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Hi, Alan and Asset: We want to inform you about: "How to Protect Yourself When Shopping Online"

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Hi, Alan and Asset: We want to inform you about: "How to Protect Yourself When Shopping Online"

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How to Protect Yourself When Shopping Online

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Learn how you can protect yourself from potential fraudsters while shopping online.

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Hi, Aldiyar and Lev: We want to inform you about 2021 Suez Canal obstruction.

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Hi, Aldiyar and Lev: We want to inform you about 2021 Suez Canal obstruction.

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Business reporter, BBC News

A huge container ship that has been wedged in the Suez Canal since Tuesday has finally been freed from the shoreline.

However, it is not clear yet when full traffic in the canal can resume.

The blockage has been the source of much worry and frustration for the global shipping industry.

We take a look at the key numbers that have been involved in the operation.

The numbers are big

The Ever Given is 400m-long (1,312ft) and weighs 200,000 tonnes, with a maximum capacity of 20,000 containers. It is currently carrying 18,300 containers.

The ship is operated by Taiwanese transport company Evergreen Marine and is one of the world's largest container vessels.

The wind speed at the time was recorded at 40 knots, but the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) told reporters that this was not the only reason for the ship becoming stranded.

An investigation would be needed to determine whether technical or human errors occurred, the authority added.

As of Sunday, there were 369 ships stuck in a tailback waiting to pass through the 193km (120-mile) canal on either side of the blockage.

How did efforts to free the ship go?

Over the weekend, 14 tugboats pulled and pushed the Ever Given at high tide to try to dislodge it and were able to move the ship "30 degrees from left and right".

​Then on Monday morning, after several reports that the ship had been partially refloated, the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) issued a statement saying that the Ever Given had been "successfully refloated".

The SCA said it would resume manoeuvres later on Monday high tide, "allowing for the full restoration of the vessel's direction so it is positioned in the middle of the navigable waterway".

Then at 13:05 GMT the Ever Given was finally fully freed.

However, it could take a while to clear the backlog of ships waiting to use the canal.

Richard Mead, managing editor of shipping journal Lloyd's List, told the BBC's Today Programme: "We're looking at about 450 ships still waiting to transit the canal. It's going to be a lengthy process clearing that backlog."

How much has the blockage cost?

About 12% of global trade, around one million barrels of oil and roughly 8% of liquefied natural gas pass through the canal each day.

SCA chairman Osama Rabie on Saturday that the Canal's revenues were taking a $14m-$15m (£10.2m-£10.9m) hit for each day of the blockage.

Prior to the pandemic, trade passing through the Suez Canal contributed to 2% of Egypt's GDP, according to Moody's.

Looking at the bigger picture, German insurer Allianz said on Friday its analysis showed the blockage could cost global trade between $6bn to $10bn a week and reduce annual trade growth by 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points.

Some vessels have been rerouted to avoid the Suez Canal. That is adding around eight days to their total journeys.

Countless businesses affected

The Suez Canal blockage doesn't just affect the global shipping industry or the Egyptian economy - countless businesses, from domestic transport providers to retailers, supermarkets and manufacturers are also impacted.

Suez Canal

Source: Suez Canal Authority

The true damage and cost is difficult to evaluate until the ship is fully freed and trade resumes.

One UK company, Seaport Freight Services, said it had 20 containers of goods stranded on the Ever Given

"We're waiting on food goods like coconut milk and syrups, some spare parts for motors, we've got some fork lift trucks, some Amazon goods on there, all sorts," the company said.

There were concerns that if the blockage at the Suez Canal continued, some firms will have to pay to order more goods and have them sent over by air freight, which costs at least three times more.

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Business reporter, BBC News A huge container ship that has been wedged in the Suez Canal since Tuesday has finally been freed from the shoreline. However, it is not clear yet when full traffic in the canal can resume. The blockage has been the source of much worry and frustration for the global shipping industry.

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Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) (Published 2019)

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Hello, Saimon and Arthur would like to present you about  students procrastination problem

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If you've ever put off an important task by, say, alphabetizing your spice drawer, you know it wouldn't be fair to describe yourself as lazy.

After all, alphabetizing requires focus and effort - and hey, maybe you even went the extra mile to wipe down each bottle before putting it back. And it's not like you're hanging out with friends or watching Netflix. You're cleaning - something your parents would be proud of! This isn't laziness or bad time management. This is procrastination.

Etymologically, "procrastination" is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare - to put off until tomorrow. But it's more than just voluntarily delaying. Procrastination is also derived from the ancient Greek word akrasia - doing something against our better judgment.

"It's self-harm," said Dr. Piers Steel, a professor of motivational psychology at the University of Calgary and the author of "The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done. "

That self-awareness is a key part of why procrastinating makes us feel so rotten. When we procrastinate, we're not only aware that we're avoiding the task in question, but also that doing so is probably a bad idea. And yet, we do it anyway.

"This is why we say that procrastination is essentially irrational," said Dr. Fuschia Sirois, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield. "It doesn't make sense to do something you know is going to have negative consequences."

She added: "People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task."

In short: yes.

Procrastination isn't a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks - boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond.

"Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem," said Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa.

In a 2013 study, Dr. Pychyl and Dr. Sirois found that procrastination can be understood as "the primacy of short-term mood repair ... over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions." Put simply, procrastination is about being more focused on "the immediate urgency of managing negative moods" than getting on with the task, Dr. Sirois said.

The particular nature of our aversion depends on the given task or situation. It may be due to something inherently unpleasant about the task itself - having to clean a dirty bathroom or organizing a long, boring spreadsheet for your boss. But it might also result from deeper feelings related to the task, such as self-doubt, low self-esteem, anxiety or insecurity. Staring at a blank document, you might be thinking, I'm not smart enough to write this. Even if I am, what will people think of it? Writing is so hard. What if I do a bad job?

All of this can lead us to think that putting the document aside and cleaning that spice drawer instead is a pretty good idea.
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But, of course, this only compounds the negative associations we have with the task, and those feelings will still be there whenever we come back to it, along with increased stress and anxiety, feelings of low self-esteem and self-blame.

In fact, there's an entire body of research dedicated to the ruminative, self-blaming thoughts many of us tend to have in the wake of procrastination, which are known as " procrastinatory cognitions." The thoughts we have about procrastination typically exacerbate our distress and stress, which contribute to further procrastination, Dr. Sirois said.

But the momentary relief we feel when procrastinating is actually what makes the cycle especially vicious. In the immediate present, putting off a task provides relief - "you've been rewarded for procrastinating," Dr. Sirois said. And we know from basic behaviorism that when we're rewarded for something, we tend to do it again. This is precisely why procrastination tends not to be a one-off behavior, but a cycle, one that easily becomes a chronic habit.

Over time, chronic procrastination has not only productivity costs, but measurably destructive effects on our mental and physical health, including chronic stress, general psychological distress and low life satisfaction, symptoms of depression and anxiety, poor health behaviors, chronic illness and even hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

If it seems ironic that we procrastinate to avoid negative feelings, but end up feeling even worse, that's because it is. And once again, we have evolution to thank.

Procrastination is a perfect example of present bias, our hard-wired tendency to prioritize short-term needs ahead of long-term ones.

"We really weren't designed to think ahead into the further future because we needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now," said psychologist Dr. Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management.

Dr. Hershfield's research has shown that, on a neural level, we perceive our "future selves" more like strangers than as parts of ourselves. When we procrastinate, parts of our brains actually think that the tasks we're putting off - and the accompanying negative feelings that await us on the other side - are somebody else's problem.

To make things worse, we're even less able to make thoughtful, future-oriented decisions in the midst of stress. When faced with a task that makes us feel anxious or insecure, the amygdala - the "threat detector" part of the brain - perceives that task as a genuine threat, in this case to our self-esteem or well-being. Even if we intellectually recognize that putting off the task will create more stress for ourselves in the future, our brains are still wired to be more concerned with removing the threat in the present. Researchers call this "amygdala hijack."

Unfortunately, we can't just tell ourselves to stop procrastinating. And despite the prevalence of "productivity hacks," focusing on the question of how to get more work done doesn't address the root cause of procrastination.

We must realize that, at its core, procrastination is about emotions, not productivity. The solution doesn't involve downloading a time management app or learning new strategies for self-control. It has to do with managing our emotions in a new way.

"Our brains are always looking for relative rewards. If we have a habit loop around procrastination but we haven't found a better reward, our brain is just going to keep doing it over and over until we give it something better to do," said psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Judson Brewer, Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center.

To rewire any habit, we have to give our brains what Dr. Brewer called the "Bigger Better Offer" or "B.B.O."

In the case of procrastination, we have to find a better reward than avoidance - one that can relieve our challenging feelings in the present moment without causing harm to our future selves. The difficulty with breaking the addiction to procrastination in particular is that there is an infinite number of potential substitute actions that would still be forms of procrastination, Dr. Brewer said. That's why the solution must therefore be internal, and not dependent on anything but ourselves.

One option is to forgive yourself in the moments you procrastinate. In a 2010 study, researchers found that students who were able to forgive themselves for procrastinating when studying for a first exam ended up procrastinating less when studying for their next exam. They concluded that self-forgiveness supported productivity by allowing "the individual to move past their maladaptive behavior and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts."

Another tactic is the related practice of self-compassion, which is treating ourselves with kindness and understanding in the face of our mistakes and failures. In a 2012 study examining the relationship between stress, self-compassion and procrastination, Dr. Sirois found that procrastinators tend to have high stress and low self-compassion, suggesting that self-compassion provides "a buffer against negative reactions to self-relevant events."

In fact, several studies show that self-compassion supports motivation and personal growth. Not only does it decrease psychological distress, which we now know is a primary culprit for procrastination, it also actively boosts motivation, enhances feelings of self-worth and fosters positive emotions like optimism, wisdom, curiosity and personal initiative. Best of all, self-compassion doesn't require anything external - just a commitment to meeting your challenges with greater acceptance and kindness rather than rumination and regret.

That may be easier said than done, but try to reframe the task by considering a positive aspect of it. Perhaps you remind yourself of a time you did something similar and it turned out O.K. Or maybe you think about the beneficial outcome of completing the task. What might your boss or partner say when you show them your finished work? How will you feel about yourself?

Cultivate curiosity: If you're feeling tempted to procrastinate, bring your attention to the sensations arising in your mind and body. What feelings are eliciting your temptation? Where do you feel them in your body? What do they remind you of? What happens to the thought of procrastinating as you observe it? Does it intensify? Dissipate? Cause other emotions to arise? How are the sensations in your body shifting as you continue to rest your awareness on them?

Consider the next action: This is different than the age-old advice to break up a task you're tempted to avoid into bite-sized chunks. According to Dr. Pychyl, focusing only on the "next action" helps calm our nerves, and it allows for what Dr. Pychyl called "a layer of self-deception." At the start of a given task, you can consider the next action as a mere possibility, as if you were method acting: "What's the next action I'd take on this if I were going to do it, even though I'm not?" Maybe you would open your email. Or perhaps you would put the date at the top of your document. Don't wait to be in the mood to do a certain task. "Motivation follows action. Get started, and you'll find your motivation follows," Dr. Pychyl said.

Make your temptations more inconvenient: It's still easier to change our circumstances than ourselves, said Gretchen Rubin, author of "Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits." According to Ms. Rubin, we can take what we know about procrastination and "use it to our advantage" by placing obstacles between ourselves and our temptations to induce a certain degree of frustration or anxiety. If you compulsively check social media, delete those apps from your phone or "give yourself a really complicated password with not just five digits, but 12," Ms. Rubin said. By doing this, you're adding friction to the procrastination cycle and making the reward value of your temptation less immediate.

On the other side of the coin, Ms. Rubin also suggested that we make the things we want to do as easy as possible for ourselves. If you want to go to the gym before work but you're not a morning person, sleep in your exercise clothes. "Try to remove every, every, every roadblock," Ms. Rubin said.

Still, procrastination is deeply existential, as it raises questions about individual agency and how we want to spend our time as opposed to how we actually do. But it's also a reminder of our commonality - we're all vulnerable to painful feelings, and most of us just want to be happy with the choices we make.

Now go finish up alphabetizing that spice drawer before it becomes your next procrastination albatross.

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Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) (Published 2019)

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If you've ever put off an important task by, say, alphabetizing your spice drawer, you know it wouldn't be fair to describe yourself as lazy. After all, alphabetizing requires focus and effort - and hey, maybe you even went the extra mile to wipe down each bottle before putting it back.

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Hi! Mariyam and Zhupar: We would like to inform you about animal testing

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Hi! Mariyam and Zhupar: We would like to inform you about animal testing

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Animal Testing - Humane Society International

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Animal testing is required for many everyday products. Such cruel animal experimentation isn’t necessary when humane alternatives exist. Learn more!

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Hey! Ayaulym and Alissa: We would like to inform you about bullying and how to deal with that 

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Hey! Ayaulym and Alissa: We would like to inform you about bullying and how to deal with that 

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Education has the power to transform the lives of children and young people, and the world around them. At UNESCO, inclusive and transformative education starts with healthy, happy and safe learners. Because children and young people who receive a good quality education are more likely to be healthy, and likewise those who are healthy are better able to learn and complete their education.

Guided by the UNESCO Strategy on education for health and well-being, UNESCO works to improve the physical and mental health, well-being and education outcomes of all learners. By reducing health-related barriers to learning, such as gender-based violence, gender inequality, HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), early and unintended pregnancy, bullying and discrimination, and malnutrition, UNESCO, governments and school systems empower learners to understand their rights, learn better and lead fulfilling lives.

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For healthy, happy and thriving learners

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Margarita Chernova and Azhar Aitzhan. We want to inform you about shocking wedding traditions in three countries, which we classified as absurd. 

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Margarita Chernova and Azhar Aitzhan. We want to inform you about shocking wedding traditions in three countries, which we classified as absurd. 

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10 Most Bizarre Wedding Rituals in Various Cultures

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Top ten most bizarre wedding rituals in various cultures. Wedding rituals and traditions vary greatly between cultures, religions, countries,

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Qwat and Zarina:I want to inform you about cultural shock 

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Qwat and Zarina:I want to inform you about cultural shock 

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Report: It’s Better to Be a Poor Student in Almost Any Rich Country but the U.S.

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In America, if your parents didn’t make it far through school, chances are you won’t either.

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Hello, Inzhel and Dina would like to tell you about how anxiety destroys students and their happiness.

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Hello, Inzhel and Dina would like to tell you about how anxiety destroys students and their happiness.

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Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school's most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques for living a happier life. But you could also see something melancholy in the course's popularity: all these young high-achievers looking for something they've lost, or never found. Either way, the desire to lead a more fulfilled life is hardly limited to young Ivy Leaguers, and Santos turned her course into a popular podcast series "The Happiness Lab," which quickly rose above the crowded happiness-advice field. (It has been downloaded more than 64 million times.) "Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy?" asks Santos, who is 46. "Because it takes work! Because it's hard!"

I was just Googling you to find out some minor fact, and I saw a story in the Yale student paper that said you're taking a leave of absence for burnout. So, first, I'm sorry that things were feeling difficult. And second, if the happiness professor is feeling burned out, what hope is there for the rest of us? Back up, back up. I took a leave of absence because I'm trying not to burn out. I know the signs of burnout. It's not like one morning you wake up, and you're burnt. You're noticing more emotional exhaustion. You're noticing what researchers call depersonalization. You get annoyed with people more quickly. You immediately assume someone's intentions are bad. You start feeling ineffective. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't noticing those things in myself. I can't be telling my students, "Oh, take time off if you're overwhelmed" if I'm ignoring those signals. You can't just power through and wish things weren't happening. From learning about the science of happiness, I treat it like any other health issue: If my blood pressure was soaring - you need to take action. So it's not a story of Even the happiness professor isn't happy. This is a story of, I'm making these changes now so I don't get to that point of being burned out. I see it as a positive.

Even aside from an expert like yourself, we all have more resources about how to be happy than any humans ever, and yet so many of us still find it so hard to figure out how to be happier. Why is that? This is the way I frame a lot of the talk about happiness on the podcast: Our minds lie to us. We have strong intuitions about the things that will make us happy, and we use those intuitions to go after that stuff, whether it's more money or changing circumstances or buying the new iPhone. But a lot of those intuitions, the science shows are not exactly right - or are deeply misguided. That's why we get it wrong. I know this stuff, but my instincts are totally wrong. After a busy day, I want to sit and watch crappy Netflix TV shows, even though I know the data suggests that if I worked out or called a friend I'd be happier. But to do that I have to fight my intuition. We need help with that, and you don't get it naturally, especially in the modern day. There's an enormous culture around us of capitalism that's telling us to buy things and a hustle-achievement culture that destroys my students in terms of anxiety. We're also fighting cultural forces that are telling us, "You're not happy enough; happiness could just be around the corner." Part of it's all the information out there about happiness, which can be hard to sift through, but a lot of it is a deeper thing in our culture that seems to be leading us astray.

A lot of stuff that we know can have a positive effect on happiness - developing a sense of meaning, connection with other people, meditation and reflection - are commonplace religious practices. How helpful are they outside religion? There's evidence that cultural structures, religious structures, even smaller groups like your CrossFit team can cause true behavior change. The question is what's driving that? Take the religious case. You could mean two things by saying you need a cultural apparatus around the behavior change: One is you need a rich sense of beliefs; you need to buy into theological principles to get the benefits. Another is that it's your commitment to these groups that does it, and it doesn't have to come with a set of spiritual beliefs. There's a lot of evidence that religious people, for example, are happier in a sense of life satisfaction and positive emotion in the moment. But is it the Christian who really believes in Jesus and reads the Bible? Or is it the Christian who goes to church, goes to the spaghetti suppers, donates to charity, participates in the volunteer stuff? Turns out, to the extent that you can disentangle those two, it seems tonotbe our beliefs but our actions that are driving the fact that religious people are happier. That's critical because what it tells us is, if you can get yourself to do it - to meditate, to volunteer, to engage with social connection - you will be happier. It's just much easier if you have a cultural apparatus around you.

Does it matter if that apparatus is one we think of as being socially positive or not? Could someone get as much benefit from actively participating in a white-nationalist militia as he could by actively participating in a Quaker church? To my knowledge, positive psychologists haven't gone out and looked at white-supremacist organizations. But if you look at accounts of people who've left those organizations, often what they self-report is, this did give me a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging. Things like social connection, finding practices that allow you to be present, exercising: There's a simple set of things that we know statistically will wind up boosting well-being. If you engage in organizations that do that stuff, it'll help. Now, I want to stay away from advocating, like, oh, the white-nationalist-exercise organization is great for well-being.

Is it possible that practices that lead to happiness like accepting anxiety, avoiding comparison with others and being satisfied with what we already have can also lead to complacency? Don't you need some of the emotionally detrimental stuff in order to achieve? People have looked at this in the context of things that we worry about when it comes to complacency: huge problems from anti-Black violence to the climate falling apart. We need people to recognize these issues, get angry and take action. There's a worry that maybe if you follow these practices, you'll be so complacent that you'll let California burn and let horrible social-justice violations continue. There's been some lovely work on this by Kostadin Kushlev, who's a positive psychologist who has been interested in, Do these practices make you complacent when it comes to the big issues? What he finds is that the people who self-report the highest positive emotions, they're the ones who are taking action. This comes up in other domains too: There's evidence that people who experience more gratitude have a high level of what's called self-regulation - kind of like sucking it up and doing the hard things now. There's also evidence that people who are more grateful are more likely to do things for other people. So I worry about complacency, but the evidence suggests it doesn't work in the way we might expect. When you do have some positive emotion, you have the bandwidth to deal with other things.

Social media, Instagram in particular, offers almost infinite capacity for negative comparison. Would quitting social media be the most important thing your students could easily do to increase their happiness? We go through a lot of the work on social media. One of the things is: Delete all your apps right now. You can see their faces. They're like, Uhh. But all these things are tools. You could use them in ways that are positive for your well-being or negative. Instagram is worth mentioning in that sense of its totally infinite potential for downer self-comparisons, but students also use it to connect with communities- about eating disorders and anxiety. So we talk about how you can nonjudgmentally try to be present enough to notice how these things are making you feel. I teach students - this comes from the journalist Catherine Price - the acronym W.W.W.: what for, why now and what else? When you pick up your phone, what was that for? Was there a purpose? Then: Why now? Did you have something to do, or were you bored or anxious or fighting some craving? And then, what else?: actively noticing the opportunity cost. It could be studying. It could be talking to your roommate. Based on seeing students in the trenches, the biggest hit of social media on their well-being is that they spend a lot of time on it thinking that they're being social rather than talking to other people. I do that too. There's times when my husband walks into the room and we could have a nice conversation about how our day is and I'm looking at some crap on Reddit. It's like, I have a husband who's here. I could talk to him! We're not always making good use of the humans around us.

Is there anything surprising to you that people are just not getting about happiness? For my students, it's often money. My fast read of the evidence is that money only makes you happier if you live below the poverty line and you can't put food on your table and then you can afford to. Whether getting superrich actually affects different aspects of your well-being? There's a lot of evidence it doesn't affect your positive emotion too much. There was a recent paper by Matt Killingsworth where he was trying to make the claim that happiness continues as you get to higher incomes. And yeah, he's right, but if you plot it, it's like if you change your income from $100,000 to $600,000 your happiness goes up from, like, a 64 out of 100 to a 65. For the amount of work you have to put in to sextuple your income, you could instead just write in a gratitude journal, you could sleep an extra hour. Yeah, the money thing is one that students fight me on. It hits at a lot of the worldview they've grown up with.

Do students wind up happier after taking your course? Is it working? We did a before-and-after measure of students who took the online class versus students who took a different Yale Introduction to Psychology class. We found that people who took our class tended to go up about a whole point on a 10-point happiness scale. But the dirty secret is that we can intervene and brieflychange behavior but long-term change is really hard. What we know works is if you plop people down in a new culture, they change. You move to the Netherlands, you'll be happier. This causes folks like Dan Buettner, who does work on blue zones for happiness, to make the claim that someone like me is misguided because, yeah, you can teach people to meditate or to do their gratitude journal, but unless they have robust structures around them societally that are helping people to do that, it's not going to work. But my hope is you can create those robust structures societally. Right now on Yale's campus there are 500 students who are taking my class, which gets lots of air time on Librex and on the Facebook page Overheard at Yale, talking about it in the dining hall.

This probably speaks more to my deficiencies as a student than anything else, but when I was in college, which is 20 years ago now, I don't remember such a pervasive, overwhelming sense of being there solely as the next step on some ladder of achievement. What has changed? It's surprising how different it feels. I'll have conversations with first-year students on campus who will ask what fourth class they should take to make sure they get that job at Google by the time they're 24. They come in planning this set of next steps, in part because that's how they got here in the first place. They think that's how you get the carrots. How that change happened is an incredibly interesting cultural puzzle. Some of my favorite guesses about it come from Julie Lythcott-Haims. Her argument is that years ago, only certain people, for the most part, were getting into Yale. They were mostly from a small set of prep schools. We opened that up. In theory, anyone on the planet, if they "put in enough work and are smart enough," can get into Yale - bracketed by the real cultural boundaries, structures of racism and all the other isms, but that's the idea. There's also the sense that the spoils of the war are really high: If you go to Yale, that's going to open up opportunities that won't happen if you don't. Lythcott-Haims's argument is that when the spoils of war get big, there becomes a nuclear-arms race for who gets in, and that parenting has changed to push children to be thinking about this stuff. They develop this implicit belief that there is a path that's correct, and if you can figure out the Easter eggs, you can be on it. It's something I feel on campus so much. I assign students this book by the social scientist Alfie Kohn, who does work on how much grades and extrinsic motivations mess kids up. He tells the story of giving this speech to high school students: A student raises their hand and is like, If everything you said is true, and I'm not just working for grades and trying to get into college, then what's the purpose of life? When I assigned that chapter, I also got that question. They're not sure what they're supposed to get out of college other than accolade building.

So what's the answer? What's the purpose of life? It's smelling your coffee in the morning. [Laughs.] Loving your kids. Having sex and daisies and springtime. It's all the good things in life. That's what it is.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

Opening Illustration: Source photograph by Michael Marsland/Yale News

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Brian Cox about the filthy rich, Dr. Becky about the ultimate goal of parenting and Tiffany Haddish about God's sense of humor.

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Yale's Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students

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Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school's most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled.

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10 Scary Yet Beautiful Facts About Space & Us

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Hello! Me (Adel) and Sabina would like to inform you about 5 (out of 10) interesting facts about space.

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Hello! Me (Adel) and Sabina would like to inform you about 5 (out of 10) interesting facts about space.

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10 Scary Yet Beautiful Facts About Space & Us

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Dilnaz K. and Nazerke. We would like to inform you about the «The lyrics of the song can affect our lives»

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Dilnaz K. and Nazerke. We would like to inform you about the «The lyrics of the song can affect our lives»

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Email, Letter and Copywriting Templates hub

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Music has been a great asset of our lives which is scientifically proven to have a very powerful effect on the brain of any living being. Some modern researches have shown that music can help in various parts or aspects of the brain, including some special benefits like reduction of pain, stress relief, memory loss problem, and various types of brain injuries.

According to some researchers music has the ability to stimulate many areas of our brain in a good way, thus helping us with various types of recovery and treatment procedures. Let's look at some of those ways in which music can help us in the healing and stimulation process of the human brain.

Some studies have proven that listening to the music of a patient's choice has the ability to reduce the pain and increase the functional mobility in a very significant way. They believe that music has the power to ease many pains as listening to it triggers opioids, which are the natural pain relievers of our body. Various types of drug in taking by the patients decreases while listening to their favorite music or songs.

Depending on the various types of music you are listening to, the relaxing music can reduce stress by decreasing our cortisol levels, which is the special hormone, which releases as a result of stress.

Music has a great impact on our memory.

Studies regarding the relation of music with the memory recall process have increased since many years, when those types of researches first emerged. Listening to certain music has the power to take your mind in the past timeline of some decades within an instant. According to some well-known researches Music has the power to evoke our emotion and those emotions are able to bring with it some memories, thus bringing back the feeling of life and joy when no other things can.

Some experiments proved that compared to the usual care, singing and listening to the music can improve mood, orientation, and the problems of episodic memory and also the other brain functions. Singing can also enhance our short-term and working memory in many cases.

It has been notified that the brains of epileptic patients are tending to respond differently to music than the other people who do not have the problem of epilepsy. Music always helps them to feel relaxed and stress-free at the same time. The stroke patients who listened to songs and music in the early stages after having a stroke can show an improvement in the recovery process according to a 2008 study.

In the year of 1973 a treatment based on music called the Melodic intonation therapyy was created and developed to help the stroke survivors or people who suffering from aphasia to be able to gain the ability to communicate again. The purpose and target of the therapyy is to convert the art of singing into the speech. And it has been found that even though the patients cannot speak, but they are often able to sing with some clarity.

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A Speech on "Lyrics in A Song Can Impact Our Lives."

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Music has been a great asset of our lives which is scientifically proven to have a very powerful effect on the brain of any living being. Some modern researches have shown that music can help in various parts or aspects of the brain, including some special benefits like reduction of pain, stress relief, memory loss problem, and various types of brain injuries.

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Dinara Karimova: I want to inform you about the international book-crossing movement, which I like a lot!:)           

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Dinara Karimova: I want to inform you about the international book-crossing movement, which I like a lot!:)           

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Book-crossing is an international movement of book-lovers and the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others who then do the same thing. The idea is to "release" the books in public places, including parks, cafés and metro carriages, so that other people would pick them up to read and enjoy. After reading these books, they would leave them somewhere else, and this process would be repeated many times over. According to book-crossers, this hobby brings together over 1.8 million people who have already "released" about 12 million books.

The origins of book-crossing

The book-crossing movement was established 16 years ago, in March 2001. American Internet technologist Ron Hornbaker conceived the idea after it dawned on him that there were special systems tracking the movement of money bills and photos worldwide but that there were no similar systems dealing with books. Ron, his wife and co-workers then launched a book-crossing website (BookCrossing.com) which had about 300 active users six months later.

How book-crossing works

Its principle resembles the work of ornithologists. Before a book is "released," it receives a book-crossing ID (BCID) for tracking its movement around the world. The book also receives a sticker with the company logo and the sign "This book has not been lost." An instruction with an explanatory note is inserted in the book, so that it would not be destroyed or stolen. However, the book-crossing movement has not yet become very popular in Russia. According to 2009 data, only every sixth or seventh book found new temporary owners who registered them on the book-crossing website, read and passed them on. Other books disappeared without a trace, either becoming lost or disappearing inside private libraries.

Book-crossing locations in Moscow

The book-crossing movement is becoming more and more popular in Moscow. It is impossible to trace spontaneous book-crossing locations all over town because they can appear in any public place. However, there are also safe book-crossing shelves at various agencies whose employees look after them. This makes it possible to prevent book being stolen and also to retain substantial improvised libraries whose size remains more or less the same. These locations are spread out far and wide all over the city, including metro stations, museums, libraries, cafés, integrated government services centres and in summer even parks.

Book-crossing addresses

Metro stations:

The Live Conversation counter at the combined entrance to the Pushkinskaya and Tverskaya stations.

My Documents integrated government services centres:

The integrated government services centre in the Strogino District at 28 Stroginsky Boulevard

The integrated government services centre in the Kurkino District at 1 Novokurkinskoye Motorway

The integrated government services centre in the Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo District at 17 Tushinskaya Street

The integrated government services centre in the Khoroshovo-Mnyovniki District at 35 Marshal Zhukov Prospekt, Bld.1

The integrated government services centre in the Shchyukino District at 15 Marshala Vasilevskogo Street

The integrated government services centre in the Severnoye and Yuzhnoye Tushino District at 13 Vasiliya Petushhkova Street, Bld. 1

Museums:

The Gogol House at 7A Nikitsky Boulevard

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art at 10 Gogolevsky Boulevard

The Vintage Cars Museum at 9/2 Rogozhsky Val Street

The roof of the State Darwin Museum at 57 Vavilov Street.

Railway stations:

The Belorussky Railway Station at 7 Tverskaya Zastava Square

The Kazansky Railway Station at 2 Komsomolskaya Square

The Kursky Railway Station at 29 Zemlyanoi Val Street

The Leningradsky Railway Station at 5/43 Komsomolskaya Square.

Open-air libraries:

24 Domodedovskaya Street, Bld.4

8 Gabrichevsky Street, Bld.1

10 Bolshoi Kharitonyevsky Pereulok

1 Shkolnaya Street.

Indoor libraries:

Library No. 37 at 3 Kutuzovsky Prospekt

Library No. 45 at 2 Akademika Bovchara Street

Central Library No. 49 at 10 Mnyovniki Street, Bld. 1

Library No. 50 at 16 Marshala Koneva Street

Library No. 51 at 33 Parshina Street

Library No. 53 at 16 Demyana Bednogo Street. The book-crossing shelf is in the hall

Library No. 54 at 28 Marshala Tukhachevskogo Prospekt, Bld.1

Library No. 69 at 40 Korneichuka Street

Library No. 90 at 3B Moldagulovoi Street. The book-crossing case is on the main floor near the regular subscribers' hall

Lermontov Central Library No. 102 at 6 Barbolina Street

Prospekt Library No. 169 at 127 Leninsky Prospekt

Dante Alighieri Central Library No. 174 at 8 Stroitelei Street, Bld. 2

Library for Young People No. 199 at 12 Geroyev Panfilovtsev Street, Bld. 1

Pioneer Library for Children No. 211 at 7/2 Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street

Gladkov Central Library No. 224 at 1 Janis Rainis Boulevard

The Svetlov Library for Young People at 1 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. The book-crossing cases are in the reading room

The Bogolyubov Art Library at 14 Sushchyovskaya Street

Lev Kassil Library for Children No. 22 at 114 Leningradskoye Motorway

The Nekrasov Central Universal Academic Library at 58/25/14 Baumanskaya Street, Bld. 14

The Losev House Library at 33 Arbat Street

The Eisenstein Cinema Art Library at 5/10 Karetny Ryad Street.

Cultural centres:

The ZIL Cultural Centre at 4 Vostochnaya Street, Bld.1. The book-crossing shelves are on every floor of the cultural centre's club section

The Otkrytiye Art School at 20/13 Staraya Basmannya Street, Bld. 1

The Shokoladnaya Fabrika Art Floor at 38 Rabochaya Street

The Sokol Creativity Centre at 5 Peschanaya Street. The book-crossing shelf is in the lobby

The Winzavod Centre of Modern Art at 1 4th Syromyatnichesky Pereulok, Bld. 6

The Garage Gallery of Modern Art at 9 Krymsky Val Street, Bld. 32

The Russian-German House at 5 Malaya Pirogovskaya Street

The Vatutinki Centre of Culture and Sport at 13 Dmitriya Ryabinkina Street in Desyonovskye rural town

The Meridian Centre of Culture and Art at 61 Profsoyuznaya Street

The Belyayevo Gallery at 100 Profsoyuznaya Street

Parks (in summer):

Izmailovsky Park at 7 Bolshogo Kruga Alley. The book-crossing bench is near the park entrance and can be reached from 5th Parkovaya Street

Muzeon Park at 2 Krymsky Val Street

Sokolniki Park at 1 Sokolnichesky Val Street, Bld. 1. The Bukvodom Library is located at 1 5th Luchevoi Prosek Street

National Exhibition of Economic Achievements (VDNKh) at 119 Prospekt Mira. A cube-shape book-crossing facility is near Pavilion No. 29 Plant-Breeding

Gorky Park at 9 Krymsky Val Street. A book-crossing pedestal is between the Verandah and Dom Rybaka cafés

Kuzminki Park at 1 Kuzminsky Park Street, Bld. 2. The book-crossing summer-house is in the park's central section

Babushkinsky Park at 6 Menzhinskogo Street, Bld. 3. Book-crossing shelves are at the chess/checkers pavilion.

Universities:

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Physics Faculty at 1 Leninskiye Gory Street, Bld. 2. The book-crossing shelf is at the library on the fifth floor

Lomonosov Moscow State University, Journalism Faculty at 9 Mokhovaya Street. The book shelf is in the lobby near the guard detail

Moscow Pedagogical State University, Faculty of Philology at 1/1 Malaya Pirogovskaya Street

National Research University Moscow Energy Institute at 14 Krasnokazarmennaya Street

Higher School of Economics, Faculty of Psychology at 46B Volgogradsky Prospekt

Russian State University of the Humanities at 15 Chayanova Street, Lecture-Room 227

Steklov Institute of Mathematics at 8 Gubkina Street

Kutafin Moscow State Law University at 9 Sadovo-Kudrinskaya Street.

Other:

A book-case at 10 Bolshoi Kharitonyevsky Pereulok

Andreyevsky Bridge at the intersection of the Frunzenskaya and Pushkinskaya Embankments

The Peter and Paul Lutheran Cathedral at 7/10Starosadsky Pereulok, Bld. 10

The Blood Centre of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency at 6 Shchukinskaya Street, Bld. 2

The Central Telegraph at 7 Tverskaya Street.

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free book-crossing movement gathers momentum in moscow

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Free book-crossing movement gathers momentum in Moscow

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More and more book-crossing locations are appearing all over Moscow. Book-crossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others who then do likewise. In late February, the first book-crossing shelf was installed in a local metro station.