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Using the Standard Solitaire Game to Sharpen Your Problem-Solving Abilities

In today’s fast-paced world, problem-solving skills are more important than ever. Whether it’s in your personal life or professional career, the ability to think critically and find solutions is highly valued. One way to enhance these skills is by playing the standard solitaire game. While many people may see solitaire as a simple card game, it actually offers numerous benefits for improving problem-solving abilities. In this article, we will explore how playing the standard solitaire game can help sharpen your problem-solving skills.

Enhancing Strategic Thinking

Playing the standard solitaire game requires strategic thinking and planning ahead. As you lay out your cards and make moves, you must consider various possibilities and anticipate future moves. This process encourages you to analyze different scenarios and make decisions based on potential outcomes.

Furthermore, solitaire also teaches you the importance of prioritization. You need to prioritize which cards to move first and which ones to leave behind. This skill translates directly into real-life situations where you must prioritize tasks or actions based on their importance or urgency.

By regularly engaging in strategic thinking while playing solitaire, you can develop a more analytical mindset that will benefit you in all areas of life.

Developing Patience

Patience is a virtue that can greatly contribute to effective problem-solving. In the standard solitaire game, patience is key as success often requires multiple rounds of trial and error before finding the right solution.

The process of patiently trying different moves and experimenting with various strategies teaches valuable lessons about persistence and resilience. It trains your mind not to give up easily when faced with challenges but instead motivates you to keep trying until you find a solution.

Developing patience through playing solitaire can be a valuable asset when faced with complex problems that require time and perseverance to solve effectively.

Making Skills

In solitaire, every move you make is a decision that can impact the outcome of the game. The ability to make informed decisions quickly is crucial for success. By playing the standard solitaire game regularly, you can improve your decision-making skills.

As you become more experienced in solitaire, you will start recognizing patterns and developing strategies that maximize your chances of winning. This process trains your brain to analyze information efficiently and make decisions based on logical reasoning.

Moreover, solitaire also teaches you to evaluate risks and rewards. Some moves may seem appealing in the short term but could lead to unfavorable outcomes later on. Learning to assess potential risks and rewards helps you make better decisions not only in the game but also in real-life situations where critical thinking is required.

Enhancing Concentration and Focus

Playing solitaire requires concentration and focus as you need to pay attention to every card on the table and track their movements. Distractions can lead to mistakes that could cost you the game.

Regularly engaging in solitaire can help improve your ability to concentrate for extended periods. This skill is transferable to various areas of life where focus is necessary, such as work tasks or studying.

Additionally, solitaire can serve as a form of meditation by providing a momentary escape from daily stressors. It allows you to clear your mind, focus solely on the game at hand, and recharge your mental energy.

The standard solitaire game offers more than just entertainment; it provides an opportunity to enhance problem-solving abilities through strategic thinking, patience development, improved decision-making skills, and enhanced concentration/focus.

By incorporating regular sessions of solitaire into your routine, you can sharpen these essential skills that are valuable in both personal and professional settings. So next time you find yourself with some free time or need a break from work-related tasks, consider playing a round of solitaire – it might just give your problem-solving abilities a boost.

This text was generated using a large language model, and select text has been reviewed and moderated for purposes such as readability.

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15 November 2013

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How Science Is Solving Health Issues at All Stages of Life

Health issues hit us in different ways at different ages. Here are some big ones science and tech are helping to solve.

Roughly 8 percent of kids in the US suffer from food allergies—often from peanuts. Epicutaneous immunotherapy could help. It’s a skin patch with a layer of peanut protein that activates immune cells that travel to the lymph nodes (which help control allergic response) without entering the bloodstream. The patch is still in trials, but the hope is that it will promote tolerance without triggering a nutty reaction.

Studies show that interventions before age 4 result in significant gains in cognition, language, and adaptive behavior, but autism is difficult to predict early enough. Scientists have used artificial intelligence to create a method for analyzing brain connectivity in babies’ fMRIs; it was able to predict with greater than 96 percent accuracy whether a 6-month-old would develop autism by age 2.

See more from the Life Issue . April 2018. Subscribe to WIRED .

By around 6 months old, a baby’s brain prunes itself to specialize in the language and sounds it has been hearing since birth. Deaf infants are at risk of missing this crucial turning point in development, even after receiving cochlear implants. Scientists have created a machine-learning algorithm that parses babies’ MRIs to predict language development and determine if they’ll need extra help.

Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is the most common visual impairment in US children. Early studies have shown virtual-reality games can be more effective than the traditional eye-patch treatment (yarrr!). VR systems beam different images to each eye to create the illusion of 3-D, so the game can be designed to deliver crucial information (flying asteroids, for example) in the image shown to the weaker eye. This trains the brain and both eyes to work together—and might give a head start to future e-athletes.

Age 13 — 26

Nearly a tenth of high school sports injuries are concussions , but it’s notoriously difficult to gauge their severity. One recent study found that the level of tau protein in the blood of students who had suffered a concussion corresponded with the length of time the young athlete needed to recover. A simple blood test that can reliably predict recovery time might not be far off.

Some 3.1 million adolescents in the US suffered at least one major depressive episode in 2016. They might want to talk to a new chatbot that’s schooled in cognitive behavioral therapy. it inquires about mood daily and trains the user to reframe negative thinking (“Life comes at you pretty fast. A wise man named Ferris Bueller said that.”) and set manageable goals.

Type 1 diabetes often emerges in the early teen years, when managing the disease—measuring blood glucose levels and injecting insulin multiple times a day—can be tough. To alleviate the burden, an insulin pump system for patients 14 and up, called the MiniMed 670G , automatically monitors glucose levels and uses an algorithm to determine when to administer precise insulin infusions.

More than 4 million young people now live with HIV worldwide. Treatment has made huge strides—the illness is no longer necessarily a death sentence. But controlling the disease requires patients to follow a complicated daily regimen of pills. To ease that, scientists have designed a six-pronged capsule that patients take just once a week: The prongs are composed of different polymers that dissolve at different rates, delivering drugs over several days.

Age 27 — 54

Most cancers don’t hit until later in life, but doctors recommend some patients in their thirties and forties get screened for colon, prostate, breast, and cervical cancers. Scientists are now developing so-called liquid biopsies to detect molecules shed by tumors in blood or urine—a less invasive, less painful, and more easily repeated process than a tissue biopsy.

For women under 35, the chance of one cycle of IVF ($12,000 and up!) working is only about 50 percent. Researchers have developed a small microfluidics device to help select which sperm to use for IVF: The cells swim through a sort of obstacle course that screens for the healthiest, fastest, most normal-­shaped sperm. The hope is that the overachievers will raise the chances of IVF success.

Scientists are getting closer to creating a universal vaccine that would be effective against multiple influenza strains (eliminating yearly shots—yay!). One strategy is to target a protein on the virus’s outer surface called hemagglutinin, which the bug uses to invade cells. The protein’s head mutates often, but its stem usually stays the same across strains—making it a promising Achilles’ heel for antibodies.

In 2015, people age 35 to 54 made up more than a third of all suicides. Researchers are exploring using data from smartphone sensors to monitor mental health . Depressed people, for instance, move around less, which can be tracked with a phone’s GPS and accelerometer. Sleep patterns are often disrupted, which researchers can see via the hours when someone uses their phone. All this allows doctors to capture data beyond what patients self-report.

Age 55 — Infinity

Earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer’s would allow for treatments that could reverse symptoms and slow cognitive decline. In 2017, scientists created an Alzheimer’s test by sifting through data from 70,000 seniors and zooming in on 31 genetic markers associated with the disease. It accurately determines one’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s—and how that risk changes as you grow older. (Spoiler alert: It gets higher.)

Kidney disease affects 14 percent of US adults, and the vast majority of them are older than 60. The treatment options are less than awesome: Dialysis is a short-term, expensive solution, and donor organs are scarce. Now a group of researchers and doctors are developing an implantable artificial kidney that filters blood through silicon membranes and runs on the body’s own blood pressure.

The median age of a lymphoma diagnosis is 67, and chemotherapy doesn’t always work to treat it. Scientists are exploring a new weapon called CAR T cell therapy . They collect a patient’s own T cells from their blood, affix receptors engineered to lock onto cancerous cells, and release them back into the patient to carry out search and destroy missions.

Mitochondria, the organelles that produce energy your cells run on, gather mutations as you age—and begin to malfunction. Scientists suspect they play a crucial role in aging , possibly because they’re involved with metabolic processes, which slow as people get older. A molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide could juice the system. It acts as fuel for a protein that helps produce mitochondria, and scientists think it could be used as a supplement to treat metabolic decline.

Age 0 — 12 : How to Reverse Infertility • Tools for Fetal Surgery • Save the Preemies • The Year's Best Tech Playthings • Cashing in on Kiddie YouTube • The #MiniMilah Effect • Rethinking Screen Time • A Brief History of Digital Worries

Age 13 — 26 : Inside Oracle High • Call Me, Maybe • The New Cyber Troops • Comp Sci Diversity • Paths to Early Stardom • Why Teens Don't Drive • In Love on Strava • Death of Middle School Romance

Age 27 — 54 : Real Wedding, Virtual Space • The Pursuit of Youth • The Digital Vision Problem • The True Screen Addicts • Gamers Age Out • Rebooting Reproduction • Silicon Valley's Brotox Boom • The Next Steve Jobs

Age 55 — Infinity : How Old Are We, Really? • Wii Bowling's Golden Years • The Testosterone Myth • How to Live Forever • Designing the Future • Aging on Demand • The Liquefied Burial

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How to Use Science to Solve Problems

Is it possible to make day-to-day decisions about your life without having some basic training in science and the scientific method? If we take a look at some current issues highlighted in the daily news, we are confronted by scientific issues. Consider, for example:

Genetics : Current research is making it possible to test and identify people who have, or are carriers for, certain diseases like Huntington's, breast cancer and many other fatal diseases. Do you want to be tested? Who should have access to your test results? Should insurance companies have the right to refuse you insurance? Should your employer have the right to know about your status?

Environment : There is evidence that many species are becoming extinct. How important is biodiversity? Should government take action to protect endangered species? What considerations should govern the use of natural resources?

Space : The exploration of space has been a driving force in technology for the past 50 years. What resources should be dedicated to putting humans into space? Who should determine the course of space exploration? How is space exploration related to warfare? Are you impacted by any of this as an individual?

Ways of Knowing and Explaining the World

How is scientific knowledge differentiated from other types of knowing? People have been attempting to explain how the world works from the beginning of history. There are three broad categories of explanations. It is important to be able to distinguish what method of explanation is being applied to a particular question or problem. Not all issues can be addressed scientifically.

• Common Sense -- These explanations of how the world operates are based on informal observations and input from experts as well as what seems self-evident based on rational explanation.
• Belief-Based -- These explanations of how the world works are based on a framework of belief that does not depend on direct observation and addresses all subjects, not just those that can be observed. Conclusions are held as true, sometimes despite evidence to the contrary.

The Scientific Method

Scientific knowledge is acquired through a very specific set of conditions called the scientific method. You can apply the scientific method in your consideration of day-to-day problems by following these steps:

• Observation -- Look critically at some aspect of the universe. Measure accurately. Explore all aspects of the situation. Review what is already known and define what is not known.
• Question -- Be curious. Ask lots of questions. Admit uncertainty. Be willing to show your ignorance. Ask "what if?"
• Hypothesis -- Invent a theory that could explain what you have observed. Take a stand and set up the question so that it can be tested and answered through observation.
• Prediction -- Use your theory to make a prediction. If the theory is correct, what should happen? If the theory is not correct, what might be the outcome?
• Experiment -- Test your prediction through experimentation. Make observations and compare them to your predictions. Set up controls to establish a basis of comparison.
• Analysis -- Examine the results of your experiments and interpret the data collected. Draw conclusions. Modify your theory. Conduct further experiments.

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We’ve come to expect science to solve problems—and that’s a problem

In a recent essay, Martin Rees, an astrophysicist and retired University of Cambridge professor, says he is certain that, for good or ill, we are coming upon the limits of human knowledge—a point at which computers could one day overtake us. The idea certainly taps into deep-seated fears about artificial intelligence, but I’d argue that we shouldn’t worry about computers outsmarting us, or even the real (or imagined) limits of human knowledge.

What we need to worry about is wasting the knowledge we already have.

Science, be it in the form of cancer biology or climatology or statistics, can help provide perspective and potential solutions for many of our most pressing problems. We know that smoking increases our risk of developing cancer. We know that overall the world has become warmer during the past 150 years. We know that the congressional districts in Wisconsin are politically gerrymandered. But these are general phenomena, found by averaging, and there will always be individual data points which deviate. Someone may smoke for 60 years and never get cancer. Sometimes, despite global warming, it will be cold and snow . Occasionally, a Democrat gets elected in a deeply conservative district. How we deal with such aberrations, or more generally, how we think about variation, is at the heart of the scientific literacy crisis.

Cognitive and behavioral scientists have found that, when confronted with data, our brains are not great at interpreting patterns with an eye to variation. We over-interpret from small datasets and are distracted by the most recent information we consumed. We are baskets of bias. And we really don’t know how to balance error and uncertainty. Consider this: FiveThirtyEight’s final predictions for the 2016 presidential election gave Hillary Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning—the lowest odds among the major poll aggregators , but nonetheless an edge that many Democrats considered money in the bank. Instead, what that figure meant was that, taking into account the polling error, Donald Trump could still win 29 out of every 100 (simulated) elections held, including the only one that mattered.

Overall, American students consistently rank lower than other advanced industrial nations for academic achievement in math and science, while American adults have fairly poor knowledge of some basic scientific concepts. Americans also have among the lowest numeracy scores in the world, meaning they have limited ability to reason with numbers. Refocused energies and revamped classroom curricula could help address this situation ( replacing high school calculus with statistics is a good place to start). But some fault may also lie with our culture writ large, particularly as manifested by government priorities.

Looking at the budget, it would be easy to deduce that America doesn’t really care about scientific research beyond engineering. Basic research—where there is no specific immediate utility—always gets the short shrift in apportionment, even though its discoveries will serve as the foundation of future applied work . Government funding for science overall has barely kept up with inflation and its share of the total budget has decreased by more than 50% since its peak in the 1960s. Basic research typically receives only a quarter of that federal R&D budget. This pattern seems likely only to worsen in the next budget . While we may undervalue research because it is much harder to identify (or collect ) the payoffs of basic science compared to development work, arguably only governments can afford to not think about science as a business proposition. Only governments can use long-term foresight to determine priorities, to worry less about the end-goal and more about the process.

In many ways, government research investments have spoiled us. And they have misled us. All of the major “moonshot” initiatives of the 20th century were endeavors of technology—the actual moonshot Apollo Program; the Manhattan Project; and even the Human Genome Project, which was mostly a question of building the necessary DNA sequencers. What these have trained us to want of our science is the clarity of engineering. The satisfaction of a job well done that translates into a job done in perpetuity. You can go on to further improve the methodology, but there is no uncertainty about whether or not you did it in the first place. (Well, at least for the second two projects.)

According to a former NASA employee, for any given Mars mission, they build three Rovers—one for practice and troubleshooting the design, one to test, and one to send to Mars. In contrast, to find genes associated with a 3.5-fold greater chance of disease, one recent study of breast cancer risk tested 256,123 women. The scale of research necessary to find small associations like this is massive because of variation. A Mars Rover is a Mars Rover is a Mars Rover, it seems. But one cancer patient—with her specific lifestyle, her history, and her ancestry—is unique. Solving her problems, let alone curing cancer altogether as in Joe Biden’s moonshot, is that much more difficult.

Rees deems problems like preventing cancer or curing the common cold to be too complex for human brains to solve. Some think we should leave them for Big Data and machine learning to tackle. Computers will not cure the problem of variation, though. They cannot get rid of the uncertainty that comes with living in a complex world full of historical contingency. So we are left again to rely on the power of our brains. The important question is not whether scientific problems are really too complex to solve, but rather are they really too complex to think about? Right now, every day, individuals, and society as a whole, misunderstand and undervalue what we have already learned from science. But it need not be this way. In other words, it is not a question of whether there is a limit to scientific understanding but whether we are limiting ourselves in our scientific understanding.

In the short term, we can make efforts to fix problems of statistical and scientific literacy in positions of decision making. Currently there is one physicist in the US Congress, one mathematician , and a smattering of doctors. (Oh, and a one-time astronaut .) But tackling problems of health care, climate change, and inequality all require scientific competence. Facts can come from reports and testimony, but we need legislators who know how to analyze that data. The skills developed from a lifetime of research and scientific analysis would be strengths in government, and scientific expertise will only increase in relevance as this century progresses. It is worth noting that before they were politicians, Margaret Thatcher was a chemist and Angela Merkel a physicist. My recommendation does not only apply to elected officials. Certainly, judges and juries would benefit from a better understanding of math and statistics.

More broadly, we need to train ourselves to appreciate the science we have. There are problems we may not be able to solve, but that is not the only value of science. It can help us identify those problems and describe their risks. It can show us probabilities to plan for the future with more informed guesses. It can give us practice in thinking about and dealing with uncertainty, which arises in our lives not only from big phenomena like weather systems but also from the everyday unpredictability of human behavior. Surely this is worth spending money on.

JFK did not give speeches about finding genes that made you 3.5 times more likely to die. Even writing that sentence is awkward, and most people do not know how to think about a 3.5-fold disease risk increase. (For reference: if the risk was infinitesimal to begin with, 3.5 times it is still very small. You should ask for the absolute risk, not for the relative change.) But these are genes worth researching. Finding signal amongst noise is perhaps the most complex problem science must tackle. And this is why we must do it—because it is hard. Building robots that will take over the planet is hard, too, but appreciating variation is harder.

This article was originally published on Undark . Read the original article .

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