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"First, automate good decisions. Whenever possible, design an environment that makes good decisions for you. For example, buying smaller plates can help you lose weight by deciding portion size for you. A study from Brian Wansink at Cornell University found that people eat 22 percent less food by switching from 12-inch dinner plates to 10-inch plates. Similarly, using software to block social media sites can help overcome procrastination by putting your willpower on autopilot. Second, get in the flow. A few years ago, PetSmart changed their checkout process. After swiping their credit card, customers were shown a screen that asked if they wanted to donate to "help save homeless animals." Through this single strategy, PetSmart Charities raised $40 million in a year. You can apply a similar strategy by designing an environment where good habits "get in the flow" of your normal behaviors. For example, if you want to practice a musical instrument, you could place it in the middle of your living room. Similarly, you are more likely to go to the gym if it is literally on the way home from work than you are if the gym is only five minutes away, but in the opposite direction of your commute. Whenever possible, design your habits so they fit in the flow of your current patterns. Third, subtract the negative influences. Ancient farmers didn't have the opportunity to remove the barriers that held them back, but you do. For example, Japanese television manufacturers rearranged their workspaces to save time by eliminating unnecessary turning, bending, and swiveling. You can also reduce the negative influences in your environment. For example, you can make it easier to avoid unhealthy foods by storing them in less visible places. (Foods that are placed at eye level tend to be purchased and eaten more frequently.)"

It is 137 years since the Catholic Church adopted its current teaching on abortion. Then, in his 1869 document Apostolicae Sedis, Pope Pius IX enacted the penalty of excommunication for abortion at any stage of pregnancy. For the previous 278 years, and following Pope Gregory XIV's Sedes Apostolica document in 1591, such excommunication only applied where abortion took place after "quickening", ie from those moments when a mother first detected the foetus move. Pope Gregory determined quickening at just over 16 weeks (166 days) of pregnancy. Prior to quickening "no homicide" was involved if abortion took place, he concluded. In 1588, just three years previously, Pope Sixtus V issued the Papal Bull Effraenatum which decreed that those who carried out abortions at any stage of pregnancy should be excommunicated and should also be punished by civil authorities (with the death penalty). For the 377 years previous to that, and since 1211 when Pope Innocent III issued the decree Sicut ex, excommunications applied as it had before 1869 - when an abortion took place after "quickening". So, for the greater part of the last millennium the Catholic Church did not hold that human life began at conception - its current teaching.

"Primary school admission policies come in different phases. The highest priority is given to applicants with blood ties to a school (Phases 1 and 2A). The remaining places go to other applicants in Phases 2B and 2C, with priority given to those who live closest to the school. Without alumni or blood tie connections, the only way to get into an elite school is by moving close to the school. Liang and Warrier found that in order to move within one kilometer of a school ranked 50 places higher, a typical family has to pay a premium of 131,000 Singapore Dollars. This premium costs about 30% more than the average household income, massively pricing out households hoping to send their children to higher-ranked schools. Not only does one have to pay more to get into a 'good' school, Liang and Warrier also discover massive inequalities in Phase 1 and 2A admissions. Grouping housing prices by Clusters, they find that these better schools in more expensive neighborhoods already have a higher Take-Up Rate (TUR, which is the spaces taken up by the end of 2A). In schools like Nanyang Primary School, children of alumni, management, and staff take up 90% of available seats, severely reducing the enrollment chances of people with no connections to the school. This accentuates the privilege of elites in propping up the futures of their children, undermining meritocracy while marching steadily towards 'parentocracy'."

while American college campuses were "awash in moral relativism" as late as the 1980s, a "shame culture" has now taken its place. The subjective morality of yesterday has been replaced by an ethical code that, if violated, results in unmerciful moral crusades on social media. A culture of shame cannot be a culture of total relativism. One must have some moral criteria for which to decide if someone is worth shaming. "Some sort of moral system is coming into place," Brooks says. "Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action." This system is not a reversion to the values that conservatives may wish for. America's new moral code is much different than it was prior to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Instead of being centered on gender roles, family values, respect for institutions and religious piety, it orbits around values like tolerance and inclusion. (This new code has created a paradoxical moment in which all is tolerated except the intolerant and all included except the exclusive.)

Each culture was equal in value and deserved its place in the sun. The villains of history for Herder were the great conquerors, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, or Charlemagne, because they stamped out native cultures. Only what was unique had true value. This was why Herder also opposed the French universalists of the Enlightenment. For him there were few timeless truths: time and place and social life -- what came to be called civil society -- were everything. . . . In Herder, there is nothing about race and nothing about blood. He only spoke about soil, language, common memories, and customs.

In new work in the Journal of Research in Personality, psychologists from the University of Virginia quizzed college students about their geographical preferences and found that introverts prefer the mountains while extroverts prefer the ocean. The researchers found more evidence for this when they looked at who actually lives where: Residents of especially mountainous states were more introverted on average than their counterparts who live in flatter places. This finding is fairly intuitive. In the mountains one can easily find seclusion and isolation. Meanwhile, beaches tend to be crowded places full of seminude strangers, a potentially unappealing scene for introverts but exactly the point for extroverts.

"While today's older generation encountered bumps along the way, for the most part, their expectations were met. They may have made more on capital gains on their homes than from working. They almost surely found that strange, but they willingly accepted the gift of our speculative markets, and often gave themselves credit for buying in the right place at the right time. Today, the expectations of young people, wherever they are in the income distribution, are the opposite. They face job insecurity throughout their lives. On average, many college graduates will search for months before they find a job - often only after having taken one or two unpaid internships. And they count themselves lucky, because they know that their poorer counterparts, some of whom did better in school, cannot afford to spend a year or two without income, and do not have the connections to get an internship in the first place. Today's young university graduates are burdened with debt - the poorer they are, the more they owe. So they do not ask what job they would like; they simply ask what job will enable them to pay their college loans, which often will burden them for 20 years or more. Likewise, buying a home is a distant dream. These struggles mean that young people are not thinking much about retirement. If they did, they would only be frightened by how much they will need to accumulate to live a decent life (beyond bare social security), given the likely persistence of rock-bottom interest rates. In short, today's young people view the world through the lens of intergenerational fairness. The children of the upper middle class may do well in the end, because they will inherit wealth from their parents. While they may not like this kind of dependence, they dislike even more the alternative: a "fresh start" in which the cards are stacked against their attainment of anything approaching what was once viewed as a basic middle-class lifestyle."

Why has housing become so expensive in high-productivity places? It is true that there are geographic constraints (Manhattan isn't getting any bigger) but zoning and other land use restrictions including historical and environmental "protection" are reducing the amount of land available for housing and how much building can be done on a given piece of land. As a result, in places with lots of restrictions on land use increased demand for housing shows up mostly in house prices rather than in house quantities. In the past, when a city like New York became more productive it attracted the poor and rich alike and as the poor moved in more housing was built and the wages and productivity of the poor increased and national inequality declined. Now, when a city like San Jose becomes more productive, people try to move to the city but housing doesn't expand so the price of housing rises and only the highly skilled can live in the city. The end result is high-skilled people living in high-productivity cities and low-skilled people live in low-productivity cities. On a national level, land restrictions mean less mobility, lower national productivity and increased income and geographic inequality.

"Of course, the phrasing of Jen's email was unfortunate, but really, if I wanted to sell bak kwa (pork jerky) in Geylang Serai, what would happen? The reality is that commercial establishments target specific demographics, or at least wish to project a certain image of those demographics all the time. Mustafa Centre targets Indians and South Asians. Their webpage notes that their traditional image is "tourists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka, and Asia" (note the order). If I were to try to open a Szechuan Hotpot restaurant there, there is a high chance that I would be turned down, and I can imagine a staff member telling me that "We are not so keen to have a Szechuan Hotpot Restaurant as our target audience are mainly of South Asian descent". Golden Mile has a Thai branding. A proposal to house a Szechuan Hotpot restaurant would probably be similarly rejected. Meanwhile, *Scape targets youth - if I wanted to set up a gout clinic there I would probably be turned away. Of course, one might be concerned if minorities were unable to find any place to sell their wares (or similar opportunities to be seen in the public domain) but this is assuredly not the case: Jen offered Century Square as an alternative venue for Ms Hairul. Interestingly, it has 10 Halal certified eating places versus Tampines 1's 2. Perhaps the saddest part of this whole episode is that, as someone observed, "This is going to set up a perverse incentive for people NOT to want to work with folks like this because they are too much drama.""

"The biggest and most direct lesson of the Quebec initiative is that creating high-quality education programs at a large scale is difficult. Over the first 10 years of the program, the number of places for kids in high-standards preschools did increase dramatically. But even so, only half of Quebec children were served by such institutions. At the same time, it turns out that low-quality child care isn't just worse than high-quality child care. It's worse than no child care"

Students today are taught critical thinking - concerned with evaluation and the finality of judgment. Our model argumentative essays hew to a strict structure and carry a strong thesis. If we're made to consider the opposing perspective, it's often as a straw man to be defeated with a counterargument. In and out of school, we're reminded that it is the forceful speaker who is rewarded, not the thoughtful vacillator. To get our children started on the route of conflict resolution, we need to teach them the long-lost skills of perspective-taking, intellectual empathy, and probing to understand each other. This is where we have to marshal the considerable resources of our schools and teachers. From Humanities and GP classes to debate and drama clubs, schools abound with potential avenues to bring out our inner vacillator. One activity I conduct is to have the class arrange themselves in single file, according to how extreme their views are about a particular controversy. (This assumes that this controversy has two extremes.) Then, I get individuals on each side to pair up with their opposite number and discuss their respective points of view. This exposes students to alternative perspectives, and, if done well, coaxes our inner vacillator out of its hiding place: "I guess there might be more than one way of thinking of this issue…"

When asked "Where are you from?" almost no one would answer "Europe," because after 50 years of assiduous labor by the eurocrats, Europe remains a continent, not an identity. As Matthew Yglesiaspoints out, an EU-wide soccer team would be invincible -- but who would root for it? These sorts of tribal affiliations cause problems, obviously, which is why elites were so eager to tamp them down. Unfortunately, they are also what glues polities together, and makes people willing to sacrifice for them. Trying to build the state without the nation has led to the mess that is the current EU. And to Thursday's election results. Elites missed this because they're the exception -- the one group that has a transnational identity. And in fact the arguments for the EU look a lot like the old arguments for national states: a project that will empower people like us against the scary people who aren't.

one may wonder whether it is really necessary for us to ask people as often as we do what sex they are. On the Internet, we frequently interact with people without knowing their gender. Some people place high value on controlling what information about them is made public, so why do we force them, in so many situations, to say if they are male or female? Is the desire for such information a residue of an era in which women were excluded from a wide range of roles and positions, and thus denied the privileges that go with them? Perhaps eliminating the occasions on which this question is asked for no good reason would not only make life easier for those who can't be squeezed into strict categories, but would also help to reduce inequality for women. It could also prevent injustices that occasionally arise for men, for example, in the provision of parental leave.

"WELCOME to the Hidden History of the Berkeley Campus, a project of the Gay Bears! Collection in The University Archives. This site gathers together information about the history of sexual minorities at Cal -- students, faculty, staff and visitors. It is designed as a gateway for further exploration into one aspect of the long and fascinating story of the University of California, Berkeley. You may browse the content on this site by: Dates Places People and Events Questions, comments and feedback regarding this website are welcome. Please contact us at the Gay Bears! Collection. Unless otherwise specified, all contents copyright the Regents of the University of California."

"naturalism is a philosophy, not an objective truth. Badinter describes how ethological studies (such as those conducted by primatologist Sarah Hrdy) have been driven by an ideological conviction that females, across species, possess an innate "maternal instinct". The naturalist psychologist John Bowlby has tried to show that attachment behaviours in human mothers and children are instinctive and uniquely female. The field of ecology has provided the backdrop for widespread mistrust of infantile exposure to "unnatural" substances, such as epidurals in childbirth, immunisations and chemicals in baby bottles. But there are problems. First, this research has failed to produce a clear, incontrovertible picture of what, if anything, constitutes innate or "natural" mothering behaviour. Second, it is not a given that, because something is "natural", we should submit to or encourage it (the Enlightenment's achievements were founded on attempts to control and supersede nature). And, third, there is not much evidence that the behaviours celebrated by naturalists create healthier, happier children or parents. Even claims that breastfeeding boosts immunity in industrial nations or raises IQ are not on solid ground."

"Rape is a heinous crime, and many people believe the conduct and outcome of rape cases insufficiently reflect this heinousness. As a result, rape complainants are treated differently; distinct rules of evidence have been developed; and measures to tackle rape myths are in place. But is all this helpful? Rape is a serious crime but is it a special crime, demanding special treatment? Do our rule of law and fairness pay a price? In this first debate in LSE Department of Law's 'Debating Law' series, LSE academic Helen Reece leads a debate on whether or not rape is in this sense special. Nazir Afzal is chief crown prosecutor for CPS North West. Barbara Hewson is a barrister in Hardwicke Chambers. Helen Reece is reader of Law at LSE. Jennifer Temkin is a professor at City Law School."

""While every parent has a responsibility to support their kids to the best of their ability, the tools developed in the 1990s are designed for people who have money," Vicki Turetsky, the commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, told the Times. "Jail is appropriate for someone who is actively hiding assets, not appropriate for someone who couldn't pay the order in the first place." A 2011 Supreme Court ruling has already held that no one should be jailed unless they actually have the ability to pay their debts. But that ruling isn't always followed by the courts. And the definition of what it means to be able to pay your debts can vary. The Times notes that in some jurisdictions, the judgment of how much someone needs to pay isn't based on their actual income but on their hypothetical income "if they had a full-time, minimum wage or median wage job.""

Simply put, the rich place a much lower value on equality than the rest. What's more, this lack of concern about inequality among the elite is not a partisan matter. Even when they self-identify as progressive Democrats, elite Americans value equality less highly than their middle-class compatriots.