“
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible)
“
The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge, and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument, the only point of debate is which comes first.
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Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible)
“
Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.
”
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.
”
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Edmund S. Morgan (American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America)
“
You’re a Natural profiler,” he said finally. “You can look at a pattern of behavior and figure out the personality of the perpetrator, or guess how a given individual is likely to behave in the future.
”
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Naturals (The Naturals, #1))
“
This implies, of course, the development of a really compact and light-weight method of storing or producing electricity, at least an order of magnitude better than our present clumsy batteries. Such an invention has been overdue for about fifty years;
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Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future)
“
It was not the past that broke you. - It was the empty future, the endless string of days filled with none of the people who mattered most.
”
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Lisa Gardner (Gone (FBI Profiler, #5))
“
Do you sometimes experience an irrational fear of the future?” This is question number sixty-one. They told us that all questions on the test were significant. That each added important detail to the psychological profile. In our case they could’ve very well started and ended the test with this one.
”
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Mariam Petrosyan (The Gray House)
“
In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.
”
”
Joseph Brodsky
“
Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.
”
”
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
“
[Trauma] freezes the soul, which is why as time moves forward, so many Black children fall bahind. They are punished more harshly and expelled more quickly... Stranded in the streets [they] are profiled as older, as a threat, as possibly carrying a weapon. When cops bully them, scare them, fuck with them, it's because our children aren't seen as part of the future."
-- Nicholas Powers
”
”
Maya Schenwar (Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States)
“
Perhaps the twentieth-century Senator is not called upon to risk his entire future on one basic issue in the manner of Edmund Ross or Thomas Hart Benton. Perhaps our modern acts of political courage do not arouse the public in the manner that crushed the career of Sam Houston and John Quincy Adams. Still, when we realize that a newspaper that chooses to denounce a Senator today can reach many thousand times as many voters as could be reached by all of Daniel Webster’s famous and articulate detractors put together, these stories of twentieth-century political courage have a drama, an excitement—and an inspiration—all their own.
”
”
John F. Kennedy (Profiles in Courage)
“
high-profile tech companies) are earning only an average of $3 per hour of attention—
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Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
“
The Undertaker frowned again. Her eyes flashed through scenes too quickly. for May to make out.
"Your future profile is very confusing. I see great fear. You fear too many things. You even fear yourself. Why?" May stared blankly.
"Oh yes. You don't believe in your heart. You doubt yourself. It's a great failing." The Undertaker gazed at her solemnly. " but there's also great courage.
”
”
Jodi Lynn Anderson (May Bird and the Ever After (May Bird, #1))
“
One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it.
”
”
James Salter (A Sport and a Pastime)
“
Novelist and essayist George Orwell wrote the masterpiece 1984 about a dystopian future. But he was also a shrewd observer of political life in democracies. He warned about the political choices people make regularly in an elective system of government. “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”4 The progressive message continues to be “hand us more power.” What they are asking us to do is ignore history—including their history—in how such power is actually exercised. We must ask ourselves: Why trust someone with more power when you cannot even trust them with the little they already have?
”
”
Peter Schweizer (Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite)
“
Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?” - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?” Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.
”
”
Joan Halifax (The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom)
“
marriage equality” was a great slogan for the Left. It fits on a bumper sticker. You can make a red equals sign your Facebook profile picture. It’s a wonderful piece of advertising. And yet it’s completely vacuous. It doesn’t say a thing about what marriage is.
”
”
Ryan T. Anderson (Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Liberty)
“
Your future profile is very confusing. I see great fear. You fear too many things. You even fear yourself. Why?"
May stared at her blankly.
"Oh, yes. You don't believe in your heart. You doubt yourself. It's a great failing." The Undertake gazed at her solemnly. "But there's also great courage.
”
”
Jodi Lynn Anderson (May Bird and the Ever After (May Bird, #1))
“
The frenzied hypernatalism of the women's magazines alone (and that includes People, Us, and InStyle), with their endless parade of perfect, "sexy" celebrity moms who've had babies, adopted babies, been to sperm banks, frozen their eggs for future use, hatched frozen eggs, had more babies, or adopted a small Tibetan village all to satisfy their "baby lust," is enough to make you want to get your tubes tied. (These profiles always insist that celebs all love being "moms" much, much more than they do their work, let alone being rich and famous, and that they'd spend every second with their kids if they didn't have that pesky blockbuster movie to finish.)
”
”
Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women)
“
Learn to level sell and bring in a leader to speed up or unstick a deal. Use Gartner, idc, and Forrester studies to persuade your customer. Look at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile to learn who they follow and what groups they are a part of. If a sales professional wants to get to me, for example, they should invoke leadership guru Simon Sinek.
”
”
Anita Nielsen (Beat The Bots: How Your Humanity Can Future-Proof Your Tech Sales Career)
“
THE RIGHT AND WRONG PICTURE OF A DREAM I’ve studied successful people for almost forty years. I’ve known hundreds of high-profile people who achieved big dreams. And I’ve achieved a few dreams of my own. What I’ve discovered is that a lot of people have misconceptions about dreams. Take a look at many of the things that people pursue and call dreams in their lives: Daydreams—Distractions from Current Work Pie-in-the-Sky Dreams—Wild Ideas with No Strategy or Basis in Reality Bad Dreams—Worries that Breed Fear and Paralysis Idealistic Dreams—The Way the World Would Be If You Were in Charge Vicarious Dreams—Dreams Lived Through Others Romantic Dreams—Belief that Some Person Will Make You Happy Career Dreams—Belief that Career Success Will Make You Happy Destination Dreams—Belief that a Position, Title, or Award Will Make You Happy Material Dreams—Belief that Wealth or Possessions Will Make You Happy If these aren’t good dreams—valid ones worthy of a person’s life—then what are? Here is my definition of a dream that can be put to the test and pass: a dream is an inspiring picture of the future that energizes your mind, will, and emotions, empowering you to do everything you can to achieve it.
”
”
John C. Maxwell (Put Your Dream to the Test: 10 Questions to Help You See It and Seize It)
“
The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower
Or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate
Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I'd like successfully to guess your weight
And win you at a fête.
I'd like to offer you a flower.
I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I'd like your particulars in folders
Marked Confidential).
I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath)
In rows.
I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work.
On hinges …
I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I'd like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I'd like to give you just the right amount
And get some change.
I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you not and hold a teacup.
I like your legs when you unwind them.
Even in trousers I don't mind them.
I like each softly-moulded kneecap.
I like the little crease behind them.
I'd always know, without a recap,
Where to find them.
I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I'd like to cross two hemispheres
And have you chase me.
I'd like to smuggle you across frontiers
Or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I'd like you to embrace me.
I'd like to see you ironing your skirt
And cancelling other dates.
I'd like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I'd like to soothe you when you're hurt
Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.
I'd like you even if you were malign
And had a yen for sudden homicide.
I'd let you put insecticide
Into my wine.
I'd even like you if you were Bride
Of Frankenstein
Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian's
Jekyll and Hyde.
I'd even like you as my Julian
Or Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan.
How melodramatic
If you were something muttering in attics
Like Mrs Rochester or a student of Boolean
Mathematics.
You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I'd like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
I'd like to make you reproduce.
I'd like you in my confidence.
I'd like to be your second look.
I'd like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I'd like to be your preference
And hence
I'd like to be around when you unhook.
I'd like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.
”
”
John Fuller
“
Unlike most other health-care systems in the world, health care in the United States is largely profit driven. The reconstruction of the U.S. medical system around managed care led to the closure of hundreds of hospitals across the country,697 leaving many cities with little surge capacity to deal with an abnormal influx of patients.698 HMO corporate stock profiles can ill afford to provide extra beds and ventilators for some indeterminate future surge of patients.
”
”
Michael Greger (How to Survive a Pandemic)
“
As the old joke goes: “Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke. A couple of high-profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living selling instruction and paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free. The lines of free code become valuable to you only through support and guidance. A lot of medical and genetic information will go this route in the coming decades. Right now getting a full copy of all your DNA is
”
”
Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
“
Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.
”
”
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
“
Most plants—from a potted snapdragon to a giant sequoia—will develop differently when grown with different communities of mycorrhizal fungus. Basil plants, for example, produce different profiles of the aromatic oils that make up their flavor when grown with different mycorrhizal strains. Some fungi have been found to make tomatoes sweeter than others; some change the essential oil profile of fennel, coriander, and mint; some increase the concentration of iron and carotenoids in lettuce leaves, the antioxidant activity in artichoke heads, or the concentrations of medicinal compounds in Saint-John’s-wort and echinacea.
”
”
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
“
While poorhouses have been physically demolished, their legacy remains alive and well in the automated decision-making systems that encage and entrap today's poor. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management - automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analysis - retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.
”
”
Virginia Eubanks (Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor)
“
From a scientific point of view, therefore, we are forced to consider Hitler, the Fuehrer, not as a personal devil, wicked as his actions and philosophy may be, but as the expression of a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany but, to a smaller degree, in all civilized countries. To remove Hitler may be a necessary first step, but it would not be the cure. It would be analogous to curing an ulcer without treating the underlying disease. If similar eruptions are to be prevented in the future, we cannot content ourselves with simply removing the overt manifestations of the disease. On the contrary, we must ferret out and seek to correct the underlying factors which produced the unwelcome phenomenon. We must discover the psychological streams which nourish this destructive state of mind in order that we may divert them into channels which will permit a further evolution of our form of civilization.”— American OSS psychological profile of Hitler.
”
”
unknown author
“
...[I]f the goal is a realistic sustainable future, then it’s necessary to take a look at what we can do to lengthen the lives of the products we’re going to buy anyway. So my ... answer to the question of how we can boost recycling rates is this: Demand that companies start designing products for repair, reuse, and recycling.
Take, for example, the super-thin MacBook Air, a wonder of modern design packed into an aluminum case that’s barely bigger than a handful of documents in a manila envelope. At first glance, it would seem to be a sustainable wonder that uses fewer raw materials to do more. But that’s just the gloss; the reality is that the MacBook Air’s thin profile means that its components—memory chips, solid state drive, and processor—are packed so tightly in the case that there’s no room for upgrades (a point driven home by the unusual screws used to hold the case together, thus making home repair even more difficult). Even worse, from the perspective of recycling, the thin profile (and the tightly packed innards) means that the computer is exceptionally difficult to break down into individual components when it comes time to recycle it. In effect, the MacBook Air is a machine built to be shredded, not repaired, upgraded, and reused.
”
”
Adam Minter (Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade)
“
The app is designed for reciprocity. You swipe right on the people you’re interested in but if they don’t swipe back, poof, you’ll never get a chance to talk. And apparently, the woman who lunches in Paris and regrets nothing doesn’t want to talk to me. Which is fine. That’s her right. Whatever. I’m fine. (I hope she regrets it.)
When you have a match, there’s a ding (such a rush) and the app encourages you to send a message to ‘your future BFF’.
Crucially, after you’ve matched, you only have twenty four hours to message each other before your potential friendship expires. And if they don’t reply to your message within twenty-four hours, they disappear for ever. There are so many areas for rejection with this app.
A woman named Elizabeth appears. Her bio reads: ‘I’m into cooking, trying new restaurants, trash TV, theatre, reading, travelling, and exploring. Love a girls’ night in as much as a night out. Lived in New York for a few years. Looking for friends to explore the city with or maybe start or join a feminist book club.’
Yes! Yes, Elizabeth, yes! I send her a message about how I’d be up for her feminist book club and trying new restaurants. Safe. Solid. Not groundbreaking, but friendly enough.
Elizabeth doesn’t reply.
‘Elizabeth, don’t do this to us!’ I yell at her photo. I watch the time dwindle away.
And then, before we have even begun, our time is up. Her profile photo fades to grey, like she’s dead. Which she is. To me.
”
”
Jessica Pan (Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: An Introvert's Year of Living Dangerously)
“
Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).
”
”
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
“
Dulles knew of Jung through his wife, who had an interest in psychoanalysis and had trained as an analyst in Zürich before the war. He also knew of the reports of Jung’s Nazi fellow traveling. He had these checked and found they were unsubstantiated. Eventually Dulles and Jung met and began an “experimental marriage between espionage and psychology” involving the “psychological profile” of political and military leaders. Dulles was so impressed by Jung’s insights that he urged his OSS chiefs to pay great attention to his analyses, especially of Hitler, who Jung had cautioned wouldn’t shy from suicide if things got desperate. By this time, Hitler was living in an underground bunker in East Prussia, and required anyone wanting an interview to be disarmed and X-rayed. This is how Jung became “Agent 488,” his code name in Dulles’ OSS reports. Dulles was convinced that Jung’s assessments of Nazi and Fascist leaders “showed a deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for,” and in later life, Dulles remarked that “Nobody will probably ever know how much Professor Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war.” When asked for details, Dulles demurred, saying the information was “highly classified for the indefinite future,” which meant that Jung’s “services would have to remain undocumented.
”
”
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
“
NRO was going through a difficult period, with a reorganization that didn’t “take” and still suffering the aftereffects of high-profile satellite system failures, notably the multibillion-dollar Future Imagery Architecture program, which was canceled in 2005 and, in 2008, lost control of a satellite that had to be destroyed in orbit.
”
”
James R. Clapper (Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence)
“
Some viewed Chinese investors as the latest “dumb money” to hit Hollywood. It is no doubt true that financing movies is not the smartest way for any investor, from anywhere in the world, to earn the best returns. Others had a different theory—that some wealthy Chinese individuals and businesses were seeking to get their money out of China, where an autocratic government could still steal anyone’s wealth at any time, for any reason. Certainly Hollywood had long been a destination for legal money laundering. But those who worked most closely with the Chinese knew that the biggest reason for these investments was a form of reverse-colonialism. After more than a decade as a place for Hollywood to make money, China wanted to turn the tables. The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of “soft power,” whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons. Over the past few years, locally produced Chinese films had become more successful at the box office there. But most were culturally specific comedies and love stories that didn’t translate anywhere else. China had yet to produce a global blockbuster. And with box-office growth in that country slowing in 2016 and early 2017, hits that resonated internationally would be critical if the Communist nation was to grow its movie business and use it to become the kind of global power it wanted to be. So Chinese companies, with the backing of the government, started investing in Hollywood, with a mission to learn how experienced hands there made blockbusters that thrived worldwide. Within a few years, they figured, China would learn how to do that without anyone’s help. “Working with a company like Universal will help us elevate our skill set in moviemaking,” the head of the Chinese entertainment company Perfect World Pictures said, while investing $250 million in a slate of upcoming films from the American studio. Getting there wouldn’t be easy. One of the highest-profile efforts to produce a worldwide hit out of China was The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and made by Wanda’s Legendary Pictures. The $150 million film, about a war against monsters set on the Chinese historic landmark, grossed an underwhelming $171 million and a disastrous $45 million in the United States. Then, to create another obstacle, Chinese government currency controls established in early 2017 slowed, at least temporarily, the flow of money from China into Hollywood. But by then it was too late to turn back. As seemed to always be true when it came to Hollywood’s relationship with China, the Americans had no choice but to keep playing along. Nobody else was willing to pour billions of dollars into the struggling movie business in the mid-2010s, particularly for original or lower-budget productions.
”
”
Ben Fritz (The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies)
“
He felt it would hardly delight his fiancee should he reveal his true opinion, which was that his future mother-in-law's profile had struck him as so alarming that he would prefer in future to view only its muted reflection, perhaps on the surface of a tea tray.
”
”
Caroline Graham
“
moving score, in the form of a continuously updating education profile, is probably a better indication of your potential than a static one that reflects who you were or what you could do when you were sixteen, or where you completed four years of schooling when you were in your late teens and early twenties.
”
”
Patrick Tucker (The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?)
“
In May 2000 I resigned from the South African Police Service and joined a private investigation company. I felt that I had paid my dues and that it was time to invest in my own future.
”
”
Micki Pistorius (Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story)
“
a new Astronomer Royal arrived in England to take up his appointment. The Press asked him to give his views on space-flight, and after two decades Dr Richard van der Riet Woolley had seen no reason to change his mind. ‘Space travel,’ he snorted, ‘is utter bilge.’ The newspapers did not allow him to forget this when Sputnik I went up the very next year. Later – irony piled upon irony – Dr Woolley became, by virtue of his position as Astronomer Royal, a leading member of the committee advising the British government on space-research. The feelings of those who have been trying, for a generation, to get the United Kingdom interested in space can well be imagined.*
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Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future)
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Zero tolerance imagines that kids are at risk of being victimized (violence, drugs, general hooliganism), but it also imagines kids as risks to the school and other students. The APA’s research found that zero-tolerance school policing “affected the delicate balance between the educational and juvenile justice systems, in particular, increasing schools’ use of and reliance on strategies such as security technology, security personnel, and profiling, especially in high-minority, high-poverty school districts.” 34 Children—black, indigenous, and Latinx children in particular—are overpoliced, especially within schools (more on this later). When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.
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Malcolm Harris (Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials)
“
Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief by David Winston and Steven Maimes
An in-depth discussion of adaptogens with detailed monographs for many adaptogenic, nervine, and nootropic herbs.
Adaptogens in Medical Herbalism: Elite Herbs and Natural Compounds for Mastering Stress, Aging, and Chronic Disease by Donald R. Yance
A scientifically based herbal and nutritional program to master stress, improve energy, prevent degenerative disease, and age gracefully.
Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients into Foods and Remedies That Heal by Rosalee de la Forêt
This book offers an introduction to herbal energetics for the beginner, plus a host of delicious and simple recipes for incorporating medicinal plants into meals. Rosalee shares short chapters on a range of herbs, highlighting scientific research on each plant.
The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry by Ann Armbrecht Forbes
In a world awash with herbal books, this is a much-needed reference, central to the future of plant medicine itself. Ann weaves a complex tapestry through the story threads of the herbal industry: growers, gatherers, importers, herbalists, and change-making business owners and non-profits. As interest in botanical medicine surges and the world’s population grows, medicinal plant sustainability is paramount. A must-read for any herbalist.
The Complete Herbal Tutor: The Ideal Companion for Study and Practice by Anne McIntyre
Provides extensive herbal profiles and materia medica; offers remedy suggestions by condition and organ system. This is a great reference guide for the beginner to intermediate student.
Foundational Herbcraft by jim mcdonald
jim mcdonald has a gift for explaining energetics in a down-to-earth and engaging way, and this 200-page PDF is a compilation of his writings on the topic. jim’s categorization of herbal actions into several groups (foundational actions, primary actions, and secondary actions) adds clarity and depth to the discussion. Access the printable PDF and learn more about jim’s work here.
The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life by Robin Rose Bennett
A beautiful tour of some of our most healing herbs, written in lovely prose. Full of anecdotes, recipes, and simple rituals for connecting with plants.
Herbal Healing for Women: Simple Home Remedies for All Ages by Rosemary Gladstar
Thorough and engaging materia medica. This was the only book Juliet brought with her on a three-month trip to Central America and she never tired of its pages. Information is very accessible with a lot of recipes and formulas.
Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family by Rosemary Gladstar
Great beginner reference and recipe treasury written by the herbal fairy godmother herself.
The Modern Herbal by Maude Grieve
This classic text was first published in 1931 and contains medicinal, culinary, cosmetic, and economic properties, plus cultivation and folklore of herbs. Available for free online.
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Socdartes
“
Noyce was indeed the son and grandson of Congregational ministers, as Tom Wolfe correctly emphasized. But Rock hated hierarchies with at least as much passion. He was the bullied, Jewish, physically insecure boy in a small town. He was the youth who despised the ranked rigidity of the army. He was the man who liberated himself from the corporate establishment of the East Coast at the first opportunity. In his laconic, just-the-facts, plainspoken lucidity, Rock was as hostile to posturing and pretension as Noyce was. If Tom Wolfe had written an epic profile of Rock rather than Noyce, the origins of Silicon Valley’s egalitarian culture might be ascribed not to the entrepreneur but to the financier.
”
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Sebastian Mallaby (The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future)
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I stare at Danielle’s profile—her bronzed skin, those full pink lips—and see our future, our life, so much more. And I have to snap out of it.
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Ebony LaDelle (Love Radio)
“
How to Quantify Achievement Stories
When hiring managers, recruiters, and staffing firms see a resume or LinkedIn profile or attend an interview with verbiage but no numbers, they don’t know what those words mean.
In fact, they know next to nothing until you add the numbers that explain the impact of your work. Here’s how you can resolve this issue.
Work With Finance
Sometimes the impact of our work is not always clear. At times like this, reaching out to one of your friends in the Finance Department can be very helpful. Finance has access to numbers that are not always readily available to other departments.
If you’re no longer with the company, explain to the Finance associate that the numbers he provides could make the difference in determining whether you land another position.
Using a Range
Per Lily Zhang of the Muse, one reason job seekers avoid quantifying is not knowing the exact number. Lily suggests using a range. Using my work experience, here’s what that means:
Before: Chaired weekly product manager meeting.
After: Chaired weekly meeting with 7 to 12 product managers so plans could be discussed and coordinated. Confusion and rework were eliminated.
Frequency
Lily shared that one of the easiest ways to add numbers is to identify the frequency with which you perform a given task. This can help the hiring manager understand how much you can handle. For example:
Before: Responded to pricing requests from the Sales Force.
After: Responded to 15 to 20 pricing requests from the Sales Force on a daily basis.
Scale
Everyone on the hiring side of the business loves when candidates provide numbers, because numbers explain the impact of what you’ve done.
The most meaningful numbers are those associated with making money, saving money, and driving productivity. Here are a couple examples from my work experience:
Before: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager’s role; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month.
After: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager role by 66%; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. Asked Director if I could take on the responsibilities of employees who were laid off.
Before: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Implemented process to prevent future errors.
After: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Recognized $7.2M. Implemented process to prevent future errors.
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Clark Finnical (Job Hunting Secrets: (from someone who's been there))
“
I know, I know, everyone wants peace, why should I want a war? I'm fed up, bored to death. Besides, my life is worth nothing. If worthwhile types like scientists and engineers die, they're a big loss to the country; my death would be a good thing. As it is, I have not done anything worth a dog's fart.
I often think I am a fly in a glass bottle, with light, but without any future, and I can't take out the cork to let myself out. Dammit, I often doubt, with the bad habits I have picked up these past few years, wether I could do an honest job of work in the factory. Its a good thing there aren't many people like me, or the country'd be in a bad way
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Zhang Xinxin (Chinese Profiles)
“
The thirty-day no-contact rule Recovering from a breakup on a more practical basis can be likened to getting over an addiction. You go through periods of major withdrawal where you become overwhelmed by a cocktail of emotions, including guilt, fear, randomly missing him, and suddenly feeling like what he did to you ‘wasn’t that bad’. You start to play the mental showreel of all your good times (even if you only had a few), and suddenly you can’t remember why you left. Feeling this cluster of imbalanced emotions can be very confusing and irritating, but all hope is not lost. Contrary to popular belief, breakups don’t actually have to be hard. We assign so much spiritual and emotional value to these men, that by the time we finally distance ourselves from them, we feel distant from ourselves. And that’s really heartbreaking, because no man is worth losing yourself over. Ever. They say it takes about thirty days to break a habit. Texting your ex, stalking his profile from your second account, deliberately asking your mutual friends certain questions to get updates on his life and his new girl – it all needs to stop. So right now, go cold turkey, block his number on whatever messaging app you use, remove him from all your social media. Maintaining little corridors of access to him means he’s still on a pedestal. It also means your value system when it comes to men is warped, because naturally you’re going to keep comparing new guys to him as long as he holds this much space in your head. You want to evict him from that space so that someone new can blow you away when the time is right! This guy is not the be-all and end-all of your experiences with men, and the outcome of your situation with him really doesn’t have to define your future relationships. This thirty-day period of making yourself the centre of your world has a 100 per cent success rate, because by the time you get to day thirty, if it’s done honestly and correctly, you will have either a) met a new guy or b) found a whole heap of new reasons to love your healing self. But the thirty-day no-contact rule must be adhered to strictly, and if you break the pact with yourself, you must start all the way from the beginning – which might feel like torture.
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Chidera Eggerue (How To Get Over A Boy)
“
P4 - The good news is that there is at least one emerging technology out there that is looking mighty promising right now: it’s called helium persufflation, and I’m currently orchestrating the funding of the most critical research into making it work.
Over the course of 2023 LEV Foundation has coordinated an effort, conceived by Martin O’Dea and Dr. Aubrey de Grey, to lay to rest the lamentable opinion that aging, along with the disease and death it brings, is inevitable - and by extension, that attempts to combat it are unworthy of serious recognition or support.
We assert instead that an immediate expansion of work to extend healthy lifespans is not only credible, but indeed crucial to the quality of our collective future.
In collaboration with primary author Professor Brian Kennedy, with input and enthusiastic endorsement from iconic researchers and leaders across the field of longevity medicine and allied fields, we are now able to publish the result of that effort - the Dublin Longevity Declaration: Consensus Recommendation to Immediately Expand Research on Extending Healthy Human Lifespans.
Whatever your background, we encourage everyone who reads the Declaration and agrees with its message to add your signature, and encourage your friends and colleagues to consider doing the same: www. dublinlongevitydeclaration. org
More on all of this here: www. quora. com/profile/Aubrey-de-Grey/answers
”
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Aubrey de Grey (Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime)
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In 1989, the average young person was high-to-very-high in self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism (most people slightly agree or agree with statements), and moderate-to-low in socially prescribed perfectionism (most people neither agree nor disagree with statements). Not the healthiest profile in terms of personal expectations, admittedly, but good news regarding socially prescribed perfectionism – young people seemed to report that expectations and pressures on them weren’t excessively demanding.
By 2016, however, that profile had drastically changed. Self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism had edged even higher, which was bad enough. But it was the trend for socially prescribed perfectionism that really worried us. It surged from low-to-moderate in 1989 to moderate-to-high in 2016. Projecting those increases into the future shows us where we might be headed. By 2050, based on the models we tested, self-oriented perfectionism will move above the very high threshold (most people agree with statements) and socially prescribed perfectionism above the high threshold (most people slightly agree or agree with statements).
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Thomas Curran (The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough)
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One afternoon we sat together on my futon and cried, knowing we were crying for our own exclusive concerns, and out of compassion for each other. We were tragically enmeshed; each the source of the other's pain, each the threshold of the other's future. We stood like tired boxers, clinging to each other to stop the beating. I could end her suffering, some of it, but only at my own expense. She was the only one who could see the magnitude of what was happening. She wasn't telling me it was somehow good for me. She knew what was at stake; she was weighing it every moment. We were two pieces in a puzzle that were negotiating the exact shape of the cut that would at once connect and divide us. We were pressing at each other through a curtain to establish the precise profile of our grief.
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Amy Seek (God and Jetfire: Confessions of a Birth Mother)
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1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks).
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
“
What, then, are the practical steps that pricing managers can take to master Big Data? Companies must recruit a new generation of pricing talent with more of a “trader” profile than an “analyst” one.
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McKinsey Chief Marketing & Sales Officer Forum (Big Data, Analytics, and the Future of Marketing & Sales)
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Do you think the stars stare back at us? I asked...
"Oh, I think they watch us with rapt attention," Blue said. "Especially during the day, when we ignore them, when our eyes can't see past the blue. It's quite the partnership, you know. We put on a show for each other. We're both spectacles."
As he spoke, I stretched out on my back, hands clasped behind my head, admiring his profile. The slope of his nose. The curve of his lips. The set of his jaw. Then I turned my gaze to the endless stars above us, and the constellations I knew by name. They were all there, shining the same as they do over two hundred years in the future. They traveled with me, my companions on this journey. Orion was driving, Cassiopeia was riding shotgun, and I was in the backseat singing 'Stardust' and 'Orion is Arising' and 'Catch a Falling Star.
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M.G. Buehrlen (The Untimely Deaths of Alex Wayfare (Alex Wayfare #2))
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He knew that to secure his bureau’s future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.
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Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
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Ingrid Seward
Ingrid Seward is editor in chief of Majesty magazine and has been writing about the Royal Family for more than twenty years. She is acknowledged as one of the leading experts in the field and has written ten books on the subject. Her latest book, Diana: The Last Word, with Simone Simmons, will be published in paperback in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press.
Although Diana assured me that she was happy and finally felt she had found a real purpose in her life, I could still sense some of her inner turmoil. When we were gossiping, she was relaxed, but when we moved on to more serious matters, such as her treatment by the media, her body language betrayed her anxiety. She wrung her hands and looked at me out of the corner of her starling blue eyes. “No one understands what it is like to be me,” she said. “Not my friends, not anyone.”
She admitted, however, that there was a positive side to her unique situation in that she could use her high profile to bring attention to the causes she cared about, and this, she assured me, was what she was doing now and wanted to do in the future. But it was the darker, negative side that she had to live with every day. After all this time, she explained, it still upset her to read untruths about herself, and it was simply not in her nature to ignore it.
“It makes me feel insecure, and it is difficult going out and meeting people when I imagine what they might have read about me that morning.”
Diana had no idea how much she was loved. To the poor, the sick, the weak, and the vulnerable, she was a touchstone of hope. But her appeal extended much further than that. She had the ability to engage the affections of the young and the old from all walks of life.
That summer, she wrote a birthday letter to my daughter that read, “I hope for your birthday you managed to get those grown-ups to give you a doll’s house and the cardigan and the pony hair brush you wanted. Don’t believe their excuses.”
She wrote similar letters to thousands of other people and always in her own hand. The effect was magical. “Please don’t say anything unkind about her. She’s my friend,” our daughter instructed her father.
That, I think, explains the extraordinary outpouring of grief we witnessed when Diana died. Her appeal was as simple as it was unique. Diana touched the child in each and every one of us.
She wasn’t the “people’s princess”--she was the people’s friend.
The words of a London cabbie still ring in my ears when I think about the week after her death.
“We’ll never see the like of her again,” he said as he dropped me off near the ocean of flowers outside Buckingham Palace.
He was right.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
“
A faraway-father is distant from his children; not necessarily in geography, but socially—either by choice or by force. Our country has many fathers who are figuratively-forced far and away from their families. Legal force brings to bear disparate dads through such innovations as no-fault divorce, legal precedence, and post-divorce incrimination. I am one of these parents—portrayed or profiled as 'perpetrator'.
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H. Kirk Rainer (A Father and Future Felon)
“
Express Scripts, based in St. Louis, is the nation’s largest independent PBM, and fills prescriptions for more than 85 million health plan customers in and out of Medicare. Express Scripts knows what drugs these people are being prescribed and, over time, knows which drugs they take and which they don’t. It has assembled individual profiles of each of these 85 million consumers, and tracks 400 variables that not only reveal what people have done with their prescription meds but also, the company believes, predict what people will and won’t do, and their future health outcomes.
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Philip Moeller (Get What's Yours for Medicare: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your Costs (The Get What's Yours Series))
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The company says it “weighs dozens of factors—ranging from a patient’s age, geography, and marital status, to prior prescription records and physician’s profile—to determine with 94 percent accuracy whether that patient will take his medication as prescribed. By comparison when asked, patients themselves correctly predict their own future nonadherence just 10 percent of the time.”3 It also analyzes speech patterns in its call-center traffic to identify follow-up needs. Other PBMs have similar “predictive analytics” capabilities.4
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Philip Moeller (Get What's Yours for Medicare: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your Costs (The Get What's Yours Series))
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There are a breathtaking number of people whose profiles and posts are public and can be viewed by anyone. George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.
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Adrian McKinty (The Chain)
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Understand yourself and others, through psychological profiling and other psychological-based techniques
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Tara Mooney (Take Control of your future- Develop your own global Co.: Co Solution # 3 (Co Solution Series))
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A confession on behalf of all generations: Future generations, accept our apology! We messed up. We permitted wars to occur and sanctioned climate parameters to drift away. We reaped the cream of the world and left behind barren desolation for you. We compelled you to suffer the trauma of our bloated egos. We failed you as a generation. We have had our troubles, we realized the facts late, however, here is a promise to be responsible from here on. We will voice out, step up action and choose fearless empathy.
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Devi Sunny (Upgrade as Futuristic Empaths: 5 Steps to Build the Profile of Intuitive Feelers for Successful Careers and to Develop Empathy as Strength. An Empath's ... Purpose. (Clear Career Inclusive Book 2))
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In 2009, Facebook was employing just around 150 content moderators, who worked primarily from Palo Alto, making around $50,000 per year (consider that salary in light of the already-skyrocketing Bay Area rents at the time). Although the moderators’ focus was broad, covering an array of topics, a Newsweek article from that year failed to appreciate the workers’ broad responsibilities, calling them “porn cops,” but also conceded that they were key to the company’s growth.6 Simon Axten, a twenty-six-year-old Facebook employee profiled in the article, was quoted in the New York Times just four months later as saying that Facebook had tried outsourcing content moderation, but “had not done so widely.”7
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
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Equity Rules - While this novel portrays an unusual slice of life, the main characters are profiled in detail. Their discussions include individual vulnerability, dating and relationships, medical situations, current jobs and future careers, religion and the afterlife, and volunteering at a youth shelter.
The underlying theme of this book is that each person is ultimately equal in the eyes of God, regardless of race, color, sex, national origin, religious beliefs, medical condition/disability, economic/social status and educational achievements. Equality Rules.
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W. Jason Petruzzi (Dawn of All Things)
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Product: •What is the product? •Who is it for? •What does it do? •How does it work? •How do people buy and use it? Benefits: •How does the product help people? •What are its most important benefits? Reader: •Who are you writing for? •How do they live? •What do they want? •What do they feel? •What do they know about the product, or this type of product? •Are they using a similar product already? Aim: •What do you want the reader to do, think or feel as a result of reading this copy? •What situation will they be in when they read it? Format: •Where will the copy be used? (Sales letter, web page, YouTube video, etc) •How long does it need to be? (500 words, 10 pages, 30 seconds, etc) •How should it be structured? (Main title, subtitles, sidebars, pullout quotes, calls to action, etc) •What other types of content might be involved? (Images, diagrams, video, music, etc) Tone: •Should the copy be serious, light-hearted, emotional, energetic, laid-back, etc? Constraints: •Maximum or minimum length •Anything that must be included or left out •Legal issues (regulations on scientific or health claims, prohibited words, trademarks, etc) •How this copy needs to fit in with other copy that’s already been written, or that will be written in the future •Whether the copy will form part of a campaign, so that different ideas along the same lines will be needed in future (see ‘Take it further’ in chapter 9) •Which countries the copy will appear in (whether in English, or translated) •SEO issues (for example, popular search terms that should feature in headings) •Brand or tone of voice guidelines (see ‘Tone of voice guidelines’ in chapter 15) Other background information about: •The product (development history, use cases, technical specifications, distribution, retail, buying processes, buying channels, marketing strategy) •The product’s market position (price point, offers and discounts, customer perceptions, competitors) •The target market (size, history, typical customer profile, marketing personas) •The client (history, current setup, culture, people, values) •The brand (history, positioning, values) Project management points: •Timescales (dates for copy plan, drafts, feedback, final copy, approval) •Who will provide feedback, and how •Who will approve the final copy, and how •How the copy will be delivered (usually a Word document, but not always) These are only suggestions.
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Tom Albrighton (Copywriting Made Simple: How to write powerful and persuasive copy that sells (The Freelance Writer's Starter Kit))
“
We became the commodity. Our data. This is the secret of modern life. We went from being citizens to consumers, and now to commodities. Our personality profiles, our social and financial history, our likes and dislikes, all used to accurately predict future behavior. How will we vote? Will we take to the streets or roll over? The data knows all, which is why today our data is more valuable than our bodies.
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Noah Hawley (Anthem)
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TO REDUCE APPETITE, PROMOTE FAT LOSS, AND REBALANCE OUR METABOLISM: The peptide semaglutide (and other glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists) have aced four-year-plus clinical trials, with subjects routinely losing 15 percent of their body weight—or 30 pounds for someone weighing in at 200. Generally well-tolerated, with a terrific safety profile, GLP-1s can be game-changers when added to a healthy diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes. Occasional side effects: nausea, diarrhea, and flatulence. May not be suitable for individuals with a history of thyroid gland tumors. MOTS-c and Humanin are derived from the mitochondria, our cells’ power packs. Among other things, they may revitalize our carbohydrate and fat metabolism. This category of mitochondrial peptides is a potential wellspring of future innovation for longevity, healthspan, and peak performance!
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Tony Robbins (Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love)
“
One can define conservatism as the political form of melancholy.
It remained decisive for the conservative syndrome which took shape in Europe after the 1789 French Revolution that it had resulted from looking back at the irretrievable goods, life forms and arts of the pre-bourgeois times.
One of the preconditions was the certainty of never becoming the dominant view. It acquired its elegiac hues by emphasizing the habit of expecting the darker constants of human nature.
To be conservative is to continue believing that good and noble things are tied to places and unique phenomena – for vulgar things, on the other hand, the majority principle and mechanical repetition are sufficient.
Such reserve imposes itself on those with nothing more to win in a history addicted to novelty.
This way of feeling will be cultivated by those who are keen to avoid being mistaken for profiteers of future conditions.
When people in the optimistic mainstream speak of a constant improvement of living conditions, the conservative keeps a low profile.
Assuming that better things lie ahead – does that not already mean searching in the wrong direction?
Fluctuating between equanimity and disgust, the conservative watches the activities of those moved by progressive feelings and waits for entropy to do its work.
Progress, the conservative is sure, is only ever an acceleration of the flight from good, which lies unattainable behind us…
Any conservative who wanted to elevate themselves to the level of principles had to move on from here to anthropological generalizations.
They had to learn to associate the idea of “mankind” with the epithet “incorrigible”…
One could no longer even speak of the “return of the tragic” – for we are ineluctably embedded in it, as if in a fabric woven of first and second nature.
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Peter Sloterdijk (Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology)
“
When you talk to Alexa, the machine uses NLP to understand and process what you are saying to it. Amazon also uses voice profiles so you can train Alexa to know who is speaking (i.e., speaker recognition). And when the machine talks back to you, it’s using NLG.
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Paul Roetzer (Marketing Artificial Intelligence: Ai, Marketing, and the Future of Business)
“
P4 - The good news is that there is at least one emerging technology out there that is looking mighty promising right now: it’s called helium persufflation, and I’m currently orchestrating the funding of the most critical research into making it work.
Over the course of 2023 LEV Foundation has coordinated an effort, conceived by Martin O’Dea and Dr. Aubrey de Grey, to lay to rest the lamentable opinion that aging, along with the disease and death it brings, is inevitable - and by extension, that attempts to combat it are unworthy of serious recognition or support.
We assert instead that an immediate expansion of work to extend healthy lifespans is not only credible, but indeed crucial to the quality of our collective future.
In collaboration with primary author Professor Brian Kennedy, with input and enthusiastic endorsement from iconic researchers and leaders across the field of longevity medicine and allied fields, we are now able to publish the result of that effort - the Dublin Longevity Declaration: Consensus Recommendation to Immediately Expand Research on Extending Healthy Human Lifespans.
Whatever your background, we encourage everyone who reads the Declaration and agrees with its message to add your signature, and encourage your friends and colleagues to consider doing the same: www. dublinlongevitydeclaration. org
More on all of this here: www. quora. com/profile/Aubrey-de-Grey/answers
”
”
Aubrey de Grey
“
As Jonathan Haidt and others have demonstrated, people are at their worst when they’re allowed to lob jabs at others behind a shield of anonymity. When their real-world reputations are at risk, they may take more care. I argued in chapter 2 that embracing transparency is a core part of how the Internet can motivate generous behavior. Indeed, I believe it played a key role in Facebook’s early astonishing growth story, gaining its first million users within just a year and then a further six million in the following two. This was not only in spite of being closed off to the general public but likely because of it, too. At that time, every profile was attached to an email address linking to an educational institution, which brought with it a layer of identity authentication. People were accountable to their real-life reputations and suddenly able to build on them in ways unlike ever before. But as this feature slipped by the wayside, and now without a real reputation to uphold, Joe Bloggs switched to User94843 and trolled toward this more toxic future. Bringing back this social dynamic, by requiring users to prove who they are, is perhaps the biggest single step big tech can make toward fostering a genuinely social media environment. There are definitely cases where people living under repressive regimes need ways to use the Internet anonymously. But the mainstream usage of social media should not.
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Chris J. Anderson (Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading)
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His most glorious gaffes were mind-bending adventures that challenged the linear nature of time: “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”; “The future will be better tomorrow”; “The real question for 1988 is whether we’re going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the… to the back”; and “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” Quayle’s verbal contortions would have killed a lesser man, but he remained unbowed. “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made,” he declared.
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Andy Borowitz (Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber)
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Elevate Your Energy Investments! Discover the Power of Fractional Ownership vs. Stock Volatility. Energia's Insights: Secure Your Financial Future in the Energy Sector! Energy investments, unlike traditional real estate projects, often offer a unique front-loaded cash return profile. The majority of cash flow in energy projects is typically projected to occur in the early years due to the depleting nature of these assets. This distinctive feature sets energy investing apart, emphasizing the importance of understanding the dynamics of expected cash flows and the associated risks.
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Understanding and Determining Net Asset Value
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J'ai de plus en plus, l'obsédante impression d'écrire pour les rescapés du futur : l'immense iceberg se profile à l'horizon, qui va croiser notre navire entouré de brume. Il y a quelques années encore, on pouvait croire à une organisation de combat ouverte et officielle, à la vertu immédiate de l'information, de la polémique, voire au vote pour tenter d'édifier un barrage contre le pire. C'est fini, aujourd'hui. D'ici une trentaine d'années, la plupart des matériaux indispensables à la continuité de notre civilisation industrielle vont manquer irréductiblement ; les riches sols d'Europe commencent à s'appauvrir sous l'effet de l'agriculture industrielle, et la pollution marine s'accumule, catastrophe après catastrophe, de marée noire en marée noire ; le Tiers Monde se désertifie et la famine y galope comme jadis les pestes ; le choix nucléaire va couvrir le monde de nos enfants d'un semis de pyramides obligatoirement épaissies tous les 25 ans à cause de leur danger radioactif, grâce à un matériau énergétique qui disparaîtra complètement à la veille de l'an 2000. Ce n'est pas un tableau poussé au noir ; c'est à peine un survol. Et vous croyez encore échapper à la catastrophe ?
Si l'homme ne disparaît pas, victime de sa propre connerie, de sa pathologie du Pouvoir et de son sexisme, s'il reste, comme je veux le croire, des rescapé(e)s du Futur aux couleurs d'Apocalypse, peut-être quelques écrits comme celui-ci n'auront pas été tout à fait futiles. Si seulement, dès aujourd'hui, les femmes s'unissaient pour de bon ! Oui, si les femmes, les jeunes femmes d'aujourd'hui prenaient subitement conscience que le féminisme, c'est beaucoup plus que le féminisme, et que le cri le plus radicalement vrai est le féminisme ou la mort !
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Françoise d'Eaubonne (Contre violence: ou La résistance à l'État)
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Deep State”—the Invisible Government The terms “invisible government,” “shadow government,” and more recently “Deep State” have been used to describe the secretive, occult, and international banking and business families that control financial institutions, both political parties, and cabals within various intelligence agencies in Britain and America. Edward L. Bernays, a pioneer in the field of propaganda, spoke of the “invisible government” as the “true ruling power of our country.” He said, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”40 “The political process of the United States of America [is] under attack by intelligence agencies and individuals in those agencies,” U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said. “You have politicization of agencies that is resulting in leaks from anonymous, unknown people, and the intention is to take down a president. Now, this is very dangerous to America. It’s a threat to our republic; it constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life.”41 Emotional Contagion One of the reasons why the Deep State has been able to hide in plain sight is because it controls the mainstream media in the United States. Despite the growing evidence of its existence, the media largely denies this reality. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, wrote an article titled, “There Is No Deep State: The Problem in Washington Is Not a Conspiracy Against the President; It’s the President Himself.” Like the “thought police” in George Orwell’s 1984—a classic book about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed by a totalitarian regime—the Deep State uses the media to program the population according to the dictates of Big Brother and tell people in effect that “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”42 Many of the largest social media platforms are used by the Deep State for surveillance and to influence the masses. Many people think social media is just for personal fun and networking with friends, family, and business associates. However, this innocent activity enables powerful computer networks to create detailed profiles of people’s political and moral beliefs and buying habits, as well as a deep analysis of their psychological conflicts, emotional problems, and pretty much anything Big Brother wants to know. Most people don’t understand the true extent of surveillance now occurring. For at least a decade, digital flat-screen televisions, cell phones and smartphones, laptop computers, and most devices with a camera and microphone could be used to spy on you without your knowledge. Even if the power on one of these devices was off, you could still be recorded by supercomputers collecting “mega-data” for potential use later. These technologies are also used to transform
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Paul McGuire (Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code))
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Childish despair: this woman I meet in my dream, fall passionately in love with and give my address to - I immediately realize that the address is wrong and she has no chance of ever finding me, either in the dream or in real life, to which I can already sense I am returning. But why, why did I give her that wrong address? Even after waking, I agonize over this all day.
He gives all sorts of people the impression that he has got exactly what they are looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warm-heartedness for the warm-hearted. For the brutal, brutality. For crooks, sharp practice. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever you want. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system.
A lot of women, feeling that their profiles were too perfect, have had them spoiled in order to give character to their faces. In a world already surreptitiously dominated by women, great beauty could only be a serious handicap.
When water freezes, all the excrement rises to the surface. In the same way, when the dialectic was frozen, we saw all the sacred excrement of the dialectic float to the top. When the future is frozen, or even the present - as it now is - we see all the excrement of the past rising.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
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The 1991 coup had exposed the collapse of the Soviet social contract. That void had not been filled. Russian citizens still carried Soviet Passports with a hammer and a sickle on the cover, paid for food with Soviet rubles decorated with profiles of Lenin and the Soviet state seal, and could not even be sure of the name of their country. Was it Russia? The Russian Federation? The constitution still called it the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, but the constitution was a thing to be stomped on, and Yeltsin's most important supporters--the new journalists--thought he was not doing it with enough force.
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Masha Gessen (The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia)
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Given the hostility and intensity of these supply operations, it is not too surprising that Disconnect software was banned from Google Play’s vast catalog of mobile apps, leading to Disconnect’s lawsuit against Google in 2015. The startup’s complaint explains that “advertising companies including Google use these invisible connections to ‘track’ the user as he/she browses the web or opens other mobile applications, in order to collect personal information about the user, create a ‘profile’ of the user, and make money targeting advertising to the user.
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Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
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Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.39
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Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
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Legal opposition and social protest have surfaced in relation to the digitalization of books,24 the collection of personal information through Street View’s Wi-Fi and camera capabilities,25 the capture of voice communications,26 the bypassing of privacy settings,27 the manipulation of search results,28 the extensive retention of search data,29 the tracking of smartphone location data,30 wearable technologies and facial-recognition capabilities,31 the secret collection of student data for commercial purposes,32 and the consolidation of user profiles across all Google’s services and devices,33 just to name several instances. Expect to see drones, body sensors, neurotransmitters, “digital assistants,” and other sensored devices on this list in the years to come.
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Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
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There are five ways technology can boost marketing practices: Make more informed decisions based on big data. The greatest side product of digitalization is big data. In the digital context, every customer touchpoint—transaction, call center inquiry, and email exchange—is recorded. Moreover, customers leave footprints every time they browse the Internet and post something on social media. Privacy concerns aside, those are mountains of insights to extract. With such a rich source of information, marketers can now profile the customers at a granular and individual level, allowing one-to-one marketing at scale. Predict outcomes of marketing strategies and tactics. No marketing investment is a sure bet. But the idea of calculating the return on every marketing action makes marketing more accountable. With artificial intelligence–powered analytics, it is now possible for marketers to predict the outcome before launching new products or releasing new campaigns. The predictive model aims to discover patterns from previous marketing endeavors and understand what works, and based on the learning, recommend the optimized design for future campaigns. It allows marketers to stay ahead of the curve without jeopardizing the brands from possible failures. Bring the contextual digital experience to the physical world. The tracking of Internet users enables digital marketers to provide highly contextual experiences, such as personalized landing pages, relevant ads, and custom-made content. It gives digital-native companies a significant advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Today, the connected devices and sensors—the Internet of Things—empowers businesses to bring contextual touchpoints to the physical space, leveling the playing field while facilitating seamless omnichannel experience. Sensors enable marketers to identify who is coming to the stores and provide personalized treatment. Augment frontline marketers’ capacity to deliver value. Instead of being drawn into the machine-versus-human debate, marketers can focus on building an optimized symbiosis between themselves and digital technologies. AI, along with NLP, can improve the productivity of customer-facing operations by taking over lower-value tasks and empowering frontline personnel to tailor their approach. Chatbots can handle simple, high-volume conversations with an instant response. AR and VR help companies deliver engaging products with minimum human involvement. Thus, frontline marketers can concentrate on delivering highly coveted social interactions only when they need to. Speed up marketing execution. The preferences of always-on customers constantly change, putting pressure on businesses to profit from a shorter window of opportunity. To cope with such a challenge, companies can draw inspiration from the agile practices of lean startups. These startups rely heavily on technology to perform rapid market experiments and real-time validation.
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Philip Kotler (Marketing 5.0: Technology for Humanity)
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The statistical likelihood that young, black men living in particular Chicago neighborhoods will be paralyzed (if not killed) by gunshot wounds serves to push them out of time, facing a future of no future, and a no future best embodied by a wheelchair. Disability, in other words, becomes the future of no future, with “dead in jail or in a chair” recognized as all the same, all signs of no future. In more mainstream, sentimental accounts of disability (i.e., those not featuring poor people of color living in “bad” neighborhoods), disability is what ends one's future; it is the familiar narrative of disability as tragedy and loss. But for the men Ostrander profiles, disability is the sign that one never had a future in the first place; loss is not the defining frame because there was nothing to “lose.
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Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip)
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being a way to raise the profile of key issues and rapidly address logjams, another key attribute of incentive prizes is their ability to cast a wide net. Everyone from novices to professionals, from sole proprietors to massive corporations, gets involved. Experts in one field jump to another, bringing with them an influx of nontraditional ideas. Outliers can become central players.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
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don’t think this is realistic,” he said. “The CEO would be an older white man.” My colleague and I agreed that might often be the case, but explained that we wanted to focus more on Linda’s needs and motivations than on how she looked. “Sorry, it’s just not believable,” he insisted. “We need to change it.” I squirmed in my Aeron chair. My colleague looked out the window. We’d lost that one, and we knew it. Back at the office, “Linda” became “Michael”—a suit-clad, salt-and-pepper-haired guy. But we kept Linda’s photo in the mix, swapping it to another profile so that our personas wouldn’t end up lily-white. A couple weeks later, we were back in that same conference room, where our client had asked us to share the revised personas with another member of his executive team. We were halfway through our spiel when executive number two cut us off. “So, you have a divorced black woman in a low-level job,” he said. “I have a problem with that.” Reader, I died. Looking back, both of these clients were right: most of the CEOs who were members of their organization were white men, and representing their members this way wasn’t a good plan for their future. But what they missed—because, I recognize now, our personas encouraged them to miss it—was that demographics weren’t the point. Differing motivations and challenges were the real drivers behind what these people wanted and how they interacted with the organization. We thought adding photos, genders, ages, and hometowns would give our personas a more realistic feel. And they did—just not the way we intended. Rather than helping folks connect with these people, the personas encouraged the team to assume that demographic information drove motivations—that
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Sara Wachter-Boettcher (Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech)
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Digital natives and millennials seem more at ease with gender fluidity. In the last year or two, we have seen high-profile moves towards trans awareness and acceptance. Young men, particularly well-educated, metropolitan guys, seem a lot less afraid of appearing gay. Maybe the Department of Masculinity is losing its grip. Like those once unassailable high-street chains which suddenly go bust, maybe the Department will one day reach a tipping point where no one will buy its wares any more. As with many real stores, maybe the Internet is helping to break the Department’s monopoly. Young men are shopping around for alternative visions of the masculine role that fit how they feel. In the future, I hope young men can easily adopt a plurality of masculinities as easily as shopping for a coat.
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Grayson Perry (The Descent of Man)
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These differences are unlikely to make much difference to a hungry shrew. But a white truffle found in Alba will sell for four times as much as a white truffle found near Bologna (although the fact that some truffle dealers regularly pass off Bolognese truffles as being from Alba would suggest that not everyone is able to tell the difference). Regional differences in truffles’ volatile profiles have been confirmed in formal studies (Vita et al. [2015]).
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Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
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steadily increased over the years as the sensitivity of detection methods has improved. These methods are still less sensitive than the human nose, and the number of truffle volatiles is likely to increase yet further in the future. For white truffle volatiles see Pennazza et al. (2013) and Vita et al. (2015); for other species see Splivallo et al. (2011). There are a number of reasons why it is risky to pin all of truffles’ allure on a single compound. In the study by Talou et al. (1990), a small sample of animals was used and only a single species of truffle was tested, at a single shallow depth, at a single site. Different subsets of the profile of volatile compounds might be more prominent at different depths or in different places. Moreover, in the wild, a range of animals are attracted to truffles, from wild pigs to voles to insects. It might be that different elements of the cocktail of volatile compounds that truffles produce attract different animals. It may be that androstenol acts on animals in more subtle ways. It might not be effective on its own, as tested in the study, but only in conjunction with other compounds. Alternatively, it may be less important in finding the truffles and more important in the animals’ experience of eating them. For more on poisonous truffles see Hall et al. (2007). Besides Gautieria, the truffle species Choiromyces meandriformis is reported to smell “overpowering and nauseous” and is considered toxic in Italy (although it is popular in northern Europe). Balsamia vulgaris is another species considered to be mildly toxic, although dogs appear to enjoy its aroma of “rancid fat.
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Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
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the “power of three”?’ she asked. She cast her eyes around the room and everybody stared back, but nobody spoke. ‘It’s a concept that some people believe in: that the number three stands for that which is solid, real, substantial, complete – for example the three dimensions of length, breadth and height which are necessary to form a solid. There are three great divisions that complete time: the past, the present and the future. Thought, word and deed complete the sum of human capability; animal, vegetable, mineral – the three kingdoms of the natural world. I could go on. For some people, three is such a powerful number that everything has to be finished in threes for them to feel safe. A famous physicist, Nicola Tesla, was so obsessed with the number that he used to walk round the block three times before he would enter a building.’ She paused and again looked around the room, taking them all in, but her gaze settled on Tom, who instantly felt guilty about his scepticism. ‘If this is his driver, he will try to kill one more girl to replace the failed attempt. She will look like the other three, but this time he will be sure to finish the job. I’m using “he” throughout this presentation because, as we know, the chances are that the killer is a man. However, “he” could just as easily be more than one man.’ She paused and every eye was on her. ‘But there’s another theory that fits the profile. I would like to suggest to you that there was only one victim that mattered to the killer. Only one person who had to die. The others were decoys, added to confuse us. Three may have been chosen as the best number to ensure the police were chasing their tails trying to find a link between the victims when there isn’t one. And
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Rachel Abbott (Kill Me Again (DCI Tom Douglas, #5))
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We might see this happening
more in the future, with more and more people charting their lives online via social media sites. But then, what people do online isn't always an accurate reflection of their lives. You can imagine clinical psychologists accessing an amnesia patients Facebook profile and assuming their memories should consist of mostly laughing at funny videos of cats.
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Dean Burnett (Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To)
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Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—”
“All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.”
“Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!”
Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.”
“The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.
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Steven Erikson (Willful Child: The Search for Spark (Willful Child, 3))
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In 1975, Newsweek magazine ran a story called, ‘The Cooling World’ and predicted the beginning of dramatic global cooling which might well lead to a drastic decline in food production. They talked about economic and social adjustments on a global scale. (In 2006, over 30 years later, Newsweek published a correction.) The bottom line is that politicians, journalists and experts are forever warning us of terrible things that are about to happen. The invariable rider is that they might well be able to save us from the terrible future which they predict, if we give them vast amounts of money, enormous prestige and a full page profile in the Guardian newspaper.
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Vernon Coleman (Endgame: The Hidden Agenda 21)
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Brian Wecht was born in New Jersey to an interfaith couple. His father ran an army-navy store and enjoyed going to Vegas to see Elvis and Sinatra. Brian loved school, especially math and science, but also loved jazz saxophone and piano. “A large part of my identity came from being a fat kid who was bullied through most of my childhood,” he said. “I remember just not having many friends.” Brian double majored in math and music and chose graduate school in jazz composition. But when his girlfriend moved to San Diego, he quit and enrolled in a theoretical physics program at UC San Diego. Six months later the relationship failed; six years later he earned a PhD. When he solved a longstanding open problem in string theory (“the exact superconformal R-symmetry of any 4d SCFT”), Brian became an international star and earned fellowships at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He secured an unimaginable job: a lifetime professorship in particle physics in London. He was set. Except. Brian never lost his interest in music. He met his wife while playing for an improv troupe. He started a comedic band with his friend Dan called Ninja Sex Party. “I was always afraid it was going to bite me in the ass during faculty interviews because I dressed up like a ninja and sang about dicks and boning.” By the time Brian got to London, the band’s videos were viral sensations. He cried on the phone with Dan: Should they try to turn their side gig into a living? Brian and his wife had a daughter by this point. The choice seemed absurd. “You can’t quit,” his physics adviser said. “You’re the only one of my students who got a job.” His wife was supportive but said she couldn’t decide for him. If I take the leap and it fails, he thought, I may be fucking up my entire future for this weird YouTube career. He also thought, If I don’t jump, I’ll look back when I’m seventy and say, “Fuck, I should have tried.” Finally, he decided: “I’d rather live with fear and failure than safety and regret.” Brian and his family moved to Los Angeles. When the band’s next album was released, Ninja Sex Party was featured on Conan, profiled in the Washington Post, and reached the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts. They went on a sold-out tour across the country, including the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas.
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Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
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some independent researchers estimate that at least 15 percent of all social media profiles may be autogenerated without a real person behind them. This high percentage of fakes is frustrating advertisers.
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Rohit Bhargava (Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series))
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Realty investing is something you can assist to variety your profile more varied. Putting your cost savings into structures and land can provide you expanded your financial investments over even more sectors besides simply bonds and stocks. Continue reading to find out properly to buy investor.
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Stick with niches you feel comfy handling. You will discover more success by adhering to a specific market sector. Whether you prepare to flip a residence, purchase or buy a rental home repossession, stay with exactly what you understand for success.
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Troubles with lessees could take in a large amount of time.
This presumption is harmful in the genuine estate market and any specific home. Your finest bet is to invest in things that supply a favorable money flow right away.
Land near water or in the future.
If you buy a home with the objective of leasing it out, be cautious of who you let lease it. If they can not get their cash together at this time, they aren't a trusted bet for you.
When thinking about a big factor to consider for buying genuine estate, Area is critical. Consider the location you are deciding to purchase and the possible capacity.
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Begin little with simply one home. Start with a single home and discover as you desire to make use of.
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Continue reading to discover the right means to invest in luxury condos miami financier.
When choosing to invest in genuine estate, make it expert by setting up an LLC. Get to understand others in genuine estate market. It can be valuable to have a couple of pals who understand about investing in genuine estate. Use this post when you begin to invest into genuine estate in order to end up being effective in it.
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Realty Investing Abcs For You To obtain Understanding About
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will be interested in moving forward on the path of engagement during the first year of follow-up activities and events. The other two-thirds will take an additional year or two. 3. Families with young children tend to access Judaism through their children at holiday time. 4. For Public Space Judaism events to be most effective, they have to take place on numerous occasions throughout the year and be dispersed throughout the wider community. 5. Public Space Judaism events raise the profile of the sponsoring institution. As a result, soliciting funds (but not at the events themselves) from community members outside the sponsoring institution becomes easier. Reflection and Discussion Questions for Synagogue Leaders
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Kerry M. Olitzky (Playlist Judaism: Making Choices for a Vital Future)
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Jede hinreichend fortschrittliche Technologie ist von Magie nicht zu unterscheiden
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Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible)
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Menopause has been linked to the following microbiome changes: REDUCED MICROBIAL DIVERSITY: Menopause and lower estrogen levels have been associated with a decrease in the diversity of the gut microbiome. This decrease can disrupt the delicate balance within the microbiota, potentially leading to health complications. SHIFT TOWARD MALE-LIKE COMPOSITION: Research suggests that menopause may alter the gut microbiome composition, shifting it to be more like the male microbiome. While we don’t know yet how this may correlate to changes in health, menopause-related microbiome alterations have been linked to adverse cardiometabolic profiles, which may include high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and increased waist circumference. ESTROBOLOME POTENTIAL: A new area of research is related to the estrobolome, which is a collection of enzyme-producing genes found in the gut microbiome that allow your gut bacteria to metabolize estrogen. Interestingly, the actions of the estrobolome allow for inactive estrogen to become active again and re-enter the bloodstream. During menopause, there may be a reduction in estrobolome potential, which could affect estrogen metabolism and hormone-related health. Researchers are exploring the potential role of the estrobolome as it relates to estrogen-responsive cancers, and I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the future. INCREASED GUT BARRIER PERMEABILITY: The decline in estrogen and progesterone levels during menopause may lead to increased permeability of the gut barrier. Greater permeability can allow bacteria and their by-products to cross into the bloodstream and potentially trigger inflammation
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Mary Claire Haver (The New Menopause: Navigating Your Path Through Hormonal Change with Purpose, Power, and Facts)
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For example, an AI‐powered quiz platform could highlight a student's recurring mistake in solving a specific type of math problem. This immediate feedback enables students to learn from errors and promptly modify their strategies. AI can also support autonomy and decision‐making by offering personalized recommendations based on a student's learning profile and progress. For example, imagine an AI system suggesting that a student who is a visual learner use a specific graphic‐based resource to prepare for an upcoming biology test. AI can guide students in making more informed decisions by providing these personalized suggestions. AI can also help foster metacognitive skills so that students are better equipped to make decisions about their own learning journeys. For example, AI can facilitate reflective activities, such as self‐assessment quizzes or reflective journal prompts. An example might be an AI‐driven journaling app that offers immediate, personalized feedback based on students' reflections, prompting them with further thoughtful questions based on their entries.
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Priten Shah (AI and the Future of Education: Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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And yet—this fascination with the future has generated its own antithesis, particularly in the so-called affluent or developed societies. There is a growing disenchantment with "progress" (however this may be defined) and even a feeling that, in many directions, we have already gone too far.
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Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible)
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Harry Markowitz won a Nobel Prize for the insight that diversification is the only free lunch in the investment business. However, if all investments are in tech, much of the benefit of diversification is lost since tech valuations are correlated. For early-stage companies, profits are in the distant future, and therefore valuations are sensitive to interest rates. Shifting sentiment plays a role, and frequently both market psychology and monetary policy are factors, creating boom/bust cycles such as the internet bubble of 1999–2000 and the more recent recalibration of tech in 2022. There is a frequently overlooked temporal dimension to diversification. Other things being equal, a fund that invests $100 million a year over ten years is less risky than a fund that invests $500 million a year over two years. The former fund will likely invest across market cycles, which should lead to a lower volatility of outcomes, even if both funds make an identical number of investments with a similar risk profile.
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Alok Sama (The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble)
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I consulted numerous works while writing this novel and wish to cite a few that were especially helpful: Conjoined Twins: An Historical, Biological, and Ethical Issues Encyclopedia by Christine Quigley; The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson; One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal by Alice Domurat Dreger; Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior by Nancy L. Segal; Psychological Profiles of Conjoined Twins by J. David Smith; Millie-Christine: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Joanne Martell.
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Lori Lansens (The Girls)
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What is the first thing you do when you get hacked on Facebook?
If your Facebook account is hacked, the first thing you should do is reset your password 1-877-646-4023. Go to the login page, click on "Forgot password?" and follow the steps to secure your account. Next, check your email for any security alerts from Facebook and report the hack through Facebook’s Help Center. Enable two-factor authentication to prevent future breaches. Finally, review your account activity, remove suspicious devices, and update your security settings to regain full control of your profile.
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Steve