A three-day-old baby was said to have been jabbed with needles and submerged in icy water and live victims dissected without anesthesia. Circles of doctors would cut open screaming women to examine their reproductive organs.

I do think it is a philosophy for everyone, and I am convinced that the world would be a better place if more people prioritized their moral development over the acquisition of external goods. That said, there are clearly people for whom Stoicism immediately “clicks,” it comes natural, and others for whom it doesn’t. Then again, Stoicism isn’t the only positive philosophy of life. Buddhism is an excellent alternative, if it speaks more clearly to one’s personality or cultural background. What the world needs is more compassion (love in the broad sense, as you were saying earlier) and use of practical reason to solve human problems.

But you do have a point: the “Dionysian” aspect of life is in the background for the Stoic, since the primary concern is to live a moral life. But that hardly seems a misplaced priority to me. We still live in a world of such gross injustice and inequality, that only privileged people like ourselves can afford to think of eros and art as top concerns in life. They are important, for sure, but I think it’s high time to shift priorities around, away from selfish indulgence, and toward more concern for the wellbeing of so many others who suffer atrocities, injustice, and famine, all over the planet.

“Socrates did not blush to play with little boys, Cato used to refresh his mind with wine after he had wearied it with application to affairs of state, and Scipio would move his triumphal and soldierly limbs to the sound of music…It does good also to take walks out of doors, that our spirits may be raised and refreshed by the open air and fresh breeze: sometimes we gain strength by driving in a carriage, by travel, by change of air, or by social meals and a more generous allowance of wine: at times we ought to drink even to intoxication, not so as to drown, but merely to dip ourselves in wine: for wine washes away troubles and dislodges them from the depths of the mind, and acts as a remedy to sorrow as it does to some diseases.”

“Fate permitting” is a standard Stoic phrase meant to remind ourselves that planning things is up to us, but the ultimate outcomes are not under our control. It helps us to develop an attitude of equanimity toward the universe. We should very much try to change things for the better, that’s the whole point of the Stoic discipline of action, as I was saying earlier, and that discipline is connected to the virtue of justice. But we should also be rational about it, and understand that sometimes things go our way, and at other times they don’t.

But if you truly cannot do anything about something, then why on earth would you want to make things even worse for you by falling into despair? It seems like adding a self-inflicting injury to the already existing one. I’m reminded of the recent movie Bridge of Spies, where one of the main characters risks the death penalty. His lawyer notices that the fellow doesn’t seem to be worried or upset at the prospect, and asks him why. The man replies: “would it help?”

I also find some of the Stoic techniques to be very useful. For instance, the evening philosophical diary, in which I interrogate myself about the difficult parts of my day, reflecting on what I did right, what I did wrong, and what I could do better the next time around. Or the exercises in mild self-denial, like occasional fasting, or even taking a cold shower. They remind me of just how good my life normally is, when I can count on things like hot water and a nice meal, which are definitely not a given for everyone on the planet. Think of them as exercises in gratitude, but in practice, not just words.

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The point of political protest is to change the world. And yet the process matters, too.

To live in the present is not to avoid hard work or strife. Alongside the projects that occupy you in your profession, or in your political life, the telic activities that matter to you, is the atelic process of protesting injustice or doing your job. To value the process is not to flee from work or political engagement. That is why living in the present is not an abdication of ethical responsibility or a recipe for detachment.

To live in the present is not to deny the value of telic activities, of making a difference in the world. That would be a terrible mistake. Nor can we avoid engaging in such activities. But if projects are all we value, our lives become self-subversive, aimed at extinguishing the sources of meaning within them. To live in the present is to refuse the excessive investment in projects, in achievements and results, that sees no inherent value in the process.

To live in the present is to appreciate the value of atelic activities like going for a walk, listening to music, spending time with family or friends. To engage in these activities is not to extinguish them from your life. Their value is not mortgaged to the future or consigned to the past, but realized here and now. It is to care about the process of what you are doing, not just projects you aim to complete.

“If you are learning, you have not at the same time learned.” When you care about telic activities, projects such as writing a report, getting married or making dinner, satisfaction is always in the future or the past. It is yet to be achieved and then it is gone. Telic activities are exhaustible; in fact, they aim at their own exhaustion. They thus exhibit a peculiar self-subversion. In valuing and so pursuing these activities, we aim to complete them, and so to expel them from our lives.

Atelic activities, by contrast, do not by nature come to an end and are not incomplete. In defining such activities, we could emphasize their inexhaustibility, the fact that they do not aim at terminal states. But we could also emphasize what Aristotle does: They are fully realized in the present. “At the same time, one is seeing and has seen, is understanding and has understood, is thinking and has thought.” There is nothing you need to do in order to perform an atelic activity except what you are doing right now. If what you care about is reflecting on your life or spending time with family or friends, and that is what you are doing, you are not on the way to achieving your end: You are already there.

They don't get that individual components can compound at a lower rate, on average, than the overall portfolio or that several bankruptcies of different holdings along the way can still result in positive returns.

Specifically, Vanguard has $198,712,172,000 in that particular fund as of the end of 2014, of which $89,234,130,000 consisted of unrealized gains.  If Vanguard were to experience a significant run on the fund for whatever reason - and these things have, do, and will happen - management could be forced to liquidate those positions or, at the very best, pay them out "in kind".  This is something Vanguard investors have never had to consider because as indexing has become the latest fashion, it has been able to pay redemption requests with fresh deposits a lot of times, net assets growing in the long-run.  Should that stop, it could get ugly.

Final Thoughts About Investing in Index FundsWhere does that leave us?  My conclusions are fairly straightforward and, at the risk of repeating myself in sections, I'll share them with you:If your portfolio is modest, and you don't have a clue what you are doing, index funds are probably your best bet.  They are good enough for what you need and will likely save you from a lot of mistakes.  If your money is held captive in a 401(k) plan at work and you have to make allocation decisions, low-cost index funds are almost always going to be among the best choices you have at your disposal.  Seriously consider investing in them over the alternatives or, at the very least, making them a core part of your portfolio.If you are affluent or high net worth, enough to get economies of scale with your money, take advantage of certain planning and tax strategies, and have a lot of money outside of tax shelters, you are bonkers if you invest in the pooled, public index fund.  Instead, if you want to use an indexing approach, build a privately held index fund for yourself or pay someone like Goldman Sachs a meaningless handful of additional basis points to administer it for you.  There are few things nuttier than someone with millions of dollars sitting on taxable index funds when the dramatically superior alternative of a private index account is available.  In other words, take index funds for what they are: a potentially wonderful tool that can save you a lot of money and help you get a good foundation underneath you.  Once you are wealthy enough to have some real money behind you, consider bypassing the pooled structure entirely and owning the underlying components.  Beyond that, index funds are neither friend nor foe, virtuous nor evil.  They are a tool.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Use them when it suits you and is to your advantage, avoid them when they don't and aren't. Don't get emotionally attached to them or somehow be seduced by the lie that there is something magical about their structure that makes them superior to all else in the universe.If you do invest through index funds, I'd gently suggest you consider dollar cost averaging into a handful of core index funds, including an all-cap domestic and a developed market international, reinvest your dividends, ignore market fluctuations, and stay the course.  Let time do the heavy lifting for you and, if you have a long enough run and good enough luck, retirement should be more comfortable than it otherwise would have been.  There are a lot worse things you can do.

All that matters is 1.) which stocks you own, 2.) how those stocks are selected, 3.) the weightings assigned to those stocks, 4.) the costs relative to the services or benefits received, and 5.) the potential tax exposure.  Maybe you can get it through an index fund, maybe you can't.  Directly owned passive portfolios are going to be a better choice for a lot of successful people.

Making money from ETFs is essentially the same as making money by investing in mutual funds because they operate almost identically.

How you make money from an ETF will depend on the underlying investments of that ETF over time.That is, if you own a stock ETF that focuses on high-dividend stocks, you are hoping to make money from a combination of capital gains (an increase in the price of the stocks your ETF owns) and dividends paid out by those same stocks. Likewise, if you own a bond fund ETF, you hope to make money from interest income. If you own a real estate ETF, you hope to make money from the underlying rents, capital gains on property sales, and service income generated by the apartments, hotels, office buildings, or other real estate owned by the REITs in which the ETF has made an investment.

Hedgehogs, however, are slow and steady, and people often overlook them because they're quiet and unassuming. But, unlike the fox, they are able to simplify the world and focus on one overarching vision. It's this principle that guides everything they do, and helps them succeed against all odds.

But knowing what your ikigai is not enough – all of these people put their purpose into action, says Buettner. Researchers stress that ikigai can change with age. For anyone whose work is their reason for living, this will come as a relief as they approach retirement and begin the search for a new ikigai.

Matthews says that ikigai will likely lead to a better life “because you will have something to live for”, but warns against viewing ikigai as a lifestyle choice: “Ikigai is not something grand or extraordinary. It’s something pretty matter-of-fact.”

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T. Nagel (1974) argues that some facts can only be captured ‘from a subjective perspective’ and uses his famous example of bats to illustrate the point: Even if we knew everything there is to know ‘from an objective perspective’ about a bat's sonar system, certain factual questions concerning bats would remain unanswered. We still would not know ‘what it is like’ to perceive a given object with a bat's sonar system.

the Martian would be lacking completely in the sort of imagery and empathy which depends on familiarity (direct acquaintance) with the kinds of qualia to be imaged or empathized.

advantages of knowledge by acquaintance over knowledge by description

Not all things wise and good are philosophy Nicholas Tampio

Good point. I think the author’s argument is weak in overlooking the issue that there are in fact philosophical traditions that do make arguments for God, for the immortal soul, etc.Additionally even the Greek tradition had philosophy as a spiritual discipline in the sense that it was about the individual’s initiation into a one-ness with the rest of creation. Thus the Indian, the Buddhist, the Native American can in fact have a philosophical tradition far more in line with the Greeks than the sad attempts of the Dennets and Churchlands who want to resurrect a debunked behaviorism or invest in silliness like computer programs as conscious entities.

In fact, an argument could be made - one that respects the Greek philosophic tradition - that contemporary Anglo-American “philosophy”, based in physicalist ontology, is not in fact philosophy (love of wisdom) at all, but rather, represents the death of philosophy much as fundamentalism represents the death of the spirit of religion.

epistemic commitments A poster below distinguished "philosophy itself" from "the history of philosophy." I don't agree with this distinction: to me, philosophy and the history of philosophy are the same field. However, let's look at both categories as possible approaches for eastern philosophy: This distinction leaves two options for eastern thought: (1) place eastern thought alongside Plato and Aristotle in the "history of philosophy" box as a piece of trivia or (2) pick and choose the parts of Eastern philosophy you like, convert it into "ideas" by extracting it from the text, break the text into a series of distinctions and discrete positions, and then attach the "ideas" to various "-isms." Basically, analytic philosophy would do to Eastern philosophy what Rorty and Dreyfus do to Heidegger. I don't mean to give an anti-analytic polemic here (and I mean this with the deepest respect for the posters below, who are simply giving their honest impressions of the climate of their field), but the debates below make it really clear why analytic philosophy can't accommodate Eastern thought (anymore than they can accommodate Foucault and Derrida). The analytic project is only interested in whatever it can "use" from Eastern philosophy; it's not interested in what Eastern thought has to say for itself.

If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is

The Comparison to Continental Coverage I agree completely that there are many Continental figures who are understudied in US philosophy departments. However, consider the following figures. The PRG ranks 13 schools that have expertise in "20th Century Continental philosophy." An additional 11 schools are unranked but "recommended for consideration by the Advisory Board," for a total of 24. (http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown/breakdown29.asp) In the area of "19th Century Continental Philosophy," the PRG ranks 20 programs, and lists an additional 4 programs as "recommended," for a total of 24. (http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown/breakdown27.asp) Now let's turn to Chinese philosophy: the programs are not ranked but simply grouped, "due to the small number of evaluators." Eight programs are "grouped," and an additional 5 are "recommended," for a total of 13. (http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/breakdown/breakdown33.asp) If the numerical disparity between the coverage of Continental and Chinese philosophy is not immediately obvious, consider these additional facts. Chinese philosophy is a tradition that is over two millennia long, and is as diverse as all of the Western tradition. So the PRG lists 24 doctoral programs as at least recommended in 19th century Continental philosophy, 24 at least recommended in 20th century Continental philosophy, and 13 at least recommended in all two thousand five hundred years of Chinese philosophy. Hmm. When we consider Indian philosophy...oh, there is no ranking for that at all. So, yes, Continental philosophy is understudied in the US. But it is worse in Chinese and Indian philosophy. The Quality Argument In an interview done by Skye Cleary and forthcoming in the APA Blog I make the following point. If someone tells me that Chinese philosophy (for example) is "not really philosophy" or is not sufficiently argumentative or "rational," I like to ask him: why he thinks that the Mohist state-of-nature argument to justify government authority is not philosophy? What does he make of Mengzi’s reductio ad absurdum against the claim that human nature is reducible to desires for food and sex? Why does he dismiss Zhuangzi’s version of the problem of the criterion? What is his opinion of Han Feizi’s argument that political institutions must be designed so that they do not depend upon the virtue of political agents? What does he think of Zongmi’s argument that reality must fundamentally be mental, because it is inexplicable how consciousness could arise from matter that was nonconscious? Why does he regard the Platonic dialogues as philosophical, yet dismiss Fazang’s dialogue in which he argues for and responds to objections against the claim that individuals are defined by their relationships to others? What is his opinion of Wang Yangming’s arguments for the claim that it is impossible to know what is good yet fail to do what is good? What does he make of Mou Zongsan’s critique of Kant, or Liu Shaoqi’s argument that Marxism is incoherent unless supplemented with a theory of individual ethical transformation? Of course, the answer to each question is that those who suggest that Chinese philosophies are irrational have never heard of any of these arguments because they do not bother to actually read them. Or, if they do bother to glance at them, they hold them to a higher standard of explicitness and clarity than they do Aristotle or Kant. (We are so used to reading Aristotle and Kant that we forget how unclear and unmotivated their claims will seem to someone who has not studied them in context, or with the guide of secondary sources and teachers.) Other arguments on this topic can be found in the excellent essays by *Eric Schwitzgebel, "Why Don't We Know Our Chinese Philosophy?" http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/NotKnowChinese.htm *Justin Tiwald, "A Case for Chinese Philosophy," http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/2EAF6689-4B0D-4CCB-9DC6-FB926D8FF530/v08n1Asian.pdf The Diversity Card If anyone has any doubts about the role of implicit racism in maintaining the status quo in philosophy, I would invite her to read Eugene Park's essay, "Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hippo-reads/why-i-left-academia_b_5735320.html). Park was a doctoral student in a top-ranked philosophy department who was passionate about Western philosophy but also interested in exploring insights from non-Western philosophy. He was told that he should transfer to a program in "ethnic studies," where this approach would be more welcome. In the face of ethnocentrism like this, Park eventually dropped out. As Myisha Cherry and Eric Schwitgebel point out, philosophy has a diversity problem that is actually worse than that in other fields in the humanities, and it shows no signs of getting better. We must address issues of diversity if we wish for our field to survive in the future. (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-schwitzgebel-cherry-philosophy-so-white-20160306-story.html) I agree that linking the call to study non-Western philosophy to issues of diversity will politicize it in ways that may lead to outcomes I would not prefer in an ideal world. Sadly, we are not in an ideal world. I and many others have been fighting with rational arguments for decades to try to get greater acceptance of non-Western philosophy into the curriculum. The rate of change has been glacial. Consequently, I increasingly think that the only way to effect change in philosophy is by appealing to students to mobilize and demand changes. For Moderate Change If philosophers want moderate, rational change, they can take simple steps. For one thing, the next time you have an opening, consider whether you need yet another person studying the philosophical traditions that grow out of Plato and Aristotle (both of whom I deeply, almost reverentially, admire). Wouldn't the field, and your students, be better served by someone teaching Indian, Chinese, or some other non-mainstream form of philosophy?

Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking

You too can be hot if you offer your woman amazing adventures, diamonds and gold, and studly body poses, all with aggressive spraying of Old Spice.

To brand effectively with social media, companies should target crowdcultures. Today, in pursuit of relevance, most brands chase after trends. But this is a commodity approach to branding: Hundreds of companies are doing exactly the same thing with the same generic list of trends. It’s no wonder consumers don’t pay attention. By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowdcultures, brands can assert a point of view that stands out in the overstuffed media environment.

Take the Google logo. It is cheerful, and people seem to like it, especially the way it is allowed to reflect events and anniversaries. It has been created for the digital era - a near zero-weight logotype designed for fast loading. But I can't help thinking that its cheerfulness is designed to mask the darker aspects of Google's activities. I don't think that Google is evil, but it is unavoidably involved in aspects of digital culture, mainly relating to privacy, that cause concern.However, my main objection to the logo is that it is a piece of woeful logotype design for one of the most ubiquitous companies, and it could only have emerged in the age of branding. It's impossible to imagine any of the great logo designers, dead or alive, doing anything as weak and lacking in subliminal qualities. Yet for the age of branding, it is somehow acceptable.

In truth, making a clear visual statement and incorporating some subliminal messaging is really all that a brand identity can hope to do. Any ambition beyond that is simply wishful thinking.

In Perkins' view, Vitra, Mercedes, Audi, Apple and Lufthansa all have great brand identities. He calls them "timeless, and no matter what the climate, consistently strong". But significantly, all these identities were initially created before branding replaced corporate identity as the primary activity of many designers.

He also sees a clear difference between North and conventional brand agencies: "We are different because we are probably a bit old fashioned; we believe in strong, honest, uncomplicated communications, usually minimal symbols and trust marks. We keep it simple." Far from being old fashioned, Perkins has recognised that the greatest service a designer can offer to an organisation is clarity and integrity of image.

Perkins sees a clear difference between brand creation and identity design: "The brand is the whole experience, the service, product, personality and expression, and I can't see how people claim to do the branding, the total experience. We build identities, not brands."

I'm saying that it is more progressive to be concerned with the visual image of an entity than it is to be concerned with its 'brand values', which in the end are mostly just smoke and mirrors.Plus, and this is the really important bit, the other stuff is no longer controllable. Firms and organisations can say that they are 'ethical', 'customer centric' or 'service focused', but unless they really are these things, they are wasting their time saying that they are. For me, this is why designers should stick to design, and firms should not confuse branding with the actual services or products they offer.

Anyway, telling customers what to think in the age of social media is simply a waste of time.

“văn mình vợ người” (văn mình luôn hay, vợ người thì luôn đẹp)

Người xưa có nói: “Trong nghĩa vua tôi ít khi có tình tri kỷ, trong đạo vợ chồng tri kỷ đã là khó, chỉ may ra có được tình tri kỷ trong bạn bè.” Nghĩa vua tôi mà tìm được người tri kỷ, thì cả ngai vàng hay giang sơn cũng không tiếc. Tri kỷ trong tình vợ chồng gọi là hồng nhan tri kỷ, đó không phải là vợ, cũng không phải người tình. Người ta định nghĩa “hồng nhan tri kỷ” là đối tượng mà người đàn ông có thể bày tỏ mọi bí mật, mà họ không thể nói được với vợ hay người tình. Quả là hiếm hoi trên đời này, gặp được một người vừa là vợ, chồng, vừa là người tình, vừa là tri kỷ.

Suốt đời chúng ta giao tiếp, quen biết, kết thân với nhiều người trong thiên hạ, có bao nhiêu là thứ bạn: bạn thời niên thiếu bắt dế, đá banh; bạn học cùng trường lớp (biết rõ tính nhau), bạn hàng xóm; khi ra đời có bạn đồng nghiệp (nhưng đồng hành tương kỵ – đồng nghiệp tương tranh); bạn nhậu (chí thiết với nhau, nhưng thường rượu nói hơn là lời nói từ trong lòng); bạn cờ bạc (sẵn sàng tháu cáy, lừa nhau miễn là dành phần thắng); bạn nhà binh (nhân tình nhà thổ); bạn tù, bạn văn chương (văn nhân tương khinh), bạn đồng đảng (đồng chí giết nhau chẳng gớm tay),… nhưng được mấy người có thể hiểu rõ tâm ý mình, có để trở thành một người bạn gọi là tri kỷ.

I was very stressed out. I wasn't a very happy person. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm cured, I got here, everything's wonderful," but I knew the second I got here—I felt more calmness. So I just wanted to stay here. I thought I could go to graduate school, and come back and do work here, and then I thought "Wait a minute, I'm already here.”

ẢNH HƯỞNG CỦA MỸ THUẬT TRUYỀN THỐNG TRONG MỸ THUẬT HIỆN ĐẠI

Những họa sĩ nổi tiếng của Việt Nam

Those who thought he might use his enormous prestige to political effect, as Vietnam's communist leaders failed to deliver the economic benefits of peace, were disappointed

Giap had his critics, too, most notably over his willingness to suffer casualties which would be politically unacceptable in anything other than a war for national liberation.“In the final analysis, victory in any war is determined by the willingness of the masses to shed blood on the battlefield,” Giap once wrote.

In a biography, Peter MacDonald, a retired British brigadier, argues that Giap combined a strategic depth of vision with a mastery of guerrilla warfare and an outstanding grasp of logistics, seen most dramatically in the creation of the Ho Chi Minh trail to supply the south during the American War.

But poised for what? The initial plan, endorsed by Giap’s Chinese military advisers, called for an early mass assault before the French could further strengthen their positions. On January 26, with six hours to go before the first attack was to be launched, Giap called it off, causing a near mutiny among his staff.“We chose to strike and advance surely,” he wrote later, “and to strike to win only when success is certain.” Giap redeployed his artillery to higher ground, ordering his men to begin steadily digging an extensive trench network towards the French positions where they could pick off the French forts one by one. At the same time, he continued diversionary movements into Laos and in the Mekong Delta, aimed at preventing Navarre from concentrating more of his forces on Dien Bien Phu.

In March 1972, the North Vietnamese carried out the Easter offensive on three fronts, expanding their holdings in Cambodia and Laos and bringing temporary gains in South Vietnam. But it ended in defeat, and General Giap again bore the brunt of criticism for the heavy losses. In summer 1972, he was replaced by Gen. Van Tien Dung, possibly because he had fallen from favor but possibly because, as was rumored, he had Hodgkin’s disease.Although he was removed from direct command in 1973, General Giap remained minister of defense, overseeing North Vietnam’s final victory over South Vietnam and the United States when Saigon, the South’s capital, fell on April 30, 1975. He also guided the invasion of Cambodia in January 1979, which ousted the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge. The next month, after Hanoi had established a new government in Phnom Penh, Chinese troops attacked along the North Vietnamese border to drive home the point that China remained the paramount regional power.

General Westmoreland relied on superior weaponry to wage a war of attrition, in which he measured success by the number of enemy dead. Though the Communists lost in any comparative “body count” of casualties, General Giap was quick to see that the indiscriminate bombing and massed firepower of the Americans caused heavy civilian casualties and alienated many Vietnamese from the government the Americans supported.With the war in stalemate and Americans becoming less tolerant of accepting casualties, General Giap told a European interviewer, South Vietnam “is for the Americans a bottomless pit.”

“Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this earth,” General Giap is said to have remarked after the war with France. “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.”

“He learned from his mistakes and did not repeat them,” Gen. Marcel Bigeard, who as a young colonel of French paratroops surrendered at Dien Bien Phu, told Peter G. Macdonald, one of General Giap’s biographers. But “to Giap,” he said, “a man’s life was nothing.”

But his critics said that his victories had been rooted in a profligate disregard for the lives of his soldiers. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded American forces in Vietnam from 1964 until 1968, said, “Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would not have lasted three weeks.”

Giap's political timidity came as a crushing disappointment to many. His last years were spent polishing his image as the "red Napoleon". He adored giving interviews, charming his hagiographers and fawning journalists with the same gestures and stories told in a fluent but outdated French of which he was immensely proud. He was always careful to avoid the real questions that hung over his increasingly contested career. He could not, however, stop many people from reconsidering his versions of history and heroism. Many Vietnamese also began to question whether the sacrifices of war had been worth it. Others saw too many moments in Giap's career where he had refused to stand up to hardliners or had failed to capitalise on his popular support to force through political and economic changes.

In 1986, in the runup to a Communist party congress, a group of officers urged Giap to take control and launch sweeping changes to the economy and political system. Giap refused, terrified of what might happen if he failed. Bui Tin, an army colonel who had been a protege, urged him again in 1990 to take over and provide a new direction for Vietnam. Giap demurred, preferring a comfortable retirement. Tin later condemned him bitterly, quoting an old Chinese saying that "the reputations of generals are built on the bodies of 10,000 men".

General William Westmoreland, commander of the American forces, once remarked that any US general that suffered Giap's losses would have been sacked instantly. His skills lay less in military tactics and more in managing the logistics and politics that were so vital to sustain the war in the south. His diplomatic skills kept open supply lines from China and the Soviet Union, while at home he organised the movement of troops and material down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a vast web of tracks stretching into Laos and Cambodia. "People should not be overawed by the power of modern weapons," Giap wrote. "It is the value of human beings that in the end will decide victory."

Dien Bien Phu "was the first time that a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in a pitched battle," wrote British historian Martin Windrow, the author of “The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam.”

For the French, however, the Viet Minh victory marked not just the end of their dominance in Indochina but the beginning of their decline as a colonial power. Inspired by the Viet Minh, many Algerians, a few of whom had even fought next to the French in Vietnam, began demanding their own independence. About six months later, Algerians would begin their own successful independence movement, through a bloody war that lasted over seven years. Julian Jackson, a historian, wrote for the BBC: "The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honor it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a 'diplomatic Dien Bien Phu.'"

But further than that, at a fundamental level, graphic design works as a kind of user interface; we organize information visually to allow people to navigate through and understand the world. As graphic designers we channel interactions through a primarily visual funnel, stripping out everything that can’t be accommodated in the medium. But as sensors, processing power and machine intelligence become more portable, ubiquitous, and increasingly part of the designer’s lexicon, we will one day find that our user interfaces are no longer primarily visual, but more sonic, haptic, and multi-sensory. With that comes a brand new palette of output at our disposal. Allow me to take this to a more extreme conclusion: We’re beginning to interface with our devices in more conversational terms as natural-language-processing algorithms improve, and in more gestural terms with improvements in computer vision and virtual reality. When coupled with renewed interest in anticipatory design, a massive signal appears pointing to a future in which graphic designers are barely required at all. But by taking a designer’s mindset to problem-framing and solving, we have skills that position us well to help shape the deployment and development of this new artificial intelligence in design; helping to develop new tools, new interfaces, and new interactions that shape future worlds in unimaginably profound ways.

The next design trend is one that eliminates all choices Written by Anne Quito Obsession Design June 18, 2015

Application developers will also likely win in all this. While the APIs and the data available will be pretty standardized, the manner in which it’s displayed will become a battleground of creativity. Innovation here will be key, doing something different and better than what everyone else is doing is the only way an app will stand out.

If there’s a definite winner in this possible future Internet, it is the content creators. If the only thing that sets one company or organization apart from their competition, then those who can create high-quality content will be in high demand. The thousands of dollars that a company used to be spent on website design will be funneled into website content instead.

Multimedia content will also still have a strong market. Those who can produce high-quality videos and even web-based apps (for things like Chrome OS) will have a strong business for years to come.

And all these touchpoints need to be designed, planned, and managed. This is a job that will continue to exist, regardless of the channel. We will still need cohesive experiences and valuable content across smart climatizers, virtual reality devices, electronic contact lenses, and whatever we invent in the decades to come.

Vietnam, therefore, stands at a consequential juncture. If it can pull up its GDP growth to the peak rates of 9% or thereabouts, then it can realistically aim to become an industrialized nation within a generation – with income levels equaling those of Korea today. On the other hand, if it continues on recent-year growth rates of just over 5 percent, then that will take its average income to levels slightly above those of Thailand, Brazil or Egypt today.

Vietnam’s long-term growth performance: A comparative perspective

Vietnam’s trade resilience to the country’s success in diversifying its exports towards electronics and garment manufacturing.Apart from the types of goods produced, Vietnam also has diversification in terms of export markets, said Mr Glenn Maguire, ANZ’s chief economist for Asia-Pacific.

This means that undiversified commodity exporters are bearing the brunt of the regional trade and growth slowdown such as Indonesia and Malaysia

By the end of his research, Leclaire was left in no doubt. For him, “athletic performance is largely determined by genetics and specifically ACTN3, the so-called ‘sprint gene’”. The ACTN3 was discovered for the first time by a team of Australian researchers in 2003. It is a gene present in all humans in two forms, either the RR form which helps speed, or the RX form which aids endurance. “Since its discovery, a lot of research has shown that the RR form of the gene gives those who hold it explosive muscle power when the body is put under a certain amount of physical stress, so it’s a natural predisposition for sprinters,” Leclaire explained. “If you had a weak form of ACTN 3, it would be impossible to match the great sprinters,” he said. Leclaire concluded that the genes favourable for sprinting are more commonly found in those of West African origin. There are exceptions, of course, which explains how French sprinter Lemaitre has been able to compete in the same class as the likes of Bolt and fellow Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake. “Lemaitre posesses the same genetic combinations that you find in most of the athletes of West African origin. He is the exception that confirms the rule,” Leclaire said. East Africa, by contrast, is the land of the long-distance runner. Author John Entine believes genetics also explains the continuing supremacy of Kenya’s runners in long distance races. “They are short and slender with huge natural lung capacity and a preponderance of slow twitch muscles, the energy system for endurance sports,” Entine wrote on the website blackathlete.net. “It’s a perfect biomechanical package for long-distance running but a disaster for sports that require anaerobic bursts of speed.”

The director of the Copenhagen Muscle Research Institute, Bengt Saltin, believes an athlete's “environment” can account for 20 to 25 percent of his speed, but that the rest is down to birth.

Vietnam: Asia’s unexpected peace broker?

The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American

Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Lit: A Primer from Viet Thanh Nguyen

But to focus on the advantages of Vietnam’s geographical location would be to downplay the commitment of the ruling Communist Party’s investment in its own people, with the backing of international development organizations. Since the 1990s the country has borrowed more than $14 billion to revolutionize its national infrastructure, creating the conditions for rapid and sustained growth. This has included rural electrification schemes ensuring that more than 97 percent of households in the countryside have access to mains power – up from less than 50 percent in 1998 – and the extension of the nation’s road transport network. These innovations have supported the huge expansion of the country’s industrial base, powered by workers who have benefited hugely from the government’s investment in education. In standardized math and science testing, Vietnam’s youth now outperform those in the United States and United Kingdom.

The remaining major factor underlying wealth and poverty is the state of the natural environment. All human populations depend to varying degrees on renewable natural resources—especially on forests, water, soils, and seafood. It’s tricky to manage such resources sustainably. Countries that excessively deplete their resources—whether inadvertently or intentionally—tend to impoverish themselves, although the difficulty of estimating accurately the costs of resource destruction causes economists to ignore it. It helps explain why notoriously deforested countries—such as Haiti, Rwanda, Burundi, Madagascar, and Nepal—tend to be notoriously poor and politically unstable.

Thus, geographical latitude acting independently of institutions is an important geographic factor affecting power, prosperity, and poverty. The other important geographic factor is whether an area is accessible to ocean-going ships because it lies either on the sea coast or on a navigable river. It costs roughly seven times more to ship a ton of cargo by land than by sea. That puts landlocked countries at an economic disadvantage, and helps explain why landlocked Bolivia and semilandlocked Paraguay are the poorest countries of South America. It also helps explain why Africa, with no river navigable to the sea for hundreds of miles except the Nile, and with fifteen landlocked nations, is the poorest continent. Eleven of those fifteen landlocked African nations have average incomes of $600 or less; only two countries outside Africa (Afghanistan and Nepal, both also landlocked) are as poor.

Two major factors contribute to the poverty of tropical countries compared to temperate countries: diseases and agricultural productivity. The tropics are notoriously unhealthy. Tropical diseases differ on average from temperate diseases, in several respects. First, there are far more parasitic diseases (such as elephantiasis and schistosomiasis) in tropical areas, because cold temperate winters kill parasite stages outside our bodies, but tropical parasites can thrive outside our bodies all year long. Second, disease vectors, such as mosquitoes and ticks, are far more diverse in tropical than in temperate areas.

The remaining factor contributing to good institutions, of which Acemoglu and Robinson mention some examples, involves another paradox, termed “the curse of natural resources.” One might naively expect countries generously endowed with natural resources (such as minerals, oil, and tropical hardwoods) to be richer than countries poorer in natural resources. In fact, the trend is opposite, the result of the many ways in which national dependence on certain types of natural resources (like diamonds and oil) tends to promote bad institutions, such as corruption, civil wars, inflation, and neglect of education.

An additional factor behind the origin of the good institutions that I discussed above is termed “the reversal of fortune,” and is the subject of Chapter 9 of Why Nations Fail. Among non-European countries colonized by Europeans during the last five hundred years, those that were initially richer and more advanced tend paradoxically to be poorer today. That’s because, in formerly rich countries with dense native populations, such as Peru, Indonesia, and India, Europeans introduced corrupt “extractive” economic institutions, such as forced labor and confiscation of produce, to drain wealth and labor from the natives. (By extractive economic institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson mean practices and policies “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society [the masses] to benefit a different subset [the governing elite].”)

The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for the rise of governments. For example, Europe began to acquire highly productive agriculture 9,000 years ago and state government by at least 4,000 years ago, but subequatorial Africa acquired less productive agriculture only between 2,000 and 1,800 years ago and state government even more recently. Those historical differences prove to have huge effects on the modern distribution of wealth. Ola Olsson and Douglas Hibbs showed that, on average, nations in which agriculture arose many millennia ago—e.g., European nations—tend to be richer today than nations with a shorter history of agriculture (e.g., subequatorial African nations), and that this factor explains about half of all the modern national variation in wealth. Valerie Bockstette, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman showed further that, if one compares countries that were equally poor fifty years ago (e.g., South Korea and Ghana), the countries with a long history of state government (e.g., South Korea) have on the average been getting rich faster than those with a short history (e.g., Ghana).

There is no doubt that good institutions are important in determining a country’s wealth. But why have some countries ended up with good institutions, while others haven’t? The most important factor behind their emergence is the historical duration of centralized government. Until the rise of the world’s first states, beginning around 3400 BC, all human societies were bands or tribes or chiefdoms, without any of the complex economic institutions of governments. A long history of government doesn’t guarantee good institutions but at least permits them; a short history makes them very unlikely. One can’t just suddenly introduce government institutions and expect people to adopt them and to unlearn their long history of tribal organization.That cruel reality underlies the tragedy of modern nations, such as Papua New Guinea, whose societies were until recently tribal. Oil and mining companies there pay royalties intended for local landowners through village leaders, but the leaders often keep the royalties for themselves. That’s because they have internalized their society’s practice by which clan leaders pursue their personal interests and their own clan’s interests, rather than representing everyone’s interests.

Find Out If Your Job Will Be Automated

I don’t want to be one of the melancholics or those who become sour and bitter and morbid. To understand all is to forgive all,18 and I believe that if we knew everything we’d arrive at a certain serenity. Now having this serenity as much as possible, even when one knows — little — nothing — for certain, is perhaps a better remedy against all ills than what’s sold in the chemist’s. A lot comes of its own accord, one grows and develops of one’s own accord.

And above all I find it a very worrying matter that you believe you have to study in order to write. No, my dear little sister, learn to dance or fall in love with one or more notary’s clerks, officers, in short whoever’s within your reach; rather, much rather commit any number of follies than study in Holland, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to make someone dull, and so I won’t hear of it. For my part, I still continually have the most impossible and highly unsuitable love affairs from which, as a rule, I emerge only with shame and disgrace.13 And in this I’m absolutely right, in my own view, because I tell myself that in earlier years, when I should have been in love, I immersed myself in religious and socialist affairs and considered art more sacred, more than now. Why are religion or law or art so sacred? People who do nothing other than be in love are perhaps more serious and holier than those who sacrifice their love and their heart to an idea. Be this as it may, to write a book, to perform a deed, to make a painting with life in it, one must be a living person oneself. And so for you, unless you never want to progress, studying is very much a side issue. Enjoy yourself as much as you can and have as many distractions as you can, and be aware that what people want in art nowadays has to be very lively, with strong colour, very intense. So intensify your own health and strength and life a little, that’s the best study.

Every designer should have and be comfortable with these tools: Pencil and/or pen Sketch pad Everything after that is a matter of preference or specialization. I've been in this business for 15 years now and I have not met a single designer, art director, or creative director that does their best without first sketching it out. You can jump right into the computer but it's never as free as early concepts should be. As for the other items listed here ... Remember that digital makes up the majority of the market these days. Print isn't dead, but it isn't the only option for professional design. In fact, it's an afterthought much of the time. Pantone? That's for those print junkies. X-acto? Nice, but mostly just for print. Light table, tape, tracing paper, ink erasers!? You guys are as bad as me. That's all for us fussy history buffs. I hardly pull that stuff out any more. My art supplies are more like a museum than a tool kit. They come in handy every few months but that's only when I'm doubling as an illustrator. Or just playing around. I could probably save my clients some money and go buy royalty free icons next time ;)

Digital art will rival the real thing. “Will a 3D-printed sculpture have the same value as a sculpture made by someone 50 years ago with their hands? People sometimes see digital art as a lesser form of art. Oh, that is done by computer, not hand! Then people think it should be cheaper. I worry that consumers will see 3D art as something cheap — not the real thing. But once you can print a masterpiece from an artist and have it as your own, people will think differently. I am pretty sure that if Michelangelo had a computer, he would have used it.”

3D printing will continue to grow in importance. “As creatives, it’s our duty to incorporate 3D printing into our work. When you have the possibility to make your work tangible, that gives it more richness. I hope 3D printing allows people to fully customize their lives. One day if we need shoes or more silverware, we can just print them in our home. I think this will be true for all of our household basics. We’re going to have more creatives in the world because things that have traditionally been done on an industrial scale will be able to be done by anyone with 3D printing.”

You’ll have to broaden your skill set. “You can have a great design, but if you can’t communicate the story behind it, it will be the downfall of the greatest designers. It’s important to learn the ‘soft skills’ which are learning how to speak publicly to grab attention, keep attention, and clearly articulate your ideas. You should learn to negotiate your prices, as well as know how to read a room and when you should disappear. The other side is the psychology of the business upfront, the questions of: Why am I building this? Why is it important? Or what impact am I going to have on the world? It’s important to answer before you design. Having the business and designer mindset is important.”

Specialization + communication = a career win.  “Instead of trying to become a jack-of-all-trades, young designers should be trained in one specific design discipline, communication design, product design, interior design, fashion design, or digital media design. The design student should develop an understanding of how the respective design discipline interfaces with technology and business. Students should work in projects together with students from other design disciplines and preferably also with students from engineering and business. This is training for young designers and a time to nurture communication skills.”

Visual VR is just the start.  “There really is a lot of opportunities and means for expression inside VR. For example, Axon VR is developing full body virtual reality, both the software and hardware. The apparatus is somewhat imposing, and the leap to a first-person experience is astounding when you add visual, sound, and the sense of touch. The visual power of the experiences has sky-rocketed as a result. When you put that in the hands of creative people, there’s a real opportunity for the experiences that come out of it to be completely, utterly fantastic.”

Storytelling will have no clear narrative arc. “The amount of investment/heat around virtual and augmented reality will be the next big challenge for creative professionals, and understanding the self-navigating narrative like that is not a part of most creative disciplines. Traditionally, we’ve always told linear stories. I think the biggest nut to crack will be how creatives design story games that the users can tell themselves.”

Experience design will become increasingly important. “Retail shopping is not solely about the transactional experience any more. It’s about going into a store, feeling the vibe of that brand and getting that bigger lifestyle out of it. Right now that’s very much an urban, high-end experience, so how do we do that in a more populous way? We are looking a lot at the mall K11 in Hong Kong, and how they have incorporated so many different things in their experience, from having art everywhere to farms that are growing mushrooms that you can pick and have incorporated into your meal to programs for kids. And it’s all very-well curated, so there are always new exhibitions and programs.”

Crooked career paths will be the norm. “More and more I am seeing people who haven’t followed the traditional career path. When hiring, I look for the narrative that stitches the person’s career together: Why did they make the decisions that they did? What was the trajectory that they found themselves on? I don’t really care that much anymore if you went to a pedigree design school or started at a prestigious company. What I care about is that you learned and grew and there was an intent behind what you were building towards.”

The line between design and business will continue to blur. “The more a designer understands how the business works, the more valuable they will be to employers. Designers who understand a company’s value proposition and mission can help them thrive and grow. They just need to learn the language that someone who is running a company actually speaks. When they can articulate exactly what they bring to the table, executives will realize that they didn’t just hire a designer — they also hired a strategist!”

According to a recent study by online job matching service TheLadders, the fastest growing jobs are in user experience design, iOS and Android development, and business intelligence–some of which didn’t exist before 2007.The study, which gathered key word search data from among its 6 million members, also found that middle management jobs are being phased out. Among the top 10% of growing jobs, less than 2% of titles contain the word “manager” or “director,” which points to a trend that you can still be a professional in a high-paying position, but the end game isn’t a gold plaque with a management title tacked to your name.Mark Newman, CEO of digital interviewing service HireVue, says the company is witnessing similar trends as it helps place people with companies such as Hilton, GE, Chipotle, and others. “Overall, HireVue is seeing that jobs of the future are design and data scientist jobs,” he says.

It partly relates to the psychology of social conformity that generally increases with age and enhanced social awareness

“Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation—even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.

In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer. When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital—why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of.Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals.

During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Do Designers Need to Go to College?

“Japanese food was created here, and only Japanese know it,” Mr. Kadowaki said in an interview. “How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?”

JLW: Did these electronic or highly technical things come naturally to you? Or is it a case of working with the right collaborator? PS: It’s always a case of working with the right collaborator. I don’t like equipment. I don’t even take pictures.

I find that with 3D work it’s the opposite of graphic design for print. The computer has revolutionised this kind of work – the way you can see work before it is built. The jobs come out almost identical 
to my Photoshop rendering, and usually something is selected in the first or second round. These things, they’re a whole different speed. They take a very long time to realise. There’s a lot of expense involved, trying out materials – they go on forever. I’ve been working on the High Line [a New York park built on the 1930s elevated railway] for a million years [since 2000].

I told you I’m not a craftsperson. Anything I do where I think I make a breakthrough, in five minutes someone’s going to come along and do it better than I did it. JLW: So you keep moving … PS: Well I have to because I’m never going to develop the craft well enough. That’s been true for me my whole life.

My view is that to grow as a designer you have to allow yourself to be who you are irrespective of the technology, but let the technology inform you in ways that it can. When you look at periods you find designers whose body of work is completely connected to one technological form and then it stops there. I see it in some of my ex-students – it’s quite a sad thing. Students who learned to work on the computer in the late 1980s and 90s who are now approaching 40 are having a hard time working because the younger kids who are right out of school are not only cheaper but they can adapt to the technology much faster and much more easily, so they’re actually better at the gig. It leaves a whole generation cold in relation to advancement.

The thing I do – which is why I became less interested in style and more interested in finding a way to do it – is to create expressionist typography. Words have meaning and typography has feeling. When you put them together it’s a spectacular combination. I think the reason I responded so negatively to Helvetica way back when was that it neutralises feeling. A Modernist would argue that that’s terrific because then the words speak and you’re not influencing the content by creating disorder with them. It’s almost like an understood, generic form … that you can say OK take the words as they are because they’re laid out very clearly in Helvetica. All other styles imbue the words with a shade or meaning, which changes them, which is where I think all the fun is!

First I had a design teacher who gave us Basel basics: move a black square around a white page, make a white on white piece – things that involved seeing and craft, but I was very sloppy, so for me that form of exercise was terrible. Y’know, the notion of lining things up and making things function, and then later designing a business card or putting typography on a grid was virtually impossible to achieve and depressing for me. I felt I was cleaning up my room in some kind of ordered system where the goal of life is to be neat. I remember seeing Kathy McCoy talk about it from her perspective and she had said that the biggest compliment you could give to something was that it was ‘clean’. C’mon, there’s gotta be more than that… That can’t be it! What about expression, what about emotion, what about feeling? You had to be engaged with it in some way. If you could be neat, it seemed that you could achieve it. And that didn’t seem right to me about a form of expression and communication. If anybody can achieve it, why bother to do it, why don’t we all do it ourselves?

R1a lineages form only about 17.5 % of Indian male lineage, and an even smaller percentage of the female lineage. The vast majority of Indians owe their ancestry mostly to people from other migrations, starting with the original Out of Africa migrations of around 55,000 to 65,000 years ago, or the farming-related migrations from West Asia that probably occurred in multiple waves after 10,000 B.C., or the migrations of Austro-Asiatic speakers such as the Munda from East Asia the dating of which is yet to determined, and the migrations of Tibeto-Burman speakers such as the Garo again from east Asia, the dating of which is also yet to be determined.

graphic design has more opportunity for impact than ever, as institutional liveries now live not just on signs and letterhead, but in apps and physical installations that span landscapes, and typefaces can breathe and grow in response to their environments

Wisdom is a virtue and a way of living, and it requires more than smart ideas and knowledge.

Although giving an account of what it means to know how to live well may prove as difficult a topic as providing an account of wisdom, Nozick provides a very illuminating start. Wisdom is not just one type of knowledge, but diverse. What a wise person needs to know and understand constitutes a varied list: the most important goals and values of life – the ultimate goal, if there is one; what means will reach these goals without too great a cost; what kinds of dangers threaten the achieving of these goals; how to recognize and avoid or minimize these dangers; what different types of human beings are like in their actions and motives (as this presents dangers or opportunities); what is not possible or feasible to achieve (or avoid); how to tell what is appropriate when; knowing when certain goals are sufficiently achieved; what limitations are unavoidable and how to accept them; how to improve oneself and one's relationships with others or society; knowing what the true and unapparent value of various things is; when to take a long-term view; knowing the variety and obduracy of facts, institutions, and human nature; understanding what one's real motives are; how to cope and deal with the major tragedies and dilemmas of life, and with the major good things too. (1989, 269) With Nozick's explanation of what one must know in order to live well, we have an interesting and quite attractive, albeit somewhat rough, theory of wisdom.

a wise person's beliefs and values cohere with one's actions

one puts one's knowledge into practice

being wise also includes action. A person could satisfy the conditions of any of the principles we have considered thus far and nevertheless behave in a wildly reckless manner. Wildly reckless people are, even if very knowledgeable about life, not wise.

cope and deal with the major tragedies and dilemmas of life, and with the major good things too.

a wise person live the sort of life that he or she could sincerely endorse upon reflection.

Wisdom, in general, many philosophers would argue, requires practical knowledge about living.

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I find I procrastinate for a good hour before getting down to the actual business of writing. This can include doing laundry, checking email, and reading the paper, until the guilt becomes inescapable. But once I start, I fall into that state of flow and become unaware of time passing. I love that feeling.

The enigma of Japanese intellectuals.

“I see this desire to escape to these landscapes, to do something real, because more than ever everyone is buried in their phones,” says photographer Corey Arnold (@arni_coraldo), who shot the October 2016 cover story for National Geographic magazine. “But where do they get the inspiration to travel? Instagram.”

Puffed, gray-tinged clouds roll over Odda, Norway, reflected in the quiet azure waters of Lake Ringedalsvatnet. More than 2,000 feet above, a hiker is perched atop Trolltunga, a cliff that juts out of the mountain. There’s not another soul in sight—at least, that’s what Instagram might have you believing. What photos of this iconic vista don’t reveal is the long line of hikers weaving around the rocky terrain each morning, all waiting for their chance to capture their version of the Instagram-famous shot. Between 2009 and 2014, visitors to Trolltunga increased from 500 to 40,000 in what many consider a wave of social media-fueled tourism.

“I think a lot about social media’s role in tourism. Now you can almost curate your whole experience based on the images you see online, and it’s an unnatural approach to travel. It makes me wonder what happened to exploration.”

On board the ship was a small library containing published accounts of previous voyages through the Pacific, and in these accounts were short lists of words from islands scattered from Southeast Asia eastwards into the Pacific as far as the the western edge of Polynesia. By comparing the list of Tahitian words he compiled with these other vocabularies, Banks was able to show how Tahitian was directly related to languages spread across the Pacific to the Southeast Asian islands of the "East Indias."

Accordingly, they dreamed up elaborate theories that explained the presence of the Polynesians in the middle of the Pacific, while denying to them the ability of having reached there through their own sailing abilities.

Whereas explorers of the previous European age of exploration were primarily searching for new routes to the riches of Asia, those of this second age sailed the seas primarily, in Braudel's words, "to obtain new information about geography, the natural world, and the mores of different peoples."

while on his first voyage into the Pacific, Cook stopped four months in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun as part of an international effort to determine the distance between the Earth and Sun.

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One of the advantages of being a songwriter instead of a performer is that, while artists have a hard time recovering their reputation when a record bombs, the only time the public pays attention to who wrote a song is when it's a hit. Most people don't realise that, even for successful writers, the good-v-great ratio is low: Chambers has written more than 1,000 songs in the last 15 years, of which 21 ranked in the top 10 – that's one hit for every 47 songs. That may sound like a frustrating process, but most writers would agree it's necessary to write non-hits to get to the nuggets. As with athletes, it's important to exercise the writing muscle.

If anyone was hoping to stumble on a secret formula, that hope was quickly shattered. As Motown legend Lamont Dozier once said: "I've written about 78 top 10 songs, and I still don't know what a hit is. I can only go by what I feel.

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Li Delun, one of the Chinese musicians trained in the West whose career survived the Cultural Revolution, helped lead the revival with a new ideological line, declaring, “People need this product of the West to liberate their cultural thinking from 2,000 years of feudalism.” By the early 1990s, the Chinese government was deliberately encouraging the study of music through its education policy. Students and their parents were keenly aware that musical training could be an advantage in China’s brutal competition for slots at top universities. Knowledge of Beethoven was something to show off, and President Jiang Zemin (in office 1993–2003) enjoyed doing just that, taking the baton to conduct orchestras at state banquets and playing the piano for Western leaders.

“Whenever I play in Korea, I feel like I’m at a rock concert,” says Bell. If there’s any irony to the most quintessentially Western music tradition being kept alive by the East, by now it’s a moot point. Classical music is as Asian as tempura and Spam. Even if it eventually dies in the West, it will have an Asian afterlife, much in the way washed-up American rock bands can still pack stadiums in Manila.

And in contrast to celebrity musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang, Asians haven’t made much headway into conducting or composing. Asian music education is not famous for its music theory. The Suzuki method, Asia’s most successful classical music export, is a highly mechanical training regimen based on drills and rote memorization, with no emphasis on “feeling” the music

“There was a time when practically every major soloist was Jewish,” says violinist Joshua Bell. “Every Jewish kid grew up wanting to play the violin. Now it’s true among Asians.” (Or at least among Asian parents.)

concern and openness

Capsaicin binds to the pain receptor TRPV1, which our brains also use to detect changes in temperature - that's why we think chillies are hot.But after being over-stimulated the neurons stop responding, killing the pain. This process involves the release of endorphins, which can give us a "rush" not dissimilar from the feeling of having exercised well. This may explain why some people believe that hot food is addictive.

It is sometimes said that people in hot countries use more chilli because it makes them sweat, which cools them down. But in 1998, researchers at Cornell University pointed out that the greater use of spices in countries such as India, Thailand and China was likely to be linked to their anti-microbial function. By studying recipe books from all over the world, the researchers found that spices including chilli were more likely to be used close to the equator, and were also used more in humid valleys than on high plateaux.

That may just explain the spice's world-conquering success. Just two or three years after Columbus brought capsicum seeds back from the New World in 1493, Portuguese merchants took the plants to Asia, where they would transform the cuisine.

Rats given access to high-fat foods showed some of the same characteristics as animals hooked on cocaine or heroin--and found it hard to quit even when given electric shocks

The team noticed that, almost as soon as the salt-depleted mice started drinking salt water, the patterns of gene regulation triggered by the need began to reverse. The rapid response is a surprise, because it means brain changes in the mice occurred before significant amounts of salt had moved from the stomach to the bloodstream. "It was stunning and perplexing to see that just ten minutes of drinking salty water led to a complete change of the whole sophisticated and elaborate genetic program," Duke's Liedtke said.

Salt appetite can be so strong that animals short on sodium will put life and limb at risk to satisfy the hunger. Mountain goats, for instance, are known to cling to sheer cliffs to access a salt lick, even when a misstep means certain death.

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Năm qua, bộ phim điện ảnh chiếm được nhiều cảm tình của khán giả Em là bà nội của anh (ELBNCA) đã chính thức đưa cái tên Phan Gia Nhật Linh đến với đông đảo công chúng. Học ngành kiến trúc nhưng thay vì say đắm những bản thiết kế, chàng trai này lại dành đam mê cho phim ảnh. Để chia sẻ những góc nhìn của mình, anh bắt đầu viết bình phim, lập diễn đàn về phim. Chưa thỏa mãn, Nhật Linh tiến tới tìm hiểu, tiếp xúc với nhiều khâu trong quy trình làm phim, từ chụp ảnh hiện trường, viết kịch bản, sản xuất, làm đạo diễn (ĐD) hậu trường, phó ĐD và giờ là ĐD. Tình yêu phim ảnh trong Linh được chắp cánh khi anh là người đầu tiên nhận học bổng của quỹ Ford cho chương trình Fellowship for Film Production và là sinh viên Việt Nam (VN) đầu tiên được nhận vào khoa sản xuất phim tại trường điện ảnh hàng đầu của Mỹ: Đại học Nam California (USC). Năm năm sau khi học xong về nước, ở tuổi 37, Nhật Linh trình làng bộ phim truyện điện ảnh đầu tay và lập tức ELBNCA gây tiếng vang.

The financial status of "Firewatch"

Firewatch’s budget, while huge for us, was modest for a game of its quality and scope, but we made our investment back in about one day. Firewatch has sold around 500,000 full-price copies in its first month.

Enlightenment's Evil Twin

By helping us stay attuned to what’s happening around us in the present moment, regardless of the time, mindfulness helps us stay connected to what is most important. As the Zen monk Suzuki Roshi teaches, “The most important thing is to remember the most important thing.”

I think it is important to clarify, however, that self-compassion doesn’t mean we are always filled with happiness and lovingkindness. Simply put, what it means is that our awareness of what’s happening is always kind, always compassionate. So even if I’m feeling angry or frustrated, I am embracing my experience with a compassionate awareness.

I believe truly practicing mindfulness helps us learn how to become more compassionate toward ourselves—which, evidence suggests, is intertwined with being more compassionate toward others. One study I often cite, especially when teaching psychotherapists and students who are training to become therapists, demonstrates that how we treat ourselves is highly correlated with how we treat others: When therapists rated how compassionate they were with themselves versus how critical and self-blaming, their ratings correlated highly with how they related to their patients.

In this way, I began to cultivate kindness toward myself, as well as a sense of interest and curiosity for my lived experience. I started to practice infusing my attention with care and compassion, similar to a parent attending to a young child, saying to myself, “I care about you. I’m interested. Tell me about your experience.”

The monk explained to me that mindfulness is not just about paying attention, but also about how you pay attention. He described a compassionate, kind attention, where instead of becoming frustrated when my mind wandered, I could actually become curious about my mind meandering about, holding this experience in compassionate awareness. Instead of being angry at my mind, or impatient with myself, I could inquire gently and benevolently into what it felt like to be frustrated or impatient.

“What you practice becomes stronger.” This wisdom has now been well documented by the science of neuroplasticity, which shows that our repeated experiences shape our brains.

One study found that people who practice mindfulness meditation appear to develop the skill of self-observation, which neurologically disengages the automatic pathways that were created by prior learning and enables present-moment input to be integrated in a new way (Siegel, 2007a).

However, most studies of mindfulness pertain to a certain aspect of Buddhist meditation practice, namely, attending to mental content, such as current feelings, or sensorial experiencing, such as the breath, in a non-judgmental, curious manner (for discussions of mindfulness see Bishop et al., 2004; Grossman, 2008 & in press-a; Kabat-Zinn, 2003; Melbourne Academic Mindfulness Interest Group, 2006). In the Buddhist tradition, there are other very prominent practices that involve other attentional objects and emotional modes of attending to those objects that have been much less discussed, namely loving-kindness and compassion meditation. These practices have only recently been investigated by contemporary psychology researchers.Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) aims to develop an affective state of unconditional kindness to all people. Compassion mediation (CM) involves techniques to cultivate compassion, or deep, genuine sympathy for those stricken by misfortune, together with an earnest wish to ease this suffering (Grossman & Van Dam, in press; Hopkins, 2001). Both forms of meditation (LKM and CM) are centrally related to, and include the practice of, mindfulness, as noted by many scholars and practitioners from varying traditions, including Theravadin, Japanese, and Chinese Zen (e.g., Bodhi, 2005; Kuan, 2008; Sanharakshita, 2004; Shen-Yen, 2001; Suzuki, 2011).

Mindfulness meditation employs the full range of perceptible experience as possible objects of mindful awareness, for example, bodily or other sensory experience, affective states, thoughts, or images. Illustrative of this approach and often seen as a particularly useful technique is the mindfulness practice of moment-to-moment attending to breathing. The aims of breath awareness within the Buddhist perspective are (among others): (1) to use an observable, easily perceptible and constantly available physical stimulus (the breath) as object of investigation of mind-body awareness; (2) to utilize continuous attention to the breath to improve the capability of moment-to-moment volition-driven concentration; (3) and to employ a rather simple object of observation (which is intimately related to physical mental and emotional functioning) as a starting point for more complex objects of awareness. It should be noted, however, that mindfulness of breathing in itself is a sophisticated, systematic, and multilayered procedure (for further details, see Rosenberg, 2004, and Grossman, 2010, Grossman, in press). Thus, consistent with definition of mindfulness above, a major aim of mindfulness meditation is to cultivate a more accurate view of how the mind operates and to raise awareness of the present moment by means of a process of phenomenological investigation that is inherent to mindfulness practice. MBT has been typically derived from non-Tibetan traditions and practices, particularly the Theravadin tradition (the oldest existing Buddhist school), although mindfulness is also central to other Buddhist traditions as well.

A recent review of the literature suggests that MBT is a beneficial intervention to reduce negative psychological states, such as stress, anxiety, and depression (Hofmann et al., 2010). This review identified 39 studies totaling 1,140 participants receiving MBT for a range of conditions, including cancer, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and other psychiatric or medical conditions. Effect size estimates suggest that MBT is associated with strong effects for improving anxiety and mood symptoms in patients with anxiety and mood disorders. In other patients, this intervention was moderately effective for improving anxiety and mood symptoms. These effect sizes were robust and unrelated to number of treatment sessions or publication year. Moreover, the treatment effects were maintained over follow-up. These findings suggest that mindfulness-based therapy is a promising intervention for treating anxiety and mood problems in clinical populations.

Mindfulness is a construct that is difficult to define (see Bishop et al., 2004; Grossman, 2008 & in press a; Kabat-Zinn, 2003; Melbourne Academic Mindfulness Interest Group, 2006). It has been described as a form of participant-observation that is a characterized by moment-to-moment awareness of perceptible mental states and processes that includes continuous, immediate awareness of physical sensations, perceptions, affective states, thoughts, and imagery (Grossman et al., 2004). Definitions of mindfulness from Buddhism and MBTs focus upon a number of qualities that include (a) a deliberate intention to pay attention to momentary experience, (b) a marked distinction from normal, everyday modes of consciousness, (c) a clear focus on aspects of active investigation of moment-to-moment experience, (d) continuity of a precise, dispassionate, non-evaluative, and sustained moment-to-moment awareness of immediate experience, and (e) an attitude of openness, acceptance, kindness, curiosity and patience (see Grossman et al., 2004, 2010; Grossman & Van Dam, in press). Additionally, mindfulness directly involves active development of such qualities as energy, tranquility, and equanimity (e.g., Nanamoli & Bodhi, 2001, note 560). Along similar lines, if somewhat simplified, Bishop and colleagues (2004) distinguish two components of mindfulness: one that involves self-regulation of attention and one that involves an orientation toward the present moment characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance.

Research shows that when people live lives that are different from their true nature and capabilities, they are less likely to be happy than those whose goals and lives match. For example, someone who has inherent potential to be a great artist or teacher may never realize his/her talents if their energy is focused on attaining the basic needs of humans.

The AMDR for carbohydrate intake recommended by the FNB:IOM in adults and children is 45–65% of dietary energy intake (FNB:IOM 2002). The intakes were based on the IOM interpretation that there is an increased risk for CHD at high carbohydrate intakes (>65%) and increased risk of obesity with low carbohydrate, high fat intakes (<45%).

a prudent upper level may therefore be 25% energy from protein

Considering all the above, a lower intake limit of 20% energy as fat seems prudent.

So love, in all its glory, is just, it seems, a chemical state with genetic roots and environmental influences.

Work on rats is leading researchers such as Dr Pfaus to wonder whether the template of features found attractive by an individual is formed during a critical period of sexual-behaviour development. He says that even in animals that are not supposed to pair-bond, such as rats, these features may get fixed with the experience of sexual reward. Rats can be conditioned to prefer particular types of partner—for example by pairing sexual reward with some kind of cue, such as lemon-scented members of the opposite sex. This work may help the understanding of unusual sexual preferences. Human fetishes, for example, develop early, and are almost impossible to change. The fetishist connects objects such as feet, shoes, stuffed toys and even balloons, that have a visual association with childhood sexual experiences, to sexual gratification.

If humans become conditioned by their experiences, this may be the reason why some people tend to date the same “type” of partner over and over again. Researchers think humans develop a “love map” as they grow up—a blueprint that contains the many things that they have learnt are attractive. This inner scorecard is something that people use to rate the suitability of mates. Yet the idea that humans are actually born with a particular type of “soul mate” wired into their desires is wrong. Research on the choices of partner made by identical twins suggests that the development of love maps takes time, and has a strong random component.

The stages of love vary somewhat between the sexes. Lust, for example, is aroused more easily in men by visual stimuli than is the case for women. This is probably why visual pornography is more popular with men. And although both men and women express romantic love with the same intensity, and are attracted to partners who are dependable, kind, healthy, smart and educated, there are some notable differences in their choices. Men are more attracted to youth and beauty, while women are more attracted to money, education and position.

Because they are independent, these three systems can work simultaneously—with dangerous results. As Dr Fisher explains, “you can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations unrelated to either partner.” This independence means it is possible to love more than one person at a time

lust, romantic love and long-term attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate phenomena, with their own emotional and motivational systems, and accompanying chemicals. These systems have evolved to enable, respectively, mating, pair-bonding and parenting. Lust, of course, involves a craving for sex. Jim Pfaus, a psychologist at Concordia University, in Montreal, says the aftermath of lustful sex is similar to the state induced by taking opiates. A heady mix of chemical changes occurs, including increases in the levels of serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and endogenous opioids (the body's natural equivalent of heroin). “This may serve many functions, to relax the body, induce pleasure and satiety, and perhaps induce bonding to the very features that one has just experienced all this with”, says Dr Pfaus. Then there is attraction, or the state of being in love (what is sometimes known as romantic or obsessive love). This is a refinement of mere lust that allows people to home in on a particular mate. This state is characterised by feelings of exhilaration, and intrusive, obsessive thoughts about the object of one's affection. Some researchers suggest this mental state might share neurochemical characteristics with the manic phase of manic depression. Dr Fisher's work, however, suggests that the actual behavioural patterns of those in love—such as attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one's loved one—resemble obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

“We may be able to do things like look at their gene sequence, look at their promoter sequence, to genotype people and correlate that with their fidelity,” he muses. It has already proved possible to tinker with this genetic inheritance, with startling results. Scientists can increase the expression of the relevant receptors in prairie voles, and thus strengthen the animals' ability to attach to partners. And in 1999, Dr Young led a team that took the prairie-vole receptor gene and inserted it into an ordinary (and therefore promiscuous) mouse. The transgenic mouse thus created was much more sociable to its mate.

The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

when this magic juice was given to the montane vole: it made no difference. It turns out that the faithful prairie vole has receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin in brain regions associated with reward and reinforcement, whereas the montane vole does not.

When prairie voles have sex, two hormones called oxytocin and vasopressin are released. If the release of these hormones is blocked, prairie-voles' sex becomes a fleeting affair, like that normally enjoyed by their rakish montane cousins. Conversely, if prairie voles are given an injection of the hormones, but prevented from having sex, they will still form a preference for their chosen partner. In other words, researchers can make prairie voles fall in love—or whatever the vole equivalent of this is—with an injection.

the brain has a reward system designed to make voles (and people and other animals) do what they ought to. Without it, they might forget to eat, drink and have sex—with disastrous results. That animals continue to do these things is because they make them feel good. And they feel good because of the release of a chemical called dopamine into the brain.

when a male rat has sex it feels good to him because of the dopamine. He learns that sex is enjoyable, and seeks out more of it based on how it happened the first time.

The activity specific to maternal attachment was compared to that associated to romantic love described in our earlier study and to the distribution of attachment-mediating neurohormones established by other studies. Both types of attachment activated regions specific to each, as well as overlapping regions in the brain's reward system that coincide with areas rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. Both deactivated a common set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment and ‘mentalizing’, that is, the assessment of other people's intentions and emotions.

We conclude that human attachment employs a push–pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate.