Consortium Quotes

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In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England—the first successful modern central bank—was originally founded. In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank—in effect, to circulate or "monetize" the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it) , but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
Nerds don't know they're nerds. I know I'm a... well, I prefer to be called a dork, thank you.
Tonya Kuper (Anomaly (Schrodinger's Consortium, #1))
I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m just here to protect Lady Ada,” Loch said. He grinned and continued, “She’s here to cause trouble.
Jessie Mihalik (Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1))
Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband’s domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female’s domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31
Kate Millett (Sexual Politics)
Why were the attractive ones always criminals?
Jessie Mihalik (Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1))
If not you, who? If not now, when? The worst thing well-meaning people can do is simply let things remain as they are.
Christine Pope (The Mandala Maneuver (The Gaian Consortium, #4))
When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
I will always, always thank my local libraries: the St. Louis County Library, the Municipal Library Consortium of St. Louis County, the St. Louis Public Library, the Webster University Library, and the University of Missouri–St. Louis Thomas Jefferson Library. And all you interlibrary loan librarians out there—thanks for what you do! Libraries are a public good. Please support yours in whatever way you can.
Ann Leckie (The Raven Tower)
What, um…what are they?” Damien thought a moment. “They’re a sort of excessively zealous consortium who have unorthodox views.” “You have a cult?” Amma’s voice was squeaky even as she tried to keep it low. “No, no, this is their own thing, not mine. Big fans of my father, really, I just drop by in his stead on occasion.
A.K. Caggiano (Throne in the Dark (Villains & Virtues, #1))
When the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly. —Toni Morrison
Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies)
Suffering the nasty twisting of body parts that should never be twisted, the card soldiers fell, lifeless, and Arch's bodyguards were soon pushing through the tangles of Outerwilderbeastie, cruching twigs and leaves underfoot. Visit the labs?" Blister said, refurring the squate network of building in Wondertropolies' warehouse district, where a consortium of Alyss' scientists and engineers had tried to transform a host of captured Glass Eyes into a benign force. On the lab grounds were the incinerator baths--large pits into which the Glass Eyes were being herded and melted down, sorched into ash. There would be lots of Glasss Eyes to choose from at the labs, bbut Ripkins shook his head. To much security," he said. Find one that roaming?" It'll be easier for us to avoid notcie," Ripkins said. Yeah, but it'd be more fun to hit the labs.
Frank Beddor
As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out. here. The unknown troubles us. Ironically, it is our fate to live in the dark. This unexpected finding of science is only about three centuries old. Head out from the Earth in any direction you choose, and—after an initial flash of blue and a longer wait while the Sun fades—you are surrounded by blackness, punctuated only here and there by the faint and distant stars. Even after we are grown, the darkness retains its power to frighten us. And so there are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know, they say. There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Of this immense multitude, could it be that our humdrum Sun is the only one with an inhabited planet? Maybe. Maybe the origin of life or intelligence is exceedingly improbable. Or maybe civilizations arise all the time, but wipe themselves out as soon as they are able. Or, here and there, peppered across space, orbiting other suns, maybe there are worlds something like our own, on which other beings gaze up and wonder as we do about who else lives in the dark…Life is a comparative rarity. You can survey dozens of worlds and find that on only one of them does life arise and evolve and persist… If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage—or to the advantage of the human species… In our time we’ve crossed the Solar System and sent four ships to the stars… But we continue to search for inhabitants. We can’t help it. Life looks for life.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
Them that wield the most power are usually the same ones who are the most ’fraid of their own shadows,
J.N. Chaney (Fractured Consortium (Star Scrapper Book 7))
Still invulnerable,' He calmly reminded the guy, as if updating his Facebook status.
Elizabeth Gannon (Electrical Hazard (Consortium of Chaos, #4))
Anyone lucky enough to be entrusted with your heart would be a fool to treat it carelessly.
Jessie Mihalik (Aurora Blazing (Consortium Rebellion, #2))
Consortium
Lauren Oliver (Must-Read Teen Novel Sampler)
We've been through this Freddy. The last time you played fourth at the whist consortium, you beheaded the queen of hearts, and that ended badly for all concerned.
Angela Bell (A Lady's Guide to Marvels and Misadventure)
We can’t identify patterns and correlations. There’s no consortium on the findings. There’s no great library of paranormal evidence.
Zak Bagans (Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew)
The S.S.S. is a small and secret consortium consisting of the inmates of intellect, and existing solely for the purpose of keeping each other alive, for we all know that once we lose our wits we will begin to die.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
In 1981 Lawrence Landweber at the University of Wisconsin pulled together a consortium of universities that were not connected to the ARPANET to create another network based on TCP/IP protocols, which was called CSNET.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
It has been fourteen years since he acquired Müller’s estate for the consortium that consisted of the friends who had gathered around the Mylins’ dinner table on a New Year’s Eve. Thirteen since he earned a portion of it, which he named Gwendolyn Gardens after his mother.
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
Wow! I thought the other two times were fantastic, but that definitely went up to eleven. Mind you, I’ve never had sex just after someone’s tried to kill me, so it’s probably just hormones and adrenaline and stuff. So don’t get any ideas about bragging to your partners in crime.” “Partners in crime? Do you think I run some sort of bloody consortium here?” Karla’s eyes glazed over at the thought and for a second she stumbled against the side of the boat, gripping the rail tightly. “If they were all like you, perhaps I just might have to submit myself for inspection,” she replied with a faint smile.
M.J. Lawless (Rocks)
Look.” I pointed. “Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don’t export directly, but there’s a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes—the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgravity or vacuum or very high temperatures or an anaerobic environment. In other words, it’s your typical pattern for an energy-exporting planet, with the added twist that because it’s very damp, a lot of planetary surface activities—smelting metals, manufacturing ceramics—are expensive to perform locally. The only interesting thing is how little slow money is going into their economic system. As for banking corruption, there’s the usual, but no more than the usual. Around one government per decade—out of nearly five hundred, mind—gets into bad trouble one way or another. But the system is self-stabilizing: What usually happens is that a consortium of their trading partners and main creditors get together and mount a hostile takeover—I believe they call it a “war”—and place the defaulter under administration until it digs itself out of the hole.
Charles Stross (Neptune's Brood (Freyaverse, #2))
The local calendar had only six days in a week, and the tourist board had run a very successful ad campaign about their lack of Mondays.
Jessie Mihalik (Aurora Blazing (Consortium Rebellion, #2))
Loch shrugged. “I never promised anything. You just assumed I did because I made a vaguely agreeing statement.
Jessie Mihalik (Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1))
This world belonged to me and others were merely allowed to live in it.
Jessie Mihalik (Aurora Blazing (Consortium Rebellion, #2))
As my father always says, there’s no shame in being poor, but it can be damned inconvenient.
Christine Pope (Breath of Life (The Gaian Consortium #2))
Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
The concept of “crime” implied that there was some authority greater than himself, who could set rules on morality, conduct, and legalities.  Kasos acknowledged nothing superior to himself.  If he desired to commit some act, then it wasn’t “criminal,” it was obviously the “right” thing to do.  His actions were the result of his choices, and thus, could in no way be viewed as “wrong.”  He was perfect.  Crime was impossible if you were perfect and in charge of all creation.  When YOU wrote the laws, you couldn’t POSSIBLY break them.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
Natalie wasn't the type of person who blamed others for the stupid things they did. She tried to be very understanding of their idiocy. Besides, they were probably doing the best they could. The world was a tough place, and it must be *so* much harder if you were stupid.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Only Fish in the Sea: A Superhero Romance (Consortium of Chaos Book 5))
And so, as the passengers drifted off to sleep to the rhythmic clicking of steel wheels against rail, little did they dream that, riding in the car at the end of their train, were six men who represented an estimated one-fourth of the total wealth of the entire world. This was the roster of the Aldrich car that night: Nelson W. Aldrich, Republican "whip" in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, business associate of J.P. Morgan, father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Abraham Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury; Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller and the international investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Henry P. Davison, senior partner of the J.P. Morgan Company; Benjamin Strong, head of J.P. Morgan's Bankers Trust Company;1 6. Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.2
G. Edward Griffin (The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve)
He was no woman’s idea of a romantic hero.  He was Mr. Darcy only if Mr. Darcy got loaded at the ball at Netherfield, started a fight with Bingley because the man was a fucking pussy, kicked Mr. Collins in the balls just to get him to shut the hell up, and then hit on Lizzy’s sexy little ass like a motherfucker.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Guy Your Friends Warned You About (Consortium of Chaos Book 3))
In 2006, the Vogelstein team revealed the first landmark sequencing effort by analyzing thirteen thousand genes in eleven breast and colon cancers. (Although the human genome contains about twenty thousand genes in total, Vogelstein’s team initially had tools to assess only thirteen thousand.) In 2008, both Vogelstein’s group and the Cancer Genome Atlas consortium extended this effort by sequencing hundreds of genes of several dozen specimens of brain tumors. As of 2009, the genomes of ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, and several forms of leukemia have been sequenced, revealing the full catalog of mutations in each tumor type. Perhaps
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
She gasped.  “I do not!  I’m a very nice person!  Which is why I could never say that to the council!”   “Oh, horseshit, woman!”  He laughed.  “You’ve confounded my every action since the very moment I met you!” “I have?” “YES!  You are NOT a nice person.  You’re the most suborn, disrespectful, spiteful, vindictive bitch I’ve ever met…And I say that with a great deal of respect, as I have no use for nice people.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
I have been saddled with you for centuries, and I just do not understand when you will get it through that preposterously attractive, but sadly empty head, that I AM YOUR MASTER!  You should have no thoughts but the ones which I GIVE YOU!  I OWN YOU!  I own you, I own your kingdom and I own the hidden power!”   “Yep.  Got it.”  She nodded.  “Writing it all down, dumbass.”  She pointed at the door.  “Wanna get the door?  This place is weird and I’m really hungry.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
As I am new to teaching this course, University policy is that we are to use this time to get to know each other better.  I realize that this is an incredible waste of all of our times and tuition money, is utterly tedious, and accomplishes nothing, but that is the rule.”  She started handing out more paperwork.  “Break into small groups and try to answer as many of the inane and entirely nonsensical questions as you can, before you stop caring about the assignment and learn to hate the others in your group.  Once you have spent five consecutive minutes discussing how it is impossible for the members of your group to discuss anything for five minutes-- as you obviously have nothing in common and are all equally boring-- the assignment will be complete, and you can promptly forget all of the names and information you have learned about your classmates, and go home.  Please hand in your papers to me on your way out, so that I can discard them without bothering to read what you wrote, as I do not care.
Elizabeth Gannon (Electrical Hazard (Consortium of Chaos, #4))
In the late 1960's, physicists Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam, and Sheldon Glashow conquered the next unification frontier. In a phenomenal piece of scientific work they showed that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are nothing but different aspects of the same force, subsequently dubbed the electroweak force. The predictions of the new theory were dramatic. The electromagnetic force is produced when electrically charged particles exchange between them bundles of energy called photons. The photon is therefore the messenger of electromagnetism. The electroweak theory predicted the existence of close siblings to the photon, which play the messenger role for the weak force. These never-before-seen particles were prefigured to be about ninety times more massive than the proton and to come in both an electrically charged (called W) and a neutral (called Z) variety. Experiments performed at the European consortium for nuclear research in Geneva (known as CERN for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) discovered the W and Z particles in 1983 and 1984 respectively.
Mario Livio (The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry)
WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY | 838 words A slippery situation in the Gulf Black Horizon (Harper, $25.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062109880), the 11th book in James Grippando's popular series featuring Florida attorney Jack Swyteck, opens with the two most important words of the lawyer's life: "I do." (Ha, ha—you thought I was going to say, "Not guilty.") The beach wedding in scenic Key Largo goes wildly awry when an epic storm arises in the Gulf, launching manifold repercussions for Swyteck and his new bride. One of the victims of the storm is a young Cuban oil rig worker whose wife emigrated to the U.S. ahead of him. He had planned to follow, but the deadly combination of high winds and an explosive oil spill have put paid to those plans forever. Now his wife would like Swyteck to file a wrongful death suit against the Chinese/Russian/Venezuelan/Cuban consortium that owns the oil rig. This is no easy feat, since the rig is in Cuban waters, and the only tenuous tie to the U.S. legal system is the wife's residency in Key West. The situation is volatile; the adversaries are lethal; and the backdrop is a toxic oil slick poised to slime the Florida coast. Black Horizon is timely, relentlessly paced and a thrill ride of the first
Anonymous
He pointed a finger at her.  “I don’t care whether you live or die.  You exist only to serve my purposes and then you will be discarded.  You are merely the vessel delivering me my reward, and nothing more.  You…” They arrived at the banks of a large river.  He held out an arm to stop her from going any further and then waded into the quickly moving water and effortlessly picked her up in his arms and carried her across the stream so that she didn’t get wet.  When they arrived at the other side, he gently placed her down and pulled himself out of the water and onto the muddy bank.  “…mean nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  I don’t know how much plainer I can say that.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
…He needed to find some little poor kids to playfully spray with a hose, while he was helping out at a charity carwash for the handicapped or something.  Maybe rent a wet dog for the afternoon, and get it to shake its head in slow motion, while he laughed like some douchebag asshole and tried to lightheartedly block the soapy droplets with his hands or one of the little wheelchair kids or something.  Women loved that shit if movies were to be believed.  They ate it up. Sadly, he had no idea how to go about doing any of that though.  None of the pet shops had been open to the idea of him using their puppies as a prop in a seduction fantasy, and all of the schools for the disabled he called had refused to give him an hourly rate on renting their students.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Guy Your Friends Warned You About (Consortium of Chaos Book 3))
Construction finally began that winter, and by early 1974 Syncrude’s Mildred Lake site bustled with 1,500 construction workers. But the deal remained tentative as cost estimates grew beyond the initial $1.5 billion to $2 billion or more and the federal government’s new budget arrived with punitive new taxes for oil and gas exports. Then, in the first week of December, one of the Syncrude partners, Atlantic Richfield, summarily quit the consortium, leaving a 30 percent hole in its financing. A mad scramble ensued in search of a solution. Phone calls pinged back and forth between government officials in Edmonton and Ottawa. Finally, on the morning of February 3, 1975, executives from the Syn-crude partner companies and cabinet ministers from the Alberta, Ontario and federal governments met without fanfare and outside the media’s brightest spotlights at an airport hotel in Winnipeg to negotiate a deal to save the project. Lougheed and Ontario premier Bill Davis both attended, along with their energy ministers. Federal mines minister Donald Macdonald represented Pierre Trudeau’s government, accompanied by Trudeau’s ambitious Treasury Board president, Jean Chrétien. Macdonald and Davis, both Upper Canadian patricians in the classic mould, were put off by Lougheed’s blunt style. By midday, the Albertans were convinced Macdonald would not be willing to compromise enough to reach a deal. Rumours in Lougheed’s camp after the fact had it that over lunch, Chrétien persuaded the mines minister to accept the offer on the table. Two days later, Chrétien rose in the House of Commons to announce that the federal government would be taking a 15 percent equity stake in the Syn-crude project, with Alberta owning 10 percent and Ontario the remaining 5 percent. In the coming years, it would be Lougheed, with his steadfast support and multimillion-dollar investments in SAGD, who would be seen as the Patch’s great public sector champion. But it was Chrétien, “the little guy from Shawinigan,” whose backroom deal-making skills had saved Syncrude
Chris Turner (The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands)
His mind turned, gradually comprehending, memories flooding his awareness that were not his own: memories from the timelessness before the Being within him had fallen into this body; of a Homeworld and a Consortium of Light that had sent two Beings away to prove themselves worthy—of one another and of their place in their own world.
J. Valor (Salomé)
Jack Anderson gave a few details in his column, “Operation Condor, an Unholy Alliance” on August 3, 1979:            Assassination teams are centered in Chile. This international consortium is located in Colonia Dignidad, Chile. Founded by Nazis from Hitler’s SS, headed by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf Hitler’s 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or roasted to death over barbecue pits.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
We ought not to think that when men are converted, they each become a little lamp, and if enough of them get converted, they will be able to form a consortium and pool their lamps to try to make a sun. The vision of the coming noontime glory does not depend at all on us trying to get some momentum up. The sun has risen, and it will continue to do what rising suns do.
Douglas Wilson (Heaven Misplaced: Christ's Kingdom on Earth)
None of your goddamn business.”  He snapped, then pointed to the device she was holding.  “That’s the ‘teleforce weapon’, some death-ray thing that crazy bastard was cooking up.  It sends concentrated beams of particles out at thirty-four times the speed of sound.  You can incinerate an army from two hundred miles away with that sucker.  Works on planes, submarines and neighbor’s cats too.”  He drank another gulp from his flask.  “Fifty cents.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Only Fish in the Sea: A Superhero Romance (Consortium of Chaos Book 5))
He could do anything, but could never pretend to be anything but a titan of strength and power laying waste to those who sought to change him.  Angst meant that he should be feeling uncertain and scared about his future and his past, and that was out of the question.  The past was dead.  The future would soon see him standing over it in conquest, drenched in its blood.  What was there to be uncertain about?
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
…That was the thing he’d never understood about the whole Occum’s Razor thing: magic was the simplest explanation for anything. Thus, that whole theory was garbage.  If the simplest explanation was always the right one, then everything would be caused by magic or super-powered enemies, which it wasn’t.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Guy Your Friends Warned You About (Consortium of Chaos Book 3))
What would you say to your victims if you had the opportunity?” He pursed his lips in thought.  “Probably something like: ‘Holy shit!  You’re alive!?!  I thought I fucking killed you already!  EAT LEAD, ZOMBIE BASTARD!  *BA-BLAM!* *BA-BLAM!
Elizabeth Gannon (The Guy Your Friends Warned You About (Consortium of Chaos Book 3))
Marian didn’t believe in crying.  In fact, she didn’t really believe in emotion.  It clouded judgment and accomplished nothing.  You could scream, and love and cry all you wanted, but when you were done, your problems would remain the same.  The only difference was that now you would be dehydrated and had less time in which to solve your issues.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Guy Your Friends Warned You About (Consortium of Chaos Book 3))
The day itself was the enemy; it didn’t want Sydney to see the end of it.  It didn’t want him to win.  So each day was a new adversary which he had to defeat, and he woke every morning dedicated to staring that bastard down and seeing which of them would blink first.
Elizabeth Gannon (Electrical Hazard (Consortium of Chaos, #4))
Here’s the thing: killing them just gets easier.  You killed him.  The man is dead by YOUR hand.”  He looked around the room.  “Was there a clap of thunder?  Did the heaven’s open up?  Hellfire bursting forth to consume you?  His angry spirit coming for revenge?  No.”  He shook his head.  “This man’s face will be the only one you remember.  The rest will merely be pale shadows of this moment.  One or ten billion, this is the only one you’ll feel.  After this, it just gets easier.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
I’m not kidnapping anyone.”  Emily shook her head vehemently.  “I have a bad history with abductions.  My parole officer said that I should stay out of the kidnapping business until I realize that people need oxygen to live.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
Why would I need to look ‘angsty’?  Why would weakness attract someone of your sex?  Weakness should be spurned, not embraced. The reward for weakness is DEATH, not romance.” He pointed at her. “Your whole gender is insane, and I blame YOU.” “It’s not about ‘weakness,’ it’s about ‘vulnerability’.”  She swatted his hand away.  “You’re trying to make it seem like you have some kind of emotion other than homicidal rage, and that you’re feeling the weight of all the things you’ve done, and that you need someone who understands your inner pain and turmoil!” “I don’t, I’m not, and I don’t.”  He crossed his arms over his chest resolutely.  “PERIOD.” “I know!”  She nodded in agreement.  “That’s why we need to act it out now as practice!  We have to figure out a way to pretend that you’re a fully functioning human being, or this is never going to work.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
He thought with some satisfaction of the sight of her little head spiraling through the sky, ridiculous ponytail pinwheeling around and around against the bright blue sky…and finally disappearing out of sight forever, never to return… What a wonderful dream.
Elizabeth Gannon (The Son of Sun and Sand (Consortium of Chaos Book 2))
We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness! But it’s a pervasive and beloved madness. And I know from experience that it’s hard to oppose a crowd fuming for war. When we have identified a hated enemy, we want to be assured that God is on our side as we go to war with our enemy. And we believe that surely God is on our side, because we feel so unified in the moment. Everyone knows the nation is most unified in times of war. Nothing unites a nation like war. But what’s so tragic is when Christian leaders pretend that a rally around the war god is compatible with worshipping the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We refuse to face the truth that waging war is incompatible with following Jesus. We forget that God is most clearly revealed, not in the nascent understanding of the ancient Hebrews but in the Word made flesh. We forget that “being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christform upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.”6 We forget that “the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God’s own Son.”7 We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. We forget all of this because the disturbing truth is this—it’s hard to believe in Jesus. When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to. Which is why, I suspect, for so long, the Gospels have been treated as mere narratives and have not been taken seriously as theological documents in their own right. We want to hear how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, and rose again on the third day. We use these historical bits as the raw material for our theology that we mostly shape from a particular misreading of Paul. In doing this we conveniently screen out Jesus’s own teachings about the kingdom of God and especially his ideas about nonviolence and enemy love.
Brian Zahnd (A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace)
Then I began calling advertising agencies, as I had done during the research-and-information phase, but this time I was dead serious. I needed someone to take a chance on me—anyone. And it was hard. Getting people on the phone was a piece of cake, but finding the person who made the decisions was almost impossible. I would leave one voice-mail, no more—because I didn’t want to sound desperate—then follow it up with an e-mail. If I didn’t have an e-mail address, I’d guess, which really isn’t that complicated. First initial, last name, @whatevercompany.com. And whenever someone actually responded, I was ready. “I have a company called Click Agents,” I would say. “We have a consortium of Web sites. I can get your ads on those sites, and I will price them on a per-click basis.” I
Gurbaksh Chahal (The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions)
I didn’t have a consortium of Web sites—I had no real connection to any legitimate Web sites—but they didn’t need to know that, and that wasn’t the point, anyway. I was a simple salesman.
Gurbaksh Chahal (The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions)
Without prior notice to the other powers or even to the State Department officials concerned with the consortium, Wilson proceeded to inform the press that the American group in the consortium would no longer have the support of the government.
Warren I. Cohen (America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations)
Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
Dear Mr. Fraser, I write to inform you that I shall not visit Helwater this quarter; official affairs detain me. […] These affairs concern an inquiry into the explosion of a cannon in Germany, June last. I was summoned before an official Commission of Inquiry, which… He wrote steadily, pausing now and then to compose a sentence, and found that the exercise did seem to bring his seething thoughts to earth. He wrote of the commission, Marchmont, Twelvetrees, and Oswald, Edgar and his consortium, Jones, Gormley, the corpse of Tom Pilchard… […] It is a brutal occupation, he wrote, and God help me, if I am no hero, I am damned good at it. You understand, I think, for I know you are the same. […] God help me further, he wrote, more slowly. I am afraid. […] I am afraid of everything. Afraid of what I may have done, unknowing—of what I might do. I am afraid of death, of mutilation, incapacity—but any soldier fears these things, and fights regardless. I have done it, and— He wished to write firmly, and will do it again. Instead, the words formed beneath his quill as they formed in his mind; he could not help but write them. I am afraid that I might find myself unable. Not only unable to fight, but to command.
Diana Gabaldon (Lord John and the Hand of Devils (Lord John Grey, #0.5, #1.5, #2.5))
About 41 percent of mothers are primary breadwinners and earn the majority of their family’s income. Another 23 percent of mothers are co-breadwinners, contributing at least a quarter of the family’s earnings.30 The number of women supporting families on their own is increasing quickly; between 1973 and 2006, the proportion of families headed by a single mother grew from one in ten to one in five.31 These numbers are dramatically higher in Hispanic and African-American families. Twenty-seven percent of Latino children and 51 percent of African-American children are being raised by a single mother.32 Our country lags considerably behind others in efforts to help parents take care of their children and stay in the workforce. Of all the industrialized nations in the world, the United States is the only one without a paid maternity leave policy.33 As Ellen Bravo, director of the Family Values @ Work consortium, observed, most “women are not thinking about ‘having it all,’ they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their children’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.”34 For many men, the fundamental assumption is that they can have both a successful professional life and a fulfilling personal life. For many women, the assumption is that trying to do both is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Women are surrounded by headlines and stories warning them that they cannot be committed to both their families and careers. They are told over and over again that they have to choose, because if they try to do too much, they’ll be harried and unhappy. Framing the issue as “work-life balance”—as if the two were diametrically opposed—practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life? The good news is that not only can women have both families and careers, they can thrive while doing so. In 2009, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober published Getting to 50/50, a comprehensive review of governmental, social science, and original research that led them to conclude that children, parents, and marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers. The data plainly reveal that sharing financial and child-care responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads, and thriving children.35 Professor Rosalind Chait Barnett of Brandeis University did a comprehensive review of studies on work-life balance and found that women who participate in multiple roles actually have lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of mental well-being.36 Employed women reap rewards including greater financial security, more stable marriages, better health, and, in general, increased life satisfaction.37 It may not be as dramatic or funny to make a movie about a woman who loves both her job and her family, but that would be a better reflection of reality. We need more portrayals of women as competent professionals and happy mothers—or even happy professionals and competent mothers. The current negative images may make us laugh, but they also make women unnecessarily fearful by presenting life’s challenges as insurmountable. Our culture remains baffled: I don’t know how she does it. Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.
Sheryl Sandberg (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)
Behavior, in this view, “is solely the consequence of the past history of the system, that has brought it to a state where various neuronal populations form an excitatory consortium that organizes and ineluctably triggers the correlated synaptic volleys needed for a particular movement,” as the neuroscientist Robert Doty described it. The sense that one is exercising free will when one orders the cheesecake or moves the cursor on the computer screen to another game of hearts rather than to the spreadsheet program with your overdue taxes—is an illusion, an artifact of a prescientific era, says the prevailing paradigm. The idea that we might choose cantaloupe over cheesecake is as illusory as the apparent underwater “bending” of an oar dipped into a river.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
Oh my.” “What is it?” Mike asked. “Did you find where Murray is staying?” “No. But here’s something else.” Catherine pointed to the very first page of the manifest. This page didn’t list the individuals who were staying in each room. Instead, it listed the facilities that had been reserved on board by various groups. For example, the Enriquez family was celebrating a wedding that night in the Lotus Ballroom. But of far more interest was what Catherine was pointing to: That evening, the Chrysanthemum Ballroom had been reserved by the International Tulip Growers Association. Back in London, two months earlier, Murray Hill had told us that the ITGA was a front for a consortium of evildoers.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School at Sea)
I just knew that Loch drew me in like a magnet and the more time I spent with him, the more I liked him. I told myself that it was for the best that today was his last day. It was a pretty lie.
Jessie Mihalik (Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1))
There’s still a problem here: we need to know that the device itself hasn’t been compromised at some point, that the machine’s own “identity,” going back to its origins as a pile of unassembled parts in the factory, can be trusted. It’s a hard nut to crack. Device manufacturers use the phrase “trusted computing” to describe their efforts to resolve it. It’s a concept that chipmakers AMD and Intel Corp. have worked on in concert with IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and others within a consortium known as the Trusted Computing Group. As it is currently designed, trusted computing is intended to confirm that a computer will act as intended—for example, that it will communicate the very string of text that the user types in, and nothing else, when certain keystrokes are hit—that is, that it has not been compromised by malicious code.
Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
Airbus, a consortium of European manufacturers it had always derided as a glorified jobs program, actually had a cost advantage over Boeing. Its factories produced planes 12 percent to 15 percent cheaper than Boeing’s, the study reported. Ironically, this was in part because of rigid labor laws in Europe, which made layoffs more expensive and, in places like Germany, forced the involvement of labor unions in management decisions. As a consequence, Airbus was quicker to adopt automated machinery, but also more likely to train and develop its workers rather than to fire them.
Peter Robison (Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing)
The original capital cost (i.e. actual value) of the Barts Health PFI was £1.1 billion (around £1 million per bed) but will end up costing £7.1 billion by 2049.14 £6 billion will go to the PFI consortium Skanska Innisfree and partners. Barts Health are paying £100 million a year in interest before they even see a patient.15 That’s £3 billion, just in interest, over 30 years. Imagine what you could do for healthcare in East London with this money. So
Youssef El-Gingihy (How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps)
…Three: I don't care if she's chasing after you with a tranquilizer gun and chloroform, intent on capturing you with a fanatical zeal not seen outside the pages of Les Miserables, if you endanger her, I will destroy you. I have done it before, and I will gladly do so again.
Elizabeth Gannon (Electrical Hazard (Consortium of Chaos, #4))
Simple Regression   CHAPTER OBJECTIVES After reading this chapter, you should be able to Use simple regression to test the statistical significance of a bivariate relationship involving one dependent and one independent variable Use Pearson’s correlation coefficient as a measure of association between two continuous variables Interpret statistics associated with regression analysis Write up the model of simple regression Assess assumptions of simple regression This chapter completes our discussion of statistical techniques for studying relationships between two variables by focusing on those that are continuous. Several approaches are examined: simple regression; the Pearson’s correlation coefficient; and a nonparametric alterative, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. Although all three techniques can be used, we focus particularly on simple regression. Regression allows us to predict outcomes based on knowledge of an independent variable. It is also the foundation for studying relationships among three or more variables, including control variables mentioned in Chapter 2 on research design (and also in Appendix 10.1). Regression can also be used in time series analysis, discussed in Chapter 17. We begin with simple regression. SIMPLE REGRESSION Let’s first look at an example. Say that you are a manager or analyst involved with a regional consortium of 15 local public agencies (in cities and counties) that provide low-income adults with health education about cardiovascular diseases, in an effort to reduce such diseases. The funding for this health education comes from a federal grant that requires annual analysis and performance outcome reporting. In Chapter 4, we used a logic model to specify that a performance outcome is the result of inputs, activities, and outputs. Following the development of such a model, you decide to conduct a survey among participants who attend such training events to collect data about the number of events they attended, their knowledge of cardiovascular disease, and a variety of habits such as smoking that are linked to cardiovascular disease. Some things that you might want to know are whether attending workshops increases
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
A lot of development has always been informally subsidized. When a system administrator writes a network analysis tool to help him do his job, then posts it online and gets bug fixes and feature contributions from other system administrators, what’s happened is that an unofficial consortium has been formed.
Karl Franz Fogel (Producing Open Source Software)
What’s in an Orange? Cuba has encouraged foreign investments in agriculture. The Cuban citrus industry was started during the 1960’s to supply the former Soviet Union, as well as other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, with oranges and grapefruit. After the economic crash and the restructuring of the Soviet Union, the demand for citrus crops fell off by about half. In 1994, the National Citrus Corporation was founded in Cuba, and is now known as the “Fruit Trees Enterprise Group.” It consists of 13 nationally owned citrus enterprises, a commercial company and 4 processing plants. Cítricos Caribe S.A. has three cold storage facilities and exports to contracted foreign vendors. A Chilean venture and a Greek-British consortium, both affected by the decline of demand, halted their operations in 2014. However an Israel company has successfully developed huge citrus and tropical fruit plantations on the island, with most of their crops being sold in Europe. Israeli orange groves stretch for miles in the Matanzas Province, east of Havana. The province known chiefly for its white sandy beaches and resorts also has the massive BM Corporation, based in Tel Aviv, operating huge citrus groves and one of its packinghouses there. Its modern processing factory is located in the middle of 115,000 acres of groves. It is known as the world’s largest citrus operation. Read the award winning bock that is at all the US Military Academies,
Hank Bracker
We should not underestimate Dodsley’s role in fostering the project. It was this ambitious and shrewd man, who had started his working life as a footman to the society wit Charles Dartiquenave, who persuaded Johnson to take the project on. He provided him with Pope’s notes. He superintended the consortium of booksellers. He would solicit the patronage of the influential Earl of Chesterfield—of whom we shall hear more later. He diligently publicized the Dictionary, especially in his own magazine the Museum. Furthermore, his own studious work as a compiler meant that he had both materials and ideas to share with Johnson:
Henry Hitchings (Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary)
For two months, between the crash of Lehman and the end of negotiations, we were really anxious,” recalled Brito. “Things were out of our hands and nobody knew where the world was going... We announced the transaction in one world and signed the contract to buy it in another... Some of the banks in our consortium almost disappeared... It was as though we had entered a tunnel and, somehow or other, had to get to the other end – only by the other end, it had suddenly started to rain. What could you do? Begin to think of a plan B, a plan C, on other ways of financing...
Cristiane Correa (DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz)
And yet something in his dark, still shape spoke of a sadness I couldn't begin to understand, one I suddenly wished I might do something to dispel. Surprising myself, I reached out and laid a hand on his forearm. I heard a sudden intake of breath, but I made myself give his arm a gentle squeeze before I let go. He really didn't feel very different from a human - at least, a human who was well-muscled. The flesh under my fingertips had been firm and unyielding.
Christine Pope (Breath of Life (The Gaian Consortium #2))
The National Stepfamily Resource Center, or NSRC (formerly the Stepfamily Association of America), a consortium of stepfamily experts and a clearinghouse of helpful information for stepfamilies, actually urges therapists and other professionals in the field to avoid the term “blended family” precisely because it engineers such unrealistic expectations and elicits feelings of failure and guilt.
Wednesday Martin (Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do)
She thought it strange that she had never visited Peterborough before; after all it was an incredible focal point for wealth. But after she arrived, she realized it ordered a different sort of money to the type she was used to. Peterborough’s money was active money, it was finance consortium muscle, corporate power, political influence; the only gambling here was the venture capital backing industrial research lab. Nobody hoarded money in Peterborough, they worked it; the static, emasculated trusts which enabled her patrons to indulgently through life shrank from this city’s vitality. Prior’s Fen epitomized the new culture, bold, purposeful architecture sticking two defiant fingers up to the dead past. The antithesis of Monaco.
Anonymous
According to a brief filed by a consortium of hospital trade groups, “A market without subsidies will trigger a premium ‘death spiral' in those states: With subsidies gone and premiums pushed higher, younger and healthier patients will likely drop coverage. Those that remain, paying the higher rates, are likely to be sicker and use more healthcare resources. That, in turn, will push rates for everyone in those states even higher, which will cause more to drop coverage, and so on.
Anonymous
The median number of animals is thirty-nine, but many hoarders have more than a hundred. Hoarders, according to the consortium,
The New Yorker (The Big New Yorker Book of Cats)
A study published by the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium says that more than two-thirds of hoarders are females, and most often they hoard cats, although dogs, birds, farm animals, and, in one case, beavers, are hoarded as well.
The New Yorker (The Big New Yorker Book of Cats)
Clip This Article on Location 1397 | Added on Monday, September 1, 2014 4:10:39 PM REVIEW & OUTLOOK An $8.3 Billion Rebuke to the FDA Roche buys a drug approved in Europe but not in America. 359 words Amid this summer's M&A fever, Roche's agreement Monday to buy the San Francisco biotech InterMune deserves special notice. The tie-up is an $8.3 billion guided missile into the fortified bunker that is the Food and Drug Administration. InterMune has never turned a profit in 16 years of existence and other than its clinical expertise the company holds a single asset: an idea for treating a lethal lung disorder called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis with no known cause, cure or approved therapy—at least in the U.S. An InterMune drug called pirfenidone that slows the progression of irreversible lung scarring is on the market in Europe, Japan, Canada and even China. Bloomberg News But the FDA refused to approve pirfenidone in 2010, despite the 40,000 Americans who are killed annually by lung fibrosis and a positive recommendation from its outside scientific advisory committee. The agency brass claimed the evidence was statistically unsatisfactory, when one clinical trial was inconclusive but another showed strong benefits such as improved lung function. The results of the third trial the FDA ordered were reported earlier this year and confirmed that pirfenidone is even more of a treatment advance than it seemed in 2010, and may prolong life. The agency is expected, finally, to approve the medicine in November. Roche is paying a 38% premium over Friday's closing share price, and 63% over trading before the news of InterMune's corporate suitors broke a few weeks ago. The deal is a big vote of confidence in pirfenidone, not least because a rival lung fibrosis drug is awaiting U.S. approval. Then again, maybe that drug's maker, the German pharmaceutical consortium Boehringer Ingelheim, will have the same FDA experience as InterMune. The Roche deal is a tacit reprimand to the FDA's unscientific and uncompassionate—and wrong—2010 defenestration. Amid medical ambiguity about effectiveness, the humane option is to allow a drug to come to patients and follow on with more research, in particular for a drug with few side effects. Pulmonary fibrosis is a protracted death sentence of three to five years. The FDA denied tens of thousands of dying people better and possibly longer lives in the time they had left. ==========
Anonymous
the next Consortium Round Table meeting.” He raised an enquiring eyebrow. “Do you have
Susan Mac Nicol (Double Alchemy (Double Alchemy, #1))
As it turned out, I never got my six-month holiday. I was literally walking out the door with Patrick in my arms to leave for the airport when the telephone rang. It was Bill Setterstrom from the bank with a change of plan. “Mary, thank heavens I caught you in time. We’d like you to take a part-time job at our consortium bank in London. Call Freddie Vinton, the head of our office, as soon as you arrive.” I was floored and asked if this was his idea of a joke. He snapped back, “No, it’s not. I wouldn’t be calling at six o’clock on a Friday night if this were a joke! Have a safe trip and call Freddie.
Mary Robertson (The Diana I Knew: Loving Memories of the Friendship Between an American Mother and Her Son's Nanny Who Became the Princess of Wales)
Vlasto had the early exit numbers that the consortium of news networks—the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News—had collected. The consortium followed eleven battleground states, including Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Trump was down in eight of the eleven states by five to eight points. The news was devastating. A kill shot. You just don’t come back from spreads like that, Dave thought. There just weren’t enough votes out there to come back from five to eight points down.
Corey R. Lewandowski (Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency)
Alice paid you. Your vault just received a 164,000 Sol-bit deposit.” “Uh, that’s short of what she said the other night, right?” “Yes. She sent a copy of the bounty payout statement—New Atlas Corporate Consortium charged quite a few fees that she, apparently, hadn’t expected.” “Figures.” Juliet’s lips twisted into a frown. She wanted to be irritated, but still, the bounty money was something she hadn’t banked on, so it felt like a massive payday out of nowhere, and she couldn’t really muster too much annoyance.
Plum Parrot (Fortune's Envoy (Cyber Dreams #3))
Every human in this system is unique and valuable.
Cathy McCrumb (Aberration (Children of the Consortium #2))
She doesn’t know her brother sent her to a school full of predators. He thinks convincing me to grant her a scholarship is based on his being part of the outer ranks of the consortium. He thinks it grants her immunity. He doesn’t realize you have to be born into one of the founding families or promise to be a member of the Order. He thinks she is safe here.
Carmen Rosales (Forbidden Flesh (Prey #5))
mayo sapiens,
Dandridge Monroe (Owo: The Consortium Book Two)
The Consortium are––” Gia interrupts me. “Considered criminally insane.
Carmen Rosales (Appetite (Prey #3))
It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’,34 used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji.35 This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users:36 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male. The emojis we have on our smartphones are chosen by the rather grand-sounding ‘Unicode Consortium’, a Silicon Valley-based group of organisations that work together to ensure universal, international software standards. If Unicode decides a particular emoji (say ‘spy’) should be added to the current stable, they will decide on the code that should be used. Each phone manufacturer (or platform such as Twitter and Facebook) will then design their own interpretation of what a ‘spy’ looks like. But they will all use the same code, so that when users communicate between different platforms, they are broadly all saying the same thing. An emoji face with heart eyes is an emoji face with heart eyes. Unicode has not historically specified the gender for most emoji characters. The emoji that most platforms originally represented as a man running, was not called ‘man running’. It was just called ‘runner’. Similarly the original emoji for police officer was described by Unicode as ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’. It was the individual platforms that all interpreted these gender-neutral terms as male. In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people.38 So instead of ‘runner’ which had been universally represented as ‘male runner’, Unicode issued code for explicitly male runner and explicitly female runner. Male and female options now exist for all professions and athletes. It’s a small victory, but a significant one.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
They have just concluded their business in the latest town, where Itempas nearly drowned trying to help a fishing boat haul in its catch with old fraying nets and a captain who did not heed the dire weather reports. Because other mortals’ lives were at stake, Itempas could use magic to save them, translocating everyone from the boat to the shore just as the mast sank beneath the waves. As a crowd gathers ’round to exclaim over the miracle of survivors, and to shout at the captain who sits ashamed nearby, Glee goes to her father, who stands watching all of this with a sterner-than-usual set to his face. There is more to it than the captain’s negligence, Glee understands. The boat’s nets were frayed because the captain could barely afford to keep his business afloat. His business was in danger because the price of fish is being artificially controlled by the Nobles’ Consortium in order to please several of the wealthier islander merchants, who run large fish distribution enterprises. The same people who curse the captain now have happily bought the cheap fish that made him so desperate for just one more catch. Now the man has lost his livelihood altogether, as have his crew members—but the price of fish will stay low, driving other captains into other storms and causing other wrecks from which there will be no magical rescue. It is painfully clear even to Glee, who has less of a jaded eye toward human foibles, that these people will never believe themselves complicit in the lives lost. They accept that this is the way the world works, in part because it is all they know and in part because it is all they wish to know. They are Itempans, probably, all of them. Comfortable with the status quo.
N.K. Jemisin (Shades in Shadow (Inheritance, #0.5, 1.5, 2.5))
In the 1950s, a consortium of publishers—including Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster—concerned about a dip in numbers, hired Bernays. Did he go into schools and make the case for books? No, he talked to the architects and contractors who were designing the new suburban homes and convinced them a house is not modern if it does not include built-in bookshelves. Indirection.
Rich Cohen (The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King)
Bianca’s eyes widened before she regained her icy control. She had it bad, but he was incredibly gorgeous when he smiled. I wondered what would happen if I accidentally locked them in a closet together.
Jessie Mihalik (Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1))
Black market identities typically came in five strengths, ranging from level one to level five. Level one identities would fall apart with even the most cursory glance, but they were also dirt cheap. Level five identities would have your own mother swearing that she’d never met you before.
Jessie Mihalik (Aurora Blazing (Consortium Rebellion, #2))
When Nature rejected the letter, Thomas and Bialy subsequently organized a consortium, The Group for Scientific Reappraisal of HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, and in 1992, Thomas called it “. . . tantamount to criminal negligence”6 for scientists to remain silent.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank—in effect, to circulate or “monetize” the newly created royal debt.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
As strange as it sounds, it is no longer possible to determine how many human genomes have been sequenced. At present the strategy of choice is whole-genome re-sequencing (Chapter 3) whereby next-generation sequence data are mapped onto a reference genome. The results have been breathtaking. The recently concluded (and aptly named) 1000 Genomes Project Consortium catalogued ~85 million SNPs, 3.6 million short insertions/deletions, and 60,000 larger structural variants in a global sampling of human genetic diversity. These data are catalysing research in expected and unexpected ways. Beyond providing a rich source of data for GWA-type studies focused on disease, scientists are also using the 1000 Genomes Project data to learn about our basic biology, something that proved surprisingly difficult when only a pair of genomes was available. For example, a recent GWAS taking advantage of the 1000 Genomes Project data identified ten genes associated with kidney development and function, genes that had previously not been linked to this critical aspect of human physiology. In 2016, Craig Venter’s team reported the sequencing of 10,545 human genomes. Beyond the impressively low cost (US$1,000–2,000 per genome) and high quality (30–40× coverage), the study was significant in hinting at the depths of human genome diversity yet to be discovered. More than 150 million genetic variants were identified in both coding and non-coding regions of the genome; each sequenced genome had on average ~8,600 novel variants. Furthermore, each new genome was found to contain 0.7 Mbp of sequence that is not contained in the reference genome. This underscores the need for methods development in the area of structure variation detection in personal genome data. Overall, however, the authors concluded that ‘the data generated by deep genome sequencing is of the quality necessary for clinical use’.
John M. Archibald (Genomics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
I thought synth food tasted slightly weird because the recipe in the system didn’t match what our chefs had prepared. The difference was less obvious with simple foods.
Jessie Mihalik (Aurora Blazing (Consortium Rebellion, #2))
And say that over the eons, countless millions of civilizations arose, many of them lasting long enough to venture into space. Spacefaring creatures found each other, linked up, and shared knowledge, their technologies accelerating with each new contact. They built great energy-harvesting spheres that enclosed entire suns and drove computers the size of whole solar systems. They harnessed the energy from quasars and gamma ray bursts. They filled galaxies the way we once spread across continents. They learned to weave the fabric of reality itself. And when this consortium mastered all the laws of time and space, they fell into the sadness of completion. Absolute Intelligence surrendered to nostalgia for
Richard Powers (Bewilderment)
What turns a man into a murderer? At which moment does anger over a historical injustice blend into another resentment that’s more ancient, private, shameful because nobody else shares it, and make this man put his hand on a detonator? When does his desire to obtain what he considers the general Good become indifference to specific Evil committed in the name of that same Good? What makes him capable of breaking the most important of prohibitions which, like a wall, divides the human consortium into those who have killed even just once, and those who haven’t? What that man needs above all else is absolute conviction, or rather a state of mind that has become cold, silent and motionless like a winter lake, in which pity no longer flows except downwards, downwards in dark and invisible eddies which may barely stir the light pebbles at the bottom, but not the icy slate on the surface.
Francesca Melandri (Eva Sleeps)
This arm,” he said quietly, “is as strong as steel but as beautiful and delicate as a poem. And it’s been out of mine for far too long.” He bowed slightly. “Ma’am.
Cathy McCrumb (Recorder (Children of the Consortium #1))