Dear Mr. Stevens, This is a reply to your inquiry about the shipment status of the desk you purchased at our store on September 26. Unfortunately, the delivery of your desk will take longer than expected due to the damage that occurred during the shipment from the furniture manufacturer to our warehouse. We have ordered an exact replacement from the manufacturer, and we expect that delivery will take place within two weeks. As soon as the desk arrives, we will telephone you immediately and arrange a convenient delivery time. We regret the inconvenience this delay has caused you. Sincerely, Justin Upton

Garnet blew out the candles and lay down. It was too hot even for a sheet. She lay there, sweating, listening to the empty thunder that brought no rain, and whispered, I wish the drought would end. Late in the night, Garnet had a feeling that something she had been waiting for was about to happen. She lay quite still, listening. The thunder rumbled again, sounding much louder. And then slowly, one by one, as if someone were dropping pennies on the roof, came the raindrops. Garnet held her breath hopefully. The sound paused. Don't stop! Please! she whispered. Then the rain burst strong and loud upon the world. Garnet leaped out of bed and ran to the window. She shouted with joy, It's raining hard! She felt as though the thunderstorm was a present.

How do you encourage other people when they are changing their behavior? Suppose you see a friend who is on a diet and has been losing a lot of weight. It's tempting to tell her that she looks great and she must feel wonderful. It feels good for someone to hear positive comments, and this feedback will often be encouraging. However, if you end the discussion there, then the only feedback your friend is getting is about her progress toward an outcome. Instead, continue the discussion. Ask about what she is doing that has allowed her to be successful. What is she eating? Where is she working out? What are the lifestyle changes she has made? When the conversation focuses on the process of change rather than the outcome, it reinforces the value of creating a sustainable process.

It might seem that praising your child's intelligence or talent would boost his self-esteem and motivate him. But it turns out that this sort of praise backfires. Carol Dweck and her colleagues have demonstrated the effect in a series of experimental studies: When we praise kids for their ability, kids become more cautious. They avoid challenges. It's as if they are afraid to do anything that might make them fail and lose your high appraisal. Kids might also get the message that intelligence or talent is something that people either have or don't have. This leaves kids feeling helpless when they make mistakes. What's the point of trying to improve if your mistakes indicate that you lack intelligence?

Fast fashion refers to trendy clothes designed, created, and sold to consumers as quickly as possible at extremely low prices. Fast fashion items may not cost you much at the cash register, but they come with a serious price: tens of millions of people in developing countries, some just children, work long hours in dangerous conditions to make them, in the kinds of factories often labeled sweatshops. Most garment workers are paid barely enough to survive. Fast fashion also hurts the environment. Garments are manufactured using toxic chemicals and then transported around the globe, making the fashion industry the world's second-largest polluter, after the oil industry. And millions of tons of discarded clothing piles up in landfills each year.

If you want to protect yourself from colds and flu, regular exercise may be the ultimate immunity-booster. Studies have shown that moderate aerobic exercise can more than halve your risk for respiratory infections and other common winter diseases. But when you feel sick, the story changes. Exercise is great for prevention, but it can be lousy for therapy, says David Nieman, the director of the Human Performance Lab. Research shows that moderate exercise has no effect on the duration or severity of the common cold. If you have the flu or other forms of fever-causing systemic infections, exercise can slow recovery and, therefore, is a bad idea. Your immune system is working overtime to fight off the infection, and exercise, a form of physical stress, makes that task harder.

The above graph shows the number of tourists who visited Istanbul and Antalya, the top two most-visited cities in Turkey, from 2013 to 2016. The number of tourists to each city was over one hundred thousand every year between 2013 and 2015. The city that received the higher number of tourists in 2013 was Antalya, but in the following three years, Istanbul received more tourists than Antalya did. While the number of tourists to Istanbul increased steadily from 2013 to 2015, Antalya received less tourists in 2015 compared to the previous year. Interestingly, in 2016, the number of tourists dropped to less than one hundred thousand for both cities. In particular, the number of tourists to Antalya in 2016 was almost only half the number from 2013.

Eddie Adams was born in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. He developed his passion for photography in his teens, when he became a staff photographer for his high school paper. After graduating, he joined the United States Marine Corps, where he captured scenes from the Korean War as a combat photographer. In 1958, he became staff at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, a daily evening newspaper published in Philadelphia. In 1962, he joined the Associated Press (AP), and after 10 years, he left the AP to work as a freelancer for Time magazine. The Saigon Execution photo that he took in Vietnam earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. He shot more than 350 covers of magazines with portraits of political leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, Richard Nixon, and George Bush.

《SHOES FOR SCHOOLS》 Your used shoes can go a long way! Brooks High School students! Do you have old or unwanted shoes? Donate them for children in Africa. The profits from reselling the shoes will be used to build schools in Africa. WHAT: * You can give away all types of shoes such as sneakers, sandals, boots, etc. WHERE: * You can drop shoes off in the collection box on the first floor of the main building. WHEN: * Between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. throughout this semester * Shoes will be picked up on Tuesdays every two weeks. HOW: * The shoes you donate need to be in a plastic bag. For more information, please call 413-367-1391. Thank you for your participation.

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My dad worked very late hours as a musician―until about three in the morning―so he slept late on weekends. As a result, we didn't have much of a relationship when I was young other than him constantly nagging me to take care of chores like mowing the lawn and cutting the hedges, which I hated. He was a responsible man dealing with an irresponsible kid. Memories of how we interacted seem funny to me today. For example, one time he told me to cut the grass and I decided to do just the front yard and postpone doing the back, but then it rained for a couple days and the backyard grass became so high I had to cut it with a sickle. That took so long that by the time I was finished, the front yard was too high to mow, and so on.

People are innately inclined to look for causes of events, to form explanations and stories. That is one reason storytelling is such a persuasive medium. Stories resonate with our experiences and provide examples of new instances. From our experiences and the stories of others we tend to form generalizations about the way people behave and things work. We attribute causes to events, and as long as these cause-and-effect pairings make sense, we use them for understanding future events. Yet these causal attributions are often mistaken. Sometimes they implicate the wrong causes, and for some things that happen, there is no single cause. Rather, there is a complex chain of events that all contribute to the result; if any one of the events would not have occurred, the result would be different. But even when there is no single causal act, that doesn't stop people from assigning one.

Leaving a store, I returned to my car only to find that I'd locked my car key and cell phone inside the vehicle. A teenager riding his bike saw me kick a tire in frustration. What's wrong? he asked. I explained my situation. But even if I could call my husband, I said, he can't bring me his car key, since this is our only car. He handed me his cell phone. The thoughtful boy said, Call your husband and tell him I'm coming to get his key. Are you sure? That's four miles round trip. Don't worry about it. An hour later, he returned with the key. I offered him some money, but he refused. Let's just say I needed the exercise, he said. Then, like a cowboy in the movies, he rode off into the sunset.

One CEO in one of Silicon Valley's most innovative companies has what would seem like a boring, creativity-killing routine. He holds a three-hour meeting that starts at 9:00 A.M. one day a week. It is never missed or rescheduled at a different time. It is mandatory―so much so that even in this global firm all the executives know never to schedule any travel that will conflict with the meeting. At first glance there is nothing particularly unique about this. But what is unique is the quality of ideas that come out of the regular meetings. Because the CEO has eliminated the mental cost involved in planning the meeting or thinking about who will or won't be there, people can focus on creative problem solving.

When meeting someone in person, body language experts say that smiling can portray confidence and warmth. Online, however, smiley faces could be doing some serious damage to your career. In a new study, researchers found that using smiley faces makes you look incompetent. The study says, contrary to actual smiles, smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence. The report also explains, Perceptions of low competence, in turn, lessened information sharing. Chances are, if you are including a smiley face in an email for work, the last thing you want is for your coworkers to think that you are so inadequate that they chose not to share information with you.

How funny are you? While some people are natural humorists, being funny is a set of skills that can be learned. Exceptionally funny people don't depend upon their memory to keep track of everything they find funny. In the olden days, great comedians carried notebooks to write down funny thoughts or observations and scrapbooks for news clippings that struck them as funny. Today, you can do that easily with your smartphone. If you have a funny thought, record it as an audio note. If you read a funny article, save the link in your bookmarks. The world is a funny place and your existence within it is probably funnier. Accepting that fact is a blessing that gives you everything you need to see humor and craft stories on a daily basis. All you have to do is document them and then tell someone.

If you ask a physicist how long it would take a marble to fall from the top of a ten-story building, he will likely answer the question by assuming that the marble falls in a vacuum. In reality, the building is surrounded by air, which applies friction to the falling marble and slows it down. Yet the physicist will point out that the friction on the marble is so small that its effect is negligible. Assuming the marble falls in a vacuum simplifies the problem without substantially affecting the answer. Economists make assumptions for the same reason: Assumptions can simplify the complex world and make it easier to understand. To study the effects of international trade, for example, we might assume that the world consists of only two countries and that each country produces only two goods. By doing so, we can focus our thinking on the essence of the problem. Thus, we are in a better position to understand international trade in the complex world.

Water is the ultimate commons. Once, watercourses seemed boundless and the idea of protecting water was considered silly. But rules change. Time and again, communities have studied water systems and redefined wise use. Now Ecuador has become the first nation on Earth to put the rights of nature in its constitution. This move has proclaimed that rivers and forests are not simply property but maintain their own right to flourish. According to the constitution, a citizen might file suit on behalf of an injured watershed, recognizing that its health is crucial to the common good. More countries are acknowledging nature's rights and are expected to follow Ecuador's lead.

No one likes to think they're average, least of all below average. When asked by psychologists, most people rate themselves above average on all manner of measures including intelligence, looks, health, and so on. Self-control is no different: people consistently overestimate their ability to control themselves. This overconfidence in self-control can lead people to assume they'll be able to control themselves in situations in which, it turns out, they can't. This is why trying to stop an unwanted habit can be an extremely frustrating task. Over the days and weeks from our resolution to change, we start to notice it popping up again and again. The old habit's well-practiced performance is beating our conscious desire for change into submission.

Trade will not occur unless both parties want what the other party has to offer. This is referred to as the double coincidence of wants. Suppose a farmer wants to trade eggs with a baker for a loaf of bread. If the baker has no need or desire for eggs, then the farmer is out of luck and does not get any bread. However, if the farmer is enterprising and utilizes his network of village friends, he might discover that the baker is in need of some new cast-iron trivets for cooling his bread, and it just so happens that the blacksmith needs a new lamb's wool sweater. Upon further investigation, the farmer discovers that the weaver has been wanting an omelet for the past week. The farmer will then trade the eggs for the sweater, the sweater for the trivets, and the trivets for his fresh-baked loaf of bread.

Have you heard someone say, He has no one to blame but himself for some problem? In everyday life we often blame people for creating their own problems. Although individual behavior can contribute to social problems, our individual experiences are often largely beyond our own control. They are determined by society as a whole ― by its historical development and its organization. If a person sinks into debt because of overspending or credit card abuse, other people often consider the problem to be the result of the individual's personal failings. However, thinking about it this way overlooks debt among people in low-income brackets who have no other way than debt to acquire basic necessities of life. By contrast, at middle- and upper-income levels, overspending takes on a variety of meanings typically influenced by what people think of as essential for their well-being and associated with the so-called good life that is so heavily marketed. But across income and wealth levels, larger-scale economic and social problems may affect the person's ability to pay for consumer goods and services.

Traditionally, people were declared dead when their hearts stopped beating, their blood stopped circulating and they stopped breathing. So doctors would listen for a heartbeat, or occasionally conduct the famous mirror test to see if there were any signs of moisture from the potential deceased's breath. It is commonly known that when people's hearts stop and they breathe their last, they are dead. But in the last half-century, doctors have proved time and time again that they can revive many patients whose hearts have stopped beating by various techniques such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation. So a patient whose heart has stopped can no longer be regarded as dead. Instead, the patient is said to be 'clinically dead'. Someone who is only clinically dead can often be brought back to life.

At the Leipzig Zoo in Germany, 34 zoo chimpanzees and orangutans participating in a study were each individually tested in a room, where they were put in front of two boxes. An experimenter would place an object inside one box and leave the room. Another experimenter would enter the room, move the object into the other box and exit. When the first experimenter returned and tried retrieving the object from the first box, the great ape would help the experimenter open the second box, which it knew the object had been transferred to. However, most apes in the study did not help the first experimenter open the second box if the first experimenter was still in the room to see the second experimenter move the item. The findings show the great apes understood when the first experimenter still thought the item was where he or she last left it.

It's reasonable to assume that every adult alive today has, at some point in their life, expressed or heard from someone else a variation of the following: Where did all the time go? I can't believe it's the New Year. Time flies! Enjoy it. One day you'll wake up and you'll be 50. While different on the surface, the sentiment behind these phrases is the same: time feels like it moves faster as we get older. But why does this happen? According to psychologist Robert Ornstein, the speed of time and our perception of it is heavily influenced by how much new information is available for our minds to absorb and process. In essence, the more new information we take in, the slower time feels. This theory could explain in part why time feels slower for children. Assigned the enormous task of absorbing and processing all this new perceptual and sensory information around them, their brains are continuously alert and attentive. Why? Because everything is unfamiliar. Consider the mind of a child: having experienced so little, the world is a mysterious and fascinating place. Adults and children may live in the same world, but reality for a child is vastly different ―full of wonders and curiosities and miraculous little events that most adults ignore. Perhaps this is why we think so fondly about the joy of childhood, that freedom of mind and body before the world becomes familiar and predictable.

A 10-year-old boy decided to learn judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident. The boy began lessons with an old Japanese judo master. The boy was doing well, so he couldn't understand why, after three months of training, the master had taught him only one move. Not quite understanding but believing in his master, the boy kept training. Several months later, the master took the boy to his first tournament. Surprising himself, the boy easily won his first two matches. The third match proved to be more difficult, but after some time, his opponent became impatient and charged; the boy skillfully used his one move to win the match. Still amazed by his success, he was now in the finals. This time, his opponent was bigger, stronger, and more experienced. Concerned that he might get hurt, the referee called a timeout to stop the match. Then the master intervened. No, the master insisted, let him continue. Soon after the match resumed, his opponent made a critical mistake: he dropped his guard. Instantly, the boy used his move to pin him. The boy had won the match and the tournament. He was the champion. On the way home, after reviewing all the matches he had, he summoned the courage to ask what was on his mind. Master, how did I become the champion with only one move? You won for two reasons, the master answered. First, you've mastered one of the most difficult throws in all of judo. And second, the only known defense for that move is for your opponent to grab your left arm. The boy's biggest weakness had become his biggest strength.