We've all been blamed (责备) wrongly sometimes in our lives. How do we deal with it? Not with anger, hurt and tears, but in a collected way…

    If you are wrongly blamed, let others know of the true state of things at once. Do it calmly and clearly — if you lose your temper, people will stop listening or become defensive.

    If you don't find a sympathetic ear, find a person who will hear you out — a teacher, a parent, a friend, or a brother or sister who believes in you.

    If you've been in trouble before, it may be easy for people to doubt you. So win your respect back in their eyes by behaving with honesty.

    If what you are blamed for is something unimportant, sometimes it's better to smile it off.

    If you've been blamed for something serious, it's important to put your side of the story forward quickly and truthfully.

    Just remember:

    Respect your friends' secret if you don't want to be wrongly blamed for making them known.

    Don't blame others without first getting proof of their wrong doing.

    Putting the blame on someone else for what you have done wrong is weakness. Admit your mistake quickly.

    If someone else is wrongly blamed, stand up for that person.

    Don't pass the responsibility to others.

    Born and raised in a digital age, today's young people are generally tech savvy (技术娴熟的). But when it comes to basic life skills, they're less capable than the older generation.

    According to a recent study, 69 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK have no idea how to bleed a radiator(暖气片换水). About 35 percent of them don't know how to sew on a button, while about 11 percent don't understand how to change a light bulb or iron clothes.

    It appears young people are losing the skills older generations took for granted. In fact, the problem is shared by young people in the United States. According to a report by Forbes in 2014, most millennial (千禧一代) drivers don't know how to check their tire pressure. Cooking is another basic life skill that has been dropped, as millennials are much more likely to order food deliveries than previous generations.

    Technology may be to blame for this generational gap. Skills at using phones and computers are the ones valued these days, and the practical skills are now seen as functions that can be easily outsourced (外包). Indeed, improvements in technology have made young people unfamiliar with many basic life skills. For example, with GPS always at hand, young people have had no need to learn how to read physical maps.

    However, this change has raised concerns among many people. “If you have your master's degree and you can't live within your means or go home from your job and feed yourself a nutritious (有营养的) meal, you're not a complete graduate,” Chris Moore, a professor from Brigham Young University, US, told Huff Post.

    That's why there's an increasing call for the return of “home ec” in the US, short for home economics, which teaches basic life skills like cooking and how to do laundry. It was very popular in the early 20th century, but was later taken out of schools and universities because of budget(预算) cuts. But recently, home ec was reintroduced in a small number of schools and universities.

    “The educational system would work better if every academic class had a practical course that applied the theory to do something regular people do in real life,” Robert Frost, instructor and flight controller at NASA, wrote on Quora, according to Huff post.

    The Metropolis Book Club

    Membership

    All you need to do is fill out the order form at the bottom of the page, select your first order from our book list and then post the completed form back to us.

    Special offers for new members

    As a special offer, you may choose any reduced-price books from our new members' book list, to the value of 100 yuan in total. Tick the box on your form to order a free watch. Join before the end of this month and you receive another free book carefully chosen by our staff. Order an audio-book from the many on offer, at half the recommended retail price.

    When you've joined

    As a member you get around 50% off the publisher's price of every book you buy, and what's more, they come straight to your door. Your free club magazine arrives once a month to keep you up to date with the latest best-sellers we've added to our list. On the Internet, you can find all our titles for the year at our exclusive members' website. Our website also has a book swap service where members can request or offer books for exchange.

    Being a member

    All you have to do is order four books during your first year. After that, you can decide on the number of books you wish to take. In each of your monthly club magazines, our experienced staff choose a “Book of the Month” for you, which is offered at an extra-special price. If you do not want this book, just say so in the space provided on the form and send it back to us. We always send the book if we do not receive this form.

    Once we receive your order, your books are delivered within one week. And remember, you have up to a fortnight to decide if you wish to keep the books you have ordered. If they aren't what you expected just send them back!

    The majority of successful senior managers do not closely follow the classical rational (理性的) model of first clarifying goals, assessing the problem, formulating options, estimating likelihoods of success, making a decision, and only then taking action to carry out the decision. Rather, in their day-by-day tactical maneuvers(战术动作), these senior executives rely on what is vaguely termed intuition(直觉) to manage a network of interrelated problems that require them to deal with ambiguity, inconsistency, novelty, and surprise; and to integrate action into the process of thinking.

    Generations of writers on management have recognized that some practicing managers rely heavily on intuition. In general, however, such writers display a poor grasp of what intuition is. Some see it as the opposite of rationality; others view it as an excuse for capriciousness(变化无常).

    Isenberg's recent research on the cognitive processes of senior managers reveals that managers' intuition is neither of these. Rather, senior managers use intuition in at least five distinct ways. First, they intuitively sense when a problem exists. Second, managers rely on intuition to perform well-learned behavior patterns rapidly. This intuition is not arbitrary or irrational, but is based on years of painstaking practice and hands-on experience that build skills. A third function of intuition is to combine isolated bits of data and practice into an integrated picture. Fourth, some managers use intuition as a check on the results of more rational analysis. Most senior executives are familiar with the formal decision analysis models and tools, and those who use such systematic methods for reaching decisions are occasionally alert of solutions suggested by these methods which run counter to their sense of the correct course of action. Finally, managers can use intuition to bypass in-depth analysis and move rapidly to engender a plausible solution. Used in this way, intuition is an almost instantaneous cognitive process in which a manager recognizes familiar patterns.

    One of the implications of the intuitive style of executive management is that thinking is inseparable from acting. Since managers often know what is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first and explain later. Analysis is tightly tied to action in thinking-acting cycles, in which managers develop thoughts about their companies and organizations not by analyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by acting and analyzing in close concert.

    Given the great uncertainty of many of the management issues that they face, senior managers often instigate (发起) a course of action simply to learn more about an issue. They then use the results of the action to develop a more complete understanding of the issue. One implication of thinking-acting cycles is that action is often part of defining the problem, not just of implementing the solution.

    There is virtue in working standing up. It sounds like a fashion. But it does have a basis in science.

    That, by itself, may not be surprising. Health ministries ask people for decades to do more exercise. What is surprising is that long periods of inactivity are bad regardless of how much time you also spend on officially approved high-impact stuff like pounding treadmills(跑步机) in the gym. What you need instead, the latest research suggests, is constant low-level activity. This can be so low-level that you might not think of it as activity at all. Even just standing up counts, for it invokes muscles that sitting does not.

Researchers in this field trace the history of the idea that standing up is good for you back to 1953, when a study published in The Lancet found that bus conductors, who spent their days standing, had a risk of heart attack half that of bus drivers, who spent their shifts on their backsides. But as the health benefits of exercise and vigorous(强度大的) physical activity began to become clear in the 1970s, says David Dunstan, a researcher at the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, interest in low-intensity activity — like walking and standing — became weaker.

    Over the past few years, however, interest has been excited again. A series of studies, none big enough to provide convincing evidence, but all pointing in the same direction, persuaded Emma Wilmot of the University of Leicester, in Britain, to carry out a meta-analysis. This is a technique that combines diverse studies in a statistically meaningful way. Dr Wilmot combined 18 of them, covering almost 800,000 people and concluded that those individuals who are the least active in their normal daily lives are twice as likely to develop diabetes(糖尿病) as those who are the most active. She also found that the immobile are twice as likely to die from a heart attack and two-and-a-half times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease as the most mobile. Crucially, all this seemed to be independent of the amount of vigorous, gym-style exercise that volunteers did.

    Being attractive isn't usually considered much of a disadvantage in today's world. Actually, there is the endless potential benefit about it, but researchers have found one area that being pretty makes life a challenge securing yourself a boring, low­paying job.

    This stands in contrast to a large body of research that attractiveness, in general, helps candidates in the selection process. For the most part good looks is a blessing. We treat pretty people more favorably in general, often vote for them more in elections, and pay them more in their professions. The research suggests that attractive people may be discriminated against in selection for relatively less desirable jobs.

    Researchers carried out four experiments involving more than 750 participants, including university students and managers who make hiring decisions in the real world. Participants were shown photos of two potential job candidates, one attractive and the other unattractive. Participants were then asked a series of questions designed to measure their opinions of the job candidates and whether they would hire these candidates for a less­than­desirable job.

    The less desirable jobs included a warehouse worker, housekeeper, customer service representative and the more desirable jobs included things like a manager, project director, IT elite(精英). In all experiments where they were asked, participants were significantly less likely to hire the attractive candidate for the less desirable job and more likely to hire the attractive candidate for the more desirable job.

    Ms Lee said, "In the selection decision for an undesirable job, decision makers were more likely to choose the unattractive individual over the attractive individual. Co­author Dr Madan Pillutla said, "It is interesting that decision makers consider others' opinions in their decisions. They thought that attractive individuals would want better outcomes, and therefore would be less satisfied, so they favored unattractive candidates when selecting for a less desirable job."

    The research also suggests the established view that attractive candidates are favored when applying for jobs might be limited to high­level jobs.