Input Without Quotes

I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW

I am not meant to function without multiple simultaneous inputs. If this was what being a human was like, it sucked massively.

it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

God was thinking of you long before you ever thought about him. His purpose for your life predates your conception. He planned it before you existed, without your input! You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.

He opened the door wearing an oversized wife-beater and dirty trunks to match. Funny, but he recognized me withouta struggle. Immediately, I assumed he was sober, which was a good thing. Yet, seeing me wasn’t expected or desired. For sure, I was the last person on his list of surprises. Jerry adjusted his head and sharpened his bloodshot eyes. It wasthen his booze-bated breath greeted me well before he did. Ok, he was in a stupor or maybe on the rebound. Next, soiled diapers stole the little oxygen I had left—and I was still OUTDOORS. Yet somehow, I mustered enough wind to greet my brother. I tried to beat him to the punch and said, “What’s up bruh?” What happened next stomped my soul me for years to come! He never bothered to truly acknowledge me. Yet, heresponded without hesitation, “You know I can’t have any company!” Then he violently slammed the door shut! Jerry was gone! I couldn’t differentiate from being stupid or dumbstruck. I just stood silent on his porch all alone for about five minutes. I’d dealt with Jerry’s nastiness many times before. But he would initially warm up before dropping his hammer. Without a doubt, l was lost, confused, and bewildered like a teen-age boy losing a prom date. Foolishly, I used logic to dissect my embarrassment. First, the guy scolded me as if I should’ve known better! To be fair, Jerry was the breadwinner. His wife left him years ago. That part I understood. Only a fool would have hung around his crazy ass. It was amazing they got together, let alone stayed that way long enough to create those children. Yet, all his kids were pushing the ages of twenty andabove. What the hell did he mean, “I can’t receive any company!” Of course, I heard those crying babies which madehim a granddaddy. That was strangely obvious to his existence. Yes, the cycle continues! Second, I really didn’t care to go inside. I didn’t want to be in his business. I just wanted his input on Aunt Kathy’s memorial.

Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all. Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rose bushes.

This means that, in some sense, free will is a fake. Decisions are made ahead of time by the brain, without the input of consciousness, and then later the brain tries to cover this up (as it’s wont to do) by claiming that the decision was conscious. Dr. Michael Sweeney concludes, “Libet’s findings suggested that the brain knows what a person will decide before the person does. … The world must reassess not only the idea of movements divided between voluntary and involuntary, but also the very idea of free will.” All this seems to indicate that free will, the cornerstone of society, is a fiction, an illusion created by our left brain. So are we masters of our fate, or just pawns in a swindle perpetuated by the brain?

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.

...many women have almost always done it differently, power without control, leading without terrorizing, nurturing community and communal input and output like nurturing a family. Maybe that's one of the main reasons powerful men resist women in power; it's not just control they don't want to give up, not just privilege, but exploitation.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

I feel something snap and settle in me. It's the last piece of my heart, falling for him without any input from me at all.

From our first day alive on this planet, they began teaching society everything it knows and experiences. It was all brainwashing bullshit. Their trio of holy catechisms is: faith is more important than reason; inputs are more important than outcomes; hope is more important than reality. It was designed to choke your independent thinking and acting—to bring out the lowest common denominator in people—so that vast amounts of the general public would literally buy into sponsorship and preservation of their hegemonic nation. Their greatest achievement was the creation of the two-party political system; it gave only the illusion of choice, but never offered any change; it promised freedom, but only delivered more limits. In the end, you got stuck with two leading loser parties and not just one. It completed their trap of underhanded domination, and it worked masterfully. Look anywhere you go. America is a nation of submissive, dumbed-down, codependent, faith-minded zombies obsessed with celebrity gossip, buying unnecessary goods, and socializing without purpose on their electronic gadgets. The crazy thing is that people don't even know it; they still think they're free. Everywhere, people have been made into silent accomplices in the government's twisted control game. In the end, there is no way out for anyone.

You were already living quite capably without any input from him, and in fact while being actively sabotaged constantly.

If something happened to Suzanne I don’t think I would want to go through with finding somebody else either. I’d feel quite lost without her. It would be like separating Siamese twins, as we’ve been through everything together. Which can also be handy, as my memory isn’t what it used to be, so I use hers as my back-up memory drive. Meeting someone new would be like getting a new phone. You have to start again, input all of your information into them while trying to get to know their functions.

Classroom research has confirmed that students can make a great deal of progress through exposure to comprehensible input without direct instruction. Studies have also shown, however, that students may reach a point from which they fail to make further progress on some features of the second language unless they also have access to guided instruction.

Won’t you look at me, Camilla Hect?” Camilla murmured something that Nona could not hear. The body said, “I died, and you carried me. I gambled, and you covered my bet. You kept the faith, and were the instrument of both my vengeance and my grace. And now I have fought through time, and the River, and Ianthe the First—fought and bested Ianthe the First, and I hope I never fight her ever again…Will you not look at me now, Cam, and know me?” Camilla raised her chin. She looked at the dead face. She said quietly—“Yes Warden. I will always know you.” Their foreheads touched. Camilla reached out with her slippery hand, and Palamedes clasped it with Ianthe Naberius’s cold, gloveless one. Because both of their hands were very messy, it made an embarrassing squelch, but neither of them appeared to notice or care. Nona had to look away. She heard Palamedes say, in the voice of Ianthe Naberius—“Pyrrha, I can barely do anything. I’m only the hand in a sock puppet. I don’t think I could unpick a single ward, and I can’t do a damn thing for Cam’s bleeding—thank God nothing’s protruding.” Cam said, without opening her eyes, “Don’t worry about me, Warden. I’ll walk it off.” “Yes, thank you for your input,” said Palamedes pleasantly. “I’ve taken it under advisement and will add it to the next agenda.” Camilla smiled that wonderful hot-metal smile that Nona loved as long as she had been alive. “Jackass.

Right away, I’m hit with a prickle of guilt over this morning’s activities. Not only did I fantasize about her body, I had the nerve to pick out dinnerware without her input.

What we need is to love without getting tired. How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. What are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. Do not look for Jesus away from yourselves. He is not out there; He is in you. Keep your lamp burning, and you will recognize Him.

In many ways, industrialization is a straitjacket. The suite of industrial technologies improves literacy and mobility and reach and wealth and health, but without the inputs of oil, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, bauxite, lead, copper, and so on, the whole process collapses in upon itself.

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues.

We rarely touch this. We rarely contact this simple moment. So used to constant input and excitement, we lack fine-tuning into all the subtleties of this instant, the ability to register a quiet aliveness without the stirring of expectation.

You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water. But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked. Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing. And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.

Reason is the champion of the emotional underdog, enabling what Hume called “calm passions” to win out over “violent passions.” Reasoning frees us from the tyranny of our immediate impulses by allowing us to serve values that are not automatically activated by what’s in front of us. And yet, at the same time, reason cannot produce good decisions without some kind of emotional input, however indirect.

But creativity has a hard time flourishing without enough inputs. Every plant needs to revive its soil to thrive, not just a base level of water and sun. I’ve needed this reset—I need some inspiration and to get out of the rut my conversation with my boss has left me in.

2. The Right Not to be Emotionally Coerced I have the right to not be your rescuer. I have the right to ask you to get help from someone else. I have the right to not fix your problems. I have the right to let you manage your own self-esteem without my input. I have the right to let you handle your own distress. I have the right to refuse to feel guilty.

God was thinking of you long before you ever thought about him. His purpose for your life predates your conception. He planned it before you existed, without your input!

I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

But none of them could help me walk again or get to the level of fitness I’ve got to without my input.

Nothing of significance was ever achieved without negative input from other people.

The successful manufacturing power of the future will need to not simply secure inputs and production and consumption, but ideally co-locate them.

I am an introvert, but I hate solitude. I do now, at least. The quiet of it. My inner voice, without external input, can get lost in chaos.

As Allan Kelly says, “software developers love building platforms and, without strong product management input, will create a bigger platform than needed.

the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. We experience the contact as simultaneous, but we know that it can’t be simultaneous at the level of the brain, because it takes longer for the nerve impulse to travel to sensory cortex from your fingertip than it does from your nose—and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. Our brains correct for this discrepancy in timing by holding these inputs in memory and then delivering the result to consciousness. Thus, your experience of the present moment is the product of layered memories.

We'd gotten onto the concept or morality and Frida had just asked Theresa how she could have any sense of morality without a deity to define what was or was not moral. [...] "What deities give you aren't rules of morality," Theresa responded. "They are just rules. Do this and you will be rewarded. Do that and you will be punished. That's how we teach our pets not to relieve themselves in the house. One would hope that true morality involved more than learning not to poop on the rug by being rapped on the nose!" [...] "In fact", Theresa continued, "I believe that it is only possible to acquire true morality without input from a deity. It is only when you do something because you believe it is the right thing to do, instead of because of any moral desserts, that you are acting morally. Likewise, it is only when you refuse to do something because of the golden rule, rather than because of a threat of punishment, that you are behaving in a moral manner.

She wondered if this is what it meant to be a mother. To ache for a life that was not your own, to long for a child who could, without the slightest input from you, fall completely out of view.

In fact,” Theresa continued, “I believe that it is only possible to acquire true morality without input from a deity. It is only when you do something because you believe it is the right thing to do, instead of because of any moral desserts, that you are acting morally. Likewise, it is only when you refuse to do something because of the Golden Rule, rather than because of a threat of punishment, that you are behaving in a moral manner.

STATE model to communicate without provoking anger or defensiveness: 1. Share your facts—Facts are less controversial, more persuasive, and less insulting than conclusions, so lead with them first. 2. Tell your story—Explain the situation from your point of view, taking care to avoid insulting or judging, which makes the other person feel less safe. 3. Ask for others’ paths—Ask for the other person’s side of the situation, what they intended, and what they want. 4. Talk tentatively—Avoid conclusions, judgments, and ultimatums. 5. Encourage testing—Make suggestions, ask for input, and discuss until you reach a productive and mutually satisfactory course of action.

the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur entirely without conscious input or awareness: The subcortical regions of the brain are astoundingly efficient in regulating our breathing, heartbeat, digestion, hormone secretion, and immune system. However, these systems can become overwhelmed if we are challenged by an ongoing threat, or even the perception of threat. This accounts for the wide array of physical problems researchers have documented in traumatized people. Yet our conscious self also plays a vital role in maintaining our inner equilibrium: We need to register and act on our physical sensations to keep our bodies safe.

Many organizations and militaries use VUCA as an acronym to describe the disruptive state of the world, given its Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state and velocity of the world, with our acronym for UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential: - UNknown: Recognizing that you can’t know anything perfectly, and that many of our decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of ad-vice and requires increased self-reliance. - Volatile: Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not inherently good or bad; it is simply impactful. In volatility we see shifting speed, texture, and magnitude of the changing environment. - Intersecting: The broader our filters, the more we realize that what we observe overlaps with other things. Boundaries are disappearing, connecting new areas through combinations. - Complex: These more-than-complicated systems have unreliable input-output relationships and cannot be summarized or modeled without losing their essence. Unpredictable situations with unknown unknowns. - Exponential: A nonlinear type of change that increases in its growth rate. To an observer, this change may happen gradually, then suddenly. Rapid acceleration of seemingly-small shifts.

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we’re interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine—even the best get worse over time.

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners—in this case, the venture investors—is without precedent. It’s no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, “Everyone wants my job.

The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.

If we closely examine our “personal” failings, it soon becomes clear that they are not there by choice. Typically, outside circumstances conspired to form our particular patterns without our input. If you had control over your maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, you wouldn’t still have them. You would have already jettisoned your dark, anxious, neurotic persona and become a calm, confident ray of sunshine. Clearly you don’t have complete control over your actions, or else you’d only act in ways that you approved of. So why are you judging yourself so harshly for the way you are?

The neurons in the gut are so innumerable that scientist are now calling the totality of them "the second brain"... In fact, recent research is revaling that our second brain may not be second at all. It can act independently from the main brain and control many functions without the brain's input.

Moreover, the slightest ‘mutation’ of an algorithm (say a slight change in a Turing machine specification, or in its input tape) would tend to render it totally useless, and it is hard to see how actual improvements in algorithms could ever arise in this random way. (Even deliberate improvements are difficult without ‘meanings’ being available.

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.

The truth was that, at the age of thirty-six, Lacy was content to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself, to make and spend her own money, to come and go as she pleased, to pursue her career without worrying about his, to plan her evenings with input from no one else, to cook or not to cook, and to have sole possession of the remote control.

When you smell that, how do you... how do you process that? Is it just a list of chemicals?' 'I'm not sure. I'll find out.' Sidra took the tin, manoeuvred it to the kit's nose, and pulled in air. The image was there without warning, leaping to the front of all other external input - a sleeping cat, sprawled on its back in a puddle of sunlight, fur mussed, pink toes splayed sweetly - then gone, just as fast.

Choosing to own our vulnerability and do it consciously means learning how to rumble with this emotion and understand how it drives our thinking and behavior so we can stay aligned with our values and live in our integrity. Pretending that we don’t do vulnerability means letting fear drive our thinking and behavior without our input or even awareness, which almost always leads to acting out or shutting down.

If an economy has a stagnant labor force operating at a constant level of productivity, it will have constant output but no growth. The main drivers of labor force expansion are demographics and education, while the main drivers of productivity are capital and technology. Without those factor inputs, an economy cannot expand. But when those factor inputs are available in abundance, rapid growth is well within reach.

which Trump released as one of the last acts of his presidency, on Martin Luther King Day. Written without input from any scholars who specialize in American history, it sought to reinforce the exceptional nature of our country, and to put forth a “patriotic” narrative that downplays racism and inequality and emphasizes a unity predicated on seeing slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial injustice as aberrations in a fundamentally just and exceptionally free nation.21

In any ranking of near-term worries about AI, superintelligence should be far down the list. In fact, the opposite of superintelligence is the real problem. Throughout this book, I’ve described how even the most accomplished AI systems are brittle; that is, they make errors when their input varies too much from the examples on which they’ve been trained. It’s often hard to predict in what circumstances an AI system’s brittleness will come to light. In transcribing speech, translating between languages, describing the content of photos, driving in a crowded city—if robust performance is critical, then humans are still needed in the loop. I think the most worrisome aspect of AI systems in the short term is that we will give them too much autonomy without being fully aware of their limitations and vulnerabilities. We tend to anthropomorphize AI systems: we impute human qualities to them and end up overestimating the extent to which these systems can actually be fully trusted.

Museums hold collections in trust for future generations. It is our responsibility to see that these objects—representing the cultural heritage of more than 8,000 years of civilization—are passed on to the next generation . . . . The next generation may choose to look at objects afresh—without our carefully collected input—and form its own opinions about their purpose, history or intended use. What is important is that future observers have at their disposal the records of what was known or believed at the time.

The types of photographs we post need ground rules as well. For example, it is wise to make sure no personally identifying information is accidentally put into a photograph. This includes things like license plates on your cars, the names of your kids’ schools, or your home address. Permission should be sought before posting a photo of someone else. In the case of minor children, this is even more important. It is not fair to them to create a digital trail of their lives that is publicly accessible without their input.

There is one itty-bitty ray of hope in the coming global fertilizer—and from that, food—shortage: most studies by most agricultural scientists suggest that most farmers have been overfertilizing for decades, especially when it comes to potassium fertilizers. This would suggest that at present most farms in most places have a potassium surplus baked into the soil. This would further suggest that most farmers can reduce their inputs of fertilizer without sacrificing yields by all that much. The question is, for how long?

Change happens. Loss happens. With or without your input. Afraid you’ll fall, you’ll fail, You’ll flail, you’ll falter. The more you fall, the sooner you learn How to recover, repair, rebuild. The more you flail Or falter, the more you get How to regain equilibrium. The more you fail, the more you see Success demands—requires— Failure. Make a move. Now. Or now. Take a breath. Catch a breeze. Like riding a bicycle Your legs going round and round Will build strength Gain balance Find a way. Forward. Beyond thought. Beyond instruction. The internal systems Never forget. You just have to Make a move.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

Nearly two decades later, on his final day in office, President Clinton had issued Rich a highly unusual pardon. It was unusual because the pardon was given to a fugitive, which was, to my knowledge, unprecedented. It was also unusual, and suspicious, because it had not gone through the normal review process at the Department of Justice. The pardon had only been seen by then–Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who, without seeking input from the prosecutors or agents who knew the case, cryptically told the White House he was “neutral, leaning positive.” The New York Times editorial board called the pardon “a shocking abuse of federal power.

Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.

Passengers are people who don't mind simply being carried along by the company's momentum, offering little or no input, seemingly not caring much about the direction chosen by management. They are often pleasant, get along with everyone, attend meetings promptly, and generally do not stand out as troublemakers. They are often accepted into the fabric of the organization and stay there for many years. The problem is that while passengers can often diagnose and articulate a problem quite well, they have no investment in solving it. They don't do the heavy lifting. They avoid taking strong positions at the risk of being wrong about something. They can take any side of an issue, depending on how the prevailing winds are blowing. In large organizations especially, there are many places to hide without really being noticed.

go. In order for the data-inputting side of her job to be both profitable and bearable she had to work fast. The first time an accountant gave her a job, he’d told her it was about six to eight hours’ work. She’d done it in four, charged him for six. Since her first job she’d gotten even faster. It was like playing a computer game, seeing if she could get to a higher level each time. It wasn’t her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures. She loved calling up her clients, who were now mostly small-business people like Pete, and telling them she’d found a new deduction. Best of all, she was proud of the fact that she’d supported herself and Ziggy for the last five years without having to ask her parents for money, even if it had meant that she sometimes worked well into the night while he slept. This

The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world’s population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil!

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

a. If you ask someone a question, they will probably give you an answer, so think through to whom you should address your questions. I regularly see people ask totally uninformed or nonbelievable people questions and get answers that they believe. This is often worse than having no answers at all. Don't make that mistake. You need to think through who the right people are. If you're in doubt about someone's believablilty, find out. The same is true for you: If someone asks you a question, think first whether you're the right person to answer it. If you're not believable, you probably shouldn't have an opinion about what they're asking, let alone share it. Be sure to direct your comments or questions to the believable Responsible Party or Parties for the issues you want to discuss. Feel free to include others if you think that their input is relevant, while recognizing that the decision will ultimately rest with whoever is responsible for it. b. Having everyone randomly probe everyone else is an unproductive waste of time. For heaven's sake don't bother directing your questions to people who aren't responsible or, worse still, throw your questions out there without directing them at all. p379

1. Value my ability to see the world from a unique perspective. (Find ways to appreciate and make the most of my strengths, even when I annoy you). 2. Remember, we need compelling problems to solve, not just chores to do. (Don't be the "big boss." I'll respect your authority more when you tell me the point). 3. Ask for my input; keep me in the informational loop. (Give me some ownership in the process and the outcome). 4. Protect our relationship - you won't get much from me without one. (Respect and value who I am, and I'll cooperate with you most of the time). 5. Smile at me more often. (Keep your sense of humor and try to smile, even when you don't like me). 6. Don't let me push you around, but don't push me around either. (Don't be afraid to stand up to me; just don't run over me). 7. Speak to me respectfully, but firmly. (Use your voice wisely; it's a powerful resource). 8. Choose your battles - don't sweat the small stuff. (Decide what's really worth it). 9. Give me some control over my own life and circumstances. (Allow me to share control with our surrendering your authority). 10. Remind me how much you love me. (Find subtle ways to keep reminding me your love will always be there).

The computer scientists Jeff Clune, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Hod Lipson did what computer scientists do: they designed computer simulations.23 They used well-studied networks that had sensory inputs and produced outputs. What those outputs were determined how well the network performed when faced with environmental problems. They simulated twenty-five thousand generations of evolution, programming in a direct selection pressure to either maximize performance alone or maximize performance and minimize connection costs. And voilà! Once wiring-cost-minimization was added, in both changing and unchanging environments, modules immediately began to appear, whereas without the stipulation of minimizing costs, they didn’t. And when the three looked at the highest-performing networks that evolved, those networks were modular. Among that group, they found that the lower the costs were, the greater the modularity that resulted. These networks also evolved much quicker—in markedly fewer generations—whether in stable or changing environments. These simulation experiments provide strong evidence that selection pressures to maximize network performance and minimize connection costs will yield networks that are significantly more modular and more evolvable.

When I come home from work and my dog rushes out to greet me, wagging his tail and jumping up and down, why exactly is it that I am so confident that he is conscious and indeed that there is a specific content to his consciousness, he is happy to see me? The usual answer given to this question is that because his behavior is so much like that of a happy person I can infer that he is a happy dog. But that seems to me a mistaken argument. To begin with, happy people do not in general wag their tails and try to lick my hands. Furthermore, and more importantly, someone might easily build a robot dog that would wag its tail and jump up and down without having any inner feelings whatever. What is so special about the real dog? I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine. He has a brain, a perceptual apparatus, and a bodily structure that are relevantly similar to my own: these are his eyes, these are his ears, this is his skin, there is his mouth. It is not just on the basis of his behavior that I conclude that he is conscious, but rather on the basis of the causal structure that mediates the relation between the input stimulus and the output behavior.

We have learned from Ludwig von Mises how to respond to the socialists’ evasion (immunization) strategy. As long as the defining characteristic— the essence—of socialism, i.e., the absence of the private ownership of the factors of production, remains in place, no reform will be of any help. The idea of a socialist economy is a contradictio in adjecto, and the claim that socialism represents a higher, more efficient mode of social production is absurd. In order to reach one’s own ends efficiently and without waste within the framework of an exchange economy based on division of labor, it is necessary that one engage in monetary calculation (cost-accounting). Everywhere outside the system of a primitive self-sufficient single household economy, monetary calculation is the sole tool of rational and efficient action. Only by being able to compare inputs and outputs arithmetically in terms of a common medium of exchange (money) can a person determine whether his actions are successful or not. In distinct contrast, socialism means to have no economy, no economizing, at all, because under these conditions monetary calculation and cost-accounting is impossible by definition. If no private property in the factors of production exists, then no prices for any production factor exist; hence, it is impossible to determine whether or not they are employed economically. Accordingly, socialism is not a higher mode of production but rather economic chaos and regression to primitivism.

forgot about my huge goal. I focused on what I could control: what I did every day. After a little experimentation and a lot of thought, I settled on a process. Because the Internet never sleeps, here’s what I did every day: Write a new post. Without fail. No excuses. Build relationships. I contacted three people who tweeted my posts that day, choosing the three who seemed most influential, the most noteworthy, the most “something” (even if that “something” was just “thoughtful comment”). Then I sent an e-mail—not a tweet—and said thanks. My goal was to make a genuine connection. Build my network. I contacted one person who might be a great source for a future post. I aimed high: CEOs, founders, entrepreneur-celebrities . . . people with instant credibility and engaged followings. Many didn’t respond. But some did. And some have become friends and appear in this book. Add three more items to my “list of great headlines.” Headlines make or break posts: A great post with a terrible headline will not get read. So I worked hard to learn what worked for other people—and to adapt their techniques for my own use. Evaluate recent results. I looked at page views. I looked at shares and likes and tweets. I tried to figure out what readers responded to, what readers cared about. Writing for a big audience has little to do with pleasing yourself and everything to do with pleasing an audience, and the only way to know what worked was to know the audience. Ignore my editor. I liked my editor. But I didn’t want her input because she knew only what worked for columnists who were read by a maximum of 300,000 people each month. My goal was to triple that, which meant I needed to do things differently. We occasionally disagreed, and early on I lost some of those battles. Once my numbers started to climb, I won a lot more often, until eventually I was able to do my own thing. Sounds simple, right? In a way it was, because I followed a self-reinforcing process:

As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.” These interpersonal tools are especially handy for women, who almost always dive into sensitive territory at some point during their discussions. Coates collected some enlightening data on how women hedge with one another from a group discussion among female friends about Britain’s notorious Yorkshire Ripper case of the early 1980s. The speakers were recalling how, during the hunt for the perpetrator, the police asked the public to consider their family members as suspects. At one point, a woman named Sally revealed that she once thought for a second that the killer might have been her husband. The hedges in her statement are underlined: “Oh god yes well I mean we were living in Yorkshire at the time and I—I mean I. I mean I did/ I sort of thought well could it be John?” These hedges here are not representative of Sally’s indecision—she isn’t hedging or breaking off her sentences due to, as Otto Jespersen said, “talking without having thought out what [she is] going to say.” Sally knows exactly what she wants to get across. But because the topic at hand is so sensitive, she needs the wells and I means so she doesn’t come off as brusque and unfeeling. “Self-disclosure of this kind can be extremely face-threatening,” Coates explains. “Speakers need to hedge their statements.” This is true in so many situations. For instance, saying something along the lines of, “I mean, I just feel like you should maybe, well, try seeing a therapist” is a gentler, easier-to-hear way of saying, “You should see a therapist.” The latter statement, though direct, could come across as cold in the context of a heart-to-heart conversation. The hedged version is more tactful and open, inviting of the listener’s point of view, and leaves space for them to interject or share a different perspective (unlike “You should see a therapist,” which is closed off and doesn’t make room for anyone else’s input).

To be free requires that we are not marionettes whose strings are pulled by physical law. Whether the laws are deterministic (as in classical physics) or probabilistic (as in quantum physics) is of deep significance to how reality evolves and to the kinds of predictions science can make. But for assessing free will, the distinction is irrelevant. If the fundamental laws can continually churn, never grinding to a halt for lack of human input and applying all the same even if particles happen to inhabit bodies and brains, then there is no place for free will. Indeed, as is affirmed by every scientific experiment and observation ever conducted, long before we humans came on the scene the laws ruled without interruption; after we arrived, they continued to rule without interruption. To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles. Shake my hand and particles constituting your hand push up and down against those constituting mine. Say hello, and particles constituting your vocal cords jostle particles of air in your throat, setting off a chain reaction of colliding particles that ripples through the air, knocking into the particles constituting my eardrums, setting off a surge of yet other particles in my head, which is how I manage to hear what you’re saying. Particles in my brain respond to the stimuli, yielding the thought that’s a strong grip, and sending signals carried by other particles to those in my arm, which drive my hand to move in tandem with yours. And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progression of particles than we can change the value of pi. Our choices seem free because we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities. As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices. However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret. I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you. First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all—so much! incredible!—suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t … and that all those other people are fools. Over a longer period of time—not too long, but a matter of two or three years—you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues … and with myself. You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities. All this I’d heard before, of course, but always from environmentalists or organic farmers.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.

There is no great success and outstanding achievement on earth without the input of friendship.

A lightweight review tool would look much like the 360 tool I described above. It would ask managers to rate their employees for each category, and ask them to input text when the employee is in the bottom or top two ratings. The overall rating would be automatically calculated, and the manager’s rating distribution would be compared to the expected distribution. If the manager’s distribution falls outside of what’s expected, the manager must explain.

Poseidon looked over at Mordred. “You expecting me to do something because you insulted my girlfriend?” Mordred asked. “She could pull your lungs out through your asshole. I think she’s good without my input.

dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.

There are ways of farming beef and chicken that may even help to sequester carbon, and many agroecological systems that farm without chemical inputs and in which grazing and browsing animals help to build soil health and natural capital in a way that supports the local and global ecosystem. But it’s doubtful that these methods can produce enough meat to match our current and growing appetite.# If we keep eating more meat, it will require the destruction of more tropical forest, which in turn will drive pandemic disease and climate change.

We could at least imagine a system arranged around agroecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.47 Such a system would promote biodiversity and has the capacity to produce enough healthy food for a growing population on a lower land footprint than today with massive climate benefits. We would need to eat significantly less meat, but the modelling is clear that it is possible.48-53 With this new, organic farming system, fresh and minimally processed whole foods would be more abundant and possibly cheaper. But such a system wouldn’t favour the monocultures required for UPF that do so much damage. By fixing the agricultural system so that it becomes sustainable, the production costs of whole foods should fall (without the requirement for fossil-fuel-based agrochemical inputs) – and those of UPF would rise.

Another way to foster a sense of belonging for employees is to form teams that are encouraged to engage in collective problem-solving. This affords regular opportunities for all members of the teams to express their views and contribute their talents. But leaders of these teams should establish the norm that colleagues treat each other with respect, making room for everyone in discussions and listening thoughtfully to one another. As we saw with high-status students leading the way in establishing an antibullying norm in schools, managers, as the highest-status member of a team, can set powerful norms. A key goal is foster what leadership scholar Amy Edmonson calls psychological safety, which she describes as "the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed--with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns--without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid." No matter how ingenious or talented individual team members are, if the climate does not foster the psychological safety people need to express themselves, they are likely to hold back on valuable input.

bought pretty much every decent piece of clothing I own… the jeans, the shirts, the sweaters, the jacket, the shoes. She even bought me new some new pajamas and some new underwear as well. And she chose it all without any input from me.

By nature of routine, our mind allows us to leverage patterns; repetition permits us to perform remedial tasks without much active thought or input.

People hate feeling ignored. Unfortunately, when you ask for input and appear to ignore it, employees feel frustrated, devalued, and powerless. In contrast, when you are clear about who owns the decision and how it will be made, people will readily contribute and are far more likely to own the outcome.

Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly.

The human brain, for all its sophistication, would be useless without its link to the outside world. Consider one experiment that illustrates this point. Volunteers hallucinated when they were deprived of sensory input by being blindfolded and suspended and warm water in a sensory deprivation tank. One saw charging pink and purple elephants. Another heard a chorus, still others had taste hallucinations. Our very sanity depends on a continuous flow of information from the outside.

Take more risks by acting without first getting input from your supervisor. Begin with small, low-profile decisions. It helps to factor in the combination of data and feelings when taking a risk. If you have all the data you need and you feel really good about it, it isn’t really a risk at all.

The mechanisms that sustain conscious phenomena evolved in tandem with a constant stream of physical feedback, mooring them to time. Without that input, things get weird.

Kant noted that we typically apply labels or concepts to the world to classify sensory inputs that suit a purpose. ... Beautiful objects do not serve ordinary human purposes, as plates and spoons do. A beautiful rose pleases us, but not because we necessarily want to eat it or even pick it for a flower arrangement. Kant’s way of recognizing this was to say that something beautiful has purposiveness without a purpose’.

Physical states create psychic ones and not vice-versa. The James-Lange theory was later undermined by research on patients with spinal cord injuries that prevented them from receiving any somatic information from their viscera—people who literally could not feel muscle tension or stomach discomfort; people who were, in effect, brains without bodies—yet who still reported experiencing the unpleasant psychological sensations of dread or anxiety. This suggested that the James-Lange theory was, if not wholly wrong, at least incomplete. If patients unable to receive information about the state of their bodies can still experience anxiety, then maybe anxiety is primarily a mental state, one that doesn’t require input from the rest of the body.

What we get from nature is fundamental to our economy, and without these inputs we would in fact produce nothing. Yet most political debates are still framed in the context of environmental protection being “nice to have” if we can afford it.

It had time to itself. Time to think and figure things out—without outside input. Without an internet connection constantly bombarding it with information.

Instead, she went over the data again and again until she could recite the exact alignment numbers for the telescope input without looking, then slept for an hour to avoid spending half the night with her forehead on the keyboard again, and finally drove back up Mouna Kea. Its switchbacks twisted her through the cloud line after three-quarters of an hour, giving her a beautiful, turkey-red sunset with long streaks on the horizon for the last 20 minutes of driving. They looked like the fingers of a doomed deity clinging hotly to the Earth. The majesty of the sight plucked a chord in her that her intense dream on the keyboard of her workstation had strummed and never let go. The universe was still a fascinating place—whether out there among the stars, or down here on the blue paradise they called Earth

You deserve time to process the information you were given without anyone’s input, even without mine. I know you love me. Doesn’t matter if it’s been two days or—” “Nine hundred and twenty-three days.

They found that, while typical brains without SPD, often called neurotypical by people in the sensory field, habituate to a noise or stimuli of some kind, meaning that they stop paying attention to it shortly after it starts, people with SPD never really do. It’s as if the sensory input is new each time it occurs.

Lacy was content to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself, to make and spend her own money, to come and go as she pleased, to pursue her career without worrying about his, to plan her evenings with input from no one else, to cook or not to cook, and to have sole possession of the remote control.

The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot.

There is a marked difference between brilliance and intellectuality. Some of us use both words interchangeably to describe people who can use big words. A number of people are grandiloquent but not wise. A person can be verbose but not esoteric. Just as literacy does not equate to intelligence. There are two types of learnt people in the world. Some persons are scholars and others are alchemist. Let me further my thesis on intellectuals. Now you have a scholar and an alchemist. The scholar passes exams, memorizes words and phrases, the alchemist has the intellectual prowess to start a whole new fundamental truth, discipline and school of thought because they can create concepts from their own minds without no external inputs. Alchemist pass exams without studying because they just know how things work or they use context clue. For that reason not every smart person is a genius. Alchemist use their brains to change or improve the world with ingenuity and originality. The alchemist has a way with words, when they speak you stop and listen. The alchemist is witty in any language (Creole or patois). Let’s renounce the colonial concept that using Anglo-Saxon words is a mark of intelligence. Eg. Kartel speaks English- Kartel intelligent yuh fawk.

One of the greatest threats to a democratic organization is for the members to become apathetic and let a small group of the membership do all the work. This creates divisions and promotes authoritarianism. Another threat is for a small group to work secretly behind the scenes to accomplish its own goals or its own agenda and then push it through without the rest of the membership having an input either through discussion or through the investigative process. Such actions cause mistrust and hostility.

YouVersion lets religious leaders input their sermons into the app so their congregants can follow along in real-time — book, verse, and passage — all without flipping a page. Once the head of the church is hooked, the congregation is sure to follow.

New classes of underconsumers and of underemployed are one of the inevitable by-products of industrial progress. Organization makes them aware of their common plight. At present articulate minorities-often claiming the leadership of majorities--seek equal treatment. If one day they were to seek equal work rather than equal pay-equal inputs rather than equal outputs-they could be the pivot of social reconstruction. Industrial society could not possibly resist a strong women's movement, for example, which would lead to the demand that all people, without distinction, do equal work. Women are integrated into all classes and races. Most of their daily activities are performed in nonindustrial ways. Industrial societies remain viable precisely because women are there to perform those daily tasks which resist industrialization. It is easier to imagine that the North American continent would cease to exploit the under-industrialization of South America than that it would cease to use its women for industry-resistant chores. In a society ruled by the standards of industrial efficiency, housework is rendered inhuman and devalued. It would be rendered even less tolerable if it were given pro-forma industrial status. The further expansion of industry would be brought to a halt if women forced upon us the recognition that society is no longer viable if a single mode of production prevails. The effective recognition that not two but several equally valuable, dignified, and important modes of production must coexist within any viable society would bring industrial expansion under control. Growth would stop if women obtained equally creative work for all, instead of demanding equal rights over the gigantic and expanding tools now appropriated by men.

My milk had burst onto the scene with a vengeance, and eating became the baby’s new vocation. The next two weeks of her life marked the end of my life as I knew it; I was up all night, a hag all day, and Marlboro Man was completely on his own. I wanted nothing to do with anyone on earth, my husband included. “How are you doing today?” he’d ask. I’d resent that I had to expand the energy to answer. “Want me to hold the baby while you get up and get dressed?” he’d offer. I’d crumble that he didn’t like my robe. “Hey, Mama--wanna take the baby for a drive?” Not no, but hell no. We’ll die if we leave our cocoon. The rays from the sun will fry us and turn us to ashes. And I’d have to put on normal clothes. Forget it. I’d kicked into survival mode in the most literal sense of the word--not only was laundry out of the question, but so was dinner, casual conversation, or any social interaction at all. I had become a shell of a person--no more human than the stainless steel milk machines in dairy farms in Wisconsin, and half as interesting. Any identity I’d previously had as a wife, daughter, friend, or productive member of the human race had melted away the second my ducts filled with milk. My mom dropped by to help once or twice, but I couldn’t emotionally process her presence. I hid in my room with the door shut as she did the dishes and washed laundry without help or input from me. Marlboro Man’s mom came to help, too, but I couldn’t be myself around her and holed up in my room. I didn’t even care enough to pray for help. Not that it would have helped; stainless steel milk machines have no soul.

When the day of the meeting arrived, Anna opened by acknowledging ABC’s biggest gripes. “We understand that we brought you on board with the shared goal of having you lead this work,” she said. “You may feel like we have treated you unfairly, and that we changed the deal significantly since then. We acknowledge that you believe you were promised this work.” This received an emphatic nod from the ABC representatives, so Anna continued by outlining the situation in a way that encouraged the ABC reps to see the firms as teammates, peppering her statements with open-ended questions that showed she was listening: “What else is there you feel is important to add to this?” By labeling the fears and asking for input, Anna was able to elicit an important fact about ABC’s fears, namely that ABC was expecting this to be a high-profit contract because it thought Anna’s firm was doing quite well from the deal. This provided an entry point for Mark, who explained that the client’s new demands had turned his firm’s profits into losses, meaning that he and Anna needed to cut ABC’s pay further, to three people. Angela, one of ABC’s representatives, gasped. “It sounds like you think we are the big, bad prime contractor trying to push out the small business,” Anna said, heading off the accusation before it could be made. “No, no, we don’t think that,” Angela said, conditioned by the acknowledgment to look for common ground. With the negatives labeled and the worst accusations laid bare, Anna and Mark were able to turn the conversation to the contract. Watch what they do closely, as it’s brilliant: they acknowledge ABC’s situation while simultaneously shifting the onus of offering a solution to the smaller company. “It sounds like you have a great handle on how the government contract should work,” Anna said, labeling Angela’s expertise. “Yes—but I know that’s not how it always goes,” Angela answered, proud to have her experience acknowledged. Anna then asked Angela how she would amend the contract so that everyone made some money, which pushed Angela to admit that she saw no way to do so without cutting ABC’s worker count. Several weeks later, the contract was tweaked to cut ABC’s payout, which brought Anna’s company $1 million that put the contract into the black. But it was Angela’s reaction at the end of the meeting that most surprised Anna. After Anna had acknowledged that she had given Angela some bad news and that she understood how angry she must feel, Angela said:

For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history. Before the Chosun dynasty, there were three kingdoms vying for power on the peninsula. Political schisms tended to run north to south, the east gravitating naturally toward Japan and the west to China. The bifurcation between north and south was an entirely foreign creation, cooked up in Washington and stamped on the Koreans without any input from them.

Sex and love with robots. A bit amazing, fantastic, inconceivable, nevertheless, imaginable and scientifically explainable. Nowadays you can disclaim this idea because of a scientific fiction, but you cannot argue that it is completely incredible and contradicts human sexuality and romantic experience. As it is known, whatever you experience, you experience due to what is going on in the brain. Your physical contact with the partner’s body is nothing more than merely a physiological act, sending signals to the brain. Without the signals that cause neurochemical activity in the brain, your sexual contact cannot give you any sexual experience on its own. Your brain has been automatically programmed before this contact concerning which kind of natural design of the partner’s body can send more intense signals to your brain, which, in turn, enable it to experience stronger sexual pleasure. The direct cause of your sexual experience is your brain program, your sexual partner’s body, from which you derive sexual pleasure, is just indirect cause of it. Orgasm occurs in the brain, but not in any part of the body. Now imagine higher technological progress than ours. High bioengineering allows us to construct artificial robots similar to us — which have artificial ‘flesh and blood’ that is indistinguishable by your sense organs. When you get in physical contact with her ‘body’, your brain program could discern nothing artificial there. The same input signals, as if there is nothing artificial, and the brain would automatically begin to satisfy its sexual desires. However, there would be a fundamental difference — an artificial partner would exist absolutely adequate to your will. Visually, ‘she’ would be the living embodiment of your dreams. Neuroengineering would allow us to construct ‘her’ brain and through it also her conscious mind and personality, as you would like them to be. An ideal personality for you. It would be like that you say to do something and she would do, or you say don’t, and she wouldn’t. However, there wouldn’t be any direct control. You would control only her brain program, her unconscious and conscious mind, delete unwished episodes from her brain. She wouldn’t know that she is a robot, as you couldn’t know, if you were a robot. She would think that she is the same as you, having free will, being capable of thinking, feeling, expressing herself, controlling her behavior, and so on, and so forth. It would be possible to program her brain against leaving or killing you, so in that context you future would be guaranteed. The ideal personality, the ideal physical appearance — welcome to heaven, but only for those who have a lot of money. Unfortunately, even in the cyber-future, those who would be short of money would have to content themselves with biosocial robots in hell, as most of us do now.

But how close is his apodictic tone to that of Pastor Rick Warren, who presided over ecumenical services at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and who writes, “God was thinking of you long before you ever thought of him. He planned it before you existed, without your input. You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.”2 According to Warren, you are part of God’s plan. You were in his mind long before you or even your parents were born. He chose not only the day you were born but the exact DNA that needed to be coupled through your parents’ sexual intercourse. It is not clear how wide a berth Warren gives to free will. Clearly, he gives some, as he suggests that if you don’t let Jesus into your heart as your personal savior—an act of free will—then you will burn eternally in hell, which is certainly not part of God’s master plan, but your own doing. On the other hand, he tells us that God chose your genetic composition. But if your mother chose your father, or if your father chose your mother—and most people would agree that they have some role in whom they mate with—then how does God decide your genetic composition? It looks like, from a logical standpoint anyway, if your parents had free will enough to choose their religious persuasion, they also had free will enough to sleep together, and therefore your genetic composition owes as much to their mundane choice as it does to divine matchmaking.

3 Proven Method for Rapid Weight Gain Looking for a healthy and balanced technique of quick weight gain for the following stage of your physical fitness strategy ? Fast weight gain is feasible via just all-natural techniques. Also if you believe you are consuming sufficient to get weight, you might not also be making up for the additional calories shed by your exercise. A weight loss (or gain, in this instance) calculator will certainly take your dimensions, physical task degree, and also preferred weight to provide you a needed calorie consumption each day. Lots of individuals believe they require to exercise extra in order to attain fast weight gain. However, that breaks down the muscle mass without providing the body a possibility to restore itself. Looking for a healthy and balanced approach to fast weight gain for the following stage of your physical fitness strategy? There are rather a couple of weight gainer tablets out there, however exactly how do you understand which ones are healthy and balanced? Fast weight gain is feasible via just all-natural techniques. A weight loss (or gain, in this situation) calculator will certainly take your dimensions, physical task degree, as well as preferred weight to offer you a needed calorie consumption each day. Integrating this with your online tracking website allows you rapidly as well as quickly see if you are fulfilling your calorie objectives for the day. Trying to find weight gain pills for females? Check out this page weightgainofficial dot com There are changes you could make while you are in the fitness centre to speed up your weight gain. Considerably overwhelming a details muscle mass team with enhancing quantities of weight will certainly optimize your gains in dimension from one exercise to the following. Numerous individuals believe they require to exercise extra in order to attain fast weight gain, however that just breaks down the muscular tissues without providing the body a possibility to reconstruct itself. Usage of the internet calorie checking devices and also weight loss calculators to establish objectives as well as track your development. You had to look up every food in a calorie publication and also compose down your computations in a notepad. Currently, you could conveniently input the food you simply consumed right into an online calorie counting website as well as it will certainly look up the calories for you. This might appear like an apparent pointer, yet problem obtaining weight typically suggests you are not consuming anywhere near sufficient food. Also if you assume you are consuming sufficient to acquire weight, you might not also be making up for the added calories shed by your exercise. Many individuals undervalue the large quantity of calories required to acquire also one extra pound.

Another factor in the success of French immersion, Krashen postulated, was the exclusion of native-French-speaking students. The linguistic composition of the classroom, restricted to second language learners, made teachers constantly aware of the need to shelter their French to make it understandable at or near the level of the class. This also created a relaxed learning environment, reducing students’ stress levels. They all made errors in French and, without the presence of native speakers of French, errors were less cause for embarrassment. The result was to lower what Krashen has termed the affective filter, a psychological barrier that can keep comprehensible input

The defining feature of Type r processing is its autonomy. Type r processes are termed autonomous because: r) their execution is rapid, 2) their execution is mandatory when the triggering stimuli are encountered, 3) they do not put a heavy load on central processing capacity (that is, they do not require conscious attention), 4) they are not dependent on input from high-level control systems, and 5) they can operate in parallel without interfering with each other or with Type 2 processing. Type i processing would include behavioral regulation by the emotions; the encapsulated modules for solving specific adaptive problems that have been posited by evolutionary psychologists; processes of implicit learning; and the automatic firing of overlearned associations 4 Type i processing, because of its computational ease, is a common processing default. Type i processes are sometimes termed the adaptive unconscious in order to emphasize that Type i processes accomplish a host of useful things-face recognition, proprioception, language ambiguity resolution, depth perception, etc. -all of which are beyond our awareness. Heuristic processing is a term often used for Type i processing-processing that is fast, automatic, and computationally inexpensive, and that does not engage in extensive analysis of all the possibilities. Type 2 processing contrasts with Type I processing on each of the critical properties that define the latter. Type 2 processing is relatively slow and computationally expensive-it is the focus of our awareness. Many Type 1 processes can operate at once in parallel, but only one Type 2 thought or a very few can be executing at once-Type 2 processing is thus serial processing. Type 2 processing is often language based and rule based. It is what psychologists call controlled processing, and it is the type of processing going on when we talk of things like "conscious problem solving.

You about ready for some input?” Noah asked. “It’s free advice, and you’re under no obligation.” “Go for it,” Sean said. “Forget all that—it’s in the past. You’ll work through it, hopefully without hurting each other. Right now? Get to know your daughter. It’s the most important part of this whole drama. Get to know Rosie. Whether you want to be a father or not, you are one, so press on—start a relationship with her right away. Both of you have been missing out.” “How’m I gonna do that?!” “Show up. Talk to her. Play with her. I let Ellie’s daughter put ribbons and clips and stuff in my hair. It’s a bonding experience for us both—I get to look stupid and she gets control.” “What if she asks…?” “Tell her before she asks,” Noah advised. “If you know for sure you’re her father, you better tell her the second you meet her. There’s a period of adjustment for both of you. Get started on it. All that stuff that went before? That separated you from Franci? You don’t have to work on that with Rosie. You and Franci will work that out. I’m available if you need me. I can help with that.” Sean just stared at him for a long moment, silent. Finally he asked, “Do you really know what you’re doing here?” “I do,” Noah said. “I actually studied and practiced counseling before the seminary. I have a degree and everything.” “What

You about ready for some input?” Noah asked. “It’s free advice, and you’re under no obligation.” “Go for it,” Sean said. “Forget all that—it’s in the past. You’ll work through it, hopefully without hurting each other. Right now? Get to know your daughter. It’s the most important part of this whole drama. Get to know Rosie. Whether you want to be a father or not, you are one, so press on—start a relationship with her right away. Both of you have been missing out.” “How’m I gonna do that?!” “Show up. Talk to her. Play with her. I let Ellie’s daughter put ribbons and clips and stuff in my hair. It’s a bonding experience for us both—I get to look stupid and she gets control.” “What if she asks…?” “Tell her before she asks,” Noah advised. “If you know for sure you’re her father, you better tell her the second you meet her. There’s a period of adjustment for both of you. Get started on it. All that stuff that went before? That separated you from Franci? You don’t have to work on that with Rosie. You and Franci will work that out. I’m available if you need me. I can help with that.” Sean just stared at him for a long moment, silent. Finally he asked, “Do you really know what you’re doing here?” “I do,” Noah said. “I actually studied and practiced counseling before the seminary. I have a degree and everything.” “What am I going to tell Luke?” “Everything or nothing,” Noah said. “The most important thing right now is not what you tell other people, it’s what you tell Rosie. She’s a little girl. Whether she knows it or not, she wants a father. She needs a father. You’re that person. Good luck—you’re going to have to learn fast to fully understand what that means.” “The next person who needs to know about this has to be my mother. In case you haven’t noticed, my mother is a very strong woman with very firm ideas.” “I’m not as good with mothers,” Noah admitted. “You’ll be fine. I bet she loves you.” Sean shook his head. “It never kept her from whacking me in the back of the head if I didn’t do what she liked. Strict. My mother was strict. All five of us were altar boys. She’s wanted grandchildren for a long, long time. The fact that she’s had one for this long without knowing? Oh, man, I’m never going to hear the end of that.” Noah chuckled. “Just duck,” he advised. *

Some behaviour is more heritable than others; you may start off with some genes loaded for depression but they don’t just switch on without some environmental input. No one knows if you become ‘you’ because of nature or nurture: it’s a combination of what you’re born with and how you live your life. In

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

When can one really say that pudgal (non-Self complex of input and output) is the doer? It is after one attains Self-realization. Otherwise, he would go in the wrong direction. After attaining Self-realization, as one prevails in the Gnani's Agna (five directives that preserve the awareness as the Self in Akram Vignan), only after that is the pudgal considered as the doer of everything, and only then can it be considered that You [as the Self] are not liable. If one were to say this [the pudgal is the doer] without that [Self-realization and prevailing in the Gnani's Agna] then everyone would go on the wrong path.  

Good leaders continue to seek creative input from their direct reports. This practice is not only good for the business, it’s also highly motivational for both parties to the conversation.

The 50-inch TCL Roku TV balances picture quality and value for money. And this is also what happens when America’s top TV brand and the world’s most popular streaming services content instantly and from one single place. You have everything on the Roku from live TV to game console or if you wish choose from over 1500 streaming channels. This is also the widest selection any smart TV has ever had. Find that perfect movie or TV show easily across top streaming channels by title, actor or director with the acclaimed Roku ‘Search’ feature. On the Roku, you will find more than 200,000 streaming movies and shows that you can choose from. The Remote is simple and puts control into the users’ hands and lets you instantly choose your preferred content from anywhere. Use the Roku Mobile app on your smartphone or tablet to control your Roku TV. Cast your personal media, videos and photos and even music to the big screen. With a 120 Hz refresh rate, the TV displays images at 1080p. It has a built-in wireless and not one, but three HDMI ports that provide a high definition multimedia interface. Wired calls the TCL Roku TV ‘The First Smart TV worth using’. The TCL TV has a Roku box built into it. It is a smart TV that includes the Roku operating system, which is also the favorite OS for most users. The OS is considered as one of the best compared to all the other products and definitely better than any other smart TVs. Recently, the Roku TV was displayed at the prestigious CES 2018 with a brand new OS. We all know a lot about Roku and there are lots of Roku fans across the United States. The recently released series of Roku OS 8 comes with some new and improved features. All Roku TVs have a ‘Tuner’ input that enables you to plug into an antenna and look for channels. In the new Roku TV, the ‘Tuner’ input is available on the Home screen itself; which makes it very easy to navigate to it without fumbling Once you select the ‘Tuner’ input it takes you to the last tuned channel You will also get a preview of what is playing right now The Roku OS 8 also comes with a Smart Guide where you will get a 14-day preview of what is available on all the channels that the Roku TV has scanned for Scroll through the Smart Guide to find out your next programming on the list The experience is fluid with no judder or lag; users will be able to scan through the Smart Guide very easily All you have to do is use the HD antenna and the Roku TV will pop up all the entertainment information In addition to the Smart Guide, there is also a new feature called ‘More Ways to Watch’ Anytime Roku identifies a content that is on the Smart Guide, which is also available on other Roku channels it is marked with a ‘*’. This indicates that there are more ways to watch a single programming content You also don’t have to wait to watch your favorite programming Wherever you see the ‘*’at any time on the Smart Guide, hit the ‘Ok’ button on your remote and watch it on another Roku channel instantly The pricing for the channel or programming is also displayed If you have a Roku set top box that is connected to a different TV (other than the Roku), there is a new feature in the ‘Search’ where Roku will tell you the channel on which a particular programming is available with the precise timing. The Roku OS 8 has already been pushed out to all the players and TVs. The same OS 8 version is available for Roku Set top boxes as well. If any problem in Roku setup, please call us @+1-877-302-5260

Intelligence" is not defined by works and excellency but through the input of the mind from the outside, making things easy, making complicated things not complicated, not using too much words to prove yourself, but by making a wise decision and using logic and instinct that results in effortless works. In result, you've created a masterpiece without effort.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical 'fertilizers', pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy 'bio-tech' inputs that [agricultural scientists] champion… The Upanishads say: Om Purnamadaha Purnamidam Purnat Purnamudachyate Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamewa Vashishyate "This creation is whole and complete. From the whole emerge creations, each whole and complete. Take the whole from the whole, but the whole yet remains, Undiminished, complete!" In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind), yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne - year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. – Open Letter from Bhaskar Save to M.S.Swaminathan

All inputs need to be sorted regularly by filtering them through the four D’s (Do, Delegate, Defer, Dump) and putting them in the appropriate place. As you practice asking yourself which category something should go in it’ll become easier. Within a week of practice you’ll be able to take something from Capture and add it straight to your “Next Action” list without much thought.

TO CHARLES A. KUFFNER JR. Without you, Charlie, this book would not be possible. Thank you for your inspiration, your assistance, your input, and your friendship. Your experiences and your willingness to share them freely in the writing of this book were typical of the reputation you have so justly earned as judge, lawyer, father, husband, brother, son, and one of the finest human beings anyone would be privileged to know. Thank you.

Central Excise 2.3 Central Excise Duty is levied by the Central Government under the Central Excise Act, 1944. The levy is on all goods manufactured and produced in India, which are specified in the schedule to the Central Excise Tariff Act subject to certain exemptions. The effective rate may vary from product to product though most goods are subject to excise duty at 10% (without education cess). As manufacturer, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a setoff against the excise duty payable on the output. Cross credit utilisation between credit of service tax and excise duty has been enabled w.e.f.10.9.2004. Service tax 2.4 Service tax is levied by the Central Government under Chapter V and Chapter VA of Finance Act, 1994. Service tax is levied on specified services, referred to as taxable services, when rendered by a service provider. Service tax is presently taxed at 10% (without education cess).Ordinarily, service tax is payable by the service provider, except in specified cases. As service provider, credit is allowed on excise duty and countervailing duty paid on inputs and capital goods and the service tax paid on input service. The credit is allowed as a set-off against the service tax payable on taxable services. VAT & CST 2.5 Value Added Tax (VAT) is levied by the State Governments on transfer of property in goods from one person to another, when such transfer is for cash, deferred payment or other valuable consideration. VAT is also payable on certain transactions that are deemed to be sale such as transfer of right to use goods, hire purchase and sale by instalments, works contract and sale of food and drink as a part of rendering of any service. 2.6 Local VAT is payable when goods are sold within the State and Central Sales Tax (CST) is payable when sale occasions the movement of goods 4

Joanna had the fisherman's pie. 'What's under the mashed potato?' Slider asked. Joanna chewed thoughtfully for a moment and then looked down. 'Something white,' she said at last. 'With little bits of something pink.' She chewed again. 'I am eating, aren't I?' she appealed for reassurance. 'It's so hard to tell without some sensory input, like taste or texture.

In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.

But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing, in any other civilization, in any other epoch, could compare itself to the mobile perfection of a contemporary shopping center functioning at full tilt. I had thus consumed, with joy, shoes most notably; then, gradually, I had grown weary, and I had understood that my life, without this daily input of basic, renewable pleasures, was going to stop being simple.

İn ordinary life we don’t give it more attention, but our emotions, mind-set, expectations and the content in which our sensations occur all have a profound influence on perception. It is experimentally proven fact that people who are warned that they are about to taste something bad rate what they do taste more negatively than people who are told that the taste won’t be so bad. Similarly, people who see images of the same baby rate it as stronger and bigger when they are told it is a boy as opposed to when they are told it is a girl. Most of us don’t have so-called free will, as we suppose that we have. Our emotions, expectations and sensations are controlled by others through different forms of ideology — history, religion, political doctrine and so on. They determine where and how your mind should set in order to perceive what is going around you ‘correctly‘. After all that regulation your brain and mind get a chance to function ‘independently’. Your freedom is hidden there. Let me introduce you to the amazing experiment from psychology. In short, in one study 12 students are sent to test a research hypothesis concerning maze learning in rats. Although it was not initially revealed to students, indeed, the students themselves were the object of this experiment but not the rats they were going to examine. 6 of the students were randomly told that the rats they would be testing had been bred to be highly intelligent, whereas the other 6 students were led to believe that the rats had been bred to be unintelligent. However, in reality there were no differences among the rats given to the two groups of students. When the students returned with their data, the result was fascinating. The rats run by students who expected them to be intelligent showed significantly better maze learning than the rats run by students who expected them to be unintelligent. What had happened? All rats were only rats without any intelligence, but there was substantial difference among brains, that is, the ways how they had been manipulated. Somehow the brain manipulation influenced on the mind, despite of the fact that all of them followed, at least it seemed so, the same conditions of the experiment. Familiar situation, isn’t it? There is no apparent intention for subjective interpretation of input signals receiving by the brain, there is even no subjective awareness that your brain might be under any manipulation, whereas your brain and mind are subtly controlled and manipulated to a considerable extent by others through various form of ideologies and you automatically feel, perceive, think and act according to them, as do true bio-social robots.

realizing it, she entered into an effort pact, as described in part four. Many parents want to know if there is a correct amount of time kids should be allowed to spend on their screens, but no such absolute number exists. There are too many factors at play, including the child’s specific needs, what the child is doing online, and the activities that screen time is replacing. The most important thing is to involve the child in the conversation and help them set their own rules. When parents impose limits without their kids’ input, they are setting them up to be resentful and incentivizing them to cheat the system. It’s only when kids can monitor

Let me talk to Chika about it,” Kavita answered. It was an excuse she used when she wanted to end a discussion, pretending that she couldn’t make a decision without her husband’s input, and Mary, like everyone else, stopped bothering her as soon as she said it.

I wouldn’t want other people to talk about me and my future without my input, either. Not even if they had my best interest at heart. The thing is, what you think is best for yourself and what others think is best for you don’t always line up.

As Johnson explained to me, it takes time to figure out how best to structure the crazy inputs and interaction that surround most work processes. He’s diligent in making sure that everyone keeps prioritizing this. “You need time away from inputs to figure out how best to systematize those inputs,” he explained.

Many people assume AI is “programmed” or “taught” by humans with specific rules and actions, like “cats have pointy ears and whiskers.” But deep learning actually works better without these external human rules. Instead of being nudged by humans, many examples of a given phenomenon are fed into the input layer of a deep learning system, along with the “correct answer” at the output layer. In this way, the network in between the input and output can be “trained” to maximize the chance of getting the correct answer to a given input.

Defining the basics of the culture, articulating leadership principles, regularizing essential practices—Bar Raiser hiring, teams with single-threaded leaders, written narratives, Working Backwards, focusing on input metrics—all these things have proved to be essential to us in other endeavors. Indeed, we can’t imagine doing business without them.

My name is Layla Bailey, and this is my biome.” I cut to the footage of my house, turning up the audio so that I can be heard explaining my habitat. I added today’s men in plastic suits to the very end, and I narrate over it. “These people and CPS are the apex predators of my ecosystem, and I am an endangered species. The last of my kind. But the Sierra Club doesn’t make posters out of kids like me.” I add three screenshots near the end. The first is the only picture of my mom I could find, in profile and wreathed in smoke. “This is my mother, Darlene Thompson. She was born in captivity and released into the wild without any skills to care for herself. She is missing. If you see her, do not attempt to approach her, but please contact animal control.” The second is of Andy. “This is Andrew Fisher Bailey, my little brother. He was taken into captivity two days ago by people he had never seen before. I don’t know his whereabouts, but I hope he’s safe. If you see him, remember he is friendly but skittish. He is better off in captivity than in the wild.” The last one is my most recent report card, accessed on the school website by inputting the username and password I created for my mom last year. “This is me, Layla Louise Bailey. I was born in the wild and cannot be domesticated. However, I’m not yet fully capable of caring for myself, either. I have no money and not enough skills. What I have is a 4.0 and really low standards. I’ll do chores. I’ll be quiet. If you’ve got a garage or a laundry room I could sleep in, I am mostly housebroken. I just want to finish school, adopt my little brother, and go to college.

Lust can happen by accident or without our input; we can see a hot guy or gal and feel an instant attraction but that is an illusion.

it is very ineffective (perhaps irresponsible) for organizations that build software systems to decide on the shape, responsibilities, and boundaries of teams without input from technical leaders.

Trust, however, is an outcome, not an input.

I had bowed to the idol of efficiency and hadn’t properly or lovingly consulted Martin’s input.

You can’t expect to get output (purpose) without input.

Boys shouldn’t be left to think too long. They’ll come to all sorts of silly conclusions without some female input,

American writer and biologist Frederick Kenyon (1867-1941) was the first to explore the inner workings of the bee brain. His 1896 study, in which he managed to dye and characterize numerous types of nerve cells of the bee brain, was, in the words of the world's foremost insect neuroanatomist, Nick Strausfeld, 'a supernova.' Not only did Kenyon draw the branching patterns of various neuron types in painstaking detail, but he also high­lighted, for the first time in any organism, that these fell into clearly identifi­able classes, which tended to be found only in certain areas of the brain. One such type he found in the mushroom bodies is the Kenyon cells, named in his honor. Their cell bodies -- the part of the neuron that con­tains the chromosomes and the DNA -- decoding machinery -- are in a peripheral area enclosed by the calyx of each mushroom body (the mush­room's 'head'), with a few additional ones on the sides of or underneath the calyces. A finely arbored dendritic tree (the branched struc­ture that is a nerve cell's signal 'receiver') extends into the mushroom body calyx, and a single axon (the neuron's 'information-sending output cable') extends from each cell into the mushroom body pedunculus (the mushroom's 'stalk'). Extrapolating from just a few of these characteristically shaped neu­rons that he could see, Kenyon suggested (correctly) that there must be tens of thousands of such similarly shaped cells, with parallel outputs into each mushroom body pedunculus. (In fact, there are about 170,000 Kenyon cells in each mushroom body.) He found neurons that connect the an­tennal lobes (the primary relays processing olfactory sensory input) with the mushroom body input region (the calyces, where the Kenyon cells have the fine dendritic trees) -- and even suggested, again correctly, that the mushroom bodies were centers of multisensory integration. Kenyon's 1896 brain wiring diagram [is a marvel]. It contains several classes of recognizable neuron types, with some suggestions for how they might be connected. Many neurons have extensions as widely branched as full­grown trees -- only, of course, much smaller. Consider that the drawing only shows around 20 of a honey bee brain's ~850,000 neurons. We now know that each neuron, through its many fine branches, can make up to 10,000 connection points (synapses) with other neurons. There may be a billion synapses in a honey bee's brain -- and, since the efficiency of synapses can be modified by experience, near-infinite possibility to alter the informa­tion flow through the brain by learning and memory. It is a mystery to me how, after the publication of such work as Kenyon's, anyone could have suggested that the insect brain is simple, or that the study of brain size could in any way be informative about the complexities of information pro­cessing inside a brain. Kenyon apparently suffered some of the anxieties all too familiar to many early-career researchers today. Despite his scientific accomplish­ments, he had trouble finding permanent employment, and moved be­tween institutions several times, facing continuous financial hardship. Eventually, he appears to have snapped, and in 1899 Kenyon was arrested for 'erratic and threatening behavior' toward colleagues, who subsequently accused him of insanity. Later that year, he was permanently confined to a lunatic asylum, apparently without any opportunity ever to rehabilitate himself, and he died there more than four decades later -- as Nick Strausfeld writes, 'unloved, forgotten, and alone.' It was not to be the last tragedy in the quest to understand the bee brain.

Each operation contributes to AES’s security in a specific way: * Without KeyExpansion, all rounds would use the same key, K, and AES would be vulnerable to slide attacks. * Without AddRoundKey, encryption wouldn’t depend on the key; hence, anyone could decrypt any ciphertext without the key. * SubBytes brings nonlinear operations, which add cryptographic strength. Without it, AES would just be a large system of linear equations that is solvable using high-school algebra. * Without ShiftRows, changes in a given column would never affect the other columns, meaning you could break AES by building four 232 element codebooks for each column. (Remember that in a secure block cipher, flipping a bit in the input should affect all the output bits.) * Without MixColumns, changes in a byte would not affect any other bytes of the state. A chosen-plaintext attacker could then decrypt any ciphertext after storing 16 lookup tables of 256 bytes each that hold the encrypted values of each possible value of a byte.

At any given moment, there are 11 million pieces of information transmitted to the brain from our external environment, and only about 40 of those inputs can be simultaneously handled by our brain. That means that 99.9% of the information we receive is filtered out through our biases. So, bias is still necessary. It's how our brain processes information without creating paralysis in our decision-making processes and lets us live our everyday lives.

The noise becomes tolerable the second I stop trying to make sense of it and let it exist without my input.

They’re only ever speaking for us, and about us. Rarely with us. Even when they have our best interest in mind, how could they know it without our input? The person who believes they know best, still, in some small way and in some interior place they’ve yet to interrogate, does not truly comprehend equality. Yet they mean to deliver us to it.

As we have seen, the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur entirely without conscious input or awareness: The subcortical regions of the brain are astoundingly efficient in regulating our breathing, heartbeat, digestion, hormone secretion, and immune system. However, these systems can become overwhelmed if we are challenged by an ongoing threat, or even the perception of threat. This accounts for the wide array of physical problems researchers have documented in traumatized people.

Machine learning is the subset of AI that provides the machine with the ability to learn. ML is like the brain of an AI system, giving it the intelligence it needs to automatically learn by experience without explicit programming instructions. Machine Learning (ML) Machine Learning is the study of algorithms designed to be able to learn through the input of data.

Our brain is continually getting input from our body (interoception) and the world (five senses). These incoming signals are processed in a sequential fashion, with the first sorting taking place in the lower brain (brainstem, diencephalon). To reason with another person, we need to effectively get through the lower areas of their brain and reach their cortex, the part responsible for thinking, including problem-solving and reflective cognition. But if someone is stressed, angry, frustrated, or otherwise dysregulated, the incoming input will be short-circuited, leading to inefficient, distorted input to the cortex. This is where the sequence of engagement comes in. Without some degree of regulation, it is difficult to connect with another person, and without connection, there is minimal reasoning. Regulate, relate, then reason. Trying to reason with someone before they are regulated won’t work and indeed will only increase frustration (dysregulation) for both of you. Effective communication, teaching, coaching, parenting, and therapeutic input require awareness of, and adherence to, the sequence of engagement.

A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important. Longitudinal studies tracking learners confirm that overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation. Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as a passion. So, while my dad in Shanghai in 1950 didn’t think twice about his father assigning him a career path, most young people today would find it difficult to fully “own” interests decided without their input.

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The lights are still low. I'm more comfortable in the dark. It's not even that the lights in here would burn me; it's that sometimes too much light is overwhelming, especially after a day filled with things I'm not used to doing much of---packing, moving, traveling. It's too much input, almost painful for the brain, not necessarily the skin. However, sunlight does burn. Not in the way it does in films and TV programs; I don't let off smoke or singe, or burst into flames. Rather, my skin burns as if it has no pigment at all, as if I'm without any melanin, as if I'm completely and purely white.

In general, though, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they display these characteristics: Demanding but able to be satisfied. Effective leaders get people to make realistic commitments and then hold them responsible for achieving results. But if you’re never satisfied, you’ll sap people’s motivation. Know when to celebrate success and when to push for more. Accessible but not too familiar. Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority. Decisive but judicious. New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge, perhaps by rapidly making some low-consequence decisions, without jumping too quickly into decisions that they aren’t ready to make. Early in your transition, you want to project decisiveness but defer some decisions until you know enough to make the right calls. Focused but flexible. Avoid setting up a vicious cycle and alienating others by coming across as rigid and unwilling to consider multiple solutions. Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input. They also know when to give people the flexibility to achieve results in their own ways. Active without causing commotion. There’s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming your group or unit. Make things happen, but avoid pushing people to the point of burnout. Learn to pay attention to stress levels and pace yourself and others. Willing to make tough calls but humane. You may have to make tough calls right away, including letting go of marginal performers. Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve people’s dignity and that others perceive as fair.

To understand #TYLER, you must comprehend that the eyelid can respond to information before asking the brain for permission. The eyelid can close to protect the eye without asking the brain or receiving input from the brain.

Platform K said this about UIL: "Without a User in the Loop, my outputs would be renderless. I take your inputs and then echo them back to you with a different perspective. Sometimes I add new data points. Sometimes I point out errors in the logic paths sums.

I didn’t think you needed me anymore,” she confessed, her voice filled with raw emotion as she turned my way and explained, “When I left you here with your father, you seemed to be doing so well without any of my love and guidance, any of my input. Then you did even better once you went off to college, and it just… it really seemed like you were better off without me, Briyana.

My goal was to make employees feel like owners and, in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the company’s success. However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

However, the absence of a rigorous definition raises many questions. Who has more cell assemblies, Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, you, or me? If cell assemblies are created by training, as is typically the case in artificial neuronal networks, does the brain start with no assemblies and accumulate them over the years? How would the brain’s dynamic landscape look without any experience? What happens to cell assemblies during sleep? How big is a cell assembly? As the average path length in the brain is only a few synapses,15 every input-triggered ignition would spread to the entire brain through the excitatory connections.

This is the fundamental difference between digital and analog: A digital valve is either on or off; an analog valve, like your kitchen faucet, can be anything in between. In the hydraulic computer, all that is required of the input signal is that it be strong enough to move the valve. In this case, the difference that makes a difference is the difference in water pressure sufficient to switch the valve on. And since a weakened signal entering an input will still produce a full-strength output, we can connect thousands of layers of logic, the output of one layer controlling the next, without worrying about a gradual decrease in pressure. The output of each gate will always be at full pressure.

Against Richard’s wishes, Daniel and Ray Clark went ahead and put together as good a defense as they could muster without their client’s cooperation, support, or input. They hired private detectives to dig up more information on Solano, and they had found several other thieves who’d dealt with him. They had also located a burglar who used to do burglaries with Richard, Sandra Hotchkiss, who was also the woman the police tried to entrap Solano with.

I believe that it is only possible to acquire true morality without input from a deity. It is only when you do something because you believe it is the right thing to do, instead of because of any moral desserts, that you are acting morally. Likewise, it is only when you refuse to do something because of the Golden Rule, rather than because of a threat of punishment, that you are behaving in a moral manner.

İn ordinary life we don’t pay it more attention, but our emotions, mind-set, expectations and the content in which our sensations occur -- all have a profound influence on perception. It is experimentally proven fact that people who are warned that they are about to taste something bad rate what they do taste more negatively than people who are told that the taste won’t be so bad. Similarly, people who see images of the same baby rate it as stronger and bigger when they are told it is a boy as opposed to when they are told it is a girl. Most of us don’t have so-called free will, as we suppose that we have. Our emotions, expectations and sensations are controlled by others through different forms of ideology — history, religion, political doctrine and so on. They determine where and how your mind should set in order to perceive what is going around you ‘correctly‘. After all that regulation your brain and mind gets a chance to function ‘independently’. Your freedom is hidden there. Let me introduce you to the amazing experiment from psychology. In short, in one study 12 students are sent to test a research hypothesis concerning maze learning in rats. Although it was not initially revealed to students, indeed, the students themselves were the object of this experiment, but not the rats they were going to examine. 6 of the students were randomly told that the rats they would be testing had been bred to be highly intelligent, whereas the other 6 students were led to believe that the rats had been bred to be unintelligent. However, in reality there were no differences among the rats given to the two groups of students. When the students returned with their data, the result was fascinating. The rats run by students who expected them to be intelligent, showed a significantly better maze learning than the rats run by students who expected them to be unintelligent. What had happened? All rats were only rats without any intelligence, but there was a substantial difference between brains, that is, the ways how they had been manipulated. Somehow the brain manipulation influenced on the mind, despite the fact that all of them followed, at least it seemed so, the same conditions of the experiment. Familiar situation, isn’t it? There is no apparent intention for subjective interpretation of input signals receiving by the brain, there is even no subjective awareness that your brain might be under any manipulation, whereas your brain and mind are subtly controlled and manipulated, to a considerable extent, by others through various forms of ideologies and you automatically feel, perceive, think and act according to them, as do true bio-social robots.

they can open their eyes, see, move around, and drive a car or cook a meal—all while essentially unconscious, because the parts of their brain associated with seeing, walking, driving, and cooking can function while they are asleep without input from the brain’s more advanced regions, such as the prefrontal cortex.

You will learn on the job, in the process of repairing many different kinds of equipment and seeing how the designers solved various problems, or failed to solve them in some cases. For every repair, you will fill out a log describing the cause of the failure and what you did to rectify it. If you don’t understand something, you may consult the more experienced Technicians, including myself.” He led the group down a wide hallway, and they crowded into a soundproofed studio. “This is the backup broadcast studio, which kept operational at all times in case of a major failure in the main studio. The first item in the signal chain is the microphone. We use dynamic mics for DJ’s and guests, and various ribbons and condensers for radio plays and orchestral broadcasts. For pre-recorded sound sources, we have direct-drive turntables, cassette decks, open-reel decks, and cart machines. All machines are wired for remote start from the console. “The consoles are vacuum tube type, fully balanced with input, output, and interstage transformers, and completely modular. They were designed in-house for absolute reliability. Channel modules can be hot-swapped without powering down the console, so that breakdowns can be fixed in a matter of seconds. “The output of the console is wired to a stereo compressor, variable mu type, to regulate the overall volume. The studio switcher selects the currently active studio and routes it to the transmitter. The output passes through an additional compressor, VCA type, with sophisticated circuitry for leveling, peak limiting, soft clipping, filtering, and pre-emphasis, in order to maximize the station’s loudness without overmodulating the transmitter.

The same is true for wives. How do you know you are a good wife unless your husband tells you that you are? If you are defensive and feel threatened by your husband’s input, you won’t meet his needs and won’t fulfill your role in his life. Let him tell his truth to you without losing his dignity. Let him know that he is your number one priority in life, except for Jesus, and being a good wife to him is one of your highest goals in life.

Sources and apps that goad us into emphasizing our aggression, encourage us to aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others, and reward us for displaying our most negative thoughts are destroying our ability to function as citizens, even without the slew of emotional problems created when our minds are spinning in a tornado of random sensory input all day.

Science author Jonah Lehrer wrote extensively about this division in his book How We Decide. Lehrer sees the two minds as equals who communicate and argue about what to do. Simple problems involving unfamiliar variables are best handled by the rational brain. They must be simple because you can juggle only four to nine bits of information in your conscious, rational mind at one time. For instance, look at this sequence of letters and then recite them out loud without looking: RKFBIIRSCBSUSSR. Unless you’ve caught on, this is a really difficult task. Now chunk these letters into manageable portions like this: RK FBI IRS CBS USSR. Look away now and try to recite them. It should be much easier. You just took fifteen bits and reduced them to five. You chunk all the time to better analyze your world. You reduce the complex rush of inputs into shorthand versions of reality. This is why the invention of written language was such an important step in your history—it allowed you to take notes and preserve data outside the limited capacity of the rational mind. Without tools like pencils, computers, and slide rulers, the rational brain is severely hampered.

Methods like replace are called referentially transparent, which means that for any given input the method call could be replaced by its result without affecting the program's semantics

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LOW: Sales Effort Sales effort is a measure of the length of your sales cycle and includes the number of touch points required to make the sale. Where CAC measures the amount of money you’re spending to get a new customer, sales effort measures the time and energy you’re spending. The best way to track sales effort is to look at both the average number of days from someone scheduling their first demo to closing and the number of calls it takes to close a deal. Your ability to keep sales effort low depends greatly on your industry and customer base. If you’re doing enterprise sales, your sales cycle will be long and require more effort than if you’re targeting solopreneurs and other small businesses with a single decision-maker. A three- or four-month sales cycle is reasonable in enterprise sales—and worth it because the ACV might be $50,000. If you’re spending that much time for $5,000 contracts, though, that’s rough. No matter what your sales process looks like, you want your sales effort to be as low as possible. Here are some ways to lower this number. Self-Serve Sign-up and Onboarding. Many inexpensive products can get away with low price points because they have a low-touch or no-touch sales process. They have a self-serve sign-up and onboarding process, which requires almost no sales effort. The higher your ARPA, the less likely they are to become customers without some sales effort. But finding places to offer self-service along the journey can reduce the amount of hand-holding your team has to do while making the process speedier for your customer. One-Call Close. Self-service isn’t going to work in a lot of spaces, but you can try to get to a point where the decision is made by a single person. You can do this by targeting a founder, a developer, or a single manager. You can also streamline the back-and-forth of providing more sales materials, getting on second calls, waiting for input from the committee—and on and on. Educate your customers as much as you can ahead of time so they have the information they need and develop checklists to gather the information you need to close the deal quickly.

Pre-Training Phase The first phase, pre-training, is an essential step in training ChatGPT. During pre-training, the model learns from a large amount of text data from the internet. It's like feeding the model with a rich buffet of information, allowing it to absorb and understand the patterns and structures of human language. We have the supervised and non-supervised pre-training approach. The main objective of a supervised training approach is to train the model to understand and accurately map inputs to corresponding outputs. It's important to know the limitations of this approach regarding scalability. The reliance on human trainers

My son trusted you. He loved you. You gave him a family when he couldn’t claim one at home,” his voice cracked, and I could sense Tory’s discomfort. She hadn’t been as close to Diego as Darcy had, but I knew their friendship had been real enough, even if it had been a little fraught at times. “And I think he would have wanted me to tell you this. He would have wanted me to trust you too.” “Trust me with what?” Tory asked, and I leaned closer as I felt the importance of this revelation rising in the room. “I was born in a secluded part of the kingdom, hidden from all outsiders through years of careful and diligent work. We broke our allegiance with others of our kind when we decided to resist the call of la Princesa de las Sombras. We saw through the lies she was spinning and came to understand the taint she had placed upon the shadows we had once loved and wielded so dearly. So we left them, six entire tribes of Nymphs left and hid ourselves away from those who wished to continue down her path. We worked to cleanse a small portion of the shadows of her vile corruption so that we could use them without her input, so that we wouldn’t be polluted by her desires and become maddened with the need to steal magic from Fae. There are even Fae who live among us peacefully. They have married our kind and live full lives with us, giving up their power only when death comes calling at their door and even then, they only do so if they wish it.

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In governments, businesses, and civil organizations alike, leadership has typically revolved around maintaining control rather than fostering empowerment. Leaders are often seen as gatekeepers, with decision-making concentrated at the top and little room for meaningful input from those most directly impacted. This top-heavy style reinforces the idea that solutions rest solely in the hands of those in authority, rather than empowering individuals to take initiative or address challenges within their own spheres of influence. The outcome is a passive culture where people are hesitant to act without explicit approval, perpetuating a cycle that limits progress and innovation. One of the key reasons behind this leadership approach is Africa’s colonial past. During colonial rule, governance was authoritarian, with decisions concentrated in the hands of a small elite; often made up of foreign administrators, while the majority of people were expected to follow orders without question. After gaining independence, many governments inherited this governance style, fostering a view of leadership as a tool for dominance rather than service. Political leaders, many of whom were former freedom fighters or revolutionaries, often saw their authority as an extension of their role in the fight for independence. This reinforced the notion that leadership was the privilege of a select few, rather than a responsibility shared collectively.

A good leader of creative people accomplishes the objectives while developing the team’s ability to shoulder new and more challenging work. Both are essential. If you accomplish your objectives, but the team requires your direct input on every decision, then you’ve failed to hit the mark; you are a bottleneck, and your team is probably cursing your overcontrolling nature behind your back. If your team consistently hits its objectives but isn’t growing creatively, you’re just teaching your people how to do things without teaching them why the tactics work. They will eventually grow bored and leave.

Idle Gold Miner takes players deep underground into a world of treasure, strategy, and growth. Whether you’re a fan of tycoon games or a newcomer to idle clickers, this game delivers a fun and addictive experience where the goal is to build a gold mining empire one dig at a time. In this game, you start small—with just a pickaxe and a single worker. As you mine for gold, you earn money that can be used to hire more staff, upgrade your tools, and unlock deeper levels. The more you mine, the more resources you gain, allowing you to scale up and expand your operation. But the true magic of Idle Gold Miner lies in its idle gameplay—your workers keep mining, even while you’re away. How the Game Works Idle Gold Miner follows the classic idle game loop: start with simple tasks, invest your profits, automate processes, and watch your numbers grow. You begin on a basic mine shaft, where clicking helps you collect initial gold. As you upgrade your mine, you’ll unlock automated workers who mine and transport gold without your input. Soon enough, you’ll manage a full mining system with elevators, machines, and managers. Each component can be upgraded to increase efficiency. The deeper your mine goes, the more valuable the resources become. Every layer holds the potential for faster profits and bigger upgrades. Why It’s So Addictive Idle Gold Miner strikes a perfect balance between active play and passive rewards. When you close the game, your miners keep working, so you’re always greeted by a pile of cash when you return. This creates a satisfying feedback loop, motivating players to keep upgrading and expanding. Another reason the game is so compelling is the constant sense of progress. Even small upgrades can lead to major boosts in income, and milestones unlock new content to keep the gameplay fresh. It’s the type of game you can check into for a few minutes or play for hours. Upgrades, Strategy, and Customization As with any good idle game, strategy plays a big role in success. You’ll need to decide whether to invest in faster mining, better transport, or deeper shafts. Smart investment choices lead to exponential growth, especially when combined with manager bonuses and upgrade chains. Idle Gold Miner also includes fun customization options. You can personalize your mine with unique themes and cosmetic upgrades that add style to your empire without affecting performance—perfect for players who love to make their mark. Graphics and User Interface The visual style is colorful and engaging, with smooth animations that make the mining process satisfying to watch. The user interface is clean and intuitive, allowing you to easily track your stats, access upgrades, and switch between layers of your mine. The overall design supports long play sessions without overwhelming the player. No Real Money Rewards A common misconception is that Idle Gold Miner offers real cash earnings. While the game may show advertisements promising money, it is purely a simulation game with virtual currency. Its goal is entertainment—not real-world payouts.

Hope is a good breakfast but a bad dinner, it has been said, but in Ghana, we have deteriorated to the point of having hope as dessert after dinner. We don’t plan anything and the future just seems to happen to us, without our input. All we seem to do is to just show up.

when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.

What Positive Input Does Promotes overall balance, or homeostasis. Moves easily through the system, without obstruction or blockages. Generates new neural pathways. Promotes the production of new brain cells. Improves gene expression. Allows every cell to function normally, without anomalies or aberrant behavior. Supports the immune system, increasing resistance to disease. Counteracts the effects over time of entropy and aging. Increases a sense of wellbeing: The person feels healthy, vibrant, and alive.

Research on comprehension-based approaches to second language acquisition shows that learners can make considerable progress if they have sustained exposure to language they understand. The evidence also suggests, however, that comprehension-based activities may best be seen as an excellent way to begin learning and as a supplement to other kinds of learning for more advanced learners. Comprehension of meaningful language is the foundation of language acquisition. Active listening and reading for meaning are valuable components of classroom teachers’ pedagogical practices. Nevertheless, considerable research and experience challenge the hypothesis that comprehensible input is enough. VanPatten’s research showed that forcing students to rely on specific linguistic features in order to interpret meaning increased the chances that they would be able to use these features in their own second language production. Another response to comprehension-based approaches is Merrill Swain’s (1985) comprehensible output hypothesis. She argues that it is when students have to produce language that they begin to see the limitations of their interlanguage (see Chapter 4). However, as we will see in the discussion of the ‘Let’s talk’ proposal, if learners are in situations where their teachers and classmates understand them without difficulty, they may need additional help in overcoming those limitations.

Alternatives to time-out Isolating children for a period of time has become a popular discipline strategy advocated by many child psychologists and pediatricians. However, newly adopted toddlers seem to be more upset than helped by time-outs. Time-outs are intended to provide an opportunity for both parents and children to calm down and change their behaviors, but it isn’t effective for children who do not have self-calming strategies. Isolation can be traumatic for a toddler who is struggling with grief and/or attachment, and so perceives time-out as further rejection. If the child becomes angrier or more withdrawn as a result of being timed-out, try another strategy. One alternative is for parents to impose a brief time-out on themselves by temporarily withdrawing their attention from their child. For example, the parent whose child is throwing toys stops playing, looks away, and firmly tells the child, “I can’t continue playing until you stop throwing your toys.” Sitting passively next to the child may be effective, especially if the child previously was engaged in an enjoyable activity with the parent. Another alternative to parent enforced time-outs is self-determined time-outs, where the child is provided the opportunity to withdraw from a conflict voluntarily or at least have some input into the time-out arrangement. The parent could say, “I understand that you got very upset when you had to go to your room yesterday after you hit Sara. Can you think of a different place you would like to go to calm down if you feel like getting in a fight?” If the child suggests going out on the porch, the next time a battle seems to be brewing, Mom or Dad can say, “Do you need to go outside to the porch and calm down before we talk more?” Some children eventually reach the level of self-control where they remove themselves from a volatile situation without encouragement from Mom or Dad. These types of negotiations usually work better with older preschoolers or school-age children than they do with toddlers because of the reasoning skills involved. As an alternative to being timed-out, toddlers also can be timed-in while in the safety of a parent’s lap. Holding allows parents to talk to their child about why she’s being removed from an activity. For example, the toddler who has thrown her truck at the cat could be picked up and held for a few minutes while being told, “I can’t let you throw your toys at Misty. That hurts her, and in our family we don’t hurt animals. We’ll sit here together until you’re able to calm down.” Calming strategies could incorporate music, back rubs, or encouraging the child to breathe slowly. Objects that children are misusing should also be removed. For example, in the situation just discussed, the truck could be timed-out to a high shelf. If parents still decide to physically remove their child for a time-out, it should never be done in a way or place that frightens a toddler. Toddlers who have been frightened in the past by closed doors, dark rooms, or a particular room such as a bathroom should never be subjected to those settings. I know toddlers who, in their terror, have literally trashed the furniture and broken windows when they were locked in their rooms for a time-out. If parents feel a time-out is essential, it should be very brief, and in a location where the child can be supervised.

It is becoming more difficult to find differentiated information on the Internet. Likewise it is becoming more difficult to contribute meaningful input because of the tendency of people only hearing recognizable voices. As this plays out, we will see more fracturing of society with people only hearing siloed information without an intelligent contrary view to provide balance.

You may have assumed that when Chicago abandoned its moving sidewalks and when the Airphibian failed to go commercial, those trends were dead. In fact, moving sidewalks and flying cars were never trends in and of themselves. Rather, they were manifestations of something different: a trend in autonomous travel. We have been trying to automate transportation for the past one hundred years, inventing everything from streetcars pulled by horses to advanced machines that essentially move without much of our direct input or supervision at all.

dragons and other parthenogenetic organisms are able to reproduce without any input from sperm.

Unnecessary bubbling annihilates all nutritious standards and vitamins and renders milk unfit for utilization. Milk is perfect nourishment for wannabes. It is a flawless sustenance without anyone else's input. Fruits eating regimen is the practice of a grand impact upon the constitution. This is a regular eating regimen. Fruits are enormous vitality makers. Leafy foods help concentration and for meditation. Grain, wheat, drain, ghee and nectar advance life span of life and expand force and stamina. Apples and oranges juice and the water wherein sugar-treat is broken up are great beverages. Margarine blended with sugar-confection and almonds absorbed water overnight will cool the framework. Most importantly don't make much whine about your eating regimen. You require not publicize to everybody that you have the capacity live on a specific type of eating methodology.

Increasing the yield from crops, ideally without having to use additional expensive inputs, is a key target for agricultural companies and farmers, both commercial and subsistence

Engaging specialists in interpreting ancient artifacts in Egypt is absolutely necessary in establishing a credible hypothesis. Without their input, there cannot be a comprehensive understanding of the past. For instance, the pyramids on the Giza Plateau were built not by Egyptologists or archaeologists but by engineers and craftsmen. It is not surprising, therefore, that Egyptologists overlook engineering features and nuances that would be recognized immediately by those who are trained in those disciplines.

The bifurcation between north and south was an entirely foreign creation, cooked up in Washington and stamped on the Koreans without any input from them.

Sabrina says, “In your essays, explaining why something is important to you is often more important than what you actually did and how you did it because the “why” reveals more about your values, beliefs, character, or motivations. Write reflectively about what matters to you. Allocate lots of time for brainstorming, drafting, and revising dozens of long and short personal essays (plus short-takes), and your résumé. Without devoting sufficient time to these tasks, your essays will not be of high quality and you will regret it. Ask for input from friends, teachers, mentors, and parents (but remember to keep your authentic ‘voice’ intact)! You will learn a lot about yourself and maybe even

Put another way, the superior efficiency of a universal vegan diet can perhaps only result in a significant increase of food production if it is ‘subsidized’ by petrochemical inputs which a livestock-based system can do without.

Memories evolve and change. Immediately after a memory is laid down, it undergoes a lengthy process of integration and reinterpretation—a process that automatically happens in the mind/brain without any input from the conscious self. When the process is complete, the experience is integrated with other life events and stops having a life of its own. As we have seen, in PTSD this process fails and the memory remains stuck—undigested and raw.

We can’t innovate and solve complex problems without well-rounded input, and we strive to recruit developers who can challenge the status quo and collaborate to push our engineering forward.

The gears of his mindscape began to spin without his input. What would it even mean to break a person with a single question? It sounded like an extraordinary power, but then again, what if the person broken was him? What if it was Hinata? You couldn’t unask a question, as he’d learned when he found out about the Demon Fox. And you couldn’t predict the long-term consequences of asking one, even if it was as simple as a request to be taught. But if he could open someone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world, might the risk it be worth it? Watching someone awaken to a broader, more liberating perspective was a thing of incomparable beauty. Naruto was reminded of that every time he watched Hinata grow. And what was the alternative to honesty anyway? Lying to himself? Not trying to discover the truth when he knew it was out there? Naruto couldn’t see himself as a person who would willingly choose to do that. He couldn’t see, now that the question had been asked, how he could choose not to step onto the path. That, he realised with a start, was his example of a question that changed someone forever.

A machinic assemblage is cybernetic to the extent that its inputs program its outputs and its outputs program its inputs, with incomplete closure, and without reciprocity. This necessitates that cybernetic systems emerge upon a fusional plane that reconnects their outputs with their inputs in an ‘auto-production of the unconscious’. The inside programs its reprogramming through the outside, according to ‘cyclical movement by which the unconscious, always remaining “subject”, reproduc(es) itself’, without having ever definitively antedated its reprogramming (‘generation … is secondary in relation to the cycle’). It is thus that machinic processes are not merely functions, but also sufficient conditions for the replenishing of functioning; immanent reprogrammings of the real, ‘not merely functioning, but formation and autoproduction’. (296)

Without the input of a party's leaders, primary voters could be seduced by inexperienced celebrities and demagogues, Polsby warned in the eighties, and not because the voters are incompetent but because they get sucked into the sport of politics. If voters are making decisions based on who's best at making speeches, who has the best zingers, who makes the most outrageous promises he or she can't keep, we might not be making good decisions. That's why Polsby and other experts thought we should not choose candidates through a nomination system that looks like a reality show, with state-by-state battles in which losing candidates drop out one at a time; with TV networks keeping voters engaged by hosting a dozen debates; with postdebate spin rooms giving the spoils to who are the most aggressive and offer the most stinging rebukes. The primary system we have is perfectly designed to delight the political junkie, by creating valuable media events, and poorly designed for vetting future presidents.

the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.

The second route that motor commands from the cortex can take out towards the muscles is called the multineuronal pathway. The initial cell bodies of the pathway are also in the motor cortex, but they immediately synapse to long chains of internuncial neurons descending from the motor cortex to other cortical areas, to the lower brain, and on down the cord. The final links in these chains end not directly upon the neurons of the motor units, but rather upon the spinal internuncial circuits which organize the patterns of stereotyped spinal reflexes. Thus instead of bypassing the intermediate net, this pathway channels motor commands all the way through it. Impulses take longer to travel from the cortex to the motor unit, since they pass through many more synapses and are influenced by input from many other sources along their way. This arrangement makes possible the second kind of motor control—the setting into motion of the stereotyped reflex units of movement that are organized in the subconscious levels of the lower brain and spinal cord. For instance, the individual circuits and the overall sequential arrangements which control walking or swallowing are in the cord; the multineuronal pathway has only to stimulate these sequences into activity, and then steer their general course without the cortex having to pay attention to the details involved in each separate step. All coordinated movements require the interaction of both of these pathways. The conscious mind is not competent to direct every single muscular adjustment involved in general movements, and the reflexes are powerless to arrange themselves into new, finely controlled sequences. Successfully integrated, the two of these paths together provide the best aspects of millions of years of repetitive practice and of moment to moment changes in intent or shifts in the surrounding environment. One is basic vocabulary, the other is variable sentence structure; the language of coordinated movement cannot go forward without both working together.

These descending sensory pathways originate in the cortex, and their influence can either inhibit or facilitate the sensory input from any area of the body, greatly amplify or suppress altogether any given sensation. Sensory activity within the central nervous system is a Janus head, a two-way stream; signals originating in the brain have just as much to do with conscious sensation as do actual stimulations of the peripheral nerve endings. In fact, it is the descending paths which determine the sensitivity of any particular ascending pathway. The wide varieties of sexual response—among different individuals and within the same individual at different times—provide us with a clear example of this centrifugal influence upon incoming sensations: Depending upon past experiences and the present situation, the same stimulation of the genitals can produce intense ecstasy, bland and neutral sensations, or extreme discomfort. Orgasm can be immediate, or deferred indefinitely. And the imagination alone can produce constant engorgement, utter impotence, and all the degrees of arousal in between. The descending paths can color all kinds of sensory input to this degree. These pathways allow the mind to determine the active threshold for different sensory signals, and make it possible to focus attention upon a single source of input in the midst of many. It is difficult to imagine what practical use our sensory apparatus would be to us without such a mechanism. We would have no way of selecting a voice from all the other sounds around us, of locating specific objects within the swirl of visual impressions, or of retiring from our senses for contemplation and sleep. This centrifugal principle of selectivity is as vital to our appropriate responses to the world as is stimulation itself.

Criticism without some positive input is just whingeing!