Nature is changing with the explosive growth in urban populations and cities have to deal with transformations in nature. While it pays too much attention to technology, smart cities research barely gives a nod to climate change, which is already influencing urbanites with more intense storms, flooding, record-breaking temperatures resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases and burning forests. As I write this in the summer of 2018, intense heat has made the season unbearable, and often life-threatening, for millions of city dwellers. Moreover, drought endangers the habitability of more of the earth’s surface, unprecedented fires are burning across California and British Columbia, monumental floods have drowned hundreds and made climate migrants of millions in India’s Kerala state, and a rare hurricane has pounded Hawaii. The first wave of what most experts believe will be catastrophic climate change appears to have arrived.

The proliferation of data brings with it many challenges for both reporting and consuming information. Social networks themselves are biased by their constituents, which never exactly mirror the population at large. Certain ethnicities are overrepresented, a significant challenge to social news as an equalizer. In addition, a growing number of algorithms make automated decisions on which content to recommend for people to read. Algorithms are generating top-news lists or hot trends and personalizing recommendations for readers. Algorithms leave the impression of being neutral, yet they are not. Algorithms are human creations. They encode political choices of their designers and have cultural values baked in. As curatorial power is enhanced by automated systems, we should understand the biases at play. Perhaps more important, we should work to make sure product engineers and designers are seeking to optimize the wanted outcome—an informed public—not just heightened traffic.

Athletes do require more protein (and all nutrients) than sedentary people, but there is no evidence that they require a higher percentage of protein compared to other macronutrients in their diet to perform more optimally. To put it another way, a diet with 10 percent protein is sufficient for most people, athlete and nonathlete alike. If an average adult female eats 2,000 calories, 10 percent is 200 calories from protein. If an average female athlete eats 3,000 calories, 10 percent is 300 calories from protein—that’s a 50 percent increase in protein achieved by simply eating more of the same foods. So when you exercise, you don’t need to change the composition of the food (i.e., consuming foods with higher concentrations of protein or consuming protein powders). You just need to ________. The increased athletic activity will work up your hunger drive. In response, you will consume more protein as well as nutrients of all types. This works well since physical activity likely requires more of all nutrients, not just protein.

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.

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 ________, software bugs flourish and security suffers, with increasing consequences for society at large.

As students move into adolescence, they are developing capabilities for abstract thinking and understanding the perspectives of others. Even greater physical changes are taking place as the students approach puberty. So, with developing minds and bodies, young adolescents must confront the central issue of constructing an identity that will provide a firm basis for adulthood. They have been developing a sense of self since infancy. But adolescence marks the first time that a conscious effort is made to answer the now-pressing question: “Who am I?” The conflict defining this stage is identity versus role confusion. Identity refers to the organization of an individual’s drives, abilities, beliefs, and history into a consistent image of self. It involves deliberate choices and decisions, particularly about work, values, ideology, and commitments to people and ideas. If adolescents fail to integrate all these aspects and choices, or if they feel unable to choose at all, role confusion threatens.

Spectators are seen as a source of drive arousal. This heightened state of arousal is presumed to facilitate the performance of well-learned or simple skills. However, if a skill is not well-learned or complex, the increase in arousal will interfere with its performance.

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, ②connected 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 short time frame, we quickly ③shifted from the internet to the internet of things and now the “You of Things,” a concept that sees our bodies as part of an ④vast sentient digital network, and our entire existence ⑤upgraded to the status of our smart TVs and refrigerator. Since our elves have been largely reduced 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.”

On one level, it is helpful for individuals to identify which kind of ethical system they have and which kind they admire. Immanuel Kant takes it one step further, adding an unusual rule for a deontologist. He believed that you can and should test your decisions for moral and ethical soundness and outlined a thought experiment he called the Categorical Imperative to help you do just that. When considering any course of action, ask yourself, “Would I want everyone else, if placed in my position, to do the same thing?” If the answer is yes, you’re on the right path. If the answer is no, then don’t do it yourself. For example, while you can easily imagine a situation in which it might be to your advantage to lie, you would not want everyone to lie, so you should not lie yourself.

He came up with several instances where we instinctively realize that someone doesn’t really know something, even though that person’s belief is both true and justified.