Over the past decade, emotional intelligence has been the subject of much debate regarding its conceptual definition, its empirical relationship to personality and traditional cognitive abilities, and how best to measure the construct. Salovey and Mayer (1990) initially proposed a definition of emotional intelligence as a set of skills and abilities contributing to the appraisal of emotions, the regulation of emotions, and the use of emotions in reasoning. Since then, other researchers have proposed alternative theories (Bar-On, 1997; Epstein & Meier, 1989; Goleman, 1995, 1998). While some of the differences in these theories may appear due to differences in the level of focus (Epstein, 1998; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002), many of the conceptual differences are due to differences in the scope of the definition.

Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso (2000) have asserted that there are two basic classes of emotional intelligence models – mixed models and ability models. Models that incorporate aspects of both the original definition of emotional intelligence and aspects of personality are classified as mixed models of emotional intelligence. Models that propose a pure ability definition of emotional intelligence are considered ability models.

The theory of rational efficient markets dominated financial economics three decades ago. In recent years, however, psychology-inspired behavioral finance has overshadowed it. Both critics and proponents of the use of psychology in economics and finance base their positions on the premise that psychology primarily deals with human fallibility, systematic mistakes and biased judgment (Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, 1982). The association of psychology with pathology seems to imply that normative behavioral economics and the design of successful institutions must focus on a benevolent paternalism aimed at saving individuals from themselves. This paper, in contrast, discusses how simple psychological processes frequently, but not always, function well in their respective environments. Using the concept of ecological rationality and the key findings of psychology in economics, three lessons for designing successful institutions are proposed.

Three decades ago, financial economics was dominated by efficient market theory. One leading finance researcher claimed that the efficiency of financial markets was the best established fact in economics (Jensen, 1978). Today, the most influential intellectual movement in financial economics is behavioral finance, the application of psychological theory and its empirical findings from laboratory experiments with human subjects to economic and financial decision making.

To help answer the question “What are the skills that information professionals must have to work with e?books, electronic records, and other digital materials?,” the National Archives and Records Administration, the Arizona State Library and Archives, and the Society of American Archivists hosted “New Skills for a Digital Era.” This colloquium brought together individuals with different perspectives on the question, including information professionals, educators, managers, and technologists. All were expected to have practical experience working with digital publications and records.

Discussion sessions were at the heart of the colloquium. Each session began with a presentation of one or two case studies that related to specific functions and illustrated practical skills information professionals need to work with born?digital and digitized materials, rather than merely theoretical knowledge. The colloquium sought to identify specific skills that information professionals working with digital materials needed to do their jobs. These skills that go beyond those of the consumer of records, but it seems unreasonable to expect information professionals to have the skills of a professional programmer or systems administrator.

Cosmology is commonly thought to have entered its “precision era”, a threshold of every science. Some of the first - and essential in order to promote it to the rank of science - developments happened almost by chance, such as Hubble’s discovery of expansion, or Penzias and Wilson’s casual observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB). Afterwards, the level of sophistication reached by the auxiliary pure sciences, like physics or mathematics, allowed room for fast and spectacular improvement. In the Sixties, after the couple of extraordinary events I mentioned, the new-born Cosmologists not only had a fantastic playground - the Universe itself - but were also supported by a well-established mathematical setting like Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and by a good knowledge of most of the required physics of fluids; also, high-energy physicists were at the same time developing the standard model of particles.

From the Hot Big Bang Cosmology to the formulation of the theory of inflation to the discovery of the CMB anisotropies, there were years that revolutioned the way people thought about the Universe. Then, after some tens of years, Cosmology has become a precision science, in the sense that the guidelines are written, and now we are cross-stitching on models, more often limited by the sensitivity of the instruments than by the cosmological community’s capacity of having better ideas. We have quite a converging view (so converging, in fact, that we call it Concordance model) of the numbers that form the Universe matter-energy content, and still we profoundly lack a theoretical interpretation of these numbers. I think that the fact that we are conceiving more and more sophisticated experiments, while at the same time the nature of a good 96% of the Universe is obscure to us, renders the present era for Cosmology more thrilling than ever. This peculiar state-of-the-art sets as a crucial challenge the search for unusual point of views, in the sense of new observables, able to resolve the present degeneracies among different parameters or give us new independent - in space or in time - constraints. We are in the intriguing era of “tricking the Universe” to force it to tell us something about itself... rather than the elegant Universe, I would call it the reluctant one.