案例分析 likely working harder than you’ve ever worked, but I bet you feel you’re not really receiving adequate monetary compensation in return. Welcome to the world of entrepreneurship!

When it comes to paying yourself a salary, you’ve got to remember an important point: You’re in this for the long run, and your rewards and compensation will come once you’ve got your business established. You’ve got to be patient, because paying yourself too much too soon is a sure recipe (食谱) for disaster.

If you go to a business consultant or accountant, they will tell you that your compensation needs to be a secondary consideration during the startup of your business. Focusing only on how much you’re going to pay yourself will detract from the overall purpose of the business and could drain the company of necessary cash resources during critical growth phases.

Of course, that’s not to say you don’t deserve compensation – you just need to be realistic that it may take a while before your business can provide it to you. That’s one reason entrepreneurs are often advised to start a business part time while maintaining their current “job” so there are other sources of income to help carry them through the startup phase. When it comes to compensation, having patience will allow your company to grow to the point where it can support a reasonable compensation package for you.

When you do start paying yourself, determine what you would be worth in a similar position if you were an employee. While you may feel you deserve more, you need to start small and work your way up the compensation scale as your profits allow. The key to paying yourself the right amount is to remember to keep enough aside so you don’t drain the business of its resources by taking too much money for your own personal use.

案例分析 International business has been conducted ever since national borders were formed and has played a major role in shaping world history. Growing in importance over the past three decades, it has shaped an environment that, due to economic linkages (关联), today presents us with a global marketplace.

In the past two decades, world trade has expanded from $$200 billion to more than $$4 trillion while international direct investment has grown from $$211 billion to $$1.8 trillion. The growth of both has been more rapid than the growth of most domestic economics. As a result, nations are much more affected by international business than in the past. Global linkages have made possible investment strategies and business alternatives that offer tremendous opportunities. Yet these changes and the speed of change also can represent threats to nations and firms.

Over the past 30 years, the dominance of the US international trade position has gradually declined. Increasingly, new participants in international business compete fiercely for world market share, and US firms have fallen behind in their global competitiveness. Apart from changes in the world environment, this development is mainly the result of delays in policy adjustments and unwillingness by the US private sector to participate in international business.

Yet times are changing. Individuals, corporations, and policymakers have awakened to the fact that international business is a major tendency and opportunity for future growth and prosperity. International business offers access to new customers, affords economies of scale, and leads to the progress in competitive skills. Performing well in global markets is the key to improved standards of living, higher profits. And the continued leadership of the United States in the world knowledge about international business is therefore important to everyone in the country, whether it is used to compete with foreign firms or simply to add to an understanding of the world around us.

案例分析 While we instinctively know what appeals to our own sense of beauty, defining what determines attractiveness is not always easy. Recent studies have shown that the secret of beauty may at last be understood. It seems that attractiveness may be hard wired in our brains.

Experiments designed to measure attractiveness usually involve showing a series of images of human faces and asking subjects to rate their visual appeal. Surprisingly, people from a variety of different ages, races and cultures agree on what is and isn’t beautiful. Babies as young as three months can identify and prefer faces that most adults would deem beautiful. Europeans can pick out the same beautiful Japanese faces as Japanese subjects; Japanese can agree on which European faces another Europeans will view as beautiful. So what’s going on?

Our brains have a special part called “the fusiform” (纺锤体), located in the back of the head near the spine. It’s the same neural pathway needed to recognize faces of family, friends and people we have met. When it’s damaged, the patients cannot recognize anyone, even people they have just met. Also, in experiments, they cannot discriminate between photographs of plain and beautiful faces.

When we recognize a face as “beautiful”, we tend to think in terms of facial symmetry, the similarity of the left and right halves of a face. This is because the human brain relates this feature to the health and vitality of an individual. A non-symmetrical face, or Facial Asymmetry (FA), increases with the presence of genetic disturbances and the exposure to environmental perturbations (干扰) during development such as extremes in temperature and pollution. This implies a genetic weakness and less than optimum health. In contrast, Bilateral Symmetry of a face is equated with resistance to infection and debilitating (使人虚弱的) bacteria or virus. It is an important factor that shows optimum health and increases the success in competition.

Thus, when we rate a face as “beautiful” or “plain”, we are actually judging whether that individual is healthy or not. We interpret facial symmetry to mean that a person has good genes and has been free from diseases, and we understand facial asymmetry as a sign of being weaker and less healthy.

案例分析 Research suggests that we view our loved ones through rose-tinted glasses that overlook the physical flaws that might put others off. As a result, husbands and wives think their other halves are more attractive than they really are.

The phenomenon could help explain some apparently physically mismatched couples such as the glamorous Beyonce and Jay-Z, the striking Lara Stone and David Walliams, or the statuesque Sophie Dahl and the diminutive Jamie Cullum.

The “positive illusion” theory comes from researchers who asked 70 couples to rate their other halves for attractiveness. Questions included how attractive their husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend was to the opposite sex, and how they rated compared with others of the same age. The results, reported in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, revealed that couples rated the physical appeal of their partners higher than that of strangers.

The researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands explain this from a psychological perspective. During the course of a romantic relationship, partners will frequently uncover sources of negativity or conflict that may raise the fear that their partner is not the “right” person after all. Such doubts about the partner are troublesome because negativity typically surfaces when the individuals have already invested in their relationship.

In order to reach some resolution between their hopes and doubts, and sustain a sense of security, partners often weave an elaborate fictitious (虚构的) story that both magnifies a partner’s virtues and minimizes his faults. By means of these positive illusions, partners may enhance their sense of security and stabilize their long-term bond.

Those who participated in the study were relatively young and had been together on average for just two and a half years. The researchers said that more work is needed to see if those in long marriages are still blind to their partner’s physical flaws. They think it is possible that positive illusions are much stronger in the beginning of the relationship when partners are still in love and tend to idealize each other strongly. Likewise, positive illusions may be stronger when people are younger and, as a consequence, relatively attractive.

案例分析 School districts all over the country are starting to rethink the way learning happens and where it happens. On a recent school district visit I had an assistant principal telling me that her school system better figure out how to meet the needs of these digital learners because they have access to so many free resources and experts, and she fears that their institution might soon be behind the times. What she said resonated (共鸣) with me and my colleagues because many amazing educators across the country are trying to figure out how to meet the needs of these 21st century learners and the role technology can play in that transformation. Along the journey we have added new terms to our vocabulary, such as blended, virtual, online, anywhere / everywhere and personalized (个性化的) learning. All of these phrases bring a new conversation to our education practice and allow us to redefine where, when and how learning happens.

When I think of the word “personalized” I immediately think of Amazon and Google. For years I have been receiving email from Amazon sharing that I might be interested in a specific book because of the books I have purchased in the past. I also see a stream of book ideas when I log in to my account. Similarly, when I do a Google search I know that Google is now using my past search behavior, my online presence and connections, to serve up information that is personalized for me. Author Cathy Davidson defines learning as being a constant disruption (中断，扰乱) of an old pattern, a breakthrough that substitutes something new for something old in a cyclical process. I like this definition because learning needs to be thought of as a continuous process that will require us to be exposed to new information constantly while we reflect on what we know and what we need to know. When you combine these two terms you get an approach that will help define a system that assumes that we can use technology and human capacity to figure out what students need to learn and what they want to learn and expose them to opportunities formally and informally. So how does this help us transform our education institutions?

案例分析 If by “intelligent” you mean someone who performs better on IQ tests, the simple answer is no. Studies in the UK, US and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy. 

Left-handedness is, however, much more common among individuals with severe learning difficulties, such as mental slowness. A slightly higher proportion of left-handers have problems in reading or speaking. Other problems, such as a higher rate of accidents reported in left-handers, mostly result from a world designed for the convenience of right-handers, with many tools not made for left-handed use. Although some people claim that a higher percentage of left-handers are exceptionally bright, large research studies do not support this idea.

If by “smarter” you mean more talented in certain areas, left-handers may have an advantage. Left-handers’ brains are structured differently from right-handers’ in ways that can allow them to process language, spatial (空间的) relations and emotions in more diverse and potentially creative ways. Also, a slightly larger number of left-handers than right-handers are especially gifted in music and math. A study of musicians in professional orchestras (管弦乐队) found a significantly greater proportion of talented left-handers, even among those who played instruments that seem designed for right-handers, such as violins. Similarly, studies of adolescents who took tests to assess mathematical giftedness found many more left-handers in the population. The fact that mathematicians are often musical may not be a coincidence.

For other talents and skills, the benefits of being left-handed are less clear. In one-on-one competitive sports, being in the minority can be a tactical advantage. For instance, most right-handed tennis players have little experience playing left-handers, whereas left-handers have plenty of experience playing right-handers. Sports arenas can also be asymmetric (不对称的), which may give left-handers an advantage. In baseball, for instance, a left-handed hitter is closer to first base after striking the ball than a right-handed batter is.

Whatever the advantages, handedness seems to be genetic. With 10 percent of people preferring their left hand, there must be some selective advantage, or else the genes would probably not survive.

案例分析 Creativity has been considered in terms of process, product or person and has been defined as the interpersonal and intrapersonal process by means of which original, high quality, and genuinely significant products are developed. In dealing with young children, the focus should be on the process, i.e., developing and generating original ideas, which is seen as the basis of creative potential.

For a proper understanding of children’s creativity, one must distinguish creativity from intelligence and talent. Some experts expressed concern about whether creativity in young children could be differentiated from other cognitive abilities. More recent studies have shown that components of creative potential can indeed be distinguished from intelligence. The term “gifted” is often used to imply high intelligence. But some scientists have argued that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other, and a highly creative child may or may not be highly intelligent.

Creativity goes beyond possession and use of artistic or musical talent. In this context, “talent” refers to the possession of a high degree of technical skill in a specialized area. Thus an artist may have wonderful technical skills, but may not succeed in evoking the emotional response that makes the viewer feel that a painting, for example, is unique. It is important to keep in mind that creativity is evidenced not only in music or art, but throughout the curriculum, in science, social studies and other areas.

Most measures of children’s creativity have focused on ideational (构思的) fluency. Ideational fluency tasks require children to generate as many responses as they can to a particular stimulus, as is done in brainstorming. Ideational fluency is generally considered to be a critical feature of the creative process.

For young children, the focus of creativity should remain on process: the generation of ideas. Adult acceptance of multiple ideas in a non-evaluative atmosphere will help children generate more ideas or move to the next stage of self-evaluation. As children develop the ability for self-evaluation, issues of quality and the generation of products become more important. The emphasis at this age should be on self-evaluation, for these children are exploring their abilities to generate and evaluate hypotheses, and revise their ideas based on that evaluation.

案例分析 What is the future of the bookstore? This was a burning question on everyone’s lips at a recent event at Foyles’s flagship bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London, where some of Britain’s leading literary agents, authors, marketing managers and booksellers gathered to discuss its fate.

For a bookstore to remain successful, it must improve “the experience of buying books,” says Alex Lifschutz, an architect whose London-based practice is designing the new Foyles. He suggests an array of approaches: “small, quiet spaces surrounded with books; larger spaces where one can dwell and read; other larger but still intimate spaces where one can hear talks from authors about books, literature, science and travel.” The atmosphere is vital, he adds. Entrances must be full of eye-catching presentations and a bar and café is essential.

The trend for not only incorporating cafés in bookstores but also placing them on the top floor makes good sense. The new Foyles will have one, Mr. Lifschutz explains, because this draws shoppers upwards floor-by-floor, which is bound to encourage people to linger longer and spend more.

There are plenty of ways to delight the bookstore customer, but few are easily monetized. It is agreed that bookstores need to become cultural destinations where people are prepared to pay good money to hear a concert, see a film or attend a talk.

But forcing people to pay for the privilege of potential good services could deter (震慑) shoppers altogether. A more attractive idea might be a membership scheme like those offered by museums and other cultural venues (场地). A club membership could provide priority access to events (talks, literary workshops) and a private lounge where members can eat, drink and meet authors before events. Different memberships could tailor to the needs of children and students.

The future of the bookstore will have to work hard. Service will be knowledgeable and personalized, spaces well-designed and the cultural events tempting. But still, the fate of these bookstores, especially small independents, is a cliffhanger (悬而未决的局势).