When computer games appeared, men were their target comsumer. Games were created for men, and the main characters in games—protagonists—were mostly men too. Women were mostly presented as characters who needed help. For instance, Mario and Princess Peach.
Recently, the gaming industry has started targeting women too. More female protagonists are appearing.
Look at the graphs below and discuss them with your teacher.
Vaccines can be a controversial issue in some cultures. For instance, according to the Washington Post, in the United States, 9 per cent of adults oppose vaccinating children against measles. Also, many people believe that the coronavirus vaccines are not safe.
Countries have different policies regarding whether it should be mandatory to vaccinate children. Have a look at the map below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
According to the National Geographic Society, Earth now has a new ocean: the Southern Ocean.
Geographers have debated whether the waters around Antarctica had enough unique characteristics to deserve their own name, or whether they were simply cold, southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.
With a range stretching the circumference of Antarctica to the 60-degrees South latitudinal line, the Southern Ocean “encompasses unique and fragile marine ecosystems that are home to wonderful marine life such as whales, penguins, and seals,” explains National Geographic’s Enric Sala. The region includes such creatures as migrating humpback whales and many different seabirds.
According to the Japan Times, the Japanese government plans to encourage firms to allow their employees to choose to work four days a week instead of five, aiming to improve the balance between work and life for people who have family care responsibilities.
The coronavirus pandemic has helped the idea of a four-day workweek gain traction as the health crisis has caused people to spend more time at home.
Experts are divided, however, on whether the new initiative, intended to address challenges posed by Japan’s labor shortage, will be widely accepted. Labor and management are both voicing concerns about possible unwanted outcomes.
For employers, while people working four days a week may become more motivated, this may not improve their productivity enough to compensate for the lost workday. An expected advantage is helping people with family care responsibilities avoid the need to quit their jobs.
According to The Guardian, the renowned Swiss architect Le Corbusier developed a system that has shaped much of the world. It dictates everything from the height of a door handle to the scale of a staircase. But the system, Le Modulor, developed in the 1940s, was created with a handsome six-foot-tall British policeman in mind. So all sizes are governed by the need to make everything as convenient as possible for Le Corbusier’s ideal man.
The system's influence even extended to the size of city blocks, since these responded to the size and needs of the car the ideal man drove to work.
By the 1980s, some women had had enough. After decades of struggling with prams and shopping trolleys, navigating dark underpasses, blind alleyways and subways in the cities mostly made by men, it was time for a different approach.
In 2017, Shanna Swan and Hagai Levine, along with six other researchers, estimated the average sperm count for 43,000 men in 55 countries across the world. The data, from 185 previously published studies, suggest that sperm counts fell by about 25% between 1973 and 2011. They found that sperm counts had in fact fallen by about 50% in Western countries over the period. Although the data were less plentiful, similar trends were observed in developing countries, too.
Please have a look at the chart below and discuss what you see with your teacher.
National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly-funded American news organization, held an interview with the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami about his new collection of stories, First Person Singular. In this collection, Murakami writes in the first-person singular “I” perspective.
Murakami said, "There's a long tradition in modern Japanese literature of the autobiographical, so-called I-novel, the idea that sincerity lies in honestly and openly writing about your life, making a kind of self-confession. I'm opposed to that idea and wanted to create my own 'first personal singular' writing."
Murakami goes on to explain that he often writes characters based on his personal experiences and rewrites them multiple times to the point that the experiences become fictional and hard to recognize from his own life.
The idea of "peak experiences" was created by psychologist Abraham Maslow in the mid-20th century. Such experiences inspire feelings of intense happiness. They are said to give you a sense that you're one with all of creation.
I've had a few peak experiences. The one I think about the most happened about 20 years ago. At the time I lived in the southwest desert of the United States. About an hour from our home was a small lake called Whitewater Draw where tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes spend the winter. Sandhill cranes are the oldest living bird species, going back at least 2.5 million years. I used to go visit them every year.
According to The Economist, in April 2021, Apple, which supplies one-fifth of the world’s smartphones and around half of the United States', introduced a software update that will end targeted advertisement by companies. Its latest mobile operating system forces apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. Many are expected to decline. It is the latest privacy move forcing marketers to rethink how they target online ads.
By micro-profiling audiences and monitoring their behavior, digital-ad platforms claim to solve advertisers’ problem of not knowing which half of their budget is being wasted. According to Group M, the world’s largest media buyer, in the past decade, digital ads have gone from less than 20% of the global ad market to more than 60%.
Vaccination against the COVID-19 virus started in December 2020. It has progressed at an unequal rate around the world. As of late April 2021, only a few million people had received a vaccination in the whole of the African continent, while over 200 million Americans had been vaccinated.
However, for some smaller countries, the situation can change very quickly.
Please take a look at the graph below and discuss what you see with your teacher. 
According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), people often think they are better listeners than in actuality. They believe good listening means just a few things: not talking when others are speaking, letting others know you are listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds (e.g., Mm-hmm), and being able to repeat what others have said.
HBR analyzed data describing the behavior of 3,492 participants in a development program designed to help managers become better coaches. The study concluded that good listening is much more than being silent while the other person talks.
People perceive the best listeners to be those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight. Good listening also includes interactions that build a person’s self-esteem. The best listeners make the conversation a positive experience for the other party, which does not happen when the listener is passive.
According to Shape of Life, an online resource on everything related to animals, the Anomalocaris (ah-NOM-ah-LAH-kariss), from the Greek meaning “unusual shrimp”, was a major predator of the ancient seas during the Cambrian Explosion 530 million years ago.
It grew up to 182 centimetres (almost 6 feet) long and had eyes with thousands of lenses, which gave the Anomalocaris extremely sharp vision. It was a fast swimmer, and once it caught up to its prey, the creature could grab it using front limbs equipped with sharp spikes on each segment. This combination of excellent vision, speed and spiky front arms would have made it a formidable predator.
The Anomalocaris’ mouth was composed of 32 overlapping plates. Some scientists interpret this as meaning that it could easily crush prey.
Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas has designed a high-tech face mask that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Called Xupermask, it has three dual-speed fans to keep you cool, and a design to keep you looking cool. The real money-grabbers are noise-canceling headphones, LED lights for nighttime, and Bluetooth capability. You can listen to music, take and make calls, and put on your own light show while wearing this thing. It doesn't come cheap, but at $299, it costs less than a set of Bose headphones, and a lot less than a mobile phone! And you can use the Xupermask for both, with a bonus face mask thrown in.
The look of the Xupermask was designed by Jose Fernandez. He created Elon Musk's spacesuits, and Marvel characters' costumes in the Avengers, Black Panther, and X-Men 2. So you know it's going to look out of this world.
Bloomberg News reports that according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index, which polled 30,000 people from a variety of companies in 31 countries and used trillions of data points, the majority of workers feel they are struggling or just surviving in pandemic work conditions and a large percentage are considering leaving their employer this year.
Nearly half of respondents said they are planning to move to a new location this year, which reflects the greater flexibility of working from home. Also, 41% of those surveyed said they're mulling leaving their jobs. The data found that burnout is widespread: 54% of workers said they are overworked and 39% said they are exhausted.
Here in Melbourne, Australia, we are heading into the colder months.
Daylight Saving has just ended, so we moved our clocks back an hour. On the plus side, we all got an extra hour of sleep over the weekend. But it also means the sun sets an hour earlier.
If I want to catch the daylight, I have to walk the dog earlier. I also have to put better lights on my bicycle because I'm cycling more often around twilight and dusk.
But as a Canadian, I love this cool weather. I love crisp autumn mornings and wearing sweaters in the evening. I can go for a run without constantly worrying about dehydration. It is all much more familiar than the typical Australian summer with sweltering days and warm nights.
So I'm happy to bid farewell to the summer and start these cooler, shorter days. I know a lot of people feel differently. To each their own!
"Prepare for warp speed." If you're a Trekkie or Star Wars fan, and maybe even if you're not, you've heard about warp drives and probably dreamed of being able to travel faster than the speed of light. It seemed like the stuff of fantasy—until now. Physicist Erik Lentz has come up with a theoretical model of a warp drive that would shorten a trip to the star Proxima Centauri, the closest star beyond our solar system, from 50,000–70,000 years using rocket fuel, or 100 years using nuclear fuel, to just 4 years and 3 months.
The English National Opera (ENO) has teamed up with a London hospital to teach breathing techniques to people recovering from COVID-19. One of the common lingering effects of the virus is difficulty breathing. Proper breathing is essential for opera singers, so they're in a unique position to help patients recover.
When in-house opera concerts were cancelled due to the pandemic, the ENO wanted to find other ways to use their skills to help others. They realized they are experts in breathing, so they created a 6-week program, called ENO Breathe, that uses therapeutic techniques reworked by singers. The techniques help restore lung capacity, as well as lessen anxiety through deep breathing exercises.
Languages generally develop organically, following changes in culture. But sometimes we have to purposefully change our language to create the culture we need.
Take, for example, sexism. In English, seeing the masculine form of a word—e.g., adding "-man" to a job title, and using he/him/his pronouns—as neutral had been accepted as the norm since the 19th century and still often is. In the 1970s, however, women began to demand equal representation in all things, and that meant in the language, too.
Studies have shown that people are influenced by the words they see. In one study, people were asked to read a story with the following sentences in it:
“The foreman reassured himself he had made the right decision.”
"The foreman reassured herself she had made the right decision.”
An interesting situation has emerged in the American stock market. It has caused the stock of several companies to be extremely volatile.
Hedge funds in the US have opened so many short positions—basically, they have bet that stock prices will fall. Now it is believed that they have short sold more than the number of shares available on the market.
However, savvy retail traders noticed this. They started to buy up these shares in large volumes in the hope to push up the price.
Trading has been so aggressive that the share prices have wildly fluctuated and multiple brokers have been refusing to even allow purchases. The situation has gotten lots of attention, with multiple members of congress showing interest in the behaviors of brokers and hedge funds. Some have called for congressional inquiries.
It isn't clear what the aftermath will be. Only time will tell.
Human beings are flawed. So no system of defense that depends on human action is going to be able to protect us 100% of the time. But we can prevent most problems. In 1990, Professor James Reason came up with the "Swiss Cheese model" to create defenses that are hard to break through.
Think about Swiss cheese—it has lots of holes in it, right? Well, the Swiss Cheese defense model takes the "holes", or human flaws, into account by using several layers of defense. Each layer has holes, but not every layer has the same holes. So, put enough different layers together and there won't be a complete series of holes that line up to allow something through. Each human failure will be blocked by other successes.
