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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is our UN-VICE in the context of Disruption 3.0? To sum up, UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state of the world. Framing the dynamics of systemic disruption as UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, Exponential enables an empowering response. We are not helpless victims unable to make decisions. With UN-VICE, we have the power to shape our own futures. KEY POINTS: OUR UN-VICE ACRONYM - UNknown: Uncertainty becomes our comfort zone. Recognize you can’t know anything perfectly and many decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of advice and requires increased self-reliance. Learn how to respond regardless of the lack of precedents. - Volatile: Harness change for gain. Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not new; we simply can’t ignore its impact. In volatility, we see the shifting speed and texture of the changing environment. - Intersecting: Everything connects to everything else. The broader our lens, the greater the insights gained from realizing how boundaries are disappearing. - Complex: Notice emergent properties and adapt. In complex environments, inputs do not map clearly to outputs. Practitioners must acknowledge emergent properties and reconcile the immediate with the indefinite. Such systems require critical thinking, experimentation, and judgment. Evaluate emerging issues, build resiliency, and learn to adapt to expanding complexity. - Exponential: Pay attention to nonlinear types of change that increase in growth rate. Notice rapid acceleration of seemingly small shifts. Monitoring early on will mean fewer surprises.

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.

When you judge people’s success by raw numbers without conversations and context, you end up with all sorts of “hacks”—people cheating to hit the numbers because the stakes are high and failure isn’t acceptable. In those circumstances, no one’s getting smarter; they’re all just inflating a balloon that will pop at some point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality

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

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.

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 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.

Delusional beliefs are key symptoms of mental illness, and physicians over hundreds of years have attempted to understand and offer treatments for patients with such beliefs.

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?

The supervisory relationship provides the context and the environment wherein the learning process takes place and lays the foundation for the work that will occur in supervision. The quality of the working relationship between the supervisee and supervisor is one of the key components determining the outcomes of clinical supervision. The effectiveness of these relational interactions largely depends on the kind of person the supervisor is and his or her ability to establish and maintain a good connection with the supervisee.

One of the key lessons to draw from Bazalgette’s sewers is that successful long-term planning needs to be based on building adaptability, flexibility, and resilience into the original design. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand points out that the most long-lasting buildings are those that can “learn” by adapting to new contexts over time: They can accommodate different users or be easily extended, retrofitted, or upgraded. He draws an analogy with biology: “The more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”24 This is exactly where the London sewers were exemplary. By making the tunnels double the size needed at the time, Bazalgette designed long-term adaptability into the system, just as his use of the finest building materials gave the sewers enough resilience to survive over a century of constant wear and tear. Of course, we can learn about resilience not just from cases like the Victorian sewers, but from natural phenomena such as a delicate spider web that manages to survive a storm or the way sweating and shivering help regulate human body temperature.

What makes a failure qualify as intelligent? Here are four key attributes: it takes place in new territory; the context presents a credible opportunity to advance toward a desired goal (whether that be scientific discovery or a new friendship); it is informed by available knowledge (one might say “hypothesis driven”); and finally the failure is as small as it can be to still provide valuable insights.

In an ecosystem context, however, you need to focus only on the objectives and key results (OKRs) that are at the core of each agile chapter, tribe, or squad's work. As you do so, remember to always ask yourself: What objective did we give the teams, and what key results are we expecting them to drive?

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.

was an old police, prosecution, and political trick to separate a few items from the total context, but still a good one; for the public never bothered to know the whole context of anything. An old trick to fasten on phrases and slogans to fix an attitude in the public mind, for a phrase or slogan was about all the public was able to master. Anyone who had ever served on a jury, observed its deliberations, knew that out of all the welter of evidence, only certain isolated statements or facts, often minor and insignificant, penetrated the juror's mind, and around these bits he formed his conclusions. Any smart lawyer knew that, and tried to set up his case accordingly.

The key shortcoming of the multiverse theory, however, is that it appeals to something outside the universe, namely, a vast ensemble of other universes and a set of meta-laws that exist for no reason (e.g., quantum mechanics, string theory). In this respect, the multiverse theory is little better than a direct theistic explanation where an appeal is made to an external creator/designer.

The key weakness of romanticism is that it seeks intimacy but refuses to encourage the habits that form people who are able to enter into and sustain genuinely intimate relationships. This is because real intimacy requires giving ourselves faithfully and permanently to another person in vulnerable trust. It is only in this context of safety that genuine intimacy, as opposed to just a powerful romantic or sexual attraction, can develop.

It is here, I think, that the most important phase of education appears, in the capacity to learn from each thing you see, from each fact you acquire, from each experience you have, from each person you meet. And nothing you learn, however wide of the mark it may appear at the time, however trivial, is ever wasted. In all my life, nothing I have ever learned has failed to be useful to me at some time or other, often in the most unexpected way and in some quite unforeseen context.

The key to Joy is unconditional kindness to all of life, including one’s own, which we refer to as compassion.1 Without compassion, little of any significance is ever accomplished in human endeavor. We may generalize to the greater social context from individual therapies, wherein patients cannot be truly cured or fundamentally healed until they invoke the power of compassion, both for themselves and others. At that point, the healed may become a healer.

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

What is missed in a discussion limited to mental illness and lone wolves are the exploitatively political and social contexts that make individuals feel like lone wolves in America. Understanding those contexts is key to understanding why most (but not all) people who commit mass shootings in America are white males, and why white males have committed mass shootings more and more frequently over the last half century.

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.

Now, suppose that in your process of experimentation, you end up creating a cake that is actually quite small. It’s so small you could sell it as a self-contained, single-serving cake, so you put a little wrapper around it. You realize that you’ve actually made supreme chocolate muffins instead of better chocolate cake. At first it might not seem like this is much of a change. The product hasn’t changed much — it’s the same batter— but almost everything else about your business has. Why? Because we changed the mental frame of reference around the product from “cake” to “muffin.” That change in context changes everything about the business: Target buyers and where you sell. Unlike cakes, muffins are sold at coffee shops and diners. Competitive alternatives. You are now competing with donuts, Danishes and bagels. Pricing and margin. Muffins sell for a buck or two, and you will be looking to sell a lot of them. Key product features and roadmap. You are now fighting for the hearts and minds of a noble class of people who eat chocolate for breakfast. They’re likely not worried about gluten or the origin of the salt in your caramel. They might like your muffin larger or with more caramel or maybe they want it deep-fried like a hash brown (you might be laughing, but deep down I think you want to try one of those).

Context constitutes 90 % of a message, words only 10 %.

When you are expectationless, when you focus only on your actions, on what you can do best in a given context, and leave the results to a higher energy, to Life, then, you are non-frustrated. When frustration sets in, you become unhappy. And when you are not happy, you are dysfunctional. Which is why, being non-frustrated is key to constructive action, on any front, in any walk of Life.

Church services often include ritualized group processes that can induce trance states. Music, prayers, and a mesmerizing preaching style can create a state of relaxation and suggestibility. When a congregation proceeds to sing and pray aloud together with enthusiasm and speaking in tongues, an individual can easily conform. The aroused emotions and the group consensus about reality are convincing enough to inspire a response to get saved, “rededicated,” or “filled with the Spirit.” 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.

It should be clear that in Finnegans Wake, past, present, future, space, time and Ego-reality are all dissolved into the multiple "realities" described by mystics and quantum physicists; that Joyce, a man of timid courage, has seized the keys of hell of death, by showing that the Ego dies and is reborn more continually than we realize, and that absence or death are as unreal in this context as the famous Schrödinger equations which demonstrated in quantum theory that a cat may be dead and alive at the same time.

During: ●   Meals: Fundraising in the time of Zoom is an even more intense experience. It can be difficult to carve out enough time to get out of your house, or even away from your computer, for a proper meal. I suggest doing meal prep or planning every Sunday. Meals should be light and calorically restricted to keep your mind and body active — you shouldn’t bring any afternoon grogginess to a pitch because you ate a burger for lunch. ●    Exercise: Add blocks to your calendar to carve out exercise time. Getting your blood pumping and providing an alternative to staring at your own face on Zoom is key to providing context and awareness. Exercise helps reset the body and the mind. ●    Emotional support: A great fundraise is still an experience in rejection (seriously, most meetings result in a “no”). Make sure you have a weekly check-in with someone (not your cofounder) who can help rationalize and normalize this crazy process. ●        Breaks: Schedule time to take breaks. Watch a movie. Take a hike. Go swimming. Do something to get your mind off the fundraise for at least 30 minutes every day. ●      Meditating: There is nothing in this world that I believe in more than meditation. I started meditating twelve months ago, and since then have nearly 10X’d our business. It’s never too late to start!

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.

Context: This is the topic you want to talk about. Of all the topics in the world, this is the one you will talk about now. Intent: What you want the audience to do with the information you are about to share. Key message: The most important part of the overall message you are about to deliver (the headline).

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.

The key to making money in this context, then, is understanding the financial structure of your business.

Do not understand only the words; also understand their contexts since they illuminate you precisely. If you vote wisely, you won’t have to fight for your rights and peace everywhere. The political mafia is the mother of all mafias and often causes wars and uses vetoes to disrupt global peace. My every minute of life is for the entire humanity and human rights; it is a core prayer of all my prayers. What is a mafia, how do you understand it, and when do you overcome it? It is neither easy nor difficult; just be brave for your rights and never ignore them. No one can stand in front of your rights if you truly believe that. I have described the context of the mafia in the form of quotations that may guide and enlighten your life journey honourably. When a nation faces the Mafia Judiciary, which employs and applies an unfair way that fractures justice, the criminal mafia groups become licensed, and freehand is a juristic disaster. Wherever the medical, trade, business, media, and political interests of the mafia prevail, there is certainly neither a cure nor freedom possible nor justice nor peace. A vote holds not only significant power; it also carries a key to a system, essence to the welfare, surety to the career of a future generation, and a magnet to the stability of the state. The wrong choice or emotional pledge and favor of the vote-casting can indeed victimize a voter himself as a consequence. Realize this power and use it wisely, disregarding all external influences and tricks. Such a political party remains the proprietorship of a particular family, a rich circle, a corrupt mafia, or an establishment that accomplishes neither transparent democratic legitimacy nor fair democracy. Undoubtedly, such a party enforces majority dictatorship when it comes to power. It is mendacious dishonesty and severe corruption in a precise democratic voting context. I have been critical of the undemocratic rule, but now I think it may be the option of neutral law, but not martial law, which is essential for the stability and unity of Pakistan’s state, constitution, economy, and institutions to eliminate the democratic mafia and terror. International intelligence agencies and their hired ones avoid the weapons now; however, they utilize deadly chemicals to kill their rivals, whether high-level or low-level, whereas doctors diagnose that as a natural death. Virtually becoming infected and a victim of deathly diseases through chemicals is neither known publicly nor common. As a fact, the intelligence mafia can achieve and gain every task for their interests.

Answer must be molded compatible with context, contextless answer creates only more problems.

qualitative market research in Myanmar Address Ramakrishna Paramhans Ward, PO mangal nagar, Katni, [M.P.] 2nd Floor, Above KBZ Pay Centre, between 65 & 66 street, Manawhari Road Mandalay, Myanmar - Phone +95 9972107002 +91 7222997497 Subjective Statistical surveying in Myanmar: Revealing Bits of knowledge for Business Development In the present globalized commercial center, understanding buyer conduct and market elements is urgent for organizations to flourish. Myanmar, with its quickly developing economy, presents special open doors and difficulties for organizations hoping to lay out areas of strength for an in the district. As organizations look to acquire an upper hand, the meaning of subjective statistical surveying in Myanmar couldn't possibly be more significant. This article digs into the significance of qualitative market research in Myanmar and how it tends to be instrumental in driving business development in the powerful Myanmar market. Myanmar, previously known as Burma, has seen critical political and monetary changes as of late, prompting expanded unfamiliar speculation and development across different areas. This change has brought about shifts in buyer inclinations, buying power, and market patterns. To explore this advancing scene effectively, organizations should participate in thorough subjective statistical surveying to acquire nuanced experiences into buyer conduct, inclinations, and social impacts. qualitative market research in Myanmar centers around understanding the "whys" behind buyer conduct, digging into the basic inspirations, feelings, and insights that drive dynamic cycles. Dissimilar to quantitative exploration, which gives mathematical information and factual examination, subjective examination offers a more profound comprehension of customer perspectives and inclinations, making it priceless for organizations looking to fit their techniques to the Myanmar market. One of the critical benefits of subjective statistical surveying in Myanmar is its capacity to uncover social subtleties and context oriented factors that impact buyer conduct. Given Myanmar's different ethnic gatherings, dialects, and cultural standards, a nuanced comprehension of nearby traditions and customs is fundamental for organizations meaning to resound with the interest group. Subjective examination procedures, for example, inside and out interviews, center gatherings, and ethnographic investigations empower scientists to dive into these social complexities, giving organizations noteworthy bits of knowledge for item improvement, promoting methodologies, and brand situating. Also, subjective examination assumes a significant part in distinguishing arising patterns and market holes that may not be obvious through quantitative information alone. By connecting straightforwardly with buyers and key partners, organizations can acquire subjective experiences into advancing business sector elements, possible undiscovered portions, and moving customer inclinations. This, thus, enables organizations to adjust their contributions and methodologies proactively, remaining on the ball in Myanmar's quickly changing business sector scene. As well as illuminating vital business choices, subjective statistical surveying encourages a more profound association among organizations and the nearby local area. By effectively including Myanmar purchasers in the examination cycle, organizations show a promise to understanding and tending to their requirements, cultivating trust and brand reliability simultaneously. This human-driven approach is especially relevant in Myanmar, where individual connections and local area ties hold huge influence over customer conduct.

the key phrase is, “I belong not to myself but to Jesus Christ.” In our present context, the answer might also have said, “I belong not to the state, but to Jesus Christ.” That affirmation of course is a Christian confession that many others may not make. It is, nonetheless, the claim of our faith that whether we confess Christ or not, we are—all of us!—creatures who receive life from the creator, live our lives back to the creator, and belong to our creator. It is the claim of our faith that we are creatures well beloved by the creator, created by God ex nihilo, or as Norman Wirzba has said so well, creatio ex amore, out of nothing . . . out of love. Such beloved creatures do not and cannot belong to the state, and cannot have the state making claims on our bodies that are gifts from God.

Metalepsis is a literary technique of citing or echoing a small bit of a precursor text in such a way that the reader can grasp the significance of the echo only by recalling or recovering the original context from which the fragmentary echo came and then reading the two texts in dialogical juxtaposition.

The culture of production was a key environmental contingency that was part of their worldview. The culture of production included norms and beliefs originating in the aerospace industry, the engineering profession, and the NASA organization, then uniquely expressed in the culture of Marshall Space Flight Center. It legitimated work group decision making, which was acceptable and nondeviant within that context.

How can we overcome our self-doubt? Through a simple practice: act lovingly. Lovability is actually the other side of the coin of loving. People who believe they are lovable are people who love. People who love are more likely to be loved. This involves letting go of ego, but it also requires a unique frame of mind: When any conflict or issue arises between ourselves and someone else, we ask not how to win but how to summon up a loving intent and how to act on it. Our immediate question is “How can I be as loving as possible in this circumstance?” When we show the five A’s to others, they feel loved and at the same time see us as lovable. To shift our focus from concern for personal victory or vindication to an attempt to be more loving brings us bliss, and that bliss is the best context for letting go of ego and releasing the five A’s.

groups of executives and other stakeholders all too often come up with the quarterly “roadmap” of features and projects and then pass them down to the product teams, essentially telling them how to solve the underlying business problems. The teams are just there to flesh out the details, code and test, with little understanding of the bigger context, and even less belief that these are in fact the right solutions. Teams today are all too often feature factories, with little regard for whether or not the features actually solve the underlying business problems. Progress is measured by output and not outcome.

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

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.

When applied immediately to spaces of a submolecular order of magnitude, Einstein’s theory breaks down altogether. In the relativity theory, motion is described in the context of a four-dimensional continuum of space-time. Therefore, using it alone, it should have been possible to determine both position and momentum or energy and time simultaneously with unlimited accuracy—a conclusion that wound up being inconsistent with the limits imposed by the uncertainty principle.

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 around us to do the same.

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.

what Marcus has in mind is getting to the ethical core of the situation (although, as becomes clear, this is also linked with understanding the natural world better). The ‘stripping’ method assumes the first of the key Stoic themes noted earlier: that our happiness depends solely on responding virtuously to situations and not at all on acquiring material or social advantages. Hence, what the method brings out is what virtues we should aim to express in that context (‘what virtue is needed ... such as gentleness, courage, truthfulness, good faith, simplicity, self-sufficiency’). The

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.

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?

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.

Satan has some good tricks up his sleeve, but they are old tricks. He cannot create, so there is nothing new coming from his corner. He also lacks the power of the Holy Spirit. This is key. While Satan can read the text, he cannot decipher the text as we can. He cannot gain revelation from the Holy Spirit as we can, so he cannot truly understand the context the way we can, which renders him less powerful than he would like us to think. This is why it is so important for us to know the Word of God.

Repetition in context is a key to dyslexic reading.

history is not an autonomous or complementary category of epistemology. Rather, Van Til held that an ontological knowledge of God is given to mankind in history by the revelation of the economic Trinity. Specifically, all epistemological issues within the creation have their initial solution in the economic, historical revelation of the God of Scripture, which God’s ontology inherently grounds. Thereby, Van Til disclosed his obsession with consistency and Christian orthodoxy; a thorough Christian-theistic epistemology coheres in the context of God’s ontological being as well as the economic disclosure of his being—the two cannot be separated.51 For this reason, Van Til declared that a philosophy of history is the key to a Christian-theistic epistemology; our knowledge of anything is dependent upon the revelation of the economic Trinity in history.

Giddy with each other and the wine, they strolled outside through the Presidio, the old fort now housing restaurants and galleries. Jess explained that she wanted to devise a matrix for scarcity and abundance, frugality and profligacy. She thought that sweetness represented, and in some periods misrepresented, a sense of surplus and shared pleasure. "I don't think taste is purely biological," she said. "I think it's economically, historically, and culturally constructed as well. Sweetness means different things depending on availability, custom, farming, trade..." She was shivering, and George took off his jacket. "Here, sweetness." He helped her into it and laughed at the way her hands disappeared inside the sleeves. "Context is key- so the question is, What carries over? What can we still know about sweet and sour? Bitterness. What persists from generation to generation? Do we taste the same things?" He kissed her, sucking her lower lip and then her tongue. "I think so," he said. "Yes.

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

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.

In the context of physics, 137 is equal to the integer part of the inverse of the fine structure constant ... The fine structure constant α is the key to the physicist’s quest for a Grand Unified Theory ... The number 137 has intrigued numerous prominent theoretical physicists ... All told, we believe that it is much easier, and more motivating, to remember a number that has deep significance in numerous disciplines, ... with the following terse ode to 137: Bethe was mischievous with 137 Bohr was intrigued by 137 Born was mystified by 137 Fermi was frisky with 137 Feynman was mesmerized by 137 Heisenberg was fascinated by 137 Lederman was enchanted by 137 Pauli was consumed by 137 Turing was matched by 137

The Politics of the Bible The key to seeing the political passion of the Bible is hearing and understanding its primary voices in their ancient historical contexts. These contexts are not only literary, but also political. The political context of the Bible is “the ancient domination system,” sometimes also called “the premodern domination system.” Both phrases are used in historical scholarship for the way “this world”—the humanly created world of societies, nations, and empires—was structured until the democratic and industrial revolutions of the past few centuries. Ancient Domination Systems Ancient domination systems began in the 3000s BCE. Two developments account for their emergence. The first was large-scale agriculture and the production of agricultural surpluses, made possible by the invention of metal and metal farm instruments, especially the plow, and the domestication of large animals. The second was the direct result of the first: cities—large concentrations of settled population—became possible. Before large-scale agriculture that produced surpluses, humans lived as nomads or in small settlements that depended on horticulture—gardening—for their sustenance. Cities created the need for a ruling class. One need was a protector class because many people lived outside of cities and knew that cities had food and wealth and were thus apt to attack them. A second need was to order the life of cities. People cannot live in concentrations of thousands without organization. Thus a ruling class of power and wealth emerged. Cities were quickly followed by kingdoms and empires, small and large, all in the same millennium.

The Reciprocity Ring created a context that encouraged takers to act like givers, and the key lies in making giving public. Takers know that in a public setting, they’ll gain reputational benefits for being generous in sharing their knowledge, resources, and connections.

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

Each business process is represented by a dimensional model that consists of a fact table containing the event's numeric measurements surrounded by a halo of dimension tables that contain the textual context that was true at the moment the event occurred. This characteristic star-like structure is often called a star join, a term dating back to the earliest days of relational databases. Figure 1.5 Fact and dimension tables in a dimensional model. The first thing to notice about the dimensional schema is its simplicity and symmetry. Obviously, business users benefit from the simplicity because the data is easier to understand and navigate. The charm of the design in Figure 1.5 is that it is highly recognizable to business users. We have observed literally hundreds of instances in which users immediately agree that the dimensional model is their business. Furthermore, the reduced number of tables and use of meaningful business descriptors make it easy to navigate and less likely that mistakes will occur. The simplicity of a dimensional model also has performance benefits. Database optimizers process these simple schemas with fewer joins more efficiently. A database engine can make strong assumptions about first constraining the heavily indexed dimension tables, and then attacking the fact table all at once with the Cartesian product of the dimension table keys satisfying the user's constraints. Amazingly, using this approach, the optimizer can evaluate arbitrary n-way joins to a fact table in a single pass through the fact table's index. Finally, dimensional models are gracefully extensible to accommodate change. The predictable framework of a dimensional model withstands unexpected changes in user behavior. Every dimension is equivalent; all dimensions are symmetrically-equal entry points into the fact table. The dimensional model has no built-in bias regarding expected query patterns. There are no preferences for the business questions asked this month versus the questions asked next month. You certainly don't want to adjust schemas if business users suggest new ways to analyze their business.

We began with a warning that we must be careful not to read the book of Acts as a strict rule book for church planting. Yet our secular, urbanized, global world today is strikingly like the Greco-Roman world in certain ways. For the first time in fifteen hundred years, there are multiple, vital, religious faith communities and options (including true paganism) in every society. Traditional, secular, and pagan worldviews and communities are living side by side. Once again, cities are the influential cultural centers, just as they were in the Greco-Roman world. During the Pax Romana, cities became furiously multiethnic and globally connected. Since we are living in an Acts-like world again rather than the earlier context of Christendom, church planting will necessarily be as central a strategy for reaching our world as it was for reaching previous generations. Ultimately, though, we don’t look to Paul to teach us about church planting, but to Jesus himself. Jesus is the ultimate church planter. He builds his church (Matt 16:18), and he does so effectively, because hell itself will not prevail against it. He raises up leaders and gives them the keys to the kingdom (Matt 16:19). He establishes his converts on the word of the confessing apostle, Peter — that is, on the word of God (Matt 16:18). When we plant the church, we participate in God’s work, for if we have any success at all, it is because “God made it grow.” Thus, “neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow” (1 Cor 3:6–7).

On the other hand, there is apocalyptic literature, which appears to be continuous with classical prophecy yet to be a particular outgrowth of it. One of the ways in which apocalyptic literature is most often distinguished from prophecy is in the more fixed and less contingent vision of the future that it envisages. Within apocalyptic literature there are sometimes distinctive portrayals of the future, whose purpose appears to be to show how a particular momentous situation, that of which the prediction speaks, fits within a larger providential scheme of God’s dealings with His people. The key point is that the life-context of the apocalyptic writer is apparently the time and context of the momentous situation envisaged in the prediction and not the situation some time in the past (from the writer’s perspective) in which the making of the prediction is set. In other words, the prediction looks to be a literary trope, an imaginative means of depicting divine sovereignty.

All apostolic ministry in some sense involves this return to the founding message as well as purpose. The missional task that follows is to reinterpret it radically into various contexts. To use the words of leadership gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, the key to dynamic entrepreneurialism is to “preserve the core and stimulate progress.”15 Thus, there is both a continuity and a discontinuity in the revitalization process, involving both a conservative dimension and a radical one. Radical traditionalism involves a rediscovery of the founder’s vision, but it must be matched with spectacular innovations that are as yet undreamed of.16 As such, it is the apostolic intrapreneur’s (the Petrine apostle) basic method of renewal.

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.

Michael Tomasello, a psychologist who has done influential research delineating just what makes human culture special, has listed his own “key characteristics of human culture”: universality, by which he means that some cultural traditions are practiced by virtually everyone in a community, such as a language or a religion; uniformity, individuals within communities performing the cultural behavior in the same way; and history, the pattern of cumulative change in behavior over time.83 “History,” as Tomasello uses the word in this context to mean “cumulative culture,” is already on our list. Universality and uniformity seem less fundamentally important. Some elements of human culture, such as language and religion, are often nearly universal and uniform within a community (although they clearly are not in many modern societies). But

This is not an affront on contemporary music or a rejection of relevant tools to help connect a new generation with the Gospel. These are important methods if we are going to properly steward our message in the context we have been placed in. The means can and must change to suit the culture, generation, and context, but the message cannot.

In this spirit, one key methodological guideline would be: if you want to understand contemporary media technological culture, look at its science and military contexts, instead of the content of what is consumed as entertainment media.

The world today is closer together and adherents of non-Christian religions live among us. In this situation, for the sake of understanding and peaceful coexistence, it is necessary to take a look over the fence of our own cultural context into the world of religions. In the process, we ascertain that compassion and beneficence are not restricted to our cultural context, but rather are universal human and primordial religious phenomena.

BUT AREN’T THESE JUST DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS? HOW CAN A DIFFERENT INTERPRETATION BE A STEP TOWARD LIBERALISM? At this point someone may object, “These other meanings for ‘head’ and ‘exercise authority’ are not removing God’s Word from believers; they are just giving a different interpretation. What’s wrong with that? How can that be a step toward liberalism?” In response I would say, there are some kinds of “interpretations” that actually nullify the original statement. For example, let’s say I am driving and I see a sign that says, SPEED LIMIT 45 But suppose I am driving 70 miles per hour, and a policeman stops me. Can I say, “Officer, I just interpreted it differently. I thought the numbers 4 and 5 placed together meant ‘70.’ I guess we just have a difference in interpretation”? Or let’s say I sign a contract that says I agree to “teach six classes” next year, and then I show up the first day and tell the students their assignments, and I never come back again for the whole term. When my academic dean questions me, I say, “Well, I interpreted ‘teach’ differently. I thought ‘teach’ just meant ‘give students assignments for the rest of the term on the first day of class.’ I didn’t interpret it to mean ‘give lectures in classes for a whole term.’ I guess we just have a difference of interpretation.”18 In both cases, these are not legitimate “differences of interpretation” because my meanings are far outside the commonly accepted and recognized ranges of meanings for the words “45” and “teach.” So it is no longer a difference of interpretation. It is a nullification and denial of the statements altogether. That is what I think is happening when evangelical feminists give key verses and key words an entirely different meaning, a meaning far outside the commonly accepted ranges of meanings for those words. That is why the question of hard facts to support those meanings is so important. When the proposals turn out to be contrary to the known evidence, we should conclude that they are untruthful. When the proposals turn out to be unsubstantiated by the known evidence, we should conclude that they are mere speculation, and the previously established meanings of the words should stand. The result of this egalitarian claim is again to chip away at God’s Word for believers, because it removes the sense of the verse that God intended: Previous meaning: I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. New egalitarian meaning: I do not permit a woman to teach or to abuse authority over a man (or: to commit violence against a man, etc.); rather, she is to remain quiet. These new meanings completely change the sense of a key word in 1 Timothy 2:12. But they do so contrary to the evidence about the word’s meaning and its use in a context like this one. And so by removing from God’s people the sense of what his Word actually says, they move another step down the path to liberalism.

Luther’s understanding of the individual Christian life is in some ways refreshingly simple and straightforward. We live at a time when the church always seems to be looking for new and elaborate ways of winning converts, of discipling, of bringing people to maturity in the faith. Luther’s approach is rather different. Building upon the objectivity of God’s action in Christ as set forth in his Word, he sees the Christian life as one fueled by the reading and hearing of this Word, primarily in a corporate context. This is a great antidote to a number of perennial problems for Christians. First, there is the “need” for something more than the Bible. The success of books that offer something spectacular—whether accounts of dying and coming back to the land of the living or low-key claims to special, extra words from God—shows that the Christian world loves something out of the ordinary. Luther would respond that such things are absolutely unnecessary, for what we need is the Word of God in the humble, mundane form that he has given it to us. Why read a book on a child who claims to have died and come back when one can read the Gospels and find there God, clothed in frail human flesh, dying and rising again? Why desire further, special words from God when the great Word of God, Christ himself, is offered to every individual as the Bible is read, preached, and sometimes applied individually through the confessional? Luther would see the market for such books as a function of our striving to be theologians of glory, unsatisfied with how God has chosen to reveal himself to be toward us, and always craving to make God conform to our expectations of what we need.

Furthermore, we had witnessed over and over again that making opportunities for creative expression within a context of care and connection is a seemingly magical key for unlocking that hope and resilience. And it doesn’t require the work of experts. We can all do this.

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

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.

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.

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was one of the key figures of decadentism. This turn-of-the-century trend was an outgrowth of romanticism and carried certain features to and past their breaking point. However, the word "decadent" can be used in two ways. One the one hand, it is a fairly neutral term referring to a certain postromantic trend in the arts running parallel and partly covering styles ranging from Pre-Raphaelitism to symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, and so on, and including artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Jovis Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé in France, Oscar Wilde and William butler Yeats in Britain, Gerhard Hauptmann and Stefan George in Germany, and D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello in Italy. Sometimes the term has been extended to included even Proust, Mann and James Joyce. On the other hand, the word "decadence" has pejorative connotations. Thus works considered decadent can only too easily be considered to actually promote the excesses they depict in such loving detail. And true enough, at its most excessive , decadentism could lead to indulgence in shameless subjectivity and sensuality, a wallowing in the forbidden and the perverse, morbid interest in sickness and death, a flaunting of moral and social values, fierce antireligiousness and arrogant faith in the rights and possibilities of men supoosedly elect because of racial or cultural superiority and threatened only by undecipherable and pernicious women. In any case, decadence in the arts obviously cannot be separated from its social context: bourgeois society heading toward a crisis at the turn of the century.

highly effective people invest little energy on their existing problem situations. Instead, they focus attention and energy on their desired outcomes or on what they want instead of these problems . . . A key to high performance across all these research contexts has been the ability to develop, articulate and stay focused on a compelling outcome. To note the difference between problems and possibilities, Penna and Phillips invite the following exercise. Think of a moderately serious problem at work or in your home. Pose and answer these questions: Why do you have this problem? What caused it? Who is to blame for it? What obstacles are there to solving it? Now take the same situation and answer these questions: What do you want instead of the problem? (Be sure to go beyond merely eliminating the problem.) What would it be like if the problem were solved? What would you see, hear and feel? Imagine the problem is solved. What has been gained?

Richard J. McNally, a Harvard clinical research psychologist, considered the "politics of trauma" in Remembering Trauma (2003).[139] He argued that the definition of PTSD had been too broadly applied, and suggested narrowing it to include "only those stressors associated with serious injury or threat to life" —a suggestion that would drastically alter the public discussion of rape, incest, abuse by clergy, and the traumatic affect of racism and homophobia, to name just a few potentially trauma-inducing contexts and actions.[140] McNally presents his conclusion that most traumatic experience is remembered soon after the event, as if his view represents objective scientific research, when much evidence suggests that memories of traumatic events reoccur over time unpredictably. McNally’s bias is apparent in his strong support of Ian Hacking’s curiously fervent effort to discredit the diagnosis of multiple personality (dissociative identity disorder) and Hacking’s effort to blame clinicians attached to recovered memory therapy of the spurious "rewriting" of patients’ "souls."[141] While McNally accounts for those who do recall their traumas, he does not equally offer an explanation for those who do not remember them, and his extensive bibliography and research do not cite key publications that would challenge his results.[142] - Page 19

How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture? Mandelbrot's point is that the complications exist only in the context of traditional Euclidean geometry. As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information. Perhaps the simplest transformations that gave rise to the shapes devised by Koch, Peano, and Sierpinski have their analogue in the coded instructions of an organism's genes. DNA surely cannot specify the vast number of bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli or the particular spatial structure of the resulting tree, but it can specify a repeating process of bifurcation and development. Such processes suit nature's purposes. When E.I. Dupont de Nemours & Company and the United States Army finally began to produce a synthetic match for goose down, it was by finally realizing that the phenomenal air-trapping ability of the natural product came from the fractal nodes and branches of down's key protein, keratin. Mandelbrot glided matter-of-factly from pulmonary and vascular trees to real botanical trees, trees that need to capture sun and resist wind, with fractal branches and fractal leaves. And theoretical biologists began to speculate that fractal scaling was not just common but universal in morphogenesis. They argued that understanding how such patterns were encoded and processed had become a major challenge to biology.

Finally, of special interest in the current context, children with autism have trouble with skills of joint attention and perspective-taking, so half of all these children acquire no serviceable language at all, and any language they do acquire is used in pragmatically odd ways. The fact that joint attention is a key problem is clear from a number of studies that have found that these two sets of skills are related to one another in autistic children in the same way they are in typically developing children (Loveland and Landry 1986; Mundy et al. 1990; Rollins and Snow 1998). Astoundingly, Siller and Sigman (2008) even found that

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.

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

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.

Based on Better Work's experience with hundred's of enterprises, there have emerged 5 critical areas of conversation between manager and contributor 1- goal setting and reflection - where the employee's OKR plan are set for the upcoming cycle. The discussion focuses on how best to align individual objectives and key results with organizational priorities. 2- ongoing progress updates, which are brief, data-driven check-ins based on the employee's real-time progress with problem-solving as needed. Progress updates really entail two basic questions - what's going well and what's not working well 3 - two-way coaching to help contributors to reach their potential and managers do a better job 4- career growth to develop skills, identify growth opportunities and expand employee's vision of their future at the company 5- light-weight performance reviews. A feedback mechanism to gather input, and summarize what the employee has accomplished since the last meeting in the context of the organization's needs. And note this conversation is held apart from the employee's annual compensation performance review.

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.

Self-understanding, racial pride, an ability to analyze the historical context and tragic experiences endured by one’s people and exploring the culture and history of other non-white groups are key to developing a healthy foundation for a young person. These provide a sense of placement and continuity.  P. 149 Connections Remembered is About Memory Memory refers to our ability to take in, retain, and when necessary, recall information and experiences contained within our brains.

For me context is the key—from that comes the understanding of everything.

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.

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.

INTEGRAL YOGA All the branches of Yoga described so far were creations of premodern India. With Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga we enter the modern era. This Yoga is a vivid demonstration that the Yoga tradition, which has always been highly adaptive, is continuing to develop in response to the changing cultural conditions. Integral Yoga is the single most impressive attempt to reformulate Yoga for our modern needs and abilities. While intent on preserving the continuity of the Yoga tradition, Sri Aurobindo was eager to adapt Yoga to the unique context of the Westernized world of our age. He did this on the basis not only of his own European education but also his profound personal experimentation and experience with spiritual life. He combined in himself the rare qualities of an original philosopher and those of a mystic and sage. Aurobindo saw in all past forms of Yoga an attempt to transcend the ordinary person’s enmeshment in the external world by means of renunciation, asceticism, meditation, breath control, and a whole battery of other yogic means. By contrast, Integral Yoga—which is called pūrna-yoga in Sanskrit—has the explicit purpose of bringing the “divine consciousness” down into the human body-mind and into ordinary life. While Aurobindo certainly did not deny the value of asceticism, he sought to assign to it its proper place within the context of an integral spirituality. He argued that the ancient Hindu thinkers and sages took very seriously the Vedāntic axiom that there is only a single Reality but failed to do proper justice to the correlated axiom that “all this is Brahman.” In other words, they typically ignored the presence of the nondual Divine in and as the world in which we live. Aurobindo’s “supramental Yoga” revolves around the transformation of terrestrial life. He wanted to see paradise on Earth—a thoroughly transmuted existence in the world. Integral Yoga has no prescribed techniques, since the inward transformation is accomplished by the divine Power itself. There are no obligatory rituals, mantras, postures, or breathing exercises to be performed. The aspirant must simply open himself or herself to that higher Power, which Sri Aurobindo identified with The Mother. This self-opening and calling upon the presence of The Mother is understood as a form of meditation or prayer. Aurobindo advised that practitioners should focus their attention at the heart, which has anciently been the secret gateway to the Divine. Faith, or inner certitude, is deemed a key to spiritual growth. Other important aspects of Integral Yoga practice are chastity (brahmacarya), truthfulness (satya), and a pervasive disposition of calm (prashānti).

CONTEXT includes current social and economic conditions, existing product portfolio, competitive landscape, and corporate culture. COMBINATION is the act of selecting key actions that can positively influence outcomes, when done together. SEQUENCE is the act of establishing a priority, order, and timing to those actions.

Line 4 - Sales (Director) Throughout the Golden Path Program we have gotten to know the 4th line as the great ‘friendmaker’. This gift comes from a truly genuine heart, and an easy warmth with people and community. This is the kind of person that emerges through the Venus Sequence, as those 4th lines release some of their inner restrictions and fears. To have a 4th line Vocation is to be a spokesperson. Such gifts are given to us to serve the whole, and although the 4th line wound may feel reluctant to engage at this level, they do have to overcome the fear that they inherited in their very early years. When we say that the 4th line is the most natural salesperson of all the lines, it does not mean only in business. The open 4th line is always selling their heart. They are here to create more openness, to help others overcome their fears, and to be examples of open-hearted communication. Like the 4th line, the 3rd line can be hugely successful in a business context. However, the role and style of the 4th line is very different. Their role is more like the director of the movie. They have to work closely with people, which involves diplomacy, conviction, and focus. The 4th line knows what the movie should look like, and their one-pointed drive will ensure that everyone else comes into harmony around that direction. The 4th line is comfortable taking control and guiding others to work towards a collective vision or ideal. This is where the notion of sales comes in - the 4th line can diffuse difficulties through the sheer strength and goodwill of its character. The 4th line also has a strong theme of aloneness as a counterbalance to its communal warmth. The inner strength and commitment of these people is rooted in this ability to stand alone and remain committed to one’s ideal, despite the odds. If you have a 4th line Vocation, then you are here to influence humanity. You are here to use your considerable gifts to open people’s hearts. If you happen to be selling a specific idea or product, then at the deepest level it is really an excuse to share your spirit with others. Sometimes you may also be here to deliver a rousing message that shakes people out of their comfort zones, and brings them to a new place inside themselves. Since the 4th line is so good at convincing people about things, it is for a very good reason. When this reason is for a higher purpose, then your whole life moves onto a higher level. There is nothing more powerful or authentic than when one of us stands alone in the world and expresses the love in our heart - whatever creative form that may take.

There is a fascist way of being antifascist, is a reflection that arises from seeing how, often, the accusation of being fascist is used, in the most varied contexts. as a low-key dialectical argument to close a discussion for which one has no case. Perhaps it is because when all one is capable of doing is opposing an idea one ends up representing that same idea in the mirror.

Ultimately, a systems thinking approach places more attention on local context, incentives, and institutions, anticipates and addresses unintended consequences, and uses approaches to develop and implement policies and programs that engage key actors through the use of data for ongoing problem-solving and adaptation.

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 salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.

Although the blockchain that Bitcoin sits on has never been hacked, transactions are difficult, which has slowed widespread adoption as a payment alternative. In addition to that, storage of Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies (wallets) has been prone to cyberattack or loss, creating a different form of risk. But even with risk and current high volatility, citizens in some parts of the world have less risk in holding Bitcoin than their own currency. The value can be moved across borders seamlessly or used as a payment mechanism when currency fails. In Venezuela today, for example, Bitcoin is already acting as a lifesaving currency for those who have it, as it is a much more secure payment medium than the local currency. 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.

Standard A1 acknowledges that accuracy in evaluation contexts is not established in a universal sense. Ideas and meanings expressed in specific languages can change over time, places, individuals, and groups. For conclusions to be accurate in a practical sense such that their consequences are justified, they must be understood within the contexts where the languages and concepts that support them can be applied. Part of the rationale for Standard A1 is to call attention to this practicality while emphasizing the key importance of sound methods in specific contexts.

Here is the personal source of "the two Hegels." On the one hand, there is Hegel's sense of particular contexts, communities, and cultures; on the other hand, there is his Enlightenment sense of humanity, this all-embracing conception that had become, in Kant for example, the key to morality, rationality, politics, religion, and simply "being human." There is, again, this extreme tension in Hegel's Spirit, in other words, between his sense of unity and his sense of differences. And I shall argue in the pages that follow that this essential temperamental tension emerges in the writing of the Phenomenology itself, literally splitting the work in two. The incoherence of the Phenomenology, I want to argue, is nothing less than the epic philosophical tension of the age—something far more important than the lack of organization of a single philosopher, and something far more earth-shaking than an academic confusion concerning the proper "systematization" of German Idealism.

process-based approach would include the following key features: (1) becoming comfortable with what we don’t know; (2) embracing the inherent complexity of suicide; (3) moving beyond a mental-illness-based model of suicide; (4) recognizing the importance of context; (5) being willing to change what we do even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient; and (6) attending to quality-of-life issues and social factors that influence the perceived value of living.

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.

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.

Resist Proxies A key part of Amazon’s “It’s always Day 1” philosophy is what Bezos calls “resisting proxies.” In simple terms, proxies (in this context) are any form of excuse people use to blame others for less-than-ideal actions or decisions. They give people an excuse to distance themselves from their actions. Common examples of proxies include policies, procedures, processes, and sometimes even orders from another person.

There are three key aspects of Bourdieu’s theory that are relevant to white fragility: field, habitus, and capital. Field is the specific social context the person is in—a party, the workplace, or a school. If we take a school as an example, there is the macro field of school as a whole, and within the school are micro fields—the teacher’s lounge, the staff room, the classroom, the playground, the principal’s office, the nurses’ office, the janitor’s supply room, and so on. Capital is the social value people hold in a particular field; how they perceive themselves and are perceived by others in terms of their power or status. For example, compare the capital of a teacher and a student, a teacher and a principal, a middle-class student and a student on free or reduced lunch, an English language learner and a native English speaker, a popular girl and an unpopular one, a custodian and a receptionist, a kindergarten teacher and a sixth-grade teacher, and so on. Capital can shift with the field, for example, when the custodian comes “upstairs” to speak to the receptionist—the custodian in work clothes and the receptionist in business attire—the office worker has more capital than does the maintenance person. But when the receptionist goes “down” to the supply room, which the custodian controls, to request more whiteboard markers, those power lines shift; this is the domain of the custodian, who can fulfill the request quickly or can make the transaction difficult. Notice how race, class, and gender will also be at play in negotiations of power. The custodian is most likely to be male, and the receptionist female; the custodian more likely a person of color and the receptionist more likely white. These complex and intersecting layers of capital are being negotiated automatically.

When you’ve experienced struggle, pain, and suffering, you are better able to empathize with others. This, in itself, may be why so many white Americans, as a privileged class, are unable to empathize with the struggle of minorities. Many white Americans have never experienced a similar and profound struggle. This may explain it, but it’s still unacceptable. Knowledge and truth are the key to unlocking the empathy that lies within themselves. The context in which I grew up shaped me

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

Over the course of time, we settled on the following seven keys:    Demonstrate competence. You possess the necessary and critical skills required to lead in your organizational context.    Exhibit conviction. You display assurance that the chosen course of action will lead to positive results.    Set high standards. You aim high, both for yourself and your team.    Listen to your team. You listen to feedback and you incorporate that feedback appropriately.    Work hard. You put in the time and effort necessary to get the job done.    Do the difficult. You do the hard things, like holding people accountable, confronting bad behavior, and staying true to your values even when it hurts.    Be consistent. Your words, actions, decisions, and investments are in alignment.

or he’s so good at acting he has us thinking that.” Marcel smiled back at him. “I like you, Thaddeus. We think a lot alike. Okay, what else we got?” “Uh-oh, jumping down here, look at this. Guy named Angelo Andrus. He’s FBI counter-intelligence. Why in the world would they have counter-intelligence listed as a witness, I wonder?” “That’s strange,” Turquoise pointed out. “That’s the same name Juan gave us a couple of days ago.” “In what context?” Thaddeus asked. Turquoise shrugged. “Basically, Juan said the word on the street is that he’s the key to this whole thing. If we start with him, we’ll find our answers.” “Counter-intelligence could be any number of things,” Marcel said. “In the context of the FBI investigation into Johann Van Giersbergen and the bomb explosion, it might be they’re looking into the possibility one of their agents was a double agent, or it could be as simple as Andrus was in charge of the terrorist investigation, the team the US sent here at the time.” “Are you saying they might be looking into an FBI agent who’s gone over to the other side? Say, he’s working with the Russians?” Thaddeus asked. “Yes, or the Chinese or the Iranians. It’s been known to happen.” Thaddeus moved the mouse and scrolled back up to the top of the witness list. “Let’s see who else we’ve got besides Angelo Andrus and see whether we can derive more context about him. Under federal law and the rules

In the context of strategic human resources development, strategies may seem a lot more like an idiosyncrasy rather than a pragmatic instrument. But the challenge is in spinning the wheels of these strategies into motion and studying the consequence which assuredly would lead to some development and not necessarily a failure. Dexterous and expert integration of strategic management and human resource management pops up as the key in this context to unlocking the uncertainties of a devised human resource strategy.

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.

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.

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.

Effective delegation of tasks to team! Establishing a culture of trust within your team, encouraging open communication and collaboration is the key. Clearly define the scope and context of each task, providing relevant background information to enhance understanding. Set measurable objectives and deadlines, allowing team members to take ownership of their responsibilities. Foster an environment that promotes continuous learning by encouraging team members to seek feedback and share insights throughout the process. Finally, regularly assess progress and adapt strategies as needed, ensuring that delegation remains a dynamic and responsive process. Draw a distinction between tearing down criticism to building up ( constructive) criticism. This points to communication skills.

I'd grown up in survival mode, clutching tightly to every dollar that came my way. And when you spend from a belief that every cent you earn will be your last, you operate from a place of scarcity - a context that runs counter to the energy of abundance. Money, like all life, is an energy exchange. You give yourself over to whatever you're passionate about, and what comes back to you is energy in the form of monetary compensation. You attract more or less of what you want by how you choose to interact with it, as well as what you believe about yourself.

Not knowing how he had come to sit behind the steering wheel, he considered driving into town for help but was too fucked up to walk much less commandeer Emma’s truck. The hike into the canyon where her body would be—500 feet beneath the Claw and at least a 90-minute jog from the truck—was too much to consider, the stream requiring being forded at least a dozen times. Paralyzed by indecision and the horror of seeing her jump, he pounded the steering wheel with palms, tears soaking his face, collecting like dew drops in the wiry strands of his beard. “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? Goddammit Emma…” Desiring nothing other than to have her back, he felt the urge to lie down on the seat and cry himself into oblivion, having no more control over himself than he had over the way Powerball had spun the universe, spitting out random equations from a spinning cage. So maybe, his mind conspired, she didn’t jump and was still wandering around the Claw, lost, searching him out. But the image of her stretching her arms wide and leaping was crystalline in its authenticity, tangible and substantial. She’s not here. The voice returned, stripping earthly context from reality. Go look somewhere else. “...the other half found me stumbling around and drunk on burgundy wine,” the tape player shattered his thoughts as though someone had thrown a large rock through the windshield, the engine suddenly idling. Like it just happened on its own, there was no way he’d touched the key. Fumbling for the cassette deck’s knobs, he watched his hand disappear into the dash, lacking mass or substance, sensation, an immaterial thing dangling uselessly from the end of his arm. Outside the truck, the mountain and trees pivoted, the world turning on a spindle, the turnout giving way to the meadow and the rutted path back to the gate. Gooch watched the speedometer needle bounce back and forth, wind tumbling the dashboard trash and debris so that everything danced against the windshield in time to the music. “I’ll get up and fly away….

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.

The fourth generation of self-management is more advanced than the third in five important ways. First, it’s principle-centered. More than giving lip service to Quadrant II, it creates the central paradigm that empowers you to see your time in the context of what is really important and effective. Second, it’s conscience-directed. It gives you the opportunity to organize your life to the best of your ability in harmony with your deepest values. But it also gives you the freedom to peacefully subordinate your schedule to higher values. Third, it defines your unique mission, including values and long-term goals. This gives direction and purpose to the way you spend each day. Fourth, it helps you balance your life by identifying roles, and by setting goals and scheduling activities in each key role every week. And fifth, it gives greater context through weekly organizing (with daily adaptation as needed), rising above the limiting perspective of a single day and putting you in touch with your deepest values through review of your key roles.

This book explores how the ethical charge carried by violence seeps into the fabric of life in the aftermath. The key arguments proposed are that for those who have perpetrated violence, the mediation of its memory is ethically tendentious and steeped in the moral, and so carries important implications for notions of the self and the negotiation of sociality in the present. 3 Memory does not entail an abstract recording of the past, but is informed by the socio-political context of recall. This means that people who have engaged in violence remember and give meaning to their experiences in ways that allow them to continue living with themselves, with their violent pasts, and with others, in the aftermath.

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.

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.

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

Doubt is crucial to science in the version we call curiosity or healthy scepticism, 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.

Watching closely are many of the Catholics whose marriages have fallen apart. An estimated 28 percent of American Catholic adults who have ever been married have since divorced, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. That rate is lower than in the general public, but still constitutes 11 million people, the researchers said. For many divorced Catholics, the church’s approach raises an existential question, said Helen Alvaré, a law professor at George Mason University: “What is my place in the church, and do I feel welcomed?” Ms. Alvaré, who is a former spokeswoman for the American bishops, said the indissolubility of marriage is a Catholic essential, “a key to the entire Roman Catholic cosmology — our understanding of the world, God, our relationship with him and our relationship to one another.” But, she added, questions about the place of divorced worshipers in the church fit into a larger context of uncertainty for Catholics who do not fully live out the church’s ideals. “There’s a lot of divorced Catholics out there, and have we let these sheep wander without reaching out to them?” Ms. Alvaré asked. “Jesus wants us to look after all the sheep, no matter what.

Most importantly, governance focuses the business on key strategic directions while ensuring that the right outcomes are achieved within the context of ethical leadership.

The key to Happiness is dropping all your wants. Even "wanting to be happy" is an expectation that can cause you so much anxiety and unhappiness. Just being, embracing what is, chipping away at what you can do in a given context, and doing what you love doing, will suffice to live a full, meaningful, Life. Clearly Happiness cannot, and must not, be pursued; simply being, consistently just being, at some point in your journey, upon reflection, will reveal to you that it is a great quality to have lived/live Life by.

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.

Key Questions • What do engaged people look like in my context? • In the past, what factors have led me to be fully engaged? • Which of these factors are missing in my followers? • What do my people need to be more engaged? • How can I help my people grow—as a group and individually? Caution: One size doesn’t fit all. People have specific and unique engagement and development needs.

Context-Based Learning: Why Mentorship Is More Effective than Formal Education The military and several missionary programs use a learning and teaching method known as “context-based learning” to radically accelerate the learning process. Context-based learning occurs in a social situation where knowledge is acquired and processed through collaboration and practical use, not merely the dissemination of information from a teacher. In order for this knowledge to be acquired, a learner engages in a real-life task, not a theoretical task. The skills the learner develops clearly match and naturally translate into real-world settings.

jungles of Central and South America—something the sloth is very good at. The reputation of the sloth was sufficiently besmirched that I felt compelled to found the Sloth Appreciation Society. (Our motto: “Being fast is overrated.”) I gave a talk on the unexpected truth about this much maligned creature to festivals and schools. This book grew out of those talks and the need to set the record straight—not just for the sloth, but for other animals as well. When seeking to understand animals, context is key. We have a habit of viewing the animal kingdom through the prism of our own, rather narrow, existence. The sloth’s arboreal lifestyle is sufficiently extraterrestrial to make it one of the world’s most misunderstood creatures, but it is by no means alone in this category. Life takes a glorious myriad of alien forms, and even the simplest require complex understanding.

To do that, look at the big picture first. Capture the aesthetic qualities as a whole and identify the patterns that are particularly effective at expressing it. Then you can follow a similar process for all the styles: start with the key roles a style has in the context of your product, audit existing instances, and then define patterns and building blocks. The guiding principles help to connect everything together and link it back to the purpose.

Like the quarter, you are always acting in a role. The roles you play aren’t your fixed and unchanging identity. Rather, you are acting a particular way based on the rules of the situation you are in. Like the chess pieces, your role is relative to what surrounds you. In some situations, you may play the role of a parent. In other situations, you may be a student, or a firefighter, or a friend, or, if you’re playing with my six-year-old, you may be a trampoline to jump on. A friend of mine, Blaine, works as a manager of an industrial hose warehouse. Blaine told his friend Brad that he was just a “hoser,” which disturbed Brad, who thought it belittled Blaine. Perhaps it would be better for Blaine to identify himself as a manager? Although it’s common for us to overattach ourselves and to identify with the jobs we have, in reality, we are just acting in roles, whether that be a writer, a manager, a police officer, a lawyer, or a teacher. These roles quickly change as we change our context.

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.

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.

As Russell Moore writes, describing another context for spiritual engagements with culture, it “doesn’t blink before power, but doesn’t seek to imitate it either.

Insulin and cortisol play the most significant part in the context of weight

Too many of us unconsciously believe that a well-studied understanding of our cultural context, rather than the Bible, is the key to preaching with power.

explore Becker’s concept of the art world but in relation to Henry Jenkin’s use of the idea in relation to fandom and fan conventions. In Jenkins’ view, an art world involves networks of artistic production, distribution, consumption, circulation and the exhibition and forums for the sale of artworks. In this regard, argues Jenkins, fan conventions are not simply events in which fans can interact with fellow fans, but they also perform a key role in the distribution of knowledge about media productions and are one of the modes by which producers promote cultural products such as comic books, science fiction novels, new film and TV releases, or online/game releases (typified by events such as Comic Con). More importantly, Jenkins argues, conventions provide spaces in which producers have the opportunity to communicate directly with the consumers of their cultural products

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, two key scholars of race in the United States, distinguish the ways that racial rule has moved “from dictatorship to democracy” as a means of masking domination over racialized groups in the United States.11 In the context of the web, we see the absolving of workplace practices such as the low level of employment of African Americans in Silicon Valley and the products that stem from it, such as algorithms that organize information for the public, not as matters of domination that persist in these realms but as democratic and fair projects, many of which mask the racism at play.

When I look at her portrait now, in the context of her opus, I see something more than a passing resemblance to Locke. There are no outward signs of agitation, although frustration was her first response to patriarchy. Her second response was a calm rejection of it: to live with personal integrity—while feeling the full complexity of human emotions ruled by reason—is key to facing an unfair world. As is the effort to change it. But there are her eyes, outsize and intelligent, the knowing look of the female gaze, constant, unmovable. Not letting up.

Within the context of Sequence, Proposition, Plot, the term Plot has a specialized definition.

Context being the key concept of modern scientific archeology, 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 archeology 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.

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Whether it is Philippians addressing anxiety or Romans talking about our future glory, the Bible cannot be spliced into pieces. We cannot apply Scripture based on key phrases or micro ideas that “feel” applicable to us. To really understand the meaning of the Bible, words and passages must be taken in their entire context, and that requires study. Sure, it is easy to shrug our shoulders at the thought of having to give time to understand what this book is really saying, but consider this: Have you ever prayed, God, show me what You want to say, and flung the pages open, hoping to find something relevant to your life or situation? I have. But almost every time I’d land somewhere in the middle of Leviticus, and I would roll my eyes, thinking, Yeah, this is great for the next time I need to practice animal sacrifice. It is easy to laugh, but we have to acknowledge how real this practice is. We ask the Holy Spirit to miraculously show up and hope that we will stumble upon something of worth and value. But the Bible isn’t a Magic 8 Ball.

Metamorphosis is a key theme in Burroughs’ life and work. Often his efforts were directed at himself, though he also sought to transform the outside world by cutting up, rearranging, and playing back its artifacts—namely, text, image, and sound. Burroughs’ ideas and techniques can be applied in many different contexts, music among them. Of course, one must have the proper tools. For Burroughs, these were his typewriter, tape recorders, camera, scissors, and voice. We can think of them as Burroughs’ divine weapons, which he used to assert his visions upon reality. This is a fundamentally occult conceit. Drawing inspiration and energy from symbols, sigils, recitation, and charged objects, practitioners enter non-normative states during which their will—or desire—is projected into the day-to-day world where it is meant to have an impact. The effectiveness of a creative or magical act is a matter of sticking the mark. A curse needs an objective, just as a work of art needs an audience. A bullet requires a target. The circuit finds its path to completion.

the critical role of confession is in its potential to liberate victims of great harm—it marks an end to the denial of their experience and an affirmation of the legitimacy of their suffering. It can offer answers, context, information about what happened or why that might be key to healing, and it can bring something too long hidden into the open.