Monitor Change Quotes

Since we are living in an open society with a space for tolerance and indulgence, we must monitor assiduously the permanent changes of habits and customs and the "normality barometer" should be determined and adjusted, time after time. ("On a doggy day”)

War has changed. It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines. War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine. War has changed. ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities. Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control. War…has changed. The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history. War…has changed. When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.

You simply never know about people,’ thought Elizabeth. ‘You think because they’re timid they’ll always be timid, or because they’re mean they’ll always be mean. But they can change awfully quickly if they are treated right.

Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries.

Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

It is necessary to monitor your behavior if you wish to change it. Awareness is essential.

A few days later, Tuesday quietly crossed our apartment as I read a book and, after a nudge against my arm, put his head on my lap. As always, I immediately checked my mental state, trying to assess what was wrong. I knew a change in my biorhythms had brought Tuesday over, because he was always monitoring me, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Breathing? Okay. Pulse? Normal. Was I glazed or distracted? Was I lost in Iraq? Was a dark period descending? I didn't think so, but I knew something must be wrong, and I was starting to worry...until I looked into Tuesday's eyes. They were staring at me softly from under those big eyebrows, and there was nothing in them but love.

For Adamatzky, the point of fungal computers is not to replace silicon chips. Fungal reactions are too slow for that. Rather, he thinks humans could use mycelium growing in an ecosystem as a “large-scale environmental sensor.” Fungal networks, he reasons, are monitoring a large number of data streams as part of their everyday existence. If we could plug into mycelial networks and interpret the signals they use to process information, we could learn more about what was happening in an ecosystem.

Management controls performance in people because it impacts skills; it’s a matter of monitoring, analyzing and directing.

And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded watseland, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealth with. Trust Daddy on this one.

A caregiver is changed by the culture of illness, just as one is changed by the dynamic era in which one lives. For one thing, I don't have as much time in conversation with myself, and I feel the loss. Certainly I worry more about his death, and mine too, since I;m so much a part of the evolving saga of his health, which I have to monitor every day. But I've grown stronger in every aspect of my life. In small ways: speaking more directly with people. In large ways: discovering I can handle adversity and potential loss and yet keep going. I've a better idea of my strength. I feel like I've been tested, like a willow whipped around violently in a hurricane, but still stranding, its roots strong enough to hold. [p. 301]

It's very, very subtle stuff, changing words and giving them a whole different meaning—it creates an artificial reality," said Walter. "What happens is this new linguistic system undermines your ability to even monitor your own thoughts because nothing means what it used to mean. I couldn't believe that I could get taken over like that. I was the most independent-minded idiot that ever walked the planet. But that's what happened.

HABITS MANIFESTO What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while. Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong. Focus on actions, not outcomes. By giving something up, we may gain. Things often get harder before they get easier. When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. We’re not very different from other people, but those differences are very important. It’s easier to change our surroundings than ourselves. We can’t make people change, but when we change, others may change. We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse. We manage what we monitor. Once we’re ready to begin, begin now.

The woman types everything into her computer, raising her eyebrows slightly at Devon's middle name. "Devon Sky Davenport," she repeats. "Sky? S-k-y?" "Yes," Devon says, addressing the back of the computer monitor rather than the woman's face directly. "S-k-y. As in"---she swallows---"as in, 'the sky's the limit.'" But Devon doesn't volunteer any further explanation, doesn't explain to the women the story behind the name. That, in fact, "the sky's the limit" is how Devon's mom has always defined Devon and her supposed potential in life. Her mom would say it when Devon brought home a flawless report card or when Devon received a stellar postseason evaluation from her coach or when a complete stranger commented on Devon's exceptional manners or after the Last Loser packed his stuff and walked out. "You'll be Somebody for both of us," her mom would say. Not anymore, Mom. Everything's changed. Now, for me, "the sky" isn't anything but flat and gray and too far away to ever reach. She takes a deep breath. If you were here with me, you'd see it for yourself.

As it becomes easier to monitor informal consumer networks, the winners will be companies that figure out what’s working fastest – and do it more (and figure out what’s not working – and kill it). Zara, a fast-growing retailer in Europe, changes its clothing line every three or four weeks. By carefully watching what’s working and what’s not, they can evolve their lineup far faster than the competition can ever hope to.

Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system. There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed. Similarly, there’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered. Nearly all the money flows to treatment rather than prevention—and when I say “prevention,” I mean prevention of human suffering.

Andrew paused in moving a microphone cable, considered for a moment, and nodded. He said, “Yeah. I really am.” Redefining winning made the recording session far less agonizing. But better still, a year later, when the group met again, several singers approached Amelia privately to tell her, “That Monitor thing? That’s changed, like, my whole life.

Football Coaches do play football matches; their attitudes toward the game in times of tendencies of losing can cause a change in the scores of the games they monitor and mentor!

At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.

To have money all you need to do is change your mind about money. How much you have right now is entirely monitored by your viewpoint on money.

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

In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.

We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It's fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes us.

We know of ESB's potential for mind control largely through the work of Jose Delgado. One signal provoked a cat to lick its fur, then continue compulsively licking the floor and bars of its cage. A signal designed to stimulate a portion of a monkey's thalamus, a major midbrain center for integrating muscle movements, triggered a complex action: The monkey walked to one side of the cage, then the other, then climbed to the rear ceiling, then back down. The animal performed this same activity as many times as it was stimulated with the signal, up to sixty times an hour, but not blindly— the creature still was able to avoid obstacles and threats from the dominant male while carrying out the electrical imperative. Another type of signal has made monkeys turn their heads, or smile, no matter what else they were doing, up to twenty thousand times in two weeks. As Delgado concluded, "The animals looked like electronic toys." 
Even instincts and emotions can be changed: In one test a mother giving continuous care to her baby suddenly pushed the infant away whenever the signal was given. Approach-avoidance conditioning can be achieved for any action simply by stimulating the pleasure and pain centers in an animal's or person's limbic system. 
Eventual monitoring of evoked potentials from the EEG, combined with radio-frequency and microwave broadcasts designed to produce specific thoughts or moods, such as compliance and complacency, promises a method of mind control that poses immense danger to all societies —tyranny without terror.

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.

The offices in the skyscrapers were lit bright as day. The giant eye zoomed in and observed a hundred thousand faces staring at computer monitors through closed-circuit cameras; their tension, anxiety, anticipation, confusion, satisfaction, suspicion, jealousy, anger refreshed rapidly while their glasses reflected the data jumping across their screens. Their looks were empty but deep, without thought of the relationship between their lives and values, yearning for change but also afraid of it. They gazed at their screens the way they gazed at each other, and they hated their screens the way they hated each other. They all possessed the same bored, apathetic face.

Big data is a type of supercomputing for commercial enterprises and governments that will make it possible to monitor a pandemic as it happens, anticipate where the next bank robbery will occur, optimize fast food supply chains, predict voter behavior on election day, and forecast the volatility of political uprisings while they are happening.

Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment: spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors; disturbance; competition; predation, whether microbial, insect, or animal; composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount; degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange; biological oscillations, including circadian; and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live. As Anthony Trewavas comments, this “continually and specifically changes the information spectrum” to which the plants are attending.

After a couple of years of monitoring the news, I’ve learned that the same stories repeat in a cycle, with just the names and places changed. At first I thought that the news broadcasters were literally reusing old reporting to save money, but I gradually came to the conclusion that humans find it comforting to watch the same news over and over again.

Campbell’s law) in his 1979 study, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change.” He explains the concept a bit more precisely: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

In business, the market is changing so rapidly that many products and services that successfully met consumer tastes and needs a few years ago are obsolete today. Proactive powerful leadership must constantly monitor environmental change, particularly customer buying habits and motives, and provide the force necessary to organize resources in the right direction.

Maneuver warfare tactics are trust tactics. That is their single most important characteristic. And that’s the biggest difference from what we do now.” It is certainly the biggest change from the current command and control system. Trust and a shared way of thinking, leadership and monitoring, not fancy new C2 equipment, are what you need to be able to fight using maneuver warfare.

We do not consider the many causes of weight loss. We don’t remember troubling weight loss is sometimes prompted by grief from a breakup, divorce, or death. We don’t think about weight loss caused by cancer or chemotherapy. We don’t consider that the person in front of us might be going through a medical crisis, their weight loss a sign of abrupt and troubling change rather than hard-fought victory. And we don’t consider that weight loss is sometimes linked to declining mental health or a new wave of disordered eating. In our eagerness to compliment what we assume is desired weight loss, many of us end up congratulating restrictive eating disorders, grief, and trauma in the process, revealing that we are in a constant state of surveillance, monitoring and assessing the bodies of those around us. We keep our disappointment and displeasure quiet, revealing our disapproval of fatness only in our celebration of thinness.

I looked at the sofa. I wanted to lie down on it and close my eyes. I wanted him to just do the therapy to me, suck it out of me while I slept. I wanted a complete overhaul. I wanted new limbs. I wanted a new neck to hold up a whole new head. I wanted to be hypnotized, brainwashed, monitored, imploded, reconstituted, turned invisible. turned inside out, and cured. I wanted my organs replaced with all new organs, no scars. I wanted him to hover over me and infuse the stew of me with clear insights and shiny bits. I wanted all this change to happen while I lay semi-dozing, in a state of beauty and receptivity, quietly thrumming, on the couch. But it wasn’t a lie-down kind of a couch. It was a forward-facing, upright, massive ship of a thing – a sofa for adults, for work, for serious conversation, maybe for reading John Steinbeck or drafting torts. There had never been a free association on this sofa in its entire life.

Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment. In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash. To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators).

A woman’s mate value even varies over the monthly ovulation cycle. Subtle changes in women’s attractiveness reflect the ovulatory phase. Their skin glows a bit more, their waist-to-hip ratio becomes slightly lower, and their voices rise a bit, all qualities found to enhance perceptions of female beauty. The fact that women become more exacting in their mate preferences at precisely this time in their cycle might reflect an adaptation to monitor their own mate value and adjust their standards accordingly.

But I want to make a further claim, one analogous to that made for scientific forestry: the modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area. Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warming, habitat loss) and ones that will right themselves (one cold winter, droughts like last year's). Consistency is key; they collect details year after year, no empty data sets between. A few species have disappeared from parts of the study area altogether, probably a lasting change. On the other hand, seemingly big news in 2012 might be just a year's aberration. Two butterflies came back to the city of Davis last year, the umber skipper after 30 years, the woodland skipper after 20-- both likely a result of a dry winter with near-perfect breeding conditions of sunny afternoons and cool nights.

We should not be complacent and view China’s actions as those of an alien nation; they are in many ways simply more honest about their totalitarianism. To control a population of disenfranchised and divided people, Western governments and bodies like the EU are all following China’s example and calling upon the power of digital and financial corporations to monitor and report on their citizen’s activities both in the real world and online. Their veneer of democratic respectability is peeling away, allowing people to see the truth that lies beneath.

Computer modeling showed the lasers’ twin collimating beams racing away from the Star Destroyer. Then, captured by gravity, the beams become one, changing vector and accelerating beyond lightspeed as it disappeared into the mask’s churning accretion envelope. Krennic watched the monitor in naked awe, wishing there was some way he could screen the results for Galen without sending him into cardiac arrest or fleeing for the farthest reaches of the galaxy. His legacy, in any case, his contribution to the greatest weapon ever constructed, was now assured.

So who lost Iraq? The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007–08 surge? Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein. One can blame almost anyone, but one must not invent facts to support an argument. Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq? He gave an eloquent speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

We decided to attend to our community instead of asking our community to attend the church.” His staff started showing up at local community events such as sports contests and town hall meetings. They entered a float in the local Christmas parade. They rented a football field and inaugurated a Free Movie Night on summer Fridays, complete with popcorn machines and a giant screen. They opened a burger joint, which soon became a hangout for local youth; it gives free meals to those who can’t afford to pay. When they found out how difficult it was for immigrants to get a driver’s license, they formed a drivers school and set their fees at half the going rate. My own church in Colorado started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter, recruiting volunteers to do painting, carpentry, and house repairs for widows and single mothers. Soon they learned of another need and opened Hands Automotive to offer free oil changes, inspections, and car washes to the same constituency. They fund the work by charging normal rates to those who can afford it. I heard from a church in Minneapolis that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets, add money to the meters with expired time, and put cards on the windshields that read, “Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call.” In Cincinnati, college students sign up every Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall — ​no charge. “People just could not understand why I would want to wrap their presents,” one wrote me. “I tell them, ‘We just want to show God’s love in a practical way.’ ” In one of the boldest ventures in creative grace, a pastor started a community called Miracle Village in which half the residents are registered sex offenders. Florida’s state laws require sex offenders to live more than a thousand feet from a school, day care center, park, or playground, and some municipalities have lengthened the distance to half a mile and added swimming pools, bus stops, and libraries to the list. As a result, sex offenders, one of the most despised categories of criminals, are pushed out of cities and have few places to live. A pastor named Dick Witherow opened Miracle Village as part of his Matthew 25 Ministries. Staff members closely supervise the residents, many of them on parole, and conduct services in the church at the heart of Miracle Village. The ministry also provides anger-management and Bible study classes.

The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.

Women start receiving pamphlets from the state at age eighteen. We are told starting at fourteen to monitor ourselves for signs of magical expression. Floating while sleeping, lights consistently flickering as we walk beneath them, unconsciously repeating ourselves three times, having a desire to eat raw meat, hearing voices others can’t hear, wanting to teach other people cruel lessons. At school, we are separated from the boys for classes about menstruation, our changing bodies, and what we should do if we ever feel like we are being swayed toward the dark one’s path. Our parents could opt us out of health classes, but no one could miss any of the classes about checking ourselves and our peers for witchcraft.

In one study, a trio of professors from Harvard Business School tracked more than one thousand acclaimed equity analysts over a decade and monitored how their performance changed as they switched firms. Their dour conclusion, “When a company hires a star, the star’s performance plunges, there is a sharp decline in the functioning of the group or team the person works with, and the company’s market value falls.”20 The hiring organization is let down because it failed to consider systems-based advantages that the prior employer supplied, including firm reputation and resources. Employers also underestimate the relationships that supported previous success, the quality of the other employees, and a familiarity with past processes.

I have found it frustrating at times that so few people know what the space program does and, as a result, are unaware that they benefit from it. Many people object to “wasting money in space” yet have no idea how much is actually spent on space exploration. The CSA’s budget, for instance, is less than the amount Canadians spend on Halloween candy every year, and most of it goes toward things like developing telecommunications satellites and radar systems to provide data for weather and air quality forecasts, environmental monitoring and climate change studies. Similarly, NASA’s budget is not spent in space but right here on Earth, where it’s invested in American businesses and universities, and where it also pays dividends, creating new jobs, new technologies and even whole new industries. The

Lenin was once asked to define communism in a single sentence. ‘Communism is power to worker councils,’ he said, ‘plus electrification of the whole country.’ There can be no communism without electricity, without railroads, without radio. You couldn’t establish a communist regime in sixteenth-century Russia, because communism necessitates the concentration of information and resources in one hub. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ only works when produce can easily be collected and distributed across vast distances, and when activities can be monitored and coordinated over entire countries. Marx and his followers understood the new technological realities and the new human experiences, so they had relevant answers to the new problems of industrial society, as well as original ideas about how to benefit from the unprecedented opportunities. The socialists created a brave new religion for a brave new world. They promised salvation through technology and economics, thus establishing the first techno-religion in history, and changing the foundations of ideological discourse. Before Marx, people defined and divided themselves according to their views about God, not about production methods. Since Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul and the afterlife. In the second half of the twentieth century, humankind almost obliterated itself in an argument about production methods. Even the harshest critics of Marx and Lenin adopted their basic attitude towards history and society, and began thinking about technology and production much more carefully than about God and heaven.

The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission

what. Content strategy asks these questions of stakeholders and clients: Why are we doing this? What are we hoping to accomplish, change, or encourage? How will we measure the success of this initiative and the content in it? What measurements of success or metrics do we need to monitor to know if we are successful? How will we ensure the web remains a priority? What do we need to change in resources, staffing, and budgets to maintain the value of communication within and from the organization? What are we trying to communicate? What's the hierarchy of that messaging? This isn't Sophie's Choice, but when you start prioritizing features on a homepage and allocating budget to your list of features and content needs, get ready to make some tough calls. What content types best meet the needs of our target audience and their changing, multiple contexts? What content types best fit the skills of our

New bureaucracy takes the form not of a specific, delimited function performed by particular workers but invades all areas of work, with the result that – as Kafka prophesied – workers become their own auditors, forced to assess their own performance. Take, for example, the ‘new system’ that OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) uses to inspect Further Education colleges. Under the old system, a college would have a ‘heavy’ inspection once every four years or so, i.e. one involving many lesson observations and a large number of inspectors present in the college. Under the new, ‘improved’ system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a ‘light’ inspection. But the downside of this ‘light’ inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirrored by in the change from the Research Assessment Exercise to the Research Excellence Framework in higher education: periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual anxiety.)

This is the thinking behind Amazon’s anticipatory shopping patent.43 Instead of customers making their own decisions, Amazon decides for them, sending what they want before they know they want it. It is, as one commentator noticed, one more step towards cutting out human agency altogether.44 Pervasive monitoring devices – smartphones, wearables, voice-enabled speakers and smart meters – allow companies to track and manage consumer behaviour. The Harvard business scholar Shoshana Zuboff quotes an unnamed chief data scientist who explains: ‘The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale . . . we can capture their behaviours and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviours.’45 MIT’s Alex Pentland seems more interested in enhancing machines than human understanding. He celebrates the opportunity to deploy sensors and data in order to increase efficiency

Search engine query data is not the product of a designed statistical experiment and finding a way to meaningfully analyse such data and extract useful knowledge is a new and challenging field that would benefit from collaboration. For the 2012–13 flu season, Google made significant changes to its algorithms and started to use a relatively new mathematical technique called Elasticnet, which provides a rigorous means of selecting and reducing the number of predictors required. In 2011, Google launched a similar program for tracking Dengue fever, but they are no longer publishing predictions and, in 2015, Google Flu Trends was withdrawn. They are, however, now sharing their data with academic researchers... Google Flu Trends, one of the earlier attempts at using big data for epidemic prediction, provided useful insights to researchers who came after them... The Delphi Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University won the CDC’s challenge to ‘Predict the Flu’ in both 2014–15 and 2015–16 for the most accurate forecasters. The group successfully used data from Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia for monitoring flu outbreaks.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

The most obvious way that defensive motivational states make themselves known to us is, in fact, through our own behavior. The ability to observe one’s behavior and thus create representations of behavior in working memory is called monitoring.77 By directing our attention to our behavioral output, we can acquire information about what we are doing and intentionally adjust our behavior in light of thoughts, memories, and feelings. As an executive function of working memory, monitoring, not surprisingly, involves circuits in the prefrontal cortex.78 We use observations of our own behavior to regulate how we act in social situations.79 If you become aware that your behavior is negatively affecting others, you can make adjustments as a social situation evolves. Or if you notice you are acting in a biased way toward some group, you can make corrections. In addition, through monitoring one can observe undesirable habits and seek to change these through therapy or other means. Not everyone is equally adept at using monitoring to improve self-awareness. The field of emotional intelligence is all about how people differ in such abilities and how one can be trained to do better.80

made some teams much better than others. What they found was that individual intelligence (as measured by IQ) didn’t make the big difference. Having a high aggregate intelligence or just one or two superstars wasn’t critical. The groups that surfaced more and better solutions shared three key qualities. First, they gave one another roughly equal time to talk. This wasn’t monitored or regulated, but no one in these high-achieving groups dominated or was a passenger. Everyone contributed and nothing any one person said was wasted. The second quality of the successful groups was social sensitivity: these individuals were more tuned in to one another, to subtle shifts in mood and demeanor. They scored more highly on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which is broadly considered a test for empathy. These groups were socially alert to one another’s needs. And the third distinguishing feature was that the best groups included more women, perhaps because that made them more diverse, or because women tend to score more highly on tests for empathy. What this (and much more) research highlights is just how critical the role of social connectedness can be. Reading the research, I

I try to catch my breath and calm myself down, but it isn’t easy. I was dead. I was dead, and then I wasn’t, and why? Because of Peter? Peter? I stare at him. He still looks so innocent, despite all that he has done to prove that he is not. His hair lies smooth against his head, shiny and dark, like we didn’t just run for a mile at full speed. His round eyes scan the stairwell and then rest on my face. “What?” he says. “Why are you looking at me like that?” “How did you do it?” I say. “It wasn’t that hard,” he says. “I dyed a paralytic serum purple and switched it out with the death serum. Replaced the wire that was supposed to ready your heartbeat with a dead one. The bit with the heart monitor was harder; I had to get some Erudite help with a remote and stuff--you wouldn’t understand it if I explained it to you.” “Why did you do it?” I say. “You want me dead. You were willing to do it yourself? What changed?” He presses his lips together and doesn’t look away, not for a long time. Then he opens his mouth, hesitates, and finally says, “I can’t be in anyone’s debt. Okay? The idea that I owed you something made me sick. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit. Indebted to a Stiff? It’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And I couldn’t have it.” “What are you talking about? You owed me something?” He rolls his eyes. “The Amity compound. Someone shot me--the bullet was at head level; it would have hit me right between the eyes. And you shoved me out of the way. We were even before that--I almost killed you during initiation, you almost killed me during the attack simulation; we’re square, right? But after that…” “You’re insane,” says Tobias. “That’s not the way the world works…with everyone keeping score.” “It’s not?” Peter raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know what world you live in, but in mine, people only do things for you for one of two reasons. The first is if they want something in return. And the second is if they feel like they owe you something.” “Those aren’t the only reasons people do things for you,” I say. “Sometimes they do them because they love you. Well, maybe not you, but…” Peter snorts. “That’s exactly the kind of garbage I expect a delusional stiff to say.” “I guess we just have to make sure you owe us,” says Tobias. “Or you’ll go running to whoever offers you the best deal.” “Yeah,” Peter says. “That’s pretty much how it is.

The realisation that what are usually called ‘predictive’ technologies are in fact interested more in ‘nudging’ and mapping out the new rhythms of the city than in simply monitoring or surveilling also suggests the need for a new conception of digital time. Armen Arvanessian argues that as a result of digital data time itself – the direction of time – has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. If people have the impression that time is out of joint, or that time doesn’t make sense anymore, or it isn’t as it used to be, then the reason is, I think, that they have – or we all have – problems getting used to living in such a speculative time or within a speculative temporality. Data technologies do not simply predict the future by guessing what an individual or group might do or want to do in the future. It is rather that those futures already exist, completely realised, and they reach backwards into the present to guide it. The possible paths for our desires to travel are mapped ahead of time by algorithms in the hands of platform capitalists.

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” —THE MENTAT HANDBOOK

The concept of product/ market fit originates in Marc Andreessen’s seminal blog post “The Only Thing That Matters.” In his essay, Andreessen argues that the most important factor in successful start-ups is the combination of market and product. His definition couldn’t be simpler: “Product/ market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Without product/ market fit, it’s impossible to grow a start-up into a successful business. As Andreessen notes, You see a surprising number of really well-run start-ups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/ market fit. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to define product/ market fit than it is to establish it! When you start a new company, the key product/ market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” space; if an opportunity is obvious to everyone, the chance that you’ll be the one who succeeds is exceedingly low. Most nonobvious opportunities arise from a change in the market that the incumbents aren’t willing or able to adapt to.

The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

To test these ideas, Dr. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal recruited a group of fifteen Carmelite nuns who agreed to put their heads into an MRI machine. To qualify for the experiment, all of them must “have had an experience of intense union with God.” Originally, Dr. Beauregard had hoped that the nuns would have a mystical communion with God, which could then be recorded by an MRI scan. However, being shoved into an MRI machine, where you are surrounded by tons of magnetic coils of wire and high-tech equipment, is not an ideal setting for a religious epiphany. The best they could do was to evoke memories of previous religious experiences. “God cannot be summoned at will,” explained one of the nuns. The final result was mixed and inconclusive, but several regions of the brain clearly lit up during this experiment: •  The caudate nucleus, which is involved with learning and possibly falling in love. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling the unconditional love of God?) •  The insula, which monitors body sensations and social emotions. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling close to the other nuns as they were reaching out to God?) •  The parietal lobe, which helps process spatial awareness. (Perhaps the nuns felt they were in the physical presence of God?) Dr. Beauregard had to admit that so many areas of the brain were activated, with so many different possible interpretations, that he could not say for sure whether hyperreligiosity could be induced. However, it was clear to him that the nuns’ religious feelings were reflected in their brain scans. But did this experiment shake the nuns’ belief in God? No. In fact, the nuns concluded that God placed this “radio” in the brain so that we could communicate with Him. Their conclusion was that God created humans to have this ability, so the brain has a divine antenna given to us by God so that we can feel His presence. David Biello concludes, “Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them.” Dr. Beauregard concluded, “If you are an atheist and you live a certain kind of experience, you will relate it to the magnificence of the universe. If you are a Christian, you will associate it with God. Who knows. Perhaps they are the same thing.” Similarly, Dr. Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University and an outspoken atheist, was once placed in the God helmet to see if his religious beliefs would change. They did not. So in conclusion, although hyperreligiosity may be induced via temporal lobe epilepsy and even magnetic fields, there is no convincing evidence that magnetic fields can alter one’s religious views.

Chet couldn’t wipe away his smile. “I have learned much since we parted ways, and one of those lessons is that a static force, even in mass, can be crushed by a dynamic one.” Wellington‘s face stiffened. “What kind of foolish talk is that?” “You will find out. On the Fourth of July, as you sit here in your governor’s mansion pandering to your public servants—using them to climb into more power, you will learn what it feels like to have everything you believe in shatter before your very eyes.” Wellington shifted irritably in his seat. “What sort of riddle is that, Chet? You and I have been in this political game our entire lives. You know how it works, and that’s not going to change. Ever. One party controls the knobs of politics with one hand, and the other party controls the knobs with the other hand. But they are all one body, members of a political ruling class. That’s what we do. This isn’t anything new.” Chet pushed his brows over his eyes in a gaze that could melt steel. “You will not be able to stop the ramifications of its impact. This thing I’m about to unleash upon you, I’m doing to you because you are an evil man. I used to be, I’ll give you that. But I changed, luckily, before death found me. And I will not let you get away with what you are doing to this country.” Wellington was aghast. “So you’re involved with terrorism now, are you? What are you going to do?” Chet shook his head. “The truth isn’t something you can hide from people. They all feel it even if they don’t understand the intentions behind the madness.” Wellington was in a near panic in anticipation over what Chet was planning. “I can have you followed, you know. Everyone you speak to will be monitored. Surely you know that? And who are you to decide what the best position for anything is? You don’t have a right to make decisions for the masses. If you were sitting in my seat, perhaps. But you’re not.” “If you hadn’t cheated, I would be in your chair.” Chet pierced Wellington with his squinted eyes. “And because of that, I have decided that you aren’t able to make decisions for the masses either, and I’ll see to it that you won’t continue to do so.” Chet pushed back his chair and stood up dramatically. “Enjoy this office because you won’t be here long.” Wellington contorted his face in panic. “What are you doing? What’s going to happen? Tell me at least that much! Was it so bad between us that we can’t reason with each other? Maybe we could make a deal. What if I make you my presidential running mate?” Chet didn’t answer. He headed for the door, unsure as to why he had said that last part. He still didn’t really know what was going to happen. But with Rick Stevens headed down in a few days with a multimillion dollar car, anything was possible. But now Wellington would know that Chet was behind the crazy driver who refused to pull over.

Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen

Strategic Planning Today: A Six-Step Process  The strategic planning process offers incredible benefits if we pursue it correctly. The following six steps constitute one version of the process: mission, objective, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and control.  The first step in the process is to define your mission; as we saw at the beginning of this lecture, this is the core that guides you. Your mission is what you look to in setting your objectives.  The objectives established in the second step are chosen based on some notion of wanting to fulfill your mission. They should be clear, concise, achievable, and in some sense, measurable.  The third step, the environmental scan, is pivotal for most firms, and it is the most involved. Look at both the external and internal environments in which your firm functions. On a personal level, evaluate the external factors that impinge on you with respect to your objectives.  The fourth step is the actual formulation of strategy. Decide what you will actually do to get from where you are to where you want to be. Allocate resources and connect your management decisions with the people who will implement the plan.  The fifth step is implementation of strategy, and here is where many companies fail because they do not follow the military dictum to “supervise and refine.” This means not to simply issue orders and assume that they’ll be carried out.  The sixth step, control, involves developing a control mechanism to evaluate whether or not the plan is working. When the control or monitoring system tells you that something is amiss in your strategy, you can then circle back to your environmental scan to discover whether the relevant environmental factors have changed.

we can pair the left brain to “consciousness” and the right brain to the “unconscious.” Perhaps our brains reflect the cosmic interplay between day and night, Sun and Moon, just as they are split between logic and intuition, conscious and unconscious. Consciousness would be linked to daylight and thus the Sun, and the unconscious would be linked to the night and the Moon. Taking this a step further, the brain is 85 percent water and therefore highly susceptible to subtle changes in electromagnetic fields. Just as the tides are affected by the Sun and the Moon, it is possible that the day and night circadian cycle of the brain hemispheres, monitored by the pineal gland, may also be affected by these two heavenly bodies. During the day, the Sun rules, and our conscious left brain, which thinks in words, is dominant. At night, when the Moon is out, a reversal takes place, and we sleep and dream. The left brain, which was conscious, becomes unconscious, and the right, which was relatively unconscious, becomes “conscious.

Those who were oblivious to, or content with, the situation lived relatively peaceful lives, but those who exercised their democratic right to advocate for change – either from inside or outside the system – were bullied, ignored, discredited, or terrorised, while systemic corruption within the police force and sections of the government (and that government’s perversion of the Westminster doctrine of separation of powers) allowed criminal elements to prosper. The situation in which the public was monitored and restricted while corrupt police sanctioned criminal behaviour was hardly conducive to social or recreational bliss. Activists and alternatives devised their own entertainment, and those with a penchant for illegal casinos and prostitutes were well catered for; but the people of mainstream Brisbane took turns in the Hilton’s glass elevator.

Reform without a vision of fundamental change, without a politics that aims to leave no one behind, can give way to new forms of captivity and containment by the state. Take, for example, reforms such as electronic monitoring, house arrest, mandatory drug testing, and other forms of probation. While for some these alternatives might be preferable over prisons, they threaten to extend imprisonment “beyond the walls of the jail or penitentiary” into our homes and neighborhoods, as author and activist Maya Schenwar astutely points out.19 These “kinder and gentler” forms of punishment create more insidious forms of control and containment by the state and legitimate a carceral logic.

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention? What concerns me as

Not engaging is the most frustrating thing to a protestor, right? “Guns don’t kill people! People kill people!” he yells. Of course this line almost stops me. Should I have a conversation with this sad sack about the disingenuousness of this statement? Should I hold a two-minute seminar on the many machines, chemicals and drugs that are strictly monitored because of their potential lethal power? Should I point out that we don’t let people walk around with heroin or bombs or cyanide or mercury, or let just anyone pilot helicopters or cruise ships or 18-wheelers? But why bother with this guy? A discussion in causation or semantics isn’t going to change his mind.

With regard to the future of Christians much is mysterious. Spiritual growth, like its physical counterpart, is ordinarily a gentle and imperceptible process. One neither sees nor feels it happening. The most that can be said about the subjective side of it is that every now and then, believers realize they are different in this or that way from what they once were. The long-term effects of particular insights, experiences, chastenings, moments of shock, sustained routines and ongoing relationships cannot be calculated in advance. Some Christians change at surface level far faster and more dramatically than others, but how much corresponding change takes place at a deep level cannot be monitored either by the agent or by any human observer. Only God knows, for He alone can search hearts down to the bottom. The spotlight of consciousness enables us to know only a small part of ourselves. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work reaches deep into that large part of ourselves to which we have no access. No wonder, then, that we constantly misconceive and misjudge what God is and is not doing in us, with us and for us, just as we constantly err when we try to assess what God is doing through us in ministry to others.

The simplest kind of control that is afforded by this feedback loop is the so-called stretch reflex, which is illustrated by the knee-jerk test which most of us have experienced in the doctor’s office. The common tendon of the quadriceps is tapped with a rubber mallet just below the knee-cap, and this tap has the effect of a sharp tug on the muscle fibers of the thigh. This sudden change in length of the thigh muscles is registered by the anulospiral receptors, which in turn stimulate in the spinal cord the motor neurons which power the thigh, causing a brief contraction of the thigh muscles which makes the foot jerk forward in a healthy reflex. This automatic contraction has the effect of keeping the thigh muscles at a constant length regardless of outside forces acting upon it, and makes it possible to maintain erect posture in spite of external disturbances. The components of this arc are like a miniature or primitive nervous system, a microcosm of our nervous system as a whole, a system which “in its simplest form is merely a mechanism by which a muscular movement can be initiated by some change in peri-ipheral sensation.” My spindles and their reflex arcs are tiny neural units that monitor and influence motor events that are so continuous and so numerous that they would totally overwhelm my conscious mind. Even if I could keep track of the changing lengths of every one of my millions of muscle cells, I certainly would have no room left to think about anything else.

Use a ‘noise level meter’ Background music makes a great noise level meter. Have it playing fairly softly in the background and assign one student per table group with the job of making sure the music is always audible. Once they can no longer hear it, they know they are too loud and they must tell their teammates to quieten down; if they can hear the music then the volume is okay. Another option is to have a visible reminder on the board or wall. This could be as simple as putting a sign up on the wall (‘You’re too noisy’) whenever talking turns into shouting, or you could be a little more creative with a colour scheme similar to traffic lights. A green card means levels are appropriate, orange means they’re getting a little bit too loud and red is way too loud. Instead of nagging kids to be quiet, just walk over to the wall and change the card to reflect the current noise level. In time, the students will start to look out for you doing this and they will remind each other to keep quiet when the orange card goes up. If the room is too noisy, put up the red card and tell students they must now work independently in silence for five minutes. If they manage that then you can then put the green card back up. A visual reminder like this develops responsibility and encourages children to monitor their own noise levels.

The Habits Manifesto What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while. Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong. Focus on actions, not outcomes. By giving something up, we may gain. Things often get harder before they get easier. When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. We’re not very different from other people, but those differences are very important. It’s easier to change our surroundings than ourselves. We can’t make people change, but when we change, others may change. We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse. We manage what we monitor. Once we’re ready to begin, begin now.

Domestic violence – the warning signs Advertisement Common abusive behaviours set out in Power and Control: • Jealousy and possessiveness. • Humiliating and insulting you in front of others. • Sabotaging your relationship with friends and family. • Sudden changes of mood – charming one minute and abusive the next. • Monitoring your movements, insisting on time limits when you do things, checking your phone, social networks and spending. • Controlling what you wear and eat (so subtly, you don’t see it happening). • Blaming you for the abuse (“I’m not like this with anyone else!” “You make me like this.”) • Expecting you to have sex when you don’t want to, including when you’re ill or asleep. • Damaging your treasured possessions. • Harming or threatening to harm family pets. • Driving recklessly to frighten you. • Threatening to kidnap or get custody of the children if you leave. • Telling you you’re useless and could never cope without him. • Dominating how you feel – whether that’s happy, afraid or frightened. Having the power to make you constantly change your behaviour to avoid his “displeasure”.

objective monitoring and qualification which reduces arbitrary, private subjective judgments carried out

Mental Biofeedback. A second method which can be very useful involves monitoring your negative thoughts with a wrist counter. You can buy one at a sporting-goods store or a golf shop; it looks like a wristwatch, is inexpensive, and every time you push the button, the number changes on the dial. Click the button each time a negative thought about yourself crosses your mind; be on the constant alert for such thoughts. At the end of the day, note your daily total score and write it down in a log book.

Frankl says we detect rather than invent our missions in life. I like that choice of words. I think each of us has an internal monitor or sense, a conscience, that gives us an awareness of our own uniqueness and the singular contributions that we can make.

I'm not convinced," Dodds said. It was Thursday morning, just six hours after Bosch and Chu had ended their surveillance of Chang, with the suspect going to an apartment in Monterey Park and apparently retiring for the night. "Well, Cap, you shouldn't be convinced yet," Bosch said. "That's why we want to continue the surveillance and get the wire." "What I mean is, I'm not convinced it's the way to go," Dodds said, "Surveillance is fine. But a wire is a lot of work and effort for long-shot results." Bosch understood. Dodds had an excellent repu tation as a detective, but he was now an administrator and about as far removed from the detective work in his division as a Houston oil executive is from the gas pump, He now worked with personnel numbers and budgets, He had to find ways of doing more with less and never allowing a dip in the statistics of arrests made and cases closed. That made him a realist and the reality was that electronic surveillance was very expensive. Not only did it take double-digit man hours to carefully draft a fifty plus-page affidavit secking court permission, but once permission was granted, a wiretap room had to be staffed twenty-four hours a day with a detective monitoring the line. Often a single-number tap led to other numbers needing to be tapped and under the law each line had to have its own monitor. Such an operation quickly sucked up overtime like a giant sponge. With the RHD's OT budget seriously down because of economic constraints on the department, Dodds was reluctant to give any of it up for what amounted to an investigation of the mur der of a South Side liquor store clerk. He would rather save it for a rainy day-a big-time media case that might come up and that would demand it.

Consciousness isn’t part of a child’s innate makeup. It has to be added. A child has to acquire consciousness, through education, something which others do to the child. Human culture operates on human infants to furnish them with a new operating system: consciousness. No other animal has a culture. No other animal can change their instinctual operating system. Children are the perfect laboratory for consciousness studies since they start off unconscious, slowly develop consciousness – for several years existing in an extraordinary liminal zone poised between the unconscious and conscious worlds – and, finally, become fully conscious. Via children, we can literally track how consciousness changes humans as we monitor the changing properties and abilities of children as their degree of consciousness increases.

As a third step, we want to create the habit of recording daily information in your notebook about how the diet is progressing. Of course, you can decide to write whatever you want in your notebook, but I believe the following information is essential for monitoring your diet: Mealtimes and dishes consumed. How you feel emotionally. If you have broken your diet for any reason, describe how and when. Recording this information will help you to identify patterns later; here are some examples: You may realize that the time of one or more of your meals tends to be at the limit of the fasting window, and reconsider the window chosen You may notice that your mood worsens on a particular day of the week, and if you are applying the 5: 2 method, you may want to reconsider the allocation of fasting days. You may notice that you tend to stop dieting too often to get results and decide to change methodology. Etc.

There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed.

A body fighting an infection required blood to be pumped through it at a faster than normal rate. “The heart rate of an old man with pneumonia is not supposed to be normal!” said Redelmeier. “It’s supposed to be ripping along!” An old man with pneumonia whose heart rate appears normal is an old man whose heart may well have a serious problem. But the normal reading on the heart rate monitor created a false sense in doctors’ minds that all was well. And it was precisely when all seemed well that medical experts “failed to check themselves.

Our new care pathways were effective because they were led by physicians, enabled by real-time data-based feedback, and primarily focused on improving the quality of patient care,” which “fundamentally motivated our physicians to change their behavior.” Crucial too was the fact that “the men and women who actually work in the service lines themselves chose which care processes to change. Involving them directly in decision making secured their buy-in and made success more likely.” What we can learn from the Geisinger example is the importance of having providers develop and monitor performance measures. The fact that the measures were in keeping with their own professional sense of mission was crucial.

Tearing Down Monoliths “Be autonomous.” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? In fact, it would be hard to overstate the effort we expended to free these teams from the constraints that bound them so tightly at the beginning. The effort would necessitate major changes to the way we wrote, built, tested, and deployed our software, how we stored our data, and how we monitored our systems to keep them running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In fairness, though, no child likes to have his life rearranged from one school year to the next. Change is difficult for anyone, but even more so for an insecure adolescent. At that age, most kids are embarrassed just to be alive. With emotional antennae raised, they are acutely aware of their social standing at all times. Like an air traffic controller monitoring blips on a screen, a teenager is constantly tracking his small place in a big world, asking himself: Am I accepted by my peers? Do they like me? Am I ugly? How's my hair? Will I be popular?

Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system. There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed.

Seek clarity on who you want to be, how you want to interact with others, what you want, and what will bring you the greatest meaning. As every project or major initiative begins, you ask questions such as “What kind of person do I want to be while I’m doing this?” “How should I treat others?” “What are my intentions and objectives?” “What can I focus on that will bring me a sense of connection and fulfillment?” High performers ask these types of questions not only at the beginning of an endeavor but consistently throughout. They don’t just “get clarity” once and develop a mission statement that lasts the test of time; they consistently seek clarity again and again as times change and as they take on new projects or enter new social situations. This kind of routine self-monitoring is one of the hallmarks of their success. Generate energy so that you can maintain focus, effort, and wellbeing. To stay on your A game, you’ll need to actively care for your mental stamina, physical energy, and positive emotions in very specific ways. Raise the necessity for exceptional performance. This means actively tapping into the reasons you absolutely must perform well. This necessity is based on a mix of your internal standards (e.g., your identity, beliefs, values, or expectations for excellence) and external demands (e.g., social obligations, competition, public commitments, deadlines). It’s about always knowing your why and stoking that fire all the time so you feel the needed drive or pressure to get at it. Increase productivity in your primary field of interest. Specifically, focus on prolific quality output (PQO) in the area in which you want to be known and to drive impact. You’ll also have to minimize distractions (including opportunities) that steal your attention from creating PQO. Develop influence with those around you. It will make you better at getting people to believe in and support your efforts and ambitions. Unless you consciously develop a positive support network, major achievements over the long haul are all but impossible. Demonstrate courage by expressing your ideas, taking bold action, and standing up for yourself and others, even in the face of fear, uncertainty, threat, or changing conditions. Courage is not an occasional act, but a trait of choice and will.

Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby! The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension cords are umbilical. Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on- her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath. This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me. I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it, pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment, the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl, but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair, my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky is a mess of blue.

Lot of people think that their partner change after sex or making love. But most of the time and the reality is .It is them who have changed first. After sex, they gain some type of entitlement. They develop You owe me attitude, or you need to love me more attitude. That attitude and behavior is the one that is pushing their partners away.  Not because they already got some from them. It is how they are talking, behaving, and treating their partner after lovemaking. Some are not that they have changed. It is just after sex you are monitoring them, and you start to see things that you didn’t notice before because you were not paying attention from the start. 

Control system overlays must be faster and more reliable than the underlying systems being controlled. The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, first introduced in 1928, explains why. A receiver (sensor) must sample at least twice the rate of the sender (the thing being monitored and controlled) to accurately measure and control a system. This theorem forms the basis of all things digital, including telecommunications, medical imaging systems, astronomy, and more. In reality, to control a complex engineered or biological system, the receiver and controller must be much faster to maintain resilience and agility. This has stark implications for top-down management. For instance, if reports are generated and reviewed once a week, they can be used to control (manage) only situations that change no faster or more frequently than every two weeks. Anything faster moving may not be detected or is not controllable. This explains why exemplary organizations are typically characterized by overlays of people in supportive roles that are uncharacteristic of their lower-performing peers. That is not “overhead” but absolutely necessary bandwidth for sustaining high performance of fast-moving, complex, dynamic systems.

LOCAL SELF AS HOST FOR NONLOCAL SELF When you drop back into your daily life after meditation, you’re changed. You’ve communed with nonlocal mind for an hour, experiencing the highest possible cadence of who you are. That High Self version of you rearranges neurons in your head to create a physical structure to anchor it. You now have a brain that accommodates both the local self and the nonlocal self. My experience has been that the longer you spend in Bliss Brain, whether in or out of meditation, the greater the volume of neural tissue available to anchor that transcendent self in physical experience. Once a critical mass of neurons has wired together, a tipping point occurs. You begin to flash spontaneously into Bliss Brain throughout your day. When you’re idle for a while, like being stuck in traffic or standing in line at the grocery store, the most natural activity seems to be to go into Bliss Brain for a few moments. This reminds you, in the middle of everyday life, that the nonlocal component of your Self exists. It also brings all the enhanced creativity, productivity, and problem-solving ability of Bliss Brain to bear on your daily tasks. You become a happy, creative, and effective person. These enhanced capabilities render you much more able to cope with the challenges of life. They don’t confer exceptional luck. When everyone’s house burns down, yours does too. When the economy nosedives, it takes you with it. But because you possess resilience, and a daily experience of your nonlocal self, you take it in stride. Even when external things vanish, you still have the neural network that Bliss Brain created. No one can take that away from you. DEEPENING PRACTICES Here are practices you can do this week to integrate the information in this chapter into your life: Posttraumatic Growth Exercise 1: In your journal, write down the names of the most resilient people you’ve known personally. They can be alive or dead. They’re people who’ve gone through tragedy and come out intact. Make an appointment to spend time with at least two of the living ones in the coming month. Listen to their stories and allow inspiration to fill you. Neural Reconsolidation Exercise: This week, after a particularly deep meditation, savor the experience. Set a timer and lie down for 15 to 30 minutes. Visualize your synapses wiring together as you deliberately fire them by remembering the deliciousness of the meditation. Choices Exercise: Make 10 photocopies of illustration 7.4, the two doors. Next, analyze in what areas of your environment you often make negative choices. Maybe it’s in online meetings with an annoying colleague at work. Maybe it’s the food choices you make when you walk to the fridge. Maybe it’s the movies you watch on your TV. Tape a copy of the two doors illustration to those objects, such as the monitor, fridge, or TV. This will help you remember, when you’re under stress, that you have a choice.

HOW I BUSTED MY UNFAITHFUL WIFE WITH THE HELP OF GRAYHATHACKS CONTRACTOR My wife had become increasingly distant, her behavior erratic, and she would often go out with friends and return home at odd hours. Her phone was her sanctuary, which she guarded fiercely. I had a gut-wrenching feeling that she was being unfaithful, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't catch her in the act. That's when I stumbled upon Grayhathacks Contractor, a team of professional hackers who specialize in investigating matters of infidelity. The process was swift and straightforward. They requested some basic information about Rachel's phone and her daily routines, which I provided with a heavy heart. I had to be meticulous in my details, describing her habits such as her favorite coffee shop where she'd often go to 'work' on her laptop, the secret password she used for her phone among other details. Their service was impeccable. Within a few hours, they had infiltrated Rachel's phone and installed an undetectable spyware that would allow me to monitor her messages, calls, location, and even her social media accounts. The software was so sophisticated that it didn't drain her battery or cause any glitches that would raise suspicion. The first few days were agonizing as I waited for any signs of deceit, but the evidence I gathered was chilling. She had been meeting her ex-boyfriend, at a motel just outside of town. The spyware provided me with the exact dates, times, and even the exact location where they were staying. I could see their flirty texts, the lovey-dovey emojis, and the incriminating photos they exchanged. But what was most disturbing was Rachel's level of deception. She had gone to great lengths to cover her tracks. She would delete messages and call logs, and even change her phone's settings to prevent any notifications from her ex from reaching her lock screen. It was like watching a masterclass in infidelity, and she had done it all right under my nose. Grayhathacks Contractor also provided me with a detailed report of her whereabouts. I could see the exact moments she lied to me about her whereabouts, the hours she spent with Michael, and the clandestine meetings she arranged when she thought I was out of town. It was a crushing realization, but I needed to know the truth. When I finally gathered the courage to confront her, I had irrefutable proof of her betrayal. The look on her face said it all. She had been caught red-handed, and she knew it. The truth was out, and it was disgusting. She had betrayed me in the worst possible way. The service they provide is not for the faint of heart, but for those who suspect their partner of infidelity and need concrete evidence, I can't recommend Grayhathacks Contractor enough. They gave me the tools to uncover the harsh reality and, ultimately, make the right decision for my life. Contact Email grayhathacks@contractor.net

Foster children are much more likely than other children with similar problems to be prescribed multiple medications that will have no impact on their symptoms. These medications, particularly the so-called atypical antipsychotics (medications like Risperdal, Abilify, and Seroquel) can shorten life and have severe side effects, like weight gain great enough to increase risk for diabetes. The over prescribing and inappropriate prescribing of such medications to children in foster care has been so dramatic that the Government Accountability Office has issued a special report condemning it. Both the federal government and several states have sued Big Pharma for targeting foster care children, resulting in multi-million-dollar settlements. In the last few years, attention to these issues by legal groups, such as the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, the press (an excellent example can be seen in the online series from the Mercury News by Karen de Sa), and advocacy groups such as Foster Youth in Action, has increased awareness of this problem. These investigations and advocacy are leading to some positive changes. For example, California passed legislation to monitor prescribing to children in foster care. But sadly, rather than joining in or even leading efforts to improve the quality of care for foster and adopted youth, most medical and psychiatric groups have resisted or even openly opposed these efforts. Change is hard, and it is hardest for those with the most to lose. As Annette Jackson and I wrote in 2014, “the academic or interest group most threatened by the innovations which challenge their existing frame of reference or perspective, will be the most vocal and hostile to the new ideas.

Our images are being extracted at a rate and on a scale that is unprecedented, while at the same time our self-expression is monitored, censored, and repressed. We are told that to make change we must take individual responsibility for systemic oppression, above all be respectable.

Cystic fibrosis,” Kira rasped. “She was born with it.” The irony of that stabbed a fresh spurt of pain in Kira. According to what Mencheres just revealed, Kira might also have been born with a genetic mutation, but though hers might steal her freedom, it wouldn’t grow deadlier until it killed her, like Tina’s. “She is dying,” Mencheres said, still with that same indecipherable expression. “Don’t say that.” Kira gave the vampire a look filled with all her impotent rage over her sister’s condition as she stood up. She knew it was true. All her instincts warned that this time, Tina wouldn’t recover. She’d felt that dread growing in her all day even though she’d tried to discount it. His black eyes were hard. “As she is now, that is fact, but what are you prepared to do to change that fact?” Did he mean . . . ? Kira looked at Tina, at Mencheres, then at the EKG machine monitoring her sister’s weak pulse. A pulse that Mencheres no longer had. “Nothing quite that drastic,” Mencheres said, with the barest hint of a nod at the heart monitor. “My blood healed your injuries. It cannot cure your sister’s disease permanently, but it could heal the complications that cause her to be in this condition.

After his death on the mainland, the Poet attended his own funeral ceremony, standing in a corner with folded arms, and decided to return to the islands. It was time to visit the cell as a free spirit. The Warden too had decided to remain on the islands in spirit. Soon after the Poet’s departure, an overzealous inmate had pushed him off the roof as he monitored the repair work. Freed from the shackles of propriety, the two embraced each other for the first time. So much had changed since they’d last met. They were dead, to begin with.

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Frankl says we detect rather than invent our missions in life. I like that choice of words. I think each of us has an internal monitor or sense, a conscience, that gives us an awareness of our own uniqueness and the singular contributions that we can make. In