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Qatar is a tiny place that insists on being heard.

The Arab nation just off the coast of Saudi Arabia has made itself a major diplomatic player, a generous donor of foreign aid, and a leader in modernizing education in the region. The ultra-modern capital Doha is full of skyscrapers, museums and history, much of it dating as far back as ... the 1990s.

Qatar is also a commercial capital that aims to become a cultural, sports and tourist center for the Gulf region despite having just 260,000 citizens.

Those citizens are outnumbered by the foreign workers by a ratio of more than five to one. The citizens and foreigners alike are governed by an absolute monarchy that was passed down earlier this year from the emir – the man responsible for Qatar's ascendancy — to his 33-year-old son.

All these head-spinning changes prompted Professor Mehran Kamrava, an American who teaches at Georgetown University's campus in Doha, to write Qatar: Small State, Big Politics.

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When you think about a scrumptious meal, airline food does not come to mind.

There are plenty of challenges to tasty airline meals, like the fact that you can't cook on an airplane, so anything you're served has probably been chilled, then reheated. And flight delays certainly don't help with the freshness factor.

But the bigger obstacles to palatable fare in the air are biological: Our senses are scrambled at high altitudes.

Lack of humidity in the pressurized cabin dries out our nasal passages, dulling our sense of smell — a key component to how we perceive flavor. Background noise — like the roar of a jet engine — can lessen our ability to perceive sweet and salty tastes, research from the U.K.'s University of Manchester has found. Separate research from Lufthansa suggests our sweet and salty sensors might be off as much as 30 percent while in flight.

So what's a traveler taking to the skies this holiday season to do?

Don't despair, says Dan Pashman of The Sporkful podcast, who has looked into the challenges of mile-high meals. He shares a few tips for foodie flyers with Weekend Edition Sunday Host Rachel Martin.

"First, if you're given the choice," Pashman says, "go for saucy pasta dishes over big cuts of meat — they tend to hold up better to the chilling and reheating process."

And don't be afraid to ask the flight attendant for extra peanuts or pretzels, he says – "those extra snacks can be crucial." Crushing them up over your meal can add much-needed texture, he notes. And that's important, because the same study that found noisy jet engines can dull taste buds also suggested that the clamor heightens our perception of crunch — so why not make things more interesting by upping the crackle in your meal?

Of course, airlines are well aware of the culinary challenges in the sky. At Delta, chefs are usually instructed to add more spices to counteract dulled senses, says Peter Wilander, the airline's managing director of onboard services.

The efforts to overcome airplane food's bad rep are even more intense when it comes to service for business and first-class passengers, whose meals are increasingly being designed with the aid of celebrity chefs. Qatar Airlines, for example, has enlisted the help of culinary superstars like Nobuyuki Matsuhisa of New York's acclaimed Nobu restaurant. And Qatar's master of wines, James Cluer, went so far as to climb Mount Everest to explore just how altitude affects the taste of vino.

"One of the things when you are selecting wines for service up in the sky is you want something with some richness and some power, nothing too sharp and acidic," Cluer says in a video documenting his Everest tasting. He chooses stronger wines for in-flight consumption than he might on the ground.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports, the chefs at British Airways have begun experimenting with umami — that savory fifth taste, along with sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Turns out, umami flavors keep their kick even at high altitudes, the airline's research has found. Among the first-class dining recipes tweaked with umami in mind: pork cheeks served with a sauce packed with lime and lemon grass, the paper reports.

Alas, don't count on encountering such a fancy feast if you're flying coach class. If that's where you're sitting, here's one last bit of advice: Slip on some headphones and play some of your favorite tunes while you dig into that tinfoil-covered dinner. That British study on background noise we mentioned? It also found that pleasant sounds can actually enhance how much you enjoy your food.

Xerox runs 175 call centers around the world. In all, the centers employ more than 50,000 customer service agents who deal with questions about everything from cellphone bills to health insurance.

Teri Morse, who is in charge of recruiting all those people, says the company had a problem: It was hiring people who just weren't a good fit.

"People were in the training classes sharing with us that they weren't right for the position," she says. "You have to deal with a frustrated customer, hang up the phone and move on to the next, and not have to excuse yourself to go to the ladies' room and cry."

So a couple of years ago, Xerox hired a company to help the company do a better job of finding the right people

This company, called Evolv, began collecting lots of data about the people applying for jobs at Xerox call centers.

The applicants had to answer extensive surveys with questions like: "Which word better characterizes you: 'consistent' or 'witty'?"

Another question: "Can you name three pieces of computer hardware?"

Applicants were tested on pattern recognition and multitasking. They had to respond to a challenging customer service call.

Some of these people got hired. Not all of them were a good fit for the job. But the data gave the company a sense of which characteristics predicted that hires would be a good fit — and which didn't. Prior experience in a call center, for instance, didn't really matter.

A retail background was a predictor of success — except for people who worked as cashiers or in restaurants. Those people tended to do worse at the call centers.

With these new techniques, Xerox says it has been able to improve its hiring and significantly reduce turnover at its call centers.

Other companies that parse employee data are finding surprising results. Michael Rosenbaum of Pegged Software, a company that works with hospitals, says one piece of conventional wisdom is flat-out wrong: "We find zero statistically significant correlation between a college degree or a master's degree and success as a software developer."

Of course, using data to drive hiring decisions has its problems. Employers guided by data could wind up skipping over promising candidates. But Barbara Marder of the consulting firm Mercer points out that the way companies hire now has its own flaws. We like to hire people who are like us. People who went to schools we know. People who were referred to us by our friends.

"A lot of these new techniques do have the potential to eliminate biases," Marder says.

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