Every day, people drink more than two billion coffee cups worldwide, and experts predict that demand for it could triple by mid-century.Coffee consumption is highest in Europe and North America. In the US, 66 percent of adults drink coffee every day — more than any other beverage, including water — and in the UK, coffee is now officially as popular as tea.But it’s the Netherlands and Nordic nations who routinely top the charts for the most-caffeinated crowd, with the Dutch, Finns and Swedes consuming 8.3 kg (18.3 lb), 7.8 kg (17.2 lb) and 7.6 kg (16.8 lb) coffee per person in 2020.

Coffee, The Love Of Our Lives

Study after study shows that our thirst for coffee harms the planet and exploits millions of people in some of the poorest parts of the world.Arabica, which originated in the highlands of Ethiopia, is prized for its smooth, complex flavour profile, and it fetches a higher price. It requires shade, so traditional coffee farms intersperse trees of different types and heights among the coffee plants. To grow well, it requires shade and requires chemical pesticides to grow in the sun, which inevitably end up in local waterways.

How Coffee Production Hurts the Environment 

<ul><li>Around 125 million people worldwide depend on coffee for their livelihoods, but many of the estimated 25 million smallholder farmers who produce 80% of the crop struggle to earn a reliable living.</li><li>Farmers' struggles are compounded by the fact that coffee is a boom-and-bust commodity, vulnerable to poor weather and pests.</li><li>This creates an unstable market with recurring supply-demand imbalances that drive wild fluctuations in price.</li></ul>

The High Human Costs of Producing Coffee

Buy certified coffee: Coffee certifications can help you find coffee produced using farming practices that meet environmental, social or economic sustainability standards. There’s a dizzying array to choose from, but some of the best-regarded certifications are Fairtrade, Alliance, 4C and Smithsonian Bird Friendly.Each scheme prioritizes different aspects of sustainability — and their focus can shift — so be sure to stay up to date and pick one that aligns with your values.

Be A Responsible Coffee Drinker

Dig deeper, beyond just the certification labels. Initiatives such as <a href="https://www.transparency.coffee/">The Pledge</a> aim to improve farmers’ bottom line by encouraging roasters to be transparent about the prices they pay. Many independent coffee shops also have close relationships with their growers and roasters, so don’t be shy to ask questions directly.

Know Your Coffee

Dairy production is second only to meat in terms of its climate impacts, so it’s worth considering the entire contents of your cup. Studies show that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a standard latte are between two and four times as high as those from a standard espresso.If you can’t forego the milk, you can slash its climate impact by two-thirds by picking one of a variety of plant-based options.

Consider Your Milk

As much as 70 percent of your cup’s environmental impact is tied to the beans and how they’re cultivated, so it makes sense to focus most of your attention there. But small actions add up, so avoid non-recyclable coffee pods and bulky pre-made drinks that take an inordinate amount of fuel to ship.Finally, don’t underestimate the power of a simple reusable cup. When you take yours into a café, you’re doing more than saving a disposable cup from the landfill — you’re also signalling your values to companies that want your business.

Do Some Legwork

Every day, more than two billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide -- wow! Unsurprisingly, that staggering consumption comes with significant environmental and human costs. Learn what they are and four ways to drink more sustainably.

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Food

health

Health

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Science & Nature

Wonder about the impact of your daily cup of coffee on the planet? Here’s the bitter truth

The term interference is used to explain why people forget long-term memories. There are two forms of interference: proactive interference, in which old memories disrupt the retrieval of new memories, and retroactive interference, in which new memories disrupt the retrieval and maintenance of old memories.

Proactive and Retroactive Interference

Interference theory is one of several theories that explain why we forget. It posits that memories compete, which means one memory may interfere with another when an individual is trying to retrieve information from long-term memory.For example, if you go to the movies on a regular basis, you may have trouble remembering who you went to a given film with. Each time you go to the movie theater, the experience is similar. Therefore, different memories of going to the movie theater may become confused in your mind because they are so much alike.

Interference Theory

<a href="https://www.simplypsychology.org/proactive-and-retroactive-interference.html">Proactive interference</a> happens when an individual is unable to learn new information because old information prevents its retrieval. In other words, old memories interfere with the retrieval of new memories. Older memories are often more strongly encoded in long-term memory because the individual has had more time to revisit and rehearse them. As a result, they are easier to recall than memories that were made more recently. <a href="https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1286&context=psych_facpub">Research</a> has shown that one way to reduce proactive interference is to rehearse the new information through testing or recitation.

Proactive Interference

Retroactive interference happens when an individual is unable to recall old information because new information prevents its retrieval. In other words, new memories interfere with the retrieval of old memories.Retroactive interference has been shown to disrupt learning.

Retroactive Interference

There is a great deal of research backing up the effects of proactive and retroactive interference. However, there are some <a href="https://www.simplypsychology.org/proactive-and-retroactive-interference.html">issues with the theory</a>. Most studies on interference theory take place in a lab using word memory tasks that are presented fairly close together. In real life, people rarely perform word memory tasks, much less with only a little bit of time between them. As a result, many of the studies of proactive and retroactive interference may not be generalizable to the real world.

The Bottom Line

Proactive and retroactive interference deal with people's ability to recall memories. Learn the definitions and the science behind them.

Proactive and Retroactive Interference: Definition and Examples

Projection bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the degree to which their future attributes (e.g., tastes and beliefs) will resemble their current ones. Essentially, this bias leads people to engage in flawed self-forecasting, by projecting their current attributes onto their future selves, and thus underestimating how much their attributes will likely change over time.Projection bias can strongly influence people’s thoughts, statements, and actions in various domains, so it’s important to understand it.

Projection Bias

An example of the projection bias is that a person who is grocery shopping while hungry will likely buy more food than they really need, because they assume that they will keep being as hungry in the future, even after they’ve eaten.

The Hungry Shopper

<ul><li>It can cause people who are making summer vacation plans during the winter to pick overly warm destinations, because they overestimate how much they will want to be somewhere warm during the summer, due to the current winter conditions.</li><li>It can cause diners to order too much food at the beginning of their meal, because they overestimate how hungry they will be as the meal progresses, due to their current hunger.</li><li>It can cause people to start engaging in an addictive habit, such as smoking cigarettes, because they underestimate how addictive it will be, due to their current lack of addiction.</li></ul>

How Projection Bias Influences Our Behaviour

Some entities may also take advantage of people’s projection bias intentionally, as in the case of companies that do so to influence people’s shopping patterns.Example: Companies may encourage overconsumption by encouraging people to purchase large quantities of a certain product in advance (like the food at an all-you-can-eat buffet) before those people realize that they don’t need so much of the product or don’t value the product as much as they initially thought.

How Entities Can Take Undue Advantage Of Projection Bias In People

The projection bias means that even though people generally understand the direction in which their attributes will change over time, they systematically underestimate the magnitude of this change, so their prediction lies between their current attributes and their actual future attributes.
This happens because people give too much weight to the anchor of their current attributes, and fail to properly take into account factors that could cause their attributes to change, such as maturation, social influence, change in circumstances, adaptation to changes, and general mood fluctuations.

The Psychology and Causes of Projection Bias

Factors that change people’s attributes over time can be categorized based on whether they are:<ul><li>Personal (or dispositional), as in the case of maturation or general mood fluctuation.</li><li>Environmental (or situational), as in the case of influence from peers or influence from a certain physical location.</li></ul>These factors can also be categorized based on whether they are short-term or long-term, based on the period of time over which they influence a person.For example, social influence from a salesperson is likely to be short-term, whereas social influence from a parent is likely to be long-term.

Factors That Influence Attributes

People often fail to learn from past mispredictions of their future attributions, and therefore continue to repeatedly display the same type of projection bias over time. This can happen due to various reasons, such as:
<ul>
<li>A person’s desire to feel that they understand themself well can lead them to engage in self-enhancement, by forgetting or misremembering their past mispredictions.</li>
<li>A person’s focus on confirming their current predictions, rather than on assessing them properly, which can lead them to ignore evidence that contradicts those predictions.</li>
</ul>

Failure to Learn from Mispredictions

<ul><li>Understand what this bias is and what causes it.</li><li>Understand when and how this bias can affect people in general.</li><li>Be aware of common projection traps, such as underestimating the influence of visceral factors, overestimating the likelihood of following up on future plans, and oversensitivity to your current state when making long-term decisions.</li><li>Identify specific situations where this bias can play a key role, and plan how you will deal with it.</li><li>Use general debiasing techniques, such as slowing down your reasoning process and making it explicit.</li></ul>

How to Deal With Projection Bias

The projection bias is attributed to a 2003 paper titled “Projection bias in predicting future utility”, by researchers George Loewenstein, Ted O’Donoghue, and Matthew Rabin (published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 118, Issue 4, pages 1209–1248).
The associated study was also published as a working paper in <a href="https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.239901">2000</a>, and mentioned in <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20210303030428/https:/www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/risky-behavior-among-youths-economic-analysis/risky-behavior-among-youths-some-issues-behavioral-economics">other publications</a> around that time period. Furthermore, evidence of this phenomenon has also been presented in other papers published <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.1.66">around that time</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.1.66">earlier</a>.

The Origin And History Of Projection Bias

Projection Bias is sometimes used to refer to people's tendency to project their beliefs, values, characteristics, and behaviours unto others, and to consequently overestimate the degree to which these things are shared with others, a phenomenon that’s sometimes referred to as social projection or the false-consensus effect.The type of projection bias that is outlined in this article can be considered a specific case of this, where people project current attributes onto their future selves.

Other Types Of Projection Bias

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Personal Development

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Leadership & Management

People Underestimate How Much They Will Change – Effectiviology

A weighted graph is interesting because it has little to do with whether the graph is directed, undirected, or contains cycles. At its core, a weighted graph is a graph whose edges have some sort of value that is associated with them. The value that is attached to an edge is what gives the edge its “weight”.

Graphs that weigh heavy on your mind

Dijkstra’s algorithm can be used to determine the shortest path from one node in a graph to every other node within the same graph data structure, provided that the nodes are reachable from the starting node.

Dijkstra’s algorithm

The abstracted rules are as follows: <ul><li>Every time that we set out to visit a new node, we will choose the node with the smallest known distance/cost to visit first. </li><li>Once we’ve moved to the node we’re going to visit, we will check each of its neighboring nodes. </li><li>For each neighboring Node, we’ll calculate the Distance/Cost by summing the cost of the edges that lead to the Node we’re checking.</li><li>Finally, if the distance/cost to a node is less than a known distance, we’ll update the shortest distance that we have on file for that vertex. </li></ul>

Rules of Dijkstra’s game

If you spend enough time reading about programming or computer science, there’s a good chance that you’ll encounter the same ideas, terms, concepts, and names, time and again. Some of them start to…

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Computer Science

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Artificial Intelligence

Finding The Shortest Path, With A Little Help From Dijkstra

<ul><li>Get through to real people. If you’re applying through the front door, make sure you’re getting to human beings.</li><li>Start small and work your way up. Plan to tackle easier interviews early on and more difficult ones later on.</li><li>Study like your future job depends on it (because it does). There’s no such thing as too much preparation.</li><li>Put your best foot forward. Don’t sell yourself short! And remember, it’s a mutual exploration.</li><li>Prepare for the long game and make sure you take care of yourself.</li></ul>

Lessons learned from applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp

A less-talked about part of the bootcamper’s journey is what happens after you graduate — when you’re searching for that six-figure developer position. I completed Hack Reactor in July 2016 and took…

I spent 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp. Here’s what I learned.

Throughout history, there have been enormous eruptions of volcanoes. The power of these eruptions is measured using the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI). The classification system was developed in the 1980s. The scale goes from 1 to 8, and each succeeding VEI is 10 x greater than the last.

Volcanic eruptions

The Yellowstone National Park is an active volcano and has erupted three times at a magnitude-8, once 2.1 million years ago, again 1.2 million years ago and most recently 640,0000 years ago. Together, it expelled enough ash and lava to fill the Grand Canyon. The last of the three supervolcano eruptions created the park's enormous crater, measuring 30 by 45 miles across (48 by 72 kilometres).

Yellowstone eruption, 640,000 Years ago (VEI 8)

Huaynaputina, in Peru, is a towering 16,000 feet (4,850 metres). The volcanic eruption sent mudflows 75 miles (120 km) away and may have affected the global climate. After the 1600 eruption, the summers were some of the coldest in 500 years. The ash buried a 20-square-mile (50 square km) area to the mountain's west, which remains covered to this day.

Huaynaputina, 1600 (VEI 6)

A massive eruption took place on 26-27 April 1883 on the volcanic island arc at the subduction zone of the Indo-Australian plate. The explosion created a tsunami whose waves reached 140 feet high (40 metres) and killed about 34,000 people. Tidal gauges over 7,000 miles (11,000 km) away on the Arabian Peninsula registered an increase in wave heights.

Krakatoa, 1883 (VEI 6)

The explosion in Guatemala was one of the largest eruptions of the 20th century and left a crater of about a mile (1.5 km) across. It came after the volcano had remained silent for about 500 years. The tree-covered volcano is one of a chain of stratovolcanoes along Guatemala's Pacific coastal plain. Since the last blast in 1922 (VEI 3), it experienced continuous activity, and in 1929, it spewed out a pyroclastic flow that may have killed about 5,000 people.

Santa Maria Volcano, 1902 (VEI 6)

The eruption of Novarupta was the largest volcanic explosion of the 20th century. Three cubic miles (12.5 cubic km) of magma and ash was thrown into the air and, when it landed, covered 3,000 square miles (7,88 square km) in ash over a foot deep.

Novarupta, 1912 (VEI 6)

When the stratovolcano in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it sent over one cubic mile (5 cubic km) of material into the air. As a result, a column of ash rose 22 miles (35 km) in the atmosphere and fell across the countryside. The blast ejected millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the air that was spread worldwide by air currents. It caused global temperatures to drop by 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) over the next year.

Mount Pinatubo, 1991 (VEI 6)

The 257-square-mile (665-square-km) volcanic island is in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The volcano sent a wave of hot ashes and dust down the mountain and formed a caldera (a large depression) 7.5 miles (12 km) wide. The volcano has erupted almost 50 times since 1774.

Ambrym island, 50 AD (VEI 6+)

This volcano has only experienced two eruptions in its history. The first known eruption was huge and covered much of central and western El Salvador with pumice and ash. It destroyed the early Mayan cities as the inhabitants had to flee.

Ilopango volcano, 450 AD (VEI 6+)

Geologists estimated that the Aegean Islands volcano Thera erupted with the energy of several hundred atomic bombs.  The Minoan civilization of the island Santorini suspected the volcano was going to blow and evacuated. The volcano disrupted the culture with tsunamis and temperature declines that changed the climate.

Mount Thera, 1610 BC (VEI 7)

The eruption spewed volcanic material about 750 miles (1,200 km) away and created a large caldera nearly 3 miles (4.5 km) across and a half-mile (almost 1 km) deep at the mountain's summit. It is now filled with water and a popular tourist destination. The mountain is located on the border of China and North Korea and last erupted in 1702.

Changbaishan volcano, 1000 AD (VEI 7)

The largest ever recorded explosion is that of Mount Tambora. The volcano is still active and one of the tallest peaks in the Indonesian archipelago. In April 1815, the volcano exploded so loudly that it was heard on Sumatra Island, over 1,200 miles (1,920 km) away. The estimated death toll was 71,000 people.

Mt. Tambora, Sumbawa Island, Indonesia - 1815 (VEI 7)

Some of these cataclysms changed history and climate. 

Wonder about the impact of your daily cup of coffee on the planet? Here’s the bitter truth

Proactive and Retroactive Interference: Definition and Examples

People Underestimate How Much They Will Change – Effectiviology

Finding The Shortest Path, With A Little Help From Dijkstra

I spent 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp. Here’s what I learned.

Joshua Roberts