21 NOVEMBER

DOCUMENT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jX5Tcqc-xyUIZ-Fj8sOECBU2P02ajb1h/edit?
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Do you agree that:
1. Children are overworked and stressed out.
2. Modern society is too challenging for children.
3. Children should grow up happy and carefree
ARTICLE 1:
Research Links Too Much Sitting with Depression
Two studies done during the COVID-19 pandemic have found that increased sedentary behavior may be linked with
worse mental health.
The first study, done in early April 2020 and based on a survey of about 3,000 US adults, revealed a sudden drop in
activity levels among those who had been meeting the US Physical Activity Guidelines before the pandemic. The
guidelines recommend 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate to vigorous exercise each week.
Activity levels among participants who had been getting the recommended level of exercise decreased by 32% on
average soon after COVID-19 restrictions began. These participants also reported feeling more lonely, anxious, and
depressed.
The second study, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, surveyed about 2,300 of the same participants for eight weeks
from April to June 2020.
The researchers wanted to see how participants' behavior — including how much time they spent in front of screens
and sitting — would affect their mental health over a longer period.
"On average, people saw their mental health improve over the eight-week period," said lead researcher Jacob Meyer
from Iowa State University.
"People adjusted to life in the pandemic. But for people whose sitting times stayed high, their depressive symptoms, on
average, didn't recover in the same way as everyone else's," Meyer said.
Meyer, however, stressed that finding a link between sitting and mental health is not the same as saying that increased
sitting causes depression. However, he said the link is worth investigating further.
Meyer also recommended taking breaks from sitting throughout the day. "If you're no longer walking down the hall for
in-person meetings, you can still incorporate that break from sitting by taking a short walk before and after your Zoom
call," Meyer said.
Discussion:
1.
What are your thoughts on the study's findings?
2.
Do you find it surprising that participants' exercise levels dropped so significantly after COVID-19 restrictions began?
3.
Did you spend more time sitting or in front of screens at the beginning of the pandemic?
4.
How has your exercise regime changed as a result of the pandemic?
5.
What impacts do you imagine the pandemic has had on mental health in your country?

Release stress -> relieve stress.

Further discussion
1.
Do you generally prefer moderate or vigorous exercise?
2.
Do you ever find it hard to get motivated to exercise?
3.
How do you usually feel after exercising?
4.
What activities do you find give you a mental health boost?
5.
What changes do you expect to see in the treatment of mental health issues over your lifetime?

A sporty person/ an active person.

Exercise = To do a (light) workout.

To sweat it out.
ARTICLE 2
First iPhone with USB-C Port Sells for $86,000
The first iPhone with a USB-C port — instead of the usual Lightning port — has sold for more than $86,000. But it
wasn't made by Apple.
The phone was made by Swiss robotics student Ken Pillonel. Pillonel said he'd been waiting years for Apple to make an
iPhone with a USB-C port — the port used by Apple's new iPads and MacBooks, as well as many Android phones. But
he eventually got tired of waiting and decided to make one himself.
He bought a used iPhone X and got started. His goal was to be able to use a USB-C cable to charge the phone as well as
to transfer data between the phone and a computer.
He did a test project in May, and by October he had made a working phone with the new port by opening it up and
adding new parts that he designed himself. In November, he put the phone on sale on eBay for $1.
Over the next 10 days, the price increased. Someone bid $100,000 before changing their mind. But at last, the winning
bid was $86,001, beating the previous highest bidder by $1 in the final minutes of the auction.
Pillonel said that the new owner shouldn't use the iPhone as their daily phone, and they shouldn't even update it
because that may break it, so it's more of a collectible.
Apple may have to start making USB-C iPhones soon, however — at least in Europe. In September, the European
Commission proposed a new law that will require all new smartphones sold in the European Union to have USB-C
ports. If the law passes in 2022, this will need to happen by 2026.
Discussion
1.
What are your thoughts on Ken Pillonel's modified iPhone?
2.
Do you have a lot of different charging cables? Do you use all of them?
3.
Do you own any Apple products? If so, do you have any complaints about them?
4.
How long have you had your current phone? Do you plan to get a new one anytime soon?
5.
How do you expect smartphones to change over the next 20 years?
Further discussion
1.
Have you ever had to get your phone repaired?
2.
What do you usually do with your old electronic devices?
3.
Who's the most tech-savvy person you know?
4.
Have you ever taken apart an electronic device?
5.
Do you think you'd enjoy studying or working in robotics? Why? Why not?
ARTICLE 3:
FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD
Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a
successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific,
actionable goals.
For many years, this was how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades
I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I
succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with
the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.
What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist
behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to
those results.
If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your
assistant coaches, and conduct practice.

If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you test product
ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns. If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your
system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult measures, and your method for receiving
feedback from your instructor.
Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still
succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused
only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?
I think you would.
The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the
scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill
 Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better
results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
What do I mean by this? Are goals completely useless? Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems
are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals
and not enough time designing your systems.
Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the
survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who
had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful
people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the goal
of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted
to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only
when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.
Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a
clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place,
soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same
outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think
we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that
cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve
for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

Discussion
1. What did you learn from the article?
 2. What are the 2 problems that arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goal?
3. What does the author suggest?
4. How did the author realize the distinction between systems and goals?
5. What points does he make to argue that we should focus on the system instead of our goals if we want to achieve our
aims.

Pack-rat habits: you are a hoarder (You like to carry things back to your base).
Further discussion:
1. How important do you think are habits?
2. How do you build beneficial habits.
3. How do you eliminate bad habits.
ARTICLE 4
Study: People Prefer Friendly Teammates to Skilled Ones
Personality may be more important than skill when it comes to selecting people for team-based tasks, according to a
new study.
Researchers from Binghamton University in New York looked at the type of "voice" MBA students used when
communicating in groups, and how this affected who the students preferred to have as members of their team.
"Challenging voice" referred to communication that challenged assumptions and pushed for efficiency and new
ideas. "Supportive voice" referred to communication that improved trust and friendship in the group.
The researchers randomly put students into teams at the beginning of the school semester, with students working in
these teams to complete projects and assignments. Then, toward the end of the semester, the students were asked to
decide who they would like to have as members of a new team that they chose for themselves — and explain their
decisions based on the type of voice those people had used during group work.
The researchers found that people who often used challenging voice created the image that they did good
work. However, they also found that those who used a mixture of both challenging voice and supportive voice were the
most wanted teammates. And students who only engaged the team using supportive voice were actually more wanted
than those who only used challenging voice.
"Our findings suggest that when people feel like they can trust you, even if you're not necessarily the best worker,
they're going to be more likely to want to work with you," said Cynthia Maupin, one of the study authors.
She said these results are highly significant for the workplace, where it isn't just important to have a reputation for
good work — it's also important to be a good person. "You should be using supportive voice to show others that you're
someone your colleagues can trust, especially if you're new to an organization," she said.
The authors also wrote that these results were supported "above and beyond" the tendency of people to enjoy working
with those who have similar personalities to their own.

Discussion
 1.
What are your thoughts on the study's findings?
2.
Would you describe yourself as using supportive or challenging voice more often at work?
3.
Do any of your coworkers have a similar personality to you?
4.
Which of your colleagues do you enjoy working with?
5.
Do you generally prefer to work alone or as part of a group?

A harmony atmosphere -> a harmonious/ cooperative/ polite atmosphere.

Further Discussion
1.
If you were in charge of hiring people, what qualities would you look for? Why?
2.
Who's the newest person in your organization? When did they start?
3.
Which of your colleagues would you say is the most hard-working?
4.
Do you ever get together with your coworkers outside of work?
5.
Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. — Steve Jobs. What are your
thoughts on this statement?

Industrious = hard-working.
ARTICLE 5
E-Cigarettes May Not Help People Quit Smoking, Says Study
Are e-cigarettes a good anti-smoking tool? A new study from the University of California San Diego isn't so sure.

Researchers found that smokers who switched to e-cigarettes and other tobacco products were actually more likely to
start smoking again within the next 12 months than people who quit using tobacco products altogether.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that switching to e-cigarettes could be helpful for
people who aren't able to stop smoking. The Canadian government and the UK's National Health Service even suggest
that e-cigarettes might help people quit. But what if this advice is wrong?

The researchers examined data from over 13,600 smokers, and used surveys to look at changes in their use of different
tobacco products.
At the first of two annual follow-ups, over 9% of the participants had stopped smoking. Nearly 63% had completely
quit tobacco, while about 37% had switched to a different type of tobacco product. Of those who switched, almost 23%
chose to use e-cigarettes — most of them daily.
Then, during the second follow-up, the researchers compared the smokers who had quit tobacco altogether with those
who had switched to e-cigarettes and other tobacco products.

They found that people who didn't quit tobacco completely were 8.5% more likely to go back to smoking traditional
cigarettes within a year.

However, the study also found that while people who switched to other tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, were
more likely to relapse, they were also more likely to try quitting a second time and be abstinent for three months at
follow-up compared to those who quit all tobacco and relapsed.
The researchers wrote that further study was needed to find out if this was evidence that these products were helping
people quit, or only evidence of a pattern of repeatedly quitting and starting again.
Discussion
1.
What are your thoughts on the findings of this study?
2.
Are e-cigarettes popular where you live? Do you know anyone who uses them?
3.
Do you know anyone who has given up smoking recently? Did they relapse before fully quitting?
4.
What do you think is the best method to quit smoking?
5.
Do you know any smokers who have no intention of quitting?
Further Discussion
1.
Have you ever smoked? If so, when did you start? If not, why not?
2.
Do you know anyone who's recently started smoking?
3.
How would you react if you caught your child smoking or vaping?
4.
Do you expect the number of smokers in your country to increase or decrease over the next decade? Why?
5.
Quitting smoking is a marathon, not a sprint. — Unknown. What do you make of this statement?