The selection procedure differed from the tool condition because the ravens were given three trays in immediate succession (to be comparable with some studies on great apes) so that the subject could select, and later exchange, three tokens in one trial. Experiment 3 tested planning in a self-control context to determine whether ravens can act with future events in mind by disregarding an immediate, valuable food reward in favor of an item that could give access to an even more valued reward occurring only after a 15-min delay. In contrast to a control condition in which all ravens selected the immediate reward on 100% of trials when no tool or token was available (10 trials per subject), subjects selected the tool on average in 73.8% of the trials (min, 8; max, 12) and the token in an average of 73.2% of trials (min, 7; max, 12).

It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web servers, highway traffic, and telecommunications…basically any situation where you have things entering a system, being processed by a system for a certain period of time, and leaving the system. Because people stand in the same line, waiting for a register to become available, there are no “slow” lines, delayed by a coupon-counting customer or languid cashier. See also How to Pick the Fastest Line at the Supermarket, Queue Theory and Design from 99% Invisible, and this paper from Bob Wescott, Seven Insights Into Queueing Theory.

Laptops and tablets that reminded us that not every new device has to get a 2, a 1, a ZERO on our repairability scale. Opening up a laptop like HP’s EliteBook 840 G6, EliteBook x360 830 G5, EliteBook x360 830 G6, or a convertible tablet like the Elite x2 G4—it’s almost too much. The battery and fan are actually easier to remove on the 830 laptops than on the 840, due to the use of regular screws and a more streamlined modular design.

By placing Renoir’s work among great nudes by predecessors he admired (Rubens, Boucher, Delacroix, Courbet and Corot) as well as contemporaries and successors who admired him (Cézanne, Degas, Bonnard, Léger, Picasso, Matisse and Valadon), Shackelford and Bell reveal his pivotal place within a grand French tradition. (Dallas Museum of Art/Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund Inc.)
Both Boucher and Renoir expressed an 18th-century view of the erotic as a humane and civilizing concept, rather than as a violent and disruptive one, which may be why women tend to love both artists in ways that men do not. Renoir’s “Blonde Braiding Her Hair,” from the Dallas Museum of Art — my vote for best in show — demonstrates why he deserves his special place in the tradition.

WASHINGTON — A new federal study has found that an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that began 14 years ago has been releasing as much as 4,500 gallons a day, not three or four gallons a day as the rig owner has claimed. The leak, about 12 miles off the Louisiana coast, began in 2004 when a Taylor Energy Company oil platform sank during Hurricane Ivan and a bundle of undersea pipes ruptured. Oil plumes from the seafloor, Taylor executives have said, are from oil-soaked sediment that has formed around the platform, and any gas rising from the bottom is the natural product of living organisms.

Loesch and Noir have become the primary public faces of the N.R.A.; at events, enormous banners feature their images alongside those of LaPierre and Chris Cox, the organization’s top lobbyist. For more than three decades, Ackerman has shaped the N.R.A.’s public identity, helping to build it from a niche activist organization into a ubiquitous presence in American popular culture. Top officials and staff move freely between the two organizations; Oliver North, the former Iran-Contra operative, who now serves as the N.R.A.’s president, is paid roughly a million dollars a year through Ackerman, according to two N.R.A. sources.

That picture is of a Flip video camera with the lid off, a product from about nine years ago. Their last product – that ultimately never shipped – could stream video live to the Web, something we wouldn’t really see from a pocket-sized device until Periscope and (now-dead) Meerkat took a run at it five years later. Who pushed for that one extra feature that might give their product a few extra years of life, when so many market forces were and are pushing against it.

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People displaced from those jobs are likely to find that comparable roles in the services sector have also been squeezed by automation, the firm said. Regions where more people have lower skills, which tend to have weaker economies and higher unemployment rates anyway, are much more vulnerable to the loss of jobs due to robots, Oxford Economics said. On average, each additional robot installed in those lower-skilled regions could lead to nearly twice as many job losses as those in higher-skilled regions of the same country, exacerbating economic inequality and political polarisation, which is growing already, Oxford Economics said.

The same is true, Einstein showed, for “stuff” like space and time, seemingly stable, unchangeable aspects of nature; in truth, it’s the relationship between space and time that always stays the same, even as space contracts and time dilates. “Einstein’s deep view was that space and time are basically built up by relationships between things happening,” said the physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein spent his final decades. Einstein connected the dots: The speed of light was a measurable manifestation of the symmetrical relationship between electric and magnetic fields — a more fundamental concept than space itself.