Context Is Key Quotes

Witness.

If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven's door! We are in the business of finding connections--within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters.

No matter what your job is, the key is your context, your beliefs about your responsibility to customers and the relationships you intend to enjoy or endure with them.

Separate text from context and all that remains is a con.

Commandment 2: Observing in context is key to understanding nonverbal behavior.

To put Göbekli Tepe in context, its megaliths predate Stonehenge by at least six thousand years. They predate the first literate civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, India, and Crete by even more. Unearthing this kind of Stone Age sophistication so deep in our past is like finding out your great-grandparents have been secretly coding apps and trading cryptocurrency behind everyone’s back.

I thought it best, finally, to start seeing where I've been rather than where I'm going.

Life does not change if you only modify the content, your life will change if you will dare to alter the context.

Always remember, women care less about the content of what’s being communicated and more about the context (the how) of what’s being communicated. Never buy the lie that good communication is the key to a good relationship with out considering how and what you communicate. Women are naturally solipsistic. Your ‘feelings’ aren’t important to her until you make them important for her.

Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.

Good Heaven! That is enough to drive away all my pains; I could mount him with thirty balls in my body. On my soul, handsome stirrups!

Time’s existence cannot be found between the tick and the tock of a clock. It is the language of life and, as such, is most powerfully felt in the context of human experience.

I should have been put down at birth.

He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it. This is one of the most bizarre things that's happened to me, ever. Context is all.

Family life is the normal context in which we can learn that a life filled with thinking about others instead of ourselves is the sure road to the most fulfilling joys and satisfactions.

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership--leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed. Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status--Steve Jobs--recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.

You know, Junie, you're fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. ... The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I'd searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I'd unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn't have said, "You're fourteen now," like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, "you're only fourteen." She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England with I was only fourteen.

Separateness" does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the "I" within the "we" - the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness.

Peter Koestenbaum also elaborated on the importance of others, particularly romantic lovers, in the existential context. Love is the choice to create and reflect each other mutually, verifying and illuminating each other's uniqueness because this is how we learn that we exist and who we are. A key theme of authentic love is resistance between, but welcoming of, two independent consciousness acting like positive and negative magnets within a single magnetic field.

Words are never good or bad on their own, context makes them so.

A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala—a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response—showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived. In contrast, the brain scans of those individuals who were given a full night’s sleep evinced a controlled, modest degree of reactivity in the amygdala, despite viewing the very same images. It was as though, without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity. We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.

The Mysteries are teachings that cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, but only by the deep mind made accessible in trance. They may be conveyed by an object—a shaft of wheat, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries—by a key phrase, or symbol. The secret itself may be meaningless when out of context: only within the framework of the ritual does it take on its illuminating power.

Choral reading opens up the possibility of using newspapers, magazines, all manner of high interest books, comic books, and personal letters…it makes reading accessible to adults and students who are completely unmotivated by the simplistic fare at their tested reading level. While participating in choral reading, the student repeatedly sees words in context. Repetition in context is a key to dyslexic reading. Practicing

Developer Relations, and more broadly how we engage and build culture in communities, is a remarkably nuanced, complex, and context-specific discipline. There simply isn’t a one-shot recipe that works well for everyone.

Yale researchers found that a key difference in the hallucinatory experiences of psychics and of people with schizophrenia was that the psychics placed the voices in the context of a spiritual or religious experience, and were less disturbed by them.

first, that co-created relationships of attachment are the key context for development; second, that preverbal experience makes up the core of the developing self; and third, that the stance of the self toward experience predicts attachment security better than the facts of personal history themselves.

I must always seem so reserved and remote to them. Once in a while they ask questions that seem to call for a statement of what the hell I'm always thinking about, but if I were to babble what's really on my mind about, say, the a priori presumption of the continuity of a motorcycle from second to second and do this without benefit of the entire edifice of the Chautauqua, they'd just be startled and wonder what's wrong. I really am interested in this continuity and the way we talk and think about it and so tend to get removed from the usual lunchtime situation and this gives an appearance of remoteness. It's a problem.

I am giving you the key to get out of frustration. Listen! Any situation you are in, when you are frustrated, look in and find out ‘What must be the best thing in this situation for which I have aspired this situation in my past? Let me look from that context at this situation.’ You will see you are enjoying exactly what you wanted!

So from the context of 1 Thessalonians 5 I say that the key to “rejoice always” is to “pray without ceasing.” Lean on God all the time for the miracle of joy in your life. Never give up looking to him for help. Come to him repeatedly during the day and often. Make your default mental state a Godward longing for all that you need, especially for spiritual desires.

[The Chinese here is tricky and a certain key word in the context it is used defies the best efforts of the translator. Tu Mu defines this word as “the measurement or estimation of distance.” But this meaning does not quite fit the illustrative simile in ss. 15. Applying this definition to the falcon, it seems to me to denote that instinct of SELF RESTRAINT which keeps the bird from swooping on its quarry until the right moment, together with the power of judging when the right moment has arrived. The analogous quality in soldiers is the highly important one of being able to reserve their fire until the very instant at which it will be most effective. When the “Victory” went into action at Trafalgar at hardly more than drifting pace, she was for several minutes exposed to a storm of shot and shell before replying with a single gun. Nelson coolly waited until he was within close range, when the broadside he brought to bear worked fearful havoc on the enemy’s nearest ships.] 14.  Therefore the good fighter will be terrible in his onset, and prompt in his decision. [The word “decision” would have reference to the measurement of distance mentioned above, letting the enemy get near before striking. But I cannot help thinking that Sun Tzu meant to use the word in a figurative sense comparable to our own idiom “short and sharp.” Cf. Wang Hsi’s note, which after describing the falcon’s mode of attack, proceeds: “This is just how the ‘psychological moment’ should be seized in war.”]

Shakespeare's plays do not present easy solutions. The audience has to decide for itself. King Lear is perhaps the most disturbing in this respect. One of the key words of the whole play is 'Nothing'. When King Lear's daughter Cordelia announces that she can say 'Nothing' about her love for her father, the ties of family love fall apart, taking the king from the height of power to the limits of endurance, reduced to 'nothing' but 'a poor bare forked animal'. Here, instead of 'readiness' to accept any challenge, the young Edgar says 'Ripeness is all'. This is a maturity that comes of learning from experience. But, just as the audience begins to see hope in a desperate and violent situation, it learns that things can always get worse: Who is't can say 'I am at the worst?' … The worst is not So long as we can say 'This is the worst.' Shakespeare is exploring and redefining the geography of the human soul, taking his characters and his audience further than any other writer into the depths of human behaviour. The range of his plays covers all the 'form and pressure' of mankind in the modern world. They move from politics to family, from social to personal, from public to private. He imposed no fixed moral, no unalterable code of behaviour. That would come to English society many years after Shakespeare's death, and after the tragic hypothesis of Hamlet was fulfilled in 1649, when the people killed the King and replaced his rule with the Commonwealth. Some critics argue that Shakespeare supported the monarchy and set himself against any revolutionary tendencies. Certainly he is on the side of order and harmony, and his writing reflects a monarchic context rather than the more republican context which replaced the monarchy after 1649. It would be fanciful to see Shakespeare as foretelling the decline of the Stuart monarchy. He was not a political commentator. Rather, he was a psychologically acute observer of humanity who had a unique ability to portray his observations, explorations, and insights in dramatic form, in the richest and most exciting language ever used in the English theatre.

The Bacchae left behind a thick trail of clues that we will begin exploring later in this book. Clues that lead to a magical version of Jesus: equal parts natural healer, initiator of mysteries, and concoctor of drugged wine. Unknown to many faithful today, it’s a version that places the founder of Christianity in the kind of detailed historical context that would have been self-evident to the earliest generations of Greek-speaking paleo-Christians.

Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader.

The key context of this passage is that at this point in history, Jews and Samaritans hated each other. That means the love demonstrated by the Samaritan isn’t one of admiration, it’s one of determination. It’s the kind of love we would naturally show to ourselves even when we look in the mirror and don’t like what we see. It’s one defined by kindness, protection, and preservation. As C. S. Lewis says, “Love is not an affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s good as far as it can be obtained.

Synergy refers to the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements. In the context of your business, consider how a team can put forth a collaborative effort that exceeds an individual’s output. Now on task, you may begin to share the key parts of your plan with the pillars of your business or family. Embrace the opportunity and be enthusiastic as you are assigning responsibilities. Everyone needs to have a “paddle in the canoe” and work in synchronicity to achieve the desired outcome.

Suggested outline of a strategy document Once you have devised the strategy, you’ll need to explain it to the organisation by writing a strategy document. Below are the key elements it should contain: Where the organisation has come from The successes it has achieved thus far The changing environment and context in which it operates The vision for the future The unique role that the organisation plays The specific strategies that will get it there The timelines The challenges How you’ll measure success The role the organisation’s people play The role of the support functions

Jesus came preaching, “The reign of God is at hand; repent, therefore, and believe the good news.” The good news of what God has for us is so good that the contrast with present actuality convinces us we need to repent; the good news is so forgiving that we are freed to be honest about where we need to repent; the judgment involved is so serious that we need to be serious about repentance. Therefore, a key move in a Christian ethics patterned after Jesus is to listen carefully to criticisms and learn from them. Christian ethics is continuous learning, transformational repenting, making corrections and growing in Christ.

Each of the eight scales represents one key area that managers must be aware of, showing how cultures vary along a spectrum from one extreme to its opposite. The eight scales are:        •  Communicating: low-context vs. high-context        •  Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback        •  Persuading: principles-first vs. applications-first        •  Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical        •  Deciding: consensual vs. top-down        •  Trusting: task-based vs. relationship-based        •  Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoids confrontation        •  Scheduling: linear-time vs. flexible-time

What is the meaning of the phrase “shall be bound in heaven... shall be loosed in heaven?” Williams, the Bible translator, points out for us that the verb form is the perfect passive participle, so the reference is to things in a state of having been already forbidden (or permitted). This tells us that whatever is bound or loosed by the believer is done on the basis that it has already been done “in heaven,” i.e. by the Lord himself. What is it, then, that the Lord has already bound and which he has given us power to bind again? Jesus teaches us: Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house. Matt. 12:29 The context of this passage finds Jesus casting out demons. His authority for thus doing is challenged by the religious authorities. They accuse him of doing it by the power of the devil himself. Jesus is explaining that he is able to control demon spirits and make them obey him because he has already bound the strong man — Satan. The fact that the demons obey Him is evidence of Satan being bound. Satan is already bound “in heaven” — by heaven’s power. His power is broken. The key is given to us. We have power over him, too. Amen! The Greek word for “bind” in the passage before us is deo. It means to fasten or tie — as with chains, as an animal tied to keep it from straying. This is glorious! When Satan is bound he is made inoperable. He loses his ability to act against us.

Doubt is crucial in science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge." ...Individual clinicians cannot single-handedly combat this kind of antiscience, a climate that has only been fostered by some political and religious leaders and by the social media. But at the very least, we can make our patients aware of the forces at play and the mind games that such merchants of doubt employ.

What emerged for me as purpose was the search for and cultivation of possibilities for experiencing meaningful human transactions in different languages and across cultural differences through play, sports, travel, food, literature, and conversation. I sought to establish relations of mutual understanding and love with people no matter what their culture or place of origin in the world—relations based on philia, eros, and agape, according to context and persons. I perhaps sensed instinctively that such relations were the key to being equally at home everywhere, even in la Yunai. More than an immigrant, at that time I still felt myself to be a sojourner in this country, but I wanted my sojourn to be imbued with the meaning found in earnest, sincere connections with the people and places that life brought to my experience.

WE’RE GOOD AT WRONG SPOTTING If you’ve ever received feedback at work—or had an in-law—you are familiar with the many shapes and sizes of wrong: It’s 2 + 2 = 5 wrong: It is literally incorrect. I could not have been rude at that meeting because I was not at that meeting. And my name is not Mike. It’s different-planet wrong: Somewhere in the universe there may exist a carbon-based life form that would have taken offense at my e-mail, but here on Earth everyone knows it was a joke. It used to be right: Your critique of my marketing plan is based on how marketing worked when you were coming up. Before the Internet. And electricity. It’s right according to the wrong people: Some see me that way, but next time, talk to at least one person who is not on my Personal Enemies List. Your context is wrong: I do yell at my assistant. And he yells at me. That’s how our relationship works—key word being “works.” It’s right for you, but wrong for me: We have different body types. Armani suits flatter you. Hoodies flatter me. The feedback is right, but not right now: It’s true that I could lose a few pounds—which I will do as soon as the quintuplets are out of the house. Anyway, it’s unhelpful: Telling me to be a better mentor isn’t helping me to be a better mentor. What kind of mentor are you anyway? Why is wrong spotting so easy? Because there’s almost always something wrong—something the feedback giver is overlooking, shortchanging, or misunderstanding. About you, about the situation, about the constraints you’re under. And givers compound the problem by delivering feedback that is vague, making it easy for us to overlook, shortchange, and misunderstand what they are saying. But in the end, wrong spotting not only defeats wrong feedback, it defeats learning.

Language can often seem abstract and transcendent of the body, the world, and even time itself. But language is more closely tied to your body mandala than you may realize, especially where its acquisition during childhood is concerned. If you read the verb “lick,” your tongue area will light up. If you hear someone say “kick,” it activates your leg areas. Christian Keysers, a mirror neuron researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, says that mirror neurons may very well be a key precursor to abstract thought and language. For example, he explains, you use the word “break” as a verb as in “I see you break the peanut, I hear you break the peanut, and I break the peanut.” The constant is the mental simulation of breaking even though the context varies in each case. So your body is the foundational source of meaning—not just of words and actions but even the meanings of things you learn about through your eyes, ears, and bodily experience.

Trauma symptoms themselves can become drivers of cycles of violence. Hyper-vigilance exxagerates survivors' sense of threat-so that a minimal threat can legitimately feel like a substantial and potentially even life-threatening one. How endangered one feels depends in part on the baseline of danger that exists. So for survivors who are hurt in the context of relative safety, their exaggerated sense of danger may result in simple self-protective actions like crossing the street when they get a bad feeling about someone approaching, holding their keys as they approach their apartment, or carrying pepper spray in their bag. For people who live where there is a more widespread, regular threat of violence, where day in and day out, they are making decisions that will affect whether or not they get home safe and alive, perceiving threats as more immediate than they are may mean that the self-protective actions people choose are graver. Not all survivors cope in this way, but many do.

Artists and designers have a largely shared skill set and knowledge base but the work they create, however indistinguishable in terms of technique, subject matter and visual language, is made for entirely different reasons. Attempts to define or make clear distinctions between art and design are always contestable, but at the beginning of a diagnostic process it is useful to identify a simple delineation between the two: Art An artist's practice generally emerges from their own individual concerns explored over varying durations in the studio. The work is then usually presented to a knowing public either in galleries or in designated public spaces. Design Design is largely initiated externally from the needs or desires of a client or external body. The functionality of the designed solution is as important as its desirability, craft and aesthetics. Design is in the public domain and, as such, its messages, meanings and functions are inextricably linked to the political, social and economic concerns of its audience/ user and its context.

Unnecessary Creation gives you the freedom to explore new possibilities and follow impractical curiosities. Some of the most frustrated creative pros I’ve encountered are those who expect their day job to allow them to fully express their creativity and satisfy their curiosity. They push against the boundaries set by their manager or client and fret continuously that their best work never finds its way into the end product because of restrictions and compromises. A 2012 survey sponsored by Adobe revealed that nearly 75 percent of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan felt they weren’t living up to their creative potential. (In the United States, the number was closer to 82 percent!) Obviously, there’s a gap between what many creatives actually do each day and what they feel they are capable of doing given more resources or less bureaucracy. But those limitations aren’t likely to change in the context of an organization, where there is little tolerance for risk and resources are scarcer than ever. If day-to-day project work is the only work that you are engaging in, it follows that you’re going to get frustrated. To break the cycle, keep a running list of projects you’d like to attempt in your spare time, and set aside a specific time each week (or each day) to make progress on that list. Sometimes this feels very inefficient in the moment, especially when there are so many other urgent priorities screaming for your attention, but it can be a key part of keeping your creative energy flowing for your day-to-day work. You’ll also want to get a notebook to record questions that you’d like to pursue, ideas that you have, or experiments that you’d like to try. Then you can use your pre-defined Unnecessary Creation time to play with these ideas. As Steven Johnson explains in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, “A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”18

You can change your patterns. You can change your roles, but you can only do that by altering your environment—whether that means having frank conversations to reestablish boundaries and expectations, or whether that means physically separating yourself from certain individuals or places. If you remain stuck in the same roles and patterns, it doesn’t matter how much willpower you exert; your efforts will continue to be confined within the limiting context of your role. You’ll remain hostage to a context that you mistakenly believe to be fixed identity. But you absolutely can change your roles, even abruptly and dramatically. People mistakenly believe they must be fully qualified to take on a particular role. But this is false. You actually become qualified through the role itself. For example, when Lauren and I became foster parents, we didn’t have any parenting experience. Sure, I read several books on the topic, many with smart ideas and innovative solutions to try. But theory and experience are two radically different things. I imagine all first-time parents go through a similar trajectory—you learn through doing.

How many thefts have there been?’ I asked. ‘That depends on how you define it,’ said Adrian. Because material went missing off sites all the time, which is why important finds were collated and secured the day they were found. Important in archaeological terms not always being the same as valuable – at least not in the fenceable sense. Archaeology came in all shapes, sizes, and apparent degrees of nickableness. ‘We wouldn’t have even noticed some of the thefts if they hadn’t been important to the context,’ said Adrian. Context being the key concept of modern scientific archaeology, and what separates your modern professional from the fumbling archivists and swivel-eyed tomb raiders of the past. It’s a religion they share with scene of crime technicians and it had been drummed into me from my first day at Hendon. Context – where you find an object – is more important than the actual object. In policing it’s whether the broken glass is on the inside or the outside. In archaeology it’s whether that datable coin is found in the wall foundations or its demolition infill. You can live without the coin, but you need the dating information.

Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart? How many times did I hear people stressing the importance of self-motivation and practice and taking ownership of your own career or education as the real differentiators for success? How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being? How ironic was it to learn that something as simple as a chicken coop or the basic planting of trees and gardens could be the most important thing we do to stabilize parts of the World of Disorder? Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? Who can ignore the fact that the key to Tunisia’s success in the Arab Spring was that it had a little bit more “civil society” than any other Arab country—not cell phones or Facebook friends? How many times and in how many different contexts did people mention to me the word “trust” between two human beings as the true enabler of all good things? And whoever thought that the key to building a healthy community would be a dining room table? That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.

The story of the Internet's origins departs from the explanations of technical innovation that center on individual inventors or on the pull of markets. Cerf and Kahn were neither captains of industry nor "two guys tinkering in a garage." The Internet was not built in response to popular demand, real or imagined; its subsequent mass appeal had no part in the decisions made in 1973. Rather, the project reflected the command economy of military procurement, where specialized performance is everything and money is no object, and the research ethos of the university, where experimental interest and technical elegance take precedence over commercial application. This was surely an unlikely context for the creation of what would become a popular and profitable service. Perhaps the key to the Internet's later commercial success was that the project internalized the competitive forces of the market by bringing representatives of diverse interest groups together and allowing them to argue through design issues. Ironically, this unconventional approach produced a system that proved to have more appeal for potential "customers"—people building networks—than did the overtly commercial alternatives that appeared soon after.

The game within the game is the game that only the players see. They experience it in relation to one another on the floor at a particular time and in the middle of the action. It is one of the nuances of the game of basketball. As Knick teammates during those years, we knew what a teammate was going to do almost before he did it. We helped one another on defense and shared the ball on offense. We made room for each of us to be his best within the context of the team. For example, I often would see Clyde come down the floor with the ball. I'd catch his eye. I knew he wanted to go down my side of the floor. In order to give him a little more room to move, I would clear out. That way I didn't clog up his space. Or, when I had the ball on the side and he was at the top of the key, waiting to go backdoor, our center knew he had to move to the other side of the floor to create the room for the backdoor bounce pass from me to Clyde who was moving down the lane toward the basket. That was the game within the game. On one level, the game within the game was a matter of mechanics but is also operated on a psychological level in that we truly were all for one and one for all. We challenged one another in practice to become better. We helped one another come back from defeat. We inspired one another to reach our peak team performance. None of us felt we could be as good alone as all of us could be together. Our unity came sometimes with laughs, sometimes with conflicts, sometimes with moments of collective insight, but it was that spirit of camaraderie which brought us together in a way that allowed the fans to see something very special.

There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence. Audibility means that you can be heard, that you have not been pressed into silence or kept out of the areas of where you can speak or write or denied the education to do so or in the age of social media, been harassed and threatened and driven off the platform as so many have. Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don't mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy's insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak. Emotional, rather than rational. Vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative. Unfit to be heeded. Those things often shouted over a women in the process of saying something challenging. Though now death threat are used as a short-cut, and some of those threats are carried out. Notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or can be premeditated murder. To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights. And give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you. The power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality in self-determination. Even legally, women's words have lacked consequence. And only in a few scattered places on earth, could women vote before the 20th century, and not so many decades ago, women rarely became lawyers and judges.

The empowerment triangle turns drama upside-down, transforming the persecutor (or scapegoat) into a challenger, the rescuer into a coach, and the victim into a creator. The empowerment dynamic allows all the roles to be essential for growth. In the drama triangle, the persecutor works with issues of power, the rescuer works with issues of responsibility, and the victim works with area of vulnerability: The drama triangle is familiar to many of us. We all know this pattern inside ourselves. We get stuck in a situation that we want to escape, and it creates drama. By leaning into the dynamic and entering deeper into relationship, we can work the energy so that it becomes an enriching transformation. If you can work this in a group, then you’ve subdued the scapegoat archetype and turned it into something more life affirming. The most important thing about the drama triangle is to make people aware of it. When a group can understand and recognize how this is a kind of destructive pattern, it becomes empowered to change the pattern. Uncoupling drama from our organizational and personal lives is the key. The group as a whole can embody a role to create safety and make sense of the system. Transformation from the drama to the redeemed starts with a pause, then an inquiry of what’s happening here, then a recollection of the three roles and who is playing what role in this context. Once the system is self-aware, ask the questions: “what else is possible? How can I become so centered that something new can happen? How can a new perception take place?” With enough safety and connection, the group will be able to follow the healing energy into re-organization and re-integration of the parts. Claiming or remembering your own archetype can protect against falling into one.

The Delusion of Lasting Success promises that building an enduring company is not only achievable but a worthwhile objective. Yet companies that have outperformed the market for long periods of time are not just rare, they are statistical artifacts that are observable only in retrospect. Companies that achieved lasting success may be best understood as having strung together many short-term successes. Pursuing a dream of enduring greatness may divert attention from the pressing need to win immediate battles. The Delusion of Absolute Performance diverts our attention from the fact that success and failure always take place in a competitive environment. It may be comforting to believe that our success is entirely up to us, but as the example of Kmart demonstrated, a company can improve in absolute terms and still fall further behind in relative terms. Success in business means doing things better than rivals, not just doing things well. Believing that performance is absolute can cause us to take our eye off rivals and to avoid decisions that, while risky, may be essential for survival given the particular context of our industry and its competitive dynamics. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick lets us confuse causes and effects, actions and outcomes. We may look at a handful of extraordinarily successful companies and imagine that doing what they did can lead to success — when it might in fact lead mainly to higher volatility and a lower overall chance of success. Unless we start with the full population of companies and examine what they all did — and how they all fared — we have an incomplete and indeed biased set of information. The Delusion of Organizational Physics implies that the business world offers predictable results, that it conforms to precise laws. It fuels a belief that a given set of actions can work in all settings and ignores the need to adapt to different conditions: intensity of competition, rate of growth, size of competitors, market concentration, regulation, global dispersion of activities, and much more. Claiming that one approach can work everywhere, at all times, for all companies, has a simplistic appeal but doesn’t do justice to the complexities of business. These points, taken together, expose the principal fiction at the heart of so many business books — that a company can choose to be great, that following a few key steps will predictably lead to greatness, that its success is entirely of its own making and not dependent on factors outside its control.

[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance. Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it. Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.

In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness. We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity. We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.

[..] too often we teach children concepts without context; we need to show them why learning is important

They did not see friendships with others as a key ingredient of the growth process. They saw them as a context for ministry.

Communication is at the root of all business strengths—and weaknesses. When things go wrong and employees become upset, whether at a restaurant, a law firm, a hardware store, a university, or a major corporation, nine times out of ten the justifiable complaint is, “We need to communicate more effectively.” I admit that for many years, I didn’t really know what this meant. I had no problem standing up in front of a group to give a talk. I thought I was a pretty good communicator, but then it dawned on me: communicating has as much to do with context as it does content. That’s called setting the table. Understanding who needs to know what, when people need to know it, and why, and then presenting that information in an entirely comprehensible way is a sine qua non of great leadership. Clear, timely communication is the key to applying constant, gentle pressure. To illustrate the point, I teach our managers about the “lily pad” theory. Imagine a pond filled with lily pads and a frog perched serenely atop each one. For the fun of it, a little boy tosses a small pebble into the water, which breaks the surface of the pond but causes just a tiny ripple. The frogs barely notice, and don’t budge. Enjoying himself, the boy next tosses a larger stone into the center of the pond, sending stronger ripples that cause all of the lily pads to rock and tilt. Some frogs jump off their lily pads, while others cling to avoid falling off. But the ripples affect them all. Not content, the boy then hurls a huge rock, which creates a wave that knocks each and every frog into the water. Some frogs are frightened. All are angry (assuming that frogs get angry). If only the frogs had had some warning about the impending rock toss, each one could have timed its jump so that the wave would have had no serious impact. Grasping the lily pad theory and training yourself and your managers to implement it prevents many, if not all, communication problems.

In this context Mugabe was eager to maintain the loyalty of key allies, particularly in the security services. As the economy at home shrunk, so did opportunities for domestic patronage. The Congo war provided the opportunity he needed to keep his collaborators happy and busy elsewhere. This explains the urgency with which the Congolese and Zimbabweans set up their joint ventures and how easily Zimbabwean officials

KEY POINTS—EMBRACING ACCOUNTABILITY • Accountability on a strong team occurs directly among peers. • For a culture of accountability to thrive, a leader must demonstrate a willingness to confront difficult issues. • The best opportunity for holding one another accountable occurs during meetings, and the regular review of a team scoreboard provides a clear context for doing so.

[The “Platonic pond ant” thought experiment] suggests there is nothing preternatural about the efflorescence of the decentralized world of the Greek city-states. I would suggest, as a working hypothesis to be tested in the chapters to come, that the ancient Greeks reproduced the ants’ process of successful decentralized organization through constantly reiterated information exchange.... It this information-centered hypothesis is right, the key to effective decentralized human cooperation in the context of a state is enabling a wide variety of valuable (at a minimum: accurate and pertinent) information to be exchanged with great frequency by the residents of the state. The hypothesis would be falsified, of course, if, relative to central-authority systems, citizen-centered Greek poleis tended to discourage information exchange.

take things out of their everyday context and frame them from my point of view. I no longer see things for what they are in themselves, that is their being, but rather frame them according to particular intentions I have for the work.

For instance, verse 29: “Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip.” Wait a second. This doesn’t sound like any of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people I know, and I know a lot of them. So maybe this is talking about something else? As always, context is key.

The two “code words” itadakimasu (ee-tah-dah-kee-mahss) and gochisoh sama (go-chee-sohh sah-mah) are very important parts of the dining etiquette in Japan. Itadakimasu, said just before eating, literally means “to receive” or “to accept,” but in this context it is an institutionalized term that has a ritual connotation, almost like a prayer. Gochisoh sama, which has the meaning of “thank you for the meal or drinks,” is said after the completion of a meal, when leaving the table or shortly thereafter, to whomever has provided the meal, whether at a restaurant or at someone’s home.

many of the key elements that define modern antisemitism can be traced to this time in history. A variety of stereotypes and myths lie at the heart of every hatred, including antisemitism. Stereotypes are the labels “we” attach to “them” and the assumptions “we” make about “them”—sometimes without ever meeting “them.” In this context, myths are lies based on those faulty assumptions, and they tend to endure because they appeal to strong emotions rather than to reason.

Memory Verse Study Guide Jesus’ mission statement for the church is to make disciples. These pivotal verses (Matthew 28:18-20) are commonly referred to as the Great Commission. Putting it in context: Read Matthew 28. What key events precede Jesus’ giving the Great Commission, and how would this have affected the disciples? The memory verses are Matthew 28:18-20. Copy these verses verbatim. What do these verses teach us about Jesus? Why does Jesus stress his authority (v. 18) as a backdrop to his command to “make disciples”? How is disciplemaking to be carried out? When is a disciple made? How have these verses spoken to you this week?

The earth is a dynamic place [...] with multiple different processes of deposition and erosion under way at all times. You can make guesses based on style and weathering, but fragments of worked stone that have been in the open for an unknown period can't be dated by their archaeological context, because there is none. Carbon-dating organic materials in the sediment in which they were found won't work, either, because they were never entombed and preserved in sediment. And in fact no other objective and widely accepted method of dating can tell us how old they are. For these reasons archaeologists have to discount artifacts found on the surface when coming to any conclusions about the age of a site, even though the artifacts themselves may obviously be ancient.

Just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012 witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they'd been thought to be just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to the implications, they'd become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great deal of attention if it concerned Western architecture--indeed it would be like discovering that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres and York Minster were not, in fact, works of the late medieval period but had actually been built by the Romans.

​The six traits are resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context, and attention.

Charlotte would always try to make it personal. It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and space, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history, that diminutive, myopic substitute.

In the Old Testament, God’s mercy stands in an indissoluble connection with the other ways in which God is revealed. His mercy may not be extracted from this context and be treated independently. Already the revelation of God’s name to Moses shows that divine mercy is, so to speak, encircled by graciousness and fidelity. God’s self-revelation in the prophet Hosea shows that mercy is insolubly bound up with God’s holiness and gives expression to it.

He broke down each scene according to five key criteria: a synopsis (or summary) of the scene; the historical context; the imagery and tone for the “look and feel” of a scene; the core intention; and any potential pitfalls to avoid. In his own words, “I endeavored to distill the essence of each scene into a sentence, expressing in a few words what the point of the scene was.

Differences between the relatively promiscuous Ache and the relatively monogamous Hiwi also illuminate the cultural variability of human sexual strategies. The different ratios of males to females in these two cultures may be the critical factor in eliciting a different sexual strategy. Among the Ache, there are approximately one and a half women for every man. Among the Hiwi, there are more men than women, although precise numbers are not available. The prevalence of available Ache women creates sexual opportunities for Ache men not experienced by Hiwi men. Ache men seize these opportunities, as evidenced by the high frequency of mate switching and casual affairs. Ache men can pursue a temporary sexual strategy more successfully than Hiwi men can. Hiwi women are better able than Ache women to secure a high investment from men, who must provide resources to attract and retain a mate.19 The cultural shifts witnessed today, such as the hookup culture on college campuses and in large urban settings and the rise of casual sex and online dating apps such as Tinder, probably reflect shifts in mating strategies as a function of a perceived or real sex ratio imbalance. One key cultural variable centers on the presumptive mating system, especially monogamy and polygamy. Some Islamic cultures permit men to marry up to four wives, as specified in the Qur’an. In parts of Utah and Texas in the United States, some fundamentalist Mormon groups place no formal limits on the number of wives a man can marry, and a few marry more than a dozen. Even presumptively monogamous cultures are often effectively polygynous, with some men having multiple mates through serial marriage or affair partners. The more polygynous the culture, the more some men will be inclined to pursue high-risk tactics in an effort to gain status, resources, and mates, either in the current life or in aspirational notions of life after death. Just as mating is a key cause of violence among nonhuman animals from elk to elephant seals, mating and violence are inexorably linked in our own species. Evolved mating strategies are influenced by, and implemented within, these key cultural contexts

This is because there is every reason to believe that slavery, with its unique ability to rip human beings from their contexts, to turn them into abstractions, played a key role in the rise of markets everywhere.

Long exposures—which in this context mean exposures longer than a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second—show only a blur.

India and rest of the world has already taken the sustainable development concept, here two important key problems are context specific solutions and unity in diversity. As world has become one, hereafter no one can stop any foreign visitors, investments or anything that happens within nation. But due to pollution an over population everywhere is succumbed. To reduce population china took one child policy but failed due to lack of genetic diversity and male - femaela ratio and also working population. to meet this problem key solution only sustainable development that touches all scienctific and technological aspects. No technical advancements ahold be stopped but they have to regulated into eco friendly aspects. Industries should evolve into eco friendly and sustainable solutions and also banking sector. They should and should and should minimize pollution at any cost otherwise this chaos will continue and will lead disintegration of society and may also lead to civil war in future. so billionaires should consider humans ans humans just like them not as robots. So try to reach SDGs and policies for any industries that pollutes the environment. And once population is getting stabilized by 2030 as predicted by UN, if it stabilized then obviously fine and if it is not stabilized then it ie better to dismiss the concept of marriage and run into future with science.

Example #2 Context: I read the report you sent me. Intent: Can you explain something? Key message: I want to understand the change in timeline.

As a guide, then, the key question of explore is: What does this story say about who God is or what God does? As you explore a story, you might do the following: • Read, paraphrase, or listen to a Bible story. • Look for who God is and what God is like. • Offer a key detail about the context of the story to help it make more sense in our time. • Invite interruptions from your kid and encourage their questions. • Notice the emotions of God and the humans at different points along the way. • See if you can connect pieces of this story to other stories in the Bible. • Try asking one question, such as: ○ What was your favorite part of this story? ○ What was the strangest part of this story to you? ○ How do you think people felt at the beginning, the middle, and the end? ○ What did you notice about who God is or what God’s like in this story?

Attributes like “15-megapixel camera” or “all-metal construction” enable benefits for customers such as “sharper images” or “a stronger frame.” Articulating value takes the benefits one step further: putting benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve. Value could be “photos that are sharp even when printed or zoomed in,” “a frame that saves you money on replacements,” “every level of the organization knows the status of key metrics” or “help is immediately available across every time zone.” Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

Bitcoin’s high volatility is often used as an example of why it cannot be trusted as a global payment mechanism. Bitcoin is volatile; it lost 30 percent of its value in 2018, only to rise over 100 percent in the first six months of 2019. But that volatility must be put in context. The inflation rate on the bolívar, Venezuela’s local currency, was 1.8 million percent in 2018. Having the choice, even in 2018, I would much rather lose 30 per-cent on my Bitcoin than 1.8 million percent on my bolívar.

defined self-socialization: “The process whereby children influence the direction and outcomes of their development through selective attention, imitation, and participation in particular activities and modalities of interaction that function as key contexts of socialization.

The key point is that the Western use—and subsequent demonization—of Sunni Islamist terror can lend itself to Clash-of-Civilizations-style cultural explanations for international political phenomena. However, this can only occur in the context of widespread historical obscurantism and disinformation that could collectively be described as state gaslighting.

Quincy hadn’t assembled the resources required to capitalize on its promising opportunity. As a result, it fell victim to the early-stage startup failure pattern I call “Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows.” In this context, “resources” doesn’t refer simply to capital; we see the Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows pattern play out when a startup with a promising opportunity falters due to deficiencies and dysfunction among a range of key resource providers, including its founders, other team members, investors, and strategic partners.

THE ABHIDHARMA IS NOT A SCHOOL AS SUCH, but rather a body of literature. Not all the early schools had such a body of literature, but when they did they incorporated it into the canon. In essence it is an ordering and explanation of the key terms and categories of analysis that appear in the sūtras. The prefix abhi- means ‘above’ or ‘for the sake of, with regard to’, so the title is usually understood to mean ‘that which is above the Dharma’ or ‘the higher or special teaching’. However, it could also be construed as meaning ‘for the sake of the Dharma’ or ‘the ancillary to the Dharma’. The Abhidharma was regarded as special in the sense that it presents the Dharma in a pure, theoretical framework, rather than in a historical context, as do the sūtras – though whether this is an advantage could be disputed. It is regarded as a ‘higher’ Dharma because it is thought to be offering an explanation of these terms superior to that offered by the sūtras themselves.

Be as transparent, clear, and specific as possible. Explain exactly why you are calling. Assert your opinions transparently. Show all of your cards up front. At the end of the phone call, recap all the key points again, or send an e-mail repeating these points straight afterwards. If you are ever not 100 percent sure what you have been asked to do, don’t read between the lines but state clearly that you don’t understand and ask for clarification. And sometimes it would be better to not be quite so polite, as it gives the impression of vagueness or uncertainty. With a little effort and practice, someone from a higher-context environment can learn to work and communicate in a lower-context way.

Lastly, when you think about improvements, make sure you consider every key stakeholder, not just your customers. For example, in the ecosystem context, make sure you focus on significantly improving the experience for your partners, too.

The key to getting the best results from these tools is to write a good prompt. You want to give the tool enough information and context so that it can generate something useful and relevant to what you’re looking for. Trust me, it makes all the difference, and

Whenever I attempt to understand the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the civilian Intelligence Bureau, whose purpose is to collect crucial information on the security of the state, I am left with biting questions about their true roles in internal and external matters. It is a fact that such countries as India and Pakistan have always suffered from a lack of limits on the role of their intelligence agencies and respect for international law and human rights, including the privacy of individuals within the concept and context of global peace and fundamental freedoms. The ISI, driven by the Pakistan Armed Forces, ignores the supreme constitutional role and rule of a democratic head of state, under which even the Armed Forces themselves fall. This is not only a violation of the constitution but also a rejection of the civilian leadership. This can be interpreted as Pakistan is a country where the servant rules its leader and patron. It is this bitter reality that leads toward the collapse of all systems of society, which the Pakistani nation has faced since the first introduction of martial law by General Ayub Khan in 1958, and such conduct has continued to exist ever since, whether visibly or invisibly. One cannot ignore, avoid, or deny that Pakistan has maintained its physical independence for more than 7 decades. However, its real freedom as conceptualized upon the nation’s creation has been only a dream and abused by its so-called defenders and its power-mongers. Unfortunately, such figures control the ISI and lead it in the wrong direction, beyond the constitutional limits of its power. Consequently, the ISI plays the role of a gang that disrupts the stability of the main political parties and promotes tiny, unpopular parties to gain power for itself. There is thus no doubt that the ISI has failed in its responsibility to support constitutional rule and to secure and defend the state and its people. The failure of the democratic system in the country, directly or indirectly, reflects the harassment practiced by both intelligence agencies without proof or legal process, even interfering with other institutions. The consequences are the collapse of the justice system and the imposition of foreign policies that damage international relationships. The result is a lack of trust in these agencies and their isolation. In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings. Pakistan needs a major cleanup and reorganization of the present awkward role of the ISI for the sake of international relations, standards, and peace, including the privacy of individuals and respect for the notable figures of society, according to the law.

The judges who breach, violate, and break the concept of the constitution and law are not fair to society, even to themselves; they just put the mask on their faces as the judge. However, history is their judge that does not ignore the reality. A verdict is neither a vote nor a consensus nor a customary decision; it is the interpretation and conclusion of the constitution and law, and judges set it accordingly in the context of that and ensure its implementation. The constitution is like a rose; foreign policy is its fragrance that flies freely everywhere, and everyone feels equally beyond restrictions. Sure, such context carries beauty, dignity, self-determination, freedom, and success; otherwise, the sting of thorns becomes a painful risk. In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings. Tit for Tat is neither a constitution nor a law; it is just an act of revenge. If it continues, be sure everything collapses wherever it happens. The cheap army, undemocratic state, and corrupt nation neither fulfill their oath nor comply with their constitution.

context is fundamental to most women’s sexual wellbeing. Context is the crux and the key. Context is the cause.

key principle of their navigation, Bruno had explained, was an inversion of movement: destinations arrived toward sailors, rather than sailors moving toward destinations. This concept of seafaring was called etak, Bruno had instructed, or “moving island”—in which a sailor in a canoe traveling the open ocean, whether standing with his legs apart feeling wave-swell, or seated and rowing, or seated and not rowing, this sailor was himself stationary, while waves and the occasional landmass flowed past his boat. These sailors weren’t stupid, Bruno had said. They knew they were not actually standing still. They were employing a special form of cognition, a skill that was crucial to getting somewhere. You and I, Bruno had said, don’t live in their world. Our own earth, our version of it, is fitted with Cartesian coordinates, a straitjacket of plumb lines and cross-stitches. The sky is no longer visible in most places. Our stars have been replaced by satellites, whose clocks tell atomic time. With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said. You can know your location without knowing your location. You can know things without knowing anything. We often proceed as if we know things without a sense of what knowledge even is, Bruno had said. The earth is turning, for instance: sure, we know that because we’ve memorized it. But our knowledge of the earth’s turn is false, it is knowledge without context, disconnected from the rest of the universe. When the sun rises, we think it’s rising. When it sets, we think it’s setting.

The critical context is comprised of two things: The overall product vision The specific business objectives assigned to each team We will discuss both of these key topics in the coming chapters. Problems arise if the leadership does not provide clarity on these two critical pieces of context. If they don't, there's a vacuum, and that leads to real ambiguity over what a team can decide and what they can't.

In the typical evangelical service, after a rousing sermon comes the “altar call.” This routine is strikingly similar to hypnotic induction methods in other contexts: The key is to get people to focus attention inward rather than outward, so that they see, hear, and feel internally rather than externally, through the five senses. At such times, you are much more susceptible to suggestions and less able to use your critical abilities. After an emotional sermon, which has likely already employed manipulative techniques such as fear and guilt, you are asked to bow your head and close your eyes. Soft music plays while everyone focuses inward. Quiet hymns repeat “Jesus is calling” or “Just as I am.” The minister then speaks softly into the microphone, suggesting that the Holy Spirit is present and moving in the congregation. Feelings are interpreted for you, as “conviction of sin,” “answering His call,” and so forth. With perfected timing, the preacher asks, “Can you hear Jesus knocking on your heart’s door? Won't you open it today?” You are then asked to raise your hand while keeping your eyes shut; then to get up and come forward. The effect is powerful, carefully orchestrated, and effective.

A key finding is that violence is remembered, given meaning and lived with in the present, in ethical terms. As we have seen from the stories belonging to former insurgents and former state counter-insurgency officers, the mediation of violent memories is fundamentally an ethical exercise for those who have participated in violence. It entails a reconstruction of one’s experiences in moral terms, in ways that enable ‘perpetrators’ to continue living with their unsettling pasts in the present. Memories of violence are morally tendentious, rather than being abstract and objective recollections of a recorded past. Shaped by the changing socio-political and moral contexts of recall, memories of violence are continuously reworked in the present, with profound implications for notions of the self and sociality.

The problem, as Daniel Gros writes is that “In Europe the banks and the sovereign are usually so closely linked that one cannot survive without the other.” As discussed above in the context of the doom loop, EZ national governments are the ultimate guarantor of their banks, but the banks are key holders of public debt. As a result: “insolvency of a government would also wipe out the capital of the banks and bankrupt them as well. But an insolvent government would no longer be able to save its banks.

HISTORY OF NIGERIA Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and the world’s eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption, and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria’s recent troubles, through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism, and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria’s history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential. TOYIN FALOLA is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Power of African Cultures (2003), Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria, 1945–1965 (2004), and A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2004). MATTHEW M. HEATON is a Patrice Lumumba Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has co-edited multiple volumes on health and illness in Africa with Toyin Falola, including HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being (2007) and Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (2007). A HISTORY OF NIGERIA

today, even when we preach on the love of God, if we neglect preaching about sin, the wrath of God, and humankind’s need for a Savior, we are promoting imbalance. When we preach God’s mercy without the reality of sin, one must ask the question: Why must God be merciful? Why do I need mercy from Him at all? If we preach a Savior without giving context for what we need saving from, our grasp of salvation is limited. It all comes together when we present the complete, full Gospel—nothing missing, nothing lacking.