Program Evaluation Quotes

Task complete. Shut it down." Unable to comply, the computer responded. "I finished." Inaccurate statement. Previous command stipulated all listed reports and evaluations must be complete before system rest. This command by Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, priority basis, can only be countermanded at her order by fire, terrorist attack, alien invasion or an open and active case requiring her attention ... Jesus, had she really programmed that? "I changed my mind." Previous command specifies changes of mind, fatigue, boredom, and other lame excuses not acceptable for countermand ... "Bite me," Eve muttered.

When you evaluate, it allows you to assess your current programming and determine your re-programming.

When we stand before Christ and He evaluates our ministries, He will not be asking us how many people sat in the pews, watched our TV programs, gave in our telethons or filled out response cards. He is not going to evaluate us based on how many people fell under the power of God or how many healings we counted in each service. He will ask how many faithful disciples we made. I pray we make this our priority.

Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. SALES

Mental toughness fundamental #5 is to complete daily performance evaluations. COMPLETE

Performance evaluations include three very distinct components:       1. What is being done well     2. What needs to be improved     3. How improvements will be made Although

The main weakness of competitiveness policy as currently practiced in Latin America is deficient implementation and lack of evaluation of programs, rooted in lack of coordination among state agencies.

Scientists have repeatedly confirmed that our emotional reactions show up in brain activity before we even have time to think. We evaluate everything emotionally as we perceive it. We think about it afterwards

There is NO LIFE if it’s a programmed mind. Listen to the struggling kid inside, and follow the innocent unbiased zeal; YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU. Never fall in to the trap of traditional rationales, which only evaluates in terms of transactions which leads to somebody else's goals someday. Time is Man-Made, Calendar is Man-Made to help us, not to disturb us, Set your own time, and allow the inner explosion to express itself. YOU ARE ONE STEP CLOSER TO YOU

...a bad diet will eventually kill our dreams. It's essential that we constantly evaluate the nutritional value of what we are feeding ourselves. It may come down to how many hours of television we're viewing, the quality of the programs we're watching, what music we're listening to, the material we're reading, the conversations we're having, the movies we're seeing, the Web sites we're visiting, the video games we're playing, or the people with whom we're associating. As harmless as these may sometimes seem, excessive consumption of things that induce negative thinking, bad habits, and wrong behavior will thwart our potential. A good litmus test is to ask yourself if you're giving more airtime to the media, educators, politicians, economists, pop stars, friends, or tradition than you are to God's Word. To see our dreams actualized, God's Word and His will must take precedence over everything else.

Ultimately, each church will be evaluated by only one thing—its disciples. Your church is only as good as her disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs or property are; if your disciples are passive, needy, consumeristic, and not [moving in the direction of radical obedience,] your church is not good.

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level—consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system, language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program—for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling—may likewise be described in only a few pages of equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific details than the actual physics and chemicalrelations controlling the neurotransmitters, ion channels, and other synaptic and dendritic variables involved in the neural processes. Although all of this complexity needs to be carefully considered before advancing to the next higher conceptual level, much of it can be simplified as the operating principles of the brain are revealed.

I objected anytime a student was automatically dismissed for having a B on a transcript or for having gone to a less prestigious undergraduate program. If we were serious about bringing in minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more holistically at candidates. We’d need to think about how they’d used whatever opportunities life had afforded them rather than measuring them simply by how far they’d made it up an elitist academic ladder. The point wasn’t to lower the firm’s high standards: It was to realize that by sticking with the most rigid and old-school way of evaluating a new lawyer’s potential, we were overlooking all sorts of people who could contribute to the firm’s success. We needed to interview more students, in other words, before writing them off.

We know from the work of television critics and from the responses of our friends and from our own that there is little pride in the quality of television programs and less in the habit of extensive viewing. The television viewer’s implication in technology typically takes the form of complicity as defined in Chapter 15. We feel uneasiness about our passivity and guilt and sorrow at the loss of our traditions or alternatives.68 There is a realization that we are letting great things and practices drift into oblivion and that television fails to respond to our best aspirations and fails to engage the fullness of our powers. These impressions generally agree with more systematic findings that show that television is “not rated particularly highly as a general way of spending time, and in fact was evaluated below average compared to other free-time activities.”69

Impressive, indeed. Evaluations of the Memphis CIT program reveal improvements in community safety, reduced officer call time on mental illness (MI) dispatches, and reduced response times. Injuries to officers dropped from over five per thousand events to under one per thousand. And, most impressive: prior to the introduction of the program, officers were jailing 20 percent of the mentally ill people they encountered; today it’s 2 percent.8

Mental toughness is the ability to focus on and execute solutions, especially in the face of adversity. Greatness rarely happens on accident. If you want to achieve excellence, you will have to act like you really want it. How? Quite simply: by dedicating time and energy into consistently doing what needs to be done. Excuses are the antithesis of accountability. Important decisions aren’t supposed to be easy, but don’t let that stop you from making them. When it comes to decisions, decide to always decide. The second we stop growing, we start dying. Stagnation easily morphs into laziness, and once a person stops trying to grow and improve, he or she is nothing more than mediocre. Develop the no-excuse mentality. Do not let anything interrupt those tasks that are most critical for growth in the important areas of your life. Find a way, no matter what, to prioritize your daily process goals, even when you have a viable excuse to justify not doing it. “If you don’t evaluate yourself, how in the heck are you ever going to know what you are doing well and what you need to improve? Those who are most successful evaluate themselves daily. Daily evaluation is the key to daily success, and daily success is the key to success in life. If you want to achieve greatness, push yourself to the limits of your potential by continuously looking for improvements. Within 60 seconds, replace all problem-focused thought with solution-focused thinking. When people focus on problems, their problems actually grow and reproduce. When you train your mind to focus on solutions, guess what expands? Talking about your problems will lead to more problems, not to solutions. If you want solutions, start thinking and talking about your solutions. Believe that every problem, no matter how large, has at the very least a +1 solution, you will find it easier to stay on the solution side of the chalkboard. When you set your mind to do something, find a way to get it done…no matter what! If you come up short on your discipline, keep fighting, kicking, and scratching to improve. Find the nearest mirror and look yourself in the eye while you tell yourself, “There is no excuse, and this will not happen again.” Get outside help if needed, but never, ever give up on being disciplined. Greatness will not magically appear in your life without significant accountability, focus, and optimism on your part. Are you ready to commit fully to turning your potential into a leadership performance that will propel you to greatness. Mental toughness is understanding that the only true obstacles in life are self-imposed. You always have the choice to stay down or rise above. In truth, the only real obstacles to your ultimate success will come from within yourself and fall into one of the following three categories: apathy, laziness and fear. Laziness breeds more laziness. When you start the day by sleeping past the alarm or cutting corners in the morning, you’re more likely to continue that slothful attitude later in the day.

Take for example job applications. In the 21st century the decision wherever to hire somebody for a job while increasingly be made by algorithms. We cannot rely on the machines to set the relevant ethical standards, humans will still need to do that, but once we decide on an ethical standard in the job market, that it is wrong to discriminate against blacks or against women for example, we can rely on machines to implement and maintain these standards better than humans. A human manager may know and even agree that is unethical to discriminate against blacks and women but then when a black woman applies for a job the manager subconsciously discriminate against her and decides not to hire her. If we allow a computer to evaluate job applications and program computers to completely ignore race and gender we can be certain that the computer will indeed ignore these factors because computers do not have a subconscious. Of course it won't be easy to write code for evaluating job applications and there is always the danger that the engineers will somehow program their own subconscious biases into the software, yet once we discover such mistakes it would probably be far easier to debug the software than to get rid humans of their racist and misogynist biases.

legislatures at different levels of government, researchers, journalists, and judges involved in one or more aspects of the process. Each of these actors (either individual or corporate) has potentially different values/interests, perceptions of the situation, and policy preferences. 2. This process usually involves time spans of a decade or more, as that is the minimum duration of most policy cycles, from emergence of a problem through sufficient experience with implementation to render a reasonably fair evaluation of a program's impact (Kirst and Jung 1982; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). A number of studies suggest that periods of twenty to forty years may be required to obtain a reasonable

But influential business leaders were eager proponents of numbers-driven merit pay for teachers. Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas to implement a plan to use test scores alone to evaluate teachers and distribute pay increases. So it was ironic that private industry had, by the 1980s, mostly turned away from efforts to pay white-collar workers according to strict productivity measures, finding that such formal evaluation programs were too expensive and time-consuming to create and implement. Research showed that companies with merit pay schemes did not perform better financially than did organizations without it, nor were their employees happier. Instead, management gurus recommended that workers be judged primarily by the holistic standards of individual supervisors.

Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium. 
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible. 
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines. 
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.

Any program about highlighting benevolence, protecting the innocent, or sacrificing time to help the underdog grew in popularity. Included in our list of reality viewing were shows about police or bounty hunters apprehending evil criminals. These too became some of the most-watched programs. To sum it all up, our entertainment is often centered on the good of humanity. Sales and Marketing 101 teaches us that a product must feel, look, sound, taste, or smell good in order to succeed in the marketplace. It must elevate the consumer’s senses or emotions to a better and happier state. We know that good items will sell. After all, who would want to purchase something bad? And only twisted people would desire to procure evil. We hear comments such as “he’s a good man” or “she’s a good woman,” and we normally accept this evaluation at face value. The vulnerable quickly let down their guard and embrace every statement or action from those proclaimed to be good as safe and trustworthy. But are these assessments always accurate? Could we ever fall into the delusional state of calling what’s right wrong or what’s wrong right? Doesn’t everybody know the difference? And we certainly could never fall into the deceived state of calling good evil or evil good. Correct?

Try this exercise: Make a list of whatever is going wrong in your life, from the biggest events to the most trivial items, and then beside that list write down everything and everyone you want to blame for that particular problem. For instance, let's say you think you're too fat. If you want to blame it on McDonald's cheeseburgers, then write that down. Perhaps you just don't normally feel well. If you want to blame that feeling on a bad doctor or on the pollen in the air, then write that down. Maybe you can't find a suitable partner. If you want to blame that on the argument that "men are creeps," then write that down. Now look at your list. Ask yourself if you are any different now that you know exactly what or who to blame, and then ask yourself if that has helped you come up with a more constructive program to solve your problems. Not a very positive picture, is it? Wouldn't it be better simply to decide to eliminate all blame from your life and focus instead on what you can do to rid yourself of the unhappiness that afflicts you? Wouldn't it be better to evaluate all the stones that you are carrying in your own bag of life--your stones of resentment, anger, and spite? Blaming will not change you. It only gives you some shallow justification for continuing to look outside yourself, rather than turning inward and rebuilding your life.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

A key step toward revitalization is to develop a positive future projection for yourself. Start by writing down your immediate and long-term goals. How would you like to see yourself one year, three years, and five years from now? Write a brief description of these images, using visual details and sounds, identifying the people around you, the focus of your time, and how you will evaluate whether you've reached your personal goals.

In Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States. The rigor started in the beginning, where it belonged, not years into a teacher’s career with complex evaluation schemes designed to weed out the worst performers, and destined to demoralize everyone else. A teacher union advertisement from the late 1980s began with this breathtaking boast: “A Finnish teacher has received the highest level of education in the world.” Such a claim could never have been made in the United States, or in most countries in the world.

To evaluate weaknesses in your teen, be aware of his capacity to engage in effortful (and nonpreferred) mental tasks. If he is bright and a good “consumer” of information (interested in a range of topics, likes to read and watch educational programs), but is not a good “producer” of information (struggles with projects, papers, etc.), executive skills are likely involved.

At the same time states across the country were rushing to adopt the Common Core, they were also adopting a new tool for evaluating teachers: the Danielson Framework. Like the Common Core, the framework is so laden with technocratic language that one might imagine its sole purpose is to confuse its readers. And as with the Common Core, if a teacher does not meet its demands, she may be out of a job. Taking its name from the education consultant Charlotte Danielson, the framework divides the teaching process into four “domains”: “planning and preparation,” “classroom environment,” “instruction,” and “professional responsibilities.” Each of these domains is then broken into four or five subcategories ranging from “using questioning and discussion techniques” to “showing professionalism.” Subcategories are then separated into a series of components. For example, the components of the subcategory “participating in the professional community” are: “relationships with colleagues,” “involvement in a culture of professional inquiry,” “service to the school,” and “participation in school and district projects.” Danielson describes “proficient” (tolerable) instruction in the “communicating with families” subcategory of the “professional responsibilities” domain as follows: “The teacher provides frequent and appropriate information to families about the instructional program and conveys information about individual student progress in a culturally sensitive manner.

networks, system operators and satellite broadcasters, are annually evaluated for their programming and areas of activity, and the

stratejiler iş fırsatları gelir gider para kazanılır kaybedilir. Ama sürdürülebilir başarının temeli değerlerdir. Yani çalışma kültürü iki insanlardır ve kültür dediğim zaman da size ne kastediyorum onu göstereceğim ben bu konuşmayı bırakacağım. Kültür bir sürü faktörün dokumasından çıkıyor komünikasyon, Compensation. HR Programs İnsan Kaynakları, Performance Evaluation Employment Relationship Endüstri İlişkileri veya Performans Analizi. Burada vizyon ve değişim için tolerans hoşgörü organizasyon yeteneği, Individual Competencies karar alabilme en önemlisi değerler kültür moral liderlik structure bütün bunların hepsi bu çalışma kültürünü oluşturuyor. İşte sürdürülebilir başarının temeli buralardan geçiyor.

Home Affordable Unemployment Program Under the Unemployment Program, for a certain period of time, you pay either reduced mortgage payments (equal to less than 31% of your gross income) or none at all. This period is called a forbearance and typically lasts for 12 months (less if you start working again, or more if the servicer extends the period). To be eligible for UP: • You must meet the same eligibility requirements as for HAMP (see below). • You must be unemployed and be eligible to receive unemployment benefits when you request UP. • The servicer can require you to receive at least three months of unemployment benefits before it starts the forbearance period. • You must make the request before you become 12 months late with your mortgage payments. The servicer cannot proceed with foreclosure after you request UP, while you are in any UP plan or extension of it, or while you are being evaluated for HAMP or HAFA (see below for descriptions of these programs). If your unemployment situation will be more than short-term, the servicer is required to evaluate whether you qualify for one of the long-term programs, like HAMP or HAFA (both described below).

We resort to a series of programs and practices like job rotation, reverse evaluation, and self-management. They’re intended to help people tap their reservoir of talent and to preclude the need for weeding out. We never assume there are weeds among us.

WHY HABITS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS If our programmed behaviors are so influential in guiding our everyday actions, surely harnessing the same power of habits can be a boon for industry. Indeed, for those able to shape them in an effective way, habits can be very good for the bottom line. Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls to action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line. However, the framework and practices explored in this book are not “one size fits all” and do not apply to every business or industry. Entrepreneurs should evaluate how user habits impact their particular business model and goals. While the viability of some products depends on habit-formation to thrive, that is not always the case. For example, companies selling infrequently bought or used products or services do not require habitual users—at least, not in the sense of everyday engagement. Life insurance companies, for instance, leverage salespeople, advertising, and word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations to prompt consumers to buy policies. Once the policy is bought, there is nothing more the customer needs to do. In this book I refer to products in the context of businesses that require ongoing, unprompted user engagement and therefore need to build user habits. I exclude companies that compel customers to take action through

For example, to print the lines 13, 19, 88, 290, and 999, you do this: perl -ne 'print if $. == 13 || $. == 19 || $. == 88 || $. == 290 || $. == 999' If you want to print more lines, you can put them in a separate array and then test whether $. is in this array: perl -ne '   @lines = (13, 19, 88, 290, 999, 1400, 2000);   print if grep { $_ == $. } @lines ' This one-liner uses grep to test if the current line $. is in the @lines array. If the current line number is found in the @lines array, the grep function returns a list of one element that contains the current line number and this list evaluates to true.

When running a Python program, the interpreter spends most of its time figuring out what low-level operation to perform, and extracting the data to give to this low-level operation. Given Python’s design and flexibility, the Python interpreter always has to determine the low-level operation in a completely general way, because a variable can have any type at any time. This is known as dynamic dispatch, and for many reasons, fully general dynamic dispatch is slow.[5] For example, consider what happens when the Python runtime evaluates a + b: The interpreter inspects the Python object referred to by a for its type, which requires at least one pointer lookup at the C level. The interpreter asks the type for an implementation of the addition method, which may require one or more additional pointer lookups and internal function calls. If the method in question is found, the interpreter then has an actual function it can call, implemented either in Python or in C. The interpreter calls the addition function and passes in a and b as arguments. The addition function extracts the necessary internal data from a and b, which may require several more pointer lookups and conversions from Python types to C types. If successful, only then can it perform the actual operation that adds a and b together. The result then must be placed inside a (perhaps new) Python object and returned. Only then is the operation complete. The situation for C is very different. Because C is compiled and statically typed, the C compiler can determine at compile time what low-level operations to perform and what low-level data to pass as arguments. At runtime, a compiled C program skips nearly all steps that the Python interpreter must perform. For something like a + b with a and b both being fundamental numeric types, the compiler generates a handful of machine code instructions to load the data into registers, add them, and store the result.

Program Evaluation and Educational Research (PEER) Associates, they created the Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative (PEEC). Findings about student achievement are still preliminary, but PEEC’s work regarding other impacts of place-based education on students and teachers reiterates much that has surfaced from earlier studies about the positive effect that situating learning in authentic contexts can have on student motivation and involvement.

One downfall of numpy’s optimization of vector operations is that it only occurs on one operation at a time. That is to say, when we are doing the operation A * B + C with numpy vectors, first the entire A * B operation completes, and the data is stored in a temporary vector; then this new vector is added with C. The in-place version of the diffusion code in Example 6-14 shows this quite explicitly. However, there are many modules that can help with this. numexpr is a module that can take an entire vector expression and compile it into very efficient code that is optimized to minimize cache misses and temporary space used. In addition, the expressions can utilize multiple CPU cores (see Chapter 9 for more information) and specialized instructions for Intel chips to maximize the speedup. It is very easy to change code to use numexpr: all that’s required is to rewrite the expressions as strings with references to local variables. The expressions are compiled behind the scenes (and cached so that calls to the same expression don’t incur the same cost of compilation) and run using optimized code. Example 6-19 shows the simplicity of changing the evolve function to use numexpr. In this case, we chose to use the out parameter of the evaluate function so that numexpr doesn’t allocate a new vector to which to return the result of the calculation.

scripting language is a programming language that provides you with the ability to write scripts that are evaluated (or interpreted) by a runtime environment called a script engine (or an interpreter). A script is a sequence of characters that is written using the syntax of a scripting language and used as the source for a program executed by an interpreter. The interpreter parses the scripts, produces intermediate code, which is an internal representation of the program, and executes the intermediate code. The interpreter stores the variables used in a script in data structures called symbol tables. Typically, unlike in a compiled programming language, the source code (called a script) in a scripting language is not compiled but is interpreted at runtime. However, scripts written in some scripting languages may be compiled into Java bytecode that can be run by the JVM. Java 6 added scripting support to the Java platform that lets a Java application execute scripts written in scripting languages such as Rhino JavaScript, Groovy, Jython, JRuby, Nashorn JavaScript, and so on. Two-way communication is supported. It also lets scripts access Java objects created by the host application. The Java runtime and a scripting language runtime can communicate and make use of each other’s features. Support for scripting languages in Java comes through the Java Scripting API. All classes and interfaces in the Java Scripting API are in the javax.script package. Using a scripting language in a Java application provides several advantages: Most scripting languages are dynamically typed, which makes it simpler to write programs. They provide a quicker way to develop and test small applications. Customization by end users is possible. A scripting language may provide domain-specific features that are not available in Java. Scripting languages have some disadvantages as well. For example, dynamic typing is good to write simpler code; however, it turns into a disadvantage when a type is interpreted incorrectly and you have to spend a lot of time debugging it. Scripting support in Java lets you take advantage of both worlds: it allows you to use the Java programming language for developing statically typed, scalable, and high-performance parts of the application and use a scripting language that fits the domain-specific needs for other parts. I will use the term script engine frequently in this book. A script engine is a software component that executes programs written in a particular scripting language. Typically, but not necessarily, a script engine is an implementation of an interpreter for a scripting language. Interpreters for several scripting languages have been implemented in Java. They expose programming interfaces so a Java program may interact with them.

So, to return to the title chapter, what is the point of learning statistics? To summarize huge quantities of data. To make better decisions. To answer important social questions. To recognize patterns that can refine how we do everything from selling diapers to catching criminals. To catch cheaters and prosecute criminals. To evaluate the effectiveness of policies, programs, drugs, medical procedures, and other innovations. And to spot the scoundrels who use these very same powerful tools for nefarious ends.

Faith in Sobriety department of health in Houston offering pretrial Services related to Intensive Outpatient Program, Relapse Prevention, Substance Abuse Evaluation

When your child is tested, the examiner will observe his ability to use language in the course of being evaluated. If a question requires your child to use spoken words to respond (versus drawing or pointing), his expressive language is being assessed. Plus, several subtests are designed to measure a child’s expressive language capacity. When your child is asked, “What is a dog?” the examiner will evaluate the quality of the expressive language he uses in responding.

we examined return on investment for communication expenditures for “most-excellent” and “least-excellent” programs. 6 In the survey, CEOs were asked to estimate benefits that their organizations received from the dollars or pounds invested in communication. If the CEO said the organization received one dollar back for each dollar spent on communication, then communication benefits were even with costs. If two dollars in benefits were received for each communication dollar spent, then communication provided the organization with a positive return on investment. The CEO's evaluation of return on investment is, admittedly, subjective. But consider this: The CEO's judgments about costs and benefits are the very judgments that will determine if your budget and staff increase or decrease next year! Further, no other manager in the organization has the same vantage point as the CEO. The average return on investment from the CEOs in organizations with most-excellent communication programs was $2.66 for every dollar invested in communication. In contrast, CEOs of organizations with least-excellent communication programs reported only a $1.46 average return on investment for each dollar spent on communication. CEOs with most-excellent communication programs—as defined by the Excellence Study and as isolated in the Excellence Factor—see greater return on investment for communication expenditures than do CEOs with least-excellent programs.

Despite his harsh criticisms Gates admired programmers and invariably put them in charge of projects, where they could both manage and program. While this double duty was stressful, Gates wanted to avoid a situation in which professional managers, with either no programming experience or out-of-date knowledge, held sway. It was destructive to rely on management pros to run software teams—or the company. They could not distinguish a promising program from a bust or evaluate schedules or product designs. At companies run by professionals, managers almost always came to mistrust their programmers, whom they could neither understand nor control. Gates

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

In an effort to gain acceptance, restorative justice programs are often promoted or evaluated as ways to decrease repeat crimes. There are good reasons to believe that, in fact, such programs will reduce offending. Indeed, the research thus far—centering mainly on juvenile offenders—is quite encouraging on this issue. Nevertheless, reduced recidivism is not the reason for operating restorative justice programs. Reduced recidivism is a byproduct, but restorative justice is done first of all because it is the right thing to do. Victims’ needs should be addressed, offenders should be encouraged to take responsibility, those affected by an offense should be involved in the process, regardless of whether offenders catch on and reduce their offending.

What does this charity do? How many different types of programs does it run? For each of these programs, what exactly is it that this charity does? If it runs more than one program, why is that? How cost-effective is each program area? Is the charity focused on one of the most important causes? How cost-effective does the evidence suggest the program to be? How robust is the evidence behind each program? What is the evidence behind the programs that the charity runs? Are there trials showing that the program is effective? Does the charity rigorously monitor and evaluate the success of its programs? How well is each program implemented? Do the leaders of the charity have demonstrated success in other areas? Is the charity highly transparent? Does it acknowledge mistakes that it’s made in the past? What are the alternative charities you could give to? Are there good reasons for supposing that this charity is better than others? Does the charity need additional funds? What would additional funding be used to do? Why haven’t other donors already funded the charity to the point it can’t use extra money?

Schedule a comprehensive evaluation to not only provide a formal diagnosis, but to also delineate a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses. You will then be ready to participate in designing a total treatment plan that meets your unique needs. Get Treatment An effective, total treatment program is essential to future success. Such programs usually include a combination of medication, psychotherapy, coaching, alternative treatments, and necessary related services (support groups, counseling, family therapy, etc.). ADHD can have serious consequences, but it is treatable with safe and effective medications that can change people’s lives. (See Question 35 for a more in-depth discussion of medications used to treat ADHD.)

If any part of a program is messy or complicated, the programmer should attempt to modularize it and to generalize the parts. He or she should expect to use higher-order functions and lazy evaluation as the tools for doing this

works. Scala decides precedence based on the first character of the methods used in operator notation (there's one exception to this rule, which will be discussed below). If the method name starts with a *, for example, it will have a higher precedence than a method that starts with a +. Thus 2 + 2 * 7 will be evaluated as 2 + (2 * 7), and a +++ b *** c (in which a, b, and c are variables, and +++ and *** are methods) will be evaluated a +++ (b *** c), because the *** method has a higher precedence than the +++ method.

It’s safe to predict this result, and not just because I have seen it many times in the companies I work with. It is a straightforward prediction of the Lean Startup theory itself. When people are used to evaluating their productivity locally, they feel that a good day is one in which they did their job well all day. When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or—heaven forbid—meetings, I felt bad. What did I really accomplish that day? Code and product features were tangible to me; I could see them, understand them, and show them off. Learning, by contrast, is frustratingly intangible.

Francine’s face. “We don’t really use the word ‘teaching’,” she said, using her fingers to form quotation marks. “We train NGO leaders to better manage their organizations.” “Right,” I said, although still not certain how “teaching” was different from “training”. Maybe I wasn’t so smart, after all. “We facilitate staff to be better project managers, financial managers, better people managers.” Francine leaned into the desk to emphasize the word “facilitate”. “And we facilitate organizations to develop long-term strategies, to create sound work plans, and to evaluate their programs. Among other things, of course. So our role is that of a facilitator, not a teacher, as such.” I’d never heard the word “facilitate” used so many times in the same breath. Back then, I had no idea how many times I, myself, would breathlessly use that word during my work in Africa.

We also changed our recruiting practices to improve our digital talent pool. Formerly, we had sought out digital talent from the best, name-brand colleges and universities. Now we focused on attracting members of a small subset of elite programmers who were capable of producing ten times the output of the typical programmer. To attract these premier programmers, or “multipliers” as we called them, we began evaluating potential hires on specific skills related to programming, collaboration, and teamwork, observing their actual behavior rather than just relying on their academic record. We took a similar approach to hiring data scientists as well. Our efforts in this area helped us significantly up our game as we developed software as a business and incorporated it into more of our existing products.

Expressions in a condition must evaluate to true of false.

it is helpful to know the status of your blood-brain barrier. The Cyrex Array 20, which evaluates the response to leaked blood-brain barrier proteins, can assess that. GOAL: Cyrex Array 20 negative.

One way is to assess tissue transglutaminase antibodies in serum, which is a standard blood test. Another is to undergo Cyrex Array 3 testing, which evaluates antibodies to different regions of the two molecules that make up gluten. Sensitivity to rye, barley, sesame, oats, or rice—which can also cause leaky gut—can be evaluated using the Cyrex Array 4.

2.6 Operator ( < = ), its function is to evaluate that the value on

The process of defining and evaluating these factors and incorporating the economic amplifier into an economic system has been popularly called game theory.

The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else. It’s wearing the country down, just as it did my father, changing us even as it leaves Donald unaltered. It’s weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him. His administration and his party have become subsumed by his politics of grievance and entitlement. Worse, Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country’s alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do. The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank. To him, every dollar going out was his loss, while every dollar saved was his gain. In the midst of obscene plenty, one person, using all of the levers of power and taking every advantage at his disposal, would benefit himself and, conditionally, his immediate family, his cronies, and his sycophants; for the rest, there would never be enough to go around, which was exactly how my grandfather ran our family.

Worse, Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country’s alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do.

Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country’s alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do. The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank. To him, every dollar going out was his loss, while every dollar saved was his gain. In the midst of obscene plenty, one person, using all of the levers of power and taking every advantage at his disposal, would benefit himself and, conditionally, his immediate family, his cronies, and his sycophants; for the rest, there would never be enough to go around, which was exactly how my grandfather ran our family.

The purpose of any program evaluation is to provide some kind of counterfactual against which a treatment or intervention can be measured.

What would we think of a pollster who issued a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he had interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about much more important matters-matters such as answered prayer, God's judgment, Christ's forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and the only experience they evaluate is the most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.

When the recruiting team gathered in a conference room in Chicago with a pile of student résumés to review, I objected anytime a student was automatically dismissed for having a B on a transcript or for having gone to a less prestigious undergraduate program. If we were serious about bringing in minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more holistically at candidates. We’d need to think about how they’d used whatever opportunities life had afforded them rather than measuring them simply by how far they’d made it up an elitist academic ladder. The point wasn’t to lower the firm’s high standards: It was to realize that by sticking with the most rigid and old-school way of evaluating a new lawyer’s potential, we were overlooking all sorts of people who could contribute to the firm’s success. We needed to interview more students, in other words, before writing them off.

To initiate its EIR program, USCIS would also turn to an agitator. Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and prolific blogger, had become exasperated when officers of two promising startups under his watch were forced to return to their home countries because they couldn’t secure visas. He shared their story on a blog, attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, including Ries, who couldn’t understand why there was no visa category for an entrepreneur with American investors and employees. In lieu of that category, many entrepreneurs were at the mercy of visa examiners who didn’t understand how they operated. At the point of visa application, many startups had not hired many employees or generated much revenue. This confused traditional visa examiners, who would then ask odd and irrelevant questions, often before a denial. To give just one example, it’s been years since AOL required a compact disc to use its service. And yet, visa examiners were demanding proof of a warehouse, where software startups would store their CD inventory for shipping to customers. As Feld’s idea of a “startup visa” became intertwined with, and paralyzed by, the broader debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the USCIS, with White House support, sought to accomplish something administratively within the existing law. It instituted an EIR program, to organize and educate a specialty unit of immigration officers to handle entrepreneur and startup nonimmigrant visa cases.22 The project also called for educating entrepreneurs about the available options, one of which they may have overlooked. For instance, the O-1 visa, which was reserved “for those with extraordinary ability,” had proven a successful channel for actors, athletes, musicians, directors, scientists, artists, businessmen, engineers, and others who could provide ample evidence of their unique and impressive abilities, attributes, awards, and accolades. It had even created some controversy, when visa evaluators took the term “model” to an extreme, awarding a visa to one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, a Playboy centerfold from Canada named Shera Berchard.23 If she was confident enough to assert and explain her “extraordinary ability,” why weren’t entrepreneurs?

One of the little-known secrets of successful individuals is that those who are most successful evaluate themselves daily. Daily evaluation is the key to daily success, and daily success is the key to success in life and career.

Just as you need to dedicate time in your schedule to complete your process goals and success logs, you need to enter time for quarterly evaluations on your calendar. Identify

Using a reality-based evaluation, assess exactly where you are on each one of your three product goals. On

slip. When you do your evaluations (whether daily or quarterly), use only the true reality of results and avoid letting your mind make judgments based on potential.

Make the commitment to the daily and quarterly performance evaluations, and you will be well on your way to developing your accountability and becoming the person you so desire to become.

When you delete a property, you’re not just deleting the value of the property, you’re deleting the property itself. And, if you try to use fido.dogYears after deleting it, it will evaluate to undefined.

An expression is anything that evaluates to a value. 3+4

Evaluation is not an afterthought to training, but rather is meant to be integrated into the entire learning and development process. If you wait until after a program is designed, developed, and delivered to consider what value it is supposed to provide to the organization and how you will evaluate it, there is little chance of the program having much value.

The Interview The largest determining factor in whether you get a job is usually the interview itself. You’ve made impressions all along—with your telephone call and your cover letter and resume. Now it is imperative that you create a favorable impression when at last you get a chance to talk in person. This can be the ultimate test for a socially anxious person: After all, you are being evaluated on your performance in the interview situation. Activate your PMA, then build up your energy level. If you have followed this program, you now possess the self-help techniques you need to help you through the situation. You can prepare yourself for success. As with any interaction, good chemistry is important. The prospective employer will think hard about whether you will fit in—both from a production perspective and an interactive one. The employer may think: Will this employee help to increase the bottom line? Will he interact well as part of the team within the social system that already exists here? In fact, your chemistry with the interviewer may be more important than your background and experience. One twenty-three-year-old woman who held a fairly junior position in an advertising firm nonetheless found a good media position with one of the networks, not only because of her skills and potential, but because of her ability to gauge a situation and react quickly on her feet. What happened? The interviewer began listing the qualifications necessary for the position that was available: “Self-starter, motivated, creative . . .” “Oh,” she said, after the executive paused, “you’re just read my resume!” That kind of confidence and an ability to take risks not only amused the interviewer; it displayed some of the very skills the position required! The fact that interactive chemistry plays such a large role in getting a job has both positive and negative aspects. The positive side is that a lack of experience doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a particular job. Often, with the right basic education and life skills, you can make a strong enough impression based on who you are and how capable you seem that the employer may feel you are trainable for the job at hand. In my office, for example, we interviewed a number of experienced applicants for a secretarial position, only to choose a woman whose office skills were not as good as several others’, but who had the right chemistry, and who we felt would fit best into the existing system in the office. It’s often easier to teach or perfect the required skills than it is to try to force an interactive chemistry that just isn’t there. The downside of interactive chemistry is that even if you do have the required skills, you may be turned down if you don’t “click” with the interviewer.

under the law, schools were required to evaluate a child and formulate an individualized education program, or an IEP, to set forth the services and support he was supposed to receive and to help him achieve in his areas of need.

The psychometric approach to studying creativity entails quantifying the notion of creativity with the aid of paper and pencil tasks. An example of this would be the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, developed by Torrance (1974), that are used by many gifted programs in middle and high schools to identify students that are gifted/creative. These tests consist of several verbal and figural tasks that call for problemsolving skills and divergent thinking. The test is scored for fluency, flexibility, originality (the statistical rarity of a response), and elaboration (Sternberg, 2000). Sternberg (2000) states that there are positive and negative sides to the psychometric approach. On the positive side, these tests allow for research with noneminent people, are easy to administer, and objectively scored. The negative side is that numerical scores fail to capture the concept of creativity because they are based on brief paper and pencil tests. Researchers call for using more significant productions such as writing samples, drawings, etc., subjectively evaluated by a panel of experts, instead of simply relying on a numerical measure.

Exercise 1.3: Experiment to measure the difference in running time between our potentially inefficient versions and the one that uses strings.Join. (Section 1.6 illustrates part of the time package, and Section 11.4 shows how to write benchmark tests for systematic performance evaluation.)

Based on the initial analysis, I recommend that the company expand Program B in the short term for the following reasons: Currently, Program A is losing money and cannot sustain itself. Program B is highly profitable. If we can expand the program by just X percent, the company can break even quickly. There are risks involved in expanding Program B, in particular the reputation risk. But due to the short-term nature of the expansion, these risks can be minimized. Given more time, we should evaluate options to turn around Program A and to unwind Program B.

However, little evidence exists to suggest that doctoral programs support the development of doctoral students as teachers, let alone as interculturally aware teachers. Teaching development is not integrated in program requirements. We are not aware of doctoral-level qualifying exams that evaluate one’s capacity to teach in addition to theory, content, and research capabilities. Even when teaching assistantships are available for funding and accruing experience, they rarely occur in the context of a programmatic approach to using that assistantship/practice to develop graduate students as educators, to generate reflection toward future and ongoing development.

Now, those who enjoy theological and/or demonological speculations may continue to enjoy them, as far as I care. This book merely attempts to clarify the difference between theological speculations and actual experiences in space-time, so that we do not wander into theology without realizing where we have gotten ourselves. The Supreme Court, for instance, wandered into theology (or demonology) when it proclaimed that "fuck" "is" an indecent word. The most one can say about that in scientific E-Prime would read: "The word 'fuck' appears indecent in the evaluations of X per cent of the population," X found by normal polling methods.

Any one-level theory of objective reality that ignores the separate reality-tunnels in which these people are living existentially has no validity in psychology, and, with a little analysis, it is obvious that no such one-level theory has any general validity in sociology either. To understand human behavior, we have to understand human evaluations (neuro-linguistic programs) and modern social scientists of all schools increasingly recognize that human evaluations (internal reality-tunnels) depend on both the external environment (setting) and the internal environment (neuro-linguistic programs).

Many females have a problem not only with stereotypes, but with other people’s opinions of them in general. They trust them too much... This vulnerability afflicts many of the most able, high-achieving females. Why should this be? When they’re little, these girls are often so perfect, and they delight in everyone’s telling them so. They’re so well behaved, they’re so cute, they’re so helpful, and they’re so precocious. Girls learn to trust people’s estimates of them. “Gee, everyone’s so nice to me; if they criticize me, it must be true.” Even females at the top universities in the country say that other people’s opinions are a good way to know their abilities. Boys are constantly being scolded and punished. When we observed in grade school classrooms, we saw that boys got eight times more criticism than girls for their conduct. Boys are also constantly calling each other slobs and morons. The evaluations lose a lot of their power. Even when women reach the pinnacle of success, other people’s attitudes can get them... The fixed mindset, plus stereotyping, plus women’s trust in people’s assessments: I think we can begin to understand why there’s a gender gap in math and science. That gap is painfully evident in the world of high tech. Julie Lynch, a budding techie, was already writing computer code when she was in junior high school. Her father and two brothers worked in technology, and she loved it, too. Then her computer programming teacher criticized her. She had written a computer program and the program ran just fine, but he didn’t like a shortcut she had taken. Her interest evaporated. Instead, she went on to study recreation and public relations. Math and science need to be made more hospitable places for women. And women need all the growth mindset they can get to take their rightful places in these fields.

General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect on the problems it attempted to alleviate — i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.

We can freely imagine several teleological futures before we act, each with a roughly equal likelihood of being enacted, and then evaluate them and reach our decision as to which is best. The smarter, the more imaginative and creative we are, the more futures we can conceive. Until we carry out our evaluation of the futures that we have freely conceived, we cannot know what we will do. An android cannot conceive futures, and carries out a program written for him by its Creator (programmer). Sam Harris keeps slipping into the tacit claim that humans are programmed machines rather than free people.

Standard A1 acknowledges that accuracy in evaluation contexts is not established in a universal sense. Ideas and meanings expressed in specific languages can change over time, places, individuals, and groups. For conclusions to be accurate in a practical sense such that their consequences are justified, they must be understood within the contexts where the languages and concepts that support them can be applied. Part of the rationale for Standard A1 is to call attention to this practicality while emphasizing the key importance of sound methods in specific contexts.

A program in Madagascar that simply told parents about the average income gains from spending one more year in school for children from backgrounds similar to theirs had a sizable positive effect on test scores, and, in the case of parents who found out that they had underestimated the benefits of education, the gains were twice as large.40 An earlier study in the Dominican Republic produced similar results with high school students.41 Since it is essentially free to have teachers simply pass on information to parents, this is so far the cheapest known way to improve test scores, among all the interventions that have been evaluated

Monte Carlo tree search makes predictions by generating examples (rollouts) and then makes a prediction based on the experience of this algorithm with these examples. Modern variations of Monte Carlo tree search further combine tree search with reinforcement learning and deep learning in order to improve predictions. Deep learning is used in order to learn the evaluation function instead of using domain knowledge. For example, AlphaZero uses Monte Carlo tree search for rollouts, while also using deep learning to evaluate the quality of the moves and guide the search. The Monte Carlo tree together with the deep learning models form the hypothesis used by the program in order to move moves. Note that these hypotheses are created using the statistical patterns of empirical behavior in games.

Monte Carlo trees tend to explore a few promising branches deeper based on evaluations from previous experience, whereas minimax trees explore all unpruned branches in a roughly similar way. The human approach to chess is similar to the former, wherein humans evaluate a small number of promising directions of play rather than exhaustively considering all possibilities. The result is that the style of chess from Monte Carlo tree search is more similar to humans than that from minimax trees. The programs resulting from Monte Carlo trees can often take more risks in game playing, if past experience has shown that such risks are warranted over the longer term. On the other hand, minimax trees tend to discourage any risks beyond the horizon of tree exploration, especially since the evaluations at leaf levels are imperfect.

Just as the United States helped create the prosperity that enabled the Party’s control, U.S. technology has been copied, repurposed, and enhanced to secure that control—sometimes with investment from U.S. venture capital. Across China, a program known as Police Cloud allows for the collection and integration of previously unimaginable amounts of information: who you’re in contact with, what you buy, where you travel, when you shop, whether you pay your parking tickets, and so on. A “social credit” system allows the government to affix a score to someone: How reliable are you? Could you pose a threat of some sort? You live your life with the knowledge that the sum total of your actions could be evaluated by someone, somewhere, with some purpose. This creates incentives and disincentives, given the reach of the Party into people’s lives. Disincentives are clear: Say the wrong thing, and you could end up detained. But the incentives may be even more powerful: Want a good job? Want your kids to get into a good school? You may have to consider those aspirations with everything you do.

In short, performance ratings are indicative only of how a person is performing in their given role at the time they are being evaluated. Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)

When people say an artist has a thick skin, what they mean is not that the person is dense or numb, but that he has seated his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego. It takes tremendous strength of character to do this, because our deepest instincts run counter to it. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe enforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells. Resistance knows this and uses it against us. It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation.

More recently, physicist Edwin May, who directed the ESP research at SRI after 1986 and then headed the program researching “anomalous cognition” (May’s preferred term) after it was transferred to SAIC, and psychologist Sonali Bhatt Marwaha have also argued that all forms of ESP are likely precognition misinterpreted or misidentified.29 Unlike Feinberg, they do not assume precognition is solely an “inside the head” phenomenon30; but reducing anomalous cognition to precognition is a bold step that may move the field of parapsychology forward by, as they say, “collaps[ing] the problem space”31 of these phenomena. What has always seemed like several small piles of interesting but perhaps not overwhelming data supporting various diverse forms of psi or anomalous cognition may really be a single, impressively large pile of evidence for the much more singular, astonishing, and as I hope to show, physically plausible ability of people to access information arriving from their own future. In Part Two, where I address the possible “nuts and bolts” of this ability, I will be making a case for precognition being something close to Feinberg’s “memory of things future”—an all-in-the-head information storage and retrieval process, but one that is not limited to short-term memory. Evidence from life and laboratory suggests it may be possible, within limits, to “premember” experiences days, months, and years in our future, albeit dimly and obliquely, in a manner not all that different from how we remember experiences in our past. The main qualitative difference would be that, unlike memory for past experiences, we have no context for recognizing information from our future, let alone interpreting or evaluating it, and thus will seldom even notice its existence. We would also have little ability to directly search our memory for things future, the way we can rummage in our mental attic for information we know we acquired earlier in life. Yet things we will learn in our future may “inform” us in many non-conscious ways, and this information may be accessed in dreams and art and tasks like ESP experiments that draw on ill-defined intuitive abilities.

He laid out the defining characteristics, workflow, and management as follows. A two-pizza team will: Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done. With the new service-based software architecture in place, any team could simply refer to the published application programming interfaces (APIs) for other teams. (More on this new software architecture to follow.) Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.” This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics. Example: a team that is in charge of adding selection in a product category might be evaluated on: a)  how many new distinct items were added for the period (50 percent weighting) b)  how many units of those new distinct items were sold (30 percent weighting) c)  how many page views those distinct items received (20 percent weighting) Be monitored in real time. A team’s real-time score on its fitness function would be displayed on a dashboard next to all the other two-pizza teams’ scores. Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business results. This paradigm shift eliminates the all-too-often heard excuses such as, “We built what the business folks asked us to, they just asked for the wrong product,” or “If the tech team had actually delivered what we asked for and did it on time, we would have hit our numbers.” Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader. The leader must have deep technical expertise, know how to hire world-class software engineers and product managers, and possess excellent business judgment. Be self-funding. The team’s work will pay for itself. Be approved in advance by the S-Team. The S-Team must approve the formation of every two-pizza team.

We even evaluated rebates and points-based programs similar to the airlines’, but there’s an important difference between airlines and retailers. Once a plane takes off, its empty seats have no value. Therefore, airlines, in exchange for loyalty, can give away marginal inventory that would otherwise go unsold. Whereas in retail, giving away either product or shipping fees always has a cost. None of the ideas made it very far because they could not meet the three essential criteria.

Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

When Bouchard’s twin-processing operation was in full swing, he amassed a staff of eighteen—psychologists, psychiatrists, ophthalmologists, cardiologists, pathologists, geneticists, even dentists. Several of his collaborators were highly distinguished: David Lykken was a widely recognized expert on personality, and Auke Tellegen, a Dutch psychologist on the Minnesota faculty, was an expert on personality measuring. In scheduling his twin-evaluations, Bouchard tried limiting the testing to one pair of twins at a time so that he and his colleagues could devote the entire week—with a grueling fifty hours of tests—to two genetically identical individuals. Because it is not a simple matter to determine zygosity—that is, whether twins are identical or fraternal—this was always the first item of business. It was done primarily by comparing blood samples, fingerprint ridge counts, electrocardiograms, and brain waves. As much background information as possible was collected from oral histories and, when possible, from interviews with relatives and spouses. I.Q. was tested with three different instruments: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, a Raven, Mill-Hill composite test, and the first principal components of two multiple abilities batteries. The Minnesota team also administered four personality inventories (lengthy questionnaires aimed at characterizing and measuring personality traits) and three tests of occupational interests. In all the many personality facets so laboriously measured, the Minnesota team was looking for degrees of concordance and degrees of difference between the separated twins. If there was no connection between the mean scores of all twins sets on a series of related tests—I.Q. tests, for instance—the concordance figure would be zero percent. If the scores of every twin matched his or her twin exactly, the concordance figure would be 100 percent. Statistically, any concordance above 30 percent was considered significant, or rather indicated the presence of some degree of genetic influence. As the week of testing progressed, the twins were wired with electrodes, X-rayed, run on treadmills, hooked up for twenty-four hours with monitoring devices. They were videotaped and a series of questionnaires and interviews elicited their family backgrounds, educations, sexual histories, major life events, and they were assessed for psychiatric problems such as phobias and anxieties. An effort was made to avoid adding questions to the tests once the program was under way because that meant tampering with someone else’s test; it also would necessitate returning to the twins already tested with more questions. But the researchers were tempted. In interviews, a few traits not on the tests appeared similar in enough twin pairs to raise suspicions of a genetic component. One of these was religiosity. The twins might follow different faiths, but if one was religious, his or her twin more often than not was religious as well. Conversely, when one was a nonbeliever, the other generally was too. Because this discovery was considered too intriguing to pass by, an entire additional test was added, an existing instrument that included questions relating to spiritual beliefs. Bouchard would later insist that while he and his colleagues had fully expected to find traits with a high degree of heritability, they also expected to find traits that had no genetic component. He was certain, he says, that they would find some traits that proved to be purely environmental. They were astonished when they did not. While the degree of heritability varied widely—from the low thirties to the high seventies— every trait they measured showed at least some degree of genetic influence. Many showed a lot.

management as follows. A two-pizza team will: Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done. With the new service-based software architecture in place, any team could simply refer to the published application programming interfaces (APIs) for other teams. (More on this new software architecture to follow.) Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.” This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics.

Graham is also one of the few living products of artificial insemination experiments in red wolves, a technique that Will wants to further hone. Artificial insemination may be useful to the program in the future in case the captive breeding efforts to create matched pairs based on mean kinship falls short of reproductive goals. In some cases, the captive female wolves were so aggressive to males that they were paired with that breeding never took place. Artificial insemination and securing red wolf sperm from all of the founding lines of the captive breeding program were identified in the 1990 Red Wolf Recovery/Species Survival Plan. Not long after, workers began collecting red wolf sperm. According to Will, there happened to be a fellow outside of Portland who had an international canid semen bank. The captive breeding program contracted him to help explore the viability of using electroejaculation on wolves. In the 1990s, Will helped develop protocols for immobilizing, catheterizing, and stimulating the wolves they sampled. They went through the captive population and methodically collected and evaluated sperm from male red wolves. If the sperm met certain criteria, it was processed and frozen. Eventually, the cryopreserved red wolf semen bank held samples from sixty individuals, which collectively represented thirteen of the fourteen founding lines. The work died down when a grant ran out and one of the main reproductive physiologists switched jobs. Today, the early efforts to cryopreserve red wolf sperm and artificially inseminate females have proven their value - not just through Graham and his antics at the exhibit, but because a wolf named Stubs, one of the last living representatives from one of the fourteen founding lines, died in 1998. With Stubs’s death, the unique diversity of his founding lineage died within the captive population. However, his semen was collected and banked before he died. Will would like nothing more than to resurrect Stubs’s line. The only challenge, he says, is that the previous two cases of artificial insemination, in 1992 and 2003, were done using fresh sperm. In the first case, a six-year-old red wolf birthed two females and one male. Graham was born into a different litter of five. “Clearly, we know artificial insemination using cryopreserved sperm works. It’s been done in other animals,” Will says. “We just need to pick this research up again and see where it might lead.” If male red wolves experience a decrease in sperm quality, or if females are behaviorally uncooperative with their male counterparts, then artificial insemination may move from the realm of research to that of necessity. It’s always nice to have a backup plan.

Over the years, as it became my responsibility to evaluate and hire new people for my unit, I developed a profile of what I wanted in a profiler. At first, I went for strong academic credentials, figuring an understanding of psychology and organized criminology was most important. But I came to realize degrees and academic knowledge weren’t nearly as important as experience and certain subjective qualities. We have the facilities to fill in any educational gaps through fine programs at the University of Virginia and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. What I started looking for was “right-brained,” creative-type thinkers. There are many positions within the FBI and law enforcement in general where engineering or accounting types do the best, but in profiling and investigative analysis, that kind of thinker would probably have some difficulty. Contrary to the impression given in such stories as The Silence of the Lambs, we don’t pluck candidates for the Investigative Support Unit right out of the Academy. Since our first book, Mindhunter was published, I’ve had many letters from young men and women who say they want to go into behavioral science in the FBI and join the profiling team at Quantico. It doesn’t work quite that way. First you get accepted by the Bureau, then you prove yourself in the field as a first-rate, creative investigator, then we recruit you for Quantico. And then you’re ready for two years of intensive, specialized training before you become a full-fledged member of the unit. A good profiler must first and foremost show imagination and creativity in investigation. He or she must be willing to take risks while still maintaining the respect and confidence of fellow agents and law enforcement officers. Our preferred candidates will show leadership, won’t wait for a consensus before offering an opinion, will be persuasive in a group setting but tactful in helping to put a flawed investigation back on track. For these reasons, they must be able to work both alone and in groups.

The back of the eye, or retina, is an extension of the brain and therefore reflects what is ongoing in there. That makes evaluating the retina for amyloid plaques a highly promising approach.

when evaluating thyroid status, you can get a good analysis of the actual thyroid function by evaluating basal body temperature in the morning, or using Thyroflex to measure the timing of one of your reflexes. If your temperature is not at least 97.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36.5 degrees Celsius), then your thyroid function is likely to be suboptimal.

If your evaluation identified sleep apnea, it is critical to treat this.