Payless stores are closing shop and many of their outlets are just waiting for their stocks to be sold, marking them down regularly. So when Susan Cook and Patrick Riordan went to buy a pair of shoes, they had an idea. They decided to buy all the Payless shoes in the Hamilton Marketplace branch in order to donate them to charity.

"I started talking to the manager, and he was saying that it had been months and they wanted to close already, they just wanted to shut down and move on with their lives,” said Riordan.

While the couple eyed the aisles of discounted women’s shoes, inspiration struck.

“It just came to me,” Riordan recalled. “I said, ‘What if we buy everything here? What if we shut this down now?’ And, then, I thought, ‘We could donate everything to a women’s shelter.'"

Read more of the story on the Philadelphia Inquirer.

(Image credit: Susan Cook)

In 1988, S. Norman Feingold predicted what kind of jobs we would have in the future, a lot of which exist today. Now, job experts have taken in all the data and trends in the workplace right now and expect that there will be some oddly interesting jobs opening up by 2030.

In a report called Signs of the Times: Expert insights about employment in 2030, the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship — a policy institute set up to help Canadians navigate the innovation economy — brings together insights into the future of work gleaned from workshops held across the country.

The report coming out Monday is part of a bigger project called Employment in 2030. This deep dive into the future of work will culminate next year with a strategic forecast into which skills will be most important in the Canadian labour market in the coming decade.

Of course, these predictions are based on what the needs of the market will be in the future and what kind of habits people will have. One possible job that experts believe might be created in the future is called "wisdom services" which would teach children skills necessary to deal with the real world, away from their computer screens and smartphones.

"Participants felt that kids, in particular, were getting worse at interactions and at knowing how to deal with certain situations." As a result, schools could morph the usual guidance counselling, which typically centres around helping teens pick classes and career paths, into a more holistic form of mentorship, she said.

Others include an expansion on technology-related careers with one job being particularly intriguing: dark web detective. As people become more adept with programming, systems and networks, and computing in general, we will see more transactions being done online. So it would make sense for people to have the skills to track illegal or covert activities being done on the web.

Cybersecurity is also a career with increasing demand as the amount of data we create and store increases as well. There will be people tasked to protect these data sort of like personal data bodyguards, keeping them away from prying eyes, big corporations, or even governments.

As society continues to change and be shaped by the developments of technology and shifts in behavior, new careers and jobs will emerge. So we just need to be flexible and continue to learn and adapt to these changing landscapes.

(Image credit: John Schnobrich/Unsplash)

A new study has found that children may not have the kind of affinity to nature as adults would, suggesting that the love of nature isn't inherent but rather more of an acquired preference which gradually develops with age.

“We hypothesized that the kids would prefer nature because adults overwhelmingly do,” said UChicago doctoral student Kim Lewis Meidenbauer, lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. “We were incredibly surprised to find evidence to the contrary.”

The researchers had controlled for various factors that might influence the preferences of the participants such as aesthetic preferences unrelated to natural or urban environments. They also considered whether one's preference might be affected by how much one is exposed to the specific environment. And they found that "children’s preferences were not related to the amount of time they spent outdoors in natural environments."

It's interesting because a lot of children nowadays grow up without experiencing the outdoors as much. While being used to urban environments might affect children's preferences, the data doesn't really explain why children would prefer urban settings more than natural ones.

The scholars have not yet identified an obvious cause for why children’s preferences counter those of adults. One theory is that the children are influenced by their parents, and that those influences may take time to manifest. That idea is bolstered by the researchers’ data, which show that older children’s preferences increasingly mirrored those of their parents.

One thing that the study does show is that preferences can change over time and it is possible that as children grow older, they would start to develop preferences for nature. But there might be other factors contributing to that shift as well so further research may be needed to verify such claims.

(Image credit: Joseph Gonzalez/Unsplash)

Studying the way our visual perception works has helped Yuqing Zhu understand how it is invariably linked with how artists use the visual medium to convey abstract concepts and ideas especially in surrealist art.

Though she is currently taking a doctoral degree in neuroscience, Zhu has been an artist since she was a child. Most of her artwork now focuses on exploring her Chinese heritage inspired by the images and stories she grew up hearing from her parents and grandparents. It's a way for her to rediscover her identity. And with the insights she gained from her studies in neuroscience, she is able to add another layer onto the art she creates.

When she came to the United States at seven years old, Zhu prioritized fitting in at school in North Carolina, where she lived for a year before moving to Cupertino, California.

“At the time, I was very focused on not being Chinese,” she said. “I feel like I robbed myself of something that I had, and now in creating art I’m trying to regain it.”

“My heritage impacts who I am and how other people see me. It may impact what kind of artwork people expect me to create.”

A childhood Chinese art teacher influenced Zhu’s work as well. The “old school” instructor made her draw at easels for hours, rarely giving compliments. She now uses paper and graphite to make realistic drawings on paper, but mixes in atypical loose pigments such as pots of eyeshadow—softer than pastels, and good for adding a flush of color to the skin.

“He taught me a lot of discipline, to really love creating, and really good technique,” Zhu said.

(Image credit: Yuqing Zhu)

Waiting in line at the airport is stressful especially if it takes more than an hour just to get your luggages screened. Many passengers have been annoyed with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for these lines that seem to go on forever, when they simply need to check your bags.

Which is why it must have been a pleasant surprise for many fliers who go to LAX to find that the waiting times at the TSA lines have improved over the years.

Passenger rights groups and veteran fliers have given the TSA and industry players credit for keeping wait times in check.

“They seem to be adopting the kind of staffing policies that fast-food restaurants use, which is to bring in more people on peak times,” said Paul Hudson, president of Flyers Rights, a nonprofit passenger advocacy group with more than 60,000 members. “I think they’ve finally improved.”

Richard and Gail Grenier of Yorba Linda recently flew out of LAX to Paris and noticed the TSA lines were a few minutes shorter than in the past.

“It wasn’t bad at all,” Richard Grenier said.

Karen Corcoran, a retiree from Huntington Beach who regularly flies out of LAX to vacation in the U.S. and abroad, said she has also noticed an improvement at TSA checkpoints. “I think it has gotten a little better over the years,” she said.

As mentioned, one of the main factors as to how LAX was able to actually make the TSA lines shorter despite the growing demand is the change in staffing policies as well as an increase in the number of screeners being hired by the TSA.

Apart from those improvements, LAX has also acquired more advanced screening technology and added several automated screening lanes so that more passengers may be accommodated especially during the peak times. Not only that, traffic on the road may also be helping shorten the queues inside LAX.

One of the factors that is most frustrating about flying out of LAX — vehicular traffic — may also be helping to keep checkpoint wait times down, Jeffries said. LAX fliers know that traffic is often heavy and unpredictable, so they arrive at the airport extra early, which helps to flatten the spikes in passengers at the TSA checkpoints.

Overall, the TSA has been doing a better job at keeping these lines at bay and making passengers' lives just a little bit easier.

(Image credit: Al Seib/LA Times)

Drive-thrus have made it easier for us to get our fast food on the go. It's just a simple three-step process and you don't have to get out of your car to do it. However, things are looking bleak for drive-thrus in the city of Minneapolis as it has recently banned the building of drive-thru windows as an initiative to reduce emissions, noise, and pedestrian accidents.

They specifically state vehicle emissions will be reduced, but no doubt human flatulence inside cars will also fall given this new ruling. Either way, this could be the first roll of the snowball that could see drive-thrus being a thing of the past.

Following a city council vote, members have voted to update zoning laws that will ban the construction of any new drive-thru windows in America’s 46th largest city. The Minneapolis City Council declared the zoning change will help achieve the city’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent come 2050.

-via BBC

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Trying to find events out in space is tedious because you wouldn't know if what you've found is the actual thing or if it's just noise. But on August 14, astronomers might have picked up a possible collision between a black hole and a neutron star which would be the third of its kind to be detected with gravitational waves.

The detection, called S190814bv, was likely triggered by the merger of a black hole and a neutron star, the ultra-dense leftovers of an exploded star. Though astronomers have long expected such binary systems to exist, they’ve never been seen by telescopes scanning the heavens for different wavelengths of light.

Though detectors also picked up signs of a neutron star-black hole merger on April 26, researchers say that S190814bv is far more compelling. The April event has a one-in-seven chance of being noise from Earth, and false alarms akin to the April signal are expected to pop up once every 20 months. But S190814bv almost certainly came from beyond our planet, and to see a false alarm resembling S190814bv, the LIGO team estimates that you’d have to wait longer than the age of the universe.

We might not be able to see a collision between a black hole and a neutron star as it happens in a millennia or more, but this gives us hope that as our technology advances and as we continue to venture out into space, we will be able to discover and one day see those events happening in real time. But for now, we can only wait.

(Image credit: Dana Berry/NASA; Wikimedia Commons)

Nobody knows what the Voynich Manuscript says or why it was written in the first place. It includes various illustrations of plants, animals, other symbols, and an as of yet unknown writing system. Many people tried to crack the code but none have been successful. So why are people so obsessed with saying they've solved it?

While it is the mystery of the Voynich that appeals, that grabs and holds the attention of a curious public, undercooked solutions presented without context lead readers down a rabbit hole of misinformation, conspiracy theories and the thoroughly unproductive fetishization of a fictional medieval past, turning an authentic and fascinating medieval manuscript into a caricature of itself.

Basically, we want to recreate the medieval world through our imagination and embed such meanings and connections onto the text where there is none. We want to try and convince ourselves that our ideas about the Voynich are what it is invariably trying to say because we want that fantasy to be true.

When we approach an ancient object such as the Voynich Manuscript, we tend to bring our preconceptions with us to the table. The more we burden the manuscript with what we want it to be, the more buried the truth becomes.

>The missteps of historical preconception are particularly problematic when dealing with the Middle Ages. We watch “Game of Thrones,” we read “Lord of the Rings,” we play medieval-themed video games, and therefore we think we know something about the Middle Ages.

But as it stands, nobody has solved the Voynich Manuscript. And we might not be able to do so if we continue to concoct theories that aren't based on solid evidence.

(Image credit: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library/Wikimedia Commons)

According to reports, Trump has expressed an interest in buying Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory for reasons not yet revealed. Although it is technically part of the North American continent by physical geography, it has been more culturally and politically associated with Europe.

The thing about Trump wanting to buy Greenland is that the island is not for sale. And even if, for some reason or another, the people of Greenland decide to become annexed to the United States, the Danes agree to the union, and America closes on the deal, there are still certain things that need to be considered and discussed. For one, Greenland is a socialist country.

How socialist? Well, private land ownership does not exist in Greenland: All the land is controlled by one of five local kommunes, a word that looks a lot like “commune” but is usually translated into English as the more innocuous “municipality.” Greenlanders neither own nor pay rent for the land they live on.

The ethic of common ownership extends to just about every enterprise in Greenland. The country’s largest fishing company is state-owned. Its largest retailer is state-owned. Its only seal tannery is state-owned. Air Greenland, its flagship carrier, is jointly owned by Greenland, Denmark, and the SAS Group, a semiprivate conglomerate that is itself partially owned by the Danish and Swedish governments.

Still, as Greenland's foreign minister said in a tweet, Greenland is "open for business, nor for sale". So we don't know whether Trump is actually serious about buying Greenland, but for the time being, Greenland has no plans on giving up their island.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When we sign up for new accounts online, sites would usually ask us for our mobile numbers as a means of adding an extra layer of security such as with Google's two-factor authentication, a feature present in many other platforms like Apple and Facebook, in which the site will send you a text message indicating a code you need to input in order for you to log onto the platform.

Despite that, there are potential risks involved with giving out our phone numbers so we need to assess whether the benefits that we will receive would be greater than the risks involved. The New York Times tech columnist Brian Chen asked security researchers to show him what kinds of information will be exposed just by sharing his phone number. And it's astonishing how much they were able to find.

In fact, your phone number may have now become an even stronger identifier than your full name. I recently found this out firsthand when I asked Fyde, a mobile security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to use my digits to demonstrate the potential risks of sharing a phone number.

Emre Tezisci, a security researcher at Fyde with a background in telecommunications, took on the task with gusto. He and I had never met or talked. He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.

With just one's phone number, any hacker could access these information and use that to log onto our accounts and bypass the security questions. More than that, it is also possible for them to pose physical threats, for instance, by going to our home addresses and compromising our security or threatening harm upon us or our family members.

But in our hyperconnected world, we cannot avoid giving out our phone numbers. However, there are instances when it is safe to share phone numbers. To learn more about them, check out Brian Chen's article on The New York Times.

One of the most important events in British history was the Peterloo Massacre in St. Peter's Square in Manchester. At many points in history, sacrifices had to be made in order to attain the freedom and rights that we enjoy today. And the Peterloo Massacre was one of the milestones that would set such political reforms and societal changes in motion.

The bloodbath that happened in Manchester, the Peterloo massacre - as it became known - was, in the words of historian Robert Poole, the 'explosion that made it all possible'.

The killings occurred during a peaceful rally that was uniquely Mancunian, a landmark in the city's proud, rich, independent tradition of fighting for social justice.

And, despite attempts at smear and cover-up made by the authorities at the time, it has gone down in history as one of the most important milestones on Britain's long road to political reform, one that changed the course of history in this country.

Read more about the Peterloo Massacre and the impact it had on British history on Manchester Evening News.

(Image credit: Richard Carlile/Manchester Library Services; Wikimedia Commons)

Researchers nowadays have greater chances to collaborate and share their studies with one another as modern technology and connected networks gives them access to their peers' work. And that has caused the proliferation of more research at a much quicker pace. However, this can also be having the side effect of slowing down innovation in various fields.

Our connected world has allowed researchers to become so tightly networked that they’re falling into the trap of groupthink. That might explain why some researchers seeking cures for Alzheimer’s disease, for example, have conceded that they’ve been throwing years of work and billions of dollars toward a single theory that has failed to lead to any treatment –while ignoring promising alternatives.

Sociologist James Evans of the University of Chicago has concluded that what’s being lost, at least in biomedical research, is scientific independence. Being able to work independently of other labs allows researchers to come up with fresher insights.

Though it is true that a lack of scientific independence could be causing us to produce less original or innovative work, we cannot deny that openness and collaboration with other researchers also help in sparking ideas and giving insights that they need for their respective studies.

Scientists are subject to the same human foibles, but groupthink shouldn’t be conflated with scientific consensus, which is often based on ideas that are backed up by multiple lines of inquiry.

That would include things like the structure of DNA, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the basic physics behind the greenhouse effect. Those are widely accepted now, in part because they were supported by independent, even isolated researchers.

(Image credit: Lucas Vasques/Unsplash)

Seeing people squeeze a salmon through a long tube and watching the fish travel to its destination is one of those oddly satisfying sights on the Internet. Simply dubbed the Fish Tube, the video first posted in 2014 gained a lot of attention again over the weekend.

The maker of the fish tube, a Seattle-based company called Whooshh, calls it a “passage portal” and designed it to move fish and eels around dams. Entire ecosystems and fisheries can be disrupted when a dam blocks a river, creating a demand for creative solutions.

Whooshh’s machinery moves the fish through a pneumatic tube; the tube is made with a flexible proprietary material and filled with mist, allowing for a “frictionless glide” to ease the fish’s passage.

One cannot deny the fact that witnessing the fish's journey from one end of the tube to the other makes you think about it as a metaphor of the existential nature of life.

Yet is there not a strange peace to be found in surrendering to whatever chaos has plucked you from your personal mental river? A salmon in a tube can do nothing but relax while physics does the work; Messina told me that Whooshh can even slow the fish down at trip’s end, the better to insure a smooth splashdown.

Twitter-scrolling and life itself can sometimes feel akin to being throttled through some strange and endless pneumatic tube—would that all our journeys could resolve so gently.

(Image credit: Whooshh Innovations)

As the saying goes, birds of the same feather, flock together. Mel Magazine writer Miles Klee noticed that some of her tall guy friends tend to hang out together and she wondered how such a phenomenon happens so she asked people on Twitter what their thoughts about it was. And several have noticed the same thing as well.

Surely, I thought, I wasn’t choosing my buddies based on their… measurements? Then again, homophily — the attraction to others with traits we share — is a powerful force. When you’re the same height as another person, you’re literally seeing eye-to-eye. And to the (troubling) degree that we link tallness and status, we may be subconsciously drawn, even platonically, to tall dudes.

Though there is no empirical study on the matter, most of the anecdotal evidence shared by other users on Twitter suggest that it's a big plus to have a tall guy in your group. And though people don't usually choose their friends based on their height, there seems to be a natural tendency for people to be part of a group with a normally distributed height range.

Not accounting for slight differences by race, the average American male stands about 5-foot-9, with a normal distribution on either side — plus or minus a few inches, in other words. So if you suddenly realize that you and your boys all fall between this range, it’s no great mystery, but a manifestation of averages.

Beyond the tall cabals, however, you have lopsided cliques: Sometimes an average-height group embraces a token tall guy, and sometimes an average-height guy has many taller friends.

(Image credit: MEL Magazine)

I never noticed until this tweet forced me to notice.

— Eddie Hooper (@Ehooper02) August 14, 2019

My husband and his best friend are both about 6’4” but WEIRDLY they met when they were eleven, and thus not yet even nearly 6’4"

— Jaime Green (@jaimealyse) August 14, 2019

Being a public servant isn't a lucrative job. The main goal is to serve the people and to maintain the efficient management of the city or county in which they are elected. So it isn't surprising that mayors don't earn big salaries and that other government employees earn more than they do.

For example, in some cities of Indiana, though mayors and other public servants are well-compensated, only some mayors are given a salary that go over $100,000 a year despite seeing an economic boom in recent years.

Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard, who is running for a seventh term, is the 13th highest paid, behind the chief of police, the fire chief and his own communications director, among others.

Brainard made $139,053 in 2018, while Police Chief James Barlow made $156,518, Fire Chief David Harboush earned $144,999 and director of community relations and economic development Nancy Heck was paid $148,283.

The highest paid city employee is Douglas Haney, the city attorney, who makes $171,833.

To see how much other city employees are paid in Hamilton County, Indiana, check out the article on the Indy Star.

(Image credit: Derek Jensen/Wikimedia Commons)