Forget calling the front desk. If you’re a guest at an Affinia hotel, the staff will try to find out what you need just by looking at you.

The Affinia Hotel Collection is improving service in its five hotels in New York City and one each in Chicago and Washington D.C. Everyone from housekeeping to management will communicate with guests based on body language.

A body language expert trained employees on what cues(信号)to look for. A guest who makes eye contact while walking down the hall, for example, may be open to conversation. A businessman frequently touching an ear is probably nervous and may be interested in a therapeutic pillow(理疗枕头).

“So many companies, when they talk about service, they program it to how many rings till you answer the phone,” says John Moser, marketing officer for Affinia. That doesn’t sound very reasonable. Let’s give employees some tools they can use to find out what’s the right way to talk with somebody at a particular time.”

Patti Wood, a body language expert who carried out the Affinia training, says she has never seen such training given to all hotel employees. “All of the training is to make sure every single guest is treated as special,” she says.

Staff questions about a guest’s day won’t disappear, Moser says. But, he says, small talk isn’t always enough to get a reading of a guest’s needs. “You can’t always tell from the first sentence whether someone is happy or unhappy," he says. “Measuring some of the things they’re showing with the way they’re talking to you, can help our employees provide a service that’s more personal for them.”

Edward O. Wilson’s Letters to a Young Scientist is part of a memoir (回忆录) and part of an advice column for young scientists. During his long and highly successful career, Wilson has advised numerous doctoral students and helped them launch their careers. Along the way, he has developed a strong sense of what it takes to be successful in the field of science. He builds his book around a more fundamental and timeless career question: What makes a good scientist?

As Wilson works toward an answer, he backs up his arguments with first-hand evidence. It is obvious that he deeply appreciates the creativity of the scientific process. In his first few chapters, he encourages readers to daydream, work hard and mess around. Wilson relates several examples of “messing around” in his own career. Some led to major discoveries while others led to nothing at all. However, quick and uncontrolled experiments open the potential for major discoveries.

I find Wilson’s writings on the importance of failure especially affecting. Most young scientists are not prepared for the level and number of setbacks they are likely to come across in their early careers. As scientific funding has been cut and tenure-track (终身的) jobs have grown rare, today’s young scientists will be refused more than scientists of equal quality in the past century. “Be prepared mentally for some amount of failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages,” Wilson writes.

Wilson also suggests, “A strong work virtue is absolutely essential. There must be an ability to pass long hours in study and research with pleasure even though some of the effort will unavoidably lead to dead ends.” The time that is seemingly wasted may later prove to have been well spent. Wilson insists that the process of exploring and gaining closeness with one’s studies — even the ones that don’t go as planned — is essential to the creative process of a scientist.