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How can I shut down
If you don't open up??
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Ana Claudia Antunes (Pierrot & Columbine (The Pierrot´s Love Book 1))
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feedback should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor. Indeed, the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning,
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
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Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.
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Donella H. Meadows
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What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life.
This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable.
With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g., in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food, shelter). I call this the “space-time theory of consciousness,
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth's interior all the way into the sky and back.
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Craig Childs (Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth)
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Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy. If
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
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Paying attention to customer feedback includes looking back over the data, as well as listening in real-time. Show your customers you hear them when they take the time to speak to you.
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Oscar Auliq-Ice (Happy Customers)
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The strength of a balancing feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too. A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all the windows and its corrective power is no match for the temperature change imposed on the system. Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until sonar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to catch the last fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes global regulations necessary.
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Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
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We fail to take responsibility, to act productively in the interest of ourselves and others. And in our attempts at a better life, we are often severely limited or thwarted by the immature and socially inept behavior of ourselves and others. There is a great fabric of relations, behaviors and emotions, reverberating with human and animal bliss and suffering, a web of intimate and formal relations, both direct and indirect. Nasty whirlwinds of feedback cycles blow through this great multidimensional web, pulsating with hurt and degradation. My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds. They will follow you all of your life—I will be your daughter’s abusive boyfriend, your belligerent neighbor from hell. And you will never grow wings because there will always be mean bosses, misunderstanding families and envious friends. And you will tell yourself that is how life must be. But it is not how life has to be. Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to collapse into a heap of atrocities.
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Hanzi Freinacht (The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One)
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We are part of a feedback loop that links our conscious acts to the conscious response of the field. In keeping with Heisenberg’s implication, the universe presents the face that the observer is looking for, and when she looks for a different face, the universe changes its mask.
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Deepak Chopra (How Consciousness Became the Universe: Quantum Physics, Cosmology, Relativity, Evolution, Neuroscience, Parallel Universes)
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When one combines the new insights gained from studying far-from-equilibrium states and nonlinear processes, along with these complicated feedback systems, a whole new approach is opened that makes it possible to relate the so-called hard sciences to the softer sciences of life—and perhaps even to social processes as well. (Such findings have at least analogical significance for social, economic or political realities. Words like “revolution,” “economic crash,” “technological upheaval,” and “paradigm shift” all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by Order Out of Chaos.
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Ilya Prigogine (Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (Radical Thinkers))
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Big data is based on the feedback economy where the Internet of Things places sensors on more and
more equipment. More and more data is being generated as medical records are digitized, more stores have loyalty cards to track consumer purchases, and people are wearing health-tracking devices. Generally, big data is more about looking at behavior, rather than monitoring transactions, which is the domain of traditional relational databases. As the cost of storage is dropping, companies track more and more data to look for patterns and build predictive models".
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Neil Dunlop
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spouse. Make sure it relates to your primary love language and will help replenish your empty tank. 3. When your spouse responds and meets your need, you will be able to react with not only your will but your emotions as well. Without overreacting, continue positive feedback and affirmation of your spouse at these times. 4. As your marriage begins to truly heal and grow deeper, make sure you don’t “rest on your laurels” and forget your spouse’s love language and daily needs. You’re on the road to your dreams, so stay there! Put appointments into your schedule to assess together how you’re doing. A Personal Word Well, what do you think? Having
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Gary Chapman (The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts)
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The ways this separation manifests itself negatively are immense: We can’t work with other people if we’ve put up walls. We can’t improve the world if we don’t understand it or ourselves. We can’t take or receive feedback if we are incapable of or uninterested in hearing from outside sources. We can’t recognize opportunities—or create them—if instead of seeing what is in front of us, we live inside our own fantasy. Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion. How are we supposed to reach, motivate, or lead other people if we can’t relate to their needs—because we’ve lost touch with our own?
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Ryan Holiday (Ego Is the Enemy)
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they feel ignored, unappreciated, and unloved. That’s because their context-blind Aspie family members are so poor at empathic reciprocity. As we have learned, we come to know ourselves in relation to others. This doesn’t just apply when children are developing self-esteem. Throughout our lifespan, we continue to weave and re-weave the context of our lives, based on the interactions we have with our friends, coworkers, neighbors and loved ones. This is why it is so important for an NT parent/partner to get feedback from their spouse. A smile, a hug, a kind word, a note of encouragement: These are messages that reinforce the NT’s self-esteem and contribute to a healthy reciprocity in the relationship. Without these daily reminders from their loved ones, NTs can develop some odd defense mechanisms. One is to become psychologically invisible to others and even to themselves.
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Kathy J. Marshack (Out of Mind - Out of Sight : Parenting with a Partner with Asperger Syndrome (ASD) ("ASPERGER SYNDROME" & Relationships: (Five books to help you reclaim, refresh, and perhaps save your life) Book 3))
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with friends at a local coffee shop Posting comments on discussion boards rather than communicating face to face in social settings Conversing via e-mails and text messages rather than phone conversations Being a part of anonymous online support groups rather than attending local support group meetings Cybersnooping friends' profiles rather than getting to know them personally Of course, some of these ways of "techno-relating" are fun and beneficial. The social components of the Web appeal to many people because they offer easier, safer, and quicker ways to connect to others. No one really knows to what extent isolation from overuse of technological ways of relating to other people contributes to the development of BPD or other emotional problems. However, technology can prevent the in-person contact you need to build relationships and trust. To get better, people with BPD need real relationships, real social support, and real feedback about their behavior.
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Charles H. Elliott (Borderline Personality Disorder For Dummies)
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There is no guarantee that a socialized economy will always succeed. The state-owned economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union suffered ultimately fatal distortions in their development because of the backlog of poverty and want in the societies they inherited; years of capitalist encirclement, embargo, invasion, devastating wars, and costly arms buildup; poor incentive systems, and a lack of administrative initiative and technological innovation; and a repressive political rule that allowed little critical feedback while fostering stagnation and elitism. Despite all that, the former communist states did transform impoverished countries into relatively advanced societies. Whatever their mistakes and political crimes, they achieved—in countries that were never as rich as ours—what U.S. free-market capitalism cannot and has no intention of accomplishing: adequate food, housing, and clothing for all; economic security in old age; free medical care; free education at all levels; and a guaranteed income. Today by overwhelming majorities, people in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe say that life was better under communism than under the present freemarket system.
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Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
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to be open and straightforward about their needs for attention in a social setting. It is equally rare for members of a group in American culture to honestly and openly express needs that might be in conflict with that individual’s needs. This value of not just honestly but also openly fully revealing the true feelings and needs present in the group is vital for it’s members to feel emotional safe. It is also vital to keeping the group energy up and for giving the feedback that allows it’s members to know themselves, where they stand in relation to others and for spiritual/psychological growth. Usually group members will simply not object to an individual’s request to take the floor—but then act out in a passive-aggressive manner, by making noise or jokes, or looking at their watches. Sometimes they will take the even more violent and insidious action of going brain-dead while pasting a jack-o’-lantern smile on their faces. Often when someone asks to read something or play a song in a social setting, the response is a polite, lifeless “That would be nice.” In this case, N.I.C.E. means “No Integrity or Congruence Expressed” or “Not Into Communicating Emotion.” So while the sharer is exposing his or her vulnerable creation, others are talking, whispering to each other, or sitting looking like they are waiting for the dental assistant to tell them to come on back. No wonder it’s so scary to ask for people’s attention. In “nice” cultures, you are probably not going to get a straight, open answer. People let themselves be oppressed by someone’s request—and then blame that someone for not being psychic enough to know that “Yes” meant “No.” When were we ever taught to negotiate our needs in relation to a group of people? In a classroom? Never! The teacher is expected to take all the responsibility for controlling who gets heard, about what, and for how long. There is no real opportunity to learn how to nonviolently negotiate for the floor. The only way I was able to pirate away a little of the group’s attention in the school I attended was through adolescent antics like making myself fart to get a few giggles, or asking the teacher questions like, “Why do they call them hemorrhoids and not asteroids?” or “If a number two pencil is so popular, why is it still number two,” or “What is another word for thesaurus?” Some educational psychologists say that western culture schools are designed to socialize children into what is really a caste system disguised as a democracy. And in once sense it is probably good preparation for the lack of true democratic dynamics in our culture’s daily living. I can remember several bosses in my past reminding me “This is not a democracy, this is a job.” I remember many experiences in social groups, church groups, and volunteer organizations in which the person with the loudest voice, most shaming language, or outstanding skills for guilting others, controlled the direction of the group. Other times the pain and chaos of the group discussion becomes so great that people start begging for a tyrant to take charge. Many times people become so frustrated, confused and anxious that they would prefer the order that oppression brings to the struggle that goes on in groups without “democracy skills.” I have much different experiences in groups I work with in Europe and in certain intentional communities such as the Lost Valley Educational Center in Eugene, Oregon, where the majority of people have learned “democracy skills.” I can not remember one job, school, church group, volunteer organization or town meeting in mainstream America where “democracy skills” were taught or practiced.
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Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real)
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The very successes of the megamachine re-enforced dangerous potentialities that had hitherto been kept in check by sheer human weakness. The inherent infirmity of this whole power system lies exposed in the fact that kings, exalted above all other men, were constantly cozened, flattered, and fed with misinformation-zealously protected from any disturbing counterbalancing 'feedback.' So kings never learned from either their own experience or from history the fact that unqualified power is inimical to life: that their methods were self-defeating, their military victories were ephemeral, and their exalted claims were fraudulent and absurd.
From the end of the first great Age of the Builders in Egypt, that of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh, Pepe I, comes corroborative evidence of this pervasive irrationality, all the more telling because it issues from the relatively orderly and unbedevilled Egyptians:
The army returned in safety
After it had hacked up the land of the Sand Dwellers
...After it had thrown down its enclosures...
After it had cut down its fig trees and vines...
After it had cast fire into all its dwellings...
After it had killed troops in it by many ten-thousand.
That sums up the course of Empire everywhere: the same boastful words, the same vicious acts, the same sordid results, from the earliest Egyptian palette to the latest American newspaper with its reports, at the moment I write, of the mass atrocities coldbloodedly perpetrated with the aid of napalm bombs and defoliating poisons, by the military forces of the United States on the helpless peasant populations of Vietnam: an innocent people, uprooted, terrorized, poisoned and roasted alive in a futile attempt to make the power fantasies of the American military-industrial-scientific elite 'credible.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
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Feedback doesn’t just show us where we are going wrong, then; it enables us to understand better the impact and the progress we are making in relation to our ultimate goals.
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Owain Service (Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals)
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Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo. Only the CEO has comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale for the criteria, all of the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative importance of the various stakeholders. Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.
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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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First of all, the tone of my muscle cells must hold my skeleton together so that it neither collapses in upon my organs nor dislocates at its joints. It is tone, just as much as it is connective tissues or bone, that is responsible for my basic structural shape and integrity. Secondly, my muscle tone must superimpose upon its own stability the steady, rhythmical expansion and contraction of respiration. Third, it must support my overall structure in one position or another—lying, sitting standing, and so on. Finally, it must be able to brace and release any part of the body in relation to the whole, and to do this with spontaneity and split-second timing, so that graceful, purposeful action may be added to my stability, my posture, and my rhythmic respiration. It is no wonder we find that such large portions of our nervous systems are so continually engaged in controlling the maintenance and adjustments of this tone. The entire system of spindle cells, with both their contractile parts and their anulospiral receptors, the Golgi tendon organs, the reflex arcs, much of the internuncial circuitry of the spinal column, and most of the oldest portion of our brains—including the reticular formation and the basal ganglia—all work together to orchestrate this complex phenomenon. We have, as it were, a brain within our brain and a muscle system within our muscle system to monitor the constantly shifting values of background tonus, to provide a stable yet flexible framework which we are free to use how we will. Nor is it a wonder that these elements and processes are normally controlled below my level of consciousness—if this were not the case, walking across the room to get a glass of water would require more diversified and minute attention than my conscious awareness could possibly muster. It is the old brain, along with the even more ancient spinal cord, that are given the bulk of this task, because they have had so many more generations in which to grapple with the problems and refine the solutions. Millions upon millions of trials and errors have resulted in genetically constant motor circuits and sensory feedback loops which handle the fundamental life-supporting jobs of muscle tone for me automatically. Firm structure, posture, respiratory rhythms, swallowing, elimination, grasping, withdrawing, tracking with the eyes—all these intact and fully functional activities and more are given to each of us as new-born infants, the legacy of the development of our ancestors.
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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I can bring a glass of water smoothly to my lips because practice has taught me just how much contractile effort and speed is necessary to lift it and carry it through the air without either dropping it or throwing the water towards the ceiling. This familiar feel for the resistance of the glass of water, and for the appropriate muscular effort to both overcome that resistance and remain in constant control, are functions of the variable settings of the inhibitory response of the Golgi tendon organs. And I use this reflex mechanism every time I use a screwdriver or a wrench, row a boat, push a car, do a push-up or a deep knee bend, pick up an object—in short, every time I need a specific amount of effort delivered in order to accomplish a specific task—any time “too much” is just as mistaken as “too little.” This includes, of course, almost all the controlled uses to which I put my muscles. Now in order to be helpful in all situations, this variable setting of the tension values which trigger the reflex must be capable of both a wide range of adjustment and rapid shifts. Objects that we need to manipulate with carefully controlled efforts may be small or large, light or heavy. Building a rock wall can require just as much finesse and balance as building a house of playing cards, but the levels of tension which require equally sensitive monitoring are very different in each case. Since these relative tension values can be altered rapidly at will, and are refined with practice, it seems evident that they can be controlled by higher brain centers. This is presumably done through descending neural pathways which can generate impulses that either facilitate or inhibit the action of the Golgi/motor neuron synapses. In this way, control signals from higher nervous centers could automatically set the level of tension at which the muscle would be maintained. If the required tension is high, then the muscle tension would be set by the servo-feedback mechanism to this high level of tension. On the other hand, if the desired tension level is low, the muscle tension would be set this level.9
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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So it is necessary that we have a means of monitoring the tension developed by muscular activity, and equally necessary that the threshold of response for the inhibitory function of that monitor be a variable threshold that can be readily adjusted to suit many purposes, from preventing tissue damage due to overload, to providing a smooth and delicate twist of the tuning knob of a sensitive shortwave receiver. And such a marvelously adaptable tension-feedback system we do have in our Golgi tendon organs, reflex arcs which connect the sensory events in a stretching tendon directly to the motor events which control that degree of stretch, neural feed-back loops whose degree of sensory and motor stimulation may be widely altered according to our intent, our conscious training, and our unconscious habits. This ingenious device does, however, contain a singular danger, a danger unfortunately inherent in the very features of the Golgi reflex which are the cleverest, and the most indispensable to its proper function. The degree of facilitation of the feed-back loop, which sets the threshold value for the “required tension,” is controlled by descending impulses from higher brain centers down into the loop’s internuncial network in the brain stem and the spinal cord. In this way, conscious judgements and the fruits of practice are translated into precise neuromuscular values. But judgement and practice are not the only factors that can be involved in this facilitating higher brain activity. Relative levels of overall arousal, our attitudes towards our past experience, the quality of our present mood, neurotic avoidances and compulsions of all kinds, emotional associations from all quarters—any of these things can color descending messages, and do in fact cause considerable alterations in the Golgi’s threshold values. It is possible, for instance, to be so emotionally involved in an effort—either through panic or through exhilaration—that we do not even notice that our exertions have torn us internally until the excitement has receded, leaving the painful injury behind to surprise us. Or acute anxiety may drive the value of the “required tension” so high that our knuckles whiten as we grip the steering wheel, the pencil suddenly snaps in our fingers, or the glass shatters as we set it with too much force onto the table. On the other hand, timidity or the fear of being rejected can so sap us of “required tension” that it is difficult for us to produce a loud, clear knock upon a door that we tremble to enter.
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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If the error is due to overload, retrying the transaction will make the problem worse, not better. To avoid such feedback cycles, you can limit the number of retries, use exponential backoff, and handle overload-related errors differently from other errors (if possible).
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Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems)
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It is a process running in circles-in circles which get narrower, like the coils of a spiral, as the cell becomes more and more specialised. The genes control the activities of the cell by relatively simple coded instructions which are spelt out in the complex operations of the cell-body. But the activities of the genes are in turn guided by feedbacks from the cell-body, which is exposed to the hierarchy of environments. this contains, apart from the chemical triggers, a number of other factors in the 'epigenetic landscape' which are relevant to the cell's future, and about which the genes must be informed.
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Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
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Children from troubled or dysfunctional families grow up not knowing what is “normal,” healthy or appropriate. Having no other reference point on which to test reality, they think their family and their life, with its inconsistency, its trauma and its pain, is “the way it is.” In fact, when we assume the role of our false self, which troubled families, friendships and work environments tend to promote, we become fixed in this role—we don’t realize there is any other way to be. In recovery, with appropriate supervision and feedback from skilled and safe others, we slowly learn what is healthy and what is appropriate. Other related issues include: being overly-responsible, neglecting our own needs, feelings, boundary issues and shame and low self-esteem.
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Charles L. Whitfield (Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families)
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These examples do not show that theoretical knowledge is worthless. Quite the reverse. A conceptual framework is vital even for the most practical men going about their business. In many circumstances, new theories have led to direct technological breakthroughs (such as the atom bomb emerging from the Theory of Relativity). The real issue here is speed. Theoretical change is itself driven by a feedback mechanism, as we noted in chapter 3: science learns from failure. But when a theory fails, like say when the Unilever mathematicians failed in their attempt to create an efficient nozzle design, it takes time to come up with a new, all-encompassing theory. To gain practical knowledge, however, you just need to try a different-sized aperture. Tinkering, tweaking, learning from practical mistakes: all have speed on their side. Theoretical leaps, while prodigious, are far less frequent.
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
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There is an art to giving feedback. It is common for critics to offer diagnoses: This is boring. This is choppy. This character isn’t working. The storyline is predictable. The transition is off. It is often more helpful to offer specific suggestions: Shorten the dialogue. Pick up the pace. Combine these three paragraphs. Invert these two lines. Envision a possibility they may not have considered. Or suggest an alternative they may not have thought of.
There is also an art to receiving advice. Suggestions may be most helpful while the paint is still wet and the ink hasn’t dried. Inviting feedback early can make a big difference.
And, ultimately, it is important to remember that the word “author” is related to the word “authority.” The choice to accept, or reject, or modify the advice that is offered always remains under the author’s control.
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Diana Pavlac Glyer (Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings)
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In the case of Trunk Club, they led with a simple polarizing message related to how their target customers generally feel about shopping. By saying “men want to dress well, but they hate to shop,” they intentionally called out shopping as the enemy of their service. And if you are a man who hates to shop, you will rapidly align with their message without much thought. The beauty of this approach is that it has the opposite effect for clients who are a poor fit for your solution. For example, if you’re a man who loves to shop, you may be immediately turned off by Trunk Club’s value proposition. While being excited about customers not liking your solution may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually a good thing! Bad-fit customers who buy your product are more likely to become dissatisfied and hurt your brand. They may also provide errant feedback that can quickly derail your product or company roadmap if you decide to follow it. In short, polarizing messages can serve double duty by keeping the good-fit customers in and helping the bad ones self-select out. In the case of Trunk Club, this approach worked: they were acquired by US luxury retailer Nordstrom in 2014 for $350 million.
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David Priemer (Sell the Way You Buy: A Modern Approach To Sales That Actually Works (Even On You!))
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Even better though, never believe what a counterparty tells you in response to any question and, instead, test it with an offer. It is not that the other side is intentionally deceiving you; it is simply that they may not be aware of their relative preferences, so a question will provoke feedback about their absolute preference.
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Victoria Medvec (Negotiate Without Fear: Strategies and Tools to Maximize Your Outcomes)
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I’ve found that it’s useful to distinguish between pain and suffering, because pain and suffering are two different things. Pain is the inevitable and unavoidable part of being human and of being an estranged parent. Unfortunately, you have relatively little control over that. However, you can gain increasing control and awareness over how long you feel pain. You can reduce the meaning of it, the actions you take that increase it, and the distance the pain travels through other aspects of your life. That’s the suffering part. The difference between pain and suffering is an insight that found its way from Buddhist teachings into contemporary psychotherapy. Psychiatrist Mark Levine, who developed the Mind to Mindful program, gives this example: “Let’s say I stub my toe walking across the kitchen floor and it really hurts. That’s pain. But then I start telling myself a bunch of things about stubbing my toe such as ‘You idiot, why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ Or ‘Next time you’re going to fall flat on your face or break your hip!’ Or ‘This is so typical of you to be so clumsy. Just one more example of what a screw-up you are!’ ” That’s suffering. Suffering lengthens the experience of pain because it creates an endless cognitive feedback loop where pain is always its terminus. Where suffering begets suffering begets suffering.
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Joshua Coleman (Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict)
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When your tissues are more lax, your joints don’t have the integrity they should because they’re stretched out,” says Dr. Starrett. This impairs your proprioception, the sense of where your limbs are oriented in space and in relation to one another, which is a huge factor in mobility and stability. When you’re not getting that proprioceptive feedback, your movement patterns are thrown
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Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
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The central function of the amygdala, which I call the brain’s smoke detector, is to identify whether incoming input is relevant for our survival.11 It does so quickly and automatically, with the help of feedback from the hippocampus, a nearby structure that relates the new input to past experiences. If the amygdala senses a threat—a potential collision with an oncoming vehicle, a person on the street who looks threatening—it sends an instant message down to the hypothalamus and the brain stem, recruiting the stress-hormone system and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to orchestrate a whole-body response. Because the amygdala processes the information it receives from the thalamus faster than the frontal lobes do, it decides whether incoming information is a threat to our survival even before we are consciously aware of the danger. By the time we realize what is happening, our body may already be on the move.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change in the stocks that the feedback loop is trying to control. Delays that are too short cause overreaction, “chasing your tail,” oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long.
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Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
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He married military history with science, building his theory upon Gödel, Heisenberg, Popper, Kuhn, Piaget and Polanyi, who highlighted the unavoidable feature of uncertainty in any system of thought (as well as the limits of the Newtonian paradigm). Cybernetics and systems theory offered him the concept of feedback, the combination of analysis–synthesis as well as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy, the distinction between open and closed systems, the importance of interactions and relations, and the need for a holistic approach. The cognitive revolution, combined with neo-Darwinist studies, showed him the role of schemata formed by genetics, culture and experience. Chaos theory highlighted non-linear behavior.
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Frans P.B. Osinga (Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History))
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SUMMARY A vast array of additional statistical methods exists. In this concluding chapter, we summarized some of these methods (path analysis, survival analysis, and factor analysis) and briefly mentioned other related techniques. This chapter can help managers and analysts become familiar with these additional techniques and increase their access to research literature in which these techniques are used. Managers and analysts who would like more information about these techniques will likely consult other texts or on-line sources. In many instances, managers will need only simple approaches to calculate the means of their variables, produce a few good graphs that tell the story, make simple forecasts, and test for significant differences among a few groups. Why, then, bother with these more advanced techniques? They are part of the analytical world in which managers operate. Through research and consulting, managers cannot help but come in contact with them. It is hoped that this chapter whets the appetite and provides a useful reference for managers and students alike. KEY TERMS Endogenous variables Exogenous variables Factor analysis Indirect effects Loading Path analysis Recursive models Survival analysis Notes 1. Two types of feedback loops are illustrated as follows: 2. When feedback loops are present, error terms for the different models will be correlated with exogenous variables, violating an error term assumption for such models. Then, alternative estimation methodologies are necessary, such as two-stage least squares and others discussed later in this chapter. 3. Some models may show double-headed arrows among error terms. These show the correlation between error terms, which is of no importance in estimating the beta coefficients. 4. In SPSS, survival analysis is available through the add-on module in SPSS Advanced Models. 5. The functions used to estimate probabilities are rather complex. They are so-called Weibull distributions, which are defined as h(t) = αλ(λt)a–1, where a and 1 are chosen to best fit the data. 6. Hence, the SSL is greater than the squared loadings reported. For example, because the loadings of variables in groups B and C are not shown for factor 1, the SSL of shown loadings is 3.27 rather than the reported 4.084. If one assumes the other loadings are each .25, then the SSL of the not reported loadings is [12*.252 =] .75, bringing the SSL of factor 1 to [3.27 + .75 =] 4.02, which is very close to the 4.084 value reported in the table. 7. Readers who are interested in multinomial logistic regression can consult on-line sources or the SPSS manual, Regression Models 10.0 or higher. The statistics of discriminant analysis are very dissimilar from those of logistic regression, and readers are advised to consult a separate text on that topic. Discriminant analysis is not often used in public
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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The biggest drawback, of course, is that you immediately scare away all survivors, and your only remaining users will be apologists. This seriously skews the nature and quality of your feedback, condemning you to a clientele of technoid apologists, which is a relatively small segment. This is one reason why so few personal-computer software-product makers have successfully crossed over into mass markets.
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Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity)
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Over those nine months in 1999, when we were rushing to reboot this broken film, the Braintrust would evolve into an enormously beneficial and efficient entity. Even in its earliest meetings, I was struck by how constructive the feedback was. Each of the participants focused on the film at hand and not on some hidden personal agenda. They argued—sometimes heatedly—but always about the project. They were not motivated by the kinds of things—getting credit for an idea, pleasing their supervisors, winning a point just to say you did—that too often lurk beneath the surface of work-related interactions. The members saw each other as peers. The passion expressed in a Braintrust meeting was never taken personally because everyone knew it was directed at solving problems. And largely because of that trust and mutual respect, its problem-solving powers were immense.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
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What Info Should a Persona Provide? Good personas convey the relevant demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and needs-based attributes of your target customer. Personas should fit on a single page and provide a snapshot of the customer archetype that's quick to digest, and usually include the following information: Name Representative photograph Quote that conveys what they most care about Job title Demographics Needs/goals Relevant motivations and attitudes Related tasks and behaviors Frustrations/pain points with current solution Level of expertise/knowledge (in the relevant domain, e.g., level of computer savvy) Product usage context/environment (e.g., laptop in a loud, busy office or tablet on the couch at home) Technology adoption life cycle segment (for your product category) Any other salient attributes
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Dan Olsen (The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback)
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More generally, the lack of feedback applies to all higher-level use of force situations for officers. While officers are trained in how to properly utilize force, the need for more serious levels of force is rare. For example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted the 2008 Police-Public Contact Survey as a supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey. An estimated 1.4% of those surveyed had force used or threatened during their most recent contact with law enforcement (BJS, 2008). In a related study, Hickman, Piquero, and Garner (2008) found that 1.5% of police-citizen contacts resulted in either the use of force or the threat of force. Of these cases, only a very small percentage (0.2%) of police-citizen encounters resulted in lethal force (i.e., use of a firearm) being applied or threatened. Geller and Scott (1992) determined that the average officer would have to work 1,299 years in Milwaukee, 694 years in New York City, or 198 years in Dallas to be statistically expected to shoot and kill a suspect.
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Pete J. Blair (Evaluating Police Tactics: An Empirical Assessment of Room Entry Techniques (Real World Criminology))
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Decision-making compresses trial-and-error learning experiences into an instantaneous mental evaluation about what the consequence of a particular action will be for a given situation. It requires the on-line integration of information from diverse sources: perceptual information about the stimulus and situation, relevant facts and experiences stored in memory, feedback from emotional systems and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal, expectations about the consequences of different courses of action, and the like. This sort of integrative processing, as we've seen is the business of working memory circuits in the prefrontal cortex. In chapters 7 and 8 , we discussed the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory and considered the contribution of the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. Here, we will focus on two of the subareas of the medial prefrontal cortex in light of their relation to the motive circuits outlined above.
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Joseph E. LeDoux
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Parenthood is harder than conventional work, the author suggests, because our jobs develop a somewhat predictable flow and offer relatively short-term feedback. This leads to internal comparisons to the improvisational nature of parenting
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Jennifer Senior (All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood)
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3. Awareness of movement is the key to improving movement. The sensory system, Feldenkrais pointed out, is intimately related to the movement system, not separate from it. Sensation’s purpose is to orient, guide, help control, coordinate, and assess the success of a movement. The kinesthetic sense plays a key role in assessing the success of a movement and gives immediate sensory feedback about where the
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
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In McDonough’s classroom study, recasts (and other forms of corrective feedback) were more likely to have been noticed because the Thai learners were accustomed to traditional grammar instruction and a focus on accuracy. This is not always the case, however. As we learned in Chapter 5, when the instructional focus is on expressing meaning through subject-matter instruction, the teachers’ recasts may not be perceived by the learners as an attempt to correct their language form but rather as just another way of saying the same thing. Later in this chapter we will look at classroom studies related to the ‘Get it right in the end’ position that have investigated the effects of more explicit corrective feedback on second language learning.
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Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
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Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply.
Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances.
These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.
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Partha Dasgupta (Economics: A Very Short Introduction)
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Learning is relatively easy when the link between cause and effect is clear. But complex systems often sever that connection: causes remote from effects, solutions detached from problems, and feedback delayed or misleading (Cyert and March, 1963; Senge, 1990).
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Lee G. Bolman (Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership)
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Phase Activities Action Establish relationships and common agenda between all stakeholders Collaboratively scope issues and information Agree on time-frame Reflection On research design, ethics, power relations, knowledge construction process, representation and accountability Action Build relationships Identify roles, responsibilities and ethics procedures Establish a Memorandum of Understanding Collaboratively design research process and tools Discuss and identify desired action outcomes Reflection On research questions, design, working relationships and information requirements Action Work together to implement research process and undertake data collection Enable participation of others Collaboratively analyse information generated Begin planning action together Reflection On research process Evaluate participation and representation of others Assess need for further research and/or various action options Action Plan research-informed action which may include feedback to participants and influential other Reflection Evaluate action and process as a whole Action Identify options for further participatory research and action with or without academic researchers Figure 2.1 Key stages in a typical PAR process
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Sara Kindon (Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place (Routledge Studies in Human Geography Book 22))
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Quick feedback and its absence One of the greatest differences between child and adult audiences is that children give immediate feedback. If they cannot relate to your stories, or if you are not connecting enough with them, they may interrupt you or leave. However, if you do capture their attention, they settle in a comfortable position and look at you with interest. You can use this as a bar to determine how your storytelling is going and what needs to change, if anything. Tone Your tone and voice often convey a lot more messages than your words. You may need to change your tone often while dealing with younger children (a higher tone of voice). The younger the audience is, the more physical your approach should be. They enjoy you acting the part out, as well as using different accents or tones of voice for different characters in the story.
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Matt Morris (Do Talk To Strangers: A Creative, Sexy, and Fun Way To Have Emotionally Stimulating Conversations With Anyone)
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A Few Tips for Storytelling to Children Children love to hear stories. They laugh, smile, giggle, and their ears perk up to the sound of a good story. However, children can also lose attention at the drop of a hat. It can take a lot to capture and maintain their attention. Quick feedback and its absence One of the greatest differences between child and adult audiences is that children give immediate feedback. If they cannot relate to your stories, or if you are not connecting enough with them, they may interrupt you or leave. However, if you do capture their attention, they settle in a comfortable position and look at you with interest. You can use this as a bar to determine how your storytelling is going and what needs to change, if anything. Tone Your tone and voice often convey a lot more messages than your words. You may need to change your tone often while dealing with younger children (a higher tone of voice). The younger the audience is, the more physical your approach should be. They enjoy you acting the part out, as well as using different accents or tones of voice for different characters in the story.
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Matt Morris (Do Talk To Strangers: A Creative, Sexy, and Fun Way To Have Emotionally Stimulating Conversations With Anyone)
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Joining the world of shapes to the world of numbers in this way represented a break with the past. New geometries always begin when someone changes a fundamental rule. Suppose space can be curved instead of flat, a geometer says, and the result is a weird curved parody of Euclid that provides precisely the right framework for the general theory of relativity. Suppose space can have four dimensions, or five, or six. Suppose the number expressing dimension can be a fraction. Suppose shapes can be twisted, stretched, knotted. Or, now, suppose shapes are defined, not by solving an equation once, but by iterating it in a feedback loop.
Julia, Fatou, Hubbard, Barnsley, Mandelbrot-these mathematicians changed the rules about how to make geometrical shapes. The Euclidean and Cartesian methods of turning equations into curves are familiar to anyone who has studied high school geometry or found a point on a map using two coordinates. Standard geometry takes an equation and asks for the set of numbers that satisfy it. The solutions to an equation like x^2 + y^2 = 1, then, form a shape, in this case a circle. Other simple equations produce other pictures, the ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas of conic sections or even the more complicated shapes produced by differential equations in phase space. But when a geometer iterates an equation instead of solving it, the equation becomes a process instead of a description, dynamic instead of static. When a number goes into the equation, a new number comes out; the new number goes in, and so on, points hopping from place to place. A point is plotted not when it satisfies the equation but when it produces a certain kind of behavior. One behavior might be a steady state. Another might be a convergence to a periodic repetition of states. Another might be an out-of-control race to infinity.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
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improve your reflective thinking and writing skills with this feedback. Budget numerous additional hours for the following purposes: Research colleges; prepare for the SAT or ACT with Writing and SAT Subject Tests (“SAT IIs”), if these are not yet done by junior year; work with teachers, your school counselor, and any other non-school recommenders; attend college-related events; prepare for interviews; and take care of whatever else may be necessary to ensure you are submitting high-quality applications on time—on top of your busy schoolwork and extracurricular activities. Try not to take rejections personally. Acceptances or rejections—in regards to college admissions and life as a whole—should
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Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
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when I look back on my first two years at McKinsey, a solid 80 percent of my managers’ feedback related to communication skills. They rarely gave me any feedback on my math skills, quantitative analysis skills, spreadsheets, or models.
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Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
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We needed a greater sense of urgency.” So the management team decided that field managers would not be eligible for promotion unless their branch or group of branches matched or exceeded the company’s average scores. That’s a pretty radical idea when you think about it: giving customers, in effect, veto power over managerial pay raises and promotions. The rigorous implementation of this simple customer feedback system had a clear impact on business. As the survey scores rose, so did Enterprise’s growth relative to its competition. Taylor cites the linking of customer feedback to employee rewards as one of the most important reasons that Enterprise has continued to grow,
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing (with featured article "Marketing Myopia," by Theodore Levitt))
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Complex behaviors of systems often arise as the relative strengths of feedback loops shift, causing first one loop and then another to dominate behavior.
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Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
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As I’ve said throughout this book, networked products tend to start from humble beginnings—rather than big splashy launches—and YouTube was no different. Jawed’s first video is a good example. Steve described the earliest days of content and how it grew: In the earliest days, there was very little content to organize. Getting to the first 1,000 videos was the hardest part of YouTube’s life, and we were just focused on that. Organizing the videos was an afterthought—we just had a list of recent videos that had been uploaded, and you could just browse through those. We had the idea that everyone who uploaded a video would share it with, say, 10 people, and then 5 of them would actually view it, and then at least one would upload another video. After we built some key features—video embedding and real-time transcoding—it started to work.75 In other words, the early days was just about solving the Cold Start Problem, not designing the fancy recommendations algorithms that YouTube is now known for. And even once there were more videos, the attempt at discoverability focused on relatively basic curation—just showing popular videos in different categories and countries. Steve described this to me: Once we got a lot more videos, we had to redesign YouTube to make it easier to discover the best videos. At first, we had a page on YouTube to see just the top 100 videos overall, sorted by day, week, or month. Eventually it was broken out by country. The homepage was the only place where YouTube as a company would have control of things, since we would choose the 10 videos. These were often documentaries, or semi-professionally produced content so that people—particularly advertisers—who came to the YouTube front page would think we had great content. Eventually it made sense to create a categorization system for videos, but in the early years everything was grouped in with each other. Even while the numbers of videos was rapidly growing, so too were all the other forms of content on the site. YouTube wasn’t just the videos, it was also the comments left by viewers: Early in we saw that there were 100x more viewers than creators. Every social product at that time had comments, so we added them to YouTube, which was a way for the viewers to participate, too. It seems naive now, but we were just thinking about raw growth at that time—the raw number of videos, the raw number of comments—so we didn’t think much about the quality. We weren’t thinking about fake news or anything like that. The thought was, just get as many comments as possible out there, and the more controversial the better! Keep in mind that the vast majority of videos had zero comments, so getting feedback for our creators usually made the experience better for them. Of course now we know that once you get to a certain level of engagement, you need a different solution over time.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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You’ve engaged in three, four, or five “doses” where you controlled how and when you talked about the distressing feedback. As your perspective is heard, you become regulated, reassured. The next day, you feel better. You have created a controllable and moderate revisiting of the distressing review, and that has changed your reaction to it. It is no longer as distressing. Originally you were dysregulated, you shut down the “rational” part of your head, distorted the comments, magnified them. But now you can reflect more accurately on the feedback, and maybe see some truth in the comments. That wasn’t possible until you could use your many relational interactions to revisit and regulate. When we have a community, we can do this kind of dosing to regulate any stressful or distressing experience. We can build and demonstrate resilience. We do so all the time. But imagine someone without the relationships that would allow this kind of relational regulation. For someone with relational poverty, these stressful experiences are magnified by the echo chamber of their own head. Stress becomes distress. And distressing experiences become sensitizing, resulting in the same physical and mental effects as trauma.
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Bruce D. Perry (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
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In other words, the learner plays a more active role in learning in an emotionally and socially supported environment, creating knowledge, while the teacher’s role is somewhat passive, guiding learners in the knowledge creation process. In pedagogy, this scenario is referred to as a dialectic teaching-learning process. As we can see, the dialectic approach has a deeper and critical focus to learning, while the didactic approach is more likely to produce a surface approach to learning. In the dialectic approach, the delivery is so paced and toned that the learners are in a more emotionally and socially comfortable position to engage in reflective observation and abstract conceptualisation stages of the Kolb’s cycle. We can also see student-centred learning from another important point of view: it is possible that individual students get more attention from the teacher to possibly get individual feedback and individual issues addressed for more purposeful learning and development. Also, the teacher gets to know students individually based on the discussions they engage in, thus getting to know their personality traits, as widely referred to by psychologists, so that appropriate personalised feedback can be provided. This learner-centred approach accommodates for a more authentic learning experience for each student, and at the same time, it caters for a more authentic evaluation of individual students.
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Chandana Watagodakumbura (Education from a Deeper and Multidisciplinary Perspective: Enhanced by Relating to Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Based on Mindfulness, Self-Awareness & Emotional Intelligence)
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Smith’s groundbreaking account of human morality, then, holds it to be an evolutionary account. We are not given moral sentiments; we do not deduce them or apprehend them once and for all. Instead, we develop moral sentiments over time. At the individual level, we train our judgment and our sentiments as a result of the interactions we have with others and the feedback we get from others’ positive and negative judgments. This feedback has purchase on us because of the pleasure we receive from achieving mutual sympathy of sentiments and the displeasure we receive from experiencing an antipathy of sentiments. We are hence encouraged to discover and follow rules of behavior that we come to see as “moral” because of our needs and desires, both of which can be satisfied only in cooperative relations with others (who can, if they like, choose not to associate with us—thus creating scarcity and competition). And our decentralized striving to discover, and follow, these rules gives rise—unintentionally, without any of us planning it—to a shared system of morality.
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James R. Otteson (The Essential Adam Smith (Essential Scholars))
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game points and achievements don’t have extrinsic value yet—so as long as the main prize is glory, bragging rights, and personal fiero, the danger of devaluing a pleasurable experience with game feedback is relatively low. But it’s not nonexistent. Like money or prizes, the opportunity to earn points and level up could potentially distract us from the initial reasons we like to do an activity.
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Jane McGonigal (Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World)
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A related tactic is asking them to play your value back to you.54 This works especially well when the customer has been reticent to give feedback. I was nervous to do this when this was first taught to me. What if the customer couldn’t do so? What if I didn’t like what I heard? But that’s the point. You want to know if you landed your value proposition or what parts of the pitch didn’t stick, something like, “You’ve clearly seen a lot and are very advanced in your thinking. I’m curious, what value do you see, if any, in what we’re doing?
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Rags Gupta (One to Ten: Finding Your Way from Startup to Scaleup)
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BRIEF.” B stands for begin peacefully; R is for relate; I triggers the interview part of the conversation; E reminds you to echo what you’re hearing; and F is the point at which you can give feedback.
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Michelle Icard (Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School)
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Once you've given your feedback, you're finished. Let go. Detach from outcome, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous. On Tuesday your partner answers with generosity and accountability. On Thursday he tells you he's in no mood for your bullshit. Tuesday is a good day for you, for your partner, and for your relationship. Thursday is a terrible day for your partner, a mixed day for the relationship, and still a great day for you. You did a fine job of speaking. That's all you're in charge of. Don't focus on results. Instead, focus on how well you handle yourself. Focus on your own relational performance.
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Terrence Real (Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press))
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In the case of software, the fixed cost of an iteration is low, so getting feedback by “trying stuff, seeing what works and what doesn’t, then fixing it” is relatively inexpensive.
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Alan Cohen (Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market)
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Teaching academic writing to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students is crucial early in their academic journey and should continue throughout their program. Here's a breakdown:
Foundation Level (First Year): Introducing basic academic writing skills at the onset helps students develop a strong foundation. This includes understanding essay structure, proper citation methods (APA, MLA), and critical reading and writing skills NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 2.
Core Nursing Courses: As students progress into core nursing courses, integrating academic writing into these subjects is beneficial. Assignments related to evidence-based practice, research papers, case studies, and reflective writing can aid in linking theoretical knowledge to practical application through writing.NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 3
Clinical Practice Integration: Incorporating writing assignments that reflect on clinical experiences or patient interactions helps students articulate their observations, reflections, and professional development, enhancing their communication skills.online class help services
Advanced Nursing Courses: In advanced years, focus on more complex academic writing, such as scholarly articles, thesis or capstone projects, and literature reviews. This phase aligns with deeper research and specialization within nursing fields.
Continuous Improvement: Encourage ongoing improvement by providing resources, workshops, and feedback on writing. Additionally, revisiting and reinforcing academic writing skills periodically ensures students maintain and enhance these crucial abilities.nursfpx.com
By introducing and reinforcing academic writing skills across various stages of the BSN program, students develop proficiency in communicating their ideas effectively, a skill essential for their future practice, research endeavors, and professional growth.
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nimra
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In recent years, Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices have emerged as a game-changer in diabetes management, offering patients a real-time view of their glucose levels and revolutionizing the way they monitor their condition. Among the pioneers in providing these life-changing devices, Med Supply US stands out as a reliable source, offering CGMs from various renowned brands like Abbott, Dexcom, and more. This article explores the significance of CGM devices and highlights the contribution of Med Supply US in making them accessible to those in need.
Understanding CGM Devices:
For individuals living with diabetes, maintaining optimal blood glucose levels is crucial to prevent serious health complications. Traditionally, this involved frequent finger-prick tests, which could be inconvenient and sometimes inaccurate. CGM devices, however, have transformed this process by providing continuous and real-time glucose level readings. These devices consist of a small sensor inserted under the skin that measures glucose levels in the interstitial fluid. The data collected is then transmitted to a receiver or a smartphone app, allowing users to track their glucose levels throughout the day and night.
Benefits of CGM Devices:
The introduction of CGM devices has brought about a paradigm shift in diabetes management due to their numerous benefits:
Real-time Monitoring: CGM devices offer a real-time insight into glucose trends, enabling users to make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin dosages. This real-time feedback empowers individuals to take timely action to maintain their glucose levels within a healthy range.
Reduced Hypoglycemia and Hyperglycemia: By providing alerts for both low and high glucose levels, CGMs help users avoid dangerous hypoglycemic episodes and hyperglycemic spikes. This is particularly beneficial during sleep when such episodes might otherwise go unnoticed.
Data-Driven Insights: CGM devices generate a wealth of data, including glucose trends, patterns, and even predictive alerts for potential issues. This information can be shared with healthcare providers to tailor treatment plans for optimal diabetes management.
Enhanced Quality of Life: The convenience of CGM devices reduces the need for frequent finger pricks, leading to an improved quality of life for individuals managing diabetes. The constant insights also alleviate anxiety related to unpredictable glucose fluctuations.
Med Supply US: Bringing Hope to Diabetes Management:
Med Supply US has emerged as a prominent supplier of CGM devices, offering a range of options from reputable brands such as Abbott and Dexcom. The availability of CGMs through Med Supply US has made these cutting-edge devices accessible to a wider demographic, bridging the gap between technology and healthcare.
Med Supply US not only provides access to CGM devices but also plays a crucial role in educating individuals about their benefits. Through informative resources, they empower users to make informed choices based on their specific needs and preferences. Furthermore, their commitment to customer support ensures that users can seamlessly integrate CGM devices into their daily routines.
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CGM devices
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Exploring the Benefits of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs)
In the world of diabetes management, Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) have emerged as a game-changing technology. These small devices are designed to provide real-time data on blood glucose levels, offering numerous advantages for individuals living with diabetes. In this article, we'll delve into the benefits of CGMs and why they are becoming an indispensable tool for managing diabetes.
Real-Time Monitoring: Continuous Glucose Monitors provide a continuous stream of data, allowing users to monitor their glucose levels 24/7. This real-time feedback helps individuals make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin administration.
Improved Glycemic Control: With constant glucose tracking, users can spot trends and patterns in their blood sugar levels. This insight enables them to make proactive adjustments to their diabetes management plan, leading to better glycemic control.
Reduced Hypoglycemia and Hyperglycemia: CGMs can provide early warnings of impending hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) or hyperglycemia (high blood sugar), reducing the risk of severe blood sugar fluctuations and related complications.
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Moeen Sheikh
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These areas are emerging as key regions changed by meditation: Amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and other structures in the emotional midbrain. Central in stress, relaxation, memory, and learning. Anterior cingulate cortex. Involved in controlling the focus of attention. Caudate nucleus. Involved in memory storage and processing, the caudate nucleus plays an essential role in how the brain learns, using feedback from past experience to influence current actions. Areas of the cingulate cortex responsible for regulating the brain’s own activity. Insula. Makes us aware of our internal emotional states and body sensations. Medial prefrontal cortex. Influences emotional responses in memory and decision-making. Orbitofrontal cortex. Involved with rational thought, impulse control, cognitive reasoning, and personality. Posterior cingulate cortex. One of the two nodes in the DMN, it’s active in memory retrieval and attaching significance to perceptions. Prefrontal cortex centerline regions related to paying close attention. Somatomotor areas processing pain, touch, and orientation of the body in space. Striatum, as well as limbic and prefrontal regions involved in emotional self-control and craving. We’ll look at each of these in turn because understanding their functions will show you how they contribute to your meditation practice. By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand each region activated in Bliss Brain, how they integrate into four distinct networks, and how these networks coordinate to produce elevated states of flow.
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Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
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In studies by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, fifth-grade students were given a problem-solving task engineered to guarantee high performance, and the students were praised for their success.11 Some students were praised for their intelligence (“person praise”: “You must be smart at these problems”), some were praised for their effort (“process praise”: “You must have worked hard at these problems”), and the remaining students, the control group, were simply told their scores were very high. Later, on a subsequent set of harder problems, those praised for being smart performed significantly worse than the other groups, while those praised for their effort significantly outperformed the other groups. Being praised for being smart is bad for you. The explanation offered by researchers in these and related studies is that when a person is given person praise, it reinforces a “fixed mind-set,” or the belief that our success is due to fixed traits that are a given. People in this mind-set worry about their traits. They also worry about how adequate or inadequate they might be. When they fail, they attribute it to personal inadequacy. They are afraid to take risks when failure may show them to be inadequate. In contrast, when a person is given process praise, it reinforces a “growth mind-set,” or the belief that our qualities can be developed through dedication and effort, and therefore that success comes from dedication and effort. This creates a love of learning and resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.12 Thus, when giving feedback, it is best to do so in a way that encourages a growth mind-set. It is better to structure feedback around effort and growth than by labeling the person. Simply put, it’s better to praise people for working hard than for being smart. Oh, and thank you for reading this book. You must have worked hard at it. Good effort!
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Chade-Meng Tan (Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace))
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Your Report Has Made It Clear That She Wants a Promotion You don’t think it’s likely to happen within the next six months. If you wait until the next performance review to tell her, she’ll have spent months wondering if she got the promotion and then be disappointed. Instead, if you say right away, “I understand that you’d like to work toward a promotion, but here are the gaps I’m seeing . . . ,” you’re showing that you want to help her reach her goal. Spell out what your promotion criteria are. Over the next few months, coach her and give her frequent feedback on how she’s doing relative to those expectations. That way, she’ll never have to wonder.
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Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
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For the feedback to be effective, it must be received very soon after the activity it is measuring occurs. Accordingly, an MBO system should set objectives for a relatively short period. For example, if we plan on a yearly basis, the corresponding MBO system’s time frame should be at least as often as quarterly or perhaps even monthly.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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The first kind of feedback relates more to summative assessments, which are the judgments we make about student performance; the second kind relates more to formative assessments, which are the opportunities we provide for students to try their hand at a task and get feedback on it before they are measured for their high-stakes grades.
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Flower Darby (Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes)
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Simply stated, our identity keeps us stable, organized, and functional when we are alone—when there is no one to supply us with feedback as to who we are. Those adults who emerged from faulty families without intact identities have to cling to others in order to keep their personality organized, just like Freda and Greta. Secondly, and equally importantly, our identity serves as our measuring stick of the universe around us. It acts as a stable point of reference that allows us to define who we are in relation to other people, to the world of work, to our community, and to our families and loved ones. Without a firm identity, we don’t know what to believe, where to go, or what to do. Comedy is often based on mistaken identities, concealed identities, or individuals who misunderstand their own identity.
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David P. Celani (Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family)
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If you’ve got products that are proprietary as well as open source, it’s important for you (and your stakeholders) to remember that your open source customers who typically aren’t paying for your product are just as valuable as your paying customers . Their feedback, contributions, and support are integral to your success. Because of this, you need to protect the open source offerings that your company has. Don’t make the open source products subpar to your paid products. Offer support to them just like you would to your paying customers. And treat your open source community just like you would your paying customers—with respect and appreciation.
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Mary Thengvall (The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success)
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Society is neither an organism nor a machine; it is-like organisms and machines-a system. It is composed of components that are related in such a way that the whole is greater than, and essentially different from, the sum of the parts. This is so because relations between the parts are maintained by mechanisms of communication and control that depend on the flow of information, on "feedback," for effective operation.
Cybernetic theory informs social analysis in a variety of ways: by focusing attention on system properties such as entropy and redundancy and on the values that function as operating rules; by emphasizing the extent to which the meaning and function of any part of the system is determined by context; and so on. Above all else, it reminds us that it is the context-a set of relationships, rather than any single component in isolation-that evolves.18 The focus of this book is on the evolving context of ideas in twentieth-century Vietnam.
Vietnamese Society as a System of Yin and Yang
In traditional Vietnamese culture we can find, in every domain of society, two different sets of operating principles, or values. These two sets can be used as the basis for a model of society and culture. One set can be seen as yang in nature; the other, as yin. Yang is defined by a tendency toward male dominance, high redundancy, low entropy, complex and rigid hierarchy, competition, and strict orthodoxy focused on rules for behavior based on social roles. Yin is defined by a tendency toward greater egalitarianism and flexibility,
more female participation, mechanisms to dampen competition and conflict, high entropy, low redundancy, and more emphasis on feeling, empathy, and spontaneity.
Much of traditional Vietnamese culture, social organization, and behavior expressed the balanced opposition between yin and yang as interlocking sets of ideas (including values, conceptual categories, operating rules, etc.). At a high level of abstraction, a great deal of persistence may be detected in the
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Neil L. Jamieson (Understanding Vietnam (Philip E. Lilienthal Book.))
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remedy the “anarchy” of the market, the socialist planned economy is utterly irrational. Its irrationality is due to the elimination of the essential indices for determining rational production and distribution – namely, prices. Von Mises showed that prices represent the incredibly thick and vital data sets required for allocating productive resources for commodity production and calibrating these to demand. Socialism is irrational because by beginning without prices for the machinery of production, no rational criteria could ever emerge for allocating resources to specific production processes. And when unpriced consumer goods are added to the mix, the chaos multiplies – unless, that is, political force is applied, and it always is. Eliminating prices, the socialist economy cannot provide the feedback loops required for determining what to produce or how much of it to produce. Cancerous, over-sized productive capacities in one sector of the economy are paralleled by relatively anemic productive capacities in another, and so on. And resorting to the labor theory of value won’t fix the problem. The socially average amount of labor time required to produce a commodity, even if it determines a commodity’s value (a doubtful claim in any case), is by no means an adequate index for determining the amount of resources to devote to its production. This means that socialism fails not only at resource allocation but also at the economic representation of the people it claims to champion. Absent price mechanisms, economic “voters,” or consumers, have no way to voice their needs and wants. Production and distribution must be based on the non-democratic decision-making of centralized authorities. Those who really care about the working masses must reject socialism for its incapacity to establish economic democracy, its most fundamental reason for being.
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Michael Rectenwald (Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage)
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This review also pointed to six common components of effective brief treatment (cf. Miller & Sanchez, 1994), summarized by the acronym FRAMES: Feedback of personal status relative to norms Responsibility for personal change Advice to change Menu of options from which to choose in pursuing change Empathic counselor style Support for self-efficacy What began as an interest in motivation for treatment had broadened now to focusing on motivation for change.
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William R. Miller (Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change (Applications of Motivational Interviewing))
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All feedback is relevant, even if it's not true.
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Ford Taylor (Relactional Leadership: When Relationships Collide with Transactions (Practical Tools for Every Leader))
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The only feedback teachers receive is whether they use the strategy. Such a process provides no feedback as to the level of skill a teacher exhibits relative to a particular strategy. This absence violates a basic principle of effective feedback
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Robert J. Marzano (Effective Supervision: Supporting the Art and Science of Teaching)
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One of the things that a Mastermind promises to do is to allow every participant to make rapid progress, whether it relates to her/ his professional activity or to her/ his personal development. And we don’t believe that can be accomplished by avoiding the mention of the weak points that we perceive in others, or in their work, since we want to help everyone quickly. As partners in responsibility, the participants should, therefore, offer one another honest, sincere feedback that will help unleash some quantum leaps. A Mastermind group is a space where lightning fast experimentation and learning takes place. Participants’ feedback should also be lightning fast.
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Jean-François Thiriet (Mastermind Groups: Accelerators of Success)
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It can be beneficial sometimes to create in relative isolation like a musician if you have faith in your idea but you know it will take a while for others to come around. In fact, when you’re forging a new path, sometime feedback is actually dangerous.
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Jason Zook (Own Your Weird: An Oddly Effective Way for Finding Happiness in Work, Life, and Love)
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clear attention to learning goals in terms that are accessible to students, evaluation by means of shared criteria as to where students are in relation to goals, and tailored feedback that offers specific guidance about how to improve.
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James H. McMillan (Sage Handbook of Research on Classroom Assessment)
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effective CA articulates the learning targets, provides feedback to teachers and students about where they are in relation to those targets, and prompts adjustments to instruction by teachers as well as changes to learning processes and revision of work products by students.
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James H. McMillan (Sage Handbook of Research on Classroom Assessment)
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Before the summer of 2014, before we had seen Eric Garner dying on a Staten Island street and Michael Brown lifeless in the Missouri sun for hours, before the grand jury decisions and the die-ins that shut down interstates, we may have lulled ourselves into believing that the struggle was over, that it had all been taken care of back in 1964, that the marching and bloodshed had established, once and for all, the basic rights of people who had been at the bottom for centuries. We may have believed that, if nothing else, the civil rights movement had defined a bar beneath which we could not fall.
But history tells us otherwise. We seem to be in a continuing feedback loop of repeating a past that our country has yet to address. Our history is one of spectacular achievement (as in black senators of the Reconstruction era or the advances that culminated in the election of Barack Obama) followed by a violent backlash that threatens to erase the gains and then a long, slow climb to the next mountain, where the cycle begins again.
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race)
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Ask your client to recall a time that he or she was able to successfully manage a time of transition or change—a time that he or she was able to “bounce back” from adversity or “survive in a changing world.” Together with your client, create a “causal loop map” of this ‘story of change’ by going through the following steps: 1.While the client is speaking, note down 7-10 key words from the story or example on a piece of paper. Key words may be of any type: behaviors, people, beliefs, values, phenomena, etc. 2.Draw arrows connecting the key words which illustrate the influences between key words and capture the flow of the story. (The arrows should be in the form of an arc or semi-circle rather than a straight line.) A positive or strengthening influence can be indicated by adding a (+) under the arrow. Negative or weakening influences can be shown by placing a (-) under the arrow. 3.When your client has finished telling his or her story, go over your initial map, checking the key words and giving him or her the chance to edit them, or add other key words you may have missed. Also review and check the links you have drawn between the key words. 4.Make sure that you have “closed” feedback loops (as a rule of thumb all key words should have at least one arrow going from them, and another arrow pointing to them). 5.Refine the map by considering the delays that may be involved between links, and searching for other missing links that may be an important part of the story. 6.Find out what beliefs are behind the map (what assumptions do these links presuppose?). Frequently, you will find that managing change involves several loops relating to the how (the steps and strategies involve), the why (the beliefs, values and motivation related to the change) and who (the role and identity issues).
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Robert B. Dilts (From Coach to Awakener)
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Our devices don’t have feelings (yet!) — if they did, they would be equivalent to the needy narcissistic partner for whom no amount of attention is ever enough. They superficially appear to care about you, give you just enough positive feedback to keep you interested in them, but never genuinely ask how you feel about your relation- ship. You doubt that you should get more serious, but it’s too easy to stay.
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Thatcher Wine (The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better)
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Despite its many layers, I THIRST is a simple tale. I have truly been honored by the positive feedback for my little story. As the author, it is my hope that it will be a parallel to your own journey, that you will be able to relate to the characters within and apply it to your own life. While there are universal themes, I think that each reader gets something different out of a book. May you find yourself in I THIRST. Perhaps it’s not much, but, if I could offer a little rose to the world, this would be it.
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Gina Marinello-Sweeney
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Consciousness is the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g., in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g., find mates, food, shelter).
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Anonymous
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In her later e-mails to me, Nancy struggled to capture the existential reality of trauma. “I want to tell you what a flashback is like. It is as if time is folded or warped, so that the past and present merge, as if I were physically transported into the past. Symbols related to the original trauma, however benign in reality, are thoroughly contaminated and so become objects to be hated, feared, destroyed if possible, avoided if not. For example, an iron in any form—a toy, a clothes iron, a curling iron, came to be seen as an instrument of torture. Each encounter with a scrub suit left me disassociated, confused, physically ill and at times consciously angry. “My marriage is slowly falling apart—my husband came to represent the heartless laughing people [the surgical team] who hurt me. I exist in a dual state. A pervasive numbness covers me with a blanket; and yet the touch of a small child pulls me back to the world. For a moment, I am present and a part of life, not just an observer. “Interestingly, I function very well at work, and I am constantly given positive feedback. Life proceeds with its own sense of falsity. “There is a strangeness, bizarreness to this dual existence. I tire of it. Yet I cannot give up on life, and I cannot delude myself into believing that if I ignore the beast it will go away. I’ve thought many times that I had recalled all the events around the surgery, only to find a new one. “There are so many pieces of that 45 minutes of my life that remain unknown. My memories are still incomplete and fragmented, but I no longer think that I need to know everything in order to understand what happened. “When the fear subsides I realize I can handle it, but a part of me doubts that I can. The pull to the past is strong; it is the dark side of my life; and I must dwell there from time to time. The struggle may also be a way to know that I survive—a re-playing of the fight to survive—which apparently I won, but cannot own.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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How did your research go?” “Oh, that.” Alejandro waved a hand. “The people recover from the fit after a few minutes of being removed from the environment. And they’re perfectly fine afterwards. I’m assuming that means that if they hear the same song or see the same movie again it has no effect.” “Hmm,” Max said. Crystal looked at him. “What?” Max asked. “You said ‘hmm’.” Alejandro snorted. “You’ll get used to him saying ‘hmm’. He does it to sound wise.” “The way I designed the beat structures,” Max said, ignoring Alejandro. “People are supposed to be affected but not know it. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that these fits are because I did not complete my work and had only tested it on a limited number of people.” Alejandro rolled his eyes. “Can I continue to give my feedback or do you want to bore us all about your scientific research?” “Your feedback is about my research.” “No it’s about the effects of your research, which, might I add, was highly unethical and inimical.” “He just said inimical,” Max said, clapping. “He knows a word that’s more than two syllables.” “Unethical is more than two syllables, too,” Alejandro retorted. “Two words!” Max snorted. “He’s a genius.” “Going back to my findings,” Alejandro said, glaring at Max, and then turning to Crystal. “I don’t trust them. I don’t trust anything I read in the papers or see in the media. Especially when it’s something related to the SOT. Luke is too powerful. The truth about these fits will never be reported. If we want to know what’s really going on, we will have to go out and find out for ourselves.” “Agreed,” Crystal said slowly. “He actually sounded pretty intelligent then,” Max whispered to Donovan. “I propose that—” “He has a proposal!” Max said. Alejandro gave Max a dismissive look. “Those with brains alone always envy and persecute those possessing both beauty and brains.” Crystal held back a snort of laughter. Even Donovan looked amused despite the deep frown of strain on his forehead. Juda’s expression didn’t change. Max glowered at Alejandro. “Why would a man refer to himself as beautiful?
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Dayo Benson (The Crystal Series Boxed Set: Searchlight, Surrender & Insurrection (The Crystal Series #1-3))