace, they would certainly be happy to adopt the mode of life of the last generation.

Reading

Essay:

Through the human eye, letters form up at attention, their ranks splitting off to make squads commonly known as words. Most can keep these letters at attention, preventing them from falling off the line. Yet, my page differs: the letters seem to dance. My eye lacks control, and my ranks fall into disarray. Words of grotesque nature form and then split off to form other unintelligible scribbles. I try hard but can only get the letters to make simple ranks for short periods, and then the renegades resume their crazed dance, defying my authority.

A child's path to "reader hood" is crucial in helping him or her become a functioning member of society. Many children start the journey with clear skies and a calibrated GPS system, mastering key fundamentals at young ages. My journey was filled with snake pits and hailstorms. Many years went by and I was still battling the armies of vowels. After a semester of grade two in South Africa, a teacher recognized that I needed remedial help. I followed her recommendation to attend a school designed for kids confronting a difficult path to "reader hood." I doubt I would be where I am today had I not followed this life-changing suggestion.

My journey as a dyslexic student has granted me the luxury of assimilating knowledge in different ways. After all, a curious mind can find answers in the most unexpected places. When I couldn't rely on letters to conform, I focused on words spoken, landscapes traversed, cultures observed, and teachers dedicated to their trade. While I have become a strong reader, I am fortunate to have retained the ability to look beyond text and written words to find meaning.

Faces tell stories that are often in direct contradiction to the facts at hand. On a family trip to Kenya, we visited rural villages with people living below the poverty line on the global economic scale. Yet the joy and warmth radiating from those we met told a story of resilience and ingenuity. I saw, through the power of observation–the same intelligence beyond reading that I was compelled to develop when words would not join my army.

I have grown to have a certain level of affection for my dyslexic brain. How else could I accept the fact that a mistakenly inverted chemical formula meant to be a common household item, could end up causing a nuclear reaction? Only a dyslexic brain could easily discern the inversion.

It would take a versatile learning style, employing all my senses, to fully engage my global education. This style accompanied my dyslexia. I attended lower school in southern hemisphere sunshine in South Africa. School uniforms were mandatory, but shoes were optional. We played rugby and cricket, and had lessons in the shade of the canopy trees when it became too hot to be inside. On Flag Day we sang N'Kosi Sikeleli, and I carried an American flag on stage to sing "America the Beautiful."

Then, at fourteen, I spent a semester at a ski program in Switzerland. I found myself gazing at the Alps wondering what possessed Hannibal to attempt them with his herd of elephant! This country with four official languages, had 450 different varieties of Swiss cheese, with further "variety within the varieties", which the locals told me was a combination of vegetation and techniques passed from one generation to the next. We studied European history, and Swiss Mountain Guides taught us how to read snow and avalanche conditions. We watched weather to predict whether we would be skiing ice or powder from the way the crystals set up on our jackets. By then, I was a reader but reading comprehension alone could not have guaranteed success in these places. Thanks to my dyslexia, I had the foundation to employ multiple paths of engagement, which helped me draw as much meaning out of these experiences as possible.

Article:

Stages of Reading Development

The Stages of Reading Development is a continuum that explains how students progress as readers. These stages are based on the students' experience and not their age or grade level. Knowing these stages is helpful when developing materials for specific types of readers.

Emergent readers need enriching and enjoyable experiences with books, especially picture books. Students can become comfortable with books even before they can read independently, recognizing letters and words and even language patterns. They are able to work with concepts of print and are at the beginning stages of developing the ability to focus attention on letter-sound relationships. Sharing books over and over, extending stories, relating experiences to both print and pictures, and guiding students to "read," helps children begin to make predictions about what they are reading.

Early readers are able to use several strategies to predict a word, often using pictures to confirm predictions. They can discuss the background of the story to better understand the actions in the story and the message the story carries. It is this time in the reader's development that the cueing systems are called upon significantly, so they must pay close attention to the visual cues and language patterns, and read for meaning. It is a time when reading habits of risk-taking, and of predicting and confirming words while keeping the meaning in mind are established.

Transitional readers often like to read books in a series as a comprehension strategy; the shared characters, settings, and events support their reading development. They read at a good pace; reading rate is one sign of a child's over-all comprehension. At this stage, children generally have strategies to figure out most words but continue to need help with understanding increasingly more difficult text.

Fluent readers are confident in their understandings of text and how text works, and they are reading independently. The teacher focuses on students' competence in using strategies to integrate the cueing systems. Students are maintaining meaning through longer and more complex stretches of language. An effective reader has come to understand text as something that influences people's ideas.

Sadness

Essay:

As early as I could remember myself, my memories have been colored with melancholy. Yes, I admit it: I am a person who loves being sad. As a child, I loved sad fairy tales, as a teenager I loved sad novels and films, which made my parents worry a lot. I realized that I did not meet their expectations: in their ideal world a happy person must irradiate joy all the time. In my view, this state of constant life enjoyment looked slightly idiotic. And I kept asking myself if sadness is really so bad.

One of the points, which I have discovered, is that people very seldom differentiate between sadness and misery and mistake one feeling for the other, although they are very different in nature. Misery can only be caused by some deeply traumatic experience; however, sadness in a natural middle between being extremely happy and feeling deep sorrow.

Another important issue is that sadness often accompanies the process of thinking, consideration and evaluation. If, for example, you once watch the face expression of a person who is writing something deep in thought, you will see that he/she looks sad.

Furthermore, sadness is absolutely natural: almost all our important events in life are colored with it. We feel it when we have to leave a place where we felt good, we experience it when we are happy because deep down we all know it will not last forever, when parents see their children getting married, they are happy, but at the same time they are sad, because their kids have grown up.

So, sadness is positive. Next time you wake up in the morning and realize you feel sad, do not get upset, it only means you are normal and experience the whole range of emotions.

Article:

Study investigates why sadness is the longest-lasting emotion

We have all been there at some point in our lives: that emotional span of time after a difficult breakup, the death of a loved one or an injury, when it seems like climbing out of the pit of despair is an insurmountable task. But why does sadness last longer than feelings of being ashamed, surprised, irritated or bored? A new study published in the journal Motivation and Emotion examines this question.

The researchers, led by Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen of the University of Leuven in Belgium, say differences in emotion duration have only been assessed for a small number of emotions, and any differences observed have not been clearly explained.

As such, the team wanted to look into this topic with more detail in order to account for differences in how long certain emotions last. They had 233 high school students recall recent emotional experiences and report their duration.

In addition, the students answered questions about strategies they used to judge and handle these emotions.

Out of 27 emotions in total, the researchers found that sadness was the longest-lasting emotion; shame, surprise, fear, disgust, boredom, being touched, irritation and relief, however, were the shortest-lasting emotions.

The team was surprised to find that boredom was one of the shortest emotions; typically time seems to pass slowly when we are bored. However, they say their results show that an episode of boredom does not actually last very long.

Rumination plays a role in how long emotions last

The findings indicate that emotions do not last as long when they arise from events that carry low importance to the individual. However, long-lasting emotions come from events with strong importance attached to them.

For example, sadness is typically linked to events with great impact, such as death or injury, the researchers say. And Verduyn notes that some of these important implications may arise over time, causing the emotion to be strengthened.

Verduyn explains further:

"Rumination is the central determinant of why some emotions last longer than others. Emotions associated with high levels of rumination will last longest."

In other words, thinking about events and consequences repeatedly - which individuals tend to do more with situations linked to feelings of sadness as a way of coping or comprehending - causes the emotion to endure.

The team also found that the lasting effects of emotions can differ between similar emotions. Guilt, for example, lasts longer than shame, and anxiety lasts longer than fear.

"Emotions of shorter duration are typically - but, of course, not always - elicited by events of relatively low importance," adds Lavrijsen. "On the other hand, long-lasting emotions tend to be about something highly important."

They conclude their study by noting that their findings held across emotion duration definitions and when taking into account how recent and intense the emotions were.

Because their study was questionnaire-based and only included high school students, it has limitations, so whether these findings are generalizable to a larger population is currently unknown.

In February of this year, Medical News Today reported on a study that suggested the emotional impact of nightmares are typically due to sadness, rather than fear.

Talking

Essay:

Talking is silver but silence is gold, it's a great idiom used by the most nations.  
Well, silence is the best policy; you can see: listen and silent two words have the same letters but arranged differently. We humans have tendency to talk more and to listen less, the main cause of it is that we have forgotten the art of waiting and allowing ourselves to listen to other viewpoints.

When we are silent and waiting, something great inside us keeps on growing, and silence gives birth to creativity, moreover the more we keep silent the less the heart that can be hurt.

There are times when silence become the most potential way of communication and it's more effective than words, for instance sometimes a silent angry look from our parents enough to let us feel their fury and agony, and this angry look capable of making us behave better than harsh reprimand or scolding.

Lovers all over the world prefer to communicate with silence, It's more romantic and a famous telepathy between two people who have strong feelings for each other.

Undeniably, silence needs a special kind of power and authority of mind, to say nothing is more difficult than expressing anger, happiness, love, betrayal with words. That's why it's a quite difficult conflict between a man and his mind to a long journey of controlling our senses and reactions.

Article:

Stop Googling. Let's Talk.

COLLEGE students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it's a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, "elsewhere."

These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the Pew  Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren't happy about it; 82 percent of adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation.

I've been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I've had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? I've looked at families, friendships and romance. I've studied schools, universities and workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a "rule of three." In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect: Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can drop in and out.

Young people spoke to me enthusiastically about the good things that flow from a life lived by the rule of three, which you can follow not only during meals but all the time. First of all, there is the magic of the always available elsewhere. You can put your attention wherever you want it to be. You can always be heard. You never have to be bored. When you sense that a lull in the conversation is coming, you can shift your attention from the people in the room to the world you can find on your phone. But the students also described a sense of loss.

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add "facts" to their conversation. "Daddy," she said, "stop Googling. I want to talk to you." A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. "Our texts are fine," he said. "It's what texting does to our conversations when we are together that's the problem."

It's a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won't mind being interrupted. They don't feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We've gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person's posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

Of course, we can find empathic conversations today, but the trend line is clear. It's not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It's that we don't allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.

In our hearts, we know this, and now research is catching up with our intuitions. We face a significant choice. It is not about giving up our phones but about using them with greater intention. Conversation is there for us to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.

The trouble with talk begins young. A few years ago, a private middle school asked me to consult with its faculty: Students were not developing friendships the way they used to. At a retreat, the dean described how a seventh grader had tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event. It's an age-old problem, except that this time when the student was asked about her behavior, the dean reported that the girl didn't have much to say: "She was almost robotic in her response. She said, 'I don't have feelings about this.' She couldn't read the signals that the other student was hurt."

The dean went on: "Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like 8-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the way 8-year-olds would play. They don't seem able to put themselves in the place of other children."

One teacher observed that the students "sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones." Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.

But we are resilient. The psychologist Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else's shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.

Unfairness

Essay:

One thing that is learned fairly quickly during the span of one's life is that life is often unfair. Unfairness takes shape in many forms and in every corner of the world. Life seems unfair when I turn on the news and see that innocent people are killed every day, often just for the simple reason of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life seems unfair when it seems that some people are just born into wealth and will never have to work a day in their lives, when it feels like I have had to work my whole life. This may be an unpleasant lesson to learn, but nonetheless, extremely important as it is integral to our emotional development and pursuit of happiness.

In "Before a Dog Can Eat..", John expresses the importance of teaching his newborn son to understand that unfairness in life is inevitable. He explains if it were not for the inequities of life, valuable growth and perspective would not be possible. "There is meaning in suffering, as difficult it is to endure. From it we learn humility and persistence. There is appreciation in abundance. From it we realize that life is full of grace as well."

This quote rings true with me. Looking back on my life, the situations that made me who I am today are the situations where I struggled, and had to come up with a viable solution to fix them. These situations taught me that when faced with unfairness, I have a choice of how I respond to it. Some choose to take out their frustrations on others and refuse to take any responsibility for their own actions. Some will complain and whine, and allocate the blame for this injustice on every single possible thing other than themselves or their own actions, projecting their fear and unhappiness onto others.

If I chose to live my life following this train of thinking, it would be filled with anger and resentment. I have decided to attempt to find a silver lining, even in the most unfair situations, because I believe that every challenge faced is another opportunity to learn more about life and about myself.

In "A Lesson Before Dying", described in the very first scene of the book is the trial in which Jefferson is being tried for murdering a white man. His court trial sets the tone of unfairness he experiences throughout the whole story. Jefferson and his family experience judicial unfairness, where he is supposed to be judged by a jury of his peers. Instead, he is judged by twelve white men who undoubtedly have a prejudiced point of view before even hearing the case, and most likely had convicted him in their minds before they were ordered to deliberate in the jury room.

He is not even given the benefit of being considered a man by his own defense lawyer, who instructs the jury to consider Jefferson a hog rather than a man, described as an animal that doesn't know any better. If Jefferson is expected to follow the laws that this nation sets just as everyone else, he should be afforded the same judicial courtesy as everyone else.

Article:

Why an unfairness test might be a better way to tackle big business bullies

Unconscionable conduct proceedings against Woolworths by the corporate regulator announced this week are a (yet another) brave attempt to crack down on an activity that has been historically very hard to police.

But a looming review of Australian Consumer Law (ACL) in 2016 could provide a good opportunity to reassess the effectiveness of the unconscionability provisions and consider a prohibition of "unfair" conduct instead.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleges the supermarket giant has engaged in unconscionable conduct in dealing with a number of its smaller supermarket suppliers.

Woolworths introduced a scheme to reduce an anticipated profit shortfall by seeking payments – to which there was no enforceable contractual right - from over 800 of its "Tier B" suppliers. Failure to pay would give the impression the supplier was failing to "support" Woolworths. The proceedings commenced less than a year after Coles paid out $10 million to settle allegations of unconscionable conduct towards smaller suppliers.

On the face of it, the prohibition of unconscionable conduct in Australian consumer law provides a robust contribution to the ACCC's efforts to protect consumers and small business people - particularly shop lessees, franchisees and grocery and food suppliers - from exploitation by larger, more powerful entities.

The reality is, however, that successful actions – especially in relation to business-to-business transactions - have been few. The reason? Establishing unconscionable conduct has proved to be notoriously difficult because of the high threshold imposed by the courts that restricts a finding of unconscionable behaviour to only the most egregious instances of commercial dealing.

Under ACL, the pivotal provisions that seek to address questionable business conduct are s20 and, of more utility, s21 ACL. Earlier incarnations in the former Trade Practices Act - somewhat controversially – introduced the prohibition of unconscionable conduct in small business transactions that has subsequently been extended to all transactions involving the supply or acquisition of goods or services.

Section 18 prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct while unfair contract terms are rendered void by the operation of s23 ACL. Despite ongoing debate as to its effectiveness and possible amendment, s46 Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) prohibits corporations with a substantial degree of market power from exercising that power for certain anti-competitive purposes.

Historically, the doctrine of unconscionable dealing seeks to protect the most vulnerable individuals from those who are aware of that vulnerability and seek to exploit it. Over time, prohibitions of unconscionable conduct were incorporated into the ACL and extended to include business-to-business dealings.

Unfortunately, the ACL does not define "unconscionable". Resort to dictionary definitions refers to conduct that offends conscience. The issue is, at what point conscience will be offended; where do we place the "bar" that segregates conduct that is unconscionable with that which is merely "doing business"?

Despite guidelines inserted into the text of the legislation, the word remains loaded with traditional notions of extreme vulnerability and moral assessments. Despite some recent references to societal expectation, while the term remains in the ACL it is almost certain that the threshold will remain artificially high and enforcement action, except in the most egregious cases, will be constrained.

The ACL review will provide an opportunity to ponder the utility of the unconscionable conduct provisions in their present form.

For some time there have been suggestions that the ACL should incorporate a prohibition of unfair conduct. While the terms unfair and unconscionable may seem synonymous, the courts have been quick to point out that "conduct which is unfair or unreasonable is not for those reasons alone unconscionable". The question becomes whether we persevere with an unconscionability standard or adopt another - arguably better understood - unfairness threshold that better reflects community expectations of commercial behaviour?

Understandably, such a development would raise concerns that dilution of the unconscionability provisions will lead to business uncertainty. Furthermore, unfairness is a nebulous term again susceptible to subjectivity and moral intrusion.

However, an unfairness standard operates effectively in several other jurisdictions, including the European Union and several US states without undermining the viability of commercial exchange. The concept of unfairness is better understood by both business and the community than unconscionability's Dickensian "baggage".

 Advocates of this approach cite the economic benefits that could flow from enhanced protections, greater ease of regulatory enforcement and the benefits of incorporating a prohibition based on community expectations.

Although it promises to be a robust discussion, perhaps it is time to seriously consider the incorporation of a prohibition of unfair business conduct into the ACL.

War

Essay:

No doubt war is an evil, the greatest catastrophe that befalls human beings. It brings death and destruction, disease and starvation, poverty, and ruin in its wake. One has only to look back to the havoc that was wrought in various countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of war.

A particularly disturbing side of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may engulf the entire world. But there are people who consider war as something grand and heroic and regard it as something that bring out the best in man, but this does not in any way alter the fact that war is a terrible, dreadful calamity. This is especially so now that a war will now be fought with atom bombs.

Some people say war is necessary. A glance at the past history will tell now war has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of nations. No period in world history has been free from the devastating effects of war. We have had wars of all types-wars lasting for a year or so. In view of this it seems futile to talk of permanent, everlasting peace or to make plans for the establishment of eternal peace. We have had advocates of nonviolence and the theory of the brotherhood of man and fraternity of God.

We have had the Buddha, Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. But in spite of that, weapons have always been used, military force has always been employed, clashes of arms have always occurred; war has always been waged. War has indeed been such a marked feature of every age and period that it has come to be regarded as part of the normal life of nations. Machiavelli, the author of the well-known book The Prince, defined peace as an interval between two wars.

Moltse, the famous German Field Marshal, declared war to be part of the God's World-Order. Poets and prophets have dreamt of a millennium, a Utopia in which war will not exist and eternal peace will reign on earth but these dreams have not been fulfilled.

After the Great War of 1914-18 it was thought that there would be no war for a long time to come and an institution called the League of Nations was founded as a safeguard against the outbreak of war. The occurrence of another war (1939-45), however, conclusively proved that to think of an unbroken peace is to be unrealistic and that no institution or assembly can ever ensure the permanence of peace. The League of Nations collapsed completely under the tensions and stresses that created by Hitler.

The United Nations Organization, with all the good work that it has been doing, is not proving as effective as was desired. A large number of wars, the most recent ones being the one in Vietnam, the other between India and Pakistan, or Indo-China war, Iran-Iraq war or Arab- Israel war, have been fought despite the UN.

The fact of the matter is that fighting is a natural instinct in man. When even a number of individuals cannot live always in peace, it is, indeed, too much to expect so many nations to live in a state of eternal peace. Besides, there will always be wide differences of opinion between various nations, different angles of looking at matters that have an international importance, radical differences in policy and ideology and these cannot be settled by mere discussions so that resort to war becomes very necessary in these cases.

Before the outbreak of World War II, for instance, the spread of Communism in Russia created distrust and suspicion in Europe; democracy was an eyesore to Nazi Germany; British Conservatives were apprehensive of the possibility of Britain being communized. In short, the political ideology of one country being abhorrent to another, the state of affairs was certainly not conducive to the continuance of peace.

Add to all this traditional enmities between nations and international disharmony that have their roots in past history. For example, Germany wished to avenge the humiliating terms imposed upon her at the conclusion of the war of 1914-18 and desired, to smash the British Empire and establish an empire of her own. Past wounds in fact do not perfectly heal up and are constant goads to an effort at vengeance. A feverish arms race is going on between the hostile nations in anticipation of such an eventuality, and disarmament efforts are proving futile. The Indo-Pakistani war was fought over the Kashmir issue. The war in Vietnam was due to ideological differences.

It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a change. Man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace—the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life. He wants something thrilling and full of excitement and he fights in order to get an outlet for his accumulated energy. It must be admitted, too, that war has its good side. It spurs men to heroism and self-sacrifice. It is an incentive to scientific research and development. War is obviously an escape from the lethargy of peace

War is destructive to humanity, without argument the worst collective experience of humanity. It has created new nations on the rubbles of destroyed cities and humans dead.

It involves mass killing without humane feelings even if short and swift. Our recent experience with Kargil, which was not even a full-fledged war, reopened the sordidness of military action.

Wars, when prolonged like the World Wars, result in human brutality, mass extermination of races and intolerable atrocities on innocent civilians. All rules are kept on the backburner and what matters is victory or defeat. The 21st Century has seen the development of weapons, controlled by computerized systems, with pin-point accuracy and a million-fold increase in powers of destruction compared to our previous wars.

Weapons and tactics have undergone total transformation in the last millennium but no deterrent has managed to quell human conflict. It may look totally different has managed to quell human conflict. It may look totally different for the war-mongers but no the common man it gives the same results – death and destruction. The totally of wars since 1945 right from Nagasaki and Hiroshima to Iraq and Afghanistan continue to grow without respite. The irony of the new millennium is that improvement in technology and scientific advancement have given us more options, leaving us with our major drawback, our primitive human failing – the fear of the other.

The core reasons for fighting wars are about proving superiority, hegemony, competition for dominating the region or the world and for economic survival. The recent wars, to preserve the efficacy of the democratic system, may be a phase which is temporary.

The US military historian and analyst Colonel Macgregor states this explicitly, "We did not fight Hitler just because he was a Nazi or the fight against Stalin was not because he was a Communist." Similarly the US ambassador to NATO asserted, "Our shared values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights are themselves every bit as much worth depending as our territory". This may be applicable for the war on Iraq or Afghanistan but vital interests are of primary importance. Otherwise why has NATO kept allot with Kashmir, Africa, Chechnya or Algeria despite terrorism and absolute human suffering. Examples of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor are now exceptions but do raise our expectations for intervention in cases of upholding human rights.

The situation has drastically changed today with hand-held missiles capable of bringing down aircraft. The US faced those situations in Somalia and Afghanistan. Even very back in 1993, the US experienced the result of new weapons, in the hands of hurriedly formed mercenary and militia. The ragged, underfed and ill uniformed militia was capable of bringing down helicopters and kill marines, wrecking a super-power campaign in Somalia. The civil war in Somalia was further intensified due to their intervention. The bloodshed in Algeria continued in 1998 but the NATO and other super-powers including France just sat back and twiddled their thumbs.

Serbia also proved a point by creating a human crisis which could not be solved by the forces of the NATO, It had to find its own solution to the problem. Intervention in Yugoslavia or Iraq has not been able to subdue the rulers there and even after carpet bombing and unleashing their might the NATO powers could not reach a conclusion.

From these results, it has been proved that self-imposed political limitations on the amount of force to be used, can simply leave problems unresolved. The future holds more terror with smaller States like North Korea going in for nuclear weapons and States like Pakistan passing on technology to other Islamic states. Lybia under Colonel Gaddafi had been seeking this technology at any price and the day is not far off when Islamic militants will be able to get together a makeshift weapon. Major powers will be facing the paradox of yet more asymmetric warfare by small adversaries wielding outsize weapons capable of atomic explosions and chemical warfare.

India had this situation at kargil when they faced a few hundred mercenaries, terrorists and Pakistani militia, entrenched at the heights. The result was that it took us 50 days of all our effort leaving with 407 dead and 584 wounded, with six missing. It was only after the Air Force was put into substantial use that we succeeded in our efforts to recapture the god-forbidden heights.

Air campaigns alone today, can bring about drastic results and with precision air power alone serve as an effective and peacemaking lever. The surrender and demise of the Taliban Government in Afghanistan was activated by the non-stop aerial bombing by US fighter bombers. The terrain and the weather would have made any other mode a long drawn process with casualties shooting sky high.

Experts are of differing opinions on the strategy to be adopted in the face of threats from rogue States and fanatical groups like Islamic fundamentalists as well as peacekeeping tasks that stop short of full-fledged war. In today's context, arms proliferation has speeded up. 'The right computer chip in an adaptable missile aboard an off-shore trawler or a pick-up truck, makes a formidable weapon of mass destruction, launched by a small but implacable foe.'

The call by US today of a space shield and an anti-missile defense are prompted not by fear of a superpower like the erstwhile Soviet Union, but countries like Libya, Iraq, North Korea or the master of all terrorists – Osama Bin Laden. The latter could not be cowed down even after near destruction of Afghanistan. All the US monitors and technology could not stop the 9/11 terror of the towers being destroyed. The pace of ware between nuclear powers has receded, but these terror annihilations by groups. Can they be stopped? It's a different kind of war now, but as destructive or even more than earlier, for humanity.

Article:

A world war has begun. Break the silence.

I have been filming, John Pilger at the University of Sydney, in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, "Where is that?" If I offer a clue by referring to "Bikini", they say, "You mean the swimsuit."

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 -- the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered "unsafe" on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called "Bravo". The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women's Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: "You, too, can have a bikini body." A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different "bikini bodies"; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions" of democratic societies. He called it an "invisible government".

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make "the world free from nuclear weapons". People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, "Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable."

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two -- led by the United States -- is taking place along Russia's western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine - once part of the Soviet Union - has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- next door to Russia - the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world's second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a "threat". According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is "building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea".

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines - a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called "freedom of navigation".

What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don't See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western "mainstream" -- a Dan Rather equivalent, say --asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China's access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is "unleashing the dark forces of violence" in the United States. Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America's wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as "a world substantially made over in [America's] own image". The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn't want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted "exceptionalism" is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about "hope". And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as "funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician", Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife - a murder made possible by American logistics - Clinton gloated over his death: "We came, we saw, he died."

One of Clinton's closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting "Hillary". This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as "worth it".

Among Clinton's biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women's candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as "identity politics" stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported -- such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self-absorption, a kind of "me-ism", became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening - as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn's closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she's nominated. He, too, has voted for America's use of violence against countries when he thinks it's "right". He says Obama has done "a great job".

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

Youth

Essay:

In words of James" Youth is the joy, the little bird that has broken out of the eggs and is eagerly waiting to spread out its wings in the open sky of freedom and hope."

Youth is the spring of Life. It is the age of discovery and dreams. India is of largest youth population in the world today. The entire world is eyeing India as a source of technical manpower. They are looking at our youth as a source of talents at low costs for their future super profits. If Indian youth make up their mind and work in close unity with working class people, they can hold the political power in their hands. Indian youth has the power to make our country from developing nation to a developed nation. Is it a dream? No, their dreams take them to stars and galaxies to the far corners of the unknown and some of them like our own Kalpana Chawla pursue their dream, till they realize it and die for it in process. Hopes of youth the youth hopes for a world free of poverty, unemployment, inequality and exploitation of man by man. A world free of discrimination on the grounds of race, color, language and gender. A world full of creative challenges and opportunities to conquer it. But let us convert these hopes in reality.

The role of youth is of most importance in today's time. It has underplayed itself in field of politics. It should become aspiring entrepreneur rather than mere workers. It can play a vital role in elimination of terrorism. Young participation is important because youth are the country's power. Youth recognize problems and can solve them. Youth are strong forces in social movements. They educate children about their rights. They help other young people attain a higher level of Intellectual ability and to become qualified adults.

Unfortunately no one is bothered to dream any s vision. Martin Luther has said, "I have a Dream" and the dream come largely true. If he had not thought of that dream he would have accomplished nothing in his life. Another problem is its indifferent attitude towards things, situation and politics .The new cool formula of "let the things be "is proving fatal to India's development .Lack of unity and spirit is the major setback. It's time the youth, the students have to realize their power, their role, their duties and their responsibility and stand up for their rights. Now it's time that instead of brain drain we should act like magnets and attract world to India.

India can become a developed nation only if everyone contributes to the best of his or her capacity and ability. Youth is wholly experimental and with the full utilization of the talents of the Youth, India will become a complete Nation. Let us hope for the same.

'Youth is like a fire it crept forward. A Spark at first growing into a flame  
the brightening into a Blaze'.

Article:

Today's youth: anxious, depressed, anti-social

Three-generation survey reveals sharp decline in teenage mental health

The mental health of teenagers has sharply declined in the last 25 years and the chances that 15-year-olds will have behavioral problems such as lying, stealing and being disobedient, have more than doubled.

The rate of emotional problems such as anxiety and depression has increased by 70% among adolescents, according to the biggest time trend study conducted in Britain.

Boys are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems and girls are more likely to suffer emotional problems. The rate is higher for emotional problems, now running at one in five of 15-year-old girls. The study found no increase in aggressive behavior, such as fighting and bullying, and no increase in rates of hyperactivity.

The study looked at three generations of 15-year-olds, in 1974, 1986 and 1999. Behavioral problems increased over the whole period, while emotional problems were stable until 1986 and have subsequently shot up. The increases cannot be explained by the rise in divorce and single parenthood, argues the team of researchers, because they found comparable increases in all types of families, although there is a higher rate of adolescent mental health problems in single-parent families.

Nor can growing inequality over the 25 years explain the rise in problem teenagers because rates of increase were comparable in all social classes. There was no difference between white and ethnic minority teenagers.

The research found that the rising rate of 15-year-olds with behavioral problems correlated to their increased chances of experiencing a range of poor outcomes as adults, such as homelessness, being sacked, dependency on benefits and poor mental and physical health. This indicated that the rise in problems cannot be attributed to a greater likelihood to report them.

The deterioration of adolescents' mental health in Britain is in contrast to the findings of research in the US which showed that a comparable decline tailed off in the 90s, while in Holland, there was no decline at all.

The study, Time Trends in Adolescent Mental Health, to be published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry in November, is the first to provide evidence in support of the increasing concern from parents and teachers about the welfare of teenagers.

The research conducted by a team from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and the University of Manchester, provides specific evidence for Britain which is in line with the World Health Organization's warning last year that the fastest-growing mental health problem in the world, and particularly in the developed world, was among adolescents. "We are doing something peculiarly unhelpful for adolescent mental health in Britain," said Sharon Witherspoon, deputy director of the Nuffield Foundation which funded the research. "This is not a trend which is being driven by a small number of kids who are getting worse. It is not a small tail pulling down the average but a more widespread malaise."

"The route people take to adulthood has become much more difficult with the pressure on for qualifications," said John Coleman, director of the Trust for the Study of Adolescence. "When young people are faced with all these choices, they say they have to 'make it up as they go along'."

The study was not focused on the most serious cases such as suicide and self-harm where other recent studies have shown significant increases, but the more general experience of adolescents which is less likely to reach the point of needing professional intervention.

The findings are likely to fuel debates about how we are raising our children and whether they reflect parenting in early years or are linked to Britain's secondary education system with its emphasis on academic achievement, and poor record of out of school activities.

A recent survey showed that discipline in secondary schools comes ahead of funding as parents' greatest concern.

Next month, the Tomlinson report into 14-19 year-old education and training - commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills - is due to be published; a green paper on youth services is also expected this autumn.

The study did not look into possible causes, which are to be the subject of further research.

Also subject to further research is whether there has been a comparable rise in emotional and behavioral disorders among younger age groups or whether this is a specific problem in adolescence.

Second main part:

Events

In fact an analysis of events can be useful in most fields. This task can take two shapes:

.Post hoc analysis: After an event is reported in the general news media or in your disciplinary media, and knowing all rumors about that event, you have to reflect on:

  * What happened?

  * Why it happened?

  * What it means to your field?

  * Who/What created it?

  * Where was it created?

  * When was it created?

  * How was it created?

  * What are its characteristics, specifics?

  * Have any major historical events impacted it and if so what have they been?

Various engineering disciplines, for instance, could analyze the Pathfinder mission to Mars by focusing on appropriate elements of the actual event, and how the new technology can create what replace our heart for moments and also without breathing.

.What-if analysis: Take an actual event and write about how the outcome might differ if one crucial condition were changed. For example, what if Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, had been successfully produced on the first try? You may search about science disciplines and speculate about scientific elements of this event.

You may search about agriculture courses and focus on the immediate impacts in food production; you may search about ethics courses that could examine the balance of world-wide patterns of food production v. individual identity; you also may search about political science that could focus on government funding issues; and so on.

AbioCor Artificial Heart

AbioCor Implantable:

The AbioCor™ implantable replacement heart is the first completely self-contained total artificial heart. It is the product of 30 years of research, development, and testing conducted by ABIOMED, Inc. and its collaborators, with the support of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The AbioCor is designed to sustain the body's circulatory system and to extend the lives of patients who would otherwise die of heart failure. Its unique design allows it to be totally implanted within the body. Unlike the artificial hearts of the past, patients are not tethered to a large, air-pumping console nor do they have wires or tubes piercing their skin.

The AbioCor is intended for use in end-stage heart failure patients whose hearts have irreversible left and right ventricular failure and for whom surgery or medical therapy is inadequate. Currently, heart transplantation is the only proven method of cardiac replacement for extending the lives of such patients; however, there remains a consistent shortage of available donor hearts for transplantation. The Food and Drug Administration has given approval for the initial implantations of the AbioCor, after which it will review the results to determine if the study should be expanded to include more patients, including patients at other medical centers. In the meantime, the FDA and ABIOMED officials have determined that the initial patients to receive the AbioCor must meet the following criteria:

• Have end-stage heart failure.

•Have a life-expectancy of less than 30 days.

•Are not eligible for a natural heart transplant.

• Have no other viable treatment options.

On July 2, 2001, surgeons at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, performed the first implant of the AbioCor in a human patient—a 59-year-old named Robert Tools. Since that time, additional implants have been performed at other hospitals throughout the country, including the Texas Heart Institute.

Internal Components:

• A thoracic unit (the pump), weighing about 2 pounds. The thoracic unit consists of the artificial ventricles, which contain their corresponding valves, and a motor-driven hydraulic pumping system. The hydraulic pumping system uses pressure to shuttle blood from side to side—in this case, from the artificial right ventricle to the lungs or from the artificial left ventricle to the rest of the body. To create this pressure, the pump's motor rotates at 4000 to 8000 revolutions per minute.

•An internal rechargeable battery, which is an emergency battery that is continually charged by the external power source. The internal battery can provide up to 20 minutes of operation while disconnected from the main battery pack.

• An electronics package, which is implanted in the patient's abdominal area. It monitors and controls the pumping speed of the artificial heart.

External Components:

The AbioCor is normally powered by an external console or battery packs. The internal battery will power the pump only when the external power supply is disconnected. Power to the AbioCor is achieved with an energy-transfer device called a transcutaneous energy transmission (TET) system. The TET system consists of internal and external coils that are used to transmit power across the skin. Because tubes or wires do not pierce the skin, the chances of developing an infection are decreased. External battery packs can power the AbioCor for 4 hours.

Avatar is released

Lack of ambition is not something anyone can accuse James Cameron of having. 2009's Avatar took ten years to make—Cameron and his team had to essentially invent new moviemaking technology on the spot, which they used to make one of the most visually mind-blowing fantasy films ever made. While the movie has been plenty criticized in the years since and it's not exactly cool to say you're a fan, Cameron has been amassing a new team of writers, crew members, and artists for a long in-development return to planet Pandora. The movies have been teased and delayed for years, and now we finally know when we'll get to see them: The next four(!) Avatar movies have been scheduled for dates all the way into the year 2025.

The Avatar team announced the news in a Facebook post on Saturday, which marks the official return to production on the sequels:

"Great to be working with the best team in the business! Avatar takes flight as we begin concurrent production on four sequels. The journey continues December 18, 2020, December 17, 2021, December 20, 2024 and December 19, 2025!"

That still gives them three whole years to get a cast together for the next film, and iron out any kinks in whatever new tech Cameron's been brewing up all this time. To make the first Avatar, Cameron developed a whole new way of working with 3-D motion-capture on a virtual stage. Essentially, he was able to create a virtual space that he could digitally place a camera into after it was all filmed so that he could make any shot as close or as far away as he wanted. He also manufactured the most advanced stereoscopic 3-D camera rig of its time, called the Fusion Camera System, and ushered in a new era of 3-D filmmaking for visually adept movies like Life of Pi, Hugo, and Tron: Legacy.

A new Avatar film has a lot to live up to, since the first set such an incredible precedent. The universe of Pandora and beyond is a blank slate—or, rather, a green screen—on which Cameron can project whatever kinds of new adventures he wants. Let's hope they're worth the wait.

Haiti Earthquake

A people in crisis:

Haiti earthquake of 2010, large-scale earthquake that occurred January 12, 2010, on the West Indian island of Hispaniola, comprising the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most severely affected was Haiti, occupying the western third of the island. An exact death toll proved elusive in the ensuing chaos. The official Haitian government count was more than 300,000, but other estimates were considerably smaller. Hundreds of thousands of survivors were displaced.

It was estimated that some three million people were affected by the quake—nearly one-third of the country's total population. Of these, over one million were left homeless in the immediate aftermath. In the devastated urban areas, the displaced were forced to squat in ersatz cities composed of found materials and donated tents. Looting—restrained in the early days following the quake—became more prevalent in the absence of sufficient supplies and was exacerbated in the capital by the escape of several thousand prisoners from the damaged penitentiary. In the second week of the aftermath, many urbanites began streaming into outlying areas, either of their own volition or as a result of governmental relocation programs engineered to alleviate crowded and unsanitary conditions.

Because many hospitals had been rendered unusable, survivors were forced to wait days for treatment and, with morgues quickly reaching capacity, corpses were stacked in the streets. The onset of decay forced the interment of many bodies in mass graves, and recovery of those buried under the rubble was impeded by a shortage of heavy-lifting equipment, making death tolls difficult to determine. Figures released by Haitian government officials at the end of March placed the death toll at 222,570 people, though there was significant disagreement over the exact figure, and some estimated that nearly a hundred thousand more had perished. In January 2011, Haitian officials announced the revised figure of 316,000 deaths. The draft of a report commissioned by the U.S. government and made public in May 2011 drastically revised the estimate downward to no more than 85,000. Officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) later acknowledged inconsistencies in data acquisition. Given the difficulty of observing documentation procedures in the rush to dispose of the dead, it was considered unlikely that a definitive total would ever be established.

Further deaths occurred as serious injuries went untreated in the absence of medical staff and supplies. The orphans created by these mass mortalities—as well as those whose parents had died prior to the quake—were left vulnerable to abuse and human trafficking. Though adoptions of Haitian children by foreign nationals—particularly in the United States—were expedited, the process was slowed by the efforts of Haitian and foreign authorities to ensure that the children did not have living relatives, as orphanages had often temporarily accommodated the children of the destitute.

Because the infrastructure of the country's computer network was largely unaffected, electronic media emerged as a useful mode for connecting those separated by the quake and for coordinating relief efforts. Survivors who were able to access the Internet—and friends and relatives abroad—took to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook in search of information on those missing in the wake of the catastrophe. Feeds from these sites also assisted aid organizations in constructing maps of the areas affected and in determining where to channel resources. The many Haitians lacking Internet access were able to contribute updates via text messaging on mobile phones.

In October 2010, cases of cholera began to surface around the Artibonite River. The river—the longest on the island and a major source of drinking water there—had been contaminated with fecal matter carrying a South Asian strain of cholera bacteria. Suspicion that Nepalese UN peacekeeping forces stationed near the river were the likely source of the outbreak was validated by the leak of a report by a French epidemiologist in December. The report cited the absence of cholera in Haiti during the previous decade and the emergence of a parallel outbreak of cholera in Kathmandu, the city from which the troops had departed Nepal. The epidemic reached the tent cities of Port-au-Prince in November 2010, and by 2016 it had sickened some 770,000 people and proved fatal to more than 9,200. A 2016 report by the organization Doctors Without Borders claimed that cases of cholera had likely been significantly underreported.

Humanitarian aid:

Humanitarian aid was promised by numerous organizations—spearheaded by the United Nations and the International Red Cross—and many countries in the region and around the world sent doctors, relief workers, and supplies in the wake of the disaster. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who had in May 2009 been named the UN special envoy to Haiti, was assigned the task of coordinating the efforts of the disparate aid initiatives. In the ensuing months, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive expressed concern that foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—which were numerous in Haiti even prior to the quake and which bore responsibility for diverse aspects of the recovery—were not sufficiently accounting for the use of their resources, making it challenging for the Haitian government to assess where its own resources could best be deployed.

The NGOs, in turn, were hindered by their own unwieldy bureaucratic structures and found inter organizational communication difficult. The U.S. military—though providing considerable initial support in the form of equipment, logistics coordination, and personnel—had withdrawn all but a fraction of its forces by the second week of March, leaving UN peacekeepers and Haitian police to maintain order.

Using a model that had proved successful in Europe after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, programs were initiated abroad whereby mobile phone users could make donations via text messages. A sizeable portion of the aid gathered in the United States was channeled through mobile phone companies. A celebrity telethon hosted by Haitian American rapper Wyclef Jean in New York City and American actor George Clooney in Los Angeles and featuring numerous other entertainers was broadcast internationally and generated over $60 million.

Mars Exploration Rovers launched

NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched toward Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. They landed on Mars January 3 and January 24 PST, 2004 (January 4 and January 25 UTC, 2004).

The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet.

Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The spacecraft are targeted to sites on opposite sides of Mars that appear to have been affected by liquid water in the past. The landing sites are at Gusev Crater, a possible former lake in a giant impact crater, and Meridiani Planum, where mineral deposits (hematite) suggest Mars had a wet past.

After the airbag-protected landing craft settled onto the surface and opened, the rovers rolled out to take panoramic images. These images give scientists the information they need to select promising geological targets that tell part of the story of water in Mars' past. Then, the rovers drive to those locations to perform on-site scientific investigations.

These are the primary science instruments carried by the rovers:

• Panoramic Camera (Pancam): for determining the mineralogy, texture, and structure of the local terrain.

• Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES): for identifying promising rocks and soils for closer examination and for determining the processes that formed Martian rocks. The instrument is designed to look skyward to provide temperature profiles of the Martian atmosphere.

• Mössbauer Spectrometer (MB): for close-up investigations of the mineralogy of iron-bearing rocks and soils.

• Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS): for close-up analysis of the abundances of elements that make up rocks and soils.

• Magnets: for collecting magnetic dust particles. The Mössbauer Spectrometer and the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer are designed to analyze the particles collected and help determine the ratio of magnetic particles to non-magnetic particles. They can also analyze the composition of magnetic minerals in airborne dust and rocks that have been ground by the Rock Abrasion Tool.

• Microscopic Imager (MI): for obtaining close-up, high-resolution images of rocks and soils.

• Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT): for removing dusty and weathered rock surfaces and exposing fresh material for examination by instruments onboard.

Before landing, the goal for each rover was to drive up to 40 meters (about 44 yards) in a single day, for a total of up to one 1 kilometer (about three-quarters of a mile). Both goals have been far exceeded! Where are the rovers now? Moving from place to place, the rovers perform on-site geological investigations. Each rover is sort of the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking the surface of Mars. The mast-mounted cameras are mounted 1.5 meters (5 feet) high and provide 360-degree, stereoscopic, humanlike views of the terrain. The robotic arm is capable of movement in much the same way as a human arm with an elbow and wrist, and can place instruments directly up against rock and soil targets of interest. In the mechanical "fist" of the arm is a microscopic camera that serves the same purpose as a geologist's handheld magnifying lens. The Rock Abrasion Tool serves the purpose of a geologist's rock hammer to expose the insides of rocks.

The founding of NATO

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. It is an alliance of 29 countries bordering the North Atlantic Ocean. two are located in North America (Canada and the United States) and 27 are European countries while Turkey is in Eurasia, in which the United States contributes three-fourths of NATO's budget.

That organization's mission is to protect the freedom of its members:

For example, (on July 8, 2016) Nato announced that it would send up to 4,000 troops to the Baltic states and eastern Poland. It will increase air and sea patrols to shore up its eastern front after Russia's attack on Ukraine.

Its targets include weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and cyber attacks. On November 16, 2015, NATO responded to the terrorist attacks in Paris. It called for a unified approach with the European Union, France and NATO. That's because France did not invoke NATO's Article 5. That would be a formal declaration of war upon the Islamic state group. France preferred to launch air strikes on its own. Article 5 states, "an armed attack upon one shall be considered an attack upon them all."

The only time NATO invoked Article 5 was after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It responded to U.S. requests for help in the War in Afghanistan. It took the lead from August 2003 to December 2014. At its peak, it deployed 130,000 troops. In 2015, it ended its combat role and began supporting Afghan troops.

NATO's protection does not extend to member's civil wars or internal coups. On July 15, 2016, the Turkish military announced it had seized control of the government in a coup. But Turkish President Recep Erdogan announced early on July 16 that the coup had failed. As a NATO member, Turkey would receive its allies' support in the case of an attack, but not a coup.

The 29 Members:

Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.

Third main part:

Dignitaries

. Biographies and stories about role model figures in history influence the writer to mention the best examples that can help reader to accommodate the reason why that article or that essay is written.

Note:

When you try to note something about someone related to your content, avoid noting unnecessary events which will not represent a useful knowledge or an important concept.

Eva Perón wife of the Argentine President Juan Perón

. She has often been credited with gaining the right to vote for Argentine women, making radio addresses in support of women's suffrage and also published articles in her Democracia newspaper asking male Peronists to support women's right to vote

. Finally, Law 13,010 was approved unanimously. In a public celebration and ceremony, however, Juan Perón signed the law granting women the right to vote, and then he handed the bill to Eva, symbolically making it hers

. Then she created the Female Peronist Party, the first large female political party in the nation. Navarro and Fraser write that by 1951, the party had 500,000 members and 3,600 headquarters across the country

. In 1951, Eva set her sights on earning a place on the ballot as candidate for vice-president. This move angered many military leaders who despised Eva and her increasing powers within the government

. Eventually, she declined the invitation to run for vice-president, saying that her only ambition was that the footnotes would mention a woman who brought the "...hopes and dreams of the people to the president", a woman who eventually turned those hopes and dreams into "glorious reality."

Magdi Habib Yacoub an Egyptian-British cardiothoracic surgeon

. Yacoub was involved in the restart of British heart transplant in 1980, carried out the first British live lobe lung transplant and went on to perform more transplants than any other surgeon in the world. A 1980 patient, Derrick Morris, was Europe's longest surviving heart transplant recipient until his death in July 2005. This record was superseded by John McCafferty who received a transplant at Harefield Hospital in Middlesex on 20 October 1982 and survived over 33 years, until 10 February 2016. He was officially recognized as the world's longest surviving heart transplant patient by Guinness World Records in 2013.

. In 1994 he founded the charity Chain in Hope (www.chainofhope.org). This charity aims to provide children suffering from life-threatening disease with the corrective surgery and treatment to which they do not have access.

. In April 2007, it was reported that a British medical research team led by Yacoub had grown part of a human heart valve, from stem cells.

. He also established the great Aswan Heart Center in April 2009.

John Maynard Keynes the British economist

. In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and  depressions.

. The advent of the global  financial crisis of 2007–08 caused a  resurgence in Keynesian thought and it also provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the crisis by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.

Henry Ford founder of the Ford Motor Company

. In 1903, he established the Ford Motor Company, and five years later the company rolled out the first Model T. In order to meet overwhelming demand for the revolutionary vehicle, Ford introduced revolutionary new mass-production methods, including large production plants, the use of standardized, interchangeable parts and, in 1913, the world's first moving assembly line for cars.

. Eventually all documents noted that the mass production techniques Henry Ford championed eventually allowed Ford Motor Company to turn out one Model T every 24 seconds.

. In 1927, Ford ceased production of the Model T, and introduced the new Model A, which featured better horsepower and brakes, among other improvements. By that time, the company had produced some 15 million Model Ts, and Ford Motor Company was the largest automotive manufacturer in the world. Ford opened plants and operations throughout the world.

Usain St Leo "Lightning" Bolt the fastest human in the world

. He gained worldwide popularity for his double sprint victory at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in world record times. Bolt is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100 m and 200 m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012 and 2016), a feat referred to as the "triple double." An eleven-time World Champion, bolt won consecutive  World Championship 100 m,  200 m and  4 × 100 m relay gold medals from 2009 to 2015, with the exception of a 100 m false start in 2011.

. In 2009, he donated his shoes to Lady Allen, the wife of the Governor General of Jamaica, in order to raise money for the Issa Trust Foundation. The charity provides medical equipment and services to pediatric wards at hospitals across Jamaica.

. Bolt Foundation (UBF) has partnered with Food For the Poor (FFP) Jamaica to provide relief for communities affected by Hurricane Matthew in Haiti.

. THE Usain Bolt Foundation has secured licenses for The EPAVE Mathematics software which comprehensively covers the CXC/CSEC Mathematics syllabus, using computer graphics, animations and audio, designed for students' success.

Forth main part:

Proverbs

.When you remember the sentence that really fit with what you are aiming to, you don't have to write it typically. You can change some words that you forgot but be careful and do not change the meaning of the sentence.

. Sometimes the style of writing those words let you remember who made that sentence, so by the time you will be able to predict the real guy who took your attention for some moments of thinking.

 Bill Gates

.Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.

.Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

.As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

.In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.

.Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

.The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.

.Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

.Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

.I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

.You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.

.If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.

.The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

.  If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

.I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

.By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

 George Orwell

.Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

.Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

.The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

.Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

 Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear..

.Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

.We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

.One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

.  In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

.Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.  
.All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.  
.There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.  
.War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.  
.The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.  
.Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

.Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Muhammad Ali Klay

.I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky.

.I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.  
.A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.  
.The name Muhammad is the most common name in the world. In all the countries around the world - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon - there are more Muhammads than anything else. When I joined the Nation of Islam and became a Muslim, they gave me the most famous name because I was the champ.  
.The word 'Islam' means 'peace.' The word 'Muslim' means 'one who surrenders to God.' But the press makes us seem like haters.  
.I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want.  
.Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.

.Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.  
.Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.  
.My only fault is that I don't realize how great I really am.  
.I'm so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.  
.I believe in the religion of Islam. I believe in Allah and peace.  
.It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.  
.Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do - they all contain truths.  
.Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.

Stephen Hawking

.A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

.In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

.Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

.People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

.I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.

.However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

.I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road  
.Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson's and motor neuron disease from which I and many others suffer. The fact that the cells may come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to die anyway.

.The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.  
.Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.  
.Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity.  
.If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

.Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.  
.Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.  
.My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn't prevent you doing well, and don't regret the things it interferes with. Don't be disabled in spirit as well as physically.  
.Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

 Thomas A. Edison

.I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists - proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.

.The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.

.If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.

.The three great essentials to achieve anything worth-while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

.There is no substitute for hard work.

.I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.  
.Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.  
.There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

.What you are will show in what you do.

.I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.  
.Discontent is the first necessity of progress.  
.The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.  
.Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.  
.Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.  
.Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.  
.Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.  
.Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

At last, here is why the word (you) mentioned at the beginning of the book, just to inform - who read - that it is an obligation to believe in what Cassandra Clare said in her novel (Clockwork Prince):

"We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you."

