Assessment Related Quotes

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media

What we did, what every president since Washington has done, was provide a measured, appropriate response, in direct relation to a realistic threat assessment.

I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.

As soon as students get a grade, the learning stops. We may not like it, but the research reviewed here shows that this is a relatively stable feature of how human minds work.

feedback should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor. Indeed, the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning,

Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption—not entirely unsound—that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own.

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.

Real life is disobliging. People like to think, or feel, in black and white. Having to assess the relative values of all those intermediate greys is tiresome and perplexing.

Nothing is exactly the same for us all. And yet our lives are lived relationally, and so we must factor in others we love as we make plans, as we alter plans as we abandon plans. It's all so complicated, and in different periods different phases of our lives a different balance is required. There's no way to get it perfectly right. There's no one way that is absolutely perfect. If you measure them up against perfection, anything you do will be found wanting... Imagining, planning, doing, maintaining, re-assessing, altering. In the process of all, you carve out a self and the world in which that self resides.

What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one’s map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another’s needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another’s needs is the assessment of that person’s capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity. All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.

When two nations had a contradictory assessment of their own military power and the issue at state was vital to both nations, war was likely.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—

It's the secrecy surrounding drone strikes that's most troubling. . . We don't know the targeting criteria, or whether the rules for CIA and military drone strikes differ; we don't know the details of the internal process through which targets are vetted; we don't know the chain of command, or the details of congressional oversight. The United States does not release the names of those killed, or the location or number of strikes, making it impossible to know whether those killed were legitimately viewed as combatants or not. We also don't know the cost of the secret war: How much money has been spent on drone strikes? What's the budget for the related targeting and intelligence infrastructures? How is the government assessing the costs and benefits of counterterrorism drone strikes? That's a lot of secrecy for a targeted killing program that has reportedly caused the deaths of several thousand people. (117-118)

Close-minded people have trouble holding two thoughts simultaneously in their minds. They allow their own view to crowd out those of others. Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well- they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and forth between them to assess their relative merits. p197

Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard calendar years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently

Open-minded people genuinely believe they could be wrong; the questions that they ask are genuine. They also assess their relative believability to determine whether their primary role should be as a student, a teacher, or a peer.

SIX STEPS TO BETTER DECISION-MAKING Step 1—Identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes. Step 2—Identify your preference using the payoff for each outcome—to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values? Step 3—Estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding. Step 4—Assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and dislike for the option under consideration. Step 5—Repeat Steps 1–4 for other options under consideration. Step 6—Compare the options to one another.

to crowd out those of others. Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well—they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and forth between them to assess their relative merits.

It is hard to understand how a compassionate world order can include so many people afflicted by acute misery, persistent hunger and deprived and desperate lives, and why millions of innocent children have to die each year from lack of food or medical attention or social care. This issue, of course, is not new, and it has been a subject of some discussion among theologians. The argument that God has reasons to want us to deal with these matters ourselves has had considerable intellectual support. As a nonreligious person, I am not in a position to assess the theological merits of this argument. But I can appreciate the force of the claim that people themselves must have responsibility for the development and change of the world in which they live. One does not have to be either devout or non devout to accept this basic connection. As people who live-in a broad sense-together, we cannot escape the thought that the terrible occurrences that we see around us are quintessentially our problems. They are our responsibility-whether or not they are also anyone else's. As competent human beings, we cannot shirk the task of judging how things are and what needs to be done. As reflective creatures, we have the ability to contemplate the lives of others. Our sense of behavior may have caused (though that can be very important as well), but can also relate more generally to the miseries that we see around us and that lie within our power to help remedy. That responsibility is not, of course, the only consideration that can claim our attention, but to deny the relevance of that general claim would be to miss something central about our social existence. It is not so much a matter of having the exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness

Six years later the lead scientist, pharmacologist Kenneth Blum, published a much more subdued assessment: Unfortunately it was erroneously reported that [we] had found the “alcoholism gene,” implying that there was a one-to-one relation between a gene and a specific behavior. Such misinterpretations are common— readers may recall accounts of an “obesity gene,” or a “personality gene.” Needless to say, there is no such thing as a specific gene for alcoholism, obesity, or a particular type of personality.… Rather the issue at hand is to understand how certain genes and behavioral traits are connected.

Instead of asking candidates to self-assess a given behavior or characteristic related to humility, hunger, or people smarts, ask them what others would say about them. For example, instead of asking someone if he considers himself to be a hard worker, ask him “How would your colleagues describe your work ethic?

The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising—all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious.

Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. Chinese strategy places a high premium on assessing China’s relative power, during peacetime and in the event of war, across a plethora of dimensions beyond just military considerations. The United States, by contrast, has never attempted to do this.

It is relatively easy to take up examples of “originality” from the past and analyze them from today’s perspective. Almost always, the things that should have disappeared—for lack of originality—have already done so, leaving us to confidently evaluate what remains. As countless instances show, however, it is far more difficult to properly assess, in real time, new forms of expression in our immediate environment. That is because they often contain elements seen as unpleasant, unnatural, nonsensical, or sometimes even antisocial. Or else just plain stupid. Whatever the case, those around us tend to react with surprise and, at the same time, shock. People instinctively dislike those things they can’t understand,

More American troops were stationed within European allies, for example, at the end of Trump’s term than at its start. Numbers do not tell the whole story, however. Donald Trump left the country’s relations with its closest allies, especially those in Europe, more frayed than at any point since the onset of the short-lived “American Century” proclaimed in 1941.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind.

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)

Monarchs have a great weakness, however, for their own sons, no matter how feckless and inept. A statistical study should be done across cultures assessing the relative frequency of the bizarre outcomes to which monarchical succession is prone: failure to provide an heir or successor, provision of an heir completely inept, or division of rule among several incompatible ones. Orderly succession followed by a successful reign is the exception.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.

67 percent of the women told the researchers that they didn’t exercise regularly, and 37 percent said they didn’t get any exercise. After this initial assessment, Crum and Langer divided the maids into two groups. They explained to the first group how their activity related to the number of calories they burned and told the maids that just by doing their jobs, they got more than enough exercise. They didn’t give any such information to the second group (who worked in different hotels from the first group and so wouldn’t benefit from conversations with the other maids). One month later, the researchers found that the first group lost an average of two pounds, lowered their percentage of body fat, and lowered their systolic blood pressure by an average of 10 points—even though they hadn’t performed any additional exercise outside of work or changed their eating habits in any way. The other group, doing the same job as the first, remained virtually unchanged. This

I would like to focus on the use of the word silly for a particular people’s point of views. Everybody has what is called a plausibility structure; we all have sets of background beliefs through which we process and assess evidence. When you call something silly, you are merely saying, ‘Relative to my plausibility structure that isn’t within that structure.’ That’s merely a comment on your own psychology, there’s nothing more to it so I don’t find that very helpful,” (Randal Rauser, Unbelieveable Feb. 1, 2014).

Withdrawal into the self is passive in relation to an overcomplex social reality which oscillates between innuendo and brutal explicitness, but it appears to be a solution of sorts. It is as difficult to assess as it is to understand. It cannot be said that ‘reprivatization’ has not been actively chosen. There has been an option, and a general one (social options, group choices, socially accepted and adopted proposals for choice). Nor can it be said that it has been chosen freely. However, the choice itself is imposed and the solution is indicated or countermanded. This constraint operates within a fairly narrow margin of freedom; the weight from outside and from the ‘world’ becomes increasingly oppressive for an intimacy which has been metamorphosed into a mass phenomenon. Is this a lifestyle, or is it life unequivocally stripped of all style? Although we would tend towards the second of these hypotheses, it is still too early to reach a decision; scrutiny of these hypotheses and this problem is part of the sociology of boredom …

When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Crosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things.

Diallo, a West African immigrant in New York, matched a description of a rapist. Four white officers questioned him, and when the unarmed Diallo started to pull out his wallet, they decided it was a gun and fired forty-one shots. The underlying neurobiology concerns “event-related potentials” (ERPs), which are stimulus-induced changes in electrical activity of the brain (as assessed by EEG—electroencephalography). Threatening faces produce a distinctive change (called the P200 component) in the ERP waveform in under two hundred milliseconds. Among white subjects, viewing someone black evokes a stronger P200 waveform than viewing someone white, regardless of whether the person is armed. Then, a few milliseconds later, a second, inhibitory waveform (the N200 component) appears, originating from the frontal cortex—“Let’s think a sec about what we’re seeing before we shoot.” Viewing a black individual evokes less of an N200 waveform than does seeing someone white. The greater the P200/N200 ratio (i.e., the greater the ratio of I’m-feeling-threatened to Hold-on-a-sec), the greater the likelihood of shooting an unarmed black individual.

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.

One may suggest that nations, in assessing their relative strength, were influenced by seven main factors: military strength and the ability to apply that strength efficiently in the chosen zone of war; predictions on how outside nations would behave in the event of war; perceptions of internal unity and the unity or discord of the enemy; memory or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war; perceptions of prosperity and of ability to sustain, economically, the kind of war envisaged; nationalism and ideology: and the personality and mental qualities of the leaders who weighted the evidence and decided for peace or war.

spouse. Make sure it relates to your primary love language and will help replenish your empty tank. 3. When your spouse responds and meets your need, you will be able to react with not only your will but your emotions as well. Without overreacting, continue positive feedback and affirmation of your spouse at these times. 4. As your marriage begins to truly heal and grow deeper, make sure you don’t “rest on your laurels” and forget your spouse’s love language and daily needs. You’re on the road to your dreams, so stay there! Put appointments into your schedule to assess together how you’re doing. A Personal Word Well, what do you think? Having

Often we believe certain things to be true simply because most, if not all, of the people around us believe and/or assert them to be true. With­ out any direct means to assess the validity of such beliefs, we infer their va­lidity based on consensus. Once we have these beliefs, and find that they are shared quite liberally within our social networks, we take them for granted and rarely think about them as needing validation. Moscovici (1984) has re­ferred to such generally shared beliefs as “social representations.” Such shared beliefs form the basis of a social aggregate’s shared reality and are often used to justify or substantiate other related beliefs or opinions.

Here are my simple rules for identifying market tops and bottoms: 1. Market tops are relatively easy to recognize. Buyers generally become overconfident and almost always believe “this time is different.” It’s usually not. 2. There’s always a surplus of relatively cheap debt capital to finance acquisitions and investments in a hot market. In some cases, lenders won’t even charge cash interest, and they often relax or suspend typical loan restrictions as well. Leverage levels escalate compared to historical averages, with borrowing sometimes reaching as high as ten times or more compared to equity. Buyers will start accepting overoptimistic accounting adjustments and financial forecasts to justify taking on high levels of debt. Unfortunately most of these forecasts tend not to materialize once the economy starts decelerating or declining. 3. Another indicator that a market is peaking is the number of people you know who start getting rich. The number of investors claiming outperformance grows with the market. Loose credit conditions and a rising tide can make it easy for individuals without any particular strategy or process to make money “accidentally.” But making money in strong markets can be short-lived. Smart investors perform well through a combination of self-discipline and sound risk assessment, even when market conditions reverse.

Coopersmith’s study with adolescent boys indicates that children develop self-trust, adventuresomeness and the ability to deal with adversity if they are treated with respect and are provided with well-defined standards of values, demands for competence and guidance toward solutions of problems. The development of individual self-reliance is fostered by a well-structured, demanding environment, rather than by largely unlimited permissiveness and freedom to explore in an unfocused way. The research of both Stanley Coopersmith and Morris Rosenberg has led them to believe that pupils with high self-esteem perceive themselves as successful. They are relatively free of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, and can realistically assess their abilities. They are confident that their efforts will meet with success, while being fully aware of their limitations. Persons with high self-esteem are outgoing and socially successful and expect to be well received. They accept others and others tend to accept them. On the other hand, according to Coopersmith and Rosenberg, pupils with low self-esteem are easily discouraged and sometimes depressed. They feel isolated, unloved and unlovable. They seem incapable of expressing themselves or defending their inadequacies. They are so preoccupied with their self-consciousness and anxiety that their capacity for self-fulfillment can be easily destroyed.4

Pre- and post-World War II immigrants in the United States, especially Jewish immigrants, were actually encouraged to keep quiet about their traumas and war-related distress. If they weren't positive, they would be deemed unfit and lacking emotional regulation, ultimately threatening their place in society. Immigration assessment also emphasized positive adjustment and productivity, while ignoring the circumstances and influences, like trauma, that often led immigrants to struggle with their emotional regulation or rapid assimilation into a new culture. Immigrants were held to an extremely high standard and risked expulsion from the larger group if they did not perform or did anything to threaten the overall happiness.

There is yet another reason why peer-oriented kids are insatiable. In order to reach the turning point, a child must not only be fulfilled, but this fulfillment must sink in. It has to register somehow in the child's brain that the longing for closeness and connectedness is being met. This registration is not cognitive or even conscious, but deeply emotional. It is emotion that moves the child and shifts the energy from one developmental agenda to another, from attachment to individuation. The problem is that, for fulfillment to sink in, the child must be able to feel deeply and vulnerably — an experience most peer-oriented kids will be defended against. Peer-oriented children cannot permit themselves to feel their vulnerability. It may seem strange that feelings of fulfillment would require openness to feelings of vulnerability. There is no hurt or pain in fulfillment — quite the opposite. Yet there is an underlying emotional logic to this phenomenon. For the child to feel full he must first feel empty, to feel helped the child must first feel in need of help, to feel complete he must have felt incomplete. To experience the joy of reunion one must first experience the ache of loss, to be comforted one must first have felt hurt. Satiation may be a very pleasant experience, but the prerequisite is to be able to feel vulnerability. When a child loses the ability to feel her attachment voids, the child also loses the ability to feel nurtured and fulfilled. One of the first things I check for in my assessment of children is the existence of feelings of missing and loss. It is indicative of emotional health for children to be able to sense what is missing and to know what the emptiness is about. As soon as they are able to articulate, they should be able to say things like “I miss daddy,” “It hurt me that grandma didn't notice me,” “It didn't seem like you were interested in my story,” “I don't think so and so likes me.” Many children today are too defended, too emotionally closed, to experience such vulnerable emotions. Children are affected by what is missing whether they feel it or not, but only when they can feel and know what is missing can they be released from their pursuit of attachment. Parents of such children are not able to take them to the turning point or bring them to a place of rest. If a child becomes defended against vulnerability as a result of peer orientation, he is made insatiable in relation to the parents as well. That is the tragedy of peer orientation — it renders our love and affection so useless and unfulfilling. For children who are insatiable, nothing is ever enough. No matter what one does, how much one tries to make things work, how much attention and approval is given, the turning point is never reached. For parents this is extremely discouraging and exhausting. Nothing is as satisfying to a parent as the sense of being the source of fulfillment for a child. Millions of parents are cheated of such an experience because their children are either looking elsewhere for nurturance or are too defended against vulnerability to be capable of satiation. Insatiability keeps our children stuck in first gear developmentally, stuck in immaturity, unable to transcend basic instincts. They are thwarted from ever finding rest and remain ever dependent on someone or something outside themselves for satisfaction. Neither the discipline imposed by parents nor the love felt by them can cure this condition. The only hope is to bring children back into the attachment fold where they belong and then soften them up to where our love can actually penetrate and nurture.

What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation: Sylvia Plath somewhere named God "King Panic." And Panic is fittingly King of the Grotesque. What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types-biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killerbees attacking with a fury and demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out-not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: the earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness. "Questo sol m'arde, e questo m'innamore," as Michelangelo put it.

A young woman faces the decision of whether to marry a certain man whom she loves but who has deeply rooted, traditional ideas concerning marriage, family life, and the roles of men and women in each. A sober assessment of her future tell the woman that each of the two alternatives offers real but contrasting goods. One life offers the possibility of a greater degree of personal independence, the chance to pursue a career, perhaps more risk and adventure, while the other offers the rewards of parenting, stability, and a life together with a man whom, after all, she is in love with. In order to choose in a self-determined mode the woman must realize that the decision she faces involves more than the choice between two particular actions; it is also a choice between two distinct identities. In posing the questions "Who am I? Which of the two lives is really me?" she asks herself not a factual question about her identity but a fundamental practical question about the relative values of distinct and incommensurable goods. The point I take to be implicit in Tugendhat's (and Fichte's) view of the practical subject is that it would be mistaken to suppose that the woman had at her disposal an already established hierarchy of values that she must simply consult in order to decide whether to marry. Rather, her decision, if self-determined, must proceed from a ranking of values that emerges only in the process of reflecting upon the kind of person she wants to be.

students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.

Moment to moment, you are a sum of emotions and thoughts. So it is important, if you find that something makes you emotional, to step back and reflect on whether you want to fight this battle – whether or not you want to pour emotions into it. This is related to the earlier exercise of knowing what you are seeking. Those who are emotionally mature know when to fight, and when not to. If you are getting caught up in a situation, and find yourself exasperated or frustrated, take a step back. Take a few seconds to breathe deeply and assess exactly what you are upset about. Then think, is this worth the frustration? If it is not important in the grand scheme of things (however you choose to frame it), recognize that you need not devote the emotional energy towards the situation.

He introduces me to his political friends from across the spectrum. Conservatives who oo and ah and nod, telling me I'm just what this country is about. And so articulate! Frowning liberals who put it simply: my immoral career is counterproductive to my own community. Can I see that? My primary issue is poverty, not race. Their earnest faces tilt to assess my comprehension, my understanding of my role in this society. They conjure metaphors of boats and tides and rising waves of fairness. Not reparations -no, even socialism doesn't stretch that far. Though some do propose a rather capitalistic trickle-down from Britain to her lagging Commonwealth friends. Through economic generosity: trade and strong relations! Global leadership. The centrists nod. The son nods, too. Now that, they can all agree to.

Appendix 1 Seven Points and Fifty-Nine Slogans for Generating Compassion and Resilience POINT ONE Resolve to Begin 1. Train in the preliminaries. POINT TWO Train in Empathy and Compassion: Absolute Compassion 2. See everything as a dream. 3. Examine the nature of awareness. 4. Don’t get stuck on peace. 5. Rest in the openness of mind. 6. In Postmeditation be a child of illusion. POINT TWO Train in Empathy and Compassion: Relative Compassion 7. Practice sending and receiving alternately on the breath. 8. Begin sending and receiving practice with yourself. 9. Turn things around (Three objects, three poisons, three virtues). 10. Always train with the slogans. POINT THREE Transform Bad Circumstances into the Path 11. Turn all mishaps into the path. 12. Drive all blames into one. 13. Be grateful to everyone. 14. See confusion as Buddha and practice emptiness. 15. Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, pray for help. 16. Whatever you meet is the path. POINT FOUR Make Practice Your Whole Life 17. Cultivate a serious attitude (Practice the five strengths). 18. Practice for death as well as for life. POINT FIVE Assess and Extend 19. There’s only one point. 20. Trust your own eyes. 21. Maintain joy (and don’t lose your sense of humor). 22. Practice when you’re distracted. POINT SIX The Discipline of Relationship 23. Come back to basics. 24. Don’t be a phony. 25. Don’t talk about faults. 26. Don’t figure others out. 27. Work with your biggest problems first. 28. Abandon hope. 29. Don’t poison yourself. 30. Don’t be so predictable. 31. Don’t malign others. 32. Don’t wait in ambush. 33. Don’t make everything so painful. 34. Don’t unload on everyone. 35. Don’t go so fast. 36. Don’t be tricky. 37. Don’t make gods into demons. 38. Don’t rejoice at others’ pain. POINT SEVEN Living with Ease in a Crazy World 39. Keep a single intention. 40. Correct all wrongs with one intention. 41. Begin at the beginning, end at the end. 42. Be patient either way. 43. Observe, even if it costs you everything. 44. Train in three difficulties. 45. Take on the three causes. 46. Don’t lose track. 47. Keep the three inseparable. 48. Train wholeheartedly, openly, and constantly. 49. Stay close to your resentment. 50. Don’t be swayed by circumstances. 51. This time get it right! 52. Don’t misinterpret. 53. Don’t vacillate. 54. Be wholehearted. 55. Examine and analyze. 56. Don’t wallow. 57. Don’t be jealous. 58. Don’t be frivolous. 59. Don’t expect applause.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

At that age, at that time of my life, refusal involved a kind of strategising for which I lacked the language. I didn’t understand how to negotiate my own disavowal – of food choices at a restaurant, of which movie to see, of which route to take through the city, of anything to do with sex – because I didn’t know my own desire, I didn’t know the limits and contours of my own wants, or the boundaries of my own comfort. Or how much another might press these. Because in its best sense refusal is relative, always secondary, always an after-effect of desire or predilection, or just a logical response to the insistence on self-preservation, to life and its livingness. But at that time I had no internalised repertoire of the preferences against which I could measure and assess his requests. Or if I did, I hadn’t found a way of articulating them, of expressing them, of saying with my body or otherwise: This is how I feel. This is what I want. This is what I’m going to do.

Trail of Tears, “these forced migrations” whose “fearful evils…are impossible to imagine…. I have witnessed evils,” Tocqueville admits a couple of paragraphs later, “I would find it impossible to relate.”* Regarding the plight of Indians in the United States, words practically fail Tocqueville. As for black people, they seem less fated for extinction than Native Americans, but their situation is nevertheless dire: black people, enslaved or free, “only constitute an unhappy remnant, a poor little wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense nation which owns all the land.” Such an assessment seems strange, if not ridiculous, to the twenty-first-century ear, since “this poor little wandering tribe” comprised more than two million people, more than 18 percent of the total population. Tocqueville very clearly realizes that slavery damages southern white people as well as the southern economy. Because of slavery, southern white people’s customs and character compare poorly with those of other Americans.

The dilemma of the AI age will be different: its defining technology will be widely acquired, mastered, and employed. The achievement of mutual strategic restraint — or even achieving a common definition of restraint — will be more difficult than ever before, both conceptually and practically. The management of nuclear weapons, the endeavor of half a century, remains incomplete and fragmentary. Yet the challenge of assessing the nuclear balance was comparatively straightforward. Warheads could be counted, and their yields were known. Conversely, the capabilities of AI are not fixed; they are dynamic. Unlike nuclear weapons, AIs are hard to track: once trained, they may be copied easily and run on relatively small machines. And detecting their presence or verifying their absence is difficult or impossible with the present technology. In this age, deterrence will likely arise from complexity — from the multiplicity of vectors through which an AI‑enabled attack is able to travel and from the speed of potential AI responses.

With the rise of molecular genetics, it has become possible to search for possible changes (mutations, polymorphisms) in target genes. Much effort has gone into investigating variations in genes that contribute to serotonin transmission, because serotonin-related drugs have antidepressant and anxiolytic properties. This assumes, however, that the treatment mechanism is the same mechanism that gives rise to the disorder.53 Although this is consistent with the old chemical imbalance hypothesis, it is not a conclusion that should simply be accepted without careful assessment. Nevertheless, studies of the genetic control of serotonin have found interesting results. For example, people with a certain variant (polymorphism) of a gene controlling a protein involved in serotonin transmission are more reactive to threatening stimuli, and this hyperreactivity is associated with increased amygdala activity during the threat.54 Further, it has been reported that this variant of the gene can account for 7 percent to 9 percent of the inheritance of anxiety.55

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6

We’ve become so focused as a society on the question of whether a given sexual behavior is evolutionarily “natural” or “unnatural” that we’ve lost sight of the more important question: Is it harmful? In many ways, it’s an even more challenging question, because although naturalness can be assessed by relatively straightforward queries about statistical averages—for example, “How frequently does it appear in other species?” and “In what percentage of the human population does it occur?”—the experience of harm is largely subjective. As such, it defies such direct analyses and requires definitions that resonate with people in vastly different ways. When it comes to sexual harm in particular, what’s harmful to one person not only is completely harmless to another but may even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive. If the supermodel Kate Upton were to walk into my office right now and tie me to my chair before doing a slow striptease and depositing her vagina in my face, I think I’d require therapy for years. But if this identical event were to happen to my heterosexual brother or to one of my lesbian friends, I suspect their brains would process such a “tragic” experience very differently. (And that of my not-very-amused sister-in-law would see my brother’s encounter with said vagina differently still.)

There can be a mismatch of attachment expectations. As mentioned earlier, not all relationships have to be attachment-based, but ideally all parties involved in the relationship need to agree about this. Very painful and confusing situations can arise when one person wants a certain relationship to meet their attachment needs, but the other person does not want the same level of involvement, or if a person wants an attachment-based relationship in theory but is practically or situationally unable to provide at that level. When I see clients struggling with attachment anxiety because a partner gives mixed signals or is inconsistent in their responsiveness, support, or availability, it is important to explore whether or not they are expecting this partner to be an attachment figure for them. If they are, then it is paramount for them to dialogue with their partner about whether or not that partner wants to be in the role of an attachment figure for them, as well as honestly assessing if the partner has enough time, capacity and/or space in their life and other relationships to show up to the degree required for being polysecure together. Some people prefer not to define their relationships, preferring to explore and experience them without labels or traditional expectations. As long as this level of ambiguity or relationship fluidity is a match for everyone involved, it can be a very liberating and satisfying way to relate with others. But when someone casts a partner in the role of attachment figure, but that person is unable or unwilling to play the part, much pain, frustration, disappointment, heartache and attachment anxiety ensues.

One of the more interesting ways of informally assessing extraversion at the biogenic level is to do the lemon-drop test. There are several variations on the test, and I draw here on a demonstration procedure I frequently used with my undergraduates.7 Here are the ingredients you will need: an eyedropper, a cotton swab (the little stick with a wrap of cotton on either end we use for babies and are admonished not to stick in our ears), a thread, concentrated lemon juice (regular lemon juice won’t work as effectively), and the willing tongue of a volunteer (such as yourself). Attach the thread to the center of the double-tipped cotton swab so that it hangs exactly horizontal. Swallow four times, then put one end of the swab on the tongue, holding it for twenty seconds. Then place five drops of the concentrated lemon juice on the tongue. Swallow, then place the other end of the swab on the same portion of the tongue and hold it for twenty seconds. Then hold up the swab by the thread. For some people the swab will remain horizontal. For others it will dip on the lemon juice end. Can you guess which? For the extraverts, the swab stays relatively horizontal, but for introverts it dips. The reason is that introverts, because they have relatively high levels of chronic arousal, respond more vigorously to strong stimulation, like lemon juice, so they create more saliva. Extraverts, being less responsive to high levels of stimulation, stay relatively dry mouthed. In fact, there is evidence that because of this tendency toward lower salivation levels, extraverts actually have higher levels of tooth decay than do introverts.8 I have done this exercise on myself a number of times, and each time my swab dips deeply. I am, at least by this measure, a biogenic introvert.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

What are the path of love and the path of meditation? There are basically two different paths to enlightenment. These two paths are The path of love and The path of meditation. The path of love is the female path to enlightenment and The path of meditation is the male path to enlightenment. The path of love is the path of love, joy, relationships, devotion and surrender. The path of meditation is the path of meditation, silence, aloneness and freedom. These two paths has different ways, but they have the same goal. Through love and surrender the person that walks The path of love discovers the inner silence. Through meditation and aloneness the person that walks The path of meditation discovers the inner source of love. These two paths are like climbing the mountain of enlightenment through different routes, but the two paths are meeting on the summit of the mountain - and discover an inner integration between love and meditation, between relating and aloneness. Before I accept to work with a student now, I make an intuitive and clairvoyant evaluation about which spiritual paths that the student has walked before in previous lives. This intuitive assessment gives information about the spiritual level that the student has attained, and it also makes it easier to guide the person spiritually if he has followed a certain path in the past. A female student of mine laughed recently when I told her that she had followed The path of love in several past lives. She commented: "You have told me three times now that I have walked the path of love and silence, but with my head I still do not understand it." But this overall assessment of her spiritual growth uptil now, and of the spiritual paths that she had walked, made all the pieces of her life puzzle fit together - and brought a new, creative light to all her life choices in her current life. A male student of mine, who was a Tibetan monk in a previous life, walks The path of meditation, and I notice how I change my language and the methods that I recommend when I guide him along the path of meditation. I now work with students who walk both The path of love and The path of meditation, which also allows me to discover a deeper integration of love and meditation on my path to enlightenment.

Weaknesses in claims about self-esteem have been evident for a long time. In California in the late 1980s, the state governor set up a special taskforce to examine politician John Vasconcellos’s claim that boosting young people’s self-esteem would prevent a range of societal problems (see chapter 1). One of its briefs was to review the relevant literature and assess whether there was support for this new approach. An author of the resulting report wrote in the introduction that ‘one of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume … is how low the associations between self-esteem and its [presumed] consequences are in research to date.’1 Unfortunately, this early expression of concern was largely ignored. Carol Craig reviews more recent warnings about the self-esteem movement in an online article ‘A short history of self-esteem’, citing the research of five professors of psychology. Craig’s article and related documents are worth reading if you are interested in exploring this issue in depth.2 The following is my summary of her key conclusions about self-esteem:        •   There is no evidence that self-image enhancing techniques, aimed at boosting self-esteem directly, foster improvements in objectively measured ‘performance’.        •   Many people who consider themselves to have high self-esteem tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities, as assessed by objective tests of their performance, and may be insulted and threatened whenever anyone asserts otherwise.        •   Low self-esteem is not a risk factor for educational problems, or problems such as violence, bullying, delinquency, racism, drug-taking or alcohol abuse.        •   Obsession with self-esteem has contributed to an ‘epidemic of depression’ and is undermining the life skills and resilience of young people.        •   Attempts to boost self-esteem are encouraging narcissism and a sense of entitlement.        •   The pursuit of self-esteem has considerable costs and may undermine the wellbeing of both individuals and societies. Some of these findings were brought to wider public attention in an article entitled ‘The trouble with self-esteem’, written by psychologist Lauren Slater, which appeared in The New York Times in 2002.3 Related articles, far too many to mention individually in this book, have emerged, alongside many books in which authors express their concerns about various aspects of the myth of self-esteem.4 There is particular concern about what we are doing to our children.

So what was this reincarnated ether, and what did it mean for Mach’s principle and for the question raised by Newton’s bucket?* Einstein had initially enthused that general relativity explained rotation as being simply a motion relative to other objects in space, just as Mach had argued. In other words, if you were inside a bucket that was dangling in empty space, with no other objects in the universe, there would be no way to tell if you were spinning or not. Einstein even wrote to Mach saying he should be pleased that his principle was supported by general relativity. Einstein had asserted this claim in a letter to Schwarzschild, the brilliant young scientist who had written to him from Germany’s Russian front during the war about the cosmological implications of general relativity. “Inertia is simply an interaction between masses, not an effect in which ‘space’ of itself is involved, separate from the observed mass,” Einstein had declared.23 But Schwarzschild disagreed with that assessment. And now, four years later, Einstein had changed his mind. In his Leiden speech, unlike in his 1916 interpretation of general relativity, Einstein accepted that his gravitational field theory implied that empty space had physical qualities. The mechanical behavior of an object hovering in empty space, like Newton’s bucket, “depends not only on relative velocities but also on its state of rotation.” And that meant “space is endowed with physical qualities.” As he admitted outright, this meant that he was now abandoning Mach’s principle. Among other things, Mach’s idea that inertia is caused by the presence of all of the distant bodies in the universe implied that these bodies could instantly have an effect on an object, even though they were far apart. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not accept instant actions at a distance. Even gravity did not exert its force instantly, but only through changes in the gravitational field that obeyed the speed limit of light. “Inertial resistance to acceleration in relation to distant masses supposes action at a distance,” Einstein lectured. “Because the modern physicist does not accept such a thing as action at a distance, he comes back to the ether, which has to serve as medium for the effects of inertia.”24 It is an issue that still causes dispute, but Einstein seemed to believe, at least when he gave his Leiden lecture, that according to general relativity as he now saw it, the water in Newton’s bucket would be pushed up the walls even if it were spinning in a universe devoid of any other objects. “In contradiction to what Mach would have predicted,” Brian Greene writes, “even in an otherwise empty universe, you will feel pressed against the inner wall of the spinning bucket… In general relativity, empty spacetime provides a benchmark for accelerated motion.

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.

Evaluate the external environment that affects you to assess the opportunities and threats you face with regard to your mission and objectives. Then, using value chain analysis, conduct an honest inventory of your personal strengths and weaknesses as they relate to that external environment. What actions do your results suggest?

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The organizational consequence of this highly quantitative image of defense decision-making is an independent and high-level office of systems analysis (or program analysis) reporting directly to the secretary. This office, separated from the parochialism of the individual services, commands, and functional offices of the Defense Department, is charged with de novo analysis of the services' program proposals (and, indeed, with the generation of alternative programs) to assess the relative merits of different potential uses of the same dollars. Its activities culminate in the secretary's decision on a single coherent set of numerically defined programs. This model imposes a requirement for close interaction between the secretary of defense and the principal program analyst. A suitable person for the job is difficult to obtain without granting him or her direct access to the secretary. This model, therefore, requires that the chief program analyst report directly to the secretary and it inevitably limits the program and budget role of the other chief officials of the OSD, especially the principal policy adviser. The model leaves unresolved how the guidance for the analysis process is to be developed and even how choices are to be made. Analysis is not always made rigorous and objective simply by making it quantitative, and not everything relevant can be quantified. At its extreme, it can degenerate into a system in which objectives become important because they can be quantified, rather than quantification being important because it can illuminate objectives.

Phase Activities Action Establish relationships and common agenda between all stakeholders Collaboratively scope issues and information Agree on time-frame Reflection On research design, ethics, power relations, knowledge construction process, representation and accountability Action Build relationships Identify roles, responsibilities and ethics procedures Establish a Memorandum of Understanding Collaboratively design research process and tools Discuss and identify desired action outcomes Reflection On research questions, design, working relationships and information requirements Action Work together to implement research process and undertake data collection Enable participation of others Collaboratively analyse information generated Begin planning action together Reflection On research process Evaluate participation and representation of others Assess need for further research and/or various action options Action Plan research-informed action which may include feedback to participants and influential other Reflection Evaluate action and process as a whole Action Identify options for further participatory research and action with or without academic researchers Figure 2.1 Key stages in a typical PAR process

My core argument is that most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet. When capitalism is mentioned, it is usually as the “free market,” which is taken as a benevolent given, almost a synonym for democracy. The conventional discussion of capitalism often degenerates into a bunch of clichés and is only loosely related to the capitalism that really exists.

Truth is relative to conceptual systems cannot be true, as it is the very sort of claim it says cannot be true.

No Some Yes G. Overall Performance Objective Is the performance objective: ___ ___ ___ 1. Clear (you/others can construct an assessment to test learners)? ___ ___ ___ 2. Feasible in the learning and performance contexts (time, resources, etc)? ___ ___ ___ 3. Meaningful in relation to goal and purpose for instruction (not insignificant)? H. (Other) ___ ___ ___ 1. Your complete list of performance objectives becomes the foundation for the next phase of the design process, developing criterion-referenced test items for each objective. The required information and procedures are described in Chapter 7. Judge the completeness of given performance objectives. Read each of the following objectives and judge whether it includes conditions, behaviors, and a criterion. If any element is missing, choose the part(s) omitted. 1. Given a list of activities carried on by the early settlers of North America, understand what goods they produced, what product resources they used, and what trading they did. a. important conditions and criterion b. observable behavior and important conditions c. observable behavior and criterion d. nothing 2. Given a mimeographed list of states and capitals, match at least 35 of the 50 states with their capitals without the use of maps, charts, or lists. a. observable response b. important conditions c. criterion performance d. nothing 3. During daily business transactions with customers, know company policies for delivering friendly, courteous service. a. observable behavior b. important conditions c. criterion performance d. a and b e. a and c 4. Students will be able to play the piano. a. important conditions b. important conditions and criterion performance c. observable behavior and criterion performance d. nothing 5. Given daily access to music in the office, choose to listen to classical music at least half the time. a. important conditions b. observable behavior c. criterion performance d. nothing Convert instructional goals and subordinate skills into terminal and subordinate objectives. It is important to remember that objectives are derived from the instructional goal and subordinate skills analyses. The following instructional goal and subordinate skills were taken from the writing composition goal in Appendix E. Demonstrate conversion of the goal and subordinate skills in the goal analysis by doing the following: 6. Create a terminal objective from the instructional goal: In written composition, (1) use a variety of sentence types and accompanying punctuation based on the purpose and mood of the sentence, and (2) use a variety of sentence types and accompanying punctuation based on the complexity or structure of the sentence. 7. Write performance objectives for the following subordinate skills: 5.6 State the purpose of a declarative sentence: to convey information 5.7 Classify a complete sentence as a declarative sentence 5.11 Write declarative sentences with correct closing punctuation. Evaluate performance objectives. Use the rubric as an aid to developing and evaluating your own objectives. 8. Indicate your perceptions of the quality of your objectives by inserting the number of the objective in either the Yes or No column of the checklist to reflect your judgment. Examine those objectives receiving No ratings and plan ways the objectives should be revised. Based on your analysis, revise your objectives to correct ambiguities and omissions. P

Part of this problem lies with how we do ‘science’. The paradigm of ‘modern science’ is that we isolate each individual factor and study it in isolation. This is the ‘reductionist’ approach to discovering scientific truth. This is straight forward and relatively easy to do, so lots of scientists swear by it. But what if a clinical problem like insulin resistance is not due to a single domino, but rather a number of dysfunctional proteins or other structural materials in combination? The answer – the reductionist approach can’t deliver an answer in this situation. If multiple steps in a pathway, working in varying combinations, eventually compromise that pathway’s action, the reductionist paradigm fails. But if one takes a more holistic or cosmopolitan approach to assessing the problem, the cause of the problem might be better appreciated.

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) The ACRC will try to promote its major policies and projects such as the Integrity Assessment, the Act on the Protection of Public Interest Whistleblowers, and e-People via the newsletters of major Ombudsman or anti-corruption related organizations around the world, and will utilize its English website and newspapers as well as e-mail newsletter and publications of foreign economic organizations to promote the anti-corruption efforts of the ACRC and Ombudsmen

A total of 239,982 respondents participated in the assessment survey. For the external integrity level, 165,191 people (complainants, public officials) who used or handled the services related to the assessment target

provinces stipulated the Corrupt Impact Assessment in their autonomous regulations. Corruption Impact Assessment for internal regulations of public service-related organizations

public service-related organizations conducted the Corruption Impact Assessment voluntarily and revised the relevant regulations

integrity levels • Public service-related agencies (140): public corporations and quasi-government agencies, etc. Results of the 2013 Assessment

regulations, and internal regulations of public service-related organizations. The Corruption Impact Assessment was introduced on December 29, 2005 with the revision of the

ACRC Act, and fully implemented from April 1, 2006. In the case of public service-related organizations, the assessment system has been implemented since December 28, 2007.

Respiratory Nursing   Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Diagnosis: Ineffective Breathing Pattern related to airflow restriction Desired Outcome: Following intervention, the patient's breathing pattern improves, as evidenced by absence of dyspnea and oxygen saturation >94%, pH >7.35, and PaCO2 <60 mm Hg. Assessments and Interventions Rationales Assess respiratory rate and depth q6h. Restlessness, dyspnea, tachypnea, use of accessory muscles of respiration are signs of respiratory distress, which should be reported. Auscultate breath sounds q6h. A decrease in breath sounds or an increase in wheezes is a sign of respiratory failure. Administer bronchodilator therapy with albuterol metered dose inhalers 2-4 puffs every 4 to 6 hours as needed. Albuterol increase expiratory volume by decreasing airway smooth muscle constriction. Administer ipratropium (Atrovent) 80 mcg, three times per day. Formoterol (Foradil) 12 mcg every 12 hours. Or administer tiotropium (Spiriva) 1 capsule (18 mcg) inhaled once daily by HandiHaler device Inhaled anticholinergics

Segmentation: Consumers’ purchasing behavior and attitudes towards brands differ from one market sector to another, depending largely on product-, market- and distribution-related factors. For this reason, the value of a brand can only be determined precisely through the separate assessment of individual segments that represent a homogenous customer group. Apart from this, brand management can only obtain the insights it needs to increase the brand’s value systematically if the brand has been evaluated in all its segments.

To the extent that we are trapped by the overvaluing, idealizing tendency, we are not free fully to celebrate the limited but real goods of creation. Idolatry by definition is not an accurate assessment of creaturely goods, but an overvaluing of them so as to miss the richness of their actual, limited values. If I worship my tennis trophies, my Mondrian, my family tree, my Kawasaki, or my bank account, then I do not really receive those goods for what they actually are - limited, historical, and finite - goods which are vulnerable to being taken away by time and death. When I pretend that a value is something more than it is, ironically I value it less appropriately than it deserves. Biblical psychology invites us to relate ourselves absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative.

In 2007 one of its biggest clients, Goldman Sachs, demanded that AIG put up billions of dollars more in collateral as required under its swaps contracts. AIG disclosed the existence of the collateral dispute in November. At the December conference, Charles Gates, a longtime insurance analyst for Credit Suisse, asked pointedly what it meant that “your assessment of certain super-senior credit default swaps and the related collateral . . . differs significantly from your counterparties.

Self-efficacy, although related to self-esteem, is not the same thing. Self-efficacy is an individual’s self-assessment of their own ability to perform a task or achieve a goal. Your

The factors that determine activity on the Exchange are innumerable, with events, current or expected, often bearing no apparent relation to price variation. Beside the somewhat natural causes for variation come artificial causes: The Exchange reacts to itself, and the current trading is a function, not only of prior trading, but also of its relationship to the rest of the market. The determination of this activity depends on an infinite number of factors. It is thus impossible to hope for mathematical forecasting. Contradictory opinions about these variations are so evenly divided that at the same instant buyers expect a rise and sellers a fall. The calculus of probability can doubtless never be applied to market activity, and the dynamics of the Exchange will never be an exact science. But it is possible to study mathematically the state of the market at a given instant- that is to say, to establish the laws of probability for price variation that the market at the instant dictates. If the market, in effect, does not predict its fluctuations, it does not assess them as being more or less likely, and this likelihood can be evaluated mathematically.

Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history.

Annabel pointed out. “I don’t think any of us doubted our marriageability.” “My new governess, Miss Flecknoe, would say that was an utterly improper comment,” Josie commented, raising her eyes from her book. “I can say that without hesitation because Miss Flecknoe finds any realistic assessment of relations between men and women improper.

derived from the assessment tool, the Emotional Quotient Inventory 2.0 or EQ-i 2.0®, distributed by Multi-Health Systems, one of the world’s leading assessment companies. This instrument measures a cross-section of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills, and facilitators that determine how effectively we understand and express ourselves, understand others and relate with them, and cope with daily demands. We use this assessment with many of our clients to establish a baseline of competencies and identify areas of improvement. We know that what gets inspected and measured does improve. In

MODEL 2: Multiple Stakeholder Sustainability, Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams (2010) PROBLEM STATEMENT How can I assess the most significant organizational dilemmas resulting from conflicting stakeholder demands and also assess organizational priorities to create sustainable performance? ESSENCE Organizational sustainability is not limited to the fashionable environmental factors such as emissions, green energy, saving scarce resources, corporate social responsibility, and so on. The future strength of an organization depends on the way leadership and management deal with the tensions between the five major entities facing any organization: efficiency of business processes, people, clients, shareholders and society. The manner in which these tensions are addressed and resolved determines the future strength and opportunities of an organization. This model proposes that sustainability can be defined as the degree to which an organization is capable of creating long-term wealth by reconciling its most important (‘golden’) dilemmas, created between these five components. From this, professors and consultants Fons Trompenaars and Peter Woolliams have identified ten dimensions consisting of dilemmas formed from these five components, because each one competes with the other four. HOW TO USE THE MODEL: The authors have developed a sustainability scan to use when making a diagnosis. This scan reveals: The major dilemmas and how people perceive the organization’s position in relation to these dilemmas; The corporate culture of an organization and their openness to the reconciliation of the major dilemmas; The competence of its leadership to reconcile these dilemmas. After the diagnosis, the organization can move on to reconciling the major dilemmas that lead to sustainable performance. To this end, the authors developed a dilemma reconciliation process. RESULTS To achieve sustainable success, organizations need to integrate the competing demands of their key stakeholders: operational processes, employees, clients, shareholders and society. By diagnosing and connecting different viewpoints and values, their research and consulting practice results in a better understanding of: The key challenges the organization faces with its various stakeholders and how to prioritize them; The extent to which leadership and management are capable of addressing the organizational dilemmas; The personal values of employees and their alignment with organizational values. These results help an organization define a corporate strategy in which crucial dilemmas are reconciled, and ensure that the company’s leadership is capable of executing the strategy sustainably. It does so while specifically addressing the company’s wealth-creating processes before the results show up in financial reports. It attempts to anticipate what the corporate financial performance will be some six months to three years in the future, as the financial effects of dilemma reconciliation are budgeted.

problem with age and grade equivalent scores is that instruments will vary in the scoring. One publisher’s test could give a child a sixth grade, eighth month score (6.8), and another publisher’s instrument could result in a score of 7.1. Although the two scores may be related to small differences between the instruments, consumers of the scores may have very different interpretations of scores that are really not all that discrepant. Another problem with age or grade equivalent scores is that teachers or administrators may expect all students to perform at or above their respective age or grade level. For example, teachers have been reprimanded because students have had scores below grade level. These misconceptions fail to take into account that the instruments are norm-referenced; thus, the expectations are that 50% of the students will fall above the appropriate age or grade score and 50% will fall below this score. Therefore, in most classrooms, expecting all students to fall above the mean is unrealistic as well as inappropriate given norm-referenced testing. 36 Section I Principles of Assessment Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial

Every now and then, a teenage girl is called forward, always through an intermediary, for a more thorough interview. “Do you pray?” “How often?” “What dishes can you cook?” It can be a life-changing exchange. This version of Miss Universe takes place every day in Afghanistan, where a girl’s looks, character, and body fat percentage are assessed in short, determined sentences, as women enforce and perpetuate their own subjugation. To Setareh, who like any other unmarried girl has often been scrutinized by other women, it is a familiar routine. “They spy on us and look at how we dress and how we move. The other women will tell her all the gossip about you—if you have a bad reputation or if you are proper. If it is not a relative, they will ask someone for your address. Then they will spy around the house, and maybe the boy will go to get a look at the girl. If he likes her, his parents go to the girl’s father. But the boy will not be allowed to choose if the mother and father have already found a good girl and decided for him

3. Awareness of movement is the key to improving movement. The sensory system, Feldenkrais pointed out, is intimately related to the movement system, not separate from it. Sensation’s purpose is to orient, guide, help control, coordinate, and assess the success of a movement. The kinesthetic sense plays a key role in assessing the success of a movement and gives immediate sensory feedback about where the