All posts tagged: Difficult

In Praise of ‘Difficult’ Kids

In Praise of ‘Difficult’ Kids

Published by José Betancourt

In 1996, I was a freshly minted high-school history teacher offering a lesson about the presidential election. Ned, who sat in the back row, was doing what Ned always did: making his classmates laugh. He had a gift for the well-timed quip. His comebacks flew so quickly, it was as if he’d prepared them in advance. Generally, he seemed to invest more energy in entertaining the room than in whatever we were studying. A few years ago, Ned reached out to me on Facebook. He is now a high-school English teacher. In his message, he recalled in great detail the debates we’d had about the Civil War, the play our class had performed about Vietnam, the days I had assigned students to bring in a newspaper article and explain it to the class—which is when he had started reading the paper. And all this time, I’d assumed Ned hadn’t been paying attention. Truth be told, in my 30 years in schools, I’ve met a lot of kids like Ned: the ones who won’t stop with …

The 3 Most Common Types of Difficult Coworkers

The 3 Most Common Types of Difficult Coworkers

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you have coworkers, there’s a decent chance that you consider at least one of them to be difficult to work with. In a previous post, I offered an approach that was based on examining your assumptions about difficult people at work, and then reframing how you interpret their motives. Here, I’d like to offer a more direct approach to having difficult conversations with problematic coworkers. A review of the relevant research revealed that problematic coworkers tend to fall into three broad categories: 1) those who withhold their full effort, 2) those who are chronically negative or pessimistic, and 3) those who display some form of inappropriate interpersonal behavior. These three general types appear to cover a wide range of individual possibilities. What makes a conversation “difficult”? For one, such conversations are uncomfortable for both parties because they address behaviors and reactions that are rarely directly addressed. Instead, people tend to gossip and complain about difficult coworkers behind their backs. Doing so vents some of the frustration and gives the commiserating coworkers something over which …

Our extinct Australopithecus relatives may have had difficult births

Our extinct Australopithecus relatives may have had difficult births

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Childbirth was difficult and dangerous for our ape-like ancestors, much as it is for women today. A new study of the pelvises of Australopithecus suggests that labour exerted powerful forces on their pelvic floors – meaning Australopithecus mothers risked perineal tearing. “We show that Australopithecines are quite similar to modern humans,” says Pierre Frémondière, a midwife at Aix-Marseille University in France. “If they had lots of deliveries, probably they would have a greater risk of pelvic floor disorder.” For modern humans, vaginal childbirth requires a lot of force, as a large-headed baby is forced through a relatively narrow pelvis. One region that is prone to damage is the pelvic floor, a sheet of muscles that links the left and right halves of the pelvis. Many women tear their pelvic floor during labour, and it’s been estimated that 1 in 4 women experience pelvic floor disorders such as incontinence or organ prolapse. Frémondière and his colleagues wanted to find out if similar difficulties afflicted our extinct ancestors. They focused on Australopithecus, which lived in Africa between …

Catherine O’Hara managed to make difficult characters utterly delightful

Catherine O’Hara managed to make difficult characters utterly delightful

Published by Sam Flores

One of the later and less beloved Christopher Guest comedies featuring his troupe of peerless, often SCTV-related improvisers is For Your Consideration, a medium-funny savaging of Hollywood’s feverish awards-season prestige campaigning. The film’s unquestionable highlight is Catherine O’Hara, playing an actor who gets a whisper of awards buzz for a schlocky, still-filming drama called Home for Purim, and slowly loses her mind with the knowledge that she could maybe, possibly be recognized by her peers. O’Hara, known for her distinctively brassy yet malleable trill of her voice and her frequently red hair, peels back her performer’s bravado to expose the frenzied need beneath it. She somehow plays the outsized beneath the regular-sized, as her Marilyn Hack goes from plugging-away workhorse to desperate striver. Unsurprisingly, O’Hara briefly generated awards buzz of her own for playing this part; even less surprisingly, an Oscar nomination was not forthcoming. It couldn’t be; otherwise, it might have marred O’Hara’s masterclass in how certain actors, especially those specializing in comedy, are destined to go under-recognized in their lifetimes. The difference, of …

Identifying dinosaurs from their footprints is difficult – but AI can help

Identifying dinosaurs from their footprints is difficult – but AI can help

Published by Miika Tikkanen

When you hear the word “dinosaur”, the first thing that might spring to mind is a hulking skeleton like Sue the T rex in Chicago’s Field Museum or Sophie the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London. Dinosaur skeletons give us striking evidence of what these ancient animals looked like, from the plates and spikes on stegosaurs like Sophie to the long-necked, airplane-sized bodies of titanosaurs. However, despite their iconic status as museum centerpieces, skeletons are not the most common type of dinosaur fossil known. That prize goes to dinosaur footprints. The abundance of dinosaur footprints is intuitive. Each dinosaur could only leave one skeleton – but on any single day of its life, it could make thousands of footprints. So, even if only a tiny fraction were fossilised, we could expect to see many more of them in the fossil record. Dinosaur footprints form in environments where the ground is soft enough to leave an impression, but still cohesive enough so that the shape of the track does not collapse. We find dinosaur …