High Reliability Quotes

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.

He was responsible. He was good. It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene. Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something, being good.

In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.

Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice—all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn’t evolve for the “good of the species” and aren’t reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever how (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self-interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony.

Without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy.

Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religion may not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.

In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?

It’s all in Hogwarts, A History. Though, of course, that book’s not entirely reliable. A Revised History of Hogwarts would be a more accurate title. Or A Highly Biased and Selective History of Hogwarts, Which Glosses Over the Nastier Aspects of the School.” “What are you on about?” said Ron, though Harry thought he knew what was coming. “House-elves!” said Hermione, her eyes flashing. “Not once, in over a thousand pages, does Hogwarts, A History mention that we are all colluding in the oppression of a hundred slaves!

Jack Stepney had once said of Miss Van Osburgh that she was as reliable as roast mutton. His own taste was in the line of less solid and more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger makes any fare palatable, and there had been times when Mr. Stepney had been reduced to a crust.

In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.

Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited with improving productivity, reliability, simplicity, and comprehensibility by factors of 5 to 15 over low-level languages such as assembly and C (Brooks 1987, Jones 1998, Boehm 2000). You save time when you don't need to have an awards ceremony every time a C statement does what it's supposed to.

The greater your integrity, the more the many gates of knowledge and the real truths of existence will be revealed. There are no training camps or courses to sign up for; this is all about you and your conscience. In every moment of your existence you have the opportunity to take the low road, the middle road, or the high road. Honesty produces a frequency that says, I have integrity and honor, and I am dependable, trustworthy, and reliable. It is all up to you. The more responsibility you are willing to claim for being the creator of your life, the greater the truths you will be able to accept and deal with. Responsibility opens the doors to complete self-empowerment. You

When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get.

Her sweet smell drove my body higher as I nibbled on the edge of her earlobe. “I’m not stopping you. You plan. I’ll kiss.” Echo turned her head to look at me over her shoulder. My siren became a temptress with that seductive smile on her lips. A mistake on her part. I caressed her cheek and kissed those soft lips. I expected her to shy away. We’d been playing this game for over an hour: she plotted while I teased.Leaving for the summer was important to her and she was important to me. But instead of the quick peck I’d anticipated, she moved her lips against mine. A burning heat warmed my blood. It was a slow kiss at first—all I meant it to be, but then Echo touched me. Her hands on my face, in my hair. And then she angled her body to mine. Warmth, enticing pressure on all the right parts, and Echo’s lips on mine—fireworks. She became my world. Filling my senses so that all I felt and saw and tasted was her. Kisses and touches and whispered words of love and when my hand skimmed down the curve of her waist and paused on the hem of her jeans my body screamed to continue, but my mind knew it was time to stop. With a sigh, I moved my lips once more against hers before shifting and pulling her body to my side. “I’m in love with you.” Echo settled her head in the crook of my arm as her fingertips lazily touched my face. “I know. I love you, too.” “I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner.” If I had, then maybe we never would have been apart. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “We’re together now and that’s all that matters.” I kissed her forehead and she snuggled closer to me. The world felt strange. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t fighting someone or something. My brothers were safe. Echo knew the truth. Soon, I’d be free from high school and foster care. Hopefully, I’d be admitted on late acceptance to college. Contentment and happiness were unfamiliar emotions, but ones I could learn to live with. “Do you mind?” she asked in a small voice that indicated nerves. “That we’re taking it slow?” “No.” And it was the truth. Everything in her life was in flux and she needed strong, steady and stable. Oddly, she found those three things in me. Who would ever have guessed I’d be the reliable sort? “Besides, taking it slow creates buildup. I like anticipation.” Her body rocked with silent giggles and my lips turned up. I loved making her happy.

Hope reliably triumphs over experience. It’s always very tempting to console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn’t work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we directed them onto the wrong person. We

We mortals are condemned not to speak at that level of no information loss. We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so. But that sacrifice is also our glory. Drastic simplification is what allows us to reduce situations to their bare bones, to discover abstract essences, to put our fingers on what matters, to understand phenomena at amazingly high levels, to survive reliably in this world, and to formulate literature, art, music, and science.

[T]he going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high level [...] conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us.

What's all this, I expect you're thinking, about "the tallest mountain in the world"? Everest, surely, deserves at least an honourable mention in this category? Well, it all depends on your point of view. Certainly, Everest stands a sturdy 29,028 feet above sea level, which is, in its way, impressive. But if you were going to climb Everest, you would probably start, fi you were using a reliable guide, somewhere in the Himalayas. Anywhere in the Himalayas is pretty damn high to start with, and so, to hear some people tell it, it's just a smartish jog to do the last little bit to the actual top of Everest. The way to keep it interesting these days is to do it without oxygen or in your underpants or something.

Who, for example, would have ever predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that the poet who overuses the word I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide? Or that a certain world leader’s use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he’d lead his country into war? By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others.

Making all the components highly reliable will not necessarily make the system safe.

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.” “And

You build trust in a relationship by being trustworthy. Create a high standard for yourself with integrity, honesty, reliability, and compassion, and work on being a pleasure to share time with,

He was a clean-cut man in his fifties who appeared so wholesome that Ian was sure he could pass as a high school teacher, a Mormon missionary, or the reliable love interest in one of those Hallmark Channel movies.

Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. That

Some parents have taught their small children, “Go to the manager,” but this poses the same problem of identification as with the policeman: That small name tag is several feet above the child’s eye-line. I don’t believe in teaching inflexible rules because it’s not possible to know they’ll apply in all situations. There is one, however, that reliably enhances safety: Teach children that if they are ever lost, Go to a Woman. Why? First, if your child selects a woman, it’s highly unlikely that the woman will be a sexual predator. Next, as Jan’s story illustrates, a woman approached by a lost child asking for help is likely to stop whatever she is doing, commit to that child, and not rest until the child is safe. A man approached by a small child might say, “Head over there to the manager’s desk,” whereas a woman will get involved and stay involved.

If, in recommending that Americans avoid meat, cheese, milk, cream, butter, eggs, and the rest, it turns out that nutrition experts made a mistake, it will have been a monumental one. Measured just by death and disease, and not including the millions of lives derailed by excess weight and obesity, it’s very possible that the course of nutrition advice over the past sixty years has taken an unparalleled toll on human history. It now appears that since 1961, the entire American population has, indeed, been subjected to a mass experiment, and the results have clearly been a failure. Every reliable indicator of good health is worsened by a low-fat diet. Whereas diets high in fat have been shown, again and again, in a large body of clinical trials, to lead to improved measures for heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes, and are better for weight loss. Moreover, it’s clear that the original case against saturated fats was based on faulty evidence and has, over the last decade, fallen apart. Despite more than two billion dollars in public money spent trying to prove that lowering saturated fat will prevent heart attacks, the diet-heart hypothesis has not held up.

It’s hard to blame Representative Petri for missing the point. The value of studying fireflies is endlessly surprising. For example, before 1994, Internet engineers were vexed by spontaneous pulsations in the traffic between computers called routers, until they realized that the machines were behaving like fireflies, exchanging periodic messages that were inadvertently synchronizing them. Once the cause was identified, it became clear how to relieve the congestion. Electrical engineers devised a decentralized architecture for clocking computer circuits more efficiently, by mimicking the fireflies’ strategy for achieving synchrony at low cost and high reliability.

As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in her book How Emotions Are Made, “You may think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” People who are scared take in a scene differently. Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech. Anxiety narrows our attention and diminishes our peripheral vision. A feeling of happiness, by contrast, widens our peripheral vision. A person who feels safe because of the reliable and empathetic presence of others will see the world as a wider, more open, and happier place.

The Eight Guiding Principles to Living a Spiritually Reliable Life: 1) I am committed to Divine higher guidance and I understand that I co-create my life with the Divine. 2) I am willing to be utilized for a greater higher purpose. 3) I operate from a high level intention to serve. 4) My contribution to the world is an up level and I ask myself: How can I serve, rather than what can I get? 5) I take time to breathe, get calm and quiet my mind in order to hear God’s whispers. 6) I hear, feel, see and sense Divine guidance as it arrives. 7) I show up where God needs me next, and in doing so, this allows my life to be utilized for a greater higher purpose. 8) I know that I am always connected to the Divine without interruption and there is no place God is not.

In a short-staffed convenience store, a store worker can sometimes be highly appreciated just by existing, by virtue of not rocking the boat. I’m not particularly brilliant compared to Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara, but I’m second to none in terms of never being late or taking days off. I just come in every day without fail, and because of that I’m accepted as a well-functioning part of the store.

Things are getting out of hand: Tony finds herself channeling this opinion at least once a day. The crazed weather. The vicious, hate-filled politics. The myriad glass high-rises going up like 3-D mirrors, or siege engines. The municipal garbage collection: Who can keep all those different-coloured bins straight? Where to put the clear plastic food containers, and why isn't the little number on the bottom a reliable guide? And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them--smelly, evil,undead--but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains. Conscientiousness and (to a smaller extent) agreeableness are also the most reliable personality predictors of physical health and longevity; the contribution of neuroticism is mixed and may depend on the specific facets considered. The life history correlates of neuroticism are much less straightforward; for example, high neuroticism tends to predict increased short-term mating in women but reduced short-term mating in men, with much cross-cultural variation. There is also evidence that slow life history–related traits can be associated with social anxiety and insecurity, which is consistent with a general profile of risk aversion and behavioral inhibition. As a first approximation, then, metatrait alpha can be treated as a broadband correlate of slow strategies, with the caveat that neuroticism may be elevated at both ends of the continuum.

In fact, with experience and maturity we learn to worry less about others’ intent and more about the effect others’ actions are having on us. No longer are we in the game of rooting out unhealthy motives. And here’s the good news. When we reflect on alternative motives, not only do we soften our emotions, but equally important, we relax our absolute certainty long enough to allow for dialogue— the only reliable way of discovering others’ genuine motives.

High-quality and transparent data, clearly documented, timely rendered, and publicly available are the sine qua non of competent public health management. During a pandemic, reliable and comprehensive data are critical for determining the behavior of the pathogen, identifying vulnerable populations, rapidly measuring the effectiveness of interventions, mobilizing the medical community around cutting-edge disease management, and inspiring cooperation from the public. The shockingly low quality of virtually all relevant data pertinent to COVID-19, and the quackery, the obfuscation, the cherrypicking and blatant perversion would have scandalized, offended, and humiliated every prior generation of American public health officials. Too often, Dr. Fauci was at the center of these systemic deceptions. The “mistakes” were always in the same direction—inflating the risks of coronavirus and the safety and efficacy of vaccines in

not as reliably able to interpret my dreams. Sometimes I wondered if I had everything backward, my life and purpose and meaning all backward. Maybe the best thing I had to offer was fry cookery of a high order, and maybe my paranormal abilities were nothing more than the equivalent of a talent for farting on command, better repressed than indulged. I, no less than anyone, was capable of self-delusion, of pride that led me to embrace a grander image of myself than was the truth.

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.

First, clarify what you really want. You’ve got a head start if you’ve already Started with Heart. If you know what you want for yourself, for others, and for the relationship, then you’re in position to break out of the Fool’s Choice. “What I want is for my husband to be more reliable. I’m tired of being let down by him when he makes commitments that I depend on.” Second, clarify what you really don’t want. This is the key to framing the and question. Think of what you are afraid will happen to you if you back away from your current strategy of trying to win or stay safe. What bad thing will happen

God wants us broken so that any power in us can be undeniably attributed to him. If self-reliance could reliably and ultimately contribute to our success and fulfillment, God’s glory would be diminished, having to share precious space with our lesser glory. But we are not glorious, even in our self-made victories. For God to get all the glory, he requires our brokenness, while promising his wholeness. He gets the glory when we trust him in difficult times. Murray Brett writes, “The price of God’s glory shining in our lives is brokenness.”1 The cost is high, but so is the benefit. And aside from that, there is no alternative.

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.” In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I’d said on Wall $ treet Week: “There’ll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was. Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one’s own currency can be successfully restructured with the government’s help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stimulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognize the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal. Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached. Staring at these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelihood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change—starting by learning a better way of handling the natural aggressiveness I’ve always shown in going after what I wanted. Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

Those neurons, the brain’s soldiers, march for years, from the time we’re born, through the byways of the brain, setting actions into motion, rolling away boulders of all kinds, and then, with Alzheimer’s, they’re blocked by trees down at one end of the road, dangling wires at another. Over the years, the brain’s soldiers—this well-trained and reliable army, which has done so much, on so many different terrains, gone high and low, swum, climbed, strolled, and marched to all the different destinations of the mind—begin to falter, long before outsiders can see the troubles. Eventually (five years on for some, three for others, ten for some), the obstacles cannot be overcome. Messages cannot be received.

Spontaneous order is self-contradictory. Spontaneity connotes the ebullition of surprises. It is highly entropic and disorderly. It is entrepreneurial and complex. Order connotes predictability and equilibrium. It is what is not spontaneous. It includes moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers. Order requires political guidance, sovereignty, and leadership. It normally entails religious beliefs. The entire saga of the history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies.

Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others. A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall. And the wall is part of a building. And the building is a cathedral. And the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of the Highest Good. And under such circumstances, every brick laid is an act that partakes of the divine. And if what you are doing in your day-to-day activity is not enough, then you are not aiming at the construction of a proper cathedral. And that is because you are not aiming high enough. Because if you were, then you would experience the sense of meaning in relationship to your sufficiently high goal, and it would justify the misery and limitations of your life. If you have something meaningful to pursue, then you are engrossed in life. You are on a meaningful path. The most profound and reliable instinct for meaning—if not perverted by self-deceit and sin (there is no other way to state it)—manifests itself when you are on the path of maximum virtue.

But enslaved people were not uncritical or gullible in their appropriation of the biblical text. John Jea, already quoted as an example of early black reverence for the Scripture, also illustrates the ability of some slaves to distinguish between the reliability of the Bible’s content itself and the unreliable teaching of the Bible in the hands of some white masters. Jea recalls: After our master had been treating us in this cruel manner [severe floggings, sometimes unto death], we were obliged to thank him for the punishment he had been inflicting on us, quoting that Scripture which saith, “Bless the rod, and him that hath appointed it.” But, though he was a professor of religion, he forgot that passage which saith “God is love, and whoso dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” And, again, we are commanded to love our enemies; but it appeared evident that his wretched heart was hardened.8 Jea’s account and others like it teach us that African-American Christians trusted the Bible while they suspected the self-serving motives and Scripture-twisting actions of white preachers and slave owners. It’s fascinating to consider that a highly oral people revered the Scriptures they could not read even while they rejected the oracles of co-opted preachers they could hear. One could say that African-American Christianity began with an unread Bible placed on the center of the church’s ecclesial coffee table.

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero. Commenting

Looks like they might cancel school on Monday. Woot! Information like this coming from Lucy is generally pretty reliable, since she happens to live right next door to Mrs. Crawford, the principal of Magnolia Branch High. Yay, I can sit home and watch more Weather Channel! I text back. This is an intervention--step away from the TV! NOW! I laugh aloud at that. It’s such a typical Lucy-like thing to say. My mom’s worried about you. Wants you to pack up and come over here. Can’t. But Ryder’s coming over if the storm gets bad. Lucy’s next text is just a line of googly eyes. Not funny, I type, even though it kind of us. You two can plan your wedding menu. Choose your linens. Stuff like that, she texts, followed by a smiley face. I gaze at my phone with a frown. Also not funny.

For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.

I am, reluctantly, a self-confessed carbon chauvinist. Carbon is abundant in the Cosmos. It makes marvelously complex molecules, good for life. I am also a water chauvinist. Water makes an ideal solvent system for organic chemistry to work in and stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. But sometimes I wonder. Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact that I am made chiefly of them? Are we carbon- and water-based because those materials were abundant on the Earth at the time of the origin of life? Could life elsewhere—on Mars, say—be built of different stuff? I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else? Harold Morowitz has calculated what it would cost to put together the correct molecular constituents that make up a human being by buying the molecules from chemical supply houses. The answer turns out to be about ten million dollars, which should make us all feel a little better. But even then we could not mix those chemicals together and have a human being emerge from the jar. That is far beyond our capability and will probably be so for a very long period of time. Fortunately, there are other less expensive but still highly reliable methods of making human beings. I think the lifeforms on many worlds will consist, by and large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps even many of the same basic molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids—but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmospheres will be very much like us in their atomic composition, except they might not have bones and therefore not need much calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos; hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal of damage to the kind of molecules that make us up, but other organic molecules, paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence. Liquid ammonia would make an even better solvent system, because ammonia is very abundant in the Cosmos. But it is liquid only on worlds much colder than the Earth or Mars. Ammonia is ordinarily a gas on Earth, as water is on Venus. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all—solid-state life, where there are electrical signals propagating rather than molecules floating about. But these ideas do not

1:THE “CRISIS”: Although Chief Judge Bazelon said in 1960 that “we desperately need all the help we can get from modern behavioral scientists”69 in dealing with the criminal law, the cold facts suggest no such desperation or crisis. Since the most reliable long-term crime data are on murder, what was the murder rate at that point? The number of murders committed in the United States in 1960 was less than in 1950, 1940, or 1930—even though the population was growing over those decades and murders in the two new states of Hawaii and Alaska were counted in the national statistics for the first time in 1960.70 The murder rate, in proportion to population, was in 1960 just under half of what it had been in 1934.71 As Judge Bazelon saw the criminal justice system in 1960, the problem was not with “the so-called criminal population”72 but with society, whose “need to punish” was a “primitive urge” that was “highly irrational”73—indeed, a “deep childish fear that with any reduction of punishment, multitudes would run amuck.”74 It was this “vindictiveness,” this “irrationality” of “notions and practices regarding punishment”75 that had to be corrected. The criminal “is like us, only somewhat weaker,” according to Judge Bazelon, and “needs help if he is going to bring out the good in himself and restrain the bad.”76 Society is indeed guilty of “creating this special class of human beings,” by its “social failure” for which “the criminal serves as a scapegoat.”77 Punishment is itself a “dehumanizing process” and a “social branding” which only promotes more crime.78 Since criminals “have a special problem and need special help,” Judge Bazelon argued for “psychiatric treatment” with “new, more sophisticated techniques” and asked: Would it really be the end of the world if all jails were turned into hospitals or rehabilitation centers?79

Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child’s self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children’s self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems. The children with poor self-control tended to wind up poorer financially. They worked in relatively low-paying jobs, had little money in the bank, and were less likely to own a home or have money set aside for retirement. They also grew up to have more children being raised in single-parent households, presumably because they had a harder time adapting to the discipline required for a long-term relationship. The children with good self-control were much more likely to wind up in a stable marriage and raise children in a two-parent home. Last, but certainly not least, the children with poor self-control were more likely to end up in prison. Among those with the lowest levels of self-control, more than 40 percent had a criminal conviction by the age of thirty-two, compared with just 12 percent of the people who had been toward the high end of the self-control distribution in their youth.

We saw in the discussion of the law of small numbers that a message, unless it is immediately rejected as a lie, will have the same effect on the associative system regardless of its reliability. The gist of the message is the story, which is based on whatever information is available, even if the quantity of the information is slight and its quality is poor: WYSIATI. When you read a story about the heroic rescue of a wounded mountain climber, its effect on your associative memory is much the same if it is a news report or the synopsis of a film. Anchoring results from this associative activation. Whether the story is true, or believable, matters little, if at all. The powerful effect of random anchors is an extreme case of this phenomenon, because a random anchor obviously provides no information at all. Earlier I discussed the bewildering variety of priming effects, in which your thoughts and behavior may be influenced by stimuli to which you pay no attention at all, and even by stimuli of which you are completely unaware. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring effects are threatening in a similar way. You are always aware of the anchor and even pay attention to it, but you do not know how it guides and constrains your thinking, because you cannot imagine how you would have thought if the anchor had been different (or absent). However, you should assume that any number that is on the table has had an anchoring effect on you, and if the stakes are high you should mobilize yourself (your System 2) to combat the effect.

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.” Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent.

Due to the various pragmatic obstacles, it is rare for a mission-critical analysis to be done in the “fully Bayesian” manner, i.e., without the use of tried-and-true frequentist tools at the various stages. Philosophy and beauty aside, the reliability and efficiency of the underlying computations required by the Bayesian framework are the main practical issues. A central technical issue at the heart of this is that it is much easier to do optimization (reliably and efficiently) in high dimensions than it is to do integration in high dimensions. Thus the workhorse machine learning methods, while there are ongoing efforts to adapt them to Bayesian framework, are almost all rooted in frequentist methods. A work-around is to perform MAP inference, which is optimization based. Most users of Bayesian estimation methods, in practice, are likely to use a mix of Bayesian and frequentist tools. The reverse is also true—frequentist data analysts, even if they stay formally within the frequentist framework, are often influenced by “Bayesian thinking,” referring to “priors” and “posteriors.” The most advisable position is probably to know both paradigms well, in order to make informed judgments about which tools to apply in which situations.

No, I have a plan and I’m sticking to it. Quitting notwithstanding.” Helen was skeptical. “Describe your supposed plan.” I leaned back in my chair and counted off on my fingers. “First, get accepted to the California bar, check; move to LA, check; get a good job; put Emily in an excellent elementary school; get a reliable babysitter; work my ass off to pay for the school and the babysitter; get Emily into Westminster; make partner so I can afford Westminster; get Emily through middle and high school without her getting arrested, pregnant, or addicted to methamphetamines; get her into a good college; get promoted so I can afford the good college; keep working my ass off to pay for the whole four years; help her get a good job; then go out into the backyard, dig myself a big hole, and sit in it.” “Wow,” said Helen. “That’s quite a detailed plan.” “Yup. You know me, I like to achieve my goals.” “When did you come up with that plan?” “When the second line appeared on the pregnancy test.” “And you haven’t deviated from your plan for the last seventeen years?” I shook my head. “Jesus, Jess, what happened to you? When we were in college you were stubborn, sure, and yes, you liked a goal, but since when did simply sticking to a plan become the goal?

The book’s secondary message, more implicit than explicit, is this: It is also time to render unto equality that which is appropriate to equality, and unto excellence that which is appropriate to excellence. Equality is a fine ideal, and should have an honored place. To have understood that each person is unique, that each person must be treated as an end and not a means, that each person should be free to live his life as he sees fit, so long as he accords others the same freedom, that each person should be equal before the law and is equal in God’s sight, and to incorporate these principles into the governance of nations—these are among the greatest of all human accomplishments. But equality has nothing to do with the abilities, persistence, zeal, and vision that produce excellence. Equality and excellence inhabit different domains, and allegiance to one need not compete with allegiance to the other. Excellence is not simply a matter of opinion, though judgment enters into its identification. Excellence has attributes that can be identified, evaluated, and compared across works. The judgments reached by those who are most expert in their fields, and who work from standards of excellence that they are willing to specify and subject to the inspection of logic, are highly consistent—so consistent that eminence in the various domains of accomplishment can be gradated with higher reliability than is achieved by almost any other measure in the social and behavioral sciences. When the rating of eminence is scrutinized against the reasons for that eminence, it also becomes apparent that those who rank highest are those who have achieved at the highest levels of their field.

Skills Unlocked: How to Build Heroic Character Strengths If you want to make a change for the better or achieve a tough goal, don’t worry about motivation. Instead, focus on increasing your self-efficacy: confidence in your ability to solve your own problems and achieve your goals. The fastest and most reliable way to increase your self-efficacy is to learn how to play a new game. Any kind of game will do, because all games require you to learn new skills and tackle tough goals. The level of dopamine in your brain influences your ability to build self-efficacy. The more you have, the more determined you feel, and the less likely you are to give up. You’ll learn faster, too—because high dopamine levels improve your attention and help you process feedback more effectively. Keep in mind that video games have been shown to boost dopamine levels as much as intravenous amphetamines. Whenever you want to boost your dopamine levels, play a game—or make a prediction. Predictions prime your brain to pay closer attention and to anticipate a reward. (Playing “worst-case scenario bingo” is an excellent way to combine these two techniques!) You can also build self-efficacy vicariously by watching an avatar that looks like you accomplish feats in a virtual world. Whenever possible, customize video game avatars to look like you. Every time your avatar does something awesome, you’ll get a vicarious boost to your willpower and determination. Remember, self-efficacy doesn’t just help you. It can inspire you to help others. The more powerful you feel, the more likely you are to rise to the heroic occasion. So the next time you feel superpowerful, take a moment to ask yourself how you can use your powers for good.

If you could be anyone else, who would you want to be?” I ask, because I’ve decided that I admire how David doesn’t self-censor. I should try it too. I think about this all the time. Waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror, and seeing someone wholly different staring back. These days I’d give anything to be the old me, the pre-accident me, who could sit at my old lunch table and chat about nothing. The pre-accident me who aspired to be more like Lauren Drucker, former benevolent ruler and social chair of Mapleview. I really wouldn’t mind being entirely full of shit, so long as I didn’t notice. “There’s this guy Trey who teaches me guitar,” David says. “He kind of pisses me off, actually, but he’s just the type of guy everyone likes. He always knows exactly what to say. Like has annoyingly pitch-perfect radio waves. So I guess him?” “I used to want my metaphorical radio waves to play music that was, like, quirky but also perfectly curated, you know? Something cool. But now I feel like I’ve become traffic on the hour.” “You are so not traffic on the hour,” he says, and to my dismay dabs at his chin with a napkin. “Though I wouldn’t mind even being that. Reliable, informative, albeit repetitive. At least people actually listen to it.” “I think your signal is in Morse code,” I say with a smile. “When I was eight, I taught myself Morse code. The clicks are highly irritating.” I lean over and for no reason I can think of—maybe because I have nothing smart to say, maybe because with David I feel like someone else entirely, I want to be someone else entirely—I take a lick of his ice cream. The vanilla part. He stares at my lips, as shocked as I am. “Sorry,” I say. “I liked your order better.” “The cold medicine is not for me. Just to be clear,” he says. “Wasn’t worried.

..."facts" properly speaking are always and never more than interpretations of the data... the Gospel accounts are themselves such data or, if you like, hard facts. But the events to which the Gospels refer are not themselves "hard facts"; they are facts only in the sense that we interpret the text, together with such other data as we have, to reach a conclusion regarding the events as best we are able. They are facts in the same way that the verdict of a jury establishes the facts of the case, the interpretation of the evidence that results in the verdict delivered. Here it is as well to remember that historical methodology can only produce probabilities, the probability that some event took place in such circumstances being greater or smaller, depending on the quality of the data and the perspective of the historical enquirer. The jury which decides what is beyond reasonable doubt is determining that the probability is sufficiently high for a clear-cut verdict to be delivered. Those who like "certainty" in matters of faith will always find this uncomfortable. But faith is not knowledge of "hard facts"...; it is rather confidence, assurance, trust in the reliability of the data and in the integrity of the interpretations derived from that data... It does seem important to me that those who speak for evangelical Christians grasp this nettle firmly, even if it stings! – it is important for the intellectual integrity of evangelicals. Of course any Christian (and particularly evangelical Christians) will want to get as close as possible to the Jesus who ministered in Galilee in the late 20s of the first century. If, as they believe, God spoke in and through that man, more definitively and finally than at any other time and by any other medium, then of course Christians will want to hear as clearly as possible what he said, and to see as clearly as possible what he did, to come as close as possible to being an eyewitness and earwitness for themselves. If God revealed himself most definitively in the historical particularity of a Galilean Jew in the earliest decades of the Common Era, then naturally those who believe this will want to inquire as closely into the historical particularity and actuality of that life and of Jesus’ mission. The possibility that later faith has in some degree covered over that historical actuality cannot be dismissed as out of the question. So a genuinely critical historical inquiry is necessary if we are to get as close to the historical actuality as possible. Critical here, and this is the point, should not be taken to mean negatively critical, hermeneutical suspicion, dismissal of any material that has overtones of Easter faith. It means, more straightforwardly, a careful scrutiny of all the relevant data to gain as accurate or as historically responsible a picture as possible. In a day when evangelical, and even Christian, is often identified with a strongly right-wing, conservative and even fundamentalist attitude to the Bible, it is important that responsible evangelical scholars defend and advocate such critical historical inquiry and that their work display its positive outcome and benefits. These include believers growing in maturity • to recognize gray areas and questions to which no clear-cut answer can be given (‘we see in a mirror dimly/a poor reflection’), • to discern what really matters and distinguish them from issues that matter little, • and be able to engage in genuine dialogue with those who share or respect a faith inquiring after truth and seeking deeper understanding. In that way we may hope that evangelical (not to mention Christian) can again become a label that men and women of integrity and good will can respect and hope to learn from more than most seem to do today.

The parallel between scientific experiments and mystical (read spiritual) experiences may seem surprising in view of the very different nature of these acts of observation. Physics perform experiments involving an elaborate teamwork and a highly sophisticated technology, whereas mystics obtain their knowledge purely through introspection, without any machinery, in the privacy of meditation. Scientific experiments, furthermore, seem repeatable any time and by anybody, whereas mystical experiences seem to be reserved for a few individuals at special occasions. A closer examination shows, however that the differences between the two kinds of observation lie only in their approach and not in their reliability or complexity. Anybody who wants to repeat an experiment in modern subatomic physics has to undergo many years of training. Only then will he or she be able to ask nature a specific question through the experiment and to understand the answer. Similarly, a deep mystical experience requires, generally, many years of training under an experienced master and, as in the scientific training, the dedicated time does not alone guarantee success. If the student is successful, however, he or she will be able to 'repeat the experiment'. The repeatability of the experience is, in fact, essential to every mystical training and is the very aim of the mystic's spiritual instruction. A mystical experience, therefore, is not any more unique than a modern experiment in physics. On the other hand, it is not less sophisticated either, although its sophistication is of a very different kind. The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystics consciousness - both physics and spiritual - in deep meditation. The scientists and the mystics then, have developed highly sophisticated methods of observing nature which are inaccessible to the layperson. A [Page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as the Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquires into the nature of the universe.

WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

This way please,' said a voice. In the door stood Dr Sesame, the famous Dr Sesame, whose reputation as a sympathetic and, according to some, also a kind-hearted man had spread throughout the town and beyond. He had also written a popular pamphlet on sexual problems, which had given Pinneberg the courage to write making an appointment for Emma and himself. This, then, was the Dr Sesame at present standing in the doorway, and saying 'This way, please.' Dr Sesame searched on his desk for the letter. 'You wrote to me, Mr Pinneberg... saying you couldn't have any children just yet because you couldn't afford it?' 'Yes,' said Pinneberg, dreadfully embarrassed. 'You can start undressing,' said the doctor to Emma, and carried on: 'And you want to know an entirely reliable means of prevention. Hm, an entirely reliable means...' He smiled sceptically behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. 'I read about it in your book... These pessoirs...' 'Pessaries,' said the doctor. 'Yes, but they don't suit every woman. And it's always a bit of a business. It depends on whether your wife would be nimble-fingered enough...' He looked up at her. She had already taken off her blouse and skirt. Her slim legs made her look very tall. 'Well, let's go next door,' said the doctor. 'You needn't have taken your blouse off for this, young lady.' Emma went a deep red. 'Oh well, leave it off now. Come this way. One moment, Mr Pinneberg.' The two of them went into the next room. Pinneberg watched them go. The top of the doctor's head reached no farther than the 'young lady's' shoulders. How beautiful she was! thought Pinneberg yet again; she was the greatest girl in the world, the only one for him. He worked in Ducherow, and she worked here in Platz, and he never saw her more than once a fortnight, so his joy in her was always fresh, and his desire for her absolutely inexpressible. Next door he heard the doctor asking questions on and off in a low voice, and an instrument clinking on the side of a bowl. He knew that sound from the dentist's; it wasn't a pleasant one. Then he winced violently. Never had he heard that tone from Emma. She was saying in a high, clear voice that was almost a shriek - 'No, no, no!' And once again, 'No!' And then, very softly, but he still heard it: 'Oh God.' Pinneberg took three steps to the door - What was that? What could it be? What about these rumours that those kind of doctors were terrible lechers? But then Dr Sesame spoke again - impossible to hear what he said - and the instrument clinked again. There was a long silence.

In previous chapters I have mentioned moral positivism (especially that of Hegel), the theory that there is no moral standard but the one which exists; that what is, is reasonable and good; and therefore, that might is right. The practical aspect of this theory is this. A moral criticism of the existing state of affairs is impossible, since this state itself determines the moral standard of things. Now the historicist moral theory we are considering is nothing but another form of moral positivism. For it holds that coming might is right. The future is here substituted for the present—that is all. And the practical aspect of the theory is this. A moral criticism of the coming state of affairs is impossible, since this state determines the moral standard of things. The difference between ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ is here, of course, only a matter of degree. One can say that the future starts to-morrow, or in 500 years, or in 100. In their theoretical structure there is no difference between moral conservatism, moral modernism, and moral futurism. Nor is there much to choose between them in regard to moral sentiments. If the moral futurist criticizes the cowardice of the moral conservative who takes sides with the powers that be, then the moral conservative can return the charge; he can say that the moral futurist is a coward since he takes sides with the powers that will be, with the rulers of to-morrow. I feel sure that, had he considered these implications, Marx would have repudiated historicist moral theory. Numerous remarks and numerous actions prove that it was not a scientific judgement but a moral impulse, the wish to help the oppressed, the wish to free the shamelessly exploited and miserable workers, which led him to socialism. I do not doubt that it is this moral appeal that is the secret of the influence of his teaching. And the force of this appeal was tremendously strengthened by the fact that he did not preach morality in the abstract. He did not pretend to have any right to do so. Who, he seems to have asked himself, lives up to his own standard, provided it is not a very low one? It was this feeling which led him to rely, in ethical matters, on under-statements, and which led him to the attempt to find in prophetic social science an authority in matters of morals more reliable than he felt himself to be. Surely, in Marx’s practical ethics such categories as freedom and equality played the major rôle. He was, after all, one of those who took the ideals of 1789 seriously. And he had seen how shamelessly a concept like ‘freedom’ could be twisted. This is why he did not preach freedom in words—why he preached it in action. He wanted to improve society and improvement meant to him more freedom, more equality, more justice, more security, higher standards of living, and especially that shortening of the working day which at once gives the workers some freedom. It was his hatred of hypocrisy, his reluctance to speak about these ‘high ideals’, together with his amazing optimism, his trust that all this would be realized in the near future, which led him to veil his moral beliefs behind historicist formulations.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

I trade in the finest quality opium,' the old merchant said. 'My products are all fresh, pure, unadulterated, stamped, and correctly weighed. We owe this refinement of our commodity to a serious and high-minded Englishman who came to Isfahan many many years ago, and showed us that purity and reliability in our product would guarantee a regular demand for it. We have never adulterated our opium since that day. To-day it is the finest in the world, fit for men, women and children, ideal for regular consumption, and without the excessive reactions which one usually suffers from the heavily oiled opium of the east. For bringing honesty to the opium trade, we owe so much to that remarkable Englishman that I would like to take the liberty of presenting you each with a small silver box of our product--the very finest little black pearls of constant enjoyment.' 'I hasten to state my unworthiness,' MacGregor said. 'On the contrary,' the merchant replied. 'My gift is unworthy of your illustrious heritage.' MacGregor rejected the three small silver boxes, and told the curious Katherine and Essex of the illustrious Englishman who had brought all this upon them, having put the opium manufacture of Isfahan on such a sound moral basis.

Get out,” Alex said and raised a hand, summoning a guard. “But my lord,” Byron protested even as he stared with alarm at the man advancing on him. “I meant no harm! I hold Lord Hawkforte in the highest possible esteem, as I do you all, most especially Her Highness, the Princess Kassandra. It was only with thought for her tender concern and wishing to prevent her from hearing this from a source less simpatico that I-“ It would never occur to Alex to repeat an order nor would there be any reason for him to do so. The door was opened and Byron was through it, his legs tangling in the air as he was unceremoniously ejected. Scarcely had he gone than Kassandra was in the hall, beseeching her brother. “I must go with you! For pity’s sake, do not say otherwise. I cannot sit here waiting to know-“ He looked at her just a touch oddly. “Of course you can’t. I’ll get a carriage brought round while you dress. Only hurry.” A few months before, he would have insisted she remain where she was while he handled the matter. But between then and now lay a world of change. She had ceased to be the protected princess of the royal house and emerged instead as a woman of maturity and grace. She would need both as she rushed upstairs and began pulling on the first gown that came to hand. Fortunately, it was a simple day dress and she was able to manage the buttons down the back without great difficulty. She had just finished the last when Joanna hurried in. She, too, had dressed hastily. Brianna, who had accompanied them back in England, came right behind, holding Amelia. “You’re ready?” Joanna asked. She was pale but composed. Kassandra nodded. “You know?” “I woke when Alex went to see what was happening. Should we thank Byron or throttle him? He is hardly the most reliable source yet if there is anything to what he says-“ “We will find out for ourselves,” Kassandra concluded.

No amount of high fashion can make up for a lifetime of poor posture.

The most common accident causality models assume that accidents are caused by component failure and that making system components highly reliable or planning for their failure will prevent accidents. While this assumption is true in the relatively simple electromechanical systems of the past, it is no longer true for the types of complex sociotechnical systems we are building today.

miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don’t have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults. Yung used murder rates—the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape—as a baseline for his analysis. After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

Investment In Real Estate Is A Worthwhile Endeavor Several factors has to be studied by any individual who is planning an investment in real estate. For example, if business properties are desired, the client should are aware of they may be targeting certain conditions that aren't typically seen with residential properties. Nonetheless, for the appropriate particular person, and for those who plan fastidiously and receive good recommendation, this feature investment will be highly profitable. Individuals looking for commercial properties can certainly find that there are numerous kinds of institutions by which to come up with selection. For instance, an individual should purchase a restaurant or lodge, or invest in a retail store. The consumer may also select to buy an investment property comparable to your rent amount advanced and make an income from leaseing every unit. Office constructings can also be a smart selection, as tenants will likely be seen reasonably ardmore three wheelock quickly. It's fundamental, nevertheless, to buy such properties in nearly anything that receives beneficiant traffic. Most commercial institutions fail if they can't appeal to a steady transfer of customers. Buying residential property is something customers may additionally wish to think about that these planning to decide on their investment portfolios. For instance, an individual may decide to obtain a dwelling that have been renovated. Sometimes called "handyman specials, " such properties will be repaired which can offered during profit. Fortuitously, usually they are cheaper than properties that are in good repair. It is also a possibility to build an ad or residential property can be an investment. Builders who've satisfactory money to finance exceptionally challenge made having a tract of land and fill homes for it on the market to the general public. However, as soon as again, it is essential to pick a location carefully, as it may possibly nominal good to supply homes for sale in a part of the country in which nobody wants to live. Purchasing the primary property one finds is rarely a clever program of action. Instead, it is always the most effective interest match investor to comparability store attempting to discover at a couple of home or business earlier than making a final decision. It will make sure that the excellent ill use made. It can be more suitable obtain authorized advice every time one is planning to purchase various types property. This is even if that the buyer must have assurance that the property just isn't encumbered, and he or she can even want knowledgeable to make all the paperwork regarding the transaction is legal. Finally, individuals planning an investment in real estate will find that it plan of action is sensible, supplied they plan with care and hire a reliable broker to supervise their transactions.

Gary Sherman has written a truly insightful and helpful book that will positively change the lives of its readers. Although many books have wise teachings, few have accessible, reliable and transformative practices like this one. I highly recommend this book.

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An example is the campaign that Goodby, Berlin & Sil- verstein produced for the Northern California Honda Deal- ers Advertising Association (NCHDAA) in 1989. Rather than conform to the stereotypical dealer group advertising ("one of a kind, never to be repeated deals, this weekend 114 Figure 4.1 UNUM: "Bear and Salmon. Figure 4.2 UNUM: "Father and Child." 115 PEELING THE ONION only, the Honda-thon, fifteen hundred dollars cash back . . ." shouted over cheesy running footage), it was decided that the campaign should reflect the tone of the national cam- paign that it ran alongside. After all, we reasoned, the only people who know that one spot is from the national cam- paign and another from a regional dealer group are industry insiders. In the real world, all people see is the name "Honda" at the end. It's dumb having one of (Los Angeles agency) Rubin Postaer's intelligent, stylish commercials for Honda in one break, and then in the next, 30 seconds of car salesman hell, also apparently from Honda. All the good work done by the first ad would be undone by the second. What if, we asked ourselves, we could in some way regionalize the national message? In other words, take the tone and quality of Rubin Postaer's campaign and make it unique to Northern California? All of the regional dealer groups signed off as the Northern California Chevy/Ford/ Toyota Dealers, yet none of the ads would have seemed out of place in Florida or Wisconsin. In fact, that's probably where they got them from. In our research, we began not by asking people about cars, or car dealers, but about living in Northern California. What's it like? What does it mean? How would you describe it to an alien? (There are times when my British accent comes in very useful.) How does it compare to Southern California? "Oh, North and South are very different," a man in a focus group told me. "How so?" "Well, let me put it this way. There's a great rivalry between the (San Francisco) Giants and the (L.A.) Dodgers," he said. "But the Dodgers' fans don't know about it." Everyone laughed. People in the "Southland" were on a different planet. All they cared about was their suntans and flashy cars. Northern Californians, by comparison, were more modest, discerning, less likely to buy things to "make state- ments," interested in how products performed as opposed to 116 Take the Wider View what they looked like, more environmentally conscious, and concerned with the quality of life. We already knew from American Honda—supplied re- search what Northern Californians thought of Honda's cars. They were perceived as stylish without being ostentatious, reliable, understated, good value for the money . . . the paral- lels were remarkable. The creative brief asked the team to consider placing Honda in the unique context of Northern California, and to imagine that "Hondas are designed with Northern Californi- ans in mind." Dave O'Hare, who always swore that he hated advertising taglines and had no talent for writing them, came back immediately with a line to which he wanted to write a campaign: "Is Honda the Perfect Car for Northern Califor- nia, or What?" The launch commercial took advantage of the rivalry between Northern and Southern California. Set in the state senate chamber in Sacramento, it opens on the Speaker try- ing to hush the house. "Please, please," he admonishes, "the gentleman from Northern California has the floor." "What my Southern Californian colleague proposes is a moral outrage," the senator splutters, waving a sheaf of papers at the other side of the floor. "Widening the Pacific Coast Highway . . . to ten lanes!" A Southern Californian senator with bouffant hair and a pink tie shrugs his shoulders. "It's too windy," he whines (note: windy as in curves, not weather), and his fellow Southern Californians high-five and murmur their assent. The Northern Californians go nuts, and the Speaker strug- gles in vain to call everyone to order. The camera goes out- side as th

The only person you can reliably kill with a high-power 9mm is yourself,

One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar - a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. Except in pure mathematics nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false). Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the veridical status of.their attempts to understand the world - ranging from conjectures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systemati­cally confirmed through many interrogations of how the world works. But even laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined - inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light -where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.

The fallacy of trying to time the highs and lows Trying to time the highs and lows of the market is a fool's game. It can't be done with any reliability, and you shouldn't waste your time trying.

The answers are perhaps as varied as the questions one asks, but a common theme that comes through in discussions with caregivers on the front lines and those who think a great deal about patient safety, is our failure to change our culture. What we have not done, they say, is create a “culture of safety,” as has been done so impressively in other industries, such as commercial aviation, nuclear power and chemical manufacturing. These “high-reliability organizations” are intrinsically hazardous enterprises that have succeeded in becoming (amazingly!) safe. Worse, the culture of health care is not only unsafe, it is incredibly dysfunctional. Though the culture of each health care organization is unique, they all suffer many of the same disabilities that have, so far, effectively stymied progress: An authoritarian structure that devalues many workers, lack of a sense of personal accountability, autonomous functioning and major barriers to effective communication. What is a culture of safety? Pretty much the opposite! Books have been written on the subject, and every expert has his or her own specific definition. But an underlying theme, a common denominator, is teamwork, founded on an open, supportive, mutually reinforcing, dedicated relationship among all participants. Much more is required, of course: Sensitivity to hazard, sense of personal responsibility, attitudes of awareness and risk, sense of personal responsibility and more. But those attitudes, that type of teamwork and those types of relationships are rarely found in health care organizations.

M113 Family of Vehicles Mission Provide a highly mobile, survivable, and reliable tracked-vehicle platform that is able to keep pace with Abrams- and Bradley-equipped units and that is adaptable to a wide range of current and future battlefield tasks through the integration of specialised mission modules at minimum operational and support cost. Entered Army Service 1960 Description and Specifications After more than four decades, the M113 family of vehicles (FOV) is still in service in the U.S. Army (and in many foreign armies). The original M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) helped to revolutionise mobile military operations. These vehicles carried 11 soldiers plus a driver and track commander under armour protection across hostile battlefield environments. More importantly, these vehicles were air transportable, air-droppable, and swimmable, allowing planners to incorporate APCs in a much wider range of combat situations, including many "rapid deployment" scenarios. The M113s were so successful that they were quickly identified as the foundation for a family of vehicles. Early derivatives included both command post (M577) and mortar carrier (M106) configurations. Over the years, the M113 FOV has undergone numerous upgrades. In 1964, the M113A1 package replaced the original gasoline engine with a 212 horsepower diesel package, significantly improving survivability by eliminating the possibility of catastrophic loss from fuel tank explosions. Several new derivatives were produced, some based on the armoured M113 chassis (e.g., the M125A1 mortar carrier and M741 "Vulcan" air defence vehicle) and some based on the unarmoured version of the chassis (e.g., the M548 cargo carrier, M667 "Lance" missile carrier, and M730 "Chaparral" missile carrier). In 1979, the A2 package of suspension and cooling enhancements was introduced. Today's M113 fleet includes a mix of these A2 variants, together with other derivatives equipped with the most recent A3 RISE (Reliability Improvements for Selected Equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include incorporation of spall liners and provisions for mounting external armour. The future M113A3 fleet will include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitisation program includes applying hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV. Current variants: Mechanised Smoke Obscurant System M548A1/A3 Cargo Carrier M577A2/A3 Command Post Carrier M901A1 Improved TOW Vehicle M981 Fire Support Team Vehicle M1059/A3 Smoke Generator Carrier M1064/A3 Mortar Carrier M1068/A3 Standard Integrated Command Post System Carrier OPFOR Surrogate Vehicle (OSV) Manufacturer Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL) United Defense, L.P. (Anniston, AL)

Figure 3.35 shows examples of nonstandard trend lines: FIGURE 3.35 Nonstandard Trend Lines in XLF A is drawn between lows in a downtrend instead of between highs in a downtrend. B is also drawn between lows in a downtrend. Furthermore, it ignores a large price spike in an effort to fit the line to later data. C is more of a best-fit line drawn through the center of a price area. These may be drawn freehand or via a procedure like linear regression. D is drawn between highs in an uptrend. E raises a critical point about trend lines: They are lines drawn between successive swings in the market. If there are no swings, there should be no trend line. It would be hard to argue that the market was showing any swings at E, at least on this time frame. This trend line may be valid on a lower time frame, but it is nonstandard on this time frame. In general, trend lines are tools to define the relationship between swings, and are a complement to the simple length of swing analysis. As such, one of the requirements for drawing trend lines is that there must actually be swings in the market. We see many cases where markets are flat, and it is possible to draw trend lines that touch the tops or bottoms of many consecutive price bars. With one important exception later in this chapter, these types of trend lines do not tend to be very significant. They are penetrated easily by the smallest motions in the market, and there is no reliable price action after the penetration. Avoid drawing these trend lines in flat markets with no definable swings.

We expect our relationships to be rewarding, caring, accountable, reliable, and of high integrity.

Far from the cinematic drama of hospital emergency rooms, Slow Medicine embraces the unsung work of daily attention that is the greatest need and firmest foundation for longevity and quality of life at the farthest reach of age. Excellent chronic care attends to the day-to-day needs and conditions of the patient—by offering emotional support and social stimulation, supplying better nutrition, easing chronic skin and nail conditions, and making sleeping, moving, bathing, dressing, and voiding easier. Slow Medicine is the careful practice that most reliably sustains fragile patterns of well-being. This foundation for better elder care strengthens, rather than replaces, the selective use of high-tech care. During the time of the writing of this book, I have lived the

By definition, new ventures call for a company to envision what is unknown, uncertain, and not yet obvious to the competition. The safe, reliable, predictable knowledge of the well-understood business has not yet emerged. Instead, managers must make do with assumptions about the possible futures on which new businesses are based. New ventures are undertaken with a high ratio of assumption to knowledge. With ongoing businesses, one expects the ratio to be the exact opposite. Because assumptions about the unknown generally turn out to be wrong, new ventures inevitably experience deviations—often huge ones—from their original planned targets. Indeed, new ventures frequently require fundamental redirection. Rather than trying to force startups into the planning methodologies for existing predictable and well-understood businesses, discovery-driven planning acknowledges that at the start of a new venture, little is known and much is assumed. When platform-based planning is used, assumptions underlying a plan are treated as facts—givens to be baked into the plan—rather than as best-guess estimates to be tested and questioned. Companies then forge ahead on the basis of those buried assumptions. In contrast, discovery-driven planning systematically converts assumptions into knowledge as a strategic venture unfolds. When new data are uncovered, they are incorporated into the evolving plan. The real potential of the venture is discovered as it develops—hence the term discovery-driven planning. The approach imposes disciplines different from, but no less precise than, the disciplines used in conventional planning.

WordPress Site If done right, a self-hosted WordPress site can act as your online business card for your freelance SEO writing services.  You can refer potential clients to it for a listing of your services and rates, plus to see your writing samples and client testimonials.   Details on how to set up a self-hosted Wordpress site are beyond the scope of this book, but it’s easy to do.  In a nutshell, all you do is purchase a domain name, purchase web hosting, install Wordpress on your site, and customize it the way you want it. If you are interested in setting up your own website for your business, sign up for the Money Machine Inner Circle (it’s FREE!) and you’ll get instant access to a free report listing exactly which services I recommend for setting up your site.  Especially if you’re new to the world of setting up a website, this will save you a ton of time since you won’t have to waste time researching which services are the best or easiest to use for a non-techie. A basic website should have the following pages: Home Page This is where you describe your freelance SEO writing services, and even include a testimonial or two once you’ve worked with clients for a while. Samples Page Use this page to show off the sample articles that you’ve written. About Page This is where you explain who you are, your experience (if any), and why someone should hire you. Contact Page This is where you set up a simple contact form that visitors to your website can use to get in touch with you. Action Steps 1. On days 1 and 2, make sure you have a reliable computer, access to high-speed internet, and a PayPal account set up.  If you don’t have

Memory, it turns out, is not as reliable as we think. We do not encode high-definition movies of our experiences and then access them at will. Rather, memory is a system dispersed throughout the brain and is subject to all sorts of biases. Memories are suggestible. We often assemble fragments of entirely different experiences and weave them together into what seems like a coherent whole. With each recollection, we engage in editing.*

Step By Step Guide To Finding A Good Roofing Contractor The local roofing repair contractor you choose should always have a great reputation in the community and a track record of exceptional customer service. When you can't be on site, you need to know that your service provider is doing an excellent job. You also need to be sure that old-fashioned craftsmanship and quality materials are part of the roofing repair contractor's vision for his work. The following are methods to make sure that you hire the right roofing repair contractor. A reliable roofing repair contractor will make an effort to bring you the highest quality results. Well-regarded roofing repair contractors preserve their good reputations by always keeping their promises. Give your roofing repair contractor an appropriate timeline and do not interrupt his work unnecessarily. Discover how the contractual worker arrangements to handle any obligation issues. Once you start seeing bids, do not make the mistake of assuming that a low bid will lead to a similarly low work performance. Check the cost of the needed materials and compare them to the pricing of the low bid. In addition, it's important to think about all the labor costs. Construct a legal contract only when you have determined the price is within reason. Often when you are searching for a local roofing repair contractor with a great reputation and who will provide the very best work, this is usually one of the busier people in his field. If your local roofing repair contractor has a reputation for doing a great job, be prepared to wait to engage his services. There is a downside to roofing repair contractors who are in high demand as they might not be able to focus entirely on your project. The most vital thing in finding a local roofing repair contractor is to trust your instincts. Every time a roofing expert comes to you with a legal contract that requires your signature, read the legal agreement to really ensure all of your requests are present in the legal agreement and the roofing expert recognizes them. If you're taking the time to ensure the legal agreement has everything you and your service provider had agreed on and is put in clear terms, it'll save you much stress and money down the road. Ensure you have posed all questions and concerns to your service provider prior to signing an agreement. If there are any terms or conditions you do not understand, give the legal agreement to a lawyer for clarification. Roofing contractors with excellent reputations consider it good business practice to provide each client with a written quote before starting work on any job. If the info is needed, pronto, your roofing repair contractor might be willing to provide you with a quote over the phone. Inspect the schedule and qualifications of the roofing repair contractor to effectively ensure that the project will be finished exactly how and when you would like it and within your financial requirements. Make sure to ask any questions and address all concerns to your satisfaction before you employee a roofing repair contractor

The advantages of eating plants are that one can reliably predict where to find them, they are often relatively abundant, and they don’t run away. A big disadvantage of plant foods, especially non-domesticated plants, is that they are high in undigestible fiber and have a comparatively low nutrient density. Back-of-the-envelope

in September 2014, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) revealed that the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline had released more than eleven gallons of concentrated live polio virus into rivers near Rixen, Belgium. The release, termed accidental, if in fact purposeful, would demonstrate a reliable way to ensure that the polio vaccine continues to be in high demand.

Amos took a high-caliber automatic that fired self-propelled rounds, recoilless and designed for use in zero g. Old-fashioned slug throwers were more reliable, but in null gravity they were also maneuvering thrusters.

Knowing your DUI attorney can eliminate the effect of the return of drunken Driving under the influence of alcohol is a serious offense. It has led to the destruction of countless innocent lives. Including in the United States against the wounded caused countless innocent people, their lives rotation indefinitely. It was carried out connected to the conclusion of households for damage. It has led to a community, the introduction of the unknown nature of the operation of the state, remain concerned with drunken diet. He is optimistic in September, then, that the federal government does not become a frivolous crime. With the repeal of the Step mode, the application of the laws of intoxication and the dishes are made to drunk drivers seem hard regularly. If it difficult to the crime of driving under the influence of alcohol or at least system is the next step in a reliable DUI lawyer, regardless of the guilt or innocence of their weight, protect yourself in the hope of such significant reductions in price, the not confirmed extremely high prices. Sam can throw a lot of money as well, you can get a driver's license, or without, it can be hard to take the prison up to one year. You can avoid because of their own and do not need to get drunk relaxed in the price. As a replacement for all these costs themselves, which is largely a good idea, the help of a DUI lawyer to win? These specialists understand the law and the conditions just mentioned above, compounds containing a labor judge and customer orientation DWI. DUI lawyers can be reduced to a constructive trust or even eliminate visibility into force. Opportunities robbery was accused of drunk again, and notes that you are responsible for the crimes. Even debt includes only the legal capacity and criminal DUI can trained your own navigation of these people to bring models. Sam, I think maybe just dedicated for his crimes while to select your mind and time, but not very simple scenario. A lawyer may reduce the value of the summary court to protect the effects, or even fines, suspensions and aspects of the prison, including research, replaced types of defenses and forage alcohol recovery. DUI lawyers said that before and look small, to see how drunken opportunities and shortcomings that can still influence the courtroom one behind the selling price. You can such a situation it is not possible lack of faith on the inside to create to take the manuscript. DUI lawyers can use our experience and work up shopping application laboratory errors that dominates lead for the detection of respiratory next acceptable display the current situation in the whatever. Unlike pilot’s proposals less effect on the mind, the entire route was to the training room, there are many cases a lot of experience of skilled DUI lawyer can help. All of these experts, the service experience of working in the right direction in order to continue to help customers move only in the courtroom and not too loose, not to keep the customers another law a hand. There are can be drunken very scary encounter billed offer. With the end of the transfer during this procedure of his or very familiar with the other side, while experts, the treatment should be fine. If you come into conflict with the mentioned at this point nation, they do poverty and a little assistance in criminal matters.

Due’s guidelines, we will especially. Florida location convictions drunk people really need a hard line. 100 ml of blood, or about 0.08 per cent of all liquid at least the 0.08 per cent alcohol (due to back) is shown when some 210 liters of breath, you can claim for drunk driving. Far assessed only through this type of general assistance, the lack of such discrepancies is guilty of drunken his strength and reliability of March, the Americans, the. But it actually drinking and drink driving test in its own way will be forced to take care of Tallahassee by individuals will be condemned, rejected by his results, but only for those very is harsh. Orlando outcome of an internal drunk food is very harsh. Only 9 weeks in jail, 1,000 $ 500 Ignition lock-track recorder old suspected car or $ 250-500 almost certainly believe that high quality feed, only about six weeks in prison, and a drunken crime before punished by a DUI offense. 10 found guilty of a DUI third internal many years, Orlando is only a third of the number of offenders. The crime, the suspect in price for at least two years in a given calendar year and the unit ignition lock was initiated criminal representation.

The root of [our] frustration is that we live for the future, and the future is an abstraction… The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., “everyone will die”) that the future assumes a high degree of reality — so high that the present loses its value.

The term developed out of a recognition that you have to integrate development and operations tasks to develop software efficiently. The kind of workflow you want to enable is one in which you can develop an app, deploy it, learn from production usage of it, change it in response to what you learn, and repeat the cycle quickly and reliably.

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.

When demand cycles increase or supplies drain low, the U.S. shale industry now sits there with the quickest tap to twist on. But when producers get “too enthusiastic” about oil prices and supplies glut, or when economics compress global demand, or when renewables partially displace fossil fuels, it will be the U.S. shale producer who will be forced to cut back. Now it's easier to see why the United States will have a much more difficult road to being energy independent: you can't rely on U.S. shale to get you there. No matter whether the oil market stays depressed for three months or three more years, the production numbers for the U.S. won’t ever be stable enough to make the United States independent of foreign oil. Only a consistently and reliably high market price can do that, something that the oil bust of 2014 proved is still hardly guaranteed. U.S. shale oil is first in line to be the supply source that must contract when the market demands it.

We have a team of highly experienced and certified pavement installers, offering reliable paving services in Ottawa.

Specifically, systematic innovation means monitoring seven sources for innovative opportunity. The first four sources lie within the enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, or within an industry or service sector. They are therefore visible primarily to people within that industry or service sector. They are basically symptoms. But they are highly reliable indicators of changes that have already happened or can be made to happen with little effort. These four source areas are: • The unexpected – the unexpected success, the unexpected failure, the unexpected outside event; • The incongruity – between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be or as it ‘ought to be’; • Innovation based on process need; • Changes in industry structure or market structure that catch everyone unawares. The second set of sources for innovative opportunity, a set of three, involves changes outside the enterprise or industry: • Demographics (population changes); • Changes in perception, mood, and meaning; • New knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific.