The growing complexity of computer software has direct implications for our global safety and security, particularly as the physical objects upon which we depend – things like cars, airplanes, bridges, tunnels, and implantable medical devices – transform themselves into computer code. Physical things are increasingly becoming information technologies. Cars are ”computers we ride in,” and airplanes are nothing more than “flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems.” As all this code grows in size and complexity, so too do the number of errors and software bugs. According to a study by Carnegie Mellon University, commercial software typically has twenty to thirty bugs for every thousand lines of code – 50 million lines of code means 1 million to 1.5 million potential errors to be exploited. This is the basis for all malware attacks that take advantage of these computer bugs to get the code to do something it was not originally intended to do. As computer code grows more elaborate, software bugs flourish and security suffers, with increasing consequences for society at large.

A significant challenge arises when we ask whether there is any such thing as general aptitude. Many people are terrific at calculus but couldn’t write a good essay or paint a good picture if their lives depended on it. Some people can walk into a room full of strangers and immediately figure out the relationships and feelings among them; others may never learn this skill. As Will Rogers put it, “Everybody is ignorant, only on different topics.” Clearly, individuals vary in their aptitude for learning any specific type of knowledge or skill taught in a specific way. A hundred students attending a lecture on a topic they knew nothing about beforehand will all walk away with different amounts and kinds of learning, and aptitude for that particular content and that particular teaching method is one important factor in explaining these differences. But would the students who learned the most in this class also learn the most if the lecture were on a different topic or if the same material were presented through hands-on experiences or in small groups?

While media are a significant cause of change in the social order, rarely are they the only one, or largest one. Thus, while the emergence of television likely contributed to changing notions of childhood, several other sociocultural factors may have strengthened this process. One particularly relevant factor has been ________. Unlike the traditional “top-down” family communication style of the 1950s, today’s parents negotiate with their children about what they may and must do, and both parties have a say in the outcome. Parents feel it is important to involve their children in family decisions so that they can learn to make choices and develop their identities. The parental motto has changed from “behave yourself” to “be yourself.” Parents are more indulgent, feel guilty more often, and want the best for their children. They want to be “cool” parents, more their children’s friends than authority figures.

Many aspects of an ant’s appearance have likely evolved to meet a specific lifestyle requirement, although the extent to which this is true has not been fully explored for all aspects of its body structure. Adaptations could be due to environment, available food, or predators. Long legs and large eyes are commonly seen in ground-foraging ants that need to move quickly to avoid predators in open ground or be the first to acquire a food resource. In contrast, ants that forage and nest in leaf litter have shorter legs and antennae, alongside small eyes. This makes sense in the dark environment of leaf litter where moving through small spaces is easier with a compact body plan. Based on the unique combination of body size measurements, scientists can predict where an ant nests and forages or even what kind of food it eats. Predators have longer, flatter mandibles, while omnivores—those eating a diverse range of foods—have shorter, curved mandibles.

Consider a bar of soap, the kind you keep by the bathroom sink to wash your hands and face. How much meaning could such an innocuous object contain? While it may be tempting to answer “not much,” or even “none,” in fact, even soap can embody a rich set of symbols. Think about a particular brand of soap. By itself, that soap cleans like any other soap. But through some clever marketing, packaging, and advertising, the brand immerses its soap in a complex set of messages about the environment, personal empowerment, and progressive politics. The brand’s website even says, “We are committed to animal protection, environmental protection and respect for human rights.” These meanings allow the brand’s customers to do more with the soap than just clean their faces: By using these products, they can make a statement about what kind of person they are and what kind of politics they embrace.

One implication of expectancy theory is that even though all students should have a chance to be rewarded if they do their best, no student should have an easy time achieving the maximum reward. This principle is violated by traditional grading practices, because some students find it easy to earn A’s and B’s, whereas others believe that they have little chance of academic success no matter what they do. In this circumstance, neither high achievers nor low achievers are likely to exert their best efforts. This is one reason why it is important to reward students for effort, for doing better than they have done in the past, or for making progress, rather than only for getting a high score. For example, students can build a portfolio of compositions, projects, reports, or other work and can then see how their work is improving over time. Not all students are equally capable of exerting effort, exceeding their own past performance, or making progress, so these are often better, more equally available criteria on which to base reward.

Your anxiety most likely has genetic roots. For example, many people that I treat at my center tend to have a family history of phobias, panic attack struggles, or obsessive compulsive disorder. The genetic connection can be close and ①evident, like a parent, or less direct, like a second aunt or a great grandfather. To put it simply, this means that those with anxious wiring tend to be more likely to ②enjoy  potential anxiety issues than those without. However, this ③tendency for developing an anxiety issue by no means suggests that it’s a foregone conclusion. It just means the table has been set, should you take certain actions to sit down and eat! This is similar in some way to someone with a genetic predisposition toward alcohol abuse. Even though the ④attraction might be strong, you only become an alcoholic once you ⑤misuse alcohol.

We come into the world ready to start relationships and, as we gain control of our body, we’re keen to take part in games and tasks that involve working with others. In this way, we’re so different from young chimps. Experiments have shown chimps can understand collaborative tasks perfectly well, but they only bother to take part if they can see how it will result in their getting a piece of fruit or some other reward. Humans, by contrast, often work together just for the joy of it. Experiments have shown that working with others affects children’s behavior. Afterward, they’re more generous in sharing any treats the experimenters give them—as if working with others has put them in a better mood. It seems unlikely that children’s greater willingness to share is simply the result of learning that they should pay people for working with them, but the way we feel about everything is strongly influenced by the experiences that shaped the development of our brain. Our childhood observations of others don’t just help us learn how to behave; they help us understand how we’re supposed to feel.

How much time are we spending not truly ①linked to other things or people, in the analogue or real sense of the word? Not much. We have turned ourselves into human wearables, attached to our phones nonstop, with additional sensors from our smart watches and AI assistant devices, while we patiently await to upload our memories, fantasies, and consciousness to the cloud. In a relatively ②brief time frame, we quickly transitioned from the internet to the internet of things and now the “You of Things,” a concept that sees our bodies as part of an ③vast sentient digital network, and our entire existence ④upgraded to the status of our smart TVs and refrigerator. Since our elves have been largely ⑤diminished to the digital fragments of our reputation captured in the many devices that connect us to others and the world, it is hard to disagree with Yuval Harari’s argument that “we are becoming tiny chips inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands.”

It is uncontroversially true that people in different societies have different customs and different ideas about right and wrong. There is no world consensus on which actions are right and wrong, even though there is a considerable overlap between views on this. If we consider how much moral views have changed both from place to place and from age to age it can be tempting to think that there are no absolute moral facts, but rather that morality is always relative to the society in which you have been brought up. On such a view, since slavery was morally acceptable to most Ancient Greeks but is not to most Europeans today, slavery was right for the Ancient Greeks but would be wrong for today’s Europeans. This view, known as moral relativism, makes morality simply a description of the values held by a particular society at a particular time. This is a meta-ethical view about the nature of moral judgements. Moral judgements can only be judged true or false relative to a particular society. There are no absolute moral judgements: they are all relative.