Host Team Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Host Team. Here they are! All 76 of them:

So let’s talk a little about April May’s theory of tiered fame. Tier 1: Popularity You are a big deal in your high school or neighborhood. You have a peculiar vehicle that people around town recognize, you are a pastor at a medium-to-large church, you were once the star of the high school football team. Tier 2: Notoriety You are recognized and/or well-known within certain circles. Maybe you’re a preeminent lepidopterist whom all the other lepidopterists idolize. Or you could be the mayor or meteorologist in a medium-sized city. You might be one of the 1.1 million living people who has a Wikipedia page. Tier 3: Working-Class Fame A lot of people know who you are and they are distributed around the world. There’s a good chance that a stranger will approach you to say hi at the grocery store. You are a professional sports player, musician, author, actor, television host, or internet personality. You might still have to hustle to make a living, but your fame is your job. You’ll probably trend on Twitter if you die. Tier 4: True Fame You get recognized by fans enough that it is a legitimate burden. People take pictures of you without your permission, and no one would scoff if you called yourself a celebrity. When you start dating someone, you wouldn’t be surprised to read about it in magazines. You are a performer, politician, host, or actor whom the majority of people in your country would recognize. Your humanity is so degraded that people are legitimately surprised when they find out that you’re “just like them” because, sometimes, you buy food. You never have to worry about money again, but you do need a gate with an intercom on your driveway. Tier 5: Divinity You are known by every person in your world, and you are such a big deal that they no longer consider you a person. Your story is much larger than can be contained within any human lifetime, and your memory will continue long after your earthly form wastes away. You are a founding father of a nation, a creator of a religion, an emperor, or an idea. You are not currently alive.
Hank Green (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1))
Well, in that case you go right ahead. It needs a tidy,’ says Elizabeth. ‘That will be fun for Stephen, a team of goons in the flat at the dead of night. He’s a fine host.
Richard Osman (The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2))
As managers rise up the hierarchy, a host of situational forces come to bear on them which can easily undermine their respect for the people on the front lines, and hence cause them to disregard the value in front-line ideas.
Dean M. Schroeder (The Idea-Driven Organization: Unlocking the Power in Bottom-Up Ideas)
The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks.
Shireen Jeejeebhoy (Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story)
Bashir’s comments were well-planned, typed into a teleprompter, and approved by an entire production team before being broadcast to his millions of few viewers. But the women of MSNBC, including feminist heroine Rachel Maddow, never uttered a word of criticism. Neither did the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, or a host of other organizations claiming to fight for the rights of women everywhere.
Katie Pavlich (Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women)
The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.
Rich Cohen (Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football)
Among DID individuals, the sharing of conscious awareness between alters exists in varying degrees. I have seen cases where there has appeared to be no amnestic barriers between individual alters, where the host and alters appeared to be fully cognizant of each other. On the other hand, I have seen cases where the host was absolutely unaware of any alters despite clear evidence of their presence. In those cases, while the host was not aware of the alters, there were alters with an awareness of the host as well as having some limited awareness of at least a few other alters. So, according to my experience, there is a spectrum of shared consciousness in DID patients. From a therapeutic point of view, while treatment of patients without amnestic barriers differs in some ways from treatment of those with such barriers, the fundamental goal of therapy is the same: to support the healing of the early childhood trauma that gave rise to the dissociation and its attendant alters. Good DID therapy involves promoting co­-consciousness. With co-­consciousness, it is possible to begin teaching the patient’s system the value of cooperation among the alters. Enjoin them to emulate the spirit of a champion football team, with each member utilizing their full potential and working together to achieve a common goal. Returning to the patients that seemed to lack amnestic barriers, it is important to understand that such co-consciousness did not mean that the host and alters were well-­coordinated or living in harmony. If they were all in harmony, there would be no “dis­ease.” There would be little likelihood of a need or even desire for psychiatric intervention. It is when there is conflict between the host and/or among alters that treatment is needed.
David Yeung
Once he stared the car, I said, “I just want you to know I’m paying for my meal, because I know it’ll be full price, and I didn’t want you to think I was expecting you to pay for it, because this isn’t a date. It’s just the team and the host sisters, brothers, whatever, getting together to have some fun tonight since it’s raining…or was raining…it’s obviously not raining now. And you’re just giving me a ride, not a meal.” Shut me up! Shut me up! Shut me up! He shifted into reverse, then backed out of the driveway. “I’m buying your dinner.” “No, really--” “Dani.” It was the first time I could recall him actually saying my name. I loved the way it just rumbled, his voice so deep, so perfect. I wanted him to say it again, over and over. But he’d stopped in the middle of the street. I figured any minute Dad was going to come barreling out of the house to find out what was wrong. I looked over at Jason. “I’m buying your dinner, as my thanks to you for convincing your family to host me. Just accept it, okay?” I nodded. “Okay.” He drove, and I settled into my seat, wondering what other surprises the night might hold.
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
The team is showing its appreciation to the host families by taking them to a water park on Sunday. I know Mac is going out of town, but I thought you might still want to go. I mean, not as a date or anything. I’m going to invite the whole family.” “You don’t have to work Sunday?” “I got scheduled off.” “Sounds like fun. We could pack a picnic lunch--” “I’ll take care of that. As my thank you. All you have to do is bring yourself.” “And a bathing suit.” He grinned. “Yeah, and a bathing suit.” “And a towel. And suntan lotion…” “Maybe it’d be simpler if I just said I’ll take care of the tickets and eats.” “Okay, but I’ll go ahead and warn you not to take it personally that Mom and Dad aren’t really into water parks. It’s that whole not-using-the-exercise-equipment-as-intended thing Dad has going.” His grin grew. “I won’t take it personally.” “Okay, then, Sunday.” As though suddenly realized how intimate it seemed to be in my bedroom, he cleared his throat and took a step back. He gave my room one more look and took another step back. “It’s amazing what a room can reveal.” Then he walked down the hallway and knocked on Tiffany’s door. I wondered what he’d discover looking into her room.
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
For a team facing a 12-run deficit, the game is all but over. Almost always. Three times in major league history, though, a club has come from down by a dozen to win. The Chicago White Sox were the first in 1911; fourteen years later, the Philadelphia Athletics duplicated the feat. Then seventy-six years would pass before it happened again. Enter the 2001 Cleveland Indians, battling for their sixth playoff spot in seven years. Hosting the red-hot Seattle Mariners, who would win a major league record 116 games that season, the Tribe found themselves trailing 12–0 after just three innings. In the middle of the seventh, Seattle led 14–2—at which point the Indians began their historic comeback. Scoring three in the seventh, four in the eighth, and five in the ninth, Cleveland forced extra innings. In the bottom of the eleventh, utility man Jolbert Cabrera slapped a broken-bat single to score Kenny Lofton for one of the more remarkable wins in the annals of baseball. On August 6, 2001, not even a 12-run deficit could stop the Cleveland Indians. Those of us who follow Jesus Christ can expect even greater victories. “I am convinced,” the apostle Paul wrote, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). If you’re deep in the hole today, take heart. As God’s child, you’re always still in the game. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. HEBREWS
Paul Kent (Playing with Purpose: Baseball Devotions: 180 Spiritual Truths Drawn from the Great Game of Baseball)
When the service began, I was not surprised to hear the angelic hosts join with the worship team. In fact, several people in the church testified to hearing the angels. After the service, we traveled to Tim Horton’s for a late dinner. We returned to Botwood to find Margaret waiting for us, and she kindly directed us to our separate rooms for the night. The Holy Spirit was still hovering very close to me, and as soon as the door closed behind my host, the Lord began to speak to me. I immediately began to pray and worship the Lord. Once again, the Lord had me begin reading from Revelation 4. It was about 3:30 A.M. when I fell into a peaceful sleep praying in the Spirit. I awoke to the sound of the Lord’s voice speaking to me. “Kevin, get up; it’s time to go to work.” I opened my eyes and looked around the room. My mind began to race. I looked at the clock, and it was just 5:00 A.M. I had only been asleep for a short while. I sleepily said, “Lord, what could you possibly want me to do at this hour?” “Walk downstairs and prophesy to Margaret,” He said. I protested, “Lord, I don’t even know Margaret.” He said, “Don’t worry. I know her. Just say what I tell you to say.” “But Lord, It’s only 5 A.M., and nobody is awake at 5 A.M.” He answered, “Margaret is awake. She is in the kitchen. She is praying and having tea and a scone. Go to her now.” In my natural mind this seemed totally insane! Me? Prophesy? Suddenly the anointing and presence of the Lord intensified, and I found myself dressed. The next thing I knew I was walking down the hallway toward the stairs. All at once, there was a still, small voice speaking into my left ear. I was being told many things about Margaret. I was hearing the secrets of her heart. When I walked into the kitchen, she was there. She was having tea and a scone. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me that she was praying. PROPHESYING ABOUT ANGELS I said, “Margaret, I think God wants me to tell you something!” Her eyes grew as big as saucers as I launched into a litany of words about angels. I was as shocked as she was! I was able to speak in great detail about angels to her. “Your angel is very precious to you, and it has a name; your angel’s name is Charity. Your very nature is much like your angel. You are full of the love of God. The Lord is going to open your eyes to see your angel again. It is going to happen soon.” Somewhere in the middle of this heavenly utterance Margaret burst into tears! Then something else rather extraordinary began to happen. Gold dust began to rain down into the kitchen! Gold started to cover the kitchen table and our faces. After a few minutes, Margaret regained her composure, and I took a seat at the table with her. She shared with me her journey and how God had always ministered to her using the realm of angels as confirmation of everything that I had just spoken to her. We continued to fellowship together while enjoying tea and scones for the next hour and a half. Margaret gave me a copy of the book, Good Morning, Holy Spirit. Later, I took this Benny Hinn book along with me into the wilderness of Newfoundland where I had a life-changing encounter with the Holy Spirit in a tiny cabin. Margaret and I were joined by two friends for breakfast, and the Lord continued to move. Jennifer received the revelation that she was supposed to give an angel’s feather she had found to our hostess.
Kevin Basconi (How to Work with Angels in Your Life: The Reality of Angelic Ministry Today (Angels in the Realms of Heaven, Book 2))
recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich? In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead! I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame. I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight. I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them. Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president. I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door. I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here. It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.
David Litt (Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years)
NBC News reporter David Gregory was on a tear. Lecturing the NRA president—and the rest of the world—on the need for gun restrictions, the D.C. media darling and host of NBC’s boring Sunday morning gabfest, Meet the Press, Gregory displayed a thirty-round magazine during an interview. This was a violation of District of Columbia law, which specifically makes it illegal to own, transfer, or sell “high-capacity ammunition.” Conservatives demanded the Mr. Gregory, a proponent of strict gun control laws, be arrested and charged for his clear violation of the laws he supports. Instead the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Irv Nathan, gave Gregory a pass: Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, as it does in every case involving firearms-related offenses or any other potential violation of D.C. law within our criminal jurisdiction, OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast. What irked people even more was the attorney general admitted that NBC had willfully violated D.C. law. As he noted: No specific intent is required for this violation, and ignorance of the law or even confusion about it is no defense. We therefore did not rely in making our judgment on the feeble and unsatisfactory efforts that NBC made to determine whether or not it was lawful to possess, display and broadcast this large capacity magazine as a means of fostering the public policy debate. Although there appears to have been some misinformation provided initially, NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity-magazine would violate D.C. law. David Gregory gets a pass, but not Mark Witaschek. Witaschek was the subject of not one but two raids on his home by D.C. police. The second time that police raided Witaschek’s home, they did so with a SWAT team and even pulled his terrified teenage son out of the shower. They found inoperable muzzleloader bullets (replicas, not live ammunition, no primer) and an inoperable shotgun shell, a tchotchke from a hunting trip. Witaschek, in compliance with D.C. laws, kept his guns out of D.C. and at a family member’s home in Virginia. It wasn’t good enough for the courts, who tangled him up in a two-year court battle that he fought on principle but eventually lost. As punishment, the court forced him to register as a gun offender, even though he never had a firearm in the city. Witaschek is listed as a “gun offender”—not to be confused with “sex offender,” though that’s exactly the intent: to draw some sort of correlation, to make possession of a common firearm seem as perverse as sexual offenses. If only Mark Witaschek got the break that David Gregory received.
Dana Loesch (Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America)
to stay! It was another answer to prayer, and I graciously accepted her offer. When the service began, I was not surprised to hear the angelic hosts join with the worship team. In fact, several people in the church testified to hearing the angels. After the service, we traveled to Tim Horton’s for a late dinner. We returned to Botwood to find Margaret waiting for us, and she kindly directed us to our separate rooms for the night. The Holy Spirit was still hovering very close to me, and as soon as the door closed behind my host, the Lord began to speak to me. I immediately began to pray and worship the Lord. Once again, the Lord had me begin reading from Revelation 4. It was about 3:30 A.M. when I fell into a peaceful sleep praying in the Spirit. I awoke to the sound of the Lord’s voice speaking to me. “Kevin, get up; it’s time to go to work.” I opened my eyes and looked around the room. My mind began to race. I looked at the clock, and it was just 5:00 A.M. I had only been asleep for a short while. I sleepily said, “Lord, what could you possibly want me to do at this hour?” “Walk downstairs and prophesy to Margaret,” He said. I protested, “Lord, I don’t even know Margaret.” He said, “Don’t worry. I know her. Just say what I tell you to say.” “But Lord, It’s only 5 A.M., and nobody is awake at 5 A.M.” He answered, “Margaret is awake. She is in the kitchen. She is praying and having tea and a scone. Go to her now.” In my natural mind this seemed totally insane! Me? Prophesy? Suddenly the anointing and presence of the Lord intensified, and I found myself dressed. The next thing I knew I was walking down the hallway toward the stairs. All at once, there was a still, small voice speaking into my left ear. I was being told many things about Margaret. I was hearing the secrets of her heart. When I walked into the kitchen, she was there. She was having tea and a scone. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me that she was praying. PROPHESYING ABOUT ANGELS I said, “Margaret, I think God wants me to tell you something!” Her eyes grew as big as saucers as I launched into a litany of words about angels. I was as shocked as she was! I was able to speak in great detail about angels to her. “Your angel is very precious to you, and it has a name; your angel’s name is Charity. Your very nature is much like your angel. You are full of the love of God. The Lord is going to open your eyes to see your angel again. It is going to happen soon.” Somewhere in the middle of this heavenly utterance Margaret burst into tears! Then something else rather extraordinary began to happen. Gold dust began to rain down into the kitchen! Gold started to cover the kitchen table and our faces. After a few minutes, Margaret regained her composure, and I took a seat at the table with her. She shared with me her journey and how God had always ministered to her using the realm of angels as confirmation of everything that I had just spoken to her. We continued to fellowship together while enjoying tea and scones for the next hour and a half. Margaret gave me a copy of the book, Good Morning, Holy Spirit. Later, I took this Benny Hinn book along with me into the wilderness of Newfoundland where I had a life-changing encounter with the Holy Spirit in a tiny cabin. Margaret and I were joined by two friends for breakfast, and the Lord continued to move. Jennifer received the revelation that she was supposed to give an angel’s feather she had found to our hostess.
Kevin Basconi (How to Work with Angels in Your Life: The Reality of Angelic Ministry Today (Angels in the Realms of Heaven, Book 2))
The cities of Asia Minor were as enthusiastic and as invested in hosting the imperial cult as modern cities are about convincing a major football team to relocate or winning the bid to host the Olympics.
David A. deSilva (Unholy Allegiances: Heeding Revelation's Warning)
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)
Russell Phillips (This We'll Defend: The Weapons & Equipment of the US Army)
My next suggestion for breaking from the past is perhaps the strangest: Use a random process to generate and select decision alternatives. Sometimes it is better to ignore the traditional decision-making process, where people spend a great deal of time comparing the pros and cons of each alternative. Writers from Benjamin Franklin to modern decision theorists have shown how, by decomposing a complex problem into simpler elements, the problem as a whole can be better understood, and better decisions can be made. As one team of researchers put it,“the terms decision theory and decision analysis describe a myriad of theoretical formulations; an assumption made by most of these approaches is that decisions are best made deliberately, objectively, and with reflection.”26 But these methods, while effective, have a troubling limitation: No matter how hard people try not to think about their past experiences, irrational prejudices, and personal preferences, much research shows that these and a host of other biases have powerful effects. These biases shape—in often suboptimal ways—which decision alternatives are generated, which decision criteria are applied, and which decisions are ultimately made and implemented.
Robert I. Sutton (Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation)
We pulled up stakes and headed north to croc country. Lakefield National Park is one of my favorite places in Australia. Steve considered it the most beautiful place on the face of the earth. He gave the NBC people everything they wanted and more. Not only did we spot numerous saltwater crocodiles, but Steve found one that had submerged under an overhanging tree limb. We were able to crawl out on the limb and film straight down over a magnificent twelve-foot croc. But it was left to me to head off what could have been a potential catastrophe at the end of filming. The Dateline host and a female producer were with a couple of the NBC crew members beside a stretch of water. Steve, myself, and some of the team from Australia Zoo faced them across the creek. “See how NBC Dateline is over there on the other side?” Steve said. “Let’s show them our NBC ‘Datelines,’ what do you reckon?” All the guys laughed. They turned around, faced their backsides toward our American friends, and were about to drop their daks. I leaped forward like a soldier throwing herself over a grenade. “Noooooo!” I exclaimed. “The women from New York just won’t get it.” The boys grumpily kept their pants on. Steve threw me an oh-you’re-no-fun look. I may have been a wet blanket, but a cross-cultural disaster had been successfully averted.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription “uppers.” All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Given Mozilla’s small initial size, this growth necessitated hiring executives from the outside (“the graft”), which was particularly challenging because of the company’s strong engineering-driven culture (“the host”) that was already skeptical about outsiders. John was able to do this successfully by following the same three-step process that was used to hire him. Hire someone who is already a known quantity to at least one member of the team. John was hired by Mitchell Baker, his predecessor as CEO of Mozilla. The two had gotten to know each other by serving on a board together, and Mitchell’s personal endorsement of John carried weight with the team at Mozilla.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
Will your infrastructure require a human to manage? Will you need a fully staffed DevOps/SRE team to support your operations? How much will it cost to run the system at full scale? Can you save $$ while you are running the proof of concept for the first 6 months before you get funded? How costly will it be to handle the occasional traffic spikes? How well will your system protect the customer’s data? How can you best support the future development and testing efforts? Most of these questions are answered by selecting your hosting model. Several options exist: Use your own dedicated hardware Provision dedicated hardware from a cloud provider Provision virtual hardware from a cloud provider Install a container solution on dedicated or virtual hardware Rely on fully managed container orchestration solution Go serverless
Anatoly Volkhover (Become an Awesome Software Architect: Foundation 2019 (#1))
Her answer was immediate: “Climate change.” As the United States becomes warmer, she said, the ranges of the sand fly and the wood rat are both creeping northward, the leish parasite tagging along. The sand fly genus known to spread this kind of leish has now been found in the United States five hundred miles northwest and two hundred miles northeast of its previously established range. A recent study modeled the possible expansion of leishmaniasis across the United States over the next sixty-five years. Since it takes both vector and host to spread the disease, the scientists wanted to know where the sand fly/wood rat combination would migrate together. They looked at two future climate scenarios, best case and worst case. For each case, they extrapolated out to the years 2020, 2050, and 2080. Even under the best-case climate assumptions, they discovered that global warming would push leishmaniasis across the entire United States into southeastern Canada by 2080. Hundreds of millions of Americans could be exposed—and this is just by wood rats. Since many other species of mammals can host the leish parasite—including cats and dogs—we know the potential problem is far greater than what was described by this study.* A similar spread of the disease is expected in Europe and Asia. It seems that leishmaniasis, a disease that has troubled the human race since time immemorial, has in the twenty-first century come into its own. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, “You got a really cold jolt of what it’s like for the bottom billion people on earth.” We were, he said, confronted in a very dramatic way with what many people have to live with their entire lives. If there’s a silver lining to our ordeal, he told us, “it’s that you’ll now be telling your story, calling attention to what is a very prevalent, very serious disease.
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
Such exponential growth does not occur in the natural world, except maybe for cancer—and that growth ceases once the host has been consumed.
Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human)
My host, GitHub’s CEO, Chris Wanstrath, began by telling me how the “Git” got into GitHub. Git, he explained, is a “distributed version control system” that was invented in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, one of the great and somewhat unsung innovators of our time. Torvalds is the open-source evangelist who created Linux, the first open-source operating system that competed head-to-head with Microsoft Windows. Torvalds’s Git program allowed a team of coders to work together, all using the same files, by letting each programmer build on top of, or alongside, the work of others, while also allowing each to see who made what changes—and to save them, undo them, improve them, and experiment with them.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
The Trade Scatto Short Sleeve Jersey is the perfect blend of aerodynamic and technical fabrics. This jersey takes advantage of the fabrics and features from our FR-C collection combined with the fit of our Silver Line Jersey. The materials utilized are ideal for the sublimation process, providing Giordana's Designers and design partners with a high tech canvas on which they can create a wide range of graphics with impeccable detailing. This is what makes The Trade Category of Garments so much fun. Unique sublimated graphics help you stand out from your local group ride, crit, or gran fondo while enjoying the comfort and performance you'd expect from a Giordana Garment Tech Specs: • Gi27: front and side panels • Asteria 2.0: sleeves and shoulders • Doubled Asteria 2.0 arm cuffs • Host Carbon: back panel to support the pockets and prevent sagging • Two reflective strips along the centre jersey pocket • Gripper elastic at waist • CamLock Zipper • Fourth zippered pocket
classiccycling
RCS was the first version control tool I used. When I was at Spyglass, we had a team of 50 or so developers across three platforms using RCS on a shared code base. Since RCS never had support for networking, people on Windows and Mac had to log in to the Sun workstation that hosted RCS, FTP their code changes up there, and then check them in from the Unix shell. It was an interesting experience just trying to get all that to work.
Eric Sink (Version Control By Example)
OLYMPICS 2012 Great Britain be proud, be blessed, be bold! Your time has come to be the host of the Massive event in the whole world, It is the time to arise from your slumber, Great Britain be proud, be blessed, be proud! The time has come to put things in order, To put aside your differences, To join hands in one accord and say, We can do this, we can win this, Build the walls of unity, peace, joy And press towards the goal. This is the time to bring back your dignity. Great Britain be proud, be blessed, be bold! This is the time to sing a new song, This is the time to pray and believe That Great Britain team will do wonders. Great Britain be proud, be blessed, be bold! Show the world what you are made of, Show them your are made of gold not of bronze. Be proud, be blessed, be bold!
Euginia Herlihy
In our experience, dedicated product teams do not need to be nearly as large as traditional managers would predict, and the smaller they can be kept the better all around. A host of narrowly skilled specialists are not needed because most marketing, engineering, purchasing, and production professionals actually have much broader skills than they have (1) ever realized, (2) ever admitted, or (3) ever been allowed to use.
James P. Womack (Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation)
Greenfield DevOps projects are often pilots to demonstrate feasibility of public or private clouds, piloting deployment automation, and similar tools. An example of a greenfield DevOps project is the Hosted LabVIEW product in 2009 at National Instruments, a thirty-year-old organization with five thousand employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. To bring this product to market quickly, a new team was created and allowed to operate outside of the existing IT processes and explore the use of public clouds. The initial team included an applications architect, a systems architect, two developers, a system automation developer, an operations lead, and two offshore operations staff. By using DevOps practices, they were able to deliver Hosted LabVIEW to market in half the time of their normal product introductions.
Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations)
At the time, BD was creeping fast across the Sierra Nevada, covering around 700 metres a year. By charting its advances, Vredenburg predicted that it would next hit Dusy Basin, a site some 11,000 feet above sea level, where thousands of yellow-legged frogs remained oblivious to the encroaching doom. It was the perfect place to put J-liv's powers to the test. In 2010, Vredenburg and his team hiked to Dusy Basin and grabbed every frog they could find. They found J-liv on the skin of one individual, and grew it into rich, thriving cultures. They then baptised some of the other captured individuals in this bacterial broth. The rest, they left in containers that just had pond water. After a few hours, they released all the frogs to fate and fungus. "The results were phenomenal," says Vredenburg. As predicted, Bd arrived that summer. The fungus took its usual toll on the frogs that had just been soaked in pond water-dozens of spores became thousands of spores, and each frog became an ex-frog. But in the animals that were dunked in J-liv, the fatal accumulation of spores not only plateaued early, it often reversed. A year later, around 39 percent of them were still alive, while their peers were all dead. The trial had worked. The team had successfully protected a wild population of vulnerable frogs with a microbe. And they had established J-liv as a probiotic: a term that is most commonly linked to yoghurts and supplements, but really applies to any microbe that can be applied to a host to improve its health.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10
Sarah Lewis (The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery)
From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone's dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription 'uppers.' All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Twitter was based on live events and virality, so they wanted stars to use the site to do things that would start conversations and lead to a lot of retweets. Nowhere was that more obvious than at the March 2014 Oscars. Twitter’s television partnerships group had spent months with host Ellen DeGeneres’s team,15 tossing back and forth ideas about how she could create a tweetable moment from the star-studded awards event. DeGeneres liked the idea of taking a selfie.
Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
When Wimdu launched, the Samwers reached out to Airbnb to discuss combining forces, as they had done with Groupon and eBay to facilitate a speedy exit. Discussions ensued between Airbnb and Wimdu cofounders and investors—meeting multiple times, touring the Wimdu offices, and checking with other founders like Andrew Mason from Groupon to best understand the potential outcome. In the end, Airbnb chose to fight. Brian Chesky described his thought process: My view was, my biggest punishment, my biggest revenge on you is, I’m gonna make you run this company long term. So you had the baby, now you gotta raise the child. And you’re stuck with it for 18 years. Because I knew he wanted to sell the company. I knew he could move faster than me for a year, but he wasn’t gonna keep doing it. And so that was our strategy. And we built the company long term. And the ultimate way we won is, we had a better community. He couldn’t understand community. And I think we had a better product.82 To do this, the company would mobilize their product teams to rapidly improve their support for international regions. Jonathan Golden, the first product manager at Airbnb, described their efforts: Early on, Airbnb’s listing experience was basic. You filled out forms, uploaded 1 photo—usually not professional—and editing the listing after the fact was hard. The mobile app in the early days was lightweight, where you could only browse but not book. There were a lot of markets in those days with just 1 or 2 listings. Booking only supported US dollars, so it catered towards American travelers only, and for hosts, they could get money out via a bank transfer to an American bank via ACH, or PayPal. We needed to get from this skeleton of a product into something that could work internationally if we wanted to fend off Wimdu. We internationalized the product, translating it into all the major languages. We went from supporting 1 currency to adding 32. We bought all the local domains, like airbnb.co.uk for the UK website and airbnb.es for Spain. It was important to move quickly to close off the opportunity in Europe.83 Alongside the product, the fastest way to fight on Wimdu’s turf was to quickly scale up paid marketing in Europe using Facebook, Google, and other channels to augment the company’s organic channels, built over years. Most important, Airbnb finally pulled the trigger on putting boots on the ground—hiring Martin Reiter, the company’s first head of international, and also partnering with Springstar, a German incubator and peer of Rocket Internet’s, to accelerate their international expansion.
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
When my father interviewed kids for Candid Camera, his favorite part of his work, he had a challenge. How could he quickly break through the intimidation felt by a little child toward a big unknown adult? He did so by lighting a match and feigning difficulty in blowing it out. Balanced on the edge of a preschool-size chair, he would huff and puff with theatrical overacting, turning finally to the youngster and saying, “Can you help me?” And they would. Moments later, my dad and his new friend would be chatting about guardian angels, the wonders of spaghetti, money, and a host of other delightful topics. The gap my father was closing is called the “power distance,” a concept developed by Professor Geert Hofstede. This phenomenon can cause people to avoid or defer to those they feel are more powerful and, in doing so, to shut down channels of honest communication. By asking for help, my father broke the power distance and opened a gateway to closeness with each and every match blower. If you lead at least a few people, this section is for you. And in order to develop the closeness needed to build a white space team, you’ll need to address the same lopsided dynamics as my father. You must ask for help, step out of having all the answers, and truly enlist a wide spectrum of input to move toward the changes you want. Speak to people about their needs, desires, and enthusiasms. And make it more than a gesture, authentically being open to using the ideas that spring from these conversations. The following steps will show you how.
Juliet Funt (A Minute to Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busyness, and Do Your Best Work)
By EzeeOnline Ezeeonline.in is one of the most affordable web design company in Delhi NCR. It offers an attractive, custom as well as profitable web presence of your brand. Be it a startup, small scale company or a company having low marketing budget, EzeeOnline. in suits your business needs. Being an cheap web design company, we help you carve your niche online without worrying about funds. Website Designing Company in Delhi NCR We, low cost web design company offer both dynamic as well as CMS enabled websites. Our diligent technical team provides various inquiry forms for lead capturing on the websites offered by us. We understand the fact that initially you would like to invest your money into daily operations. We also provide domain and hosting free for the first year. Web Development Company India Being an affordable web design company, we work closely with our customers to offer profitable web solutions including professional designs, call to action & carefully planned websites. Web Development Company India So, if you are planning to use your website as one of the major marketing strategies, then approach ezeeonline.in. We make sure that we meet all the latest standards for projecting an enchanting image about your company. Web Development Services India Our Cheap Website Designing Company in Delhi does not interfere with the quality. The loading speed of the website is always great. Consequently the aesthetic look of the website remains enchanting. Guess what! All within economical prices! As your brand is a startup or belongs to the low budged enterprise, we understand your pain. Hence, we offer affordable web design in Delhi; this will help you save cash for investing into operations services.
Affordable Web Design Company
All eyes focus on me. Sam looks like a hopeful puppy. Noah looks like a pissed-off house cat. It’s ridiculous. And I’m definitely not hosting the team for dinner at my beautiful home. My sanctuary. Not after what happened last time.
Louisa Masters (One Bite With a Vampire (Hidden Species #2))
The group was divided, almost entirely along generational lines. The older and more senior members of my team—Joe, Hillary, Gates, and Panetta—counseled caution, all of them having known and worked with Mubarak for years. They emphasized the role his government had long played in keeping peace with Israel, fighting terrorism, and partnering with the United States on a host of other regional issues. While they acknowledged the need to press the Egyptian leader on reform, they warned that there was no way of knowing who or what might replace him.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
It was 1992, and the Knicks were hosting their first annual summer camp for youngsters. Like many camps with professional teams, the club wanted to have one of its players make an appearance for a day. Not someone like Ewing, a star who had too many demands on his time already. But not someone from the end of the bench, either. So they asked Mason—basically still new to the NBA—if he’d appear for $1,500. The forward said yes, and the team provided him with a limousine to the camp that day. Mason had his window rolled down as the vehicle arrived, and the kids hovered around it like paparazzi, wanting to catch a glimpse of him up close. Yet Mason stayed in the car. First for two minutes. Then five. Then almost fifteen. Finally Ed Tapscott, then the club’s administrative director, came outside. He’d been responsible for Mason’s appearance at the camp that day, and couldn’t figure out why Mason wasn’t making his way inside the gym. “I’m not getting out of the car for anything less than $2,000, bro. And I want cash,” Mason told him. Tapscott figured he was joking at first. But Mason was completely serious. Sure, he’d agreed to the $1,500 figure before, but now—with an army of young, excited kids waiting inside—he had the leverage to play hardball. Tapscott said he wasn’t even sure he could realistically get access to that much cash that soon. “I had to give one of our staffers my ATM card,” he recalls. “What choice did I really have in a situation like that?” With assurance of the pay increase, Mason hopped out. He played in a couple of scrimmages with the children. But, in classic Mason fashion, he couldn’t turn off his competitiveness. While playing, Mason inadvertently elbowed a kid, knocking the child out cold and breaking his nose, which gushed with blood. When the boy regained consciousness, he woke to find a worried Mason hovering over him. The child smiled and asked the Knick to sign his bloody T-shirt. Meanwhile, Tapscott said he and others running the camp were merely happy to escape the situation without the threat of a lawsuit.
Chris Herring (Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks)
When Mathewson arrived in the majors, most first class and many second class hotels would not host big league teams for fear that the players' behavior would offend other guests. The hotels that did admit ballplayers often made them eat in a separate dining room. Players were well known for pinching waitresses and wrecking furniture, and if they didn't like the steaks they were served, they would nail them to the restaurant's walls.
Philip Seib (The Player: Christy Mathewson, Baseball, and the American Century)
The last time the federation had scheduled a men’s home friendly match on artificial turf had been in 1994. In that same time span since 1994, the women played dozens of U.S. Soccer–hosted matches on artificial turf. Now, even as World Cup winners, they were stuck on turf again.
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer)
A stellar housekeeper is the most important member of your Airbnb team.
Culin Tate (Host Coach: A Blueprint for Creating Financial Freedom Through Short-Term Rental Investing)
The way I identified with Wu-Wei was through football. You often hear athletes talking about being “in the zone”—a state of unself-conscious concentration. In the World Cup, when England inevitably end up in a quarterfinal penalty shoot-out, I believe it is their inability to access Wu-Wei that means the Germans win. (This was written prior to the 2014 World Cup, so my assumption that England would reach the quarterfinal has been exposed as hopelessly optimistic, but, look, I correctly predicted a German victory.) If you are in a stadium with 80,000 screaming supporters and the hopes of a nation resting on the outcome of a penalty kick, you need to be focused, you need at that moment to be in a state of mind which is the result of great preparation but has total fluidity. Kind of like a self-induced trance where the body is free to act upon its training without the encumbrance of a neurotic mind. Stood in front of the keeper, the ball on the spot, you need to have access to all the preparation that has gone into perfecting the kick that will place the ball in the top right corner of the net. You cannot be thinking, “Oh, God, if I miss this they’ll burn effigies of me in Essex,” or “I think my wife is fucking another member of the team,” “My dad never loved me; I don’t deserve to score.”—those mental codes are an obstacle to success. I once was a guest on Match of the Day, a British Premier League football-analysis show; before it began, I hung out with the host, ex-England hero Gary Lineker and pundit, and another ex-England hero, Alan Shearer. I chatted to the two men about their lives as top-level athletes and they both agreed that the most important component in their success had been mental strength, the ability to focus the mind, literally, in their case, on the goal, excluding all irrelevant, negative, or distracting information. Both of those men have a quality that you can feel in their presence of focus and assuredness. Lineker is more superficially affable and Shearer more stern, but there is a shared certainty and connectedness to their physicality that is interesting.
Russell Brand (Revolution)
the second case of incest Felitti had encountered in his twenty-three-year medical practice, and yet about ten days later he heard a similar story. As he and his team started to inquire more closely, they were shocked to discover that most of their morbidly obese patients had been sexually abused as children. They also uncovered a host of other family problems.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
In 1962, the San Francisco Giants were preparing to host the LA Dodgers for a crucial three-game series, late in the season. The Dodgers, led by master base stealer Maury Wills, were five and a half games ahead of the Giants. Before the series began, the Giants manager approached Matty Schwab, the team’s head groundskeeper, and asked if anything could be done—wink wink—to slow down Wills. “Dad and I were out at Candlestick before dawn the day the series was to begin,” said Jerry Schwab, Matty’s son, as quoted by Noel Hynd in Sports Illustrated. “We were installing a speed trap.” Hynd continues: Working by torchlight, the Schwabs dug up and removed the topsoil where Wills would take his lead off first base. Down in its place went a squishy swamp of sand, peat moss and water. Then they covered their chicanery with an inch of normal infield soil, making the 5- by 15-foot quagmire visually indistinguishable from the rest of the base path. The Dodgers were not fooled. When the team began batting practice, the players and coaches noticed the quicksand, and so did the umpire, who ordered it removed. Schwab and the grounds crew came out with wheelbarrows, shoveled up the mixture, and returned soon after with reloaded wheelbarrows. It was the same bog. They’d just mixed in some new dirt, which made it even looser. Somehow the umpires were satisfied. Then Matty Schwab ordered his son to water the infield. Generously. By the time the game started, there was basically a swamp between first and second base. (“They found two abalone under second base,” wrote an irritated Los Angeles sports columnist.) Maury Wills, en route to an MVP season, stole no bases, and neither did his teammates, and the Giants won, 11–2. Pleased, the Schwab father-son team continued to conjure more marshy conditions, and the Giants swept the Dodgers—and went on to leapfrog them to win the National League pennant. There’s something admirably mischievous about this story. I mean, it’s cheating, let’s be clear, but it’s cheeky cheating. It’s fun to think that the father-son groundskeeping team pulled one over on the National League’s MVP. The underdogs won one—they tilted the odds in favor of their home team.
Dan Heath (Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen)
The drawbacks of “hot-desking” or “hoteling,” as it’s called, point to another way in which space can be used to extend our minds (but too often is not). When we operate within a space over which we feel ownership—a space that feels like it’s ours—a host of psychological and even physiological changes ensues. These effects were first observed in studies of a phenomenon known as the “home advantage”: the consistent finding that athletes tend to win more and bigger victories when they are playing in their own fields, courts, and stadiums. On their home turf, teams play more aggressively, and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance.
Annie Murphy Paul (The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain)
When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer.
Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of
Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
When I plan a menu I consider color, texture, taste, and balance: Color: A red vegetable next to a yellow one looks unappetizing. Two white ones, like celery and cauliflower, look awful. Texture: Creamed chicken with mashed potatoes makes too much mush. Always serve something crisp with something soft. Taste: Never team two sours, two sweets, or two bitters. Candied yams and cranberry sauce are both delectable, but served together they break two of these rules, color and taste contrast. Balance: Courses shouldn't be uniformly rich nor light. A too rich menu might consist of a heavy cream soup, a roast with thickened gravy and potatoes, and a heavy cream soup, a roast with thickened gravy and potatoes, and a heavy whippedcreamtopped dessert. If the main course is substantial, the first should be light, crisp and appetizing, and the dessert an airy sherbet or a compote of fresh fruit. I decide first on the main course. For a buffet for twelve there should be two warm dishes. If you're going to be a relaxed hostess choose two that can be made the day before. Most of them improve with reheating. Some of the possibilities are beef bourguignon, boned and skinned breasts of chicken in a delicate cream sauce, a shrimp-lobster-and-scallop Newburg, lamb curry with all its interesting accompaniments. With any of these, serve a large, icy bowl of crisp salad with a choice of two or three dressings in little bowls alongside. Hot dishes must be kept hot in chafing dishes or on a hot tray so that they’re just as good for the second helping. Plates should be brought warm to the buffet table just before the guests serve themselves. I like to have a complete service at each end of the table so that people won’t have to stand in line forever, and there should be an attractive centerpiece, though it can be very simple. A bowl of flowers, carefully arranged by the hostess in the afternoon, and candles—always candlelight. The first course for a buffet supper should be an eye-catching array of canapés served in the living room with the drinks. I think there should be one interesting hot thing, one at room temperature, and a bouquet of crisp raw vegetables. The raw vegetables might include slim carrot sticks, green pepper slices, scallions, little love tomatoes, zucchini wedges, radishes, cauliflowerettes, olives, and young turnips. Arrange them colorfully in a large bowl over crushed ice and offer a couple of dips for non-dieters. [...] It’s best to serve hot hors d’oevres in two batches, the second ones heating under the broiler while the first round of drinks is served. [...] After people have had their second helpings the maid clears the buffet and puts out the dessert. Some people like an elaborate ice-cream concoction — so many men like gooey, sweet things. Pander to them, and let them worry about their waistlines. Some people like to end dinner with cheese and fruit. Other two kinds — one bland and one forthright, and just ripe. French bread and crackers on the side. For diet watchers gave a pretty bowl of fresh fruits, dewy and very cold. Serve good, strong coffee in pretty demitasses and let the relaxed conversation take over.
Joan Crawford (My Way of Life)
We had had physios before Andrew, and several afterwards, but he was the only member of the support staff for whom the team hosted a farewell dinner when he left us towards the end of 2004. He was a consummate professional, but also a wonderful and trustworthy friend.
V.V.S. Laxman (281 and Beyond)
One family described their core value of hospitality, lived out as they cleaned the house together each Friday for the express purpose of welcoming people over the weekend. They wanted to be able to spontaneously invite others over, knowing their space was ready to receive them. All this was explained to their kids by connecting the dots between the practice of keeping house and the immense welcome of God. They talked about their apartment as a gift and a refuge, and how important it was for it to feel inviting. Hosting people was not about living some Magnolia life; it was how they loved their neighbors. Thus, Friday night cleanup was a faith practice. One family used the tradition of a summer road trip to visit relatives as a means to support being who God uniquely made each of them to be. Each family member got to design the itinerary for one day of the trip. On that day, everyone else went along with that person’s choices for restaurants and an activity. They talked about the wonder of God’s image in each person and how this was a fun way to see each member of the family just as God made them to be. Thus, a family trip was a faith ritual. What about your family? What unique characteristics need to be accounted for as you craft a vision for faith? • Who makes up your family? List the members. You may share a living space with them or not, live in the same town or not, be relationally close or not. • Next to each person on the list, jot down a few distinguishing key traits of that person. What are they like? What are they interested in? • What are some of your family’s strengths and loves as a group? Do you love a good party? Cheer for a certain team? Love a particular place or meal? • What are some of your family’s unique challenges right now? Do you have a child who doesn’t “fit the mold,” for whatever reason? Are finances tight? Have any of the relationships been strained or broken? • List anything else that feels important to you about who your family is and what they are like. What other traits make you, you?
Meredith Miller (Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn't Have to Heal From)
The pons is active during meditation, as we breathe deeply and regularly. It’s associated with the production of delta and theta waves in the brain, which research shows turns on a host of healthy processes in your cells. These include increased stem-cell production and the repair of skin, bone, muscle, nerves, and cartilage. These brain waves also lengthen our telomeres, the most reliable marker of longevity. A remarkable ability of humans is that we are able to activate or deactivate all of these brain regions by consciousness alone. We can shift our thoughts deliberately with meditative practices or simply by focusing on different stimuli. The brain responds accordingly. We’ll see the extraordinary neural effects of this superpower of “selective attention” in Chapter 6, and the evolutionary implications in Chapter 8. Pons Activation Benefits Increases Decreases Quality REM sleep Insomnia Cell repair Longevity Energy Cell metabolism Melatonin Delta brain waves Theta brain waves Dream frequency and quality Lucid dreaming To the Brain, Imagination Is Reality For thousands of years, sages have assured us that our minds create our reality. In Proverbs 23:7, the poet tells us that, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Two thousand years ago the Buddha said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” Now neuroscience is showing us how true this is. An ingenious study measured how our brains respond to scenarios that exist only in our imaginations. A research team at the University of Colorado at Boulder took 68 people and gave them a mild electric shock accompanied by a sound. They were then divided into three groups. The first group heard the sound repeatedly, though this time without the shock. The second group imagined the sound in their heads repeatedly. The third group imagined the pleasant natural music of rain and birds. The group imagining the sound showed the same brain activity as the one actually hearing the sound. Two brain regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, lit up. As we’ve seen, the first regulates emotions like fear in the limbic system, while the second processes reward and aversion. Later, people in the “rain and birds” group were still afraid of the sound even when it was repeated many times without the shock. But those in the group that heard the real sound, as well as those imagining it, unlearned their fear. In neuroscience, this revision of reality is called “extinction learning.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
But we also mixed in some vinegar. Menashe Shapiro, who ran our research shop, started compiling a list of campaign donations to Governor Cuomo by the insurance industry. The comms team started preparing pitches about pay-to-play politics and regulatory capture. We prepared a letter from a host of major VCs to the governor saying that if New York couldn’t license a company like Lemonade, there was no reason to invest in New York’s tech sector. We created an online petition calling on the governor to respect consumer rights.
Bradley Tusk (The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics)
An all-star game was the post–World Cup opportunity the national team was looking for. After all, the players had already asked U.S. Soccer how the federation planned to capitalize on hosting the Women’s World Cup on home soil. The answer they got back, essentially, was that the federation wasn’t really thinking about that. “We pressed them on it and said, Hey, what are you doing? What are the plans?” remembers Julie Foudy. “They said we were going to Africa. We were like, Africa? We need to grow the game here. Why are we going to Africa? We had never even been to Africa.
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer)
With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar. The players demanded to know how U.S. Soccer could justify skipping the tournaments. Flynn replied that it was “the technical director’s recommendation” to play a lighter schedule. The technical director? April Heinrichs. The players wanted to figure out if Heinrichs really believed the team should play so few games in 2005, so Julie Foudy reached out to her. “Is that true? Did you tell U.S. Soccer we should only play five games?” Foudy asked. “I never said anything like that,” Heinrichs told her. “I told them you should play 20 games.” If Heinrichs hadn’t recommended such a sparse schedule and, in fact, recommended around 20 games, it seemed that U.S. Soccer was making a decision that went against what was best for the players. The players saw a clear double standard—the men’s team hadn’t played so few games since 1987, almost two decades earlier. They concluded U.S. Soccer’s real reason was the same one behind most disputes between the players and the federation: money. The federation, it appeared, did not want to spend the money for training camps, player stipends, and travel for overseas competitions, even as it was sitting on a $30 million surplus at the time. “In 2005, they had no plans for us and wanted us to go quiet so they didn’t have to pay us the entire year,” says defender Kate Markgraf.
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer)
With a quiet post-Olympics year ahead, U.S. Soccer secretary general Dan Flynn informed the players that the national team would “go dark” for 2005 and play between four and six games total that year. Rather than schedule the usual slate of games, the federation would instead focus on scouting new players. “If there are no games, where will the women play?” Langel asked. “The W-League,” replied Flynn. “Are you kidding me?” Langel said. The W-League wasn’t a professional league. It was a development league that included amateur, unpaid players. There was no comparison between playing international opponents with the national team and competing in the W-League. “We told them we don’t necessarily need a residency camp, but we don’t have anywhere to play at all,” says Cat Whitehill, who graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in communications. “They wanted nothing to do with us.” U.S. Soccer argued the next World Cup wasn’t for another three years and there were no major events the team needed to prepare for. It would be similar to the team’s schedule in 2001, when U.S. Soccer hosted just two home games for the national team. But for the players who had now made soccer their living and didn’t have the WUSA anymore, that was unacceptable. It’s not as if U.S. Soccer was simply scaling back friendlies. The federation said it had no plans to send the team to the annual Algarve Cup in Portugal, which the team always competed in. A team wouldn’t be sent to the Four Nations Tournament in China either, despite the competition being a usual fixture on the team’s calendar.
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer)
Singapore Why should I book a live band for my wedding? Merry Bees Merry Bees have serenaded dignitaries at the Istana. Merry bees provide services to their customers like Solo Live Music, Virtual live band, Solo Musician, Solo Wedding Singer, Instrumental live band, Corporate Live Band, wedding livestream etc. their all the services are quite good. Merry bees also performed at TV programmes and other high profile events including APEC, F1 Singapore Grand Prix, Young NTUC Celebrates NDP, DBS, Prudential, Maersk, Singapore Sports Awards, etc. Merry Bees have produced and performed to over 2,000 successful events. When COVID-19 hit us in 2020, Merry Bees was one of the first few events companies in Singapore who adapted quickly to virtual. Merry bees have produced and live streamed to over 250 events and performances by Dec 2020. Apart from that merry bees also provide Content creation, Videography, livestream production, Corporate Videography Merry bees are emotionally attached with their each client. ShiLi & Adi TWO IS BETTER THAN ONE It is no surprise that ShiLi & Adi are a highly sought after duo in the wedding live bands and corporate events circuit due to their fresh piano arrangements and smooth vocal harmony. From duets and their ability to medley any songs dedicated by the audience, their chemistry is unmistakable. John Lye Live Looping Singer Guitarist, Bilingual Emcee & Host, Production & Technical Director John Lye is one of the most versatile performers we know with 12 years of performing experience under his belt. As part of our core team and co-founder of Merry Bees, John wears many hats but his biggest hat would be charming audiences with a wide vocal range and solid guitar live looping skills, as he switches effortlessly from heavy old school rock ballads of Journey and Bon Jovi to classics from Sinatra and Nat King Cole in various languages. Merry bees have many live offers you can book merry bees to make your special day wonderful.
Merry Bees
This chicken-and-egg problem is common in scientific research and is often difficult to address. Often we can say with certainty only that two factors (the microbiota and obesity, in this case) are correlated or coincident, but not necessarily causally related. However, here is where the power of the gnotobotic mouse can really be seen. Jeff’s team transplanted the microbiota from the obese mice into lean mice with no previous microbiota. Suddenly the lean mice with the obese microbiota began to gain weight, even though there had been no change in their diet or exercise habits! What these scientists had shown, to the surprise of many, was that the gut microbiota is enough to cause weight gain in an otherwise lean, healthy mouse. These findings forced the scientific community to reframe our view of the gut microbes. Clearly the microbiota is not just a collection of innocuous bacteria loitering within our gut. These bacteria are capable of profoundly changing the biology of their host and may be a major contributor to one of the most alarming health issues in the Western world.
Justin Sonnenburg (The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health)
3D printers are already producing parts that are lighter than traditionally built parts, are much stronger in design, and are more readily produced on demand for machines as sophisticated as NASA rockets and Air Force fighters. But for mission-critical products like these, there’s also a risk, one that’s put into context by James Regenor, director of the additive manufacturing and innovation unit at precision parts manufacturer Moog, Inc.: “How can the maintenance crew on a U.S. aircraft carrier have absolute confidence that the software file they downloaded to 3D-print a new part for a fighter jet hasn’t been hacked by a foreign adversary?” To tackle this problem, Regenor’s team at Moog has launched a service it calls Veripart, which uses blockchain technology to, among other things, verify the software design and upgrading work performed by different providers of 3D-printed products along a supply chain. It plans to incorporate a host of features that, among other things, will protect intellectual property and make it more flexible and dynamic as an asset.
Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
To acquire customers, Baroo did not invest in traditional paid marketing, such as Facebook ads. Instead, the startup relied on the marketing efforts of apartment building partners and on word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers. Buildings would distribute a welcome gift from Baroo—a chew toy or leash—to new residents who owned pets. The team also hosted quarterly events for residents, such as “yappy hours” and pet Halloween. Finally, building concierge staff would recommend Baroo to residents. In exchange, the startup paid buildings a share of the revenue that it earned from their residents, averaging about 6 percent. Such revenue sharing is standard practice for service providers, like cable TV companies, that want access to residents.
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
The Razorbacks would play Duke, the NCAA champs in 1991 and 1992. Duke had a host of great players, but their star was Grant Hill, a consensus pick for national Player of the Year honors. The day before the championship, Richardson grew pensive. He was reasonably proud of his accomplishments, but something was nagging him. Richardson had been the underdog so long that despite his team’s yearlong national ranking, he still felt dispossessed. He found himself pondering one of Arkansas’s little-used substitutes, a senior named Ken Biley. Biley was an undersized post player who was raised in Pine Bluff. Neither of his parents had the opportunity to go to college, but every one of his fifteen siblings did, and nearly all graduated. “I had already learned that everybody has to play his role,” Biley says of his upbringing. As a freshman and sophomore, Biley saw some court time and even started a couple of games, but his playing time later evaporated and he lost faith. “Everyone wants to play, and when you don’t you get discouraged,” he says. On two occasions, he sat down with his coach and asked what he could do to earn a more important role. “I never demanded anything,” Biley says, “and he told me exactly what I needed to do, but we had so many good players ahead of me. Corliss Williamson, for one.” Nearly every coach, under the pressure of a championship showdown, reverts to the basic strategies that got the team into the finals. But Richardson couldn’t stop thinking about Biley, and what a selfless worker he had been for four years. The day before the championship game against Duke, at the conclusion of practice, Richardson pulled Biley aside. Biley had hardly played in the first five playoff games leading up to the NCAA title match—a total of four minutes. “I’ve watched how your career has progressed, and how you’ve handled not getting to play,” Richardson began. “I appreciate the leadership you’ve been showing and I want to reward you, as a senior.” “Thanks coach,” Biley said. He was unprepared for what came next. “You’re starting tomorrow against Duke,” Richardson said. “And you’re guarding Grant Hill.” Biley was speechless. Then overcome with emotion. “I was shocked, freaked out!” Biley says. “I hadn’t played much for two years. I just could not believe it.” Biley had plenty of time to think about Grant Hill. “I was a nervous wreck, like you’d expect,” he says. He had a restless night—he stared at the ceiling, sat on the edge of his bed, then flopped around trying to sleep. Richardson had disdained book coaches for years. Now he was throwing the book in the trash by starting a benchwarmer in the NCAA championship game.
Rus Bradburd (Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson)
After the Accuser trumpeted his philosophical dilemma of an unloving or unjust God, Enoch was about to respond when the entrance of another counselor to his team interrupted him. He came from the right hand of the throne of the Ancient of Days and whispered to Enoch. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. But when he whispered, it was a still small voice heard only by his listener. It was the Son of Man, the “second power in heaven.” The first one he spoke to was Uriel. The Son of Man whispered something to him and Uriel immediately excused himself from the throne room. Then the Son of Man walked to Enoch and gave him counsel. Enoch could see the Accuser visibly shaken by the presence of this glorious being. It was as if he knew his case was instantly lost. Enoch had seen this “Son of Man” in his dreams when he was on earth, but after ascending into heaven, he came to know him. There he learned that this Son of Man was also a Son of Elohim, but not like all the other heavenly host. He was the Firstborn, a species-unique, uncreated Son of God. And now, he had joined the defense. Everything would change. After receiving counsel, Enoch spoke, “There is a third way, not addressed by the Accuser’s dilemma. And that is substitutionary atonement.
Brian Godawa (Enoch Primordial (Chronicles of the Nephilim #2))
George Mumford, a Newton-based mindfulness teacher, one such moment took place in 1993, at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. The center was hosting a retreat devoted to mindfulness meditation, the clear-your-head habit in which participants sit quietly and focus on their breathing. Leading the session: meditation megastar Jon Kabat-Zinn. Originally trained as a molecular biologist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn had gone on to revolutionize the meditation world in the 1970s by creating a more secularized version of the practice, one focused less on Buddhism and more on stress reduction and other health benefits. After dinner one night, Kabat-Zinn was giving a talk about his work, clicking through a slide show to give the audience something to look at. At one point he displayed a slide of Mumford. Mumford had been a star high school basketball player who’d subsequently hit hard times as a heroin addict, Kabat-Zinn explained. By the early 1980s, however, he’d embraced meditation and gotten sober. Now Mumford taught meditation to prison inmates and other unlikely students. Kabat-Zinn explained how they were able to relate to Mumford because of his tough upbringing, his openness about his addiction — and because, like many inmates, he’s African-American. Kabat-Zinn’s description of Mumford didn’t seem to affect most Omega visitors, but one participant immediately took notice: June Jackson, whose husband had just coached the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship. Phil Jackson had spent years studying Buddhism and Native American spirituality and was a devoted meditator. Yet his efforts to get Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates to embrace mindfulness was meeting with only limited success. “June took one look at George and said, ‘He could totally connect with Phil’s players,’ ’’ Kabat-Zinn recalls. So he provided an introduction. Soon Mumford was in Chicago, gathering some of the world’s most famous athletes in a darkened room and telling them to focus on their breathing. Mumford spent the next five years working with the Bulls, frequently sitting behind the bench, as they won three more championships. In 1999 Mumford followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he helped turn Kobe Bryant into an outspoken adherent of meditation. Last year, as Jackson began rebuilding the moribund New York Knicks as president, Mumford signed on for a third tour of duty. He won’t speak about the specific work he’s doing in New York, but it surely involves helping a new team adjust to Jackson’s sensibilities, his controversial triangle offense, and the particular stress that comes with compiling the worst record in the NBA. Late one April afternoon just as the NBA playoffs are beginning, Mumford is sitting at a table in O’Hara’s, a Newton pub. Sober for more than 30 years, he sips Perrier. It’s Marathon Monday, and as police begin allowing traffic back onto Commonwealth Avenue, early finishers surround us, un-showered and drinking beer. No one recognizes Mumford, but that’s hardly unusual. While most NBA fans are aware that Jackson is serious about meditation — his nickname is the Zen Master — few outside his locker rooms can name the consultant he employs. And Mumford hasn’t done much to change that. He has no office and does no marketing, and his recently launched website, mindfulathlete.org, is mired deep in search-engine results. Mumford has worked with teams that have won six championships, but, one friend jokes, he remains the world’s most famous completely unknown meditation teacher. That may soon change. This month, Mumford published his first book, The Mindful Athlete, which is part memoir and part instruction guide, and he has agreed to give a series of talks and book signings
Anonymous
Once a country is included on the “counterinsurgency” list, or any other such category, a move is made to develop a CIA echelon, usually within the structure of whatever U.S. military organization exists there at the time. Then the CIA operation begins Phase I by proposing the introduction of some rather conventional aircraft. No developing country can resist such an offer, and this serves to create a base of operations, usually in a remote and potentially hostile area. While the aircraft program is getting started the Agency will set up a high frequency radio network, using radios positioned in villages throughout the host country. The local inhabitants are told that these radios will provide a warning of guerrilla activity. Phase II of such a project calls for the introduction of medium transport type aircraft that meet anti-guerrilla warfare support requirements. The crew training program continues, and every effort is made to develop an in-house maintenance capability. As the level of this activity increases, more and more Americans are brought in, ostensibly as instructors and advisers; at this phase many of the Americans are Army Special Forces personnel who begin civic action programs. The country is sold the idea that it is the Army in most developing nations that is the usual stabilizing influence and that it is the Army that can be trusted. This is the American doctrine; promoting the same idea, but in other words, it is a near paraphrase of the words of Chairman Mao. In the final phase of this effort, light transports and liaison type aircraft are introduced to be used for border surveillance, landing in remote areas, and for resupplying small groups of anti-guerrilla warfare troops who are operating away from fixed bases. These small specialized aircraft are usually augmented by helicopters. When the plan has developed this far, efforts are made to spread the program throughout the frontier area of the country. Villagers are encouraged to clear off small runways or helicopter landing pads, and more warning network radios are brought into remote areas. While this work is continuing, the government is told that these activities will develop their own military capability and that there will be a bonus economic benefit from such development, each complementing the other. It also makes the central government able to contact areas in which it may never have been able to operate before, and it will serve as a tripwire warning system for any real guerrilla activities that may arise in the area. There is no question that this whole political economic social program sounds very nice, and most host governments have taken the bait eagerly. What they do not realize, and in many cases what most of the U.S. Government does not realize, is that this is a CIA program, and it exists to develop intelligence. If it stopped there, it might be acceptable but intelligence serves as its own propellant, and before long the agents working on this type of project see, or perhaps are a factor in creating, internal dissension.
L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
At this point in the evolution of the ST it would not occur to anyone that such an operation that violated the sovereignty of another country or that was patently a case of “interference in the internal affairs of another nation” should not be carried out without some formal sanction from the host government. The idea of fighting Communism had become so blindly accepted that they began to forget that such activity was properly a “clandestine operation” and should not be performed lightly. The feeling of urgency and of an almost missionary zeal to combat and root out real or imagined subversive insurgency anywhere was such that the great importance of national sovereignty was all but overlooked.
L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
Musical Event Management Service– Make the right & sensible choice Music is essential to keep the spirit up in the day to day activities. It is known to elevate positive feelings and makes you a cheerful person. There is no one on this earth, who will not agree that listening to soulful songs is a great therapy to kick out stress. Not only this, it has become a great source of entertainment in modern day lifestyle. It keeps everyone upbeat and definitely lightens up everyone’s mood. With these benefits, there has been a massive rise in the demand of musical event management service. So, if you are someone who is planning to host such an event, it makes sense to take a right call by consulting the company SPRING OF RHYTHM. Well, this can be achieved by opting for a trustworthy event management firm like SPRING OF RHYTHM. Only consider the best, which can guarantee of top-notch musical event management solutions. In the market, you might come across to hundreds of companies, but never get fooled by their big promises. Sit down and perform extensive research to opt only the prominent one for your peace of mind. In case you compromise on this point, it can prove to be a costly affair. Of all, the event can turn out to be a major disappointment and this can harm your reputation in the society. This is why there is a need to be smart in the decision-making process. Firstly, one should get complete information about the musical event management service provider. Check their reputation in the industry and for how they have been performing. Give your vote of confidence to only the most experienced and the best one. With years of experience in their kitty, it can do wonders in the quality of service. Secondly, get an insight on the team members and their hands-on experience. Only a good team with superlative members can assure of exceptional service. Thirdly, check the industry connections of the firm and this is vital in terms of costing. This will prove to be decisive in a smooth event within the desired budget. Based on their industry connections, it helps to meet the requirements in a cost-effective way and without compromising on your end goals. A reputed musical event management service provider will assess the main objective of the occasion in a proficient manner. They can offer the customize service as per the necessities of the client in a clinical manner. SPRING OF RHYTHM possesses the much-needed expertise in organizing the best musical event. With the best pool of music artists, it gives the liberty to make the choice according to the budget and occasion. You certainly end up saving time by knowing which artist will be available for a particular day and what will be the charge. This can bring about a lot of clarity and make the decision-making process less stressful. Make the right decision to add the right enthusiasm to the event and make it unbelievable for everyone. SPRING OF RHYTHM is assuring you with the successful and entertaining event will give an immense satisfaction.
SPRING OF RHYTHM
One of the most amazing things about mycorrhizal fungi is their ability to associate with more than one host plant at the same time—in other words, their networks can be shared among plants, even plants of different species. As a result of this feat, mycorrhizae can benefit entire forests, as the larger trees literally feed and protect the smaller trees through an interconnected mycelial network. And when one plant dies, many of its nutrients are returned to the network and flow toward other plants.
Jeff Lowenfels (Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower's Guide to Mycorrhizae (Science for Gardeners))
Don’t be afraid to provide white glove customer support for early adopters to help them through the onboarding process. Sometimes automation also entails a host of emotional concerns, such as fear that someone’s job will be replaced by a shell script. By working one-on-one with early users, you can address those fears personally, and demonstrate that rather than owning the toil of performing a tedious task manually, the team instead owns the configurations, processes, and ultimate results of their technical work. Later adopters are convinced by the happy examples of early adopters.
Betsy Beyer (Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems)
These increases in brain cholesterol and pituitary activity were clues that were rich in their implications, and in the late 1960’s a research team at the University of California at Berkeley began to look for specific differences in the neural structures of gentled and ungentled rats. They found that greater tactile stimulation resulted in the following differences: These animals’ brains were heavier, and in particular they had heavier and thicker cerebral cortexes. This heaviness was not due only to the presence of more cholesterol—that is, more myeline sheaths—but also to the fact that actual neural cell bodies and nuclei were larger. Associated with these larger cells were greater quantities of cholinesterase and acetylcholinesterase, two enzymes that support the chemical activities of nerve cells, and also a higher ratio of RNA to DNA within the cells. Increased amounts of these specific compounds indicates higher metabolic activity. Measurements of the synaptic junctions connecting nerve cells revealed that these junctions were 50% larger in cross-section in the gentled rats than in the isolated ones. The gentled rats’ adrenal glands were also markedly heavier, evidence that the pituitary-adrenal axis—the most important monitor of the body’s hormonal secretions—was indeed more active.34 Many other studies have confirmed and added to these findings. Laboratory animals who are given rich tactile experience in their infancy grow faster, have heavier brains, more highly developed myelin sheaths, bigger nerve cells, more advanced skeletal muscular growth, better coordination, better immunological resistance, more developed pituitary/adrenal activity, earlier puberties, and more active sex lives than their isolated genetic counterparts. Associated with these physiological advantages are a host of emotional and behavioral responses which indicate a stronger and much more successfully adapted organism. The gentled rats are much calmer and less excitable, yet they tend to be more dominant in social and sexual situations. They are more lively, more curious, more active problem solvers. They are more willing to explore new environments (ungentled animals usually withdraw fearfully from novel situations), and advance more quickly in all forms of conditioned learning exercises.35 Moreover, these felicitous changes are not to be observed only in infancy and early maturation; an enriched environment will produce exactly the same increases in brain and adrenal weights and the same behavioral changes in adult animals as well, even though the adults require a longer period of stimulation to show the maximum effect.36
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
another true Death Valley Days story is presented for your entertainment by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, producers of that famous family of products—20 Mule Team Borax, 20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips, and Boraxo. Well, Old Ranger, what’s your story about tonight?” Through many changes of format, it remained a hardy perennial, eventually becoming a filmed TV series with Ronald Reagan as host.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
Schools have tried just about anything to try to calm racial tensions: professional mediation, multi-cultural training, diversity celebrations, anger-management classes, and a host of other interventions. In 2004, the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, in Riverside County, California, even considered a rule that would have forbidden any student to “form or openly participate in groups that tend to exclude, or create the impression of the exclusion of, other students.” The school board narrowly rejected the proposal when it was pointed out that the ban would have prohibited membership in the Hispanic group, La Raza, and could have been read to forbid playing rap music around white students. Absurd measures like this show how desperate schools are to solve the race problem. A 2003 survey found that 5.4 percent of high-school students had stayed home at least once during the previous month because they were physically afraid. This was an increase over 4.4 percent ten years earlier. Racial violence was undoubtedly an important factor. The circumstances under which some of our least advantaged citizens must try to get an education are nothing short of scandalous. Is it a wonder their test scores are low, that many drop out, that they fail to see the value of an education? How many times must school race riots be put down by SWAT teams before school authorities realize that this may be a problem that will not be cured with sensitivity training? The purpose of schools is to educate, not to force on children integration of a kind their parents do not even practice.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
There came a moment in my discovery of the microbes that inhabit the human body when I stopped seeing myself as an individual, and began to consider myself instead as a vessel for my microbiota. Now, I see us - myself and my microbes - as a team. But, as in any relationship, I will only get what I give. I am their provider and their protector, and in return they sustain and nourish me. I find myself thinking about my meal choices in terms of what my microbes would be grateful for, and my mental and physical health as markers of my worthiness as a host to them. They are my own personal colony, and their preservation is worth as much to me as the well-being of the cells of my own body.
Alanna Collen (10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness)
From what Steel was learning, the language of the deals made them look less like aboveboard legal transactions and more like cover-ups. The agreements included one restrictive clause after another. The women were obliged to turn over all their evidence—audio recordings, diaries, emails, backup files, any other shred of proof—to O’Reilly and his lawyers. They and in one case their attorneys were prohibited from helping any other women who might have similar claims against the host. If they received subpoenas compelling them to talk, they were required to notify O’Reilly and his team, who could fight their being called to testify. The lawyer for one of the women agreed to switch sides, to “provide legal advice to O’Reilly regarding sexual harassment matters,” according to the language of the agreement. Another of the alleged victims promised never to make disparaging statements about O’Reilly or Fox News, “written or oral, direct or indirect,” and not to respond—ever—to any journalists who might contact her about the matter. As part of the deal, she confirmed that she had not filed a complaint with any of the government agencies responsible for fighting sexual harassment, including the EEOC. In return, one alleged victim received about $9 million, and another got $3.25 million. If either woman violated any of these clauses, she could lose the money. Whatever O’Reilly had or hadn’t done to the women was thus dropped down a deep well, never to be recovered. Cash for silence; that was the deal.
Jodi Kantor (She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement)
When Lonegan hosted rallies, he and his team were ready to record the e-mail address of anyone who shared it. They made phone trees and hosted volunteer training sessions. They passed out the phone numbers of local congressmen to activists and coached them on the best time to call. (Late night was sometimes best so that volunteers could leave voicemails, which would be waiting in big batches when the politician showed up for work the next day.) They taught volunteers the fine art of calling talk-radio programs and getting on the air, coaching them to mention the right website address or phone number when they were on the air. Lonegan and his colleagues did more than just get Tea Party activists to focus on the Waxman-Markey bill. Americans for Prosperity also helped direct the activists’ passion toward a very specific group of targets: Republican politicians. Attacking the Republican party was one of AFP’s central strategies from the earliest days. In 2006, Lonegan attended a private AFP event hosted by Charles and David Koch, in Aspen, Colorado.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
better for the virus if a host not only continues walking around but also sheds a lot of the virus when exhaling, sneezing, coughing, perspiring, defecating or releasing other bodily fluids. The virus that hits the evolutionary jackpot is the one that spreads to other humans via the medium that runs the least interference: the air. A host can spread a virus via saliva, mucus and small moisture particles called aerosols that are produced when exhaling. The more forceful the breathing out, such as when singing, coughing or exercising, the more aerosols are produced. Covid is in this category and mainly spreads through the air into noses and lungs. It is very infectious and slow to cause notable symptoms. How do our bodies deal with an intruder like this? THE IMMUNE RESPONSE: HOW WE DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST A VIRAL ATTACK Our bodies’ first line of defence against enemy viruses is the skin, which is normally impervious to them. The weak points are cuts, abrasions and areas of the body not covered in protective skin, including the eyes, ears, nose and other apertures. Once inside the gates, viruses can find exposed cells that grant them direct access to other parts of the body. The initial exposure is unavoidable because our bodies need these areas to be exposed for other reasons, such as to get oxygen, smell, hear, eat and get pregnant. Covid is a virus that attacks the human respiratory system through the nose and mouth. There it homes in on, and binds to, exposed cells coated with an enzyme called ACE2. Covid’s protein structure ‘fits’ with ACE2, and is able to invade the cells with the help of another enzyme, furin. It is a complicated process but one can think of the ACE2 and furin team as a kind of ‘keyhole’ into which covid fits to enter the cell.
Paul Frijters (The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next)