“
Charles,” Bones said distinctly. “You’d better have a splendid explanation for her being on top of you.”
The black-haired vampire rose to his feet as soon as I jumped off, brushing the dirt off his clothes.
“Believe me, mate, I’ve never enjoyed a woman astride me less. I came out to say hello, and this she-devil blinded me by flinging rocks in my eyes. Then she vigorously attempted to split my skull before threatening to impale me with silver if I so much as even
twitched! It’s been a few years since I’ve been to America, but I daresay the method of greeting a person has changed
dramatically!”
Bones rolled his eyes and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re still upright, Charles, and the only reason you are is because she didn’t have any silver. She’d have staked you right and proper otherwise. She has a tendency to shrivel someone first
and then introduce herself afterwards.
”
”
Jeaniene Frost (Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress, #1))
“
I saw my problem immediately.
I should never have introduced Alex to Percy Jackson. She had learned way too much from his relentless training methods. Maybe Alex couldn't summon sea animals, but she could turn into them. That was just as bad.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, #3))
“
Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.
”
”
Lawrence Durrell (Balthazar (The Alexandria Quartet, #2))
“
Any philosopher, any international economist may talk to me about the methods I have introduced and the thoughts behind them. Illiteracy is a disability only for those who lived their lives walking and talking while their minds slept.
”
”
Abdul Sattar Edhi
“
But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
In the diagnosis of disease, Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: “Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
Dot wondered how she was to mention Phryne’s habit of strewing her boudoir with beautiful naked young men. She could not think of a method of introducing the subject and decided to leave it to Phryne to cope with.
”
”
Kerry Greenwood (Flying Too High (Phryne Fisher, #2))
“
Whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts cannot take a better method than by putting himself into the circumstances and postures of life that the author was in upon every important passage as it flowed from his pen; for this will introduce a parity and strict correspondence of ideas between the reader and the author. Now, to assist the diligent reader in so delicate an affair, as far as brevity will permit, I have recollected that the shrewdest pieces of this treatise were conceived in bed in a garret; at other times (for a reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my invention with hunger; and in general, the whole work was begun, continued, and ended under a long course of physic and great want of money.
”
”
Jonathan Swift (A Tale of a Tub)
“
Erasure is as important as writing. Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute. . . . The best method of correction is to put aside for a time what we have written, so that when we come to it again it may have an aspect of novelty, as of being another man's work; in this way we may preserve ourselves from regarding our writings with the affection that we lavish upon a newborn child.
”
”
Quintilian (De Institutione Oratoria)
“
A teacher simply assists him at the beginning to get his bearings among so many different things and teaches him the precise use of each of them; that is to say, she introduces him to the ordered and active life of the environment. But then she leaves him free in the choice and execution of his work.
”
”
Maria Montessori (The Discovery of the child: formerly entitled "The Montessori Method", based on the original archives by M. Montessori, in partnership with AMI - ASSOCIATION ... (The Montessori Series Book 2))
“
Somehow she would manage to introduce herself, and before her victim had scented danger she had proffered an invitation to her suite. Her method of attack was so downright and sudden that there was seldom opportunity to escape. At the Côte d’Azur she staked a claim upon a certain sofa in the lounge, midway between the reception hall and the passage to the restaurant, and she would have her coffee there after luncheon and dinner, and all who came and went must pass her by. Sometimes she would employ me as a bait to draw her prey, and, hating my errand, I would be sent across the lounge with a verbal message, the loan of a book or paper, the address of some shop or other, the sudden discovery of a mutual friend. It seemed as though notables must be fed to her,
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
“
Religion itself is a method of engaging the ultimate; the various religions are various methods of doing so; their histories are a record of the results of these efforts.
”
”
Arvind Sharma (Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition)
“
Equally important was the fact that the interpretation provided the model for how Tianming had hidden his message in the three stories. He employed two basic methods: dual-layer metaphors and two-dimensional metaphors. The dual-layer metaphors in the stories did not directly point to the real meaning, but to something far simpler. The tenor of this first metaphor became the vehicle for a second metaphor, which pointed to the real intelligence. In the current example, the princess’s boat, the He’ershingenmosiken soap, and the Glutton’s Sea formed a metaphor for a paper boat driven by soap. The paper boat, in turn, pointed to curvature propulsion. Previous attempts at decipherment had failed largely due to people’s habitual belief that the stories only involved a single layer of metaphors to hide the real message. The two-dimensional metaphors were a technique used to resolve the ambiguities introduced by literary devices employed in conveying strategic intelligence. After a dual-layer metaphor, a single-layer supporting metaphor was added to confirm the meaning of the dual-layer metaphor. In the current example, the curved snow-wave paper and the ironing required to flatten it served as a metaphor for curved space, confirming the interpretation of the soap-driven boat. If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on the plane. Thus, this single-layer metaphor was also called the bearing coordinate. Viewed by itself, the bearing coordinate seemed meaningless, but once combined with the dual-layer metaphor, it resolved the inherent ambiguities in literary language. “A subtle and sophisticated system,” a PIA specialist said admiringly. All the committee members congratulated Cheng Xin and AA. AA, who had always been looked down on, saw her status greatly elevated among the committee members. Cheng
”
”
Liu Cixin (Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3))
“
The great advantage of the reductio method is that it allows us to tell if a statement is true, even if we do not know how to construct a proof for it. We can tell a statement is true by showing that its negation leads to a contradiction.
”
”
Dan Cryan (Introducing Logic: A Graphic Guide)
“
On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan!
No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria.
We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader.
Islamism is your livelihood
Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands.
But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other.
No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship.
You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature.
You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans.
Humanity will not remember you with good deeds
Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions.
In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies.
We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue.
You are an illusion
You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it.
You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do
”
”
Kamel Daoud
“
choose to use Kanban as a method to drive change in your organization, you are subscribing to the view that it is better to optimize what already exists, because that is easier and faster and will meet with less resistance than running a managed, engineered, named-change initiative. Introducing a radical change is harder than incrementally improving an existing one.
”
”
David J. Anderson (Kanban)
“
If your spouse is collaborating with you, you both might want to start with making changes in communication (Chapters 14 and 15), reducing anger (Chapter 17), and introducing new methods of solving problems (Chapter 16). If you are able to cooperate to determine more precisely what your spouse legitimately wants or doesn’t want, likes or dislikes, you are in a better position to make those changes (Chapters 12 and 16).
”
”
Aaron T. Beck (Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstanding)
“
In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others in greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from a comprehensive account. Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius, and not Dirac or von Neumann, are the models for presenting a knowledge of this kind in which the history of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself - it is essential for its further development as well as for giving content to the theories it contains at any particular moment. Experts and laymen, professionals and dilettani, truth-freaks and liars - they all are invited to participate in the contest and to make their contribution to the enrichment of our culture. The task of the scientist, however, is no longer 'to search for the truth', or 'to praise god', or 'to synthesize observations', or 'to improve predictions'. These are but side effects of an activity to which his attention is now mainly directed and which is 'to make the weaker case the stronger' as the sophists said, and thereby to sustain the motion of the whole.
”
”
Paul Karl Feyerabend (Against Method)
“
It was under their successors at Oxford School [successors to the Muslims of Spain] that Roger Bacon learned Arabic and Arabic Sciences. Neither Roger Bacon nor later namesake has any title to be credited with having introduced the experimental method. Roger Bacon was no more than one of apostles of Muslim Science and Method to Christian Europe; and he never wearied of declaring that knowledge of Arabic and Arabic Sciences was for his contemporaries the only way to true knowledge.
”
”
Robert Briffault (The Making Of Humanity (1919) (Legacy Reprints))
“
many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)
”
”
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
“
Language had arrived from outer space and mated together lizards and monkeys or whatever until it had customized a host which could sustain it. That first person had been introduced to the complicated DNA sequence of proper nouns and compound verbs. Outside of language he didn't exist. There was no method to escape. To feel anything, anymore, required ever-increasing amounts of words. Great landfills and airlifts of words. It took a mountain of talk to achieve even the tiniest insight.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread)
“
The transfinite numbers themselves are in a certain sense new irrationals, and in fact I think the best way to define the finite irrational numbers is entirely similar; I might even say in principle it is the same as my method for introducing transfinite numbers. One can absolutely assert: the transfinite numbers stand or fall with the finite irrational numbers; they are alike in their most intrinsic nature; for the former like these latter are definite, delineated forms or modifications of the actual infinite.
”
”
Georg Cantor
“
My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. They were only one step out of poverty. But when I announced that I wanted to be an astronomer, I received unqualified support—even if they (as I) had only the most rudimentary idea of what an astronomer does. They never suggested that, all things considered, it might be better to be a doctor or a lawyer.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
At that time there were a good number of noble houses in Segovia which were no better off than we were; drawn together by this common interest, they had introduced a method of saving money. They rarely visited each other; ladies showed themselves at their windows, and gentlemen remained in the street below. There was a great deal of playing of the guitar, and even more amorous sighing, neither of which cost a penny. Manufacturers of vicuna cloth lived in luxury; we could not emulate them, so we took our revenge by despising and ridiculing them.
”
”
Jan Potocki (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa)
“
Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma based upon 19th century prejudices. Marxism never was a dogma. There is no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have passed into the body of science... The defense generally given is that the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian; that foreign ideas like Marxism are objectionable. This is generally argued in English the foreign language common to educated Indians; and by persons who live under a mode of production (the bourgeois system forcibly introduced by the foreigner into India.) The objection, therefore seems less to the foreign origin than to the ideas themselves which might endanger class privilege. Marxism is said to be based upon violence, upon the class-war in which the very best people do not believe nowadays. They might as well proclaim that meteorology encourages storms by predicting them. No Marxist work contains incitement to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to those in the divine Gita.
”
”
Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (Exasperating Essays: Exercises in the Dialectical Method)
“
Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Louis XIV, was a man of probity, of great industry and knowledge of detail, of great experience and acuteness in the examination of public accounts, and of abilities, in short, every way fitted for introducing method and good order into the collection and expenditure of the public revenue. That minister had unfortunately embraced all the prejudices of the mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation, and such as could scarce fail to be agreeable to a laborious and plodding man of business, who had been accustomed to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere. The industry and commerce of a great country he endeavoured to regulate upon the same model as the departments of a public office; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice, he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints.
”
”
Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
“
Inheritance has recently fallen out of favor as a programming design solution in many programming languages because it’s often at risk of sharing more code than necessary. Subclasses shouldn’t always share all characteristics of their parent class but will do so with inheritance. This can make a program’s design less flexible. It also introduces the possibility of calling methods on subclasses that don’t make sense or that cause errors because the methods don’t apply to the subclass. In addition, some languages will only allow a subclass to inherit from one class, further restricting the flexibility of a program’s design.
For these reasons, Rust takes a different approach, using trait objects instead of inheritance.
”
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Steve Klabnik (The Rust Programming Language)
“
MIT, the researchers gave a group of four-year-olds exactly the same toy, and only varied the method with which they introduced it to the children. In one group, the researcher acted naïve and clueless when she demonstrated one of the functions of the toy, whereas the other group was given direct instruction by the researcher on how to use it. When left alone with the toy, all the children in the study were able to replicate what the “teacher” had done—pull on one of the toy’s tubes to make it squeak—but the children in the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its functions. They were simply more curious and more likely to discover new information than the children who had been told by the teacher how to use the toy.
”
”
Linda Åkeson McGurk (There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge))
“
A proof represents a logical process which has come to a definitive conclusion in a finite number of stages. However, a logical machine following definite rules need never come to a conclusion. It may go on grinding through different stages without ever coming to a stop, either by describing a pattern of activity of continually increasing complexity, or by going into a repetitive process like the end of a chess game in which there is a continuing cycle of perpetual check. This occurs in the case of some of the paradoxes of Cantor and Russell. Let us consider the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Is this class a member of itself? If it is, it is certainly not a member of itself; and if it is not, it is equally certainly a member of itself. A machine to answer this question would give the successive temporary answers: “yes,” “no,” “yes,” “no,” and so on, and would never come to equilibrium.
Bertrand Russell’s solution of his own paradoxes was to affix to every statement a quantity, the so-called type, which serves to distinguish between what seems to be formally the same statement, according to the character of the objects with which it concerns itself—whether these are “things,” in the simplest sense, classes of “things,” classes of classes of “things,” etc. The method by which we resolve the paradoxes is also to attach a parameter to each statement, this parameter being the time at which it is asserted. In both cases, we introduce what we may call a parameter of uniformization, to resolve an ambiguity which is simply due to its neglect.
”
”
Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine)
“
In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and
pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic
corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods. Monasteries were the first institutions to use clocks, and for
centuries they and the cathedral schools were the most important learning centres of Europe, helping to found many of Europe’s first universities, such as Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Of course, it is not so easy to “falsify,” i.e., to state that something is wrong with full certainty. Imperfections in your testing method may yield a mistaken “no.” The doctor discovering cancer cells might have faulty equipment causing optical illusions; or he could be a bell-curve-using economist disguised as a doctor. An eyewitness to a crime might be drunk. But it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance. Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances. If you think the task is easy, you will be disappointed—few humans have a natural ability to do this. I confess that I am not one of them; it does not come naturally to me.*
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
“
When I taught the meditation on sound to the participants at my weekend workshop and had people open to the ringing of their cell phones, I was trying to introduce them to his method. By listening meditatively, we were changing the way we listen, pulling ourselves out of our usual orientation to the world based on our likes and dislikes. Rather than trying to figure out what was going on around us, resisting the unpleasant noises and gravitating toward the mellifluous ones, we were listening in a simpler and more open manner. We had to find and establish another point of reference to listen in this way, one that was outside the ego’s usual territory of control. You might say we were simply listening, but it was actually more complex than that. While listening, we were also aware of ourselves listening, and at the same time we were conscious of what the listening evoked within. Unhooked from our usual preoccupations, we were listening from a neutral place.
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Mark Epstein (The Trauma of Everyday Life)
“
The primary method of mathematics is deduction; the primary method of philosophy is descrip- [16] tive generalization. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foisted onto philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an essential auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. This misapprehension of philosophic method has veiled the very considerable success of philosophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience. The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,† Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. A new idea introduces a new alternative; and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.
”
”
Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality)
“
Christianity and other traditional religions are still important players in the world. Yet their role is now largely reactive. In the past, they were a creative force. Christianity, for example, spread the hitherto heretical notion that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries. In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
For the future it will, I think, be essential to introduce a threeyear period of military service ; only by so doing can we ensure efficiency in the handling of new technical weapons. A threeyear period will be a great advantage to those who later propose to adopt a learned profession, for it will give them ample time to forget all the muck that was jammed into their heads at school; they will have time to discard everything which will not be of future use to them, and that, in itself, is most valuable. Everybody, for example, learns two or three foreign languages, which is a complete waste of time. The little one learns is not of the slightest use when one goes abroad. Everybody, I agree, should receive a basic education. But the whole method of instruction in secondary and higher schools is just so much nonsense. Instead of receiving a sound basic education, the student finds his head crammed with a mass of useless learning, and in the end is still ill-equipped to face life. Lucky are those who have the happy knack of being able to forget most of what they have been taught. Those who cannot forget are ripe to become professors—a race apart. And that is not intended as a compliment!
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
“
To pastors and teachers
If all who laboured for the conversion of others were to introduce them immediately into Prayer and the Interior Life, and make it their main design to gain and win over the heart, numberless as well as permanent conversions would certainly ensue. On the contrary, few and transient fruits must attend that labour which is confined to outward matters; such as burdening the disciple with a thousand precepts for external exercises, instead of leaving the soul to Christ by the occupation of the heart in him . . .
O when once the heart is gained, how easily is all moral evil corrected! It is, therefore, that God above all things requires the heart. It is the conquest of the heart alone that can extirpate those dreadful vices which are so predominant, such as drunkenness, blasphemy, lewdness,envy, and theft. Jesus Christ would become the universal and peaceful Sovereign, and the face of the church would be wholly renewed.
The decay of internal piety is unquestionably the source of the various errors that have arisen in the church, all which would would speedily be sapped and overthrown should inward religion be reestablished . . .
O how inexpressibly great is the loss sustained by mankind from the neglect of the Interior Life!
”
”
Jeanne Guyon (A Short and Easy Method of Prayer)
“
To observe the kingdom of Scotland in 1513 in terms of the strength of the Crown, its relations with its magnates, the quality and administration of its justice, its economy, foreign relations, culture and religious life, is to see a community at some remove from the leaderless country inherited by James I in 1424; yet it is also to see a country still strongly tied to its ancient traditions, customs and ethnic divisions which it either could not, or would not, abandon. By 1513 the Crown was strong, popular, its position in society unassailable. It had both sought and obtained the co-operation of its nobility who were themselves closely bound together by bonds of alliance, and whose status in society was recognised by the strength and closeness its kin groups. It had introduced some useful, constructive statutes and had strengthened its legal procedures. It had sought to inform its legal officers of the body of the law. New and more efficient methods of land registration and of royal revenue collection had been the direct result of the reorganisation of the Chancery, the Exchequer, and of the Secretariat of the Privy Seal. Its economy was buoyant enough to enable a protected merchant class to trade modestly with the Baltic states through Denmark, with Southern Europe through its Staple in Flanders, with England and France. Through its many embassies abroad it pursued, as far as possible, constructive peace treaties with the major European powers.
”
”
Leslie J. MacFarlane (William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431 - 1514: The Struggle for Order)
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While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.
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Bill Browder (Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice)
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In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness.
An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength...
Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.
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Edward N. Luttwak
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theory. “The development of the general theory of relativity introduced Einstein to the power of abstract mathematical formalisms, notably that of tensor calculus,” writes the astrophysicist John Barrow. “A deep physical insight orchestrated the mathematics of general relativity, but in the years that followed the balance tipped the other way. Einstein’s search for a unified theory was characterized by a fascination with the abstract formalisms themselves.”44 In his Oxford lecture, Einstein began with a nod to empiricism: “All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.” But he immediately proceeded to emphasize the role that “pure reason” and logical deductions play. He conceded, without apology, that his success using tensor calculus to come up with the equations of general relativity had converted him to a faith in a mathematical approach, one that emphasized the simplicity and elegance of equations more than the role of experience. The fact that this method paid off in general relativity, he said, “justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.”45 That is an elegant—and also astonishingly interesting—creed. It captured the essence of Einstein’s thought during the decades when mathematical “simplicity” guided him in his search for a unified field theory. And it echoed the great Isaac Newton’s declaration in book 3 of the Principia: “Nature is pleased with simplicity.” But Einstein offered no proof of this creed, one that seems belied by modern particle physics.46 Nor did he ever fully explain what, exactly, he meant by mathematical simplicity. Instead, he merely asserted his deep intuition that this is the way God would make the universe. “I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other,” he claimed.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap - and refills are free. Being largely without flavor, it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.
This contrast can stand for the differences between America and Europe - differences nowadays asserted with increased frequency and not a little acrimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The mutual criticisms are familiar. To American commentators Europe is 'stagnant.' Its workers, employers, and regulations lack the flexibility and adaptability of their U.S. counterparts. The costs of European social welfare payments and public services are 'unsustainable.' Europe's aging and 'cossetted' populations are underproductive and self-satisfied. In a globalized world, the 'European social model' is a doomed mirage. This conclusion is typically drawn even by 'liberal' American observers, who differ from conservative (and neoconservative) critics only in deriving no pleasure from it.
To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in trouble and the 'American way of life' that cannot be sustained. The American pursuit of wealth, size, and abundance - as material surrogates for happiness - is aesthetically unpleasing and ecologically catastrophic. The American economy is built on sand (or, more precisely, other people's money). For many Americans the promise of a better future is a fading hope. Contemporary mass culture in the U.S. is squalid and meretricious. No wonder so many Americans turn to the church for solace.
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Tony Judt (Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century)
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But so far, we have only discussed applying quantum mechanics to the matter that moves within the gravity fields of Einstein’s theory. We have not discussed a much more difficult question: applying quantum mechanics to gravity itself in the form of gravitons. And this is where we encounter the biggest question of all: finding a quantum theory of gravity, which has frustrated the world’s great physicists for decades. So let us review what we have learned so far. We recall that when we apply the quantum theory to light, we introduce the photon, a particle of light. As this photon moves, it is surrounded by electric and magnetic fields that oscillate and permeate space and obey Maxwell’s equations. This is the reason why light has both particle-like and wavelike properties. The power of Maxwell’s equations lies in their symmetries—that is, the ability to turn electric and magnetic fields into each other. When the photon bumps into electrons, the equation that describes this interaction yields results that are infinite. However, using the bag of tricks devised by Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga, and many others, we are able to hide all the infinities. The resulting theory is called QED. Next, we applied this method to the nuclear force. We replaced the original Maxwell field with the Yang-Mills field, and replaced the electron with a series of quarks, neutrinos, etc. Then we introduced a new bag of tricks devised by ’t Hooft and his colleagues to eliminate all the infinities once again. So three of the four forces of the universe could now be unified into a single theory, the Standard Model. The resulting theory was not very pretty, since it was created by cobbling together the symmetries of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, but it worked. But when we apply this tried-and-true method to gravity, we have problems. In theory, a particle of gravity should be called the graviton. Similar to the photon, it is a point particle, and as it moves at the speed of light, it is surrounded by waves of gravity that obey Einstein’s equations. So far, so good. The problem occurs when the graviton bumps into other gravitons and also atoms. The resulting collision creates infinite answers. When one tries to apply the bag of tricks painfully formulated over the last seventy years, we find that they all fail. The greatest minds of the century have tried to solve this problem, but no one has been successful. Clearly, an entirely new approach must be used, since all the easy ideas have been investigated and discarded. We need something truly fresh and original. And that leads us to perhaps the most controversial theory in physics, string theory, which might just be crazy enough to be the theory of everything.
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Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
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Are you interested in medical marijuana but have no idea what it is? In recent years, there is a growing cry for the legalization of cannabis because of its proven health benefits. Read on as we try to look into the basics of the drug, what it really does to the human body, and how it can benefit you. Keep in mind that medical marijuana is not for everyone, so it’s important that you know how you’re going to be using it before you actually use it.
What is Marijuana?
Most likely, everyone has heard of marijuana and know what it is. However, many people hold misconceptions of marijuana because of inaccurate news and reporting, which has led to the drug being demonized—even when numerous studies have proven the health benefits of medical marijuana when it is used in moderation. (Even though yes, weed is also used as a recreational drug.)
First and foremost, medical marijuana is a plant. The drug that we know of is made of its shredded leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa or indica plant. Whatever its strain or form, all types of cannabis alter the mind and have some degree of psychoactivity. The plant is made of chemicals, with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) being the most powerful and causing the biggest impact on the brain.
How is Medical Marijuana Used?
There are several ways medical weed is used, depending on the user’s need, convenience and preference. The most common ways are in joint form, and also using bongs and vaporizers. But with its growing legalization, we’re seeing numerous forms of cannabis consumption methods being introduced (like oils, edibles, drinks and many more).
● Joint – Loose marijuana leaves are rolled into a cigarette. Sometimes, it’s mixed with tobacco to cut the intensity of the cannabis.
● Bong – This is a large water pipe that heats weed into smoke, which the user then inhales.
● Vaporizer – Working like small bongs, this is a small gadget that makes it easier to bring and use weed practically anywhere.
What’s Some Common Medical Marijuana Lingo?
We hear numerous terms from people when it comes to describing medical marijuana, and this list continually grows. An example of this is the growing number of marijuana nicknames which include pot, grass, reefer, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, ganja, boom, chronic and herb among many others. Below are some common marijuana terms and what they really mean.
● Bong – Water pipe that allows for weed to be inhaled
● Blunt – Hollowed-out cigar with the tobacco replaced with weed
● Hash – Mix of medical weed and tobacco
● Joint – Rolled cigarette-like way to consume medical cannabis
How Does It Feel to be High?
When consumed in moderation, weed’s common effects include a heightened sense of euphoria and well-being. You’ll most likely talk and laugh more. At its height, the high creates a feeling of pensive dreaminess that wears off and becomes sleepiness. In a group setting, there are commonly feelings of exaggerated physical and emotional sensitivity as well as strong feelings of camaraderie.
Medical marijuana also has a direct impact on a person’s speech patterns, which will get slower. There will be an impairment in your ability to carry out conversations. Cannabis also affects short-term memory. The usual high that one gets from cannabis can last for about two hours; when you overindulge, it can last for up to 12 hours.
Is Using Medical Marijuana Safe?
Medical cannabis is scientifically proven to be safer compared to alcohol or nicotine. Marijuana is slowly being legalized around the world because of its numerous health benefits, particularly among people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety and stress. It also has physical benefits, like helping in managing pain and the treatment of glaucoma and cancer.
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Kurt
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Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.
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Tom Boellstorff (Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method)
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Toilet training by 8 months and Elimination communication. My parents used the so-called “Elimination communication” method. It means that parents use timing, signals and cues to eliminate waste and can do that either from birth or later. In Russia, they start at 2- 3 months by holding the baby in squat or ‘potty’ position above a small basin, a toilet or a waterproof fabric. The position is very comfortable for babies. Parents always say “pees-pees” or “aaa-aaa,” so the baby learns these words very early. Usually, by 7-8 months, when a child can sit firmly, they introduce him to a potty. By that time, the kid really knows what “pees” and “aaa” mean and give signals to parents. One of the most detailed descriptions about EC is written by Ingrid Bauer in her book Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene. The secrets of this method are: 1. Learn baby’s cues and schedule. Daniella either freezes or loudly calls before she poops now, when she is 12 months. Before, her signals included pausing in the middle of activity, turning red, a sudden cry, staring or mimicking straining. If she is sleeping, she arches or gathers in her stomach when pees. These are very common signs for babies. Also, it is usual for them to go soon after waking up or eating, and sometimes after walks. 2. Teach baby to know your cues. As mentioned earlier, create some sound signals each time baby goes. It can be anything. Most common are “psss,” “pees,” “aaa,” “fuuu” or whistling. 3. Be persistent and punctual. As soon as you feel, see or hear the signals that baby needs to go, take him, hold him and let him ease himself! 4. Encourage! Make a big deal about correct signals by applauding. Little babies love applause. 5. There will be accidents. Whatever you do, there will be misses. From the child’s viewpoint, your baby will feel much better wearing cotton undies and escaping diaper rash. He will finally be potty trained much earlier.
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Julia Shayk (Baby's First Year: 61 secrets of successful feeding, sleeping, and potty training: Parenting Tips)
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A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.
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Jordan Ellenberg (How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking)
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It’s kind of like dating. If you are introduced to someone randomly in a bar, there is a chance it might work out, but you are more likely to have a higher success rate if you have a friend or family member introduce you.
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Geoff Smart (Who: The A Method for Hiring)
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What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. He introduces the insights that he learned from surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. He outlines methods to discover deep meaning and purpose in life. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. His 81 Zen teachings are the foundation for the religion of Taoism, aimed at understanding “the way of virtues.” Lao Tzu’s depth of teachings are complicated to decode and provide foundations for wisdom. Mind Gym by Gary Mack is a book that strips down the esoteric nature of applied sport psychology. Gary introduces a variety of mindset training principles and makes them extremely easy to understand and practice. What purchase of $ 100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? A book for my son: Inch and Miles, written by coach John Wooden. We read it together on a regular basis. The joy that I get from hearing him understand Coach Wooden’s insights is fantastically rewarding.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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So science and art introduce us into the intimacy of a matter which the one thinks and the other manipulates. From this standpoint the intellect would, in principle, finally reach an absolute. It would then be completely itself. Vague at the outset because it was only a presentiment of matter, it takes shape more clearly the more precisely it knows matter. But precise or vague, it is the attention that mind gives to matter. How then could mind still be intellect when it turns upon itself? We can give things whatever names we choose and I see no great objection, I repeat, to knowledge of the mind by the mind still being called intelligence, if one insists. But then it will be necessary to specify that there are two intellectual functions, the one the inverse of the other, for mind thinks mind only in climbing back up the slope of habits acquired in contact with matter, and these habits are what one currently calls intellectual tendencies. Is it not better to designate by another name a function which certainly is not what one ordinarily calls intelligence? I call it intuition. It represents the attention that the mind gives to itself, over and above, while it is fixed upon matter, its object. This supplementary attention can be methodically cultivated and developed.
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Henri Bergson (The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics)
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Contour drawing, introduced as a teaching method by the revered art teacher Kimon Nicolaides in his 1941 book, The Natural Way to Draw, is still widely used by art teachers.
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Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence: The Definitive 4th Edition)
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PHARMAKEUS, magician or sorcerer, is applied to Socrates himself by his accusers and enemies. Is Socrates working by enchantment? Is the sorcery of the undecidable inside philosophy, inescapably part of philosophical method?
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Jeff Collins (Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0))
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Face Connection With this method you make a link between the name and an outstanding feature on the person’s face. Every person’s face is unique and every face has an outstanding feature. Let me give you an example. Imagine you are introduced to a woman and the first thing you notice about her face is that she has striking blue eyes. That will then be her outstanding feature. When she gives you her name you will then have a place to put the name. Imagine she says her name is Janice. You then make an image of the name: Janice sounds like chain ice. You then make the connection and think of a chain of ice flying out of her blue eyes.
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Kevin Horsley (Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive (Mental Mastery, #1))
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NASA had convened a conference to explore the benefit of a new kind of training: Crew Resource Management. The primary focus was on communication. First officers were taught assertiveness procedures. The mnemonic that has been used to improve the assertiveness of junior members of the crew in aviation is called P.A.C.E. (Probe, Alert, Challenge, Emergency).* Captains, who for years had been regarded as big chiefs, were taught to listen, acknowledge instructions, and clarify ambiguity. The time perception problem was tackled through a more structured division of responsibilities. Checklists, already in operation, were expanded and improved. The checklists have been established as a means of preventing oversights in the face of complexity. But they also flatten the hierarchy. When pilots and co-pilots talk to each other, introduce themselves, and go over the checklist, they open channels of communication. It makes it more likely the junior partner will speak up in an emergency. This solves the so-called activation problem. Various versions of the new training methods were immediately trialed in simulators. At each stage, the new ideas were challenged, rigorously tested, and examined at their limits. The most effective proposals were then rapidly integrated into airlines around the world. After a terrible set of accidents in the 1970s, the rate of crashes began to decline.
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
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Bernays developed a thoroughgoing critique of book publishing, which he accused of underpricing its product. But he also came up with an ingenious formula for transforming the industry: bookshelves. “Where there are bookshelves, there will be books,” he confidently asserted. Bookshelves were alien to most American homes, a luxury reserved for Jay Gatsby and his kind. Bernays methodically went about introducing bookshelves to the middle class. He persuaded architects to include them in their plans and encouraged stories in magazines (House Beautiful, American Home, Woman’s Home Companion) that celebrated built-in shelving. The shelves were obviously an adornment, but also more than that. The presence of books in the household was implicitly meant to signify social advancement—books were hallmarks of the ascendant professional class, whose jobs demanded intellectual skills; they were consumer goods that indicated purchasing power.
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Franklin Foer (World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech)
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He served as a cryptanalyst with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and returned to River-bank to write an 87-page tract that revolutionized cryptanalysis by introducing statistical methods for the first time.
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David Kahn (The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet)
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1. Introduce yourself and the big idea: 5 minutes. 2. Explain the budget and secret sauce: 10 minutes. 3. Offer the deal: 2 minutes. 4. Stack frames for a hot cognition: 3 minutes. Phase
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Oren Klaff (Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal)
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The crew advised us to learn the locator and security identifier methods that were so common on Earth. In most nations we would have no choice, but in a few we could choose to abstain. When I asked Will Nelson why those systems had been developed, he told me that the coded anklets had been introduced as a more convenient version of credit cards and had soon become status symbols. Someone equipped with an anklet could receive phone calls anywhere and could pick up merchandise in a store and walk out with it, free of the delay of waiting in a checkout line. As another visible sign of special privilege, the anklet wearer could walk directly on board a plane without stopping either at a ticket counter or a gate. It was only some time later, Nelson told me, that the records of position made possible by the anklets became legal evidence in courts of law. His advice to me was direct: unless I just couldn't stand the notion, I would be a lot better off letting the immigration guards at Freeport Seven put an anklet on me. If I didn't, I would be annoyed by time-wasting delays at every national border, and I'd be hassled at every residential town, museum, and shopping enclave.
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Gerard K. O'Neill (2081)
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Start with what’s in your gut, feel something for what you see. Then you go to the ropes, begin study in earnest, methodically introducing foundation or academic drawing techniques while honoring the emotions that drove you to the drawing board in the first place. This is how I approach drawing, how I teach drawing.
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Yvonne Wakefield (Suitcase Filled with Nails)
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it’s precisely the infinite that casts light upon how the brain thinks, and how clever it is in showing us something that seems real when it’s merely an abstraction, namely that brain introduced or employed to great effect those methods of distortion, that dislocation
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László Krasznahorkai (Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming)
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To begin the discussion of the Tipping Point, I’ll start with a prominent strategy, “Invite-Only,” that is often used to suck in a large network through viral growth. Another method to tip over a market is with a “Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network” strategy. Take Dropbox, for instance, which is initially adopted by many people for file backup and keeping files synced up between work and home computers—this is the tool. But eventually, a more advanced and stickier use case emerges to share folders with colleagues—this is the network. And if that doesn’t work, some products can always just spend money to build out their network, with a strategy of just “Paying Up for Launch.” For many networked products that touch transactions like marketplaces, teams can just subsidize demand and spend millions to stimulate activity, whether that’s in paying content creators for your social network, or subsidizing driver earnings in rideshare. If the hard side of the network isn’t yet activated, a team can just fill in their gaps themselves, using the technique of “Flintstoning”—as Reddit did, submitting links and content until eventually adding automation and community features for scale. In the end, all of these strategies require enormous creativity. And to close out the Tipping Point section of the book, I introduce Uber’s core ethos of “Always Be Hustlin’”—describing the creativity and decentralized set of teams, all with its own strategies that were localized to each region. Sometimes adding the fifth or one hundredth network requires creativity, product engagements, and tactical changes. In the goal of reaching the Tipping Point, teams must be fluid to build out a broad network of networks.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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Structured methods for learning Method Uses Useful for Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys Learning about culture and morale. Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. If not, consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions. Useful for managers at all levels if the analysis is available specifically for your unit or group.
Usefulness depends on the granularity of the collection and analysis. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously. Structured sets of interviews with slices of the organization or unit Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. You can interview people at the same level in different departments (a horizontal slice) or bore down through multiple levels (a vertical slice). Whichever dimension you choose, ask everybody the same questions, and look for similarities and differences in people’s responses. Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds.
Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. Focus groups Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and identify who displays leadership. Fostering discussion promotes deeper insight. Most useful for managers of large groups of people who perform a similar function, such as sales managers or plant managers.
Can be useful for senior managers as a way of getting quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. Analysis of critical past decisions Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision, and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with the people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said. Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. Process analysis Examining interactions among departments or functions and assessing the efficiency of a process. Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a cross-functional group to chart the process and identify bottlenecks and problems. Most useful for managers of units or groups in which the work of multiple functional specialties must be integrated.
Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes. Plant and market tours Learning firsthand from people close to the product. Plant tours let you meet production personnel informally and listen to their concerns. Meetings with sales and production staff help you assess technical capabilities. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. Most useful for managers of business units. Pilot projects Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Although these insights are not the primary purpose of pilot projects, you can learn a lot from how the organization or group responds to your pilot initiatives. Useful for managers at all levels. The size of the pilot projects and their impact will increase as you rise through the organization.
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Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
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There are two methods of delivering a blow. First is a boxing-like movement, and the second is the traditional karate strike. While equal in force, the boxing-style strike has a greater range and is easier to execute. The boxing-style strike uses gravity and shift of weight to support the strike, while the traditional karate-style strike uses a sudden tightening of your body’s muscles to deliver a short blow. The longer range of the boxing blow facilitates greater acceleration to a higher speed and is more efficient in creating a knockout effect. The traditional karate-style strike is more suitable for breaking boards of wood, but the composition of wood fibers is quite different from the human body's protective tissues. The traditional straight karate strike takes longer to execute and requires slight preparation. Since even a split second is of the essence and the force used is more efficient with the boxing style, it has won popularity in the martial arts field. From the split second you decide to move your body and deliver the strike, all you need is to aim at the opponent’s chin. You then need to accelerate your arm to maximum speed, and maintain that speed as your fist lodges in your opponent’s face. The opponent’s skull will then shake the brain and nerves to a concussion. The ancient Olympics had fighting sports. Sparta is believed to have had boxing around 500 BC. Spartans used boxing to strengthen their fighters’ resilience. Boxing matches were not held since Spartans feared that it would lead to internal competitions, which could reduce the morale of the losers. Sparta did not want low morale on the battlefield. For many years the question of Bodhidharma’s existence has been a matter of controversy among historians. A legend prevails that the evolution of karate began around 5 BC when Bodhidharma arrived to the Shaolin temple in China from India, and taught Zen Buddhism. He introduced a set of exercises designed to strengthen the mind and body. This marked the roots of Shaolin-style temple boxing. This type of Chinese boxing, also called kung fu, concentrates on full-body energy blows and improving acrobatic level. Indian breathing techniques are incorporated, providing control of the muscles of the whole body while striking. This promotes self-resistance that helps achieve balance and force when striking and kicking. Krav Maga shows that it is not the most efficient approach. It is certainly forceful, but cannot be mastered quickly enough, and also does not promote a natural and fast reach to the opponent's pressure points, nor does it adhere to the principle of reaction time.
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Boaz Aviram (Krav Maga: Use Your Body as a Weapon)
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2. If these figures express units of string lengths, then Anu is,
with 60 units, the longest string, the bass note. Sin is one octave
below Ištar and one above Anu. The ratios of string lengths are thus
in reciprocal relation to the ratios of frequencies.
It seems appropriate at this point to introduce the musical cent
or centième since it is the most tangible unit of tonometry. The
conversion of ratios into musical cents consists in multiplying the
log to base 10 of the quotient of the division between the
denominator and numerator of the ratio by the constant 3986.314.
This method produces a scale composed of 1200 units in which
equal semitones measure 100 cents. Thus, 1/1 = 0 cents; 2/1= 1200
cents, the octave; 9/8 = 204 cents, the Pythagorean tone; 3/4 = 498,
the just fourth; 2/3 = 702, the just fifth, etc.
From this we see that the gods’ respective numbers are
contained in the span of the top octave. Anu, Enlil, Ea and Sin
provide with the tonal infrastructure for the Babylonian scale as
shown below:
SIN EA ENLIL ANU
0 498 884 1200
Fundamental Fourth Sixth Octave
Anu/Enlil 60/50 = 6/5 = 316 = just minor third
Enlil/Ea 50/40 = 5/4 = 386 = just major third
Ea/Sin 40/30 = 4/3 = 498 = just fourth
Sin/Šamaš 30/20 = 3/2 = 702 = just fifth
Šamaš/Bel 20/10 = 2/1 = 1200 = octave.
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Richard Dumbrill (Götterzahlen and scale structure)
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I want to introduce you to a method for approaching the Word of God.
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William Hendricks (Living By the Book: The Art and Science of Reading the Bible)
“
Preparing agendas Agendas serve several purposes. The main ones are keeping the meeting running in the correct sequence and covering the right topics. However, another major role of the agenda is to let the meeting participants know what the meeting will be about and also what it won’t cover. If you are the person putting the agenda together and distributing it you’ll need to work closely with the chair of the meeting to make sure the agenda is correct. You’ll also need to get a list of who to circulate the agenda to, which may include some people who are not going to attend the meeting. Agendas enable attendees to prepare for a meeting and should, therefore, be circulated in good time beforehand. You need to be aware of this for your planning. Remember, the agenda is also your first step to excellent preparation. Styles of agenda As you become more experienced, you can probably draft an agenda for the meeting. Until then, either ask the chairperson for topics or request suggestions from attendees. This draft can then be agreed with the chairperson. The style of agendas can vary enormously. It is usually possible to find the agenda for a previous, similar meeting and use this format for the next meeting. If there are several items on an agenda then number them. If an individual agenda item has more than one part then consider sub-section numbers, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc. Some agendas are very informal; they do not need to mention minutes of previous meetings or any other business. Below is an example of an agenda for an ad hoc meeting. From: A Manager
Sent: Friday 23 July 16:47
To: All staff
Subject: NEW IT SYSTEM On 30 September, a new IT system is being introduced within the department. Training will be given to all staff as the method of working will be different. In order that we can decide the best way to implement this training, I would like you to attend a brief meeting in my office at 9am on Wednesday 4th September. I expect the meeting to last about half an hour. Please let me know immediately if, for any reason, you are unable to attend. Tip: Always include the day of the week with the date, it helps avoid errors. Here is an example of a more formal agenda: EXPERT WINDOWS HEALTH AND SAFETY COMMITTEE
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Heather Baker (Successful Minute Taking and Writing - How to Prepare, Organize and Write Minutes of Meetings and Agendas - Learn to Take Notes and Write Minutes of Meetings - Your Role as the Minute Taker)
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In 2005, a computer expert named Ian Grigg, working at a company called Systemics, introduced a trial system he called “triple-entry bookkeeping.” Grigg worked in the field of cryptography, a science that dates way back to ancient times, when coded language to share “ciphers,” or secrets, first arose. Ever since Alan Turing’s calculating machine cracked the German military’s Enigma code, cryptography has underpinned much of what we’ve done in the computing age. Without it we wouldn’t be able to share private information across the Internet—such as our transactions within a bank’s Web site—without revealing it to unwanted prying eyes. As our computing capacity has exponentially grown, so too has the capacity of cryptography to impact our lives. For his part, Grigg believed it would lead to a programmable record-keeping system that would make fraud virtually impossible. In a nutshell, the concept took the existing, double-entry bookkeeping system and added a third book: the independent, open ledger that’s secured by cryptographic methods so that no one can change it. Grigg saw it as a way to combat fraud. The way Grigg described it, users would maintain their own, double-entry accounts, but added to these digitized books would be another function, essentially a time stamp, a cryptographically secured, signed receipt of every transaction. (The concept of a “signature” in cryptography means something far more scientific than a handwritten scrawl; it entails combining two associated numbers, or “keys”—one publicly known, the other private—to mathematically prove that the entity making the signature is uniquely authorized to do so.)
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
“
Recognizing that the reasoning individual is far more likely to be carried away by some worthless passing fashion than he is to discover a new and valuable truth, they prefer to uphold ideas and behaviors that have been tested for generations and have stood their ground. And where they introduce alterations, they do so according to the method of constructive reasoning.
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Yoram Hazony (Conservatism: A Rediscovery)
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The method now commonly practiced to restore old writings, is by wetting them with an infusion of galls in white wine.
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David Nunes Carvalho (Forty Centuries of Ink or, a chronological narrative concerning ink and its backgrounds, introducing incidental observations and deductions, parallels ... to-day and an epitome of chemico-legal ink.)
“
What is zero? It is the number of elements in the class nil. And what is the class nil? It is the class which contains none.
To define zero as nil and nil as none is really an abuse of the wealth of language, and so [Logicists] introduced an improvement into the definition, ... which means in English: zero is the number of the objects that satisfy a condition that is never fulfilled. But as never means in no case, I do not see that any very great progress has been made.
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Henri Poincaré (Science and Method)
“
Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865, was referring to the history of the use of coal; once the Watt engine was introduced, which greatly increased the efficiency of coal burning as energy creation, the use of coal grew far beyond the initial reduction in the amount needed for the activity that existed before the time of the improvement. The rebound effect of this paradox can be mitigated only by adding other factors to the uptake of the more efficient method, such as requirements for reinvestment, taxes, and regulations. So they say in economics texts. The paradox is visible in the history of technological improvements of all kinds. Better car miles per gallon, more miles driven. Faster computer times, more time spent on computers. And so on ad infinitum. At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere. And yet many still exhibit this naiveté. Associated with this lacuna in current
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Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
“
In proposing such an extreme approach Einstein astoundingly brought up no experimental data. Instead he argued for the particles’ existence on aesthetic grounds, thus introducing into twentieth-century physics an entirely new method of reasoning.
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Arthur I. Miller (Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc)
“
These two ways to incorporate mindfulness sit well with art therapy: first, by incorporating meditative or contemplative methods to facilitate relaxation and deepen the inward turn for connecting with deeper consciousness in all phases of the art task; second, by introducing cognitive skills to bring clients into the present moment with what they are feeling. Not how (guilt, anger, shame), but what (I feel helpless, unworthy, agitated). Cognitive mindfulness also provides a skillful means for dialoguing with art, where remaining open and image-centered may result in deeper insights.
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Barbara Jean Davis (Mindful Art Therapy: A Foundation for Practice)
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Brücke was also important as one or the scientists who introduced the methods of chemistry and physics into medical and biological study. His influence in linguistics may have added to the practice of analysing and classifying languages, as well as sets of sounds and forms, much like the objects of study in these sciences.
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Winfred P. Lehmann (Theoretical Bases Of Indo European Linguistics)
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Doesn’t Kanban mean abandoning iterations and other elements of Scrum? This is a serious misconception. Kanban is the start with what you do now method; we would be the first to warn you not to drop aspects of your current process in an uncontrolled fashion. However, it would be dishonest of us to pretend that your pursuit of flow won’t at some point test your commitment to timeboxes, story points, and the like. How you and your organization deal with that will be a matter of choice.
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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Westcliff turned to the black-haired man beside him. “Hunt, I would like to introduce Matthew Swift—the American I mentioned to you earlier. Swift, this is Mr. Simon Hunt.”
They shook hands firmly. Hunt was five to ten years older than Matthew and looked as if he could be mean as hell in a fight. A bold, confident man who reputedly loved to skewer pretensions and upper-class affectations.
“I’ve heard of your accomplishments with Consolidated Locomotive Works,” Matthew told Hunt. “There is a great deal of interest in New York regarding your merging of British craftsmanship with American manufacturing methods.”
Hunt smiled sardonically. “Much as I would like to take all the credit, modesty compels me to reveal that Westcliff had something to do with it. He and his brother-in-law are my business partners.”
“Obviously the combination is highly successful,” Matthew replied.
Hunt turned to Westcliff. “He has a talent for flattery,” he remarked. “Can we hire him?”
Westcliff’s mouth twitched with amusement. “I’m afraid my father-in-law would object. Mr. Swift’s talents are needed to built a factory and start a company office in Bristol.”
Matthew decided to nudge the conversation in a different direction. “I’ve read of the recent movement in Parliament for nationalization of the British railroad industry,” he said to Westcliff. “I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, my lord.”
“Good God, don’t get him started on that,” Hunt said.
The subject caused a scowl to appear on Westcliff’s brow. “The last thing the public needs is for government to take control of the industry. God save us from yet more interference from politicians. The government would run the railroads as inefficiently as they do everything else. And the monopoly would stifle the industry’s ability to compete, resulting in higher taxes, not to mention—”
“Not to mention,” Hunt interrupted slyly, “the fact that Westcliff and I don’t want the government cutting into our future profits.”
Westcliff gave him a stern glance. “I happen to have the public’s best interest in mind.”
“How fortunate,” Hunt commented, “that in this case what is best for the public also happens to be best for you.”
Matthew bit back a smile.
Rolling his eyes, Westcliff told Matthew, “As you can see, Mr. Hunt overlooks no opportunity to mock me.”
“I mock everyone,” Hunt said. “You just happen to be the most readily available target.
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Lisa Kleypas (Scandal in Spring (Wallflowers, #4))
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In 1856 the state of Victoria, which had been carved out of New South Wales in 1851, and the state of Tasmania would become the first places in the world to introduce an effective secret ballot in elections, which stopped vote buying and coercion. Today we still call the standard method of achieving secrecy in voting in elections the Australian ballot.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
“
the next time you are surprised and frustrated by what looks like a failure of an individual or a failure of the process, ask if it could be explained instead as a failure to collaborate effectively. Turn
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
“
In order to penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature, it is necessary that both notions and axioms be derived from things by a more sure and guarded way, and that a method of intellectual operation be introduced altogether better and more certain. 19. There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one files from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried. 20. The understanding left to itself takes the same course (namely the former) which it takes in accordance with logical order. For the mind longs to spring up to positions of higher generality, that it may find rest there, and so after a little while wearies of experiment. But this evil is increased by logic, because of the order and solemnity of its disputations. 21. The understanding left to itself, in a sober, patient, and grave mind, especially if it is not hindered by received doctrines, tries a little that other way, which is the right one, but with little progress; for the understanding, unless directed and assisted, is a thing unequal, and quite unfit to contend with the obscurity of things. 22. Both ways set out from the senses and particulars, and rest in the lightest generalities, but the difference between them is infinite. For the one just glances at experiment and particulars in passing, the other dwells duly and orderly among them. The one, again, begins at once by establishing certain abstract and useless generalities, the other rises by gradual steps to that which is prior and better known in the order of nature.
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Roger Ariew (Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources)
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This little book aims to introduce the Thai language. It is intended for those who know nothing about it, but are keen to learn. We use the method of selecting 100 key words, and using these to make up sentences and present a range of expressions, so that you can “say 1000 things.
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Stuart O. Robson (Instant Thai: How to Express 1,000 Different Ideas with Just 100 Key Words and Phrases! (Thai Phrasebook) (Instant Phrasebook Series))
“
Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 221-228 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:41:32 Those who are introduced to the Quran only through the media, generally have the impression that the Quran is a book of jihad, and jihad to them is an attempt to achieve one’s goal by means of violence. But this idea is based on a misunderstanding. Anyone who reads the Quran for himself will easily appreciate that its message has nothing to do with violence. The Quran is, from beginning to end, a book which promulgates peace and in no way countenances violence. It is true that jihad is one of the teachings of the Quran. But jihad, taken in its correct sense, is the name of peaceful struggle rather than of any kind of violent action. The Quranic concept of jihad is expressed in the following verse, ‘Do greater jihad (i.e strive more strenuously) with the help of this [Quran]’ (25:52). Obviously, the Quran is not a weapon, but a book which gives us an introduction to the divine ideology of peaceful struggle. The method of such a struggle, according to the Quran, is ‘to speak to them a word to reach their very soul’ (4:63). ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Note at location 228 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:41:45 jihad ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 232-235 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:43:12 It is true that there are certain verses in the Quran, which convey injunctions similar to the following, ‘Slay them wherever you find them’ (2:191). Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is totally untrue. Such verses relate, in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 239-244 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:44:16 This division of commands into different categories is a natural one and is found in all religious books. For instance, the Gita, the holy book of the Hindus, pertains to wisdom and moral values. Yet along with this is the exhortation of Krishna to Arjuna, encouraging him to fight (Bhagavad Gita, 3:30). This does not mean that believers in the Gita should wage wars all the time. Mahatma Gandhi, after all, derived his philosophy of non-violence from the same Gita. The exhortation to wage war in the Gita applies only to exceptional cases where circumstances leave no choice. But for general day-to-day existence it gives the same peaceful commands as derived from it by Mahatma Gandhi. ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 244-245 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:44:39 Similarly, Jesus Christ said, ‘Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ (Matthew, 10:34). ==========
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Anonymous
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The best leaders are in the business of growing leadership in others, and they do not limit their investments to only the areas they control.
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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making the mental shift away from doing what is asked, taking orders, fulfilling requests, meeting requirements, and so on, and reorienting the process toward discovering and meeting needs.
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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Too much work coupled with poor quality—is that a combination you recognize?
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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2012 Continuation of My Message to Andy Our simultaneous out-of-body experience was a once-in-a-lifetime one. To be honest with you, Andy, since that “perfect” day at the Keukenhof Gardens, I have not achieved that heavenly occurrence again. Do you recall our subsequent Zentology sessions with Monsieur Dubois? He went to great lengths to describe what he saw when he found us at the poppy field? His words rang clearly in my mind. This was how he explained our “astral projection.” He said, “One of the reasons I’m interested in spiritual travel is that it provides a unique means of approaching distant and extraordinary states of transcendent awareness; especially that of sexual mysticism. This sui generis experience exposes the seeker to a series of spiritual lessons to his or her identity, therefore providing the soul the freedom to journey to various non-physical dimensions. These lessons introduce the traveler to a variety of psychic and metaphysical states, where individual freedom and spiritual awareness are heightened to insurmountable ecstasies. In addition, astral projection provides an inner laboratory where the seeker can experiment with techniques and methods of moving through our limited psychic consciousness, delving into distant realities, what we spiritualists call ‘exploring the heavenly states.’ We loosely term the experience ‘Nirvana,’ turning faith and hope into confidence and spiritual enlightenment. He continued, “That brings me to Sahasrāra chakra. This is the seat of the parabindu (the supreme bindu), the merging of Kundalini Shakti and Shiva, which emanate from this location. The liberation you and Andy attained is what Hindus believe to be the highest unification of the individual with the universe. “Above Brahma-randhra (‘the cave of Brahma’) is a hole in the crown of the head. It is through this opening that the soul escapes after death. This is the Sahasrāra chakra. When the soul separates from the physical body, the Brahma-randhra bursts open, freeing the soul from its confines through the ‘Door to Pure Consciousness’ or the ‘Door of Liberation.’ The Hindus call this perforation – Kapala Moksha.
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Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
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If unpredictability is a constant presence, we need to design for resilience and adaptability. Complexity
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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Managers don’t determine how the system behaves; they merely interact with it.
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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Is Kanban, in the words of the manifesto, a way of developing software? No. We
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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Power in ALEC does not come from political acumen, it comes from brute financial force ... After corporate members use ALEC to draft legislation, the 'model' bills go home with state legislators. The ALEC bills are introduced, debated and voted on by other lawmakers who think the proposals are democratic creations. The method is ruthlessly efficient and effective.
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Will Potter (Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege)
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My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to scepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. They were only one step out of poverty. But when I announced that I wanted to be an astronomer, I received unqualified support - even if they (as I) had only the most rudimentary idea of what an astronomer does. They never suggested that, all things considered, it might be better to be a doctor or a lawyer.
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Anonymous
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Meanwhile, survey respondents can choose the method
of taking the survey (phone, e-mail, smart phone) and
the visit survey system was introduced for the survey of
expert groups to diversify the methods of the survey
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출장안마초희넷
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The limitations of these methods make it easier to understand why so many women might leap at the prospect of removing hair through prolonged exposure to radiation. First introduced by professional physicians in the late 1890s, x-ray hair removal offered several distinct advantages over other techniques. To begin, x-rays were undeniably effective at removing hair, as even the staunchest critics grudgingly admitted.37
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Rebecca M. Herzig (Plucked: A History of Hair Removal)
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My practical work had satisfied me that the methods of war communism forced on us by the conditions of civil war were completely exhausted, and that to revive our economic life the element of personal interest must be introduced at all costs; in other words, we had to restore the home market in some degree.
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Anonymous
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The Methodists aim at a methodical conversion that carries immediate certainty with it. They place men before the law, cause them to see their utter sinfulness and terrible guilt, and frighten them with the terrors of the Lord. And after they have thus brought them under the terrifying influence of the law, they at once introduce them to the full and free gospel of redemption, which merely calls for a willing acceptance of Christ as their Saviour. In a single moment sinners are transported on waves of emotion from the deepest sorrow into the most exalted joy. And this sudden change carries with it an immediate assurance of redemption. He who believes, is also sure that he is redeemed. This does not mean, however, that he is also certain of ultimate salvation. This is a certainty to which the consistent Methodist cannot attain since he believes in a falling away of the saints.
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Louis Berkhof (Systematic Theology)
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Phlebotomy. Even the word sounds archaic—and that’s nothing compared to the slow, expensive, and inefficient reality of drawing blood and having it tested. As a college sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes envisioned a way to reinvent old-fashioned phlebotomy and, in the process, usher in an era of comprehensive superfast diagnosis and preventive medicine. That was a decade ago. Holmes, now 30, dropped out of Stanford and founded a company called Theranos with her tuition money. Last fall it finally introduced its radical blood-testing service in a Walgreens pharmacy near the company headquarters in Palo Alto, California. (The plan is to roll out testing centers nationwide.) Instead of vials of blood—one for every test needed—Theranos requires only a pinprick and a drop of blood. With that they can perform hundreds of tests, from standard cholesterol checks to sophisticated genetic analyses. The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods. The implications are mind-blowing. With inexpensive and easy access to the information running through their veins, people will have an unprecedented window on their own health. And a new generation of diagnostic tests could allow them to head off serious afflictions from cancer to diabetes to heart disease. None of this would work if Theranos hadn’t figured out how to make testing transparent and inexpensive. The company plans to charge less than 50 percent of the standard Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates. And unlike the rest of the testing industry, Theranos lists its prices on its website: blood typing, $2.05; cholesterol, $2.99; iron, $4.45. If all tests in the US were performed at those kinds of prices, the company says, it could save Medicare $98 billion and Medicaid $104 billion over the next decade.
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Anonymous
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It was Che’s dictum that it was better to execute one hundred innocent men, than to allow one clever traitor to live to challenge the revolution. In the furtherance of the glorious cause of promoting social justice, the ends always justified the means. A generation later in South Africa, Winnie Mandela had updated the method of execution for greater public impact. At her orders, her followers had introduced the gasoline-filled automobile tire “necklace” to the world, punishing suspected collaborators with the most agonizing death imaginable.
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Matthew Bracken (Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (The Enemies Trilogy, #2))
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Exactly why the sources were intertwined in this way is unclear. Exploring this issue really involves asking two questions: (1) Why were all of these sources retained, rather than just retaining the latest or most authoritative one? (2) Why were they combined in this odd way, rather than being left as complete documents that would be read side by side, much like the model of the four different and separate gospels, which introduce the Christian Bible or New Testament?
Since there is no direct evidence going back to the redaction of the Torah, these issues may be explored only in a most tentative fashion, with plausible rather than definitive answers. Probably the earlier documents had a certain prestige and authority in ancient Israel, and could not simply be discarded.9 Additionally, the redaction of the Torah from a variety of sources most likely represents an attempt to enfranchise those groups who held those particular sources
as authoritative. Certainly the Torah does not contain all of the early traditions of Israel. Yet, it does contain the traditions that the redactor felt were important for bringing together a core group of Israel (most likely during the Babylonian exile of 586-538 B.C.E.).
The mixing of these sources by intertwining them preserved a variety of sources and perspectives. (Various methods of intertwining were used-the preferred method was to interleave large blocks of material, as in the initial chapters of Genesis. However, when this would have caused narrative difficulties, as in the flood story or the plagues of Exodus, the sources were interwoven-several verses from one source, followed by several verses from the other.) More than one hundred years ago, the great American scholar G. F Moore called attention to the second-century Christian scholar Tatian, who composed the Diatessaron.10 This work is a harmony of the Gospels, where most of the four canonical gospels are combined into a single work, exactly the same way that scholars propose the four Torah strands of J, E, D, and P have been combined. This, along with other ancient examples, shows that even though the classical model posited by source criticism may seem strange to us, it reflects a way that people wrote literature in antiquity
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Marc Zvi Brettler (How to Read the Bible)
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Manage Your Team’s Collective Time Time management is a group endeavor. The payoff goes far beyond morale and retention. ILLUSTRATION: JAMES JOYCE by Leslie Perlow | 1461 words Most professionals approach time management the wrong way. People who fall behind at work are seen to be personally failing—just as people who give up on diet or exercise plans are seen to be lacking self-control or discipline. In response, countless time management experts focus on individual habits, much as self-help coaches do. They offer advice about such things as keeping better to-do lists, not checking e-mail incessantly, and not procrastinating. Of course, we could all do a better job managing our time. But in the modern workplace, with its emphasis on connectivity and collaboration, the real problem is not how individuals manage their own time. It’s how we manage our collective time—how we work together to get the job done. Here is where the true opportunity for productivity gains lies. Nearly a decade ago I began working with a team at the Boston Consulting Group to implement what may sound like a modest innovation: persuading each member to designate and spend one weeknight out of the office and completely unplugged from work. The intervention was aimed at improving quality of life in an industry that’s notorious for long hours and a 24/7 culture. The early returns were positive; the initiative was expanded to four teams of consultants, and then to 10. The results, which I described in a 2009 HBR article, “Making Time Off Predictable—and Required,” and in a 2012 book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone , were profound. Consultants on teams with mandatory time off had higher job satisfaction and a better work/life balance, and they felt they were learning more on the job. It’s no surprise, then, that BCG has continued to expand the program: As of this spring, it has been implemented on thousands of teams in 77 offices in 40 countries. During the five years since I first reported on this work, I have introduced similar time-based interventions at a range of companies—and I have come to appreciate the true power of those interventions. They put the ownership of how a team works into the hands of team members, who are empowered and incentivized to optimize their collective time. As a result, teams collaborate better. They streamline their work. They meet deadlines. They are more productive and efficient. Teams that set a goal of structured time off—and, crucially, meet regularly to discuss how they’ll work together to ensure that every member takes it—have more open dialogue, engage in more experimentation and innovation, and ultimately function better. CREATING “ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY” DAYS One of the insights driving this work is the realization that many teams stick to tried-and-true processes that, although familiar, are often inefficient. Even companies that create innovative products rarely innovate when it comes to process. This realization came to the fore when I studied three teams of software engineers working for the same company in different cultural contexts. The teams had the same assignments and produced the same amount of work, but they used very different methods. One, in Shenzen, had a hub-and-spokes org chart—a project manager maintained control and assigned the work. Another, in Bangalore, was self-managed and specialized, and it assigned work according to technical expertise. The third, in Budapest, had the strongest sense of being a team; its members were the most versatile and interchangeable. Although, as noted, the end products were the same, the teams’ varying approaches yielded different results. For example, the hub-and-spokes team worked fewer hours than the others, while the most versatile team had much greater flexibility and control over its schedule. The teams were completely unaware that their counterparts elsewhere in the world were managing their work differently. My research provide
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Anonymous
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relationships between and among groups of students, faculty, and others across campus or around the world? That larger challenge-to harness and focus the participatory learning methods in which our students are so accomplished-is only now beginning to be introduced and typically in relatively rare and isolated formats.
Most university education, certainly, is founded on ideas of individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement
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Cathy N. Davidson (The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age)
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If “improve collaboratively” is about how change is driven, then “evolve experimentally” is about how it is conducted.
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Mike Burrows (Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact)
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Advisors ask me what it takes to be referable. My response is simple: It all comes down to trust. Clients and strategic partners have to trust that endorsing you will reflect positively on them in turn, but what does that mean, and how can you predictably and methodically create trust? Let’s revisit the foundation of refer-ability, summed up in the four Cs.: Credentials – Your skills as a professional advisor in terms of your judgment and the solutions you provide give you the credibility needed to foster trust. Consistency – People crave consistency and your professional deployment of best practices helps you meet and exceed the expectations you set for your clients. Chemistry – The rapport you develop using F.O.R.M., as well as your sincere and holistic interest in your clients’ lives, creates comfort and chemistry. Congruency – Doing what you say you will and conducting yourself as a professional consultant rather than as a salesperson means that you can attract rather than having to chase new business. Many elite advisors who deploy the Four C’s are still underwhelmed with the quality and quantity of referrals they see. The reason is simple - while they have laid down a foundation for refer-ability, they still find themselves in the red-zone but not in the Promised Land. The last piece of the puzzle is to create awareness for the concept of referrals in their on-going Communication (the fifth C) with their clients and rain-makers. Just because you are referable due to your professional conduct, that doesn’t mean that it will occur to your clients that they should introduce a friend to you. You have to continually communicate your value to them so that they make the connection.
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Duncan MacPherson (The Advisor Playbook: Regain Liberation and Order in your Personal and Professional Life)