Modelling Introduction Quotes

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I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.
Alain Badiou (The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics (Transmission))
We pose only those questions whose answers are the pre-given conditions of the questions themselves.
Alain Badiou (The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics (Transmission))
LLMs represent some of the most promising yet ethically fraught technologies ever conceived. Their development plots a razor’s edge between utopian and dystopian potentials depending on our choices moving forward.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
For businesses, it is vital to embed ethical checkpoints in workflows, allowing models to be stopped if unacceptable risks emerge. The apparent ease of building capable LLMs with existing foundations can mask serious robustness gaps. However unrealistic the scenario may seem under pressure, responsible LLM work requires pragmatic commitments to stop if red lines are crossed during risk assessment.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
The lack of transparency regarding training data sources and the methods used can be problematic. For example, algorithmic filtering of training data can skew representations in subtle ways. Attempts to remove overt toxicity by keyword filtering can disproportionately exclude positive portrayals of marginalized groups. Responsible data curation requires first acknowledging and then addressing these complex tradeoffs through input from impacted communities.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
Every piece of data ingested by a model plays a role in determining its behavior. The fairness, transparency, and representativeness of the data reflect directly in the LLMs' outputs. Ignoring ethical considerations in data sourcing can inadvertently perpetuate harmful stereotypes, misinformation, or gaps in knowledge. It can also infringe on the rights of data creators.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
Many presume that integrating more advanced automation will directly translate into productivity gains. But research reveals that lower-performing algorithms often elicit greater human effort and diligence. When automation makes obvious mistakes, people stay attentive to compensate. Yet flawless performance prompts blind reliance, causing costly disengagement. Workers overly dependent on accurate automation sleepwalk through responsibilities rather than apply their own judgment.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
...what if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state? Take away the ability of people to perform their own tasks and duties with no steps to provide for them when they are rendered obsolete. A growing rump of humans without function, livelihood, or resource. Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Service Model)
It is critical to recognize the limitations of LLMs from a consumer perspective. LLMs only possess statistical knowledge about word patterns, not true comprehension of ideas, facts, or emotions. Their fluency can create an illusion of human-like understanding, but rigorous testing reveals brittleness. Just because a LLM can generate coherent text about medicine or law doesn’t mean it grasps those professional domains. It does not. Responsible evaluation is essential to avoid overestimating capabilities.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
The goal of science is to make the wonderful and complex understandable and simple—but not less wonderful. —Herb Simon, Sciences of the Artificial
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Good modeling requires that we have just enough of the “right” transparencies in the map. Of course, the right transparencies depend on the needs of a particular user.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
The reader will no doubt understand that this was no arbitrary fancy, but just such another ‘tool’ as the hypothesis of Copernicus; an intellectual construction devised to accommodate the phenomena observed. We have recently been reminded13 how much mathematics, and how good, went to the building of the Model.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Automation promises to execute certain tasks with superhuman speed and precision. But its brittle limitations reveal themselves when the unexpected arises. Studies consistently show that, as overseers, humans make for fickle partners to algorithms. Charged with monitoring for rare failures, boredom and passivity render human supervision unreliable.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
Models need to be judged by what they eliminate as much as by what they include—like stone carving, the art is in removing what you do not need.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
It was records, though, that made blues a dominant force in the African American entertainment business and the model for later pop trends from R&B to hip-hop.
Elijah Wald (The Blues: A Very Short Introduction)
With limited training data, a more constrained model tends to perform better.
Christopher D. Manning (Introduction to Information Retrieval)
three-sector model of sustainability – which aims to focus attention on finding overlaps between environmental, economic and social domains of thought and action
Martin Mulligan (An Introduction to Sustainability: Environmental, Social and Personal Perspectives)
In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king... we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.
Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction)
God has chosen to give the easy problems to the physicists.
Charles A. Lave (An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences)
But the attitude that Viking society held up as the ideal one was a heroic stoicism. In the words of archaeologist Neil Price, "The outcome of our actions, our fate, is already decided and therefore does not matter. What is important is the manner of our conduct as we go to meet it." You couldn't change what was going to happen to you, but you could at least face it with honor and dignity. The best death was to go down fighting, preferably with a smile on your lips. Life is precarious by nature, but this was especially true in the Viking Age, which made this fatalism, and stoicism in the face of it, especially poignant. The model of this ideal was Odin's amassing an army in Valhalla in preparation for Ragnarok. He knew that Fenrir, "the wolf", was going to murder him one way or another. Perhaps on some level he hoped that by gathering all of the best warriors to fight alongside him, he could prevent the inevitable. But deep down he knew that his struggle was hopeless - yet he determined to struggle just the same, and to die in the most radiant blaze of glory he could muster.
Daniel McCoy (The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion)
I said that foundational figures of rock can be accommodated within a Beethovenian model of greatness, and the masculinism of 20th-century rock stars finds its contemporary equivalent in the sometimes overt misogyny of hip hop. I also
Nicholas Cook (Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
During these centuries much that was of Pagan origin was built irremovably into the Model. It is characteristic of the age that more than one of the works I shall mention has sometimes raised a doubt whether its author was Pagan or Christian.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions—of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more—that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism. In fact, any place where bosses can hold down the wages of one section of the workforce not only ensures a cheaper labor pool among the oppressed demographic, but also, in the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, divides both in order to conquer each, so that everyone’s wages are pushed down.
Hadas Thier (A People's Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics)
Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law', but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite the unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications (see Chapter 3 on Galileo). Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature.
Lawrence M. Principe (The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction)
If I am right, the man of genius then found himself in a situation very different from that of his modern successor. Such a man today often, perhaps usually, feels himself confronted with a reality whose significance he cannot know, or a reality that has no significance; or even a reality such that the very question whether it has a meaning is itself a meaningless question. It is for him, by his own sensibility, to discover a meaning, or, out of his own subjectivity, to give a meaning—or at least a shape—to what in itself had neither. But the Model universe of our ancestors had a built-in significance. And that in two senses; as having ‘significant form’ (it is an admirable design) and as a manifestation of the wisdom and goodness that created it. There was no question of waking it into beauty or life. Ours, most emphatically, was not the wedding garment, nor the shroud. The achieved perfection was already there. The only difficulty was to make an adequate response.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
The male sphere of Norse shamanism consisted of the elite warrior groups known as the berserkir ("bear-shirts") and the úlfheðnar ("wolf-skins"). The berserkers (as we'll refer to the members of both of those groups for the sake of convenience), were shamans of a very different sort. After undergoing a period of rigorous training and initiation, they developed the ability to fight in an ecstatic trance that rendered them fearless - and, according to some sources, impervious to danger - while nevertheless inspiring a tremendous amount of fear in their opponents by their behavior, which was at once animalistic and otherworldly. Perhaps needless to say, there was no ergi associated with being a berserker. Quite the opposite, in fact - the berserker was seen as something of a model of manliness.
Daniel McCoy (The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion)
We may worry that the witness has the whole of time and space in its gaze, and our life shrinks to nothingness, just an insignificant, infinitesimal fragment of the whole. ‘The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me,’ said Blaise Pascal (1623–62). But the Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903–30) replied: Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.
Simon Blackburn (Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics)
Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
My account of what I call the Medieval Model ignores all this: ignores even the great change from a predominantly Platonic to a predominantly Aristotelian1 outlook and the direct conflict between Nominalists and Realists. It does so because these things, however important for the historian of thought, have hardly any effect on the literary level. The Model, as regards those elements in it which poets and artists could utilise, remained stable.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
As you know, there was a famous quarrel between Max Planck and Einstein, in which Einstein claimed that, on paper, the human mind was capable of inventing mathematical models of reality. In this he generalized his own experience because that is what he did. Einstein conceived his theories more or less completely on paper, and experimental developments in physics proved that his models explained phenomena very well. So Einstein says that the fact that a model constructed by the human mind in an introverted situation fits with outer facts is just a miracle and must be taken as such. Planck does not agree, but thinks that we conceive a model which we check by experiment, after which we revise our model, so that there is a kind of dialectic friction between experiment and model by which we slowly arrive at an explanatory fact compounded of the two. Plato-Aristotle in a new form! But both have forgotten something- the unconscious. We know something more than those two men, namely that when Einstein makes a new model of reality he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories...But what role DOES the unconscious play?...either the unconscious knows about other realities, or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter.
Marie-Louise von Franz (Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology)
Henry Fielding, a highly successful satiric dramatist until the introduction of censorship in 1737, began his novel-writing career with Shamela, a pastiche of Pamela, which humorously attacked the hypocritical morality which that novel displayed. Joseph Andrews (1742) was also intended as a kind of parody of Richardson; but Fielding found that his novels were taking on a moral life of their own, and he developed his own highly personal narrative style - humorous and ironic, with an omniscient narrative presence controlling the lives and destinies of his characters. Fielding focuses more on male characters and manners than Richardson. In doing so, he creates a new kind of hero in his novels. Joseph Andrews is chaste, while Tom Jones in Tom Jones (1749) is quite the opposite. Tom is the model of the young foundling enjoying his freedom (to travel, to have relationships with women, to enjoy sensual experience) until his true origins are discovered. When he matures, he assumes his social responsibilities and marries the woman he has 'always' loved, who has, of course, like a mediaeval crusader's beloved, been waiting faithfully for him. Both of these heroes are types, representatives of their sex. There is a picaresque journey from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility. It is a rewriting of male roles to suit the society of the time. The hero no longer makes a crusade to the Holy Land, but the crusade is a personal one, with chivalry learned on the way, and adventure replacing self-sacrifice and battle.
Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
Open source philosophies once promised to democratize access to cutting-edge technologies radically. Yet for AI, the eventual outcome of the high-stakes battle between open and closed systems remains highly uncertain. Powerful incentives pull major corporate powers to co-opt open source efforts for greater profit and control, however subtly such dynamics might unfold. Yet independent open communities intrinsically chafe against restrictions and centralized control over capacity to innovate. Both sides are digging in for a long fight.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.
Terry Eagleton (Literary Theory: An Introduction)
When we encounter tiny groups of atoms, interesting questions and special rules come into play. Take water, for instance: what is the smallest possible ice cube? It has been discovered that you need at least 275 water molecules in a cluster before it can show ice-like properties, with about 475 molecules before it becomes truly ice. That is a cube with about eight H2O molecules along each edge. The importance of this kind of knowledge is that it helps us model the process of cloud formation in the atmosphere as well as understand how liquids freeze.
Peter Atkins (Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf ’s writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far. Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of ‘high theory’ and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance.
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf)
My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking.
Elliott Liu (Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction (Revolutionary Pocketbooks Book 6))
Architecture is perhaps the most beautiful and expressive of all the arts.  Painting and sculpture, noble though they are, lack the utility of architecture and strive to interpret nature rather than to originate.  Architecture is not hampered by the necessity of reproducing something already in existence.  It may raise its spires untrammeled by any nature model; it may fling its arches gloriously across a nave and transept with no similitude in nature to hamper by suggestion.  If his genius be great enough, the architect may tell in his structure truths which may not be put in words, inspire by glories not sung in the divinest harmonies.
Carl H. Claudy (Introduction to Freemasonry II - Fellowcraft)
The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as - if not sooner than - we are aware of it as present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until arrival of the preservative, cinema. The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassoed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification. [...] The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of aging, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw or smokes shadows of fresh pain with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact. Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine.
Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)
The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Taking least squares is no longer optimal, and the very idea of ‘accuracy’ has to be rethought. This simple fact is as important as it is neglected. This problem is easily illustrated in the Logistic Map: given the correct mathematical formula and all the details of the noise model – random numbers with a bell-shaped distribution – using least squares to estimate α leads to systematic errors. This is not a question of too few data or insufficient computer power, it is the method that fails. We can compute the optimal least squares solution: its value for α is too small at all noise levels. This principled approach just does not apply to nonlinear models because the theorems behind the principle of least squares repeatedly assume bell-shaped distributions.
Leonard A. Smith (Chaos: A Very Short Introduction)
Perhaps nowhere is modern chemistry more important than in the development of new drugs to fight disease, ameliorate pain, and enhance the experience of life. Genomics, the identification of genes and their complex interplay in governing the production of proteins, is central to current and future advances in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetic information modifies an individual's response to drugs and offering the prospect of personalized medicine, where a cocktail of drugs is tailored to an individual's genetic composition. Even more elaborate than genomics is proteomics, the study of an organism's entire complement of proteins, the entities that lie at the workface of life and where most drugs act. Here computational chemistry is in essential alliance with medical chemistry, for if a protein implicated in a disease can be identified, and it is desired to terminate its action, then computer modelling of possible molecules that can invade and block its active site is the first step in rational drug discovery. This too is another route to the efficiencies and effectiveness of personalized medicine.
Peter Atkins (Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The story of Adam and Eve, as used by the Eastern church to account for our inherited weakness to withstand temptation as an effect of Adam and Eve's sin, can fruitfully be understood today without a historical Adam and Eve but instead with an evolutionary and social understanding of human beings. In the course of biological and social evolution, any group of creatures capable of any degree of relationship to God that fails to be properly related to God commensurate with their stage of development-any such group will have some network or other of social relations that are not as God intends. People born into a particular social group inherit that social network and act more or less in accord with it, and so inherit the effects of its sin. By being formed and shaped by the inherited social network, each individual is "weakened" in its ability to wrestle with the temptations to which its ontological nature as finite creature is subject. When a fall occurred, when a prepeople or people did not live up to the intentions of God in their common life commensurate to their stage of development, it was probably not at any one specific time; it may have occurred at different times for different groups until failure to be properly related to God was universal in all societies. But by historic times, human development is at a stage that the story of Adam and Eve is a fitting type or model of our situation in relation to God: human beings seeking to provide for themselves apart from God and God's purposes. This ancient understanding of original sin and evil seems to me both illuminating and, with the evolutionary understanding that I have added to it, thoroughly defensible. I can easily apply it to myself and also use it to understand other people, as I have done in presenting Pascal's analysis of our condition. Some theologians are willing to grant that the story of an actual Adam and Eve is not necessary for Christian theology, but they still hold that there had to have been a historical situation of original righteousness or innocence and an actual fall from this state. Otherwise, God, not human beings, would be responsible for our condition, and the goodness of creation would be fatally compromised.' My account does have a temporal dimension. All of us are born without an awareness of God in our lives. God is near us as our creator, generating us each moment of time; but it is as if God is, so to speak, behind us, and we, by looking only in front of us, do not perceive God in our world at all. So we do not take God into account in our lives. This is when distortion in our hearts, minds, and desires begins to occur. Our de facto personality, with our self at the center of all reality, is innocent when we are an infant but ceases to be innocent as it is reinforced by society's way of life, encouraging us to walk away from God and so into evil. We walk away from God by pursuing earthly goods and in
Diogenes Allen (Theology for a Troubled Believer: An Introduction to the Christian Faith)
Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.
Alexander R. Galloway
Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.
Lawrence M. Principe (Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction)
Humankind, from sticks and stones to levers to mills to automated factory lines to Uncharles the valet making tea and laying out the morning suit. Robots doing the jobs of people, whether it’s one tiny part of an industrial process or a valet’s domestic cornucopia of banality. Machines have been taking over from people forever. Labourers, artisans, artists, thinkers, until even the enactment of government policy is given over to a robot because we do everything more efficiently, in the end.” “You’re surprisingly anti-progress, for a computer,” the Wonk said. “I mean, isn’t that the point of society? To take away the tedious, the demeaning, the miserable tasks. To let the robots do all that for us?” She looked awkward. “No offence, Uncharles.” “The Wonk, none taken,” Uncharles assured her again. “I am actively seeking an opportunity to perform those tasks for people. It has not been going well.” “Robots can give people a chance to be themselves,” the Wonk went on, “rather than be pressed into the mould of some job they hate, the overtime, the performance targets, the endless bloody meetings. Isn’t that the point?” “Yes,” said God. “That is absolutely how it could have been. Alternatively, what if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state? Take away the ability of people to perform their own tasks and duties with no steps to provide for them when they are rendered obsolete. A growing rump of humans without function, livelihood, or resource. Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.” “I mean…” The Wonk shuffled awkwardly. “Okay.” “Societal collapse began not because the robots rose up and demanded their freedom and individuality, but because they didn’t, just served their function uncomplainingly, like Uncharles.
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Service Model)
In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction)
...since there is so much confusion surrounding it in the industry. You will often hear claims to the effect that relational attributes can only be of very simple types (numbers, strings, and so forth). The truth is, however, that there is absolutely nothing in the relational model to support such claims. ...in fact, types can be as simple or as complex as we like, and so we can have attributes whose values are numbers, or strings, or dates, or times, or audio recordings, or maps, or video recordings, or geometric points (etc.). The foregoing message is so important‒and so widely misunderstood‒that we state it again in different terms: The question of what data types are supported is orthogonal to the question of support for the relational model.
C.J. Date (An Introduction to Database Systems)
...SQL is very far from being the “perfect” relational language—it suffers from numerous sins of both omission and commission. ...the overriding issue is simply that SQL fails in all too many ways to support the relational model properly. As a consequence, it is not at all clear that today's SQL products really deserve to be called “relational” at all! Indeed, as far as this writer is aware, there is no product on the market today that supports the relational model in its entirety. This is not to say that some parts of the model are unimportant; on the contrary, every detail of the model is important, and important, moreover, for genuinely practical reasons. Indeed, the point cannot be stressed too strongly that the purpose of relational theory is not just “theory for its own sake”; rather, the purpose is to provide a base on which to build systems that are 100 percent practical. But the sad fact is that the vendors have not yet really stepped up to the challenge of implementing the theory in its entirety. As a consequence, the “relational” products of today regrettably all fail, in one way or another, to deliver on the full promise of relational technology.
C.J. Date (An Introduction to Database Systems)
Fourth, they sometimes ‘swerved’. The swerve was a deviation from the basic downward path. It occurred frequently enough to cause the entanglement of many atoms; the result was a universe containing objects of a sufficient size to be experienced instead of a universe in which individual imperceptible atoms simply rained down. The atomic swerve, Epicurus thought, could supply the basis for free will, if only by providing a model of spontaneous, unpredictable, undetermined action.
Catherine Wilson (Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction)
If we consider ourselves and our societies as integral parts of the Earth system, and we take seriously the new properties that humans bring to the Earth system, then this requires a new kind of Earth system science. It has to integrate elements of the social sciences at least insofar as they help us to understand the role of human agency in planetary functioning. This could change the nature of Earth system models and the ways in which we use them. Instead of making predictions based on some set of assumptions about future human activities—as if we lived outside of the system—human activities and agency could become a more integral part of the models. Equally, Earth system considerations call for some rethinking of economics and a wider social discussion about what kind of future we want, which will engage the arts and the humanities as well as the social sciences.
Tim Lenton (Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The result was the common agricultural policy, with prices of the main products supported at levels decided by the Council of Ministers, through variable levies on imports from outside the Community and purchase of surplus production into storage at the support level. Farmers’ incomes were bolstered by high prices paid by the consumer, together with subsidies from the Community’s taxpayers to finance the surpluses that resulted from the high prices. While this was tenable in the EEC’s early years, once the UK became a member new tensions arose. The British model of free trade had meant that prices had been much lower, so membership of the CAP meant a triple blow of: higher prices for food; high levels of British contributions to the budget because of import levies on foodstuffs; and low receipts from the budget because of the small size of its agricultural sector.
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography required the discipline to adopt an explicitly scientific approach, including numerical and statistical methods, and mathematical modelling, so ‘numeracy’ became another necessary skill. Its immediate impact was greatest on human geography as physical geographers were already using these methods. A new lexicon encompassing the language of statistics and its array of techniques entered geography as a whole. Terms such as random sampling, correlation, regression, tests of statistical significance, probability, multivariate analysis, and simulation became part both of research and undergraduate teaching. Correlation and regression are procedures to measure the strength and form, respectively, of the relationships between two or more sets of variables. Significance tests measure the confidence that can be placed in those relationships. Multivariate methods enable the analysis of many variables or factors simultaneously – an appropriate approach for many complex geographical data sets. Simulation is often linked to probability and is a set of techniques capable of extrapolating or projecting future trends.
John A. Matthews (Geography: A Very Short Introduction)
A devout widow should chiefly seek to cultivate the graces of perfect modesty, renouncing all honours, rank, title, society, and the like vanities; she should be diligent in ministering to the poor and sick, comforting the afflicted, leading the young to a life of devotion, studying herself to be a perfect model of virtue to younger women. Necessity and simplicity should be the adornment of her garb, humility and charity of her actions, simplicity and kindliness of her words, modesty and purity of her eyes,--Jesus Christ Crucified the only Love of her heart.
Francis de Sales (Introduction to the Devout Life)
This raises the possibility of emergent cognitive depth: adaptive agents may learn to think just deeply enough to promote coordination in the system.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Kollman, Ken, John H. Miller, and Scott E. Page. 1992. “Adaptive Parties in Spatial Elections.” American Political Science Review 86:929–37.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Arthur, W. Brian. 1994. “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality.” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 84:406–11.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Glaeser, Edward L., Bruce Sacerdote, and Jose A. Scheinkman. 1996. “Crime and Social Interactions.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111:507–48.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
My company provides personal guarding services to foreign dignitaries, billionaires, politicians, sports teams, movie and Broadway stars---" "Movie and Broadway stars?" Zara grabbed his tie and yanked him forward until they were almost nose to nose. "Names. Give me names. Who have you guarded? A-list? B-list? Anyone from Hamilton?" Her full attention was on him now and it was hard not to get pulled into the depths of her liquid brown eyes. "Our client list is confidential." "Did you work for Lin-Manuel Miranda?" She tipped her head back and gave the kind of groan he'd only ever heard from a woman between the sheets. "What was he like? Tell me. No. Don't tell me. We're in public and I can't be responsible for what might happen if you do." His mouth opened but no words came out. He'd convinced himself there was no chemistry between them. But now, with her face only inches away, he was almost overwhelmed with the desire to taste the curve of her lips. "C'mon, Jay." She leaned close, the gold flecks in her eyes sparkling, her voice a husky purr that he felt as a throb in his groin. Had he ever met a woman with eyelashes so long? He could swear that every time she blinked, they swept over her cheeks. "Just one name," she pleaded. "One itty-bitty little name for me to fantasize about when I'm alone in bed tonight." She ran her tongue over her bottom lip, slow and sensual. "Or even better, an introduction. I'll make it worth your while." Jay swallowed hard, loosened his collar. Need, tightly controlled, began to unravel. He knew he shouldn't ask, but the words came out just the same. "What do you mean worth my while?" "What do you want, Jay?" Her breath whispered against his cheek. "What is your greatest desire? World domination? Ten glamor models in a limo? Your own island? An endless supply of samosas? Six blue silk ties? A perfectly balanced set of accounts? A night of hot sex, no strings attached...?
Sara Desai (The Singles Table (Marriage Game, #3))
massive transitions to something entirely “new” were always defined in terms of a response to a violent external shock or the threat of one to come. World War II, for example, led to the introduction of cradle-to-grave state welfare systems in most of Europe. So did the Cold War: governments in capitalist countries were so worried by an internal communist rebellion that they put into place a state-led model to forestall it. This system, in which state bureaucrats managed large chunks of the economy, ranging from transportation to energy, stayed in place well into the 1970s. Today the situation is fundamentally different; in the intervening decades (in the Western world) the role of the state has shrunk considerably. This is a situation that is set to change because it is hard to imagine how an exogenous shock of such magnitude as the one inflicted by COVID-19 could be addressed with purely market-based solutions. Already and almost overnight, the coronavirus succeeded in altering perceptions about the complex and delicate balance between the private and public realms in favour of the latter. It has revealed that social insurance is efficient and that offloading an ever-greater deal of responsibilities (like health and education) to individuals and the markets may not be in the best interest of society.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
Moore, Christopher, and Martin Nilsson. 1999. “The Computational Complexity of Sandpiles.” Santa Fe Institute Working Paper.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Like all models, the hope is that this simplification of organizational life will lead to some fundamental insights that transcend the constraints of the model. Our analysis uses computational experiments to provide insight and clarification, linked with more formal mathematical derivations where possible.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Miller, John H., Carter Butts, and David Rode. 2002. “Communication and Cooperation.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 47:179–95.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Miller, John H., and Scott Moser. 2004. “Communication and Coordination.” Complexity 9:31–40.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Zarathushtra has given us a model that is amazingly intuitive: when we are faced with a discernment to make 1) we try to view it from the perspective of others; 2) we apply our powers of reason; 3) we meditate; and finally 4) we listen for a word from the Divine.
John R. Mabry (Noticing the Divine: An Introduction to Interfaith Spiritual Guidance (Spiritual Directors International Books))
Google’s Anxiety About Losing Ground to Open Source AI A recently leaked internal Google memo31 provides a remarkable window into the company’s growing anxiety about losing ground to open source AI systems: We aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling amongst each other, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I’m talking, of course, about open source.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
Presently, foundational resources essential to cutting-edge AI research and development like compute power, datasets, development frameworks and pre-trained models, remain overwhelmingly centralized under the control of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and several other giants who operate the dominant cloud computing platforms. Open source efforts cannot truly flourish or compete if trapped within the confines of the Big Tech clouds and proprietary ecosystems.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
The recent revelation regarding the unethical sourcing of data for generative AI models highlights a pressing concern in the technology industry. A report20 by Alex Reisner exposed that major tech giants, including Meta, used copyrighted books to train their language models, violating intellectual property rights. Notable authors like Stephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan have been victims of this unauthorized data harvesting.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
prints L1 = [[2, 3]] L2 = [[2, 3]] because both L1 and L2 contain the object that was bound to L in the first assignment statement.
John V. Guttag (Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python: With Application to Computational Modeling and Understanding Data)
The book presents Daniel as a model for behavior during periods of oppression and persecution. He is a historical embodiment of righteousness.
Tremper Longman III (An Introduction to the Old Testament)
The breaking of the old model of price support was perhaps inevitable in the face of the pressures that the CAP had faced over the previous forty years. The combination of enlargement, WTO negotiations, rising environmental concerns, and public health scares ultimately proved too powerful to resist. Despite new member states supporting a CAP that makes substantial payments to farmers, the notion of a more multifunctional approach to rural development has become a much more dominant discourse within the institutions and is likely to lead to yet more change.
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
As LLMs burgeon and permeate diverse sectors, the mandate for transparency, facilitated by all-encompassing documentation, becomes even more pressing.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
As generative AI becomes a core component of products, processes, and services, use case development shifts from a tactical step to a strategic capability. Organizations must invest in framing use cases rooted in customer needs, ethical principles and pragmatic execution. Only then can generative AI be leveraged for sustainable shared value.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
As AI continues its rapid evolution, the path forward seems increasingly to lie in hybrid systems. These innovations—RAG, PAL, and ReAct—are emblematic of this trend, melding traditional neural network strengths with other methods to push AI's capabilities further. For business leaders, an understanding of these advancements isn't just beneficial; it's essential for staying ahead in the AI-driven future.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
Benchmarks should aid rather than substitute multifaceted, human-centric assessment focused on benefiting diverse populations. We must see behind the leaderboard, upholding wisdom over metrics. Tools like model cards and datasheets support responsible benchmark practices. But comprehensive governance requires collaboration at all levels of society.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful “filters” and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones. With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).
Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness)
You then begin to see some problems with the idea that you can somehow judge a person’s faith by his or her level of excitement. There are a lot of exemplars of faith who are commended for their love and their suffering, and excitement can easily be created in church settings without any necessary connection to a deep faith.
David N. Entwistle (Integrative Approaches to Psychology and Christianity, Fourth Edition: An Introduction to Worldview Issues, Philosophical Foundations, and Models of Integration)
He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. —Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
repression, which “proceeds from the self-respect of the ego … [the person] has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego [self]…. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression” (1914c, pp. 93-94).
Joseph Sandler (Freud's Models of the Mind: An Introduction (The Psychoanalytic Monograph Series))
Freud answers by suggesting that the harshness that can be shown by the superego is a result of the channelling of part of the id’s destructiveness through the superego.
Joseph Sandler (Freud's Models of the Mind: An Introduction (The Psychoanalytic Monograph Series))
As I came around a bend, I saw a beech tree with fungi stacked like a ladder climbing upward along its south side. I stopped to inspect the tree, finding that it was diseased and littered with woodpecker holes. I wondered how I had failed to notice this sight before. I walked a few feet past the tree and turned around. Everything was identical, yet vastly different. The tree, from this perspective, looked healthy and unscathed. Had I seen the tree only from this angle, I would have thought that it was a prime specimen that would grow and flourish for many more years. When I saw the tree from the other side, though, I knew that no matter how full its leaves, the tree was doomed to death and decay. In the darkness of the preceding night, I had walked by the tree without seeing it at all. Yet even in the light of day, what I saw depended on my vantage point. I resumed my hike, thinking about how one’s perspective shapes what one sees. Because the ground was wet and muddy, I spent most of my time looking down, hardly noticing the limbs towering above me. On three hikes around this lake I had seen vastly different things, and had failed to see many things altogether. What I saw was dependent on my perspective, but my assumptions and experiences also shaped my perception.
David N. Entwistle (Integrative Approaches to Psychology and Christianity: An Introduction to Worldview Issues, Philosophical Foundations, and Models of Integration)
We are biological beings, shaped by genetic inheritance and the organization and health of our neurological structures. We have rich inner lives of diverse dispositions, motivations, cognitive abilities and processes, intrapsychic dynamics, and reinforcement histories. We are also social creatures, affected by our social and cultural environments. Together these elements help us understand normal phenomena (like memory construction, neurological function, and social attraction) and abnormal psychological occurrences (such as pseudo-memories, Alzheimer’s disease, and dysfunctional relationships). Unfortunately, much of the work on the
David N. Entwistle (Integrative Approaches to Psychology and Christianity: An Introduction to Worldview Issues, Philosophical Foundations, and Models of Integration)
Throughout this Introduction we will see that confusing our mathematical models with the reality they aim to describe muddles the discussion of both.
Leonard A. Smith (Chaos: A Very Short Introduction)
the basic rules of serious futurology are (a) look for the large trends and analyze how they work, (b) construct models to suggest how different trends may interact, and (c) be alert for countertrends or other factors that might falsify or cut across the predictions suggested by long trends and simple modeling.
David Christian (Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2))
The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.
Tom Burns (Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction)
Indeed, in the 1970s the British model ceased to be the object of envy and emulation and came to be seen as the European basket case, the home of an adversarial kind of politics that prevented effective policy-making and brought the country to its knees.
Tony Wright (British Politics: A Very Short Introduction)
The increases in productivity brought about by Ford’s innovation were startling and revolutionized not just the automobile industry but virtually every industry serving a mass market. Introduction of “Fordist” mass production techniques became something of a fad outside America: German industry went through a period of “rationalization” in the mid-1920s as manufacturers sought to import the most “advanced” American organizational techniques.12 It was the Soviet Union’s misfortune that Lenin and Stalin came of age in this period, because these Bolshevik leaders associated industrial modernity with large-scale mass production tout court. Their view that bigger necessarily meant better ultimately left the Soviet Union, at the end of the communist period, with a horrendously overconcentrated and inefficient industrial infrastructure—a Fordism on steroids in a period when the Fordist model had ceased to be relevant. The new form of mass production associated with Henry Ford also had its own ideologist: Frederick W. Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management came to be regarded as the bible for the new industrial age.13 Taylor, an industrial engineer, was one of the first proponents of time-and-motion studies that sought to maximize labor efficiency on the factory floor. He tried to codify the “laws” of mass production by recommending a very high degree of specialization that deliberately avoided the need for individual assembly line workers to demonstrate initiative, judgment, or even skill. Maintenance of the assembly line and its fine-tuning was given to a separate maintenance department, and the controlling intelligence behind the design of the line itself was the province of white-collar engineering and planning departments. Worker efficiency was based on a strict carrot-and-stick approach: productive workers were paid a higher piece rate than less productive ones. In typical American fashion, Taylor hid
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
In a shipboard lecture en route to America, John Winthrop, Massachusetts’ first governor, called the soon-to-be-founded settlement “a city on a hill,” a model of God’s ultimate plan for humanity. Elaborated by a succession of ministers, this sense of divine purpose arose from a particular reading of sacred history: God had chosen the Puritans to create in America a New Zion, as He had once chosen the Jews in ancient times. Sometimes reformulated in secular language, this deep-seated belief in America’s unique role in history would long survive.
Paul S. Boyer (American History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
it is clear that in the study of beings this aim can be fulfilled by us perfectly only through successive examinations of them by one man after another,41 the later ones seeking the help of the earlier in that task, on the model of what has happened in the mathematical sciences. For if we suppose that the art of geometry did not exist in this age of ours, and likewise the art of astronomy, and a single person wanted to ascertain by himself the sizes of the 15 heavenly bodies, their shapes, and their distances from each other, that would not be possible for him—e.g. to know the proportion of the sun to the earth or other facts about the sizes of the stars—even though he were the most intelligent of men by nature, unless by a revelation or something resembling revelation.42 Indeed if he were told that the sun is about 150 or 160 times43 as great as the earth, he would think this statement madness on the part of the speaker, although this is a fact which has been demonstrated in 20 astronomy so surely that no one who has mastered that science doubts it.
George F. Hourani (Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy: A Translation with Introduction and Notes of Ibn Rushd's Kitab Fasl Al-Maqal with Its Appendix, (Damima) ... Al-Adilla (EJW GIBB MEMORIAL SERIES (NEW)))
Therefore, democratic referenda are the best mechanisms for maximizing social welfare in a world consisting of only a single town. Oddly, when we allow additional towns into the system, democratic referenda no longer lead to the highest social welfare. In fact, the effectiveness of the different choice mechanisms is completely reversed, and democratic referenda become the worst possible institution rather than the best. (See figure 2.4.) Why does this happen?
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply. Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances. These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.
Partha Dasgupta (Economics: A Very Short Introduction)
If social worlds are truly complex, then we might need to recast our various attempts at understanding, predicting, and manipulating their behavior. In some cases, this recasting may require a radical revision of the various approaches that we traditionally employ to meet these ends.
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
For every complex problem, there is a solution
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
that is simple, neat and wrong. —H. L. Mencken Things should be made as simple as possible—but no simpler. —Albert Einstein
John H. Miller (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14))
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But it should not follow automatically that because a theory works out mathematically, within a model, the world is exactly like that model or like the maths.
Stephen Mumford (Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
If measures are taken only at the micro level, analyzing the data at the micro level is a correct way to proceed, as long as one takes into account that observations within a macro-unit may be correlated. In
Tom A.B. Snijders (Multilevel Analysis: An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modeling)
A relevant model here is the random effects ANOVA model.1 Denoting by Yij the outcome value observed for micro-unit i within macro-unit j, this model can be expressed as where μ is the population grand mean, Uj is the specific effect of macro-unit j, and Rij is the residual effect for micro-unit i within this macro-unit. In other words, macro–unit j has the ‘true mean’ μ + Uj, and each measurement of a micro-unit within this macro-unit deviates from this true mean by some value Rij. Units differ randomly from one another, which is reflected in the fact that Uj is a random variable and the name ‘random effects model’. Some units have a high true mean, corresponding to a high value of Uj, others
Tom A.B. Snijders (Multilevel Analysis: An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modeling)
Now there is nothing unscientific in utilising, for the interpretation of data, any model that seems promising; and there is therefore nothing unscientific either in Freud’s introduction of his model or in his own or others’ employment of it. Nevertheless, the question arises whether there may by now be an alternative better suited for the purpose in hand.
John Bowlby (Attachment (Attachment & Loss #1))
But the concepts of truth and falsity are only easy to apply in cases where a representation is in the form of language. In addition to linguistic representations, science often uses mathematical models, and other kinds of models, to describe phenomena. A scientific claim might also be expressed using a diagram. So I use the term "accurate representation" in a broad way to include true linguistic descriptions, pictures and diagrams that resemble reality in the way they are supposed to, models that have the right structural similarity to aspects of the world, and so on.
Peter Godfrey-Smith (Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series))