Operating System Related Quotes

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms––"the Force and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say. The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face. Darth Vader has not developed his humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? . . . The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being ...[b]y holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you. Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity––because that's where the life is, from the heart––or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Knobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions. ... [O]f course the Force moves from within. But the Force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

Principles of Liberty 1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. 2. A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally strong people is to elect virtuous leaders. 4. Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained. 5. All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible. 6. All men are created equal. 7. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things. 8. Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. 9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. 10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. 11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical. 12. The United States of America shall be a republic. 13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. 14. Life and Liberty are secure only so long as the Igor of property is secure. 15. The highest level of securitiy occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations. 16. The government should be separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. 17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power. 18. The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution. 19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to the government, all others being retained by the people. 20. Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority. 21. Strong human government is the keystone to preserving human freedom. 22. A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men. 23. A free society cannot survive a republic without a broad program of general education. 24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong. 25. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." 26. The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. 27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest. 28. The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.

You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.

Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward.

Randomness and luck are related, but there is a useful distinction between the two. You can think of randomness as operating at the level of a system and luck operating at the level of the individual.

As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable.

The working of the central nervous system is a hierarchic affair in which functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate structural units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activating lower patterns that have their own relatively autonomous structural unity.

Discovery is thus inextricably interwoven with what is known as error. To recognize a certain relation, many another relation must be misunderstood, denied, or overlooked. The operation of cognition [Erkenntnisphysiologie] is analogous to the physiology of movement. To move a limb, an entire so-called myostatic system must be immobilized to provide a basis of fixation. Every movement consists of two active processes; namely, motion and inhibition. The corresponding features in the operation of cognition are purposive, directed determination and cooperative abstraction, which complement one another.

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution.

Darkness seems to have prevailed and has taken the forefront. This country as in the 'cooperation' of The United States of America has never been about the true higher-good of the people. Know and remember this. Cling to your faith. Roll your spiritual sleeves up and get to work. Use your energy wisely. Transmute all anger, panic and fear into light and empowerment. Don't use what fuels them; all lower-energy. Mourn as you need to. Console who you need to—and then go get into the spiritual and energetic arena. There's plenty work for us to do; within and without. Let's each focus on becoming 'The President of Our Own Life. Cultivate your mind. Pursue your purpose. Shine your light. Elevate past—and reject—any culture of low vibrational energy and ratchetness. Don't take fear, defeat or anger—on or in. The system is doing what they've been created to do. Are you? Am I? Are we—collectively? Let's get to work. No more drifting through life without your higher-self in complete control of your mind. Awaken—fully. Activate—now. Put your frustrations or concerns into your work. Don't lose sight. There is still—a higher plan. Let's ride this 4 year energetic-wave like the spiritual gangsters that we are. This will all be the past soon. Let's get to work and stay dedicated, consistent and diligent. Again, this will all be the past soon. We have preparing and work to do. Toxic energy is so not a game. Toxic energy and low vibrations are being collectively acted out on the world stage. Covertly operating through the unconscious weak spots and blind spots in the human psyche; making people oblivious to their own madness, causing and influencing them to act against–their–own–best–interests and higher-good, as if under a spell and unconsciously possessed. This means that they are actually nourishing the lower vibrational energy with their lifestyle, choices, energy and habits, which is unconsciously giving the lower-energy the very power and fuel it needs—for repeating and recreating endless drama, suffering and destruction, in more and more amplified forms on a national and world stage. So what do we do? We take away its autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves. By recognizing how this energetic/spiritual virus or parasite of the mind—operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. Knowledge is power. Applied knowledge is—freedom. Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, starting with each of us— vibrationally. In closing and most importantly, the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by this lower-energy is to be in touch with our higher vibrational-self. We have to call our energy and power back. Being in touch with our higher-self and true nature acts as a sacred amulet, shielding and protecting us from the attempted effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we’ve already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects— our higher vibrational-self. Will this defeat and destroy us? Or will it awaken us more and more? Everything depends upon our recognizing what is being revealed to us and our stepping out of the unconscious influence of low vibrational/negative/toxic/evil/distraction energy (or whatever name you relate to it as) that is and has been seeking power over each of our lives energetically and/or spiritually, and step into our wholeness, our personal power, our higher self and vibrate higher and higher daily. Stay woke my friends—let's get to work.

I propose a simple account of how we generate intuitive opinions on complex matters. If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. I call the operation of answering one question in place of another substitution. I also adopt the following terms:

In technical language, an ego state may be described phenomenologically as a coherent system of feelings, and operationally as a set of coherent behavior patterns. In more practical terms, it is a system of feelings accompanied by a related set of behavior patterns. Each individual seems to have available a limited repertoire of such ego states, which are not roles but psychological realities.

...Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force -- and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments -- the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place.

The concept of happiness is not one which man abstracts more or less from his instincts and so derives from his animal nature. It is, on the contrary, a mere idea of a state, and one to which he seeks to make his actual state of being adequate under purely empirical conditions--an impossible task. He projects this idea himself, and, thanks to his intellect, and its complicated relations with imagination and sense, projects it in such different ways, and even alters his concept so often, that were nature a complete slave to his elective will, it would nevertheless be utterly unable to adopt any definite, universal and fixed law by which to accommodate itself to this fluctuating concept and so bring itself into accord with the end that each individual arbitrarily sets before himself. But even if we sought to reduce this concept to the level of the true wants of nature in which our species is in complete and fundamental accord, or, trying the other alternative, sought to increase to the highest level man's skill in reaching his imagined ends, nevertheless what man means by happiness, and what in fact constitutes his peculiar ultimate physical end, as opposed to the end of freedom, would never be attained by him. For his own nature is not so constituted as to rest or be satisfied in any possession or enjoyment whatever. Also external nature is far from having made a particular favorite of man or from having preferred him to all other animals as the object of its beneficence. For we see that in its destructive operations--plague, famine, flood, cold, attacks from animals great and small, and all such things--it has as little spared him as any other animal. But, besides all this, the discord of inner natural tendencies betrays man into further misfortunes of his own invention, and reduces other members of his species, through the oppression of lordly power, the barbarism of wars, and the like, to such misery, while he himself does all he can to work ruin to his race, that, even with the utmost goodwill on the part of external nature, its end, supposing it were directed to the happiness of our species, would never be attained in a system of terrestrial nature, because our own nature is not capable of it. Man, therefore, is ever but a link in the chain of nature's ends.

What is necessary is the construction of a strongly structured spiritual unity that completely grasps and envelops the individual. Only a new religion which releases the deeper powers of man from their petrification and integrates them into a product will beyond the petty interests of party and class; a system of ethical ideals that operate with the immediate power of self-understood truths; in short regaining or awakening common and certain constraints of will and faith that are related to one another and to the center of our lives, will be able to lead us from the individualistic fragmentation and the overrefined materialism of the nineteenth century to a new culture.

Joscha: For me a very interesting discovery in the last year was the word spirit—because I realized that what “spirit” actually means: It’s an operating system for an autonomous robot. And when the word was invented, people needed this word, but they didn’t have robots that built themselves yet; the only autonomous robots that were known were people, animals, plants, ecosystems, cities and so on. And they all had spirits. And it makes sense to say that a plant is an operating system, right? If you pinch the plant in one area, then it’s going to have repercussions throughout the plant. Everything in the plant is in some sense connected into some global aesthetics, like in other organisms. An organism is not a collection of cells; it’s a function that tells cells how to behave. And this function is not implemented as some kind of supernatural thing, like some morphogenetic field, it is an emergent result of the interactions of each cell with each other cell. Lex: Oh my god, so what you’re saying is the organism is a function that tells the cells what to do? And the function emerges from the interaction of the cells. Joscha: Yes. So it’s basically a description of what the plant is doing in terms of macro-states. And the macro-states, the physical implementation are too many of them to describe them, so the software that we use to describe what a plant is doing—this spirit of the plant—is the software, the operating system of the plant, right? This is a way in which we, the observers, make sense of the plant. The same is true for people, so people have spirits, which is their operating system in a way, right, and there’s aspects of that operating system that relate to how your body functions, and others how you socially interact, how you interact with yourself and so on. And we make models of that spirit and we think it’s a loaded term because it’s from a pre-scientific age, but it took the scientific age a long time to rediscover a term that is pretty much the same thing and I suspect that the differences that we still see between the old word and the new word are translation errors that over the centuries.

The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some. Public discussions about racial caste in America are relatively rare. We avoid talking about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our racial history. We also avoid talking about race. We even avoid talking about class. Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one's class reflects upon one's character. What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief - despite all evidence to the contrary - that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole. What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this perspective, the so-called underclass is better understood as an undercaste - a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.

If you object (as some of us did to Dr. Goris) that Cantor's transfinite numbers aren't really numbers at all but rather sets, then be apprised that what, say, 'P(Infinity to the Infinity +n), really is is a symbol for the number of members in a given set, the same way '3' is a symbol for the number of members in the set {1,2,3}. And since the transfinites are provably distinct and compose an infinite ordered sequence just like the integers,they really are numbers, symbolizable (for now) by Cantor's well-known system of alephs or '(Aleph symbol's). And, as true numbers, transfinites turn out to be susceptible to the same kinds of arithmetical relations and operations as regular numbers-although, just as with 0, the rules for these operations are very different in the case of (Alephs) and have to be independently established and proved.

Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa was motivated by more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical component, one that was related to his penchant for control. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies.

Intellectual property rights are sometimes hailed as the mother of creativity and invention. However, Marshall Brain points out that many of the finest examples of human creativity—from scientific discoveries to creation of literature, art, music and design—were motivated not by a desire for profit but by other human emotions, such as curiosity, an urge to create, or the reward of peer appreciation. Money didn’t motivate Einstein to invent special relativity theory any more than it motivated Linus Torvalds to create the free Linux operating system. In contrast, many people today fail to realize their full creative potential because they need to devote time and energy to less creative activities just to earn a living. By freeing scientists, artists, inventors and designers from their chores and enabling them to create from genuine desire, Marshall Brain’s utopian society enjoys higher levels of innovation than today and correspondingly superior technology and standard of living.

Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided—already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order—by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by what Poincaré called the (experimental) group of displacement. But it goes without saying that, at this elementary level, which precedes all thought, we cannot regard this grouping as an operational system, since it is a system of responses actually effected; the fact is therefore that it is undifferentiated, the displacements in question being at the same time and in every case responses directed towards a goal serving some practical purpose. We might therefore say that at this level spatio-temporal, logico-arithmetical and practical (means and ends) groupings form a global whole and that, in the absence of differentiation, this complex system is incapable of constituting an operational mechanism. At the end of this period and at the beginning of representative thought, on the other hand, the appearance of the symbol makes possible the first form of differentiation: practical groupings (means and ends) on the one hand, and representation on the other. But this latter is still undifferentiated, logico-arithmetical operations not being distinguished from spatio-temporal operations. In fact, at the intuitive level there are no genuine classes or relations because both are still spatial collections as well as spatio-temporal relationships: hence their intuitive and pre-operational character. At 7–8 years, however, the appearance of operational groupings is characterized precisely by a clear differentiation between logico-arithmetical operations that have become independent (classes, relations and despatialized numbers) and spatio-temporal or infra-logical operations. Lastly, the level of formal operations marks a final differentiation between operations tied to real action and hypothetico-deductive operations concerning pure implications from propositions stated as postulates.

Perhaps even more fundamentally, it is possible to argue that there is no “reality” that is not always already a form of fantasy: that fantasy is all we have got. In other words, the very distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is in many ways an artificial one, reminiscent of an Enlightenment worldview—one that believed in the power of the rational mind to tell fact from fiction—that has been seriously undermined in recent decades of postmodern theorizing. That is, the belief that we could ever relate to the world objectively, as it “really is,” has itself been discredited as a fantasy that occludes the recognition that the ways we perceive and interpret the world always necessarily reflect the value systems within which we operate. In effect, while the Enlightenment worldview distinguishes between “reality” and our more or less successful efforts to represent it, contemporary theorists recognize—as Nietzsche already did—that our very attempts to represent reality invariably shape the form of this reality. By this I do not mean to say that there exists no reality independently of human representations, but merely that we do not possess any immediate or unmediated access to that reality; since we only understand the world around us through the conceptual frameworks, labels, and systems of thought that we impose on this world, there is no way to know what this world might be like outside of our endeavors to comprehend it.

Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?" Hiro asks. "They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin is obscure." "Enki must have been responsible for that one," Hiro says. "Enki's most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and the gis-hur, the 'key words' and 'patterns' that rule the universe." "Tell me more about the me." "To quote Kramer and Maier again, '[They believed in] the existence from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.'" "Kind of like the Torah." "Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often deal with banal subjects -- not just religion." "Examples?" "In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into giving her ninety-four me and brings them back to her home town of Uruk, where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing." "Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with." "Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because 'she brought the perfect execution of the me.'" "Execution? Like executing a computer program?" "Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires." "The operating system of society." "I'm sorry?" "When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people into a functioning system." "As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the me." "So he was a good guy, really." "He was the most beloved of the gods." "He sounds like kind of a hacker.

Cannabinoids relax the rules of cortical crowd control, but 300 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide break them completely. This is a clean sweep. This is the Renaissance after the Dark Ages. Dopamine—the fuel of desire—is only one of four major neuro modulators. Each of the neuromodulators fuels brain operations in its own particular way. But all four of them share two properties. First, they get released and used up all over the brain, not at specific locales. Second, each is produced by one specialized organ, a brain part designed to manufacture that one potent chemical (see Figure 3). Instead of watering the flowers one by one, neuromodulator release is like a sprinkler system. That’s why neuromodulators initiate changes that are global, not local. Dopamine fuels attraction, focus, approach, and especially wanting and doing. Norepinephrine fuels perceptual alertness, arousal, excitement, and attention to sensory detail. Acetylcholine energizes all mental operations, consciousness, and thought itself. But the final neuromodulator, serotonin, is more complicated in its action. Serotonin does a lot of different things in a lot of different places, because there are many kinds of serotonin receptors, and they inhabit a great variety of neural nooks, staking out an intricate network. One of serotonin’s most important jobs is to regulate information flow throughout the brain by inhibiting the firing of neurons in many places. And it’s the serotonin system that gets dynamited by LSD. Serotonin dampens, it paces, it soothes. It raises the threshold of neurons to the voltage changes induced by glutamate. Remember glutamate? That’s the main excitatory neurotransmitter that carries information from synapse to synapse throughout the brain. Serotonin cools this excitation, putting off the next axonal burst, making the receptive neuron less sensitive to the messages it receives from other neurons. Slow down! Take it easy! Don’t get carried away by every little molecule of glutamate. Serotonin soothes neurons that might otherwise fire too often, too quickly. If you want to know how it feels to get a serotonin boost, ask a depressive several days into antidepressant therapy. Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, and all their cousins leave more serotonin in the synapses, hanging around, waiting to help out when the brain becomes too active. Which is most of the time if you feel the world is dark and threatening. Extra serotonin makes the thinking process more relaxed—a nice change for depressives, who get a chance to wallow in relative normality.

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate. Fain wou'd I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. I have expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declar'd my disapprobation of their systems; and can I be surpriz'd, if they shou'd express a hatred of mine and of my person? When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho' such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning. For with what confidence can I venture upon such bold enterprises, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which are common to human nature? Can I be sure, that in leaving all established opinions I am following truth; and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune shou'd at last guide me on her foot-steps? After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou'd assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they appear to me. Experience is a principle, which instructs me in the several conjunctions of objects for the past. Habit is another principle, which determines me to expect the same for the future; and both of them conspiring to operate upon the imagination, make me form certain ideas in a more intense and lively manner, than others, which are not attended with the same advantages. Without this quality, by which the mind enlivens some ideas beyond others (which seemingly is so trivial, and so little founded on reason) we cou'd never assent to any argument, nor carry our view beyond those few objects, which are present to our senses. Nay, even to these objects we cou'd never attribute any existence, but what was dependent on the senses; and must comprehend them entirely in that succession of perceptions, which constitutes our self or person. Nay farther, even with relation to that succession, we cou'd only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou'd those lively images, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv'd as true pictures of past perceptions. The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas.

During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8).

By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement. During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk. For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe. The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became. Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations. Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.

It is a scandal—or, rather, it should be a scandal and one wonders why it isn’t—that the US prison population, after reaching a postwar low in the early 1970s, has since grown more than 500 percent. The United States locks up a higher percentage of its own population than any other nation in the world. Even with extraordinary prison construction projects over the last decades, the cells are still overfull. This massive expansion cannot be explained by a growing criminality of the US population or the enhanced efficiency of law enforcement. In fact, US crime rates in this period have remained relatively constant. The scandal of US prison expansion is even more dramatic when one observes how it operates along race divisions. Latinos are incarcerated at a rate almost double that of whites, and African Americans at a rate almost six times as high. The racial imbalance of those on death row is even more extreme. It is not hard to find shocking statistics. One in eight black US males in their twenties, for instance, is in jail or prison on any given day. The number of African Americans under correctional control today, Michelle Alexander points out, is greater than the number of slaves in the mid-nineteenth century. Some authors refer to the racially skewed prison expansion as a return to elements of the plantation system or the institution of new Jim Crow laws. Keep in mind that this differential racial pattern of imprisonment is not isolated to the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, if one considers immigrant detention centers and refugee camps as arms of the carceral apparatus, those with darker skin are disproportionately in captivity.

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1. that the emergence of the nervous system was an indispensable enabler of life in elaborate multicellular organisms; the nervous system has been a servant of whole-organism homeostasis, although its cells also depend on that same homeostasis process for its own survival; this integrated mutuality is most often overlooked in discussions of behavior and cognition; 2. that the nervous system is part of the organism it serves, specifically a part of its body, and that it holds close interactions with that body; that these interactions are of an entirely different nature from those that the nervous system holds with the environment that surrounds the organism; the particularity of this privileged relationship also tends to be overlooked; I will say more on this critical issue in part II; 3. that the extraordinary emergence of the nervous system opened the way for neurally mediated homeostasis—an addition to the chemical/visceral variety; later, after the development of conscious minds capable of feeling and creative intelligence, the way was open for the creation, in the social and cultural space, of complex responses whose existence began as homeostatically inspired but later transcended homeostatic needs and gained considerable autonomy; therein the beginning but not the middle or the end of our cultural lives; even at the highest levels of sociocultural creation, there are vestiges of simple life-related processes present in the most humble exemplars of living organisms, namely, bacteria; 4. that several complex functions of the higher nervous system have their functional roots in simpler operations of the lower devices of the system itself; for this reason, for example, it has not been productive to first look for the grounding of feeling and consciousness in the operations of the cerebral cortex; instead, as discussed in part II, the operation of brain-stem nuclei and of the peripheral nervous system offers better opportunities to identify precursors to feeling and consciousness.

As nervous systems developed, they acquired an elaborate network of peripheral probes—the peripheral nerves that are distributed to every parcel of the body’s interior and to its entire surface, as well as to specialized sensory devices that enable seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Nervous systems also acquired an elaborate collection of aggregated central processors in the central nervous system, conventionally called the brain.10 The latter includes (1) the spinal cord; (2) the brain stem and the closely related hypothalamus; (3) the cerebellum; (4) a number of large nuclei located above brain-stem level—in the thalamus, basal ganglia, and basal forebrain; and (5) the cerebral cortex, the most modern and sophisticated component of the system. These central processors manage learning and memory storage of signals of every possible sort and also manage the integration of these signals; they coordinate the execution of complex responses to inner states and incoming stimuli—a critical operation that includes drives, motivations, and emotions proper; and they manage the process of image manipulation that we otherwise know as thinking, imagining, reasoning, and decision making. Last, they manage the conversion of images and of their sequences into symbols and eventually into languages—coded sounds and gestures whose combinations can signify any object, quality, or action, and whose linkage is governed by a set of rules called grammar. Equipped with language, organisms can generate continuous translations of nonverbal to verbal items and build dual-track narratives of such items.

The cognitive system of the brain is based on the functional operation of several sub-systems. If there is relatively perfect accordance among them, then the mind can reach the harmony and clarity. Each sub-system in mind has got its start point – presuppositions, the deep content of which is hidden in unconsciousness, but in most cases, if not all, actively affects the whole process of rational thinking. You can be aware of mostly its consequences, and you can intuitively sense whether these consequences are logical and clear, or illogical and vague. If the latter is the case, it means that the presuppositions of the sub-systems in mind are incompatible, which in turn influences the functions of whole sub-systems and conclusions that the sub-systems draw as the consequence of these functional operations. Ultimately, the mind would suffer from inevitable disagreement and disharmony, which in turn would constantly keep the mental state under stress. (The Denotation and Connotation of the concept of God)

Your laptop is a note in a symphony currently being played by an orchestra of incalculable size. It’s a very small part of a much greater whole. Most of its capacity resides beyond its hard shell. It maintains its function only because a vast array of other technologies are currently and harmoniously at play. It is fed, for example, by a power grid whose function is invisibly dependent on the stability of a myriad of complex physical, biological, economic and interpersonal systems. The factories that make its parts are still in operation. The operating system that enables its function is based on those parts, and not on others yet to be created. Its video hardware runs the technology expected by the creative people who post their content on the web. Your laptop is in communication with a certain, specified ecosystem of other devices and web servers. And, finally, all this is made possible by an even less visible element: the social contract of trust—the interconnected and fundamentally honest political and economic systems that make the reliable electrical grid a reality. This interdependency of part on whole, invisible in systems that work, becomes starkly evident in systems that don’t. The higher-order, surrounding systems that enable personal computing hardly exist at all in corrupt, third-world countries, so that the power lines, electrical switches, outlets, and all the other entities so hopefully and concretely indicative of such a grid are absent or compromised, and in fact make little contribution to the practical delivery of electricity to people’s homes and factories. This makes perceiving the electronic and other devices that electricity theoretically enables as separate, functional units frustrating, at minimum, and impossible, at worst. This is partly because of technical insufficiency: the systems simply don’t work. But it is also in no small part because of the lack of trust characteristic of systemically corrupt societies. To put it another way: What you perceive as your computer is like a single leaf, on a tree, in a forest—or, even more accurately, like your fingers rubbing briefly across that leaf. A single leaf can be plucked from a branch. It can be perceived, briefly, as a single, self-contained entity—but that perception misleads more than clarifies. In a few weeks, the leaf will crumble and dissolve. It would not have been there at all, without the tree. It cannot continue to exist, in the absence of the tree. This is the position of our laptops in relation to the world. So much of what they are resides outside their boundaries that the screened devices we hold on our laps can only maintain their computer-like façade for a few short years. Almost everything we see and hold is like that, although often not so evidently

There is one are of work that should be mentioned here, referred to as 'automatic theorem proving'. One set of procedures that would come under this heading consists of fixing some formal system H, and trying to derive theorems within this system. We recall, from 2.9, that it would be an entirely computational matter to provide proofs of all the theorems of H one after the other. This kind of thing can be automated, but if done without further thought or insight, such an operation would be likely to be immensely inefficient. However, with the employment of such insight in the setting up of the computational procedures, some quite impressive results have been obtained. In one of these schemes (Chou 1988), the rules of Euclidean geometry have been translated into a very effective system for proving (and sometimes discovering) geometrical theorems. As an example of one of these, a geometrical proposition known as V. Thebault's conjecture, which had been proposed in 1938 (and only rather recently proved, by K.B. Taylor in 1983), was presented to the system and solved in 44 hours' computing time. More closely analogous to the procedures discussed in the previous sections are attempts by various people over the past 10 years or so to provide 'artificial intelligence' procedures for mathematical 'understanding'. I hope it is clear from the arguments that I have given, that whatever these systems do achieve, what they do not do is obtain any actual mathematical understanding! Somewhat related to this are attempts to find automatic theorem-generating systems, where the system is set up to find theorems that are regarded as 'interesting'-according to certain criteria that the computational system is provided with. I do think that it would be generally accepted that nothing of very great actual mathematical interest has yet come out of these attempts. Of course, it would be argued that these are early days yet, and perhaps one may expect something much more exciting to come out of them in the future. However, it should be clear to anyone who has read this far, that I myself regard the entire enterprise as unlikely to lead to much that is genuinely positive, except to emphasize what such systems do not achieve.

The entropy of a system is related to the number of indistinguishable rearrangements of its constituents, but properly speaking is not equal to the number itself. The relationship is expressed by a mathematical operation called a logarithm; don't be put off if this brings back bad memories of high school math class. In our coin example, it simply means that you pick out the exponent in the number of rearrangements-that is, the entropy is defined as 1,000 rather than 2^1000.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

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

One might think that as a country almost always involved in a military operation of one kind or another, the United States would be accustomed to and prepared for injured soldiers coming home. Yet this is not the case. Conflicts during the twenty years prior to Iraq (Grenada, the Gulf War, Somalia, and the Balkans) produced relatively few US causalities and thus never stressed the home front medical system as the current war has. Not since the Vietnam War has Walter Reed seen thousands of returning wounded soldiers, some needing months, if not years, of medical care.8

Muad'Dib gave us a particular kind of knowledge about prophetic insight, about the behaviour which surrounds such insight and its influence upon events whcih are seen to be "on line." (That is, events which are set to occur in a related system which the prophet reveals and interprets.) As has been noted elsewhere, such insight operates as a peculiar trap for the prophet himself. He can become the victim of what he knows — which is a relatively common human failing.

Muad'Dib gave us a particular kind of knowledge about prophetic insight, about the behaviour which surrounds such insight and its influence upon events which are seen to be "on line." (That is, events which are set to occur in a related system which the prophet reveals and interprets.) As has been noted elsewhere, such insight operates as a peculiar trap for the prophet himself. He can become the victim of what he knows — which is a relatively common human failing.

Both suppliers and buyers tend to be powerful if: They are large and concentrated relative to a fragmented industry (think Goliath versus many Davids). What percentage of an industry’s purchases/sales does a supplier/buyer represent? Look at the data and map out how it is trending. How painful would it be to lose that supplier or that customer? Industries with high fixed costs (e.g., telecommunications equipment and offshore drilling) are especially vulnerable to large buyers. The industry needs them more than they need the industry. In some cases, there may be no alternative suppliers, at least in the short term. Doctors and airline pilots, to cite two examples, have historically exercised tremendous bargaining power because their skills have been both essential and in short supply. China produces 95 percent of the world’s supply of neodymium, a rare earth metal needed by Toyota and other automakers for electric motors. Neodymium prices quadrupled in just one year (2010), as the Chinese restricted supply. Toyota is working hard to develop a new motor that will end its dependence on rare earth metals. Switching costs work in their favor. This occurs for a supplier when an industry is tied to it, as for example, the PC industry has been to Microsoft, its dominant supplier of operating systems and software. Switching costs work in the buyer’s favor when the buyer can easily drop one vendor for another. The ease with which customers can switch from one airline to another on popular routes makes it hard for airlines to raise prices or cut service levels. Frequent flyer programs were intended to raise switching costs, but they have not been effective. Differentiation works in their favor.

[T]here exists a long history of political and social struggles over the design of classification systems that present themselves as ‘purely technical’ but promote a biased account of the social world. … Critical race theorists, such as Richard Delgado and Jean Stanfancic, have similarly argued that races operate as ‘categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient’. Although invented as a category, the effects of race on social relations and people's life opportunities are material and multiple.

The polarities of personality often present as victim and oppressor, the haves and the have nots, rights and wrongs, and other seemingly persistent divisions in our society. These polarities are not the source of this tension, but when we relate with the polarities through a reactionary state of operation, we can easily divide ourselves along those lines. Us and them. The familiar and the other. When we don't own our own wholeness, when we identity too much with something other than our core worth, we collapse into one pole, as in being with or against others. This othering process is myopic, in that it doesn't take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole, the person we think we are not, the "other" within us. When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast and generative transformation, rather than division. Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct, and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of ourself that we get to reclaim. Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us. The idea that you are either with us or against us is a limiting lens that perpetuates humanity's suffering. The recognition that you are us, that everyone is us, allows our self-love to humanize others into belonging.

To do this, we follow five “R’s”—recognize, respect, regulate, reshape, re-story. Awareness allows us to recognize the autonomic state and accurately name it. We then respect the ways the state has activated in service of survival remembering that the nervous system is always acting to keep us safe. Putting the word “adaptive” before the words “survival response” reminds us that no matter how irrational our behavior in the moment may seem or how crazy our story may feel, a familiar cue of danger has come to life and our nervous system has enacted an old pattern of protection. Next, we bring a bit of ventral regulation and then begin to explore ways to reshape the pattern. Finally, we listen to the new story that is emerging. Through understanding how the autonomic nervous system takes in embodied, environmental, and relational experiences, we become active operators of our systems and authors of our own autonomic stories. Understanding how to find the way back to a ventral state is key to living a balanced life. When we begin to find a foothold in regulation, we can look at any problem with the emergent properties that accompany a ventral state—curiosity, creativity, and the ability to see options and explore possibilities. From this place, we have the autonomic resources to see our experience in a new way, and we often find a path to resolution in a way we never thought possible. A polyvagal perspective on life is not only a theory but a way of being in the world that is experienced from the inside out. Looking through the lens of the nervous system and listening to our autonomic stories, we shape our systems toward ventral regulation, and engage with our systems in new ways. When daily life is lived from a polyvagal perspective, we make a commitment to being aware of our autonomic experiences and becoming a regulated and regulating presence not only for ourselves but also for our partners, family members, friends, colleagues, and the people we naturally come into connection with during a day.

There is one further attribute of language that places it at a higher level than any existing technological organization or facility; and that is, to function at all, it demands a reciprocal relation between producer and consumer, between sayer and listener: an inequality of advantage destroys in some degree the integrity and common value of the product. Unlike any historic economic system, the demand for words may be limited without embarrassing the supply: the capital reserves (vocabulary) may become huger and the capacity for production (speech, literature, sharable meanings) continue to increase without imposing any collective duty to consume the surplus. This relationship, embedded in the special form of language, the dialogue, is at last being undermined by a new system of control and one-way communication that has now found an electronic mode of operation; and the grave issues that have thus been raised must now be faced.

Cedar Capital Group Tokyo Review of Stats Shows Decrease in Mortality Rate in Construction Sites Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan construction industry is one of the riskiest industries to work with. Not only do they have to deal with falling debris but workers also have to be aware of faulty wirings, defective equipment and weather warnings. Workers even sometimes have to lose their lives in the midst of construction. These circumstances are inevitable and precautions were already implemented even at the start of training. Yet, it cannot be denied that construction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today. Everywhere we go, we see buildings being built and establishments being constructed. We see new structures in developed nations. New York, America, Tokyo, Japan, Beijing, China and Seoul, South Korea are some of the leading cities which feature new construction projects almost everyday. Singapore is also not left behind. Considered as one of the most flourishing countries in the world, the little island-city has prided itself with new infrastructure projects and promise a thousand more to come. It came no surprise that the country’s journey towards urbanization was held liable for the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in the previous years. Just recently, though, Singapore has declared their concern on the number of fatalities there are in a construction project. If not of deaths, accidents resulting to fractures and minor and major injuries are also experienced in other neighboring countries. Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan, one the distributor of heavy capital equipment in the country, reports to have dozens of death in the last 4 years of their operation. This, as they claim, is one of the reasons why there is a large scarcity in job application related to construction. Many companies are also faced with numerous complaints because of these deaths and injuries. According to further review, approximately one-quarter of the deaths result from exposure to hazardous substances which cause such disabling illnesses as cancer and cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous-system disorders. Analysts even warn that work-related diseases are expected to double by the year 2020 and that if improvements are not implemented now, exposures today will kill people by the year 2020. Surprisingly, though, while people are being troubled with the number of casualties in the construction sector, recent studies and statistics show fewer deaths in construction sector in the first half of the year. Specifically in Singapore, Manpower Ministry has announced only 8 death reports compared to the 17 deaths in 2014. Although this is not a reason to celebrate since there are still fatalities, Singapore’s Contractual Association stated that this is an improvement as it shows the effectiveness of the recent awareness programs and training seminars conducted across the island-city. The country aims to clear all fatalities for the next succeeding years.

Ironically, the internal version number of Windows 7 is version 6.1,[1] which implies that Microsoft considers its newest operating system to be a (relatively) minor revision of Windows Vista (version 6.0).

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

Playing Chess Unconsciously For another demonstration of the power of our unconscious vision, consider chess playing. When grand master Garry Kasparov concentrates on a chess game, does he have to consciously attend to the configuration of pieces in order to notice that, say, a black rook is threatening the white queen? Or can he focus on the master plan, while his visual system automatically processes those relatively trivial relations among pieces? Our intuition is that in chess experts, the parsing of board games becomes a reflex. Indeed, research proves that a single glance is enough for any grand master to evaluate a chessboard and to remember its configuration in full detail, because he automatically parses it into meaningful chunks.29 Furthermore, a recent experiment indicates that this segmenting process is truly unconscious: a simplified game can be flashed for 20 milliseconds, sandwiched between masks that make it invisible, and still influence a chess master’s decision.30 The experiment works only on expert chess players, and only if they are solving a meaningful problem, such as determining if the king is under check or not. It implies that the visual system takes into account the identity of the pieces (rook or knight) and their locations, then quickly binds together this information into a meaningful chunk (“black king under check”). These sophisticated operations occur entirely outside conscious awareness.

counselors, often confuses stages, states, and lines. He mentioned that clients could move through all four stages (sensorimotor to formal operations) in a single counseling session. People do not actually develop through four (or even two) stages in a day. Rather, different lines of development may be differentially developed, so that a client may appear to exhibit very rudimentary development in one aspect (for example, morality) and advanced development in another (scientific or mathematical thinking). Similar phenomena (clients’ appearing to exhibit the qualities of different stages of development) can be accounted for by distinguishing between stages and states of consciousness. For example, a client may have a developmental center of gravity that hovers around the formal-reflexive mind but experience a state of panic or intense depression during which he resorts to the type of illogical and contrary-to-evidence thinking that characterize preoperational thinking. There are a few places where Ivey seems to distinguish between stages and states, as when he is describing a concrete operational client with whom the counselor finds various deletions, distortions, overgeneralizations, and other errors of thinking or behaving that “represent preoperational states” (1986, p. 163, italics added). This is an important point. The basic structures are not completely stable; otherwise, they would endure even under extreme stress. Hence, developmental waves are conceived of as relatively stable and enduring—far more stable and enduring than states of consciousness, but also far from rigidly permanent structures. Levels and Lines of Development Ivey also wrote of how clients cycle through Piaget’s stages of cognitive development: Each person who continues on to higher levels of development is also, paradoxically, forced to return to basic sensori-motor and pre-operational experience… . the skilled individual who decides to learn a foreign language … must enter language training at the lowest level and work through sensori-motor, preoperational, and concrete experience before being able to engage in formal operations with the new language. (Ivey, 1986, p. 161) People do not revert from the capacity for formal operational thinking to sensorimotor, except perhaps because of a brain injury or organic disorders of the nervous system. Piaget was very emphatic that cognitive development occurs in invariant stages, meaning that everyone progresses through the stages in the same order. At the same time, it is true that just because an individual exhibits formal operational thinking (a stage or level of cognitive development) in chemistry and mathematics does not mean that she automatically can perform at mastery levels in any domain, such as, in this case, a foreign language. This is another example of the utility of Wilber’s (2000e) distinguishing the sundry lines

Most of them [the soldiers—Warriors in New Pentagon Speak—of the all-volunteer military] come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or the big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine. But so many of them are so very young, enticed or strong-armed by smartly uniformed recruiters who work the corridors and classrooms of America's most impoverished and thoroughly militarized high schools. So many are badly educated, knowing nothing of the world and how it operates. So many are immigrants, risking their lives for a fast track to citizenship. So many are poor and short on promise. So many have such a slim chance of another job, another line of work [like the one who tells the author "where else can I get a job doing the stuff I love? . . . Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."], let alone a decent wage or a promotion. And because the Pentagon lowered standards to fill the ranks of the volunteer army, so many are high school dropouts, or gangbangers, or neo-Nazi white supremacists, or drug addicts, or convicted felons with violent crimes on their record. In just three years following the invasion of Iraq, the military issued free passes—so called "moral waivers"—to one of every five recruits, including more than 58,000 convicted drug users and 1,605 with "serious" felony convictions for offenses including rape, kidnapping, and murder. When the number of free passes rose in the fourth year, the Pentagon changed the label to "conduct waiver.

One may perhaps usefully consider here the image of a radio receiver. When the output of the receiver 'feeds back' into the input, the receiver operates on its own, to produce mainly irrelevant and meaningless noise, but when it is sensitive to the signal on the radio wave, its own order of inner movement of electric currents (transformed into sound waves) is parallel to the order in the signal and thus the receiver serves to bring a meaningful order originating beyond the level of its own structure into movements on the level of its own structure. One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures. Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of the universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement. (This notion is discussed further in chapter 7.) It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony or fitting between mind and matter.

There is an argument that blockchain technology can more equitably address issues related to freedom, jurisdiction, censorship, and regulation, perhaps in ways that nation-state models and international diplomacy efforts regarding human rights cannot. Irrespective of supporting the legitimacy of nation-states, there is a scale and jurisdiction acknowledgment and argument that certain operations are transnational and are more effectively administered, coordinated, monitored, and reviewed at a higher organizational level such as that of a World Trade Organization. The idea is to uplift transnational organizations from the limitations of geography-based, nation-state jurisdiction to a truly global cloud. The first point is that transnational organizations need transnational governance structures. The reach, accessibility, and transparency of blockchain technology could be an effective transnational governance structure. Blockchain governance is more congruent with the character and needs of transnational organizations than nation-state governance. The second point is that not only is the transnational governance provided by the blockchain more effective, it is fairer. There is potentially more equality, justice, and freedom available to organizations and their participants in a decentralized, cloud-based model. This is provided by the blockchain’s immutable public record, transparency, access, and reach. Anyone worldwide could look up and confirm the activities of transnational organizations on the blockchain. Thus, the blockchain is a global system of checks and balances that creates trust among all parties. This is precisely the sort of core infrastructural element that could allow humanity to scale to orders-of-magnitude larger progress with truly global organizations and coordination mechanisms.

The philosopher R. G. Collingwood once observed that the past as past was wholly unknowable. What was knowable was something different: the elements of the past which had been residually preserved in the present. In other words, what we take to be knowledge of past reality derives in fact from those texts, artefacts, buildings, belief systems, memories and traditions which have somehow survived and are amenable to investigation—and interpretation. History can only be written from the standpoint of present reality and can never encompass either the totality of events or the fullness of meaning. The historical consciousness inevitably selects and orders its material in accordance with contemporary concerns which consciously or unconsciously determine the frame of reference of its operations. However, while the being of the past may be unknowable in an absolute sense its effects remain relentlessly present; its traces surround us and form the theatre of our actions; it is through our relation to history (personal, family, collective) that we acquire an individual identity within culture.

Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.' Huntington concludes (regretfully) this was no longer possible by the late sixties. Why not? Presidential authority was eroded. There was a broad reappraisal of governmental action and 'morality' in the post-Vietnam/post-Watergate era among political leaders who, like the general public, openly questioned 'the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception—all of which are, in some measure,' according to Huntington, 'inescapable attributes of the process of government.' Congressional power became more decentralized and party allegiances to the administration weakened. Traditional forms of public and private authority were undermined as 'people no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.' ¶ Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, too many people participated too much: 'Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [sic] before. [Italics mine.] ¶ Against their will, these 'groups'—the majority of the population—have been denied 'opportunities, positions, rewards and privileges.' More democracy is not the answer: 'applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.' Huntington concludes that 'some of the problems in governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy...Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.' ¶ '...The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic but it is also one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively. [Italics mine.]' ¶ With a candor which has shocked those trilateralists who are more accustomed to espousing the type of 'symbolic populism' Carter employed so effectively in his campaign, the Governability Report expressed the open secret that effective capitalist democracy is limited democracy! (See Alan Wolfe, 'Capitalism Shows Its Face.')

... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.

public service-related organizations are operating the preliminary announcement system for enacting/revising internal regulations. In addition, 131

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

Vote on issues related to the regulation of bundled service products offered by system operators Voting Vote on administrative sanctions to be issued against two system operators (GTB (Gangwon Television Broadcasting) and SBC (Silla Broadcasting Corporation)

For in the ever-repeated origination of highly organized individuals from an infinitesimal germ, the working-out of a prearranged plan of growth and development seems obvious. Thus the very idea of “development” which the facts of reproduction suggested stood in the way of applying to the living kingdom the same categories of genesis that were applied on mechanistic principles to reality at large. Indeed, the term “evolution” denoted originally just this phenomenon of individual genesis, and by no means the genesis of species. On the contrary, “evolution” in its literally sense presupposes the existence of the species, because it is precisely this which, in the person of parent individual, provides the prearranged plan to be “evolved” in every given case of generation. What evolves is not the model itself but its re-embodiment in each generation from germ to maturity: what evolves was involved in the germ, its potency there derived from its act in the progenitor. In terms of cause-effect relation, then, the parent accounts not only for its offspring’s existence, but also for its offspring’s form by its own possession of this selfsame form. This is a pattern very different from mechanistic chain of cause and effect and strongly suggest the operation of a causa formalis in addition to a causa effciens, or the existence of a substantial form, which were otherwise banned from the whole system of natural explanation. In short, the very concept of development was opposed to that of mechanics and still implied some version of other of classic ontology.

Infusion breaks down the boundaries between internally facing systems of record and externally facing systems of engagement. The relational, continuous, collaborative nature of service means that internal company operations are inseparable from customer service. In

People may not develop a class consciousness but they still are affected by the power, privileges, and handicaps related to the distribution of wealth and want. These realities are not canceled out by race, gender, or culture. The latter factors operate within an overall class society. The exigencies of class power and exploitation shape the social reality we all live in. Racism and sexism help to create superexploited categories of workers (minorities and women) and reinforce the notions of inequality that are so functional for a capitalist system. To

From mind control to programming Foa and Kozak (1986) note that pathological fear structures, including unrealistic elements that may become associated with states of absorption and heightened arousal often attendant with extreme stress, are extremely resistant to modification. Hence, the power of all statements made during and immediately after abusive episodes while the victim is in an altered state will be enhanced by the absence of an operative critical consciousness (Conway, 1994), and by the indelible connection with intolerable terror or dread. Psychologically sophisticated abusers who have mastered the methods of mind control know how to induce psychobiological state changes, how to elaborate and encapsulate them, how to provide the cues to trigger them, how to tap into and alter the victim's motivational and belief systems, and how to layer amnesias within a personality. In this way a polyfragmented dissociative individual can appear to lead the life of a normal hardworking citizen, yet can function undetected (by himself or by others) as a mind-controlled operative and remain available for service to individual perpetrators or groups.

Psychologically sophisticated abusers who have mastered the methods of mind control know how to induce psychobiological state changes, how to elaborate and encapsulate them, how to provide the cues to trigger them, how to tap into and alter the victim's motivational and belief systems, and how to layer amnesias within a personality. In this way a polyfragmented dissociative individual can appear to lead the life of a normal hardworking citizen, yet can function undetected (by himself or by others) as a mind-controlled operative and remain available for service to individual perpetrators or groups.

The Al Saud operate something like baseball’s farm team system, in which ambitious young princes start off with relatively junior minor league positions and, if they are talented and fortunate, advance to more senior major league posts.

But then, during the months that I was away from my little colony of apes, I began to see the built-in limitations of empathy. Perhaps because of my relationship with Carol and the rivalry with Zack, and because I am a woman, I came for the first time to believe that even a well-intentioned man, one who truly does empathize with women, is nonetheless incapable of knowing how the relations between men and women feel to a woman. Mainly, he is incapable of knowing how he is perceived by her. And therefore she, despite her likeness to him, remains opaque to him, unknowable. This doesn’t mean that conflict between them is inevitable or inescapable. But there are useful parallels in the relations between men and women, between whites and blacks, between people without disabilities and disabled people, and between human primates and non-human primates. We who have more power in the world, like men with good intentions, try to empathize with those who have less. We try to experience racism as if I who am white were black, to see the world as if I who am sighted were blind, and to reason and communicate as if I who am human were non-human. And thus I dealt with my chimpanzees as if I were one myself. And what was wrong with this? What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time, I answered, Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s good politics. I see a blind man about to cross the street and think, He can’t see the whizzing traffic, he needs me to see it for him, to take his arm and escort him over to where he clearly wishes to go. Operating on the assumption that, if I were blind, I’d need me to help me, I grab the man’s arm and pull him panic-stricken into the traffic, terrifying and endangering him. Because I am sighted, I have relied and insisted on using a guidance system that utilizes sight as its main source of data. But the blind man has his own system for crossing the street. The blind man hears what I merely see, isolates bits of information that are lost on me, and coordinates and remembers data that I’ve not even registered. I’m talking here about the difference between empathy and sympathy, between feeling for the other and feeling with the other. The distinction came to matter to me. It still does. When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you’re not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that’s as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.

Within an authentic education framework, learners’ individual psychological and neurological characteristics (akin to social-emotional learning aspects) are given consideration and accepted/honoured as they are, promoting inclusive practices. For example, emotional and other high sensitivities commonly found in gifted and creative personnel are not treated as constraints, maladjustments, or something antisocial; rather, they are considered as enriching a neurodiverse society to operate in a more balanced manner. All learners, including those with high developmental potential, get conducive environments to reach higher levels of development, similar to the self-actualised/self-transcended state. An authentic education system sends learners through a lasting deep learning and/or critical thinking experience, which human brains are capable of under conducive teaching-learning environments; human brains are treated as parallel processors that are capable of dealing with multiple inputs and solving complex problems, unlike machines or computers that are good at executing routine steps in reaching specific answers at very high speeds. In effect, in an authentic learning environment, most parts of a human brain (a.k.a. whole brain) including the right hemisphere, are stimulated using appropriate instructions and activities; this contrasts from mainly addressing the left hemisphere in a traditional environment.

there are crucial differences between the right hemisphere of the brain and the left. The left brain is the thinking brain as it is highly verbal and analytical. It operates as a conscious emotion regulation system that can modulate low to medium arousal. It is the domain of cognitive strategies as it processes highly verbal emotions such as guilt and worrisome anxiety. In contrast, the right hemisphere is the emotional brain. It processes all of our intense emotions, regardless of whether they are negative, such as rage, fear, terror, disgust, shame and hopeless despair, or positive such as excitement, surprise, and joy. When our level of emotional arousal escalates the left hemisphere goes off-line and the right hemisphere dominates. Our right brain enables us to read the subjective state of others through its appraisal of subtle facial (visual and auditory) expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication. The right hemisphere is more holistic than the left, holding many different possibilities simultaneously. Dreams, music, poetry, art, metaphor and other creative processes originate in the right hemisphere. The first critical period of development of the right brain begins during the third trimester of pregnancy and this growth spurt continues into the second year of life. It is primarily the right brain which is shaped by our early relational environment and which is crucial for the development of emotional security. Around two months after birth the right anterior cingulate comes on-line, meaning that it allows for more complex processing of social-emotional information than the earlier maturing amygdala. It is responsible for developing attachment behavior. Starting from about tenth months after birth, the highest level of the emotional brain, the right orbitofrontal cortex, becomes active. It continues developing for the next twenty years and remains exceptionally plastic throughout our entire life span. During the second year of life the right orbitofrontal cortex establishes strong, bidirectional connections with the rest of the limbic system. Once these connections are established it then monitors, refines, and regulates amygdala-

Until relatively recently, there was no real need for a term referring in general to the kind of object our Solar System is. It was the only known object of its type. We knew of stars but no planets outside the Solar System. We had no ability to observe planet formation in action. That has all changed, but so recently that there is no generally agreed term in the astronomical community for a star and all the gravitationally bound objects surrounding it. The term ‘planetary system’ has begun to gain currency to describe such objects, and it is the term we adopt to refer to a star and all the bodies gravitationally bound to it—the planets whether rocky, gassy, or icy, their moons, the asteroids, comets, and the far-flung icy bodies that make up Kuiper Belts. Our own planetary system contains only one star, but other planetary systems commonly contain two or even three stars. While the same general processes that formed our Solar System were also operating in the formation of other planetary systems, the end result of the process can yield planetary systems very unlike our own. Now that the Solar System isn’t the only example of a planetary system subject to study, and now that we can in effect peer back in time and observe processes such as those that occurred billions of years ago when our Solar System was being born, we can begin to appreciate how our home planetary system, and indeed our home world, is or isn’t special. The veil has been lifted, and this book provides a glimpse of what has been revealed.

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The ego — or self — defined by this system appears more mammalian and evolutionarily advanced than the quick reptilian reflexes of the self operating on the oral biosurvival system. Nonetheless, the personality shrinks back to the primitive bio-survival self whenever real danger appears — whenever confronted by threat to life, rather than mere threat to status. This difference between mammalian strategy and reptilian reflex explains why there seems more "time" in the anal territorial system than in the oral bio-survival system. In the later, mammalian system, one explores relative power signals slowly; in the earlier, reptilian system, one attacks or flees instantly.

With these points in mind, it’s helpful to more closely examine the relations between grammars, theories of physical systems, and generated systems. Grammatical rules determine the meaningful orderings of words within a language, thereby defining the corpus for the language. Similarly, the mechanisms of a physical model (anything from levers to electron spin) determine possible trajectories through physical-state space (such as the trajectory of a probe through the solar system). It is possible to mimic grammatical rules and physical mechanisms in a generated system by specifying appropriate operators for the system. Once the appropriate operators are chosen, we can make precise comparisons between corresponding grammars, physical models, and generated systems. The generated system format offers an additional advantage because it encompasses additional important complex systems, such as computer programming languages. An important advantage of precise comparisons is that activities that are easy to observe in one complex system often suggest ‘where to look’ in other complex systems where the activities are difficult to observe.

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The oscillation of 'in and out', 'rushing to and from', 'holding on and breaking away' is naturally profoundly disturbing and disruptive of all continuity in living, and at some point the anxiety aroused becomes so great that it cannot be sustained. It is then that a complete retreat from object relations is embarked on, and the person becomes overtly schizoid, emotionally inaccessible, cut off. This state of emotional apathy, of not suffering any feeling, excitement or enthusiasm, not experiencing either affection or anger, can be very successfully masked. If feeling is repressed, it is often possible to build up a kind of mechanized, robot personality. The ego that operates consciously becomes more a system than a person, a trained and disciplined instrument for 'doing the right and necessary thing' without any real feeling entering in.

Justifications come to an end; procedures for testing are rooted in the indubitable presuppositions which undergird the system or worldview in which they operate. What one accepts is an interrelated system of truths (rather than adopting each proposition one by one), a system which is interwoven with a form of life or pattern of behavior. Thus, circularity in support of specific truths and actions (in relation to other specific truths and actions) will be inevitable.

When it stops working or operates suboptimally, our capacity to perform even the most ordinary daily activities (like bugging your kids to brush their teeth while making them pack lunches and also thinking about what meetings you have later that day) fails. And connected to working memory is the inner voice. A critical component of working memory is a neural system that specializes in managing verbal information. It’s called the phonological loop, but it’s easiest to understand it as the brain’s clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present. It has two parts: an “inner ear,” which allows us to retain words we’ve just heard for a few seconds; and an “inner voice,” which allows us to repeat words in our head as we do when we’re practicing a speech or memorizing a phone number or repeating a mantra.

None of this is to say that experts are inflexible automatons. Experts act with demonstrably more flexibility than novices in a particular domain. Psychologists specify two types of expert flexibility. In the first type, the expert internalizes many of the domain’s salient features and hence sees and reacts to most of the domain’s contexts and their effects. This flexibility operates effectively in relatively stable domains. The second type of flexibility is more difficult to exercise. This flexibility requires experts to recognize when their cognitively accessible models are unlikely to work, forcing the experts to go outside their routines and their familiar frameworks to solve problems. This flexibility is crucial to success in nonlinear, complex systems.

None of this is to say that experts are inflexible automatons. Experts act with demonstrably more flexibility than novices in a particular domain. Psychologists specify two types of expert flexibility. In the first type, the expert internalizes many of the domain’s salient features and hence sees and reacts to most of the domain’s contexts and their effects. This flexibility operates effectively in relatively stable domains. The second type of flexibility is more difficult to exercise. This flexibility requires experts to recognize when their cognitively accessible models are unlikely to work, forcing the experts to go outside their routines and their familiar frameworks to solve problems. This flexibility is crucial to success in nonlinear, complex systems. So how do experts ensure they incorporate both types of flexibility? Advocates of cognitive flexibility theory suggest the major determinant in whether or not an expert will have more expansive flexibility is the amount of reductive bias during deliberate practice.4 More reductive bias may improve efficiency but will reduce flexibility. To mitigate reductive bias, the theory prescribes exploring abstractions across diverse cases to capture the significance of context dependence.

We would seem to be in the presence of a genuine historical anomaly: a political entity that presented itself to the outside world as a kingdom, organized around the charismatic figure of a brilliant child of pirates, but which within operated by a decentralized grassroots democracy without any developed system of social rank. How to explain this? Are there any real historical analogies? In fact, the most obvious parallel would be pirate ships themselves. Pirate captains often tried to develop a reputation among outsiders as terrifying, authoritarian desperadoes, but on board their own ships not only were they elected by majority vote and could be removed by the same means at any time, they were also empowered to give commands only during chase or combat, and otherwise had to take part in the assembly like anybody else. There were no ranks on pirate ships, other than the captain and the quartermaster (the latter presided over the assembly). What’s more, we know of explicit attempts to translate this form of organization onto the Malagasy mainland. Finally, as we’ll see, there is a long history of buccaneers or other questionable characters who found themselves a foothold in some Malagasy port town, trying to pass themselves off as kings and princes without doing anything to reorganize actual social relations on the ground in the surrounding communities. Discipline on board sixteenth-century European ships was arbitrary and brutal, so crews often had good reason to rise up; but the law on land was unforgiving. A mutinous crew knew they had signed their own death warrants. To go pirate was to embrace this fate. A mutinous crew would declare war “against the entire world,” and hoist the “Jolly Roger.” The pirate flag, which existed in many variations, is revealing in itself. It was normally taken to be an image of the devil, but often it contained not only a skull or skeleton, but also an hourglass, signifying not a threat (“you are going to die”) so much as a sheer statement of defiance (“we are going to die, it’s only a matter of time”)—which crews making out such a flag on the horizon would likely have found, if anything, even more terrifying. Flying the Jolly Roger was a crew’s way of announcing they accepted they were on their way to hell.

The thin film of water found on the microscopic particles that make clay has been shown to possess the proper conditions for important chemical reactions. Clays serve as a support and as a catalyst for the diversity of organic molecules involved in what we define as living processes. Ever since J. Desmond Bernal presented (during the late 1940s) his ideas concerning the importance of clays to the origin of life, additional prebiotic scenarios involving clay have been proposed. Clays store energy, transform it, and release it in the form of chemical energy that can operate chemical reactions. Clays also have the capacity to act as buffers and even as templates. A.G. Cairns-Smith analyzed the microscopic crystals of various metals that grew in association with clays and found that they had continually repeating growth patterns. He suggested that this could have been related to the original templates on which certain molecules reproduced themselves. Cairns-Smith and A. Weiss both suggest clays might have been the first templates for self-replicating systems.

The overall objective of logical design is to achieve a design that’s (a) hardware independent, for obvious reasons; (b) operating system and DBMS independent, again for obvious reasons; and finally, and perhaps a little controversially, (c) application independent (in other words, we’re concerned primarily with what the data is, rather than with how it’s going to be used). Application independence in this sense is desirable for the very good reason that it’s normally—perhaps always—the case that not all uses to which the data will be put are known at design time; thus, we want a design that’ll be robust, in the sense that it won’t be invalidated by the advent of application requirements that weren’t foreseen at the time of the original design.

Muad'Dib gave us a particular kind of knowledge about prophetic insight, about the behaviour which surrounds such insight and its influence upon events whcih are seen to be "on line." (That is, events which are set to occur in a related system which the prophet reveals and interprets.) As has been noted elsewhere, such insight operates as a peculiar trap for the prophet himself. He can become the victim of what he knows — which is a relatively common human failing.

The theoretical concepts of Freudianism are corrected and affirmed once they are understood, as suggested in the work of Melanie Klein, in terms of corporeality taken as itself the search of the external in the internal and of the internal in the external, that is, as a global and universal power of incorporation... A philosophy of the flesh finds itself in opposition to any interpretation of the unconscious in terms of "unconscious representations," a tribute paid by Freud to the psychology of bis day. The unconscious is feeling itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of "what" is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it...The double formula of the unconscious ( "I did not know" and "I have not always known it'') corresponds to two aspects of the flesh, its poetic and its oneiric powers. When Freud presents the concept of repression in all its operational richness, it comprises a double movement of progress and regression, of openness toward the adult universe and of a relapse to the pregenital life, but henceforth called by its name, having become unconscious "homosexuality." Thus the repressed unconsciousness would be a secondary formation, contemporary with the formation of a system of perception-consciousness -- and the primordial unconsciousness would be a permissive being, the initial yes, the undividedness of feeling. The preceding leads to the idea of the human body as a natural symbolism...We may ask what could be the relation between this tacit symbolism, or undividedness, and the artificial or conventional symbolism, which seems to be privileged, to open us toward ideal being and to truth.

I did not, and could not, know when writing this book that our nation would soon awaken violently from its brief colorblind slumber. In the final chapter, I did predict that uprisings were in our future, and I wondered aloud what the fire would look like this time. What actually occurred in the years that followed was, to paraphrase James Baldwin, more terrible and more beautiful than I could have imagined. We now have white nationalist movements operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks. We have a president who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people—calling Mexican migrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as “shithole countries,” and smearing the majority-black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. And yet, in the midst of all of this, we also have vibrant racial justice movements led by new generations of activists who are working courageously at the intersections of our systems of control, as well as growing movements against criminal injustice led by those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Many of these movements aim to redefine the meaning of justice in America. A decade ago, much of this progress seemed nearly unimaginable. When this book was first released, there was relatively little racial justice organizing, and “mass incarceration” was not a widely used term. Back then, the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as most civil rights organizations, did not include criminal justice issues among its top priorities. Little funding could be found for work challenging the enormous punishment bureaucracy

Note, however, that as conventionally understood, the operational and relational closure of an algebraic system does not imply that its identity is completely self-contained. Instead, the mathematician and any required display, storage, or processing media are typically missing from its formal idealization, and it is usually considered to exist in a Platonic realm beyond which no explanation is required. In a ToE, this is unacceptable.

visual clarity. From either personal experience or familiarity with the Battle at Yavin, everyone in the room recognized the smaller hologram as an unfinished Imperial Death Star. “The data brought to us by the Bothan spies pinpoints the exact location of the Emperor’s new battle station,” Mon Mothma said. “We also know that the weapon systems of this Death Star are not yet operational. With the Imperial fleet spread throughout the galaxy in a vain effort to engage us, it is relatively unprotected. But most important of all, we’ve learned that the Emperor

Karl Marx, observing this disruption in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, could not accept the English evolutionary explanation for the emergence of capitalism. He believed that coercion had been absolutely necessary in effecting this transformation. Marx traced that force to a new class of men who coalesced around their shared interest in production, particularly their need to organize laboring men and women in new work patterns. Separating poor people from the tools and farm plots that conferred independence, according to Marx, became paramount in the capitalists’ grand plan.6 He also stressed the accumulation of capital as a first step in moving away from traditional economic ways. I don’t agree. As Europe’s cathedrals indicate, there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads, canals, windmills, irrigation systems, and wharves. The accumulation of cultural capital, especially the know-how and desire to innovate in productive ways, proved more decisive in capitalism’s history. And it could come from a duke who took the time to figure out how to exploit the coal on his property or a farmer who scaled back his leisure time in order to build fences against invasive animals. What factory work made much more obvious than the tenant farmer-landlord relationship was the fact that the owner of the factory profited from each worker’s labor. The sale of factory goods paid a meager wage to the laborers and handsome returns to the owners. Employers extracted the surplus value of labor, as Marx called it, and accumulated money for further ventures that would skim off more of the wealth that laborers created but didn’t get to keep. These relations of workers and employers to production created the class relations in capitalist society. The carriers of these novel practices, Marx said, were outsiders—men detached from the mores of their traditional societies—propelled forward by their narrow self-interest. With the cohesion of shared political goals, the capitalists challenged the established order and precipitated the class conflict that for Marx operated as the engine of change. Implicit in Marx’s argument is that the market worked to the exclusive advantage of capitalists. In the early twentieth century another astute philosopher, Max Weber, assessed the grand theories of Smith and Marx and found both of them wanting in one crucial feature: They gave attitudes to men and women that they couldn’t possibly have had before capitalist practices arrived. Weber asked how the values, habits, and modes of reasoning that were essential to progressive economic advance ever rooted themselves in the soil of premodern Europe characterized by other life rhythms and a moral vocabulary different in every respect. This inquiry had scarcely troubled English economists or historians before Weber because they operated on the assumption that human nature made men (little was said of women) natural bargainers and restless self-improvers, eager to be productive when productivity

Fredric Jameson and others have detailed the operation of a cultural prohibition, at the structural level, on even the imaging of alternatives to the desolate insularity of individual experience within the competitive workings of capitalist society. possibilities of non-monadic or communal life are rendered unthinkable. In 1965, a typical negative image of collective living was, for example, that of the Bolsheviks moving sullen working-class families into Doctor Zhivago's spacious and pristine home in the David Lean movie. For the past quarter-century, the communal has been presented as a farm more nightmarish option. For example, in recent neoconservative portrayals of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, measures taken against private property and class privilege on behalf of collective social formations are equated to the most monstrous crimes in world history. On a smaller scale, there are the countless narratives of cult-like communes of obedient converts ruled by homicidal madmen and cynical manipulators. Echoing bourgeois fears in the late nineteenth century following 1871, the idea of a commune derived from any form of socialism remains systemically intolerable. The cooperative, as a lived set of relations, cannot actually be made visible -- it can only be represented as a parodic replication of existing relations of domination. In many different ways, the attack on values of collective and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependency on others, while in fact we are experience a more comprehensive subjection to the 'free' workings of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is 'to be free of other selves.' In academic circles, the right-wing attach on the cooperative is abetted by the current intellectual fashion of denouncing the idea or possibility of community for its alleged exclusions and latent fascisms. One of the main forms of control over the last thirty years has been to ensure there are no visible alternatives to privatized patterns of living.

It is equally hard to know what to make of Fausto-Sterling’s (1992, p. 199) claim that “there is no single undisputed claim about universal human behavior (sexual or otherwise).” Presumably even the most ardent cultural relativist would accept that everywhere; people live in societies; they eat, sleep, and make love; and that women give birth and men do not. The arguments seem to arise when we move from basic universals to their specific behavioral expression. Though everywhere women are the principal caretakers of children, the fact that there may be variation in how that task is fulfilled leads some anthropologists to conclude that mothering is not universal. This is analogous to arguing that because people eat different food in different parts of the world, eating is not universal. Evolutionary psychologists do not argue for cultural invariance in the expression of evolved adaptations. As Tooby and Cosmides (1992, p. 45) put it, “manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs.” At a behavioral level, the expression of the mechanism may vary but that does not question the universality of the generative mechanism itself. Fortunately Donald Brown (1991), trained in the standard ethnographic tradition, has documented the extent of human universals. The list is astoundingly long but here is a taste of the hundreds that he finds: gossip, lying, verbal humor, storytelling, metaphor, distinction between mother and father, kinship categories, logical relations, interpreting intention from behavior and recognition of six basic emotions. Of special interest to the study of gender we find: binary distinctions between men and women, division of labor by sex, more child care by women, more aggression and violence by men, acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures, and domination by men in the public political sphere. Now this last observation (that men predominate in positions of power) provides a nice example of the extreme reluctance of cultural anthropologists to acknowledge universals. In 1973, Steven Goldberg wrote a book documenting the universality of patriarchy. He was inundated with letters informing him that he was wrong and pointing out counter-examples. (Other feminists were more willing to accept his premise, see Bem, 1993; Millett, 1969; Rich, 1976.) Over the next 20 years, he carefully examined the available ethnographic documentation for each putative counter-example and in 1993 authored a second book in which he was emphatic that no society had yet been found that violated his rule. There are societies that are matrilineal and matrilocal and where women are accorded veneration and respect—but there are no societies which violate the universality of patriarchy defined as “a system of organisation … in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 14). Such a state of affairs is deplorable but mere denial of the facts will do nothing to alter it—women’s engagement in the political arena will.

Society is neither an organism nor a machine; it is-like organisms and machines-a system. It is composed of components that are related in such a way that the whole is greater than, and essentially different from, the sum of the parts. This is so because relations between the parts are maintained by mechanisms of communication and control that depend on the flow of information, on "feedback," for effective operation. Cybernetic theory informs social analysis in a variety of ways: by focusing attention on system properties such as entropy and redundancy and on the values that function as operating rules; by emphasizing the extent to which the meaning and function of any part of the system is determined by context; and so on. Above all else, it reminds us that it is the context-a set of relationships, rather than any single component in isolation-that evolves.18 The focus of this book is on the evolving context of ideas in twentieth-century Vietnam. Vietnamese Society as a System of Yin and Yang In traditional Vietnamese culture we can find, in every domain of society, two different sets of operating principles, or values. These two sets can be used as the basis for a model of society and culture. One set can be seen as yang in nature; the other, as yin. Yang is defined by a tendency toward male dominance, high redundancy, low entropy, complex and rigid hierarchy, competition, and strict orthodoxy focused on rules for behavior based on social roles. Yin is defined by a tendency toward greater egalitarianism and flexibility, more female participation, mechanisms to dampen competition and conflict, high entropy, low redundancy, and more emphasis on feeling, empathy, and spontaneity. Much of traditional Vietnamese culture, social organization, and behavior expressed the balanced opposition between yin and yang as interlocking sets of ideas (including values, conceptual categories, operating rules, etc.). At a high level of abstraction, a great deal of persistence may be detected in the

The construction of femininity is historical. It is lived by women economically, socially and ideologically. Women occupy a particular position within a patriarchal, bourgeois society, a relation of inequality to its structures of power. Power is not only a matter of coercive forces. It operates through exclusions from access to those institutions and practices through which dominance is exercised. One of these is language, by which we mean not just speech or grammar, but the discursive systems through which the world we live in is represented by and to us.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

TRANSFORM LOCAL DISCOVERIES INTO GLOBAL IMPROVEMENTS When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge. In other words, when teams or individuals have experiences that create expertise, our goal is to convert that tacit knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing) into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else’s expertise through practice. This ensures that when anyone else does similar work, they do so with the cumulative and collective experience of everyone in the organization who has ever done the same work. A remarkable example of turning local knowledge into global knowledge is the US Navy’s Nuclear Power Propulsion Program (also known as “NR” for “Naval Reactors”), which has over 5,700 reactor-years of operation without a single reactor-related casualty or escape of radiation. The NR is known for their intense commitment to scripted procedures and standardized work and the need for incident reports for any departure from procedure or normal operations to accumulate learnings, no matter how minor the failure signal—they constantly update procedures and system designs based on these learnings. The result is that when a new crew sets out to sea on their first deployment, they and their officers benefit from the collective knowledge of 5,700 accident-free reactor-years. Equally impressive is that their own experiences at sea will be added to this collective knowledge, helping future crews safely achieve their own missions.

…semiotic interpretations are not intended to answer the question of what forms mean. That might be a problem of iconology, or iconography, or psychology, or – of course – criticism. The issue which semiotics must address is not what forms mean, but rather how they mean the various things they mean the various things they do. In other terms, semiotics must study the expressive systems operating in each case: which traits of the form convey meaning, to which other traits they are opposed, how the relation between form and meaning originated, how meanings change, how interpretation is achieved, and so on.

Modern Western thought is characterized by an extensive use of abstract concepts that exist and operate within a more general abstract system. Jewish thought, on the other hand, has, with very few exceptions, done without them. Abstract concepts are not to be found in the Bible, the Talmud, or even in relatively modern Hasidic texts.

Each of us is like an operation which has to be performed to produce a product in the plant; each of us is one of a set of dependent events. Does it matter what order we’re in? Well, somebody has to be first and somebody else has to be last. So we have dependent events no matter if we switch the order of the boys. I’m the last operation. Only after I have walked the trail is the product “sold,” so to speak. And that would have to be our throughput—not the rate at which Ron walks the trail, but the rate at which I do. What about the amount of trail between Ron and me? It has to be inventory. Ron is consuming raw materials, so the trail the rest of us are walking is inventory until it passes behind me. And what is operational expense? It’s whatever lets us turn inventory into throughput, which in our case would be the energy the boys need to walk. I can’t really quantify that for the model, except that I know when I’m getting tired. If the distance between Ron and me is expanding, it can only mean that inventory is increasing. Throughput is my rate of walking. Which is influenced by the fluctuating rates of the others. Hmmm. So as the slower than average fluctuations accumulate, they work their way back to me. Which means I have to slow down. Which means that, relative to the growth of inventory, throughput for the entire system goes down. And operational expense? I’m not sure. For UniCo, whenever inventory goes up, carrying costs on the inventory go up as well. Carrying costs are a part of operational expense, so that measurement also must be going up. In terms of the hike, operational expense is increasing any time we hurry to catch up, because we expend more energy than we otherwise would. Inventory is going up. Throughput is going down. And operational expense is probably increasing. Is that what’s happening in my plant? Yes, I think it is.