For at least two centuries, the political battle in most democracies has been between conservatives and progressives. In particular, between those who want to maintain the status quo and those who want to question it; those who favour stability and those who want to shake up the status quo established by previous generations. Naturally, these distinctions are full of nuances in different countries, considering the different history, mentality, geopolitical situation and social divisions of each country. Today, this divide has become even more complex: should we make a distinction, among the conservatives, the people who want to protect nature? Should the people who want to encourage and accept all types of technological and industrial innovations be considered as supporters of change? It could lead to classifying ecological parties on the right-wing and the supporters of the liberal economy on the left-wing. Should those who support defending rural territories really be classified on the right-wing? And the defenders of big cities on the left-wing? Should the people who defend the national identity cause necessarily be classified on the right-wing and those who want a more open world on the left-wing? Is secularism, which is at the heart of French identity, not left-wing quest? And is not openness to the world an idea of the proponents of the market economy, which should rather be classified on the right-wing? Finally, is an authoritarian government necessarily more right-wing than left-wing? It is clear that these concepts are evolving, the analytical grids are converging, new struggles are emerging, which do not overlap with the old ones. And it is increasingly difficult to reduce the political debate to two simple camps: there are conservatives and modernists on both the right-wing and the left-wing. The policy evolutions have allowed some people to say that the left-right political spectrum divide is dead. Does that mean we have to give up on it? And to think that today's struggle is in fact between progressives and conservatives, between those who defend the homeland and those who favour mobility. The distinction between "open" and "closed" is certainly becoming more and more important. Those who advocate for closure are those who defend an identity, a territory, and a cultural and natural heritage. If we were to follow this criterion, it should lead us to see the emerging coalition between the far right and the ecologists, which does not actually exist almost anywhere. It is therefore not a relevant divide. Because in reality, we cannot defend the environment by closing ourselves off: the climate has no borders; and it is not, for example, because we improve the situation of forests in one country that the situation of the world's forests will not worsen. Those who advocate for openness are those who defend receiving goods and people from elsewhere, in exchange for the individual right to mobility. If we were to follow this criterion, we should see an alliance between those who defend the right to receive migrants and those who favour free trade. But this is not an actual thing. Thus, I do not think the distinction between conservatives and progressives, or between closed and open is still relevant. Or that the left-right divide wing is a thing of the past. It has taken new forms. Never have inequalities in income, wealth, hope and social mobility been so high. Never has the fight for more social justice been more justified. Justice related to individuals, generations, social groups, and territories. And it is this struggle that brings together those who want to defend the weakest wherever they are, in factories, territories, abroad, or in future generations. To bring these various concepts together and to find out where the new divide is leading us, it seems to me that we need to make a new distinction between those who think that we should only take care of ourselves and those who believe the best way to take care of ourselves is to take care of others. Between selfishness and altruism. Both perfectly respectable. Both favouring different values. Yet both can turn into unbearable caricatures. Of course, there may be times when necessary reforms that are neither left or right on the policy spectrum, but are objectively useful to everyone, are delayed for too long by pusillanimous leaders, and lead to putting aside for a time the distinction between left-wing and right-wing. But this can only last for a period of time. Altruism will prevail if it can convince us that it is also the most intelligent and effective form of selfishness; and that, for example, it is by helping rural areas that we will best defend urban areas; that it is by helping African development that we will best protect the interests of Europeans, and that it is by defending future generations that we will best prepare our own future.

Worried to see the European civilization wither away, as a historian, I give my thoughts and personal advice in What to do? Living with the decline of Europe, a survival guide for lovers of the West. My book What to do? Living with the decline of Europe is more personal testimony than political essay. This is the reason why I wanted to share these intimate reflections.

The terrifying accident at the Russian weapons and ammunition warehouse in Achinsk, Russia, not far from Krasnoyarsk, is a grating metaphor of what is happening around the world. And, it is still perfectly avoidable: the accumulation of ammunition and weapons, in hazardous security conditions, near a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, ended up producing an explosion equivalent to that of 40,000 shells. Looking at the world, it appears that something similar is being prepared, on a completely different scale: in a senseless typical junkyard manner, we are accumulating many flammable materials without any precaution, all of which can trigger a global upheaval: Beijing can shoot at Hong Kong demonstrators, which would lead to a violent reaction from the Americans and China's neighbours; North Korea's production of nuclear weapons and launchers will eventually lead to a reaction from South Korea and Japan, who will also want these weapons as well; which will push Iran to go much further in enriching its uranium. Similarly, the catastrophic destruction of one of the world's last primary forests vital for humanity in Brazil, and similarly senseless accumulation of waste in the oceans, are other examples of the suicide of every man for himself. In addition, there are the threats of the United States’ trade war against China, Germany or France; the imminent exit of Great Britain from the European Union without an agreement; and above all, the world's financial situation is getting more volatile every day and is only being maintained by a slow spoliation of savers, which will not be sufficient to finance the demands of the richest for long. All this leads to an accumulation of contradictions that will soon be unbearable: the more the wealthy classes plunder the middle classes, the more populism will rise; the more the poor classes emerge from their misery without changing their way of life, the more the environment will be looted and massacred. All of this is absolutely untenable. And it is the expression of a carefree attitude on the part of everyone, mostly concerned about their own interests, without wanting to consider the global consequences of their actions. And, with leaders and the global elites convinced that what has made the west happy since the end of the Second World War can make the whole planet happy tomorrow—deadly illusions. In these circumstances, someone will soon have an interest in lighting the fuse, to divert attention from their own turpitudes, or to try to take advantage of a crisis to impose themselves on their rivals. And everything will explode, into a crisis much more serious than the previous one, because it will be financial, commercial, environmental and military.

The expo starts from my beginnings: the lions. They are the ones who taught me the picture. I was a kid very 'little con': I lied, flew. I was fired from schools. Yet everyone has a chance that passes. I was not afraid of my luck. As I had nothing, no diploma, I agreed to sweep the Boulogne film studio where I met actors, directors. After a year, I did a movie or two as an actor but I was bad, I did not work. Everything rocks when I fall in love with the mother of my best friend who then takes me to the Allier. She makes me discover her love of animals and we create a zoological reserve, at the beginning, with deer, wild boars etc. then, little by little, we raised tigers, lions. When I left at 30, I wanted to become a scientist. I went to Kenya with my wife today to prepare a thesis on the behavior of lions in Kenya. I realize then that the photos give information that does not give the writing. I start to learn patience. At the same time, I become a hot-air balloon pilot. I discovered aerial photography. When I started to photograph, I learned to look at beauty. What is more beautiful than a large oak in a field? What is more beautiful than a storm? This beauty crushes everything. Then the talk about the beauty of the planet changed in speech about the urgency to save what can still be. The success of "The Earth comes from the sky" comes from there: the beauty is around us, one is not even more aware of it. I have no great merit. My only quality is to make every effort for my work. I mortgaged my house for the project "Earth from the sky". When you work on something, you are inhabited by a certainty about what you do. It may be a little pretentious. But when you have the right subject, everyone is a good photographer. And then, I always thought that my photos did not belong to me. Earth is a common good. This is also why all the photos will be sold for the benefit of my foundation and everything is offset carbon. I dreamed of having a place where we could talk about ecology, awareness, raising people's awareness of the environment through free exhibitions, cooking classes, an outdoor course. We now have a giant hive too. To have in Paris three hectares and a castle to do it, it is the dream. The GoodPlanet Foundation does not stop there and is full of projects around the world. Since I'm 20, I'm interested in the environment. It was not the same look as today. We were interested in biodiversity: rhinos, elephants, birds. Today, we talk about global danger for all life on Earth. Scientists are now talking about the sixth extinction. Our values and our way of life are similar to the society consumer society in which we live. And finally, this religion of growth is killing life on Earth. What we could do at $ 2 billion, we can not do it at $ 7 billion. The population has been multiplied by 4 and the consumption of meat and fish by 8. We are consuming the Earth. It's been a decade that we really realize all this. I am an optimist very worried. We go to an unknown world, not everyone will die but it's a more complicated world, more cyclones, storms, an unbalanced world. What is terrible is that life on earth next to us is disappearing: wild animals only represent 2% of the world's biomass. There is more than us on Earth. And today, it's ridiculous to think that we can stop the machine. We must not think that it is useless to act, all our actions in favor of the planet amortize, we must continue to fight. You can eat organic, live in the countryside, stop buying industrial meat. It's simple.It will not change the world but allows to be in harmony with oneself. But acting makes you happy. Politicians lack courage. They are either unconscious or so obsessed with their electoral vision that they do not see what is happening. I imagine all the files that pile up on the desk of Emmanuel Macron whereas this subject should exceed all the others. The agreement of COP 21? What a fake stuff. The words oil, fossil energy and coal are absent, otherwise the producing countries did not sign. The problem is the egoism of everyone, nations. Everyone does what he wants. It would take a world government.

Customer expectations of reliable quality and rapid delivery forces today’s manufacturers to either shorten cycle times or lose business. Customers simply switch suppliers when others are more capable of delivering within their preferred timeframes. Lean systems have provided a formidable operating strategy for leaders determined to achieve and maintain optimal operational systems and customer satisfaction levels. There are multiple good models for lean manufacturing operations. ISO publishes guidelines for conformance to its standards. “5S” programs are taught in some business college courses, and the SCOR model is also utilized. There are programs that emphasize rapid, or low-cost implementation. And, most models are applicable to any business size or integrated corporate structure. Who Needs Lean Manufacturing? A company in need of lean manufacturing practices tends to be easy to identify, typically displaying multiple of the following symptoms of operational deficiency: Inventory amasses in buffer stocks. Work-in-progress (WIPs) queues are jammed. Information quality and flow is poor. Production goals are rarely met. Production schedules are unbalanced. Overhead costs are excessive (due to systemic disorder). Customer service performance is poor. Sales forecasting information is insufficient. Inventory records, product specs, shipping documents contain errors. Delinquent and/or low quality suppliers remain in the supply chain. There are excess inventories of some materials and shortages of needed. Cycle times are unnecessarily long. Operating procedures are overly-complex and confusing. Unnecessary steps are common in processes. Lead times are too long. Backorders are the norm. Product is unnecessarily moved. Holding areas are maintained for excess inventory. Shipping containers permit excessive empty space or product damage. Employees conduct superfluous, value-subtracted activities. Lean Manufacturing Planning and Implementation Lean manufacturing implementation should not be undertaken until top management firmly supports the initiative and is clear that many processes will be changed. After careful planning, test implementation on one product line to demonstrate proof of concept regarding your design for implementation prior to broad-scale execution. Identify an executive who will champion the lean program, and engage in planning. Educate all employees fully on new systems to be implemented. Lay out the comprehensive designs for the new/modified processes. Develop a plan for a lean manufacturing test run in a single operational area. Set quantified goals for amounts of improvement in various facets of performance. Design your plan to be implemented in phases. Establish time-tables. Obtain full commitment from management prior to starting phase 1. The now outmoded MRP scheduling approach too often moves inventory into stock that doesn’t reflect customer needs and cannot efficiently make frequent adjustments to accommodate variations in those needs. Consequently, unnecessarily prolonged lead times and excess inventory are used to compensate for the poor system, and compromised customer service is the outcome. Employ a system that replenishes inventories by gauging actual rates of depletion. Migrate to lean manufacturing-friendly software, integrating departments and suppliers as appropriate to capacitate optimal flow of information and coordination of diverse activities. This is often the most challenging and expensive step in conversion to lean manufacturing operating, but the payoffs in operational efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction make it well worth the investment. Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software can be an ideal tool for managing customer services, inventory allocations, scheduling, and other functions—eliminating countless routine hand-to-hand transfers of information that prolong the fulfillment process. Measuring Lean Manufacturing Performance Insufficient metrics employed by many business leaders often reflect only on areas like production labor efficiency and equipment usages—focusing inordinate amounts of emphasis on improvement in these isolated areas and failing to identify performance issues throughout the company. In addition, establishing a well-rounded set of metrics, set up self-monitoring metrics that hold individuals accountable for tracking their own levels of participation in the lean program. Conduct routine assessments. Most employees soon come to appreciate the advantages of working in a lean facility: Workflow processes are smoothed as information transmission delays are eliminated. Physical reorganization cuts useless steps. Paper and electronic files are reordered to reduce frustrations. Schedules are balanced. Like-kind tasks, and those along a single route, are grouped appropriately. Time no longer wasted can be applied to increasing productivity. Supply Chain Lean Manufacturing Integration Close coordination with suppliers is necessary to optimize your lean manufacturing program. Some suppliers may need to upgrade their own systems or processes to match your company’s new capabilities. Sharing visibility of your customers’ consumption rates transforms the supply chain companies into a unified group with a singular goal with respect to your company’s needs. Such integration affords your business exciting benefits: reduced dependency on forecasting enhanced flexibility to accommodate variables in customers’ purchasing patterns reduced waste due to “overproduction” new sense of collaborative relations with suppliers and more pro-active problem solving significantly reduced waste at all points in your system Costs of Lean Manufacturing Implementation Some capital expenditures may be necessary, but most substantial improvements from lean manufacturing are achievable with existing equipment. Decisions to invest in lean come much more easily when management views it as a strategy for increasing competitiveness, revenues, market share, profit margin and reducing labor and inventory costs. Considering that if competitors gain too much ground in these areas, it may become less clear that your company can continue to compete. The question may be whether or not your company can afford not to invest in lean operations. Financial Benefits of Going Lean Customer satisfaction is your money-maker. Unifying the entire organization, and linking in your entire supply chain, dramatically improves both management and staff productivity, eliminating redundancy. Excess layers of paperwork are stripped away from queues throughout the fulfillment process, and priorities are clarified automatically. reduces cycle times reduces needed manufacturing floor space cuts percentage of reworks cuts purchasing costs frees up capital, strengthens the company reduces production costs cuts necessary lead times cuts inventory costs reduces costs of quality increases on-time delivery rates Being Lean vs. Claiming to be Lean Some manufacturing facilities merely pretend to have a lean manufacturing program in order to impress customers, incurring what they view as a superfluous cost to maintain the lean façade. They have no intention to actually improve operational efficiency. They see lean as an encumbrance instead of as a true model of what they could accomplish in quality, efficiency, cost savings, and more meaningful customer satisfaction. But, symptoms of “fake lean” are often readily apparent to customers who tour, or even who deal remotely with, manufacturing facilities. Ready, Set, Go Lean! Lean manufacturing principles are highly valued by businesses worldwide. Today’s competitive global environment demands lean operation. Lean principles are understood to eliminate wastefulness and direct focus only on practices that honor customers and increase value in the products offered them. Lean ultimately cultivates business cultures concentrated on mutual problem solving. Such cultures empower and encourage all team members to contribute to quality operations. Facilitating communications throughout the organization and its supply chain develops a harmonious way of doing business that is very attractive to quality personnel, the pivotal resource for sustainability of the high quality production and customer service requisite for competitive advantage in the modern marketplace.

Highways England has become the latest company to partner with the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC). This new collaboration will look to address some of the many challenges experienced by the road network in England, such as the deterioration of road and pavement surfaces. Highways England is responsible for the motorways and major A roads in the country, which carry four million journeys over four thousand, three hundred miles of road network; safely and reliably every single day. The government company is continually seeking to improve the experience of those who use and operate the network. Adding graphene into maintenance and renewals operations has the potential to extend asset life and make the network perform at an industry changing level. Improving the experience of those using the roads, reducing road worker exposure and making journeys more reliable. This partnership is looking to explore the operational and road user benefit of incorporating graphene into assets such as road surfacing and road markings as well as help to drive the development of a low carbon and digital road network. The potential improvements could result in stronger, long lasting materials reducing roadworks and improving road user journeys. This latest partnership is a brilliant example of how graphene can be used to tackle problems faced by most people everyday. This is further enabled by the facilities and capabilities we can provide to our industry partners, that accelerates the many small improvements that ultimately create an optimised product. James Baker, CEO Graphene@Manchester Isolated at The University of Manchester in 2004 by Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov, graphene is the world’s first two-dimensional material, many more times stronger than steel, more conductive than copper and one million times thinner than a human hair. James Baker, CEO Graphene@Manchester said: “This latest partnership is a brilliant example of how graphene can be used to tackle problems faced by most people everyday. “This is further enabled by the facilities and capabilities we can provide to our industry partners, that accelerates the many small improvements that ultimately create an optimised product.” Paul Doney, Innovation Director at Highways England said: “We are really excited about the opportunity to explore leading edge materials and what this might lead to for our road network. GEIC is at the forefront, having made the discovery here in Manchester, and by building a collaboration with our operations teams who understand the challenges, we are looking to deliver improved safety and performance of our roads.” The Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) specialises in the rapid development and scale up of graphene and other 2D materials applications. The GEIC is an industry-led innovation centre, designed to work in collaboration with industry partners to create, test and optimise new concepts for delivery to market, along with the processes required for scale up and supply chain integration. The two-tier membership model allows the flexibility for industry partners to work on short feasibility projects, through to a long-term strategic partnership with multiple projects in different application areas. Advanced materials is one of The University of Manchester’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet.

If you have experienced love, you know its power. The intoxicating emotion has been credited with the rise and fall of empires. It has created billion-dollar industries and inspired an endless list of books, movies and songs. People in all cultures around the world glorify love, particularly romantic love. It is enshrined as the cornerstone of a happy mating relationship, but why? David M. Buss, a University of Texas at Austin psychology professor, argues the universality of love goes beyond the traditional arguments of “nature versus nurture” and straight to the heart of our evolutionary history as a species. “Although we do not have a videotape of our ancestors, abundant evidence tells us that the capacity for love is a human universal,” says Buss. “Love evolved over many eons in the context of long-term mating. To paraphrase a popular song from many years ago, ‘Without love, where would we be now?’ ” Buss is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology and believes all our emotions and behaviors can be explained in the context of evolution. Natural selection explains not only why we stand upright but also how we think about the world, who we are attracted to, and yes, how we love. “Love is a psychological adaptation,” he says, “and probably the most intoxicating and bracing emotion humans have.” Psychological adaptions, according to evolutionary theory, are mechanisms our species develops to solve problems. These adaptions are passed on to future generations if they contribute to our survival and reproduction. And what might be love’s evolutionary contribution? Simply put, it serves as a commitment device. “Some other species, such as some bird species, form long-term pair bonds. But even our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, do not form long-term mateships. Because love evolved as part of our long-term mating strategy, humans may be unique among primates in having the emotion of love,” he says. Unfortunately, you can’t speak about the evolution of love without talking about what happens when love is lost. The vast majority of humans experience a failed love. Studies have shown that 85 percent of us have experienced at least one romantic breakup. So, what evolutionary role does heartbreak play? “Being one of the most important emotions humans experience, it’s important to understand the evolution of love because it is also linked with terrible outcomes when it shatters,” notes Buss. Recovering from heartbreak, he argues, is an evolutionary strength. Viewing relationships in the context of humanity versus our individual situations is quite comforting. As Buss wrote for the Austin American-Statesman last Valentine’s Day, “Humans are remarkably resilient. We rally from setbacks. Despite myths about ‘the one and only,’ most people recover and often discover love anew. More people should know that evolution has equipped us with the glories of love, the strength of spirit to rebound from its loss, and the fortitude to throw ourselves back into life again.”

Did you know that billions of dollars are wasted on ads that fail to grab attention or motivate people to act? Since the dawn of time, humans have tried to influence one another. Scholars, academics, and researchers have developed countless theories of persuasion which ignore the latest brain research on how people decide. I have researched the effectiveness of persuasive messages on the brain for nearly two decades. Each day, whether you realize it or not, you participate in or create persuasive arguments you hope will change people’s views, or convince them to buy a product or solution that will change their lives. Unfortunately, few of these messages have a real chance to grab people’s attention, shift their perceptions and lead them to act. The game of persuasion is often a complete waste of time and money. And if you use conventional research to investigate why people like or dislike your messages, you will not get closer to the truth. Only direct measures of how their brains respond to ads can begin to shed light on the unconscious mechanisms that can really explain and predict the impact sales messages have on the brain. Persuasion science is a new field that can finally provide scientific answers to questions that have puzzled advertisers, marketers, PR experts but also academics and researchers for decades. But while measuring brain responses has become relatively easier and affordable, the real challenge is to make sense of the gigabytes of data generated by millisecond recordings of brain waves, eye fixations, facial expressions and skin moisture. After nearly two decades of research and practice in the field of persuasion science (also known as neuromarketing or consumer neuroscience), my partner Patrick Renvoise and I have been able to develop a persuasion theory that can help you avoid many pitfalls in constructing and delivering convincing claims. A theory of persuasion based on brain science There are countless theories of persuasion that have been debated for hundreds of years. Curiously, few are anchored in any measure of what happens in the brain when people pay attention, decode the meaning of an argument, feel an emotion related to the message and trigger a decision. Thanks to the phenomenal growth of the field of neuroscience over the last 20 years, new answers have finally emerged to solidify our scientific understanding of how ads can either influence or be disregarded within just a few seconds. Our theory of persuasion is based on the work of remarkable decision scientists and psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely and many more. It is also based on our own research for private and public projects we have conducted since the creation of our company SalesBrain in 2002. This is what we have learned the relationship between persuasive messages and the brain: The nervous system has two major systems, but one dominates the processing and it is not the one you would suspect does. The Primal Brain: The oldest system composed of a multitude of brain structures that make you safe. The Primal brain manages critical internal states that control attention and emotional resources to address survival-related priorities below our level of consciousness. Think of it as the BIOS of your mind, a set of basic instructions that control how your computer receives input and output. The Primal dominates the processing of all persuasive messages! The Rational Brain: The most recent, more evolved part of the brain. Think of it as the latest version of Windows or Mac OS for your brain. The Rational brain is like a suite of enhanced applications you can learn, change or upgrade during your lifetime. This brain uses higher cognitive resources that help mediate some of the responses of the Primal brain. A science of persuasion based on the dominance of the Primal Brain Because of the dominance of the primal brain, we like to say that persuasion is a bottom-up effect. So to optimize your chances of getting results from your ads, you need to first and foremost make your messages friendly to the Primal brain. How? By using the 6 persuasion biases that trigger instant Primal brain responses. Make your message PERSONAL: Think of the Primal brain as the center of ME. It has no patience or empathy for anything that does not immediately concern its well-being. It scans for threats before it attends to pleasure. Vigilance drives the speed and nature of its response. Make your arguments CONTRASTABLE: The Primal brain is sensitive to solid contrast such as before/after, risky/safe, with/without, and slow/fast. Contrast allows quick, risk-free decisions. Without contrast, the brain enters a state of confusion, which delays a decision, or worse, stalls a decision altogether. Make your proofs TANGIBLE: The Primal brain needs tangible input. It is constantly looking for what is familiar and friendly; what can be recognized quickly, what is concrete and immutable. The Primal brain cannot process complexity without a lot of effort and skepticism. It appreciates simple, easy-to-grasp, concrete ideas. Make your story MEMORABLE: The Primal brain remembers little. Placing the most important content at the beginning is a must, and repeating it at the end is imperative. Keep in mind that what you say in the middle of your delivery should be brief and convincing. Don’t go over 3 convincing arguments: your CLAIMS. The Primal brain loves stories because a good narrative construction is easy to remember. Make your points VISUAL: The Primal brain’s default sensory channel is visual. The optical nerve is physically connected to the Primal brain and at least 25 times faster than the auditory nerve. Therefore, the visual channel provides a fast and effective connection to accelerate decisions. No other sense is more dominant than the visual sense. It is the superhighway of your messages. Make your impact EMOTIONAL: The Primal brain is strongly triggered by emotions. Emotions create chemical events in your brain that directly impact the way you process and memorize information. In fact, you simply can’t remember events unless you strong “emotional cocktail.” No emotion, no decisions! A process of persuasion based on 4 critical steps Learning to speak the language of the 6 Primal brain stimuli is a good start, but your message must be designed to answer 3 critical questions first. What are the top PAINS of your targets? Diagnosing PAINS helps you unveil the most critical decision drivers that influence your customers’ behavior. Our primal nature is to orient our attention to messages that awaken our fears, which is why a product or solution that can clearly articulate which PAINS it can eliminate first will receive more consideration and create higher urgency. What are your 3 unique CLAIMS? Turn your top reasons into short and simple words that are easy to pronounce and information that is clearly organized under a maximum of three chapters or arguments: your CLAIMS. Also, messages that are easy to read, with fonts that are processed with maximum fluency are preferred by the Primal brain. What is the evidence of your GAIN? Your value demonstration needs to be understood by a brain that does not even understand the future. This means that you need to make that demonstration simple enough that even a non-expert would understand it in the present moment. Use customer testimonials or demos to, create ah-ha moments your targets needs to confirm a decision. Putting together a persuasion message using a theory can deliver phenomenal results.

It is completely vain to preach peace and non-violence without taking charge of the inner condition of concrete humanity. We must get out of moralism and ideology, to enter into a therapeutic and spiritual perspective: violence is a disease, the inevitable effect of a radical alienation. It is at this level that we must work, if we want to really educate someone for peace. I believe that to truly educate a person to non-violence today, at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era, we must get out of any easy rhetoric or pacifist ideology, from any moralistic approach, and enter into the merits of the difficult inner changes that every authentic process of pacification requires. In all of us there is, in fact, a powerful and often unconscious propensity to violence and destructiveness, so much so that war seems to constitute a constant in all the planetary history we know. Throughout the twentieth century we have seen the illuminist and even Marxist illusions collapse, which saw evil only as an effect of social injustices, which humanity would have known an era of peace and prosperity. The world wars, the extermination camps, the violence of the totalitarianisms, the communist tyranny have shown us in a new and shocking way how abysmal the human heart is instead, contradictory and potentially violent. Likewise, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, art and literature have probed the infernal depths of the human soul, revealing its furious longing for death and destruction: "an abyss is the man and his heart is an abyss" ( Psalm 63.7). We could say that the 20th century re-proposes in various ways an anthropology of the wounded man, inhabited by dark and unconscious abysses, by furies and almost irrepressible impulses. It is this piercing wound, which breaks every man's heart, and which makes us feel guilty, split, unfinished, the true root cause of our violence: the human being is violent, he is aggressive, greedy, eager, envious , and murderer, precisely because he is radically unhappy, torn apart, desperate, literally out of his mind, alienated. On the other hand, it is well known in Christian spiritual anthropology: "Is it not true that man throughout his entire history finds himself alienated, tortured, abused? The great mass of humanity has almost always lived in oppression, and from another angle: the oppressors - are they perhaps the true images of man or are they not the first deformed, a degradation of man? Karl Marx drastically described the alienation of man, even if he did not reach the true depth of alienation, because he reasoned only in the material sphere "(J. Ratzinger). That is why today it is completely vain to preach peace and non-violence without taking charge of the inner condition of concrete humanity. It would be like preaching to a terminally ill person to jump with a pole, continuing to repeat how beautiful and appropriate it is to exceed two meters. We must definitely get out of moralism and ideology, in order to get into a more properly therapeutic and spiritual perspective: violence is a disease, the inevitable effect of a radical alienation, so it is at that level that we have to work, if we want to really educate someone for peace. According to the Christian faith it is only the rebirth in the Spirit of Christ that can heal us, heal our wound, and give us a life that is finally intact, and freed from the effects of sin, which separates us from God and therefore alienates us. But the problem we are proposing today is this: to what extent have Christians made and experienced this inner reconciliation? How is it that during these Christian centuries, in our "Christian" civilizations and societies, violence continued to dominate with such virulence? How can we enter a new age of greater realization of the miracle of our deep healing? What can a new evangelization-pacification of Christians mean? In other words, education for peace today presents itself as an urgent need on two distinct and correlated levels, one spiritual and the other political-pedagogical: on the one hand it is a question of radically renewing the Christian initiatory itineraries, so that the peace of Christ comes experienced daily as the balm that cures our despair, and which consequently frees us from the violence it produces. While on the other hand we are called to formulate educational journeys for all, completely secular, that is, from kindergarten to professional formations, which however take care of man's wounded heart, that is, of his structural alienation, and help him to walk towards states of greater integrity / happiness, thus renewing the deteriorated and often terminal forms of our urban, national and planetary coexistence. This obviously involves a great pedagogical and spiritual experimentation, which can effectively compose different educational levels. Today, in fact, we need both interpretative tools much more adequate to the epochal challenges in progress, and that is a new culture of transformation (cultural level), and to know much more deeply our defensive-aggressive psychic forms, and that is how we continue to to close ourselves, to isolate ourselves, to hate, and to put others at a distance, often without even realizing it (psycho-existential level). And finally we also need to placate our breathless, and therefore often violent, mind by teaching them to subside, to breathe, and to expand their inner view, as, as the prophet Isaiah says: "In salvation and conversion there is your salvation, in the trusting abandonment there is your strength "(Is 30,15). This integrated method of education to peacemaking must then be transmitted through warm, group, and fraternal and prolonged accompaniment relationships, as we have been trying to do for 18 years in our Groups, called Darsi pace. In short, war is first and foremost within the heart of man, of every man, and at all times. Overtaking this reality by lingering on extrinsic, moral or social considerations, simply means increasing the anger of our split and unheard parts. Instead we must learn to listen to these furious and sorrowful parts to the end, to recognize their strong presence and influence within us, so that they can be corrected, and their destructive energies can be converted into creative energies, and to really be able to build relationships pacified.

A new model to reveal a full emotional profile The study aimed to create and develop an emotion recognition algorithm based on EEG data. Although studying emotions is quite common practice in neuromarketing, most of the existing models focus on separate characteristics of an emotional process: mainly on emotional engagement and valence. More sophisticated methods of measuring the precise emotional states could help companies to better understand customers, their behavior and the differences in perception of commercials by various segments of target audiences. An emotional component becomes particularly important in a perception of brands, logos, packaging, etc. Knowing what particular combination of emotional reactions is the key to consumers’ hearts might be a useful finding for commercial production. In our study we tried to build a predictive model estimating salience of eight specific emotional responses that could potentially be useful in assessing the perception of advertising stimuli. We hope the results will allow us to reveal the emotional pattern of a stimulus and help gain complex and differentiated understanding of potential customers’ experience. Approach In order to identify the specific patterns of emotional responses, we first identified the emotions that seemed to be worth studying from a perspective of our everyday commercial studies. Secondly, we pre-selected video stimuli eliciting the identified emotions. Various video content was manually chosen from different sources and the relevance of the stimuli to expected affective reactions was validated. During the pilot session we asked the participants to assess and describe their emotional states. Then we merged all videos into eight categories in accordance with the collected responses: surprise, tenderness, joy, laughter, boredom, anger, sadness and fear. The pilot study confirmed that the emotional responses elicited by our pre-selected videos are salient and consistent (only one kind of emotional response is elicited at the same time and similarly described by the majority of participants).The respondents (250 men and women aged 25 to 55 years old) viewed the selected videos that were intended to elicit the emotional responses mentioned above. A total of 16 videos (two in each category) lasting from 10 to 120 seconds were shown. After each video, the participants were asked to name an emotion evoked by the video and fill in the brief questionnaire describing their emotional state in terms of valence, engagement and presence of each of the studied emotional reactions using a 10-point Likert scale. EEG data were recorded simultaneously during the study. The collected data was expected to be used in machine learning to derive an emotion recognition algorithm. Results The obtained data were used to determine the relationship between self-assessing emotional states and EEG activity. The numerous EEG parameters such as spectral power, Shannon entropy and coherence between each of 20 electrodes in theta, alpha, beta 1, beta 2 and gamma bands were taken into analysis as independent variables. The categories of emotional responses were treated as eight binary dependent variables. For each emotional response, a predictive model was built. The model allows the probability of emotion appearance in a stimulus to be calculated. Eight models (one per emotion) were calculated on a learning sample. The results showed an accuracy of 56% to 83% in identifying the target emotion. The models’ outcomes, together with the collected data, create a unique emotional pattern reflecting the complex perception of stimuli. The predicted values of all eights emotions’ presence in each tested video were highly correlated to self-assessing emotional profiles. Conclusions The findings suggest that the extracted models could be used as a metrics of emotion recognition on EEG data, reflecting a complex emotional state when perceiving emotional stimuli. The created metrics might reveal some tiny details that distinguish emotional and memorable commercials from many others. It could help marketers to create high-performance and more targeted advertising with a high efficiency and “selling function”. We believe that our algorithm of emotion recognition is one of the first steps in a long-term process to better understand the complicated emotional processes in the human brain. However, initial progress seems encouraging. More data, more varied stimuli, and more dedicated researchers are required to create better tools that will help us understand better what people feel. But the prize is invaluable. It will create a new level of neuromarketing application in the commercial world and contribute not only to applied neuromarketing and business production, but to the scientific community too.

“Time is passing too fast!” Many of us use that phrase every day when we feel like our kids are growing up fast or when a deadline sneaks up on us. When Virginie van Wassenhove hears that phrase, it conjures an entirely different point of view. She goes straight to consciousness, musing on how we perceive reality. “When it comes to time, we tend to use linguistic shortcuts that may abuse the state of reality and fundamentally bias the way we think about time and the way scientists conceptualize issues related to time,” she says. “I am interested in understanding how the slow time scales of squishy matter afford us to assign meaning to reality.” A cognitive neuroscientist at CEA and INSERM in Paris, van Wassenhove is working to understand the neural underpinnings of time. She has organized a symposium on the topic at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting in San Francisco this month — featuring scientists who are exploring evidence of how we construct mental models of time. “Our work suggests that the conscious arrow of time — thinking about the past or the future — is calibrated on where we imagine ourselves to be, what the brain represents to be the ‘here and now.'” -Virginie van Wassenhove Traditionally, she explains, research on time has focused on how the brain quantifies duration and responds to external rhythms. Now, comparisons of mental time and space at the computational level are offering promising venues to explore new questions on how we perceive time in the brain — questions, van Wassenhove says, like “do high-level representations of time, unlike those of space, show an obligatory orientation past to future?” “Our work suggests that the conscious arrow of time — thinking about the past or the future — is calibrated on where we imagine ourselves to be, what the brain represents to be the ‘here and now,’” she says. Van Wassenhove’s team’s work thus suggests that how we sequence time is determined by internal representations of ourselves. For Marc Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University, his fascination with time dates back to childhood. “The brain’s estimate of the past and the future is foundational to our experience,” he says. “We don’t experience a series of isolated moments. We experience a stream of memories receding gradually towards the past and a stream of predictions approaching from the future.” Our memory is thus a timeline that we must construct, he says. What is exciting about the field now, Howard says, is that scientists are finding neurophysiological evidence to support what was once only theoretical mathematical models. “Over the last several years we’ve seen growing evidence that there’s a record of time in various parts of the brain,” Howards says. “These ‘time cells’ behave like we would expect from a compressed record of the past and have been observed in many brain regions, e.g. hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and the striatum.” “The field of neuroscience will have to further mature and embrace the fact that it will not be possible to understand the human mind without describing how the brain tells, represents, and conceptualizes time.” -Dean Buonomano In even newer work he’ll be discussing at the CNS meeting, researchers have now found evidence to support a mathematical construct of time called a “Laplace transform.” Last summer, Albert Tsao in the Moser lab at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation, which first discovered time cells, published a paper showing evidence that suggested the lateral entorhinal cortex maintains the Laplace transform of time. Howard described the Laplace transform as a fun-house mirror reflection of an image that shows the pattern of events in time that lead to the present. “The reflection doesn’t look much like the image you started with,” he says. “But different images would give different reflections. If you knew the mapping between each image and its reflection, you could look at a reflection and guess what image caused it.” For several years, Howard and colleagues have argued that the brain constructs time as a Laplace transform and a corresponding inverse. (The inverse in the funhouse analogy, he says, is the shape of the funhouse mirror.) In this construct, time cells estimate the past but with a systematic distortion predicted by the Laplace equations; the estimate gets more blurry for events further in the past. Howard’s lab is working to replicate the Tsao data in monkeys to show that the Laplace transform equations govern this construct. “If this result holds up across tasks and species, it suggests that the equations are telling us something relatively deep about the way the brain estimates time,” he says. “It suggests we can work out a real theory of memory and maybe cognition more broadly.” Indeed, Howard’s ultimate goal is to create “simple, elegant, and powerful descriptions of cognition.” While it’s still early, he says, “these new results convince me that this goal is at least possible.” Indeed, van Wassenhove quotes Dean Buonomano (Your Brain is a Time Machine, 2018): “The field of neuroscience will have to further mature and embrace the fact that it will not be possible to understand the human mind without describing how the brain tells, represents, and conceptualizes time.”

The University of Chester’s Energy Centre at Thornton Science Park is working with PowerHouse Energy to ‘turn off the plastic tap into the ocean’ to ultimately clean it up. The innovative technology turns waste plastic into electricity and low-cost hydrogen, which can be used for transport fuel. The process takes all mixed waste plastic in an untreated unsorted contaminated form and requires no sorting or washing. This ground breaking technology has the potential to not only create a green fuel but to clean up plastic from the world’s oceans. The technology developed by the University and Powerhouse Energy, over several years, currently demonstrates small scale conversion of plastic to hydrogen and electricity with zero plastic remaining. W2T are the exclusive developer in the UK and South East Asia including Japan and South Korea for the Powerhouse PLC DMG (distributes modular generation) for waste plastic to hydrogen and electricity. W2T will soon develop a plant on the 54-acre Protos site near Ellesmere Port in Cheshire where they will produce low-cost and low-carbon hydrogen fuel and electricity which will help power the site. This is a first-of-a-kind on the site owned by Peel Environmental- part of Peel Holdings Land and Property. W2T will then aim to roll out plants in SE Asia to clean up waste plastic and to monetise plastic via this highly efficient conversion system. This will enable W2T plants to buy in unrecyclable plastic waste in countries, such as Indonesia for $50 a ton. Therefore, dissuading the disposal of waste plastic in rivers and oceans. Professor Joe Howe, Executive Director Thornton Energy Research Institute, University of Chester, said: “We are extremely excited to be hosting the prototype demonstrator here at the University of Chester. The technology converts all plastic waste into high quality, low carbon hydrogen syngas which can then be used to power gas engines. A by-product of this process is electricity, meaning waste plastic can not only fuel cars but can also keep the lights on at home. Surely the world must wake up to this technology. It will make waste plastic valuable with it being able to power the world’s towns and cities and most importantly it can help clean up our oceans of waste plastic now."