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Q W E R T Y. For anyone who doesn’t live under a rock, this string of letters will immediately ring a bell – it’s the first six keys on the top row of our keyboards! The QWERTY keyboard layout is so ingrained into our society that using it feels like second nature. But have you ever wondered, “Why QWERTY?” Christopher Sholes, an American newspaper editor and printer, devised the QWERTY layout in the early 1870s. The original layout was just two rows of characters arranged like the following: - 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M If we knew nothing about keyboards or computers, this layout makes perfect sense. After all, the letters are ordered alphabetically from left to right! But as anyone who has tried to search anything on a TV would tell you, using an alphabetized keyboard is a horror… Over the next several decades, Sholes adjusted the layout to get what we are familiar with today: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - = Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ] \ A S D F G H J K ...

Ali Abdaal, Feel Good Productivity Book Review Would you believe me if I told you I was diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder in tenth grade? That I had weekly therapy sessions every Thursday at 4:00 pm? Many people who I’ve met at USC and told this to don’t quite believe me. Since coming to college, I have completely changed as a person. I’ve learned to be happier, more easy-going, and less prideful. For this assignment, I chose to read Ali Abdaal’s Feel-Good Productivity to see if I could learn more about my personal growth and how I can avoid reverting to my old ways in the future. Reading Feel-Good Productivity felt like talking to a therapist. When I first started reading the book, I was a little disappointed. It seemed like Ali was just reiterating things I already knew about productivity. But as I got deeper into the book, I realized that Ali never intended to teach me anything new in the first place. Rather, he was just trying to help me clarify, explain, and compartm...

Ali Abdaal, Feel-Good Productivity I used to have an unhealthy obsession with being productive. Until two years ago, I went to sleep every night reflecting on and grading my productivity that day. I would nitpick this, criticize that, and stress that I needed to work more to get what I wanted. Fortunately, I broke away from this cycle last year by forcing myself to work less and spend more time on my hobbies. Since then, I’ve been feeling so much happier. And, despite studying significantly less, my grades have not dropped at all. This experience forced me to reconsider my perception of productivity and reassess how I approached studying and work. I chose to read Ali Abdaal’s Feel-Good Productivity because I wanted to see if it could teach me more about this recent change I’ve undergone. Until now, I’ve been reluctant to read self-help books because they always seem to highlight grandiose themes that feel distant and unachievable. However, based on the synopsis, this book seemed inter...

  To: Clark Hansen, CEO of Anima Mundi Development Partners From: Hai Tran, Research and Development Date: October 18th, 2024 Subject: Investment Opportunity: Neste Executive Summary I strongly recommend that AMDP invest in Neste, a public Finnish oil company specializing in producing renewable diesel as a substitute for fossil fuels. Since 2019, Neste has already helped its customers reduce 50 million tons of GHG emissions, and it plans to scale its environmental impact even further.  In this memo, I will demonstrate how Neste meets AMDP’s investment criteria and why it will flourish in the future despite current challenges. This memo includes: Summary of AMDP’s investment criteria Overview of Neste’s background and claims Analysis of Neste’s financials and claims Final recommendation AMDP Investment Criteria At AMPD, our mission is to support businesses that positively impact our planet. In alignment with this mission, our investment strategy is based on four k...

Random Post 1 Have you ever loved a hobby enough to dedicate more than 10,000 hours to it? For a 21-year-old, that’s equivalent to 1.2 hours every day from the moment you came out of the womb until now. For me, that hobby is playing video games. Most people think video games are only meant for children with abundant free time and nothing else to do. But video games are so much more than that. Playing video games is like drinking alcohol but healthier! How often have you come home from work or school, dropped dead on your bed, and lamented that you will have to do it all over again tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that? Many people in these situations will drink the night away and drown out their thoughts but end up waking up the next morning with a hangover that makes them feel even worse than before. In these situations—rather than permanently damaging my liver—I simply put on my headphones, hop on a call with my friends, jump into my favorite game, and spend the night goofi...

  Mike Brown, “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming” Book Review As a kid, I dreamt of becoming an astronaut. I remember being amazed in first grade when my teachers told me that a Vietnamese astronaut, Pham Tuan, had already been into space in 1980. I hoped that once I grew up, I would get to board a rocket ship, travel even further to the edge of our solar system, and see a new planet with my own eyes that I could name myself. 14 years later, even though I decided to major in Business and not Astrophysics, I still love learning more about space. So, a book about how Pluto, one of my favorite planets as a kid, got downgraded to a mere dwarf planet intrigued me. What initially drew me into the book was Mike’s description of the history of astronomy. He showed us that our view of the universe is shaped not only by what we see in the sky but also by linguistics, technology, and religion. He wrote about how the ever-changing definition of the word ‘planet’ affected how astronom...