“
Ladies and gentleman," he said over the speakers, "welcome aboard this recently liberated Gulfstream V. If I could have your attention for just a few moments, I'd like to go over the safety features of this aircraft. It has an engine, to make us go, and wings, to keep us in the air. There are seatbelts, which won't do you an awful lot of good if we fly into the side of a mountain.
”
”
Derek Landy (The Maleficent Seven (Skulduggery Pleasant, #7.5))
“
It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers.
”
”
Alain de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work)
“
Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Get real. You are not the star of the movie. Most of what happens around you isn’t about you at all. There are infinite numbers of other movies. In those, if you feature at all, you’re just a supporting actor. It would really help your happiness if you started to look at your life that way.
”
”
Mo Gawdat (Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy)
“
The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. The only way we can do this is through assessment. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.
”
”
Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
“
The human body is a funny machine. When you want to move something - say, your arm - the brain actually sends two signals at the same time: "More power!" and "Less power!" The operating system that runs the body automatically holds some power back to avoid overexerting and tearing itself apart. Not all machines have that built - in safety feature. You can point a car at a wall, slam the accelerator to the floor, and the car will crush itself against the wall until the engine is destroyed or runs out of gas.
Martial arts use every scrap of strength the body has at its disposal. In martial arts training, you punch and shout at the same time. Your "Shout louder!" command helps to override the "Less power!" command. With practice, you can throttle the amount of power your body holds back. In essence, you're learning to channel
the body's power to destroy itself.
”
”
Hiroshi Sakurazaka (All You Need Is Kill)
“
Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
“
Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
A pause. “You are a brilliant engineer who knows the Premier League stats of the past three decades off the top of your head. Physically, you are the uncanny combination of every single feature I’ve ever found attractive—no, I will not expand on that. And you saved me on your phone as Corporate Thor, even after I gave you my full name.
”
”
Ali Hazelwood (Stuck with You (The STEMinist Novellas, #2))
“
Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.
”
”
John Ousterhout (A Philosophy of Software Design)
“
Bill liked to tell a story about when he was at Intuit and they started getting into banking products. They hired some product managers with banking experience. One day, Bill was at a meeting with one of those product managers, who presented his engineers with a list of features he wanted them to build. Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has. You give them context on who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features. They will provide you with a far better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them what to build.
”
”
Eric Schmidt (Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell)
“
If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Baldwin saw clearly what he was up against; he fully understood the power of the American lie. It is the engine that moves this place. It transforms facts and events that do not quite fit our self-understanding into the details of American greatness or features of our never-ending journey to perfection. The lie is the story that warps reality in this country, which means that resisting it involves telling in each moment a truer story, one that casts the lie into relief, showing it for what it is.
”
”
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own)
“
Businesses frequently prioritize new feature releases over fixing technical debt. They choose to work on revenue-generating work instead of revenue-protection work. This rarely works out as the business hopes, particularly as problems discovered during the final stages of uncompleted projects drag engineers away from the newer projects.
”
”
Dominica Degrandis (Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow)
“
Feature creep is an innocent process. An engineer looking at a prototype of a remote control might think to herself, “Hey, there’s some extra real estate here on the face of the control. And there’s some extra capacity on the chip. Rather than let it go to waste, what if we give people the ability to toggle between the Julian and Gregorian calendars?
”
”
Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
“
The fundamental engineering feature of the fiat system is that it treats future promises of money as if they were as good as present money because the government guarantees these promises
”
”
Saifedean Ammous (The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization)
“
Companies with strong product-driven or engineering cultures tend to be the ones that develop feature shocks. Firms with a culture of playing it safe and avoiding big risks typically suffer minivations. Hidden gems most often afflict companies that coddle the core business. And undeads are born in firms whose top-down cultures discourage feedback and criticism from below. Let
”
”
Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price)
“
In a startup, the first product is not designed to satisfy a mainstream customer. No startup can afford the engineering effort or the time to build a product with every feature a mainstream customer needs in its first release.
”
”
Steve Blank (The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win)
“
In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk...
I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up.
Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief.
It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers.
To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret!
And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!...
Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long?
The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!
”
”
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas)
“
I would choose you." The words were out before he thought better of them, and there was no way to pull them back.
Silence stretched between them. Perhaps the floor will open and I'll plummet to my death, he thought hopefully.
"As your general?" Her voice careful. She was offering him a chance to right the ship, to take them back to familiar waters.
And a fine general you are.
There could be no better leader.
You may be prickly, but that what Ravka needs.
So many easy replies.
Instead he said, "As my queen."
He couldn't read her expression. Was she pleased? Embarrassed? Angry? Every cell in his body screamed for him to crack a joke, to free both of them from the peril of the moment. But he wouldn't. He was still a privateer, and he'd come too far.
"Because I'm a dependable soldier," she said, but she didn't sound sure. It was the same cautious, tentative voice, the voice of someone waiting for a punch line, or maybe a blow. "Because I know all of your secrets."
"I do trust you more than myself sometimes- and I think very highly of myself."
Hadn't she said there was no one else she'd choose to have her back in a fight?
But that isn't the whole truth, is it, you great cowardly lump. To hell with it. They might all die soon enough. They were safe here in the dark, surrounded by the hum of engines.
"I would make you my queen because I want you. I want you all the time."
She rolled on to her side, resting her head on her folded arm. A small movement, but he could feel her breath now. His heart was racing. "As your general, I should tell you that would be a terrible decision."
He turned on to his side. They were facing each other now. "As your king, I should tell you that no one could dissuade me. No prince and no power could make me stop wanting you."
Nikolai felt drunk. Maybe unleashing the demon had loosed something in his brain. She was going to laugh at him. She would knock him senseless and tell him he had no right. But he couldn't seem to stop.
"I would give you a crown if I could," he said. "I would show you the world from the prow of a ship. I would choose you, Zoya. As my general, as my friend, as my bride. I would give you a sapphire the size of an acorn." He reached in to his pocket. "And all I would ask in return is that you wear this damnable ribbon in your hair on our wedding day."
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the coil of blue velvet ribbon resting in his palm.
Then she pulled back her hand, cradling her fingers as if they'd been singed.
"You will wed a Taban sister who craves a crown," she said. "Or a wealthy Kerch girl, or maybe a Fjerdan royal. You will have heirs and a future. I'm not the queen Ravka needs."
"And if you're the queen I want?"
...
She sat up, drew her knees in, wrapped her arms around them as if she would make a shelter of her own body. He wanted to pull her back down beside him and press his mouth to hers. He wanted her to look at him again with possibility in her eyes. "But that's not who I am. Whatever is inside me is sharp and gray as the thorn wood." She rose and dusted off her kefta. "I wasn't born to be a bride. I was made to be a weapon."
Nikolai forced himself to smile. It wasn't as if he'd offered her a real proposal. They both knew such a thing was impossible. And yet her refusal smarted just as badly as if he'd gotten on his knee and offered her his hand like some kind of besotted fool. It stung. All saints, it stung.
"Well," he said cheerfully, pushing up on his elbows and looking up at her with all the wry humour he could muster. "Weapons are good to have around too. Far more useful than brides and less likely to mope about the palace. But if you won't rule Ravka by my side, what does the future hold, General?"
Zoya opened the door to the Cargo hold. Light flooded in gilding her features when she looked back at him. "I'll fight on beside you. As your general. As your friend. Because whatever my failings, I know this. You are the king Ravka needs.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Rule of Wolves (King of Scars, #2))
“
market-driven pressures plus an engineering-driven company yield ever-increasing features, complexity, and confusion. But even companies that do intend to search for human needs are thwarted by the severe challenges of the product development process, in particular, the challenges of insufficient time and insufficient money.
”
”
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
“
is not to listen to the damned nonsense the natives are always talking.” And poor Burlton flushed with shame and avoided Fleury’s eye. Fleury had by now grown accustomed to the gloom and could see that Ford was a heavy-featured man of about forty; in spite of his inferior social status as an engineer, he clearly dominated Rayne and Burlton.
”
”
J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur)
“
I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth. The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving the world and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves…these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ – Thomas Jefferson
”
”
Michael Tsarion (Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation)
“
If we want to solve problems effectively...we must keep in mind not only many features but also the influences among them. Complexity is the label we will give to the existence of many interdependent variables in a given system. The more variables and the greater their interdependence, the greater the system's complexity. Great complexity places high demands on a planner's capacity to gather information, integrate findings, and design effective actions. The links between the variables oblige us to attend to a great many features simultaneously, and that, concomitantly, makes it impossible for us to undertake only one action in a complex system.
A system of variables is "interrelated" if an action that affects or meant to affect one part of the system will also affect other parts of it. Interrelatedness guarantees that an action aimed at one variable will have side effects and long-term repercussions. A large number of variables will make it easy to overlook them.
We might think of complexity could be regarded as an objective attribute of systems. We might even think we could assign a numerical value to it, making it, for instance, the product of the number of features times the number of interrelationships. If a system had ten variables and five links between them, then its "complexity quotient", measured in this way would be fifty. If there are no links, its complexity quotient would be zero. Such attempts to measure the complexity of a system have in fact been made.
Complexity is not an objective factor but a subjective one. Supersignals reduce complexity, collapsing a number of features into one. Consequently, complexity must be understood in terms of a specific individual and his or her supply of supersignals. We learn supersignals from experience, and our supply can differ greatly from another individual's. Therefore there can be no objective measure of complexity.
”
”
Dietrich Dörner (The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations)
“
One odd result of allowing super-enhancements could be that children will become like iPhones: a new version will come out every few years with better features and apps. Will children as they age feel that they are becoming obsolete? That their eyes don’t have the cool triple-lens enhancements that are engineered into the latest version of kids? Fortunately, these are questions we can ask for amusement but not for an answer.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race)
“
There is a misconception held by many Egyptian professionals, especially engineers, that informal housing is haphazardly constructed and liable to collapse. However, such precarious housing is almost unknown in informal areas. Since informal housing is overwhelmingly owner-built without use of formal contractors, it is in the owner’s own best interest to ensure that care is taken in construction. In fact, one of the main features of informal housing construction is its high structural quality, reflecting the substantial financial resources and tremendous efforts that owners devote to these buildings. It is worth noting that in the 1992 earthquake in Cairo, practically all building collapses and the resulting fatalities occurred not in informal areas, but either in dilapidated historic parts of the city or informal areas…where apartment blocks had been constructed by (sometimes) unscrupulous developers and contractors.
”
”
David Sims (Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control)
“
This underscores another common feature of WMDs. They tend to punish the poor. This is, in part, because they are engineered to evaluate large numbers of people. They specialize in bulk, and they’re cheap. That’s part of their appeal. The wealthy, by contrast, often benefit from personal input. A white-shoe law firm or an exclusive prep school will lean far more on recommendations and face-to-face interviews than will a fast-food chain or a cash-strapped urban school district. The privileged, we’ll see time and again, are processed more by people, the masses by machines.
”
”
Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy)
“
was many of the changes that Musk wanted that started to delay the Roadster. Musk kept pushing for the car to be more comfortable, asking for alterations to the seats and the doors. He made the carbon-fiber body a priority, and he pushed for electronic sensors on the doors so that the Roadster could be unlocked with the touch of a finger instead of a tug on a handle. Eberhard groused that these features were slowing the company down, and many of the engineers agreed. “It felt at times like Elon was this unreasonably demanding overarching force,” said Berdichevsky. “The company as a whole was sympathetic to Martin because he was there all the time, and we all felt the car should ship sooner.
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
“
Newcomen’s engine borrowed the best features of its predecessors and incorporated new features of its own. It borrowed Huygens’s cylinder and piston but followed Papin in substituting steam for gunpowder. It borrowed from Savery the idea of condensing steam to make a vacuum. The Newcomen engine, however, unlike Papin’s or Savery’s, heated water to steam in a large, separate boiler, then piped the steam through a flap valve up to an open-ended cylinder mounted overhead. Instead of using steam pressure to push up the piston, as Papin had, Newcomen hung the piston from a massive wooden rocking beam so that the weight of the beam as it rocked pulled up the piston to open the cylinder between cycles.
”
”
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
“
My father told me, ‘You always want to be in the middle,’ ” he said. “I didn’t want to be up with the high-level people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was way too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.” By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the “electronics kids.” He had an easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he developed the chunky and stooped look of a guy who spends most of his time hunched over circuit boards. At the same age when Jobs was puzzling over a carbon microphone that his dad couldn’t explain, Wozniak was using transistors to build an intercom system featuring amplifiers, relays, lights, and buzzers that connected the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in the neighborhood. And at an age when Jobs was
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
I have already mentioned two features that successful unifications tend to share. The first, surprise, cannot be underestimated. If there is no surprise, then the idea is either uninteresting or something we knew before. Second, the consequences must be dramatic: The unification must lead quickly to new insights and hypothesis, becoming the engine that drives progress in understanding. But there is a third factor that trumps both of these. A good unified theory must offer predictions that no one would have thought to make before. It may even suggest new kinds of experiments that make sense only in light of the new theory. Most important of all, the predictions must be confirmed by experiment. These three criteria-surprise, new insights, and new predictions confirmed by experiment-are what we will be looking for when we come to judge the promise of current efforts at unification.
”
”
Lee Smolin (The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next)
“
We tried a number of single-threaded efforts to meet the challenge. We rolled out features one after another, such as a recommendation engine for people that our users should meet and a professional Q&A service. None of them worked well enough to solve the problem. We concluded that the problem might require a Swiss Army knife approach with multiple use cases for multiple groups of users. After all, some people might want a news feed, some might want to track their career progress, and some might be keen on continuing education. Fortunately, LinkedIn had grown to the point where the organization could support multiple threads. We reorganized the product team so that each director of product could focus on a different approach to address engagement. Even though none of those efforts alone proved a silver bullet, the overall combination of them significantly improved user engagement.
”
”
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
I would choose you." The words were out before he thought better of them, and there was no way to pull them back.
Silence stretched between them. Perhaps the floor will open and I'll plummet to my death, he thought hopefully.
"As your general?" Her voice careful. She was offering him a chance to right the ship, to take them back to familiar waters.
And a fine general you are.
There could be no better leader.
You may be prickly, but that's what Ravka needs.
So many easy replies.
Instead he said, "As my queen."
He couldn't read her expression. Was she pleased? Embarrassed? Angry? Every cell in his body screamed for him to crack a joke, to free both of them from the peril of the moment. But he wouldn't. He was still a privateer, and he'd come too far.
"Because I'm a dependable soldier," she said, but she didn't sound sure. It was the same cautious, tentative voice, the voice of someone waiting for a punch line, or maybe a blow. "Because I know all of your secrets."
"I do trust you more than myself sometimes- and I think very highly of myself."
Hadn't she said there was no one else she'd choose to have her back in a fight?
But that isn't the whole truth, is it, you great cowardly lump. To hell with it. They might all die soon enough. They were safe here in the dark, surrounded by the hum of engines.
"I would make you my queen because I want you. I want you all the time."
She rolled on to her side, resting her head on her folded arm. A small movement, but he could feel her breath now. His heart was racing. "As your general, I should tell you that would be a terrible decision."
He turned on to his side. They were facing each other now. "As your king, I should tell you that no one could dissuade me. No prince and no power could make me stop wanting you."
Nikolai felt drunk. Maybe unleashing the demon had loosed something in his brain. She was going to laugh at him. She would knock him senseless and tell him he had no right. But he couldn't seem to stop.
"I would give you a crown if I could," he said. "I would show you the world from the prow of a ship. I would choose you, Zoya. As my general, as my friend, as my bride. I would give you a sapphire the size of an acorn." He reached in to his pocket. "And all I would ask in return is that you wear this damnable ribbon in your hair on our wedding day."
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the coil of blue velvet ribbon resting in his palm.
Then she pulled back her hand, cradling her fingers as if they'd been singed.
"You will wed a Taban sister who craves a crown," she said. "Or a wealthy Kerch girl, or maybe a Fjerdan royal. You will have heirs and a future. I'm not the queen Ravka needs."
"And if you're the queen I want?"...
She sat up, drew her knees in, wrapped her arms around them as if she would make a shelter of her own body. He wanted to pull her back down beside him and press his mouth to hers. He wanted her to look at him again with possibility in her eyes. "But that's not who I am. Whatever is inside me is sharp and gray as the thorn wood." She rose and dusted off her kefta. "I wasn't born to be a bride. I was made to be a weapon."
Nikolai forced himself to smile. It wasn't as if he'd offered her a real proposal. They both knew such a thing was impossible. And yet her refusal smarted just as badly as if he'd gotten on his knee and offered her his hand like some kind of besotted fool. It stung. All saints, it stung.
"Well," he said cheerfully, pushing up on his elbows and looking up at her with all the wry humour he could muster. "Weapons are good to have around too. Far more useful than brides and less likely to mope about the palace. But if you won't rule Ravka by my side, what does the future hold, General?"
Zoya opened the door to the Cargo hold.Light flooded in gilding her features when she looked back at him. "I'll fight on beside you. As your general. As your friend. Because whatever my failings, I know this. You are the king Ravka needs.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo
“
If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.
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Bill Bryson (One Summer: America, 1927)
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美国学历认证本科硕士MC学位【梅里马克学院毕业证成绩单办理】
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This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years. While the story of the QWERTY
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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[Hyun Song Shin] most accurately portrayed the state of the global economy.
'I'd like to tell you about the Millennium Bridge in London,' he began…'The bridge was opened by the queen on a sunny day in June,' Shin continued. 'The press was there in force, and many thousands of people turned up to savor the occasion. However, within moments of the bridge's opening, it began to shake violently.' The day it opened, the Millennium Bridge was closed. The engineers were initially mystified about what had gone wrong. Of course it would be a problem if a platoon of soldiers marched in lockstep across the bridge, creating sufficiently powerful vertical vibration to produce a swaying effect. The nearby Albert Bridge, built more than a century earlier, even features a sign directing marching soldiers to break step rather than stay together when crossing. But that's not what happened at the Millennium Bridge. 'What is the probability that a thousand people walking at random will end up walking exactly in step, and remain in lockstep thereafter?' Shin asked. 'It is tempting to say, 'Close to Zero' '
But that's exactly what happened. The bridge's designers had failed to account for how people react to their environment. When the bridge moved slightly under the feet of those opening-day pedestrians, each individual naturally adjusted his or her stance for balance, just a little bit—but at the same time and in the same direction as every other individual. That created enough lateral force to turn a slight movement into a significant one. 'In other words,' said Shin, 'the wobble of the bridge feeds on itself. The wobble will continue and get stronger even though the initial shock—say, a small gust of wind—had long passed…Stress testing on the computer that looks only at storms, earthquakes, and heavy loads on the bridge would regard the events on the opening day as a 'perfect storm.' But this is a perfect storm that is guaranteed to come every day.'
In financial markets, as on the Millennium Bridge, each individual player—every bank and hedge fund and individual investor—reacts to what is happening around him or her in concert with other individuals. When the ground shifts under the world's investors, they all shift their stance. And when they all shift their stance in the same direction at the same time, it just reinforces the initial movement. Suddenly, the whole system is wobbling violently.
Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King, Jean-Claude Trichet, and the other men and women at Jackson Hole listened politely and then went to their coffee break.
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Neil Irwin (The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire)
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The Model S also offered a way to fix issues in a manner that people had never before encountered with a mass-produced car. Some of the early owners complained about glitches like the door handles not popping out quite right or their windshield wipers operating at funky speeds. These were inexcusable flaws for such a costly vehicle, but Tesla typically moved with clever efficiency to address them. While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the Internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if magical elves had done the work. Tesla soon began showing off its software skills for jobs other than making up for mistakes. It put out a smartphone app that let people turn on their air-conditioning or heating from afar and to see where the car was parked on a map. Tesla also began installing software updates that imbued the Model S with new features. Overnight, the Model S sometimes got new traction controls for hilly and highway driving or could suddenly recharge much faster than before or possess a new range of voice controls. Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it. As Craig Venter, one of the earliest Model S owners and the famed scientist who first decoded man’s DNA, put it, “It changes everything about transportation. It’s a computer on wheels.” The
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
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our explosive growth was slowing down our pace of innovation. We were spending more time coordinating and less time building. More features meant more software, written and supported by more software engineers, so both the code base and the technical staff grew continuously. Software engineers were once free to modify any section of the entire code base to independently develop, test, and immediately deploy any new features to the website. But as the number of software engineers grew, their work overlapped and intertwined until it was often difficult for teams to complete their work independently. Each overlap created one kind of dependency, which describes something one team needs but can’t supply for itself. If my team’s work requires effort from yours—whether it’s to build something new, participate, or review—you’re one of my dependencies. Conversely, if your team needs something from mine, I’m a dependency of yours. Managing dependencies requires coordination—two or more people sitting down to hash out a solution—and coordination takes time. As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially. Regardless of what form it takes—and we’ll get into the different forms in more detail shortly—every dependency creates drag. Amazon’s growing number of dependencies delayed results, increased frustration, and disempowered teams.
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
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The existence of a transgender identity provides powerful evidence for this geno-developmental cascade. In an anatomical and physiological sense, sex identity is quite binary: just one gene governs sex identity, resulting in the striking anatomical and physiological dimorphism that we observe between males and females. But gender and gender identity are far from binary. Imagine a gene—call it TGY—that determines how the brain responds to SRY (or some other male hormone or signal). One child might inherit a TGY gene variant that is highly resistant to the action of SRY on the brain, resulting in a body that is anatomically male, but a brain that does not read or interpret that male signal. Such a brain might recognize itself as psychologically female; it might consider itself neither male or female, or imagine itself belonging to a third gender altogether. These men (or women) have something akin to a Swyer syndrome of identity: their chromosomal and anatomical gender is male (or female), but their chromosomal/anatomical state does not generate a synonymous signal in their brains. In rats, notably, such a syndrome can be caused by changing a single gene in the brains of female embryos or exposing embryos to a drug that blocks the signaling of “femaleness” to the brain. Female mice engineered with this altered gene or treated with this drug have all the anatomical and physiological features of femaleness, but perform the activities associated with male mice, including mounting females: these animals might be anatomically female, but they are behaviorally male.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
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I want you both to show me how much you know about each other,” he began. “I want you both to make me a collage.”
I looked at him for a moment. “A collage?” I asked. “Like, with magazine pictures and glue?”
“That’s exactly right,” Father Johnson replied. “And it doesn’t have to be large or elaborate; just use a piece of legal-size paper as the backdrop. I want you to fill it with pictures that represent all the things you know about the other person. Bring it to your session next week, and we’ll look at them together.”
This was an unexpected development.
I made the mistake of glancing at Marlboro Man, who I imagined had never felt more uncomfortable in his life than he did once he faced the prospect of sitting down and working with paper and glue in an effort to prove to someone else how much he knew about the woman he was going to marry. He tried to keep a straight face, to remain respectful, but I’d studied his beautiful features enough to know when things were going on under the surface. Marlboro Man had been such a good sport through our series of premarital training. And this--a collage assignment--was his reward.
I put on a happy face. “Well, that’ll be fun!” I said, enthusiastically. “We can sit down and do it together sometime this week…”
“No, no, no…,” Father Johnson scolded, waving his hands at me. “You can’t do it together. The whole point is to independently sit down and make the collage without the other person present.”
Father Johnson was awfully bossy.
We shook hands, promised to bring our assignments to the following week’s appointment, and made our way to the parking lot. Once out of the church doors, Marlboro Man swatted me.
“Ow!” I shrieked, feeling stung. “What was that for?”
“Just your Tuesday spanking,” Marlboro Man answered.
I smiled. I’d always loved Tuesdays.
We hopped in the pickup, and Marlboro Man started the engine. “Hey,” he said, turning to me. “Got any magazines I can borrow?” I giggled as Marlboro Man pulled away from the church. “I could use some glue, too,” he added. “I don’t think I have any at my house.
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Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
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SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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I am assured that this is a true story. A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed. “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?” “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.” “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.” “Well, pardon me, friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.” The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup. I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text. Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of
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Bill Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away)
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I’ve been discussing elite attitudes toward democracy. I sketched a line from the first democratic revolution, with its fear and contempt for the rascal multitude who were asking for ridiculous things like universal education, health care, and democratization of law, wanting to be ruled by countrymen like themselves who know the people’s sores, not by knights and gentlemen who just oppress them. From there to the second major democratic revolution establishing the US Constitution, which was, as discussed last time, a Framers’ Coup, the title of the main scholarly work, a coup by elites that the author describes as a conservative counterrevolution against excessive democracy. On to the twentieth century and such leading progressive theorists of democracy as Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and their conception that the public has to be put in its place. They’re spectators, not participants. The responsible men, the elite, have to be protected from the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd, who have to be kept in line with necessary illusions, emotionally potent oversimplifications, and, in general, engineering of consent, which has become a gigantic industry devoted to some aspects of the task, while responsible intellectuals take care of others. The men of best quality through the ages have to be self-indoctrinated, as Orwell discussed. They must internalize the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. It must be so fully internalized that it becomes as routine as taking a breath. What else could anyone possibly believe? As long as all of this is in place, the system functions properly, with no crises. This picture, I think, captures crucial features of thought control in the more free societies, but it is misleading in essential ways. Most importantly, it largely omitted the constant popular struggles to extend the range of democracy, with many successes. Even in the last generation, there have been quite substantial successes. Such successes typically lead to a reaction. Those with power and privilege don’t relinquish it easily. The neoliberal period that we’re now enduring, long in planning, is such a reaction.
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Noam Chomsky (Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance)
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As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyse it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature? To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system. The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scaleable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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How to choose a best website development company
RNS IT Solutions is the best Software development company.
When choosing a development company for your website, it is very important not only to look at the price, but also the quality of the work you hope to obtain and it is that a good Web of quality, realized of the hand of good engineers who have been working in the sector for years, can make you recover the investment in a short time and generate great benefits in the long term. Of course, to have a quality website the initial investment will probably be greater than you expect and maybe right now you think that the web you need does not require much quality, or a lot of work, but stop to think for a moment and consider the possibility that you are totally wrong, because that may depend on the future of your company as well as Web Development company India.The image that you want to transmit to the clients of the same one and the investment that you will have to do in the web once developed.
With all this I do not mean that you have to ask for a loan from the bank to pay for the web. If the project you have in mind takes more work than you initially thought and the budget is out of your expectations, you can always limit and remove features that are dispensable. In this way you can publish the Web as soon as possible, so that once the initial investment is amortized, you can continue investing in adding those features that were left in the background.
There are few Web Development Company In India hat right now could not survive, if they were not involved in the online world and it costs much less to make you a quality professional website, with a higher initial investment, to make you a website on which you have to invest, and then large amounts in development and consulting to correct deficiencies initially not contemplated. In the worst case, a bad development, may even force you to throw all the code of the web to the trash, to have to start from scratch.
But what is quality of Web Development Services India? Let's see the characteristics that a website must have in order to be considered quality and professional:
In any development project, meetings are always held to develop an initial analysis, gathering all the requirements and objectives of the web that the client wants. At this point you should have a proactive attitude, proposing functionalities that could be interesting or alternative ideas that we know can generate good results.
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RNSITSOLUTIONS.COM
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There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.)
Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide.
When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.
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Bianca Bosker (Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste)
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Danny and the Memories was the band at the root of Crazy Horse. They were a vocal group with Danny Whitten, Ralphie, Billy, and a guy named Ben Rocco. When I recently saw their old video of "Land of a Thousand Dances" on You-Tube, I realized that is is truly the shit. You know, I looked at it maybe twenty times in a row. Even though Danny was amazing and he held the Horse together in the early days, I did not know how great Danny was until I saw this! The moves! What an amazing dancer he was. His presence on that performance is elevating! He is gone, and no one can change that. We will never see and hear where he was going. I am telling you, the world missed one of the greatest when Danny and the Memories did not have a NUMBER ONE smash record back in the day. They were so musical, with great harmonies, and Danny was a total knockout! I am so moved by this that it could make me cry at any time. This is one of those many times when words can't describe the music.
Danny and the Memories eventually transformed into the Rockets; they were playing in this old house in Laurel Canyon, and I somehow connected with them while Buffalo Springfield was at the Whiskey. We had a lot of pots jams in the house. Later on I saw Danny and the guys at somebody's house in Topanga. After that I asked if Danny, Billy, and Ralphie would play on a record with me. We did one day, practicing in my Topanga house, and it sounded great. I named the band Crazy Horse and away we went. The Rockets were still together, but this was a different deal.
At that time, I thought Danny was a great guitarist and singer. I had no idea how great, though. I just was too full of myself to see it. Now I see it clearly. I wish I could do that again, because more of Danny would be there.
I have made an Early Daze record of the Horse, and you can hear a different vocal of "Cinnamon Girl" featuring more of Danny. He was singing the high part and it came through big-time. I changed it so I sang the high part and put that out. That was a big mistake. I fucked up. I did not know who Danny was. He was better than me. I didn't see it. I was strong, and maybe I helped destroy something sacred by not seeing it. He was never pissed off about it. I wasn't like that. I was young, and maybe I didn't know what I was doing. Some things you wish never happened. But we got what we got.
I never really saw him a sing and move until I saw that "Land of a Thousand Dances" video. I could watch it over and over. I can't believe it. It's just one of those things. My heart aches for what happened to him. These memories are what make Crazy Horse great today. And now we don't have Briggs, either, for the next record, but we have the spirit and the heart to go on. And we have John Hanlong, taught by Briggs, to engineer this sucker. It will rock and cry. Please let's get to this before life comes knocking again.
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Neil Young (Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream)
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The Smart Way to Build a Buy Verified Naver Accounts
Meta Description:
Looking to buy verified Naver accounts? Learn the reasons people seek them, the associated risks, and smarter, legal alternatives to succeed on Naver.
Buy Verified Naver Accounts: A Complete Guide for Marketers, Businesses & Global Users
As South Korea’s leading online platform, Naver is far more than just a search engine. With services ranging from blogging (Naver Blog), social communities (Naver Café), and news aggregation to email, Webtoon, and e-commerce, it’s no surprise that many people around the world want access to Naver.
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Buying Verified Naver Accounts
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Businessworld
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The technosphere is described here as if neither history nor social or political dynamics mattered. It does not take into account collective agency or political, economic, and social structures, let alone the evolution of knowledge with its powerful impact on shaping technological systems. Has human technology now reached a stage (or will it any time soon) at which it attains the autonomy of an organism with its own agency - an autopoietic structure reproducing its own organization? Such generalizations tend to overlook some essential features of human interaction with the global environment.
For instance, while the biosphere has proven its resilience over the course of at least 3.5 billion years of evolution, the technosphere may turn out to be a rather fragile scaffolding for human existence. While it is quite conceivable that the sum total of the unintended consequences of our actions has developed its own dynamics, even in the age of the Anthropocene escape routes may still be left to us - an observation, however, that does not imply, vice versa, that there will be a guarantee for the existence of an escape route. It rather appears that the dynamics underlying the Anthropocene might well enhance both the challenges with which we are confronted and our opportunities to react to them, leaving the question open as to whether the latter will always be sufficient to match the former. Is it possible, for instance, that geoengineering can intervene in the planetary system to the point that a new state of the planetary system would be reached in which high carbon dioxide concentration, radioactive pollution, and other unintended consequences of industrialization are no longer challenging problems but can be safely kept under control by novel technologies? Given the fact that macro-scale interventions in the Earth system are beyond anything that human engineering has achieved so far, and given the fact that there are still important gaps in our knowledge about our planetary system, we are certainly on the safer side to prioritize, at least for the time being and to the extent that it is possible at all, the preservation of our existing Earth system and damage control.
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Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
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Truth be told, GX Smartwatch was worked in under supervision of great engineers. That is the reason you can appreciate some extraordinary features like coordinated versatile help, area GPS following, cautions for meds and Wi-Fi.In the modern-day, health smartwatches aren’t worth considering if they don’t give you all the latest technology on your wrist. Thankfully, times have changed to make them more affordable so you can use them to check your health as well as arrange meetings.The impressive GX SmartWatch ensures you can keep up to date with your loved ones, business partners and check your wellbeing. That’s just the tip of the iceberg
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GX SmartWatch
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According to Aza Raskin, the smartphone’s infinite scroll feature (which allows us to swipe down continuously without clicking) was deliberately built to be habit-forming. He should know. He’s the engineer who created it.
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Dave Rubin (Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason)
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engage in development tasks, because the service basically runs and repairs itself: we want systems that are automatic, not just automated. In practice, scale and new features keep SREs on their toes.
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Betsy Beyer (Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems)
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● Pursuing online courses with pre-recorded videos?
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● Online lectures seem boring and disengaging?
Not anymore. Technology has been able to advance an already transformative concept. Online learning has made its way into almost every professional’s career life. However, there is a new concept which not many people are aware of - LIVE & interactive learning. As the name suggests, it’s just like traditional classroom learning but entirely online.
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LIVE & interactive learning entails experienced tutors and instructors delivering lectures via LIVE online learning platforms that are built with features to aid in engaging educational learnings. Furthermore, Online Courses are delivered in a similar format that is found in a traditional classroom. With interactivity, teachers can not only deliver lectures, take LIVE questions, and respond, but also the students can interact with one another - just like they would in a brick and mortar classroom.
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Instead of sitting through a pre-recorded lecture, you can now attend the session LIVE. And the best part about this type of learning is that both tutors and students can interact with each other, so query resolution is instant, students can voice out their thoughts, collaboration becomes easy, and the face-to-face interaction definitely makes it more interactive.
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Students pursuing LIVE & interactive online courses get the opportunity to learn at their own pace. They can discuss their questions in LIVE lectures and interact with the faculty as well.
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Ranging from Online Data Analytics Courses to finance, marketing, and sales, online courses allow students to involve themselves in class discussions and chat with more ease. This is just not possible in regular face-to-face interactions where teachers can ask questions and embarrass you in front of the entire class if you are wrong or don’t know the answer.
It’s Not a Roadblock, Rather an Accelerant to Your Career
The best part - you don’t have to leave your current job to pursue a degree program. Passion to gain knowledge and upskill and a search engine that will take you the right online course is all you need. So whether you are scouting for online data analytics courses, machine learning courses, or digital marketing, LIVE & interactive learning can help you gain the education you deserve.
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Talentedge
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3D Art Outsourcing & Game Art Design Companies By Game Art Outsourcing Studio
A 3D game art outsourcing company can outsource the game art to extra game developers. Game art is separated into two categories which are 2D and 3D game art. In 2D art outsourcing, game developers outsource their 2D oriented design to the game artists. 2D game artist focus in produce the thought as well as the texture of the game. 3D game artist deliberate on fabricating the animation of games; which include models and 3D environment. It is also potential to get a game art company that has artists who focus in both 2D and 3D game art. Game 3D Art Outsourcing company give lots of reward to game developers.
The major advantage is that game developers are able to delegate all their work to diverse companies so that the work get concluded in a very short length of time. This, therefore, make it feasible for a game developer to discharge a game in lesser phase of time. Time full in developing a game is very central since if the game take too long to be unconfined, technology worn in the game may quickly be out of manner. Hence, it is very significant for 3D Game Designer to outsource their gaming growth work to guarantee that all games are out in ideal occasion, i.e., while there is publicity in the market.
3D Game outsourcing company make it potential for a game developer to construct games of finest value. It is well-known by professional and while game developers rush with their work in arrange to try and cut the occasion really required in increasing a game, quality of the pastime is regrettably compromised. On the other pass, if they break down the labor into programming, art, level scheming and sound engineering, they can shun poverty of superiority. It is potential to outsource every work to the diverse team of game development company.
By receiving in touch with encoding and Art Outsourcing Studio game designers, it is probable to get the best entity for each part of game conniving. When the labour is outsourced, every section will have adequate time to focus in their area and once everything has been mutual together, a superb game is shaped. As a game developer, it is very significant to outsource your Game Art Design Company frequently. This is because hiring diverse game art designers make your games exclusively diverse each time.
This is incredibly significant if you want to market a game effectively because it must have amazing completely diverse to offer as compare to your previous games. For example, it should contain the upgrade of features that were liked by patrons who used last account. Doing that is very easy as you only require a long term game outsourcing company for your game art and design.
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GameYan
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Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept. It’s important to understand that the old approach did not lack customer feedback or customer involvement in the planning process. In the true spirit of genchi gembutsu, Intuit product managers (PMs) would do “follow-me-homes” with customers to identify problems to solve in the next release. However, the PMs were responsible for all the customer research. They would bring it back to the team and say, “This is the problem we want to solve, and here are ideas for how we could solve it.” Changing to a cross-functional way of working was not smooth sailing. Some team members were skeptical. For example, some product managers felt that it was a waste of time for engineers to spend time in front of customers. The PMs thought that their job was to figure out the customer issue and define what needed to be built. Thus, the reaction of some PMs to the change was: “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” Similarly, some on the engineering side just wanted to be told what to do; they didn’t want to talk to customers. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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The Model T was introduced on October 1, 1908. Its purchase price was $825. Breaking all records, the Model T sold over ten thousand copies in that first year. It had several distinctive features, like having the steering wheel on the left, which every other company soon copied. The entire engine and transmission were enclosed; there were four cylinders cast in a solid block, and two semi-elliptic springs were used for the suspension. Best of all, the car was easy to drive, simple to learn, and inexpensive to repair.
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Hourly History (Henry Ford: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Business Leaders))
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some of the crew ran amuck. One member of the engine watch attacked four of his companions with a wrench; another went into the ship’s kitchen and slashed himself with a paring knife. The assistant engineer leapt through a ’chute opening, after avowing that he preferred impalement to suffocation. He was impaled. It was horrible. Looking down Lawton could see his twisted body dangling on a crimson-stippled thornlike growth forty feet in height. Slashaway was standing at his elbow in that Waterloo moment, his rough-hewn features twitching. “I can’t stand it, sir. It’s driving me squirrelly.” “I know, Slashaway. There’s something worse than marijuana weed down there.” Slashaway swallowed hard. “That poor guy down there did the wise thing.” Lawton husked: “Stamp on that idea, Slashaway—kill it. We’re stronger than he was. There
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Frank Belknap Long (The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Megapack®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales)
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ENGINEERING ORGANIZATIONS OFTEN do the equivalent of spring cleaning. Everyone will stop working on new features for a week and fix bugs in the current product. Engineering teams are constantly tracking and evaluating bugs, so that they have a prioritized list to tackle when the so-called “fix-it” week comes around. A bug fix-it week is sort of the opposite of a Hack Week; instead of a chance to work on new and exciting ideas people usually don’t have time to get to, it’s a chance to fix old and annoying problems that have been bothering people for months. It’s like cleaning out the utensil drawer into which you spilled a little honey three months ago but somehow never found the moment to take all the knives and forks out to scrub the bottom of the drawer properly. Fix-it weeks can be deeply satisfying in a totally different way from hack weeks.
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Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean (Expert Thinking))
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Human actions are based on imagination, belief, and faith, not on objective observation – as military and political experts know well. Even science, which claims its methods and theories are rationally developed, is shaped by emotion and fancy, or by fear. And to control human imagination is to shape mankind's collective destiny.
Beyond the question of the physical nature of the UFOs, it is imperative that we study the deeper problem of their impact on our imagination and culture. How the UFO phenomena will affect, in the long run, our views about science, about religion, about the exploration of space, is impossible to measure. But the phenomenon does appear to have a real effect. And a peculiar feature of this mechanism is that it affects equally those who "believe" and those who oppose its reality in a physical sense.
For the time being, the observation can be made that it is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes the details of which are adapted to the culture and symbols of a particular time and place.
Could the meetings with UFO entities be designed to control our beliefs? Consider their changing character. In the United States, they appear as science fiction monsters. In South America, they are sanguinary and quick to get into a fight. In France, they behave like rational, Cartesian, peace-loving tourists. The Irish Gentry, if we believe its spokesmen, was an aristocratic race organized somewhat like a religious-military order. The airship pilots were strongly individualistic characters with all the features of the American farmer.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
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A long gestation period of intense thinking about the problem may result in a solution, or else the temporary abandonment of the problem. This temporary abandonment is a common feature of many great creative acts. The monomaniacal pursuit often does not work; the temporary dropping of the idea sometimes seems to be essential to let the subconscious find a new approach. Then comes the moment of “insight,” creativity, or whatever you want to call it—you see the solution. Of course, it often happens that you are wrong; a closer examination of the problem shows the solution is faulty, but might be saved by some suitable revision. But maybe the problem needs to be altered to fit the solution! That has happened! More usually it is back to the drawing board, as they say, more mulling things over. The false starts and false solutions often sharpen the next approach you try. You now know how not to do it! You have a smaller number of approaches left to explore. You have a better idea of what will not work and possibly why it will not work.
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Richard Hamming (The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn)
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Here, Veblen’s iconoclasm showed its range, as he simultaneously exposed modern corporations as hives of swarming parasites, derided marginalism for disingenuously sanitizing these infested sites by rebranding nonproductivity as productivity, and attacked economists for failing to situate themselves historically. On Veblen’s account, the business enterprise was no more immune from historical change than any other economic institution. As the controlling force in modern civilization, the business enterprise too would necessarily undergo “natural decay” and prove “transitory.” Where history was heading next, however, Veblen felt he could not say, because no teleology was steering the evolutionary process as a whole, only (as he had said before) the “discretionary action of the human agents,” whose institutionally shaped choices were still unformed. Nevertheless, limiting himself to the “calculable future”—to what, in light of existing scientific knowledge, seemed probable in the near term—Veblen pointed to two contrasting possibilities, both beyond the ken of productivity theories.
One alternative was militarization and war—barbarism redux. According to Veblen, the business enterprise, as its grows, spills over national boundaries and fosters the expansion of a world market in which “the business men of one nation are pitted against those of another and swing“the forces of the state, legislative, diplomatic, and military, against one another in the strategic game of pecuniary advantage.” As this game intensifies, competing nations rush (said Veblen presciently) to amass military hardware that can easily fall under the control of political leaders who embrace aggressive international policies and “warlike aims, achievements, [and] spectacles.” Unchecked, these developments could, he believed, demolish “those cultural features that distinguish modern times from what went before, including a decline of the business enterprise itself.” (In his later writings from the World War I period, Veblen returned to these issues.)
The second future possibility was socialism, which interested Veblen (for the time being) not only as an institutional alternative to the business enterprise but also as a way of economic thinking that nullified the productivity theory of distribution. In cycling back to the phenomenon of socialism, which he had bracketed in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen zeroed in on men and women who held industrial occupations, in which he observed a growing dissatisfaction with the bedrock institutions of the modern age. This discontent was socially concentrated, found not so much among laborers who were “mechanical auxiliaries”—manual extensions—“of the machine process“ but “among those industrial classes who are required to comprehend and guide the processes.” These classes consist of “the higher ranks of skilled mechanics and [of people] who stand in an engineering or supervisory ”“relation to the processes.” Carrying out these jobs, with their distinctive task requirements, inculcates “iconoclastic habits of thought,” which draw men and women into trade unions and, as a next step, “into something else, which may be called socialism, for want of a better term.”
This phrasing was vague even for Veblen, but he felt hamstrung because “there was little agreement among socialists as to a programme for the future,” at least aside from provisions almost “entirely negative.
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Charles Camic (Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics)
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Jana Ann Bridal Couture San Diego Wedding Dress Styles
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Valujet flight 592 crashed after takeoff from Miami airport because oxygen generators in its cargo hold caught fire. The generators had been loaded onto the airplane by employees of a maintenance contractor, who were subsequently prosecuted. The editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology “strongly believed the failure of SabreTech employees to put caps on oxygen generators constituted willful negligence that led to the killing of 110 passengers and crew. Prosecutors were right to bring charges. There has to be some fear that not doing one’s job correctly could lead to prosecution.”13 But holding individuals accountable by prosecuting them misses the point. It shortcuts the need to learn fundamental lessons, if it acknowledges that fundamental lessons are there to be learned in the first place. In the SabreTech case, maintenance employees inhabited a world of boss-men and sudden firings, and that did not supply safety caps for expired oxygen generators. The airline may have been as inexperienced and under as much financial pressure as people in the maintenance organization supporting it. It was also a world of language difficulties—not only because many were Spanish speakers in an environment of English engineering language: “Here is what really happened. Nearly 600 people logged work time against the three Valujet airplanes in SabreTech’s Miami hangar; of them 72 workers logged 910 hours across several weeks against the job of replacing the ‘expired’ oxygen generators—those at the end of their approved lives. According to the supplied Valujet work card 0069, the second step of the seven-step process was: ‘If the generator has not been expended install shipping cap on the firing pin.’ This required a gang of hard-pressed mechanics to draw a distinction between canisters that were ‘expired’, meaning the ones they were removing, and canisters that were not ‘expended’, meaning the same ones, loaded and ready to fire, on which they were now expected to put nonexistent caps. Also involved were canisters which were expired and expended, and others which were not expired but were expended. And then, of course, there was the simpler thing—a set of new replacement canisters, which were both unexpended and unexpired.”14 These were conditions that existed long before the Valujet accident, and that exist in many places today. Fear of prosecution stifles the flow of information about such conditions. And information is the prime asset that makes a safety culture work. A flow of information earlier could in fact have told the bad news. It could have revealed these features of people’s tasks and tools; these longstanding vulnerabilities that form the stuff that accidents are made of. It would have shown how ‘human error’ is inextricably connected to how the work is done, with what resources, and under what circumstances and pressures.
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Sidney Dekker (The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error)
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I flew home with Iran Air, which gave me six and a half hours to truly appreciate the impact of the international sanctions first hand. The scratchy seat fabric, cigarette-burned plastic washbasins and whiff of engine oil throughout the cabin reminded me of late seventies coach travel, which was probably the last time these planes had had a facelift. I tried to convince myself that Iran Air had prioritised the maintenance of engines and safety features over the interior decor but I wasn’t convinced, especially when the seatbelt refused to budge. The in-flight entertainment had certainly been spared an upgrade, consisting of one small television at the front of the plane showing repeat screenings of a gentle propaganda film featuring chador-clad women gazing at waterfalls and flowers with an appropriately tinkly soundtrack. The stewardesses’ outfits were suitably dreary too. Reflecting Iran Air’s status as the national carrier of the Islamic Republic, they were of course modest to the point of unflattering, with not a single glimpse of neck or hair visible beneath the military style cap and hijab. As we took off, I examined my fellow passengers. Nobody was praying and as soon as we were airborne, every female passenger removed her headscarf without ceremony.
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Lois Pryce (Revolutionary Ride: On the Road in Search of the Real Iran)
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Christian Sia 5-Star Review
"AI Beast by Shawn Corey is a fascinating techno-thriller featuring AI technology and compelling characters. Professor Jon Edwards is a genius who intends to solve the problems of humanity, and this is the reason for creating Lex, an AI computer with incredible powers. While regulators are not sure of what she can do and despite the opposition from different quarters that Lex can be dangerous, the professor believes in its powers. Lex is supposed to be a rational, logical computer without emotions, capable of reproducing processes that can improve life. When she comes to life, she is incredibly powerful, but there is more to her than the professor has anticipated. After an accident, Jon awakens to the startling revelation that Lex might have a will of her own. What comes after is a compelling narrative with strong apocalyptic themes, intrigue, and a world that can either be run down or saved by an AI computer.
The novel is deftly plotted, superbly executed, and filled with characters that are not only sophisticated but that are embodiments of religious symbolism. While Lex manipulates reality and alters the minds of characters in mysterious ways, there are relationships that are well crafted. Readers will appreciate the relationship between the quantum computer science student Nigel and the professor and the professor's affair with his mother. While the narrative is brilliantly executed and permeated with realism, it explores the theme of Armageddon in an intelligent manner. AI Beast is gripping, a story with twisty plot points and a setting that transports readers beyond physical realities. The prose is wonderful, hugely descriptive, and the conflict is phenomenal. A page-turner that reflects Shawn Corey's great imagination and research.
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Shawn Corey
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Offline-first is not just a feature, it’s a mindset. It’s about building resilient systems that empower users, no matter their connection status.
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Akshat Paul (Serverless Web Applications with AWS Amplify: Build Full-Stack Serverless Applications Using Amazon Web Services)
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A product manager follows a product through its lifecycle, working with engineers and marketers alike to identify strengths, narrow in on which features could use refinement, and analyze data to determine the best possible audience.
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Nikki Elizabeth (Poor Vinnie's Valor (Industrialized, #0))
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On the positive side, perhaps the best example of a creative and (potentially) helpful use of AI is Chat2024, an AI-powered chatbot that serves as a stand-in for each candidate. This gives any visitor to Chat2024.com the ability to ask any candidate any question you want. Through the site, you can carry on a conversation with each candidate just as you’d engage a friend over any other messaging app. The AI has been programmed with everything it needs to field any question, even answering in the voice, tone, and attitude of each candidate (mostly).
The company behind Chat2024 is also developing a voice feature that will allow people to engage in a voice conversation with each candidate’s AI avatar, which will have a voice eerily close to the real thing.
I tried Chat2024 soon after it launched, and the results were interesting, to say the least. I can see some real value here for voter education … but I can also see how tools like this could go horribly wrong. We’ve opened a Pandora’s Box, and there’s no going back.
Obviously, the big potential danger with a tool like Chat2024 is that these answers are not actually coming from a candidate. The AI is using all the information at its disposal to approximate what it thinks the candidate would say in response to each question. But, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT and other AI-powered search engines knows, sometimes the AI is just … wrong. Sometimes, woefully so.
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Craig Huey (The Great Deception: 10 Shocking Dangers and the Blueprint for Rescuing The American Dream)
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When a Formula One car is pushed beyond its limits, it shuts down. A safety feature to protect the engine. My mind reached its limit; it’s shut down.
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Craig Stanland (Blank Canvas: How I Reinvented My Life after Prison)
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A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase “software engineering” shake their heads disapprovingly.
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Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
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Not only was the ship large, the Fitzgerald was also safe; she featured a well-equipped pilot house with the best equipment available, and her three holds were divided by 21 steel watertight hatches. In 1969, the company installed a bow thruster that improved the ship’s safety and maneuverability, and over the winter of 1971-72, she was modernized with oil burners to replace her coal-fired engines.
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Charles River Editors (The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald: The Loss of the Largest Ship on the Great Lakes)
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The integrated circuit made its debut before electronic society at the New York Coliseum on March 24, 1959. The occasion was the industry’s most important yearly get-together—the annual convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Texas Instruments had managed, in the nick of time, to turn out a few chips that had no flying wires, and there was a lavish display at the TI booth featuring the new “solid circuits.” There was also a lavish prediction (which we know today to have been a massive understatement) from TI’s president, who said that Jack Kilby’s invention would prove to be the most important and must lucrative technological development since the silicon transistor. Nonetheless, the new circuit-on-a-chip received a frosty reception.
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T.R. Reid (The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution)
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Switching over Entire Networks Part of why cherry picking can be dangerous for the incumbent is that the upstart networks can reach over and directly acquire an entire set of users who have been conveniently aggregated on your network. It’s just software, after all, and users can spread competitors within an incumbent’s network by using all the convenient communication and social tools. Airbnb is again an example of this. The company not only unbundled Craigslist and turned the shared rooms idea into an entire product, but they actually used Craiglist users to advertise Airbnb to other users. How? Early on, Airbnb added functionality so that when a host was done setting up their listing, they could publish it to Craigslist, with photos, details, and an “Interested? Got a question? Contact me here” link that drove Craigslist users back to Airbnb. These features were accomplished not by using APIs provided by Craigslist, but by reverse-engineering the platform and creating a bot to do it automatically—clever! I first wrote about this in 2012 on my blog, in a post titled “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” with this example in mind. By the time Craigslist decided it didn’t like this functionality and disabled it, months had passed and Airbnb had formed its atomic network. The same thing happened in the early days of social networks, when Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, and others grew on the back of email contacts importing from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and other mail clients. They used libraries like Octazen—later acquired by Facebook—to scrape contacts, helping the social networks grow and connect their users. At the time, these new social networks didn’t look like direct threats to email. They were operating within niche parts of messaging overall, focused on college and professional networks. It took several years for the email providers to shut down access after recognizing their importance. When an incumbent has its network cherry-picked, it’s extra painful along two dimensions: First, any network that is lost is unlikely to be regained, as anti-network effects kick back in. And second, the decline in market share hits doubly hard, which has implications for being able to raise money.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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To learn why bundling sometimes works, and other times doesn’t, I went to the source. I asked Brad Silverberg, who in his decade at Microsoft headed up some of the company’s most important product efforts—including the much-celebrated release of Windows 95, accelerating the franchise from $50 million to $3.5 billion, as well as all the early releases of Internet Explorer. He’s been a mentor of mine for years, having served on the board of a startup I founded years back. I interviewed Brad for The Cold Start Problem over videoconference; he was mostly retired and spending time with family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But his experience from the 1980s and ’90s has made him the definitive authority on this topic, and perhaps surprisingly, he’s skeptical of the power of bundling: Bundling a product is not the silver bullet everyone thinks. If it were that easy, the version 1.0 for Internet Explorer would have won, by simply bundling it with Windows. It didn’t—IE 1.0 only got to 3% or 4% market share, because it just wasn’t good enough yet. Bing is another example, when Microsoft wanted to get into search. It was the default search engine across the operating system, not just in Internet Explorer but also MSN and everywhere Microsoft could jam it. But it went nowhere. The distribution advantages don’t win when the product is inferior.91 Even if bundling gets you a lot of new users trying out a product, they won’t stick around if there’s a huge gap in features.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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In software development, engineers are often pressured to deliver features instead of fixing defects, addressing reliability issues, or working on internal improvement projects. As a result, so called “technical debt”§§ adds up, leading to more complex problems that are increasingly difficult to solve. Consequently, Marty Cagan, a product expert who has trained generations of product leaders on building software products that customers love, stresses the importance for product and engineering leaders to allocate at least 20% of engineering’s time to proactively fix issues before they snowball into catastrophic ones, such as having to “rewrite the entire codebase from scratch.
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Gene Kim (Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification)
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Third, and finally, Clara designated certain team members to clean up messes, such as “fixing bugs in real time.” She assigned other engineers to focus on developing new features and other promising solutions.
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Robert I. Sutton (The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder)
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As engineers now like to quip: Failure is a Feature.
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
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She might simply have done what Tekla did, and created versions of herself modified for certain traits associated with athleticism. Instead, having become fascinated by the odd detail in her genetic report, she had embarked on a program to reawaken the Neanderthal DNA that, or so she imagined, had been slumbering in her and her ancestors’ nuclei for tens of thousands of years. It was a somewhat insane idea, and in any case she didn’t have enough Neanderthal in her to make it feasible, but she did produce a race of people with vaguely Neanderthal-like features, and in later centuries the processes of Caricaturization, Isolation, and Enhancement—which had affected all the races to some extent—had wrought especially pronounced changes on this subrace. Gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth and sequenced before Zero, were put to use. Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wetware. The man sitting at the end of the table was the artificial product of breeding and of genetic engineering, but, had he been sent back in time to prehistoric Europe, he would have been indistinguishable, at least in his outward appearance, from genuine Neanderthals. The creation of the new race had happened incrementally, over centuries. By the time Neoanders existed it was too late to bother with the trifling ethical question of whether it was really a good thing to have created them. During their slow differentiation from the other races they had developed a history and a culture of their own, of which they were as proud as any other ethnic group. Not surprisingly, much of that history was about their relationship with Teklans, which was, as foreordained, largely combative. At its most simple-minded and stupidly reductionist bones, the Teklan side of the story was that Neoanders were dangerous ape-men brought into existence by a crazy Eve as a curse upon the other six races. The Neoander side had it that Teklans were what Hitler would have produced if he’d had genetic engineering labs, and that it was a damned good thing that Eve Aïda had had the foresight to produce a countervailing force of earthy, warm, but immensely strong and dangerous protectors. Much of this combative relationship had become irrelevant as the tactical landscape had become dominated by katapults and ambots, and physical strength had become less important to the outcome of fights. But the old primordial animus remained, and explained why Beled’s immediate response, upon entering a room that contained a Neoander, was to make himself ready for hand-to-hand combat. Doc chose to ignore this. If he even notices, Kath Two thought, but she was pretty sure Doc noticed everything. “Beled, Kath, I do not believe you have met Langobard.” It was a fairly common Aïdan name. “Bard for short,” Langobard offered. “Langobard, may I present Beled Tomov and Kath Amalthova Two.
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Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
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BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd,
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Searching for an ideal escape Dubai Tour Package From Bangalore? SurfNxt presents a selective Dubai Visit Bundle from Bangalore that guarantees a remarkable mix of current wonders, rich culture, and top notch extravagance. Whether you're an experience searcher, shopaholic, or somebody who loves to investigate engineering ponders, this bundle takes special care of a wide range of explorers. Here is a nitty gritty outline of what you can anticipate from the SurfNxt Dubai Visit Bundle.
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Dubai Tour Package From Bangalore
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What were they playing? All agree that the band featured light, cheerful music—ragtime, waltzes, and the comic songs that were then so popular in the London music halls. Survivors specifically recalled Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and a pretty English melody called “In the Shadows,” the big London hit of 1911. Colonel Gracie couldn’t remember the name of any tune, but he was sure the beat was lively to the end. Nevertheless, the Carpathia had no sooner reached New York than the story spread that the band went down playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The idea was so appealing that it instantly became part of the Titanic saga—as imperishable as the enduring love of the Strauses and the courage of the engineers who kept the lights burning to the final plunge. Yet doubts persist. In the first place, the whole point of the band playing was to keep the passengers’ spirits up, and light music seems best suited to that. As Colonel Gracie observed, “If ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ was one of the selections, I assuredly would have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death, and more likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding….
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Walter Lord (The Complete Titanic Chronicles: A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On (The Titanic Chronicles))
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The core product team at most modern tech companies is called the triad: Engineer (or Tech Lead), Designer, and Product Manager. Engineers are responsible for the technical solution. They'll plan the data structures and algorithms that will make things fast, scalable, and maintainable. They'll write the code and tests. Designers are responsible for the solution from the user experience perspective. What will it look like? What are the flows, screens, and buttons? They'll make mockups or prototypes of how the feature should work. Product managers are responsible for selecting and defining which problems the team is going to solve, then ensuring the team solves them. They'll define what success looks like, and plan how to get there.
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Jackie Bavaro (Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices To Become a Great Product Manager (Cracking the Interview & Career))
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As a result, anecdotes abound in the tech world about scientists, entrepreneurs, and inventors who study and train here but move to Silicon Valley or Austin or North Carolina, lured by climate and lifestyle and a more freewheeling atmosphere. Technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have branch offices in Cambridge, but are headquartered on the West Coast. To compete on a global scale, Bostonians need to claim their place in the global conversation. Friday marks a step in that direction. At a press conference at the Ragon Institute, The Boston Globe will join Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MGH in announcing HUBweek, a week-long festival of discussions and creative problem-solving scheduled for Oct. 3 to 10 of next year. It’s a collaborative effort to bring big ideas out from behind institutional walls. To draw participants from all over the nation, and the world, all four co-hosts are creating programming that will focus on game-changing science, technology, engineering, and art. The week will feature some central events, kicking off with a master class at Fenway Park.
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Anonymous
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Entz Media went after children as well. The sexualized and gender confused teen ranked highly on the demographics ladder. So did the impressionable tween. Television shows used exaggerated character types to encourage children and teenagers to label one another. Shows featured skaters, goths, gays, jocks, nerds, etc. Children and teenagers were encouraged to identify with one of the labels. Once an identity was embraced, corporations would then define the group's attributes and charge for compliance. Kid's programming was calculated to make them consume. Entertainment was no longer about story telling; it was story selling -- social engineering.
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Patrick Ord (The Curtain)
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Chuck Rossi, Director of Release Engineering at Facebook, described, “All the code supporting every feature we’re planning to launch over the next six months has already been deployed onto our production servers. All we need to do is turn it on.
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Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations)
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Writing and repairing software generally takes far more time and is far more expensive than initially anticipated. “Every feature that is added and every bug that is fixed,” Edward Tenner points out, “adds the possibility of some new and unexpected interaction between parts of the program.”19 De Jager concurs: “If people have learned anything about large software projects, it is that many of them miss their deadlines, and those that are on time seldom work perfectly. … Indeed, on-time error-free installations of complex computer systems are rare.”20 Even small changes to code can require wholesale retesting of entire software systems. While at MIT in the 1980s, I helped develop some moderately complex software. I learned then that the biggest problems arise from bugs that creep into programs during early stages of design. They become deeply embedded in the software’s interdependent network of logic, and if left unfixed can have cascading repercussions throughout the software. But fixing them often requires tracing out consequences that have metastasized in every direction from the original error. As the amount of computer code in our world soars (doubling every two years in consumer products alone), we need practical ways to minimize the number of bugs. But software development is still at a preindustrial stage—it remains more craft than engineering. Programmers resemble artisans: they handcraft computer code out of basic programming languages using logic, intuition, and pattern-recognition skills honed over years of experience.
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Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?)
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The dance took place on a viewpoint level of Tower Four. Each hour, the whole floor would make a single revolution, so couples at tables could see both the city and the ocean. This was by far its lowest-tech feature. The Synth-Bio Club had engineered all manner of plants and animals just for the occasion: grabby little tentacular vines that climbed up the walls, twirling maple keys that danced and spun in the air like pixies and spiralled up from whatever surface they touched, butterflies that dampened signal by flapping their Faraday wings.
None of the students really noticed. They were too busy miming anal on the dance floor.
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Madeline Ashby (Company Town)
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Harvard economist Theodore Levitt was the first authority to write about what he called the total product.2 A total product has four dimensions that marketers, executives, and support people need to understand if they want customers to appreciate the value of what they are selling: 1.Generic What your product is — software, a suitcase, etc. 2.Expected The essential features and benefits the product must provide, e.g., a refrigerator has to cool food. 3.Value-Added Features and benefits that exceed customer expectations. 4.Potential Future enhancements to value based on what customers want. Levitt’s thinking was daring but limited because it focused on features and benefits but not the overall customer experience. Then in 1999, Geoffrey A. Moore took Levitt’s ideas to the next logical level with his book, Crossing the Chasm. According to Moore, the way to create a “whole” product is to think through both your customer’s problems and solutions. It’s not enough to address the core product — you have to think about everything needed to get your customer from consideration to an imperative to buy. This can be everything from the installation of the product to training to procedural standards to integrations, whether they are provided by your company or achieved using partners.3 “The product is the complete experience and the relationship you and the customer share.” Moore moved beyond features and benefits — bigger iPhones with higher camera resolution — to something else: Being the solution to customers’ problems. Doing that requires more than visionary engineers and brilliant designers. It means getting to know your customers, learning what they care about, and learning to care about them. That’s why Moore is the grandfather of the CPE.
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Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
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Split testing often uncovers surprising things. For example, many features that make the product better in the eyes of engineers and designers have no impact on customer behavior.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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For it to be successful, the architect must • remember that the builder has the inventive and creative responsibility for the implementation; so the architect suggests, not dictates; • always be prepared to suggest a way of implementing anything he specifies, and be prepared to accept any other way that meets the objectives as well; • deal quietly and privately in such suggestions; • be ready to forego credit for suggested improvements. Normally the builder will counter by suggesting changes to the architecture. Often he is right—some minor feature may have unexpectedly large costs when the implementation is worked out.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas: 1. Results against objectives Once you’ve set a high standard, it will be straightforward to measure your executive against that standard. 2. Management Even if an executive does a superb job achieving her goals, that doesn’t mean she is building a strong and loyal team. It’s important to understand how well she is managing, even if she is hitting her goals. 3. Innovation It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future. For example, a great way for an engineering manager to hit her goals for features and dates is by building a horrible architecture, which won’t even support the next release. This is why you must look beyond the black-box results and into the sausage factory to see how things get made. 4. Working with peers This may not be intuitive at first, but executives must be effective at communicating, supporting, and getting what they need from the other people on your staff. Evaluate them along this dimension.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, re-evaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds. If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. It’s such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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In the current business scenario, it is imperative for all the business persons to take efficient Backup Thunderbird Mac so that they don’t have to lose their precious data permanently due to various security hazards. So, if you are also looking for an alternative for doing so, then Inventpure’s Mail Backup X is the best solution for you. This tool has an incremental backup system which means that it is smart enough to skip those files whose backup has been taken in the previous mail backup proceedings. Moreover, there will be no repetition of the data and users can locate them with complete ease. Also, the tool works independently as it is based on high-level automation which can accomplish the entire task automatically by itself. Users don’t have to participate in the software while backup proceedings are going on.
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This email backup software has advanced data conversion engine that is mostly used by professional conversion tools. Through this, users can convert any mail to any file format that is supported by almost all the major email clients. It will come up with complete, appropriate and 100% accurate results with zero file damages. Thus, users do not need to purchase additional data converter; Mail Backup X can flawlessly restore their email archives in the format of their choice without any compatibility issues.
• Mail Backup X Come Up With Advanced Emailing Services Which Makes Your Thunderbird Email Backup Process A Piece Of Cake:
Inventpure’s Mail Backup X not only takes mail backups from all the major email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc. but also supports IMAP and POP services by directly operating on your Mac system. More than that, it can save your emails in PDF format for quick conversion from soft copies into hard copies.
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Maddy Roby
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The fullest account we have of Oannes is found in surviving fragments of the works of a Babylonian priest called Berossos who wrote in the third century BC. [...] Oannes did not do his work alone but was supposedly the leader of a group of beings known as the Seven Apkallu--the "Seven Sages"--who were said to have lived "before the flood" (a cataclysmic global deluge features prominently in many Mesopotamian traditions, including those of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon). Alongside Oannes, these sages are portrayed as bringers of civilization who, in the most ancient past, gave humanity a moral code, arts, crafts and agriculture and taught them architectural, building and engineering skills.
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Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
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The logistic models suggest that purchases of information technology have a further 20 years or more until they approach saturation. This would mean that information technology would have taken around 70 years to work its way through the consumption and production features of the economy. This is similar to the time taken for the adoption of the automobile and of electricity, the growth engines of the first two thirds of the 20th century.
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Edward A. Hudson (Economic Growth: How it works and how it transformed the world)
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You know, we’re struggling, too. We’ve never had so many problems hitting our ship dates. My engineers keep getting pulled off of feature development to handle escalations when things break. And deployments keep taking longer and longer. What used to take ten minutes to deploy starts taking an hour. Then a full day, then an entire weekend, then four days. I’ve even got some deployments that are now taking over a week to complete.
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Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)