Word: task
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Unfortunately, our puny human brains aren't particularly up to the task. Go back thousands of years and think about the simpler times of human existence. "We had a few friends; we had to be scared of a few animals. A trillion didn't come up very often," says Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos, whose book Innumeracy addresses the topic. "There is a sense that when numbers are too big or too small, the brain just shuts off," says Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at the California Institute of Technology. "People either don't think about...
...tendency to glorify the past: "Do not hold yourself to a mythologized standard of the past in which everyone's attention was focused on only one task at a time. It turns out that when researchers studied engineers working in the early 1990s (before the BlackBerry era but after the advent of computers in their profession), the average time they spent focusing on a given task was about six seconds. They didn't have email to check, but they did have lots of other multitasking possibilities. Why only six seconds? Maybe this time limit is inherent to the nature...
President Obama therefore will need urgently to paint his vision of a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, summoning all leaders of goodwill to the task--perhaps suggesting they convene in Washington to declare their common intent. He will need to announce a series of mechanisms for achieving it, including: resumption of Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations, rebuilding of the West Bank and Gaza economies and PA security capabilities, initiation of U.S.-sponsored direct negotiations between Israel and Syria, and operationalizing the Arab League peace initiative. And he should put this into the even larger context of his efforts...
Harry Mattison, a member of the Harvard Allston Task Force who runs a blog that has featured discussion of Harvard’s purchases in the past, voiced concerns about the transparency of such acquisition techniques...
...where I want to go, I'm a big believer in staying on task and doing a good job in the position you've been given. And who knows what the future may hold...