Month: December 2016

Like so many things in life, the future of eldercare seemingly lies in robotics. On December 8, IBM and Rice University announced that they have collaborated on a prototype robot designed to help the elderly and assist their caregivers.

Named IBM MERA (Multi-Purpose Eldercare Robot Assistant), the project is a Watson-powered robot that can help read a patient’s vital signs, answer questions about their health, and recognize and assist if there is a fall. The prototype was created by IBM alongside Rice University students and faculty from the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Psychology. The robot currently resides inside IBM’s “Aging in Place” research facility in Austin, Texas.

In addition to running on IBM systems—such as the Cloud and Watson technologies—MERA also implements CameraVitals, a system that can read vital signs by recording a patient’s face. This technology was developed by Rice’s Ashutosh Sabharwal and Ashok Veeraraghavan.

The combination of IBM Watson’s speech functions and CameraVitals can potentially help get information to caregivers quickly and at all times of the day, especially in an emergency situation. Watson’s speech and text capabilities also come into play if a patient has any health questions for the MERA, such as “What are the symptoms of anxiety?” or “What is my heart rate?,” according to the university. The idea is that the MERA will implement these systems to help the elderly live independently, while still being provided with the basic care they need.

“Now is the time to invest in, care for, protect, and empower our aging population so they can live more independent lives,” Arvind Krishna, IBM Research’s senior vice president, said. “Our new research on ‘embodied cognition,’ which combines real-time data generated by sensors with cognitive computing, will explore how to provide clinicians and caregivers with insights that could help them make better care decisions for their patients.”

Both IBM and the university stress that the number of people aged 65 and up in the United States will continue to grow in the coming decades, with estimates pointing at 92 million by 2060, making advancements in eldercare vital as the overall population ages.

[h/t Healthcare IT News] 

The winter holidays often bring some vacation time and the desire to curl up by a fireplace with hot chocolate. You might as well do something productive with your hands as you pass your time watching the snow fall, so it’s a great time to tackle knitting projects that will make your winter that much more enjoyable. Here are a few to consider:

1. WARM SOCKS

Keep your feet toasty with home-knitted socks, which you can customize with whatever patterns or colors you want. This free pattern promises that they are “so simply designed that they almost make themselves,” so there’s really no excuse for cold tootsies.

2. SLIPPERS

Slippers are another easy way to keep your feet warm and protected from the dirt on your front porch or the weirdness of going down to your basement laundry room in bare feet. Plus, you can customize them to your actual foot size instead of dealing with the too-small or too-big sizes offered by store-bought slips. Try out these free patterns, many of which are designed for beginners.

3. CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS

Get a head start on next year’s holiday decorating by knitting your own stocking. Rather than boring red-and-white stockings, go for for something a little more custom—reindeer-decorated stockings or stockings emblazoned with the name of their owner.

4. STUFFED TOYS

Stuffed animals don’t need to come from a store. You can fashion your own crochet lions, knit teddy bears, and yarn dolls. These patterns are just a few dollars each, and are sure to become beloved possessions. Plus, if they get a little too well-loved and start to wear, you can always do your own repairs.

5. FINGERLESS GLOVES

Making fingerless gloves can be relatively easy, depending on the pattern. They’re great for wearing in cold offices when you still need to be able to type, or even for doing more knitting when the house is chilly.

6. KNIT HATS

Once you get the hang of circular needles, hats are a relatively quick knitting project to complete, giving you that instant satisfaction of a job well done. From slouchy beanies to cable knit caps to berets, you can make just about any style of hat in whatever color pattern you want. Add buttons or switch up your stitch to make a hat with a dash of flair.

7. EAR WARMERS

Because they’re just a circle of fabric, ear warmers are super easy to throw together, and they’ll keep your head nice and warm on freezing days. You can choose how thick to make your ear warmers depending on the weather in your area. If a simple headband-style ear warmer isn’t fashion-forward enough for you, you can add knitted decoration like flowers. But they don’t have to be overtly feminine in style, either. Some patterns will show you how to make a slightly more gender-neutral accessory, so everyone you know can enjoy properly warm ears all winter.

8. A COFFEE OR TEA COZY

Winter is a time to stay warm, but not too warm. Enjoy your hot beverages without burning your hands by making your own cozies. If you’re out at a coffee shop, using your own coffee sleeve is a great way to feel just a little less guilty about your disposable cup use. Check out this list of free patterns.

9. AN ARM-KNIT BLANKET

You don’t even need knitting needles for this one. The Ukraine-based designer Anna Marinenko makes blankets out of massively thick yarn, sometimes using her hands instead of needles. (She also sells specially crafted 2-inch thick needles for “bulky knitting” on her Etsy page.) You can craft a blanket so big—with stitches a full 3 inches thick—you’ll feel like you’ve stolen a giant’s comforter. There are free instructions on how to knit with your arms from the blog Flax and Twine, or you can watch the video above.

5 Times Carrie Fisher Made Hollywood History. She was much more than Princess Leia.
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Full Star Wars Movie Schedule and Release Date Calendar. Mark your appointment book through the year 2020.
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Cheetahs Are Far Closer To Extinction Than We Realized. Loss of habitat has the numbers down to little over 7,000.
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Let Kids Lose! Scientists Say It Helps Children Learn Better Judgment. Mistakes made as a child are less costly than those of a young adult.  
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The 21 Worst Handymen In The World. Sometimes you gotta work around what you already have.
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How One Man Used a Deck of Cards to Make Parapsychology a Science. Dr. Joseph B. Rhine develop Zener cards to test psychic abilities.
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10 tasty winter-weather drinks to keep you warm. Although they may leave you too tipsy for ice skating.
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6 New Year Traditions from Around the World. Maybe we should try them all out.
 

Pretend you’re the director of a movie. You want to indicate to the audience that something important is happening. Maybe your hero is facing off against his or her mortal enemy for the first time, or is reuniting with a long lost love after many years. Naturally, there are a number of cinematography techniques at your disposal, but should you choose slow motion, you’d be in good company; it’s a favorite technique of filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, and Wes Anderson.

Of course, time isn’t literally slowing down for your characters—it just feels that way for the audience. There are a few different techniques that a director or cinematographer can use to accomplish slow motion, each of which probably strays very far from what August Musger, the original inventor of the effect, could have imagined.

A PRIEST, PHYSICIST, AND MOVIE LOVER

August Musger was born in 1868 in Eisenerz, an old mining town in Styria, Austria. A gifted student throughout his childhood, he graduated from the Faculty of Theology and was ordained in 1890, after which he spent two years serving as a Kaplan, or a priest’s assistant. He began studying mathematics, physics, and drawing in Graz during this time, eventually becoming a teacher of these subjects in 1899. When he wasn’t teaching, he was likely taking in a film.

In the early 1900s, motion pictures were a relatively new art form. Not much time had passed since one of the world’s first movies, the Lumière brothers’s L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), allegedly sent audiences screaming out of the theater, but motion pictures were becoming a popular pastime. The first “nickelodeon” opened on June 19, 1905 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, allowing scores of people access to the cinema for only five cents a pop. By 1907, some 2 million Americans had visited a movie theater.

Still, the technology was primitive. Projectors used intermittent motion, in which a mechanism held a frame of the film in place for a split second before the film advanced. The hand-cranked machines had shutters that blocked light and caused flashes of darkness between frames, which was necessary to trick the eye and brain into seeing motion. If all was operating smoothly, and the cranking was moving at a consistent rate of around 16 to 24 frames per second, the flashes would be imperceptible to the human eye—but they became apparent when the film was moving slowly. Because the projectors were cranked by hand, the frame rate was highly variable, causing movies to flicker and jerk. (That’s one theory for why we call movies “flicks.”)

CONTINUOUS MOTION

Musger thought he could fix the flickering by creating continuous motion—or having the film move with the shutter open—within a projector. It was easier said than done. Just playing film without the shutter made the projected image blur, so he developed a method of “optical compensation” for the movement of the film. To do this, Musger divided a dark chamber into two areas: In one was a conical lens, a wheel of mirrors, and a rotatable prism; in the other were the rollers that, along with the wall, guided the film strip.

During projection, a light source placed outside the apparatus shone into an opening (n) designed to allow light to enter. The light illuminated a frame of film (e) that was exposed by a gap (d) in the wall along which it ran, projecting that image onto a mirror on the rotating mirror wheel (c). The image bounced off the mirrored wheel onto an angled mirror (located at u) that projected it through a lens (b) and onto the surface where the film was being viewed. Rather than using a shutter to block the light in between frames of film, as in intermittent motion, Musger’s apparatus fed the film continuously, using wheels that rotated at the same speed as the mirror wheel. The mirrors from the wheel caught the images from the film and threw them onto the angled mirrors, which projected them onto the viewing surface. Each mirror on the wheel reflected one image, which was replaced by the next image as the mirror rotated and the film progressed. The angled mirrors worked to flip the top and bottom portions of an image when one frame was replacing another, so that the picture always remained right-side up to the viewers.

Musger patented his device—which could also shoot film—in 1904 and demonstrated its projection capabilities for the first time in 1907 in Graz (where Musger lived) on a projector made by K. Löffler. After the demonstration, Leopold Pfaundler, a professor and a member of the Board of the Physical Institute, wrote that Musger’s device was “theoretically correct and has also proven to be useful in the samples taken at the physical Institute. Any extant imperfections, which exist with the first model, will be easily remedied by small modifications.”

Musger’s complicated projector did create a small improvement in the flickering, but it had an unintended side effect: By shooting at 32 frames per second—twice the normal speed—during recording and playing it back at a regular frame rate, he could create slow motion.

The inventor didn’t see this as a selling point for his apparatus, though, and didn’t seem aware that he had created something unusual; he mentioned his device’s slow motion capabilities only in passing in the patent, noting that “all movements are continuous and without impacts, that no moment of time is lost for the recording, and that the number of recordings possible in a second becomes a significant one, which may be particularly advantageous for scientific purposes.”

SLOW MOTION MAKES ITS WAY TO THE MASSES

With a public demonstration and a favorable review under his belt, Musger went about improving his invention. In 1907, he submitted a patent on the improvements. At the same time, he founded Prof. Musger Kinetoscope GmbH in Berlin to build and sell his projector, expanding the business to Ulm in 1908.

Sadly, Musger wouldn’t get far in his endeavor. His projector was plagued by technical difficulties, and though he had conversations with Zeiss, Messter’s Projection, and Steinheil & Sohne, he couldn’t convince any of them to invest in his technology. Financially ruined, Musger couldn’t pay the fees to keep his patents and lost them in 1912.

Waiting in the wings was Hans Lehmann, a technician at Ernemann and a man to whom Musger had been writing about his apparatus for a year. Lehmann took Musger’s idea and improved upon it, creating a slow motion system that he presented to the public in 1914. 

The Zeitlupe (from the German words for time and magnifying glass), as he dubbed it, was then sold by his employer, the Ernemann company, specifically as a slow motion recorder and player. Like Musger, Lehmann thought slow motion was a means to observe the previously unobservable—more for scientists than for cinematography. In a 1916 article for the German periodical Die Umschau, Lehmann recommended the technology to sculptors, military trainers, and gymnasts, so that they could further their craft by studying, in slow motion, movements typically too fast for the naked eye.

THE SLOW MOTION REVOLUTION BEGINS—WITHOUT MUSGER

Lehmann never publicly acknowledged that his device was based on Musger’s work, though he did admit it privately to the priest in a 1916 letter. “I would be delighted to be able to show you the progress [of technology] based on your invention,” Lehmann wrote, noting that his device “might be called ‘Zeitmikroscop’ (because it increases the temporal length of rapid movements that the eye can not follow at the natural speed).” Musger never profited financially from the device Ernemann sold.

Despite his failures, Musger wasn’t yet ready to give up on cinematographic inventions. In 1916, he filed another patent application in Austria and Germany for “Kinematograph mit optischem Ausgleich der Bildwanderung,” or “Cinematograph with optical compensation of the image migration.” The layout of the device differed significantly from his first cinematograph, and had two rotating mirror wheels. But Europe was in the midst of World War I, and the poor economic situation prevented Musger from building the new device. Eventually, the idea of continuous film would fall by the wayside as well, when camera operators realized that by “overcranking” or cranking the camera at a faster-than-normal speed, they could capture footage that was good enough for their purposes.

Musger passed away on October 30, 1929 in the Prince-Bishop’s minor seminary in Graz, without seeing the effect his invention would have on the film world. But if he were alive today, he’d probably be happy that slow motion is one of the most widely used cinematography techniques.

Additional reporting by Jocelyn Sears.

Robots are omnipresent in pop culture. Since the term was coined nearly a century ago, robots have played the role of sidekick, villain, and protagonist in some of the greatest science fiction works of all time. But there’s a lot that books and movies get wrong about our mechanical companions. Here are 11 myths about robots that your favorite TV shows and films have helped spread.

1. ROBOTS ARE A MODERN INVENTION.

It’s hard not to associate robots with visions of the future, but we’ve been building artificial helpers to complete tasks for us for thousands of years. In 400 BCE, long before the advent of electricity, the inventor of the pulley and the screw built a wooden pigeon capable of flight. Centuries later the Roman writer Petronius Arbiter built a doll that moved like a person and in 1557, inventor Giovanni Torriani constructed a wooden bot to pick up the Holy Roman Emperor’s daily bread. Some early concepts more closely resembled the metal machines we know today, including designs for a mechanical knight published by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495.

2. THE MAJORITY OF ROBOTS ASSEMBLE CARS.

If you had cited this as fact a few decades ago, you would have been correct: The automotive industry once accounted for 90 percent of all robots in use. But today they’re good for a lot more than assembling cars. Half of the world’s robots can be found in diverse environments including hospitals, labs, and energy plants, with the other 50 percent still working in auto manufacturing.

3. ROBOTS ARE EXPENSIVE.

Home robots have been around for a while, but the steep price of some flashier products has put the technology out of reach for many households. Believe it or not affordable home robots do exist—buyers just have to know what they’re looking for. Smaller, simple robots like kids’ toys, rolling alarm clocks and smart security cameras can all be purchased for less than $50. If you’re willing to set your price ceiling a little higher, more interactive robots that do everything from keeping you company on walks to encouraging you to exercise can be found for under $200.

4. ROBOTS WILL LEAD TO MASS UNEMPLOYMENT.

While it’s true that increased automation will lead to the extinction of many jobs, this issue often gets blown out of proportion. Americans have had anxiety over being replaced with new technology since the 1800s. As has been the case throughout history, future technological developments will likely also play a hand in job creation. So while bank tellers, telemarketers, and loan officers may be taken over by computers in the not-too-distant future, new jobs we can’t yet predict will likely take their place.

5. ONLY PROFESSIONALS CAN BUILD ROBOTS.

You don’t need an engineering degree to build a robot of your own. With the right tools and an urge to tinker, anyone can build a basic robot at home for around $100 or less. After assembling your bot, you can program it to complete simple tasks like lighting up or rolling around. If gathering the components yourself sounds like too much effort, there are plenty of robot-building kits available online.

6. ALL ROBOTS ARE HUMANOID.

Robots are often portrayed in film with at least some human-like features, whether it’s a face, voice or set of arms and legs. But gadgets don’t have to follow this familiar model to qualify as robots. Robots are defined as machines that do the work of humans, but a humanoid form isn’t always the best design for the task at hand. Bipedal locomotion is hardly the gold standard in the animal kingdom (as anyone with back problems can tell you), which is why roboticists who try to replicate this movement sometimes run into trouble. Even when humanoid designs are successful, they may not always be preferred by the people who use them. According to experts, we don’t like robots that look too much like us because they threaten our sense of identity.

7. ROBOTS ARE SMARTER THAN HUMANS.

With AI machines besting people at chess, trivia, and other mental competitions, it’s easy to believe that we’ve already been surpassed in terms of intelligence. But intelligence is a complex beast: Even if a computer can process information faster than the human mind can, that doesn’t mean it’s smarter. The ability to learn from our experiences, recognize patterns and respond to unfamiliar situations are other necessary measures of intelligence, and robots haven’t caught up to us in those categories just yet.

8. ROBOTS ARE DANGEROUS.

It’s easy to see why Hollywood would embrace the trope of the hostile robot antagonist: It makes for a compelling story. But even in real life, some of science’s brightest minds can’t resist indulging in doomsday scenarios when speaking of artificial intelligence. One aspect of robotics that gets less coverage than it should is how the technology can be used to save lives. Robots are already assisting in surgeries, detonating landmines, and embarking on search-and-rescue missions. Researchers are also working on nanorobots that could be used to fight diseases within our bodies.

9. ROBOTS HAVE FEELINGS.

Most people know that projecting feelings onto machines is illogical, but that doesn’t stop us from doing it anyway. Multiple studies have shown that we feel empathy for robots we perceive to be in pain. When shown videos of a human woman and a robot dinosaur being hurt, participants in a 2013 study showed the same cognitive reactions to both. Physical sensations aren’t the only feelings we imagine robots to have. When a robot expressed regret after making mistakes in a study from earlier in 2016, subjects actually felt bad for him and graded him easier than they did the robot that showed no emotion. Regardless of how we perceive them, though, given that robots lack self-awareness and a nervous system, these gut instincts are 100 percent false.

10. BREAKTHROUGHS IN ROBOTICS ARE MADE BY LONE GENIUSES.

This is a trope that comes up in science fiction again and again: The robotics breakthrough that drives the plot was made quietly by a single scientist working out of their garage. This is also one of the misconceptions professional roboticists hate the most. That’s because they know any significant leaps in the field will likely come from large teams collaborating over long periods of time. To be fair, although this scenario is more realistic, it wouldn’t make for the most compelling big-screen plotline.

11. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS A FAR-OFF DREAM.

When AI is portrayed by the media, it usually involves human-like robots that have been programmed with artificial intelligence so lifelike, they’ve become aware of their own existence. In reality, machine intelligence covers a broad spectrum. AI is simply defined as the power of a computer to copy intelligent human behavior. The virtual assistant on your phone that’s learned to recognize your speech, a smart thermostat that adjusts itself and even a music-streaming service that suggests songs you may like are all examples of artificial intelligence. None of these cases approach human-level cognition, which means a robot uprising is still the stuff of sci-fi. For now.

The future is here—especially when it comes to vacuuming. Neato Robotics’s line of D-shaped, smart navigating Wi-Fi enabled robot vacuums make it possible to clean your home even when you’re miles away. Visit Neato Robotics to learn more.

Oh, how they grow up so fast! EBay—or “the world’s biggest garage sale” as most regard it today—celebrated its big 2-1 this year. In 1995, the company founded by Pierre Omidyar went by a different name, though: AuctionWeb. The domain ebay.com would have directed you to an informational landing page for the ebola virus.

EBay wasn’t the only notable thing (or even technological thing, for that matter) to turn 21 in 2016. Check out the video above from the mental_floss List Show to hear John Green walk you through all 21 of ’em.

As beautiful as a winter snowfall can be, the white stuff is certainly not without its irritations—especially if you have to get into your car and go somewhere. As if shoveling a path to the driver’s door wasn’t enough, then you’ve got a frozen windshield with which to contend. Everyone has his or her own tricks for warming up a car in record time—including appropriately-named meteorologist Ken Weathers, who works at WATE in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Earlier this year, Weathers shared a homemade trick for defrosting your windshield in less than 60 seconds: spray the glass with a simple solution of one part water and two parts rubbing alcohol. “The reason why this works,” according to Weathers, “is [that] rubbing alcohol has a freezing point of 128 degrees below freezing.”

Watch the spray in action below.

[h/t: Travel + Leisure]

The beginning of a new year is quickly approaching, which makes now the perfect time to take stock of your priorities and set goals for your future. Setting goals helps you focus your attention, get more done, and change your life. Robert Pozen, MIT professor and author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, shares his top tips for honing in on your goals—be they to live a healthier lifestyle, advance in your career, or prioritize your relationships—and seeing them through to fruition.

1. USE THE RIGHT TOOLS.

Just brainstorming your goals isn’t enough—you need to write them down. To give you one place to organize and categorize your goals, Pozen partnered with the Wall Street Journal to create the Productivity Planner for their Journal Collection. “If you don’t write down your goals and prioritize them, you are not likely to achieve them,” Pozen writes in the foreword to his Productivity Planner.

“Begin by jotting down all your goals for the next year, both personal and professional,” Pozen writes. “Use your notebook to then divide both sets of goals into ‘high priority’ and ‘secondary priority.’” The planner then helps you translate your goals into monthly objectives, and uses a two-sided schedule to help you manage your time. For every appointment you pencil in to your planner (meetings, phone calls, lunches, etc.), you also provide its purpose, or what you want to get out of it. “This will help you actively manage your day,” Pozen writes.

2. START WITH SHORTER-TERM GOALS.

Pozen’s Productivity Planner starts by asking you to list your yearly goals, but coming up with these can seem like a monumental task, especially when you’re young. “Start with your goals for a relatively short period—like the summer or a semester,” Pozen tells mental_floss in an email. “Those periods are easier to see as relevant.”

Once you have your list of goals, “divide your goals into personal and professional,” Pozen says. “When you think about personal goals, start with the easy ones such as what type of social life would you like to have? When you think about your professional goals, similarly, start with something like what new skill would you like to develop?”

3. GIVE EQUAL ATTENTION TO YOUR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL GOALS.

“It is often easier to think about your professional goals because most people have an idea of a career path,” Pozen says. “Do you want to advance to a higher level in your current organization, or get a job someplace else? Do you need to go to a short training course or get a new degree or simply do a lot more networking? In this process, you can consult a colleague at work or a professional mentor.”

Personal goals often get the short shrift since it’s more difficult to nail down what it is you want and how to get there, but they shouldn’t be neglected. “When you try to generate personal goals, you should try to think through your daily life and needs. If you are single, do you want to meet a girlfriend or boyfriend? If you are married, do you want to have children?” Pozen says. “Then you might focus on your free time. Do you want to become better at playing a physical sport or start a new hobby or go on a special vacation? In this process, you can consult your partner or a friend.”

4. DO THINGS RIGHT THE FIRST TIME.

Pozen recommends you live by the principle OHIO: Only Handle It Once. “OHIO means that it is most efficient to deal with important matters right then and there, instead of waiting a week,” Pozen says. “If you wait a week, you may forget the important matter or it may take you a hour to get back up to speed. So if you receive an important email from your boss, only handle it once—answer it right then and there.”

5. MAKE TIME FOR MORE SLEEP.

You need a solid seven hours of rest for more than just your beauty. “Without enough sleep, your performance will decline on complex tasks without you even realizing,” Pozen writes in the Productivity Planner.

Without a doubt, this is something you’ve heard before. But it can feel impossible to put in the hours you need at work, get your chores and errands done, exercise, eat dinner, and hit the hay at a decent hour. While Pozen notes that there are tricks you can try to fit more in—“routinizing low priority tasks like eating breakfast, trying not to procrastinate by getting started with an easy part of a large project, and limiting meetings to 90 minutes at the most”—the most important thing you can do is de-emphasize the number of hours you’re putting in at the office. “The key points are to set your priorities and focus on getting them done, rather than just staying long hours at work—that is a false sense of productivity,” Pozen tells mental_floss.

6. EXERCISE.

“Devote at least 15 minutes each day to exercise,” Pozen writes in his planner. This will help you feel more alert and eager to tackle the day. But again, how do you fit this time into your busy schedule? “You should try to exercise in the middle of the afternoon when your energy is low – that will help you be more energetic and productive for the rest of the day,” Pozen tells mental_floss. Moreover, an afternoon workout won’t cut into your dinner prep or sleeping time.

7. MAKE SOME SIMPLE CHANGES TO YOUR ROUTINE.

To increase your productivity and work more efficiently, Pozen recommends making five easy changes to your daily routine—right now.

1. Get prepared the night before so in the morning you can quickly dress, eat a standard breakfast, and leave for work.
2. Use a two-sided schedule where you list your appointments on the left and what you want to get out of them on the right.
3. Don’t call a meeting unless you need to discuss something and keep all meetings to 90 minutes at the maximum.
4. Skip over two thirds of your email—you can tell they are not worth reading by the subject matter and sender.
5. Think about your purpose before reading anything, then read the intro and conclusions to decide if you need to read more.

You’ve still got a few days to go until that New Year resolution to indulge in fewer sweets kicks in—and Starbucks wants to help its customers end 2016 on a (sugar) high note. So they’ve introduced the Tuxedo Beverage Collection—a trio of chocolatey espresso drinks—at select locations across the U.S. and Canada.

For espresso lovers, there’s the Tuxedo Mocha, which is a mix of mocha and white chocolate sauces with espresso and steamed milk; the Tuxedo Hot Chocolate has also got a bit of white chocolate at the base and is topped with whipped cream, a drizzle of mocha, and dark chocolate curls; and the Tuxedo Mocha Frappuccino is yet another chocolate and white chocolate flavor combo, this time blended and frosty.

If you want to get your hands on one of these limited-time treats, you’d better act fast; after January 1, 2017, they’ll disappear as quickly as you can say “Where’s the aspirin?”

 
Thank goodness 2016 is almost over. It’s hard to come across one person who enjoyed much of what the year threw at us—and that’s true of its weather, too. Whether you were baked by extreme heat or drenched by never-ending rains, 2016 was an active, record-breaking year that left few parts of the U.S. untouched by tumult. Here’s a quick look back at how the weather treated us in 2016.

1. 2016 WAS LIKELY THE WARMEST YEAR EVER RECORDED.

The weather is more than what you see in your backyard. We only ever personally experience a small fraction of the weather events that unfold every day around the world, but we’re all impacted by large-scale trends like the record-setting warmth of 2016.

2016 will very likely go down as the warmest year ever recorded, the third such year in a row, topping 2015 as the previous holder of this dubious distinction. NOAA’s year-to-date temperature data for the world through the end of November has 2016 coming in 0.94°C warmer than normal, which almost guarantees that 2016 will come in slightly warmer than 2015’s astounding year-end anomaly of 0.89°C.

Some of this year’s record warmth is attributable to El Niño, the anomalous warming of the ocean water near the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but that doesn’t explain all of it. This year continued an undeniable trend that shows that our atmosphere is warming at a fairly steady pace; in fact, including this year, six of the ten warmest years recorded since 1880 have occurred since 2010. If the warming trend continues in the years ahead, it will likely result in adverse situations like more intense and prolonged droughts in some areas, more frequent flooding due to rising sea levels and heavier rainfall in others, and longer, deadlier heat waves.

2. WE HAVEN’T SEEN MANY RECORD LOWS AS A RESULT.

 
The recent cold snap that froze much of the U.S. in the middle of December felt exceptionally cold—with low temperatures dipping well below zero across many states—but it’s easy to forget that it used to get much colder than that on a pretty regular basis. As a result, this bone-chilling cold didn’t set as many record lows as one would think. That’s not an uncommon situation these days.

Climate Central recently took a look at the ratio of daily record lows to daily record highs and found that the latter significantly outnumbers the former. For every record low we’ve seen in the United States in 2016, there have been at least six record highs. Climate Central notes that the number of record highs and lows should equal out over time in a “stable climate,” but we’re in anything but a stable climate these days. 

3. THE U.S. SUFFERED FROM HISTORIC FLOODS.

On the precipitation side of things, extreme flooding events were by far the largest cause of weather disasters this year in the United States, and there were two particularly devastating flooding events in 2016. The first unfolded across Louisiana in August, the result of a storm system that stalled out over the eastern part of the state and dumped up to 30 inches of rain over a short period of time. The extreme rain led to flooding that caused more than $8.7 billion in damages, killed more than a dozen people, and forced tens of thousands of people out of their homes.

The other flooding disaster was caused by Hurricane Matthew, a powerful storm that grazed the Florida and Georgia coasts before coming ashore in the Carolinas at the beginning of October. The hurricane merged with a frontal system over North Carolina and focused one to two feet of intense rainfall on the eastern part of the state. Much as we saw in Louisiana, the floods claimed thousands of homes and resulted in multiple fatalities.

4. WHERE IT DIDN’T RAIN, IT REALLY DIDN’T RAIN.

 
The split between feast and famine was stark this year. While the West Coast’s drought slowly got a bit better, much of the eastern parts of the United States slipped into a disruptive, and at times, destructive drought. The drought is particularly bad in interior parts of the southeast, where states like Georgia and Alabama have slipped into their worst drought in a decade. The dry earth has led to devastating wildfires that have claimed thousands of homes and killed numerous people. The extreme dryness will likely last through a significant portion of 2017, and affected areas may not see any noticeable relief until next summer’s hurricane season.

5. TORNADO ACTIVITY AND TORNADO DEATHS ARE NEAR RECORD LOWS.

Still, not all of the wacky weather we’ve seen in 2016 was bad. The Storm Prediction Center’s data through the end of December shows that 2016 is very close to the fewest number of tornadoes recorded in one year since 1950. The United States typically sees around a thousand confirmed tornadoes every year, but that activity has been relatively minimal for the past couple of years. Adjusted for inflation—removing false reports and duplicate reports for the same tornado—2016 has seen 897 reported tornadoes through December 19, 2016. That’s significantly lower than the previous low-point of 944.

Tornadoes can grow into violent monsters that destroy entire towns, but these beastly formations are surprisingly fragile. Tornado formation requires precise amounts of wind shear, instability, and moisture—too much or too little of one ingredient will prevent a storm from producing tornadoes. This natural limitation is why only a tiny fraction of thunderstorms ever spawn tornadoes.

The near-record lack of tornadoes so far this year has had the added benefit of resulting in one of the lowest tornado death tolls on record. On average, about 98 people die every year as a direct result of injuries sustained in tornadoes [PDF]. Only 17 people have died as a result of tornadoes so far in 2016, the second-lowest number on record since 1940. Only 1986 saw a lower tornado death toll, when just 15 people were killed.