Project Initiation Quotes

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You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done.
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)
The challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.
Seth Godin
What initially began as a couple of pieces that fitted together from first dates, slowly expands with time and for a moment the puzzle actually looks like it will be realized. Heartbreak is when the puzzle is nearly finished and you suddenly realize that pieces are missing. Perhaps they were never in the box in the first place or perhaps they went missing along the way; regardless, the puzzle remains undone. You frantically search the box and your surroundings, desperately trying to find the missing pieces, anxiously looking to fill the void, but you search for what cannot be found.
Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.
Richard Rohr (Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation)
I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.
Seth Godin (Poke the Box)
Rosa Parks turned to me sweetly and asked, 'Now, Bryan, tell me who you are and what you're doing.' I looked at Ms. Carr to see if I had permission to speak, and she smiled and nodded at me. I then gave Ms. Parks my rap. 'Yes, ma'am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we're trying to help people on death row. We're trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We're trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who've been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice...Ms. Parks leaned back smiling. 'Ooooh, honey, all that's going to make you tired, tired, tired.' We all laughed. I looked down, a little embarrassed. Then Ms. Carr leaned forward and put her finger in my face and talked o me just like my grandmother used to talk to me. She said, 'That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave.' All three women nodded in silent agreement and for just a little while, they made me feel like a young prince.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
No matter how neutral the initial presentation of information, people do tend to gradually recruit the stereotypes and the associations that are prevalent in a culture and then project that,
Angela Saini (Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story)
In modern times, nationalism is the most copious and durable source of mass enthusiasm, and that nationalist fervor must be tapped if the drastic changes projected and initiated by revolutionary enthusiasm are to be consummated.
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)
Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.
Merlin Stone (When God Was a Woman)
The ethos of the Indian Ocean is a consultative one and in the long run, it is the people-centric initiatives and projects that are likely to be more sustainable.
S. Jaishankar (The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World)
Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, the He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principal questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so kept, they have the regressive effect: they reduce the father image back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." The World Savior's cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.
Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains… Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment. Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfillment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.
Alain de Botton (The Consolations of Philosophy)
Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
Remember to avoid self-criticism about setbacks or obstacles that appear in the midst of your project. As management consultant Michael Durst says, “You may not be responsible for causing what happens to you, but you are responsible for what you do to correct it.” This powerful message contains a crucial concept that many people miss: let go of worrying about the initial cause of the problem so that you can direct your energies to where they can do the most good—on the solution.
Neil A. Fiore (The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play)
When we allow that the individual projects a definition of the situation when he appears before others, we must also see that the others, however passive their role may seem to be, will themselves effectively project a definition of the situation by virtue of their response to the individual and by virtue of any lines of action they initiate to him.
Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life)
(Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don’t know what your living conditions are at Lattimore—tidy and sterile, I suspect—but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.)
Julie Schumacher (Dear Committee Members)
trying to micromanage employees slows decisions and kills individual initiative. Attempting to impose precise order on how a project in a department is accomplished stifles creativity and leads to a formulistic approach to business problems. Insisting
Steve Blank (The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win)
whatever happens on earth is only a transitory dream picture projected in time and space by ourselves. We only need to take it seriously in so far as it adds to our experience.
Elisabeth Haich (Initiation)
Profit provides the financial foundation for businesses to invest in CSR initiatives, such as sustainable practices, employee well-being programs, and community development projects.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
The 1968 bugging issue revolved around a Republican initiative to undermine Johnson's Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War and brought home 500,000 American soldiers then fighting in Indochina. The Nixon-Agnew campaign, however, feared that this 'October Surprise' would catapult Vice President Hubert Humphrey to victory and again deny Nixon the White House.
Robert Parry (Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth')
Initially, class privilege was not discussed by white women in the women’s movement. They wanted to project an image of themselves as victims and that could not be done by drawing attention to their class. In fact, the contemporary women’s movement was extremely class bound. As a group, white participants did not denounce capitalism. They chose to define liberation using the terms of white capitalist patriarchy, equating liberation with gaining economic status and money power. Like all good capitalists, they proclaimed work as the key to liberation. This emphasis on work was yet another indication of the extent to which the white female liberationists’ perception of reality was totally narcissistic, classist, and racist. Implicit in the assertion that work was the key to women’s liberation was a refusal to acknowledge the reality that, for masses of American working class women, working for pay neither liberated them from sexist oppression nor allowed them to gain any measure of economic independence.
bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism)
When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Eventually she begins to open up and allow herself to trust me. And as she does, I find that I love this version of her, with all of its circumstance, even as the initial excitement gives way to cozy routine, with its own kind of intimacy. I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows. And whenever she catches me projecting idealized versions of herself onto her, she calls me out for doing so. Throughout our relationship, she insists on remaining real.
Zaina Arafat (You Exist Too Much)
When no one is watching Mother Earth, and most of the time no one is, she sings softly to herself. Certainly no one is watching after her, to the point where she's now calling herself M. Earth, using her first initial only, like the early women writers who did not want their work to be automatically dismissed because of their gender disadvantage. Though she is grand, M. Earth is feeling, perhaps, overly feminine, and therefore vulnerable. Don't even mention the word Gaia; it's such a projection! She thinks she could benefit from a more macho profile, a little kick-ass to make her point. Perhaps a little masculine detachment would be helpful, or a thicker skin. Because, frankly, she's been trampled, poisoned, stripped bare, robbed blind, and blamed for just about everything that's come down the pike. And like all mothers, everyone just assumes she'll always be there for them with open, loving arms, and a cup of hot cocoa. That it will be her pleasure to feed them, lick their wounds, and clean a load or two of their dirty laundry. She's looking for a little more respect.
Sharon Weil (Donny and Ursula Save the World)
I decided that ten positions would be sufficient initially. More could be learned if the initial encounter was successful. It did not take long—less time than learning the cha-cha. In terms of reward for effort, it seemed strongly preferable to dancing and I was greatly looking forward to it.
Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1))
The second principle is to limit your work in progress. Perhaps the most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once; that way, you get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved—whether by their superiors or by a client—supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Strive to do small things well. Be a doer and a self-starter—aggressiveness and initiative are two most admired qualities in a leader—but you must also put your feet up and think. Strive for self-improvement through constant self-evaluation. Never be satisfied. Ask of any project, How can it be done better? Don’t overinspect or oversupervise. Allow your leaders to make mistakes in training, so they can profit from the errors and not make them in combat. Keep the troops informed; telling them “what, how, and why” builds their confidence. The harder the training, the more troops will brag. Enthusiasm, fairness, and moral and physical courage—four of the most important aspects of leadership. Showmanship—a vital technique of leadership. The ability to speak and write well—two essential tools of leadership. There is a salient difference between profanity and obscenity; while a leader employs profanity (tempered with discretion), he never uses obscenities. Have consideration for others. Yelling detracts from your dignity; take men aside to counsel them. Understand and use judgment; know when to stop fighting for something you believe is right. Discuss and argue your point of view until a decision is made, and then support the decision wholeheartedly. Stay ahead of your boss.
David H. Hackworth (About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior)
What made this project especially remarkable is that, among the many associations that are relevant to diet and disease, so many pointed to the same finding: people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored. From the initial experimental animal studies on animal protein effects to this massive human study on dietary patterns, the findings proved to be consistent. The health implications of consuming either animal or plant-based nutrients were remarkably different.
T. Colin Campbell (The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health)
Since the 1980s, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has been on the rise, not just among children, but now among the adult population as well. The sudden rise of adult ADD, while it may have genetic components, certainly receives a major boost from our kinetic, hyper-speed, information-bombarded society. Victims of adult ADD are likely to initiate more tasks and projects that they'll ever finish, get bored easily, seek thrills readily, have a propensity to be late while loathing having to wait, and not be averse to taking foolish risks.
Jeff Davidson (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Things Done)
Resist your initial impulse to immediately jump to social media websites to launch your project. Instead, start with the network you already have (and that already trusts you).
Jason SurfrApp (Creativity For Sale: How I Made $1,000,000 Wearing T-Shirts and How You Can Turn Your Passion Into Profit, Too)
I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn't initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used.
Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
Project Princess Teeny feet rock layered double socks Popping side piping of many colored loose lace ups Racing toe keeps up with fancy free gear slick slide and just pressed recently weaved hair Jeans oversized belie her hips, back, thighs that have made guys sigh for milleni year Topped by an attractive jacket her suit’s not for flacking, flunkies, junkies or punk homies on the stroll. Her hands mobile thrones of today’s urban goddess Clinking rings link dragon fingers no need to be modest. One or two gap teeth coolin’ sport gold initials Doubt you get to her name just check from the side please chill. Multidimensional shrimp earrings frame her cinnamon face Crimson with a compliment if a comment hits the right place Don’t step to the plate with datelines from ‘88 Spare your simple, fragile feelings with the same sense that you came Color woman variation reworks the french twist with crinkle cut platinum frosted bangs from a spray can’s mist Never dissed, she insists: “No you can’t touch this.” And, if pissed, bedecked fists stop boys who must persist. She’s the one. Give her some. Under fire. Smoking gun. Of which songs are sung, raps are spun, bells are rung, rocked, pistols cocked, unwanted advances blocked, well stacked she’s jock. It’s all about you girl. You go on. Don’t you dare stop.
Tracie Morris (Intermission)
Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention’s mother. In 1942, in the middle of World War II, the U.S. government set up the Manhattan Project with the explicit goal of inventing the technology required to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do so. That project succeeded in three years, at a cost of $2 billion (equivalent to over $20 billion today). Other instances are Eli Whitney’s 1794 invention of his cotton gin to replace laborious hand cleaning of cotton grown in the U.S. South, and James Watt’s 1769 invention of his steam engine to solve the problem of pumping water out of British coal mines. These familiar examples deceive us into assuming that other major inventions were also responses to perceived needs. In fact, many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or by a love of tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains… Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment. Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfillment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.
Alain de Botton (The Consolations of Philosophy)
Fear of feedback often feels more uncomfortable than experiencing the feedback itself. As a result, it is not so much negative feedback on its own that can impede progress but the fear of hearing criticism that causes us to shut down. Sometimes the best action is just to dive straight into the hardest environment, since even if the feedback is very negative initially, it can reduce your fears of getting started on a project and allow you to adjust later if it proves too harsh to be helpful.
Scott H. Young (Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career)
Initiative, white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950, an average of three every two weeks for eight and a half decades.52 (Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.53)
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
The Human Genome Project, the full sequence of the normal human genome, was completed in 2003. In its wake comes a far less publicized but vastly more complex project: fully sequencing the genomes of several human cancer cells. Once completed, this effort, called the Cancer Genome Atlas, will dwarf the Human Genome Project in its scope. The sequencing effort involves dozens of teams of researchers across the world. The initial list of cancers to be sequenced includes brain, lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer. The Human Genome Project will provide the normal genome, against which cancer’s abnormal genome can be juxtaposed and contrasted. The result, as Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project describes it, will be a “colossal atlas” of cancer—a compendium of every gene mutated in the most common forms of cancer: “When applied to the 50 most common types of cancer, this effort could ultimately prove to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Human Genome Projects in terms of the sheer volume of DNA to be sequenced.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.) Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
Positive growth can also be compared to a remodeling project. The initial result is horrendous. You find yourself surrounded by excruciating noise, suffocating dust, and bedlam. Only when it is well under way do the benefits start to unfold. Similarly, the initial response to a physical or spiritual exercise program is frequently an intense desire to stop. But after persevering for a while, the positive emotions and benefits kick in. Growth and achievement that result from struggle, diligence, and sacrifice feel very good to us and make us feel happy down the road.
Daniel Lapin (Buried Treasure: Secrets for Living from the Lord's Language)
Soros had his own reform, promoted by the Open Society Institute, that he saw as compatible with the initiatives that became known as HillaryCare. He called it, with characteristic bluntness, The Project on Death in America.22 Its rationale was compassionate: to embed hospices and "palliative
John Perazzo (From Shadow Party to Shadow Government: George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America)
In particular, interrogative e-mails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message—temporarily—out of your inbox. A quick response will, in the short term, provide you with some minor relief because you’re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back onto the sender’s. This relief, however, is short-lived, as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again, continually sapping your time and attention. I suggest, therefore, that the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? Once you’ve answered this question for yourself, replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I call this the process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved—whether by their superiors or by a client—supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
though the ENIAC had been designed by men, this gruelling, fiddly job of actually building it was almost exclusively the work of women, who laboured nights and weekends until it was complete.11 Buried in the project’s payroll records are the names of nearly fifty women and perhaps many more who were only listed by their initials.
Ananyo Bhattacharya (The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann)
For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward. The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge.
Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language)
The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education.
Alec J. Ross (The Industries of the Future)
But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego. The feelings of fear, pain, and lack that are an intrinsic part of egoic consciousness but had been covered up by the “love relationship” now resurface. Just as with every other addiction, you are on a high when the drug is available, but invariably there comes a time when the drug no longer works for you. When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project them outward and attack the other with all the savage violence that is part of your pain. This attack may awaken the partner's own pain, and he or she may counter your attack. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously hoping that its attack or its attempts at manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their behavior, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your pain. Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to — alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person — you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you. Every addiction does that. Every addiction reaches a point where it does not work for you anymore, and then you feel the pain more intensely than ever. This is one reason why most people are always trying to escape from the present moment and are seeking some kind of salvation in the future. The first thing that they might encounter if they focused their attention on the Now is their own pain, and this is what they fear. If they only knew how easy it is to access in the Now the power of presence that dissolves the past and its pain, the reality that dissolves the illusion. If they only knew how close they are to their own reality, how close to God.
Eckhart Tolle (Practicing the Power of Now)
Of course, the challenge of being the initiator is that you’ll be wrong. You’ll pick the wrong thing, you’ll waste time, you’ll be blamed. This is why being an initiator is valuable. Most people shy away from the challenge. They’ve been too abused, they’re too fearful, they hold back, they’re happy to let someone else take the heat. Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. Ditch digging is not scarce. It’s not hard at all to find manual labor at minimum wage, which is precisely why manual labor gets paid minimum wage. It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others.
Seth Godin (Poke the Box)
One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done." The list of projects is the compilation of finish lines we put before us, to keep our next actions moving on all tracks appropriately
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)
The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view. In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islamism. In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran. The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
Herod did a masterful job of maintaining order on behalf of Rome. His reign ushered in an era of political stability among the Jews that had not been seen for centuries. He initiated a monumental building and public works project that employed tens of thousands of peasants and day laborers, permanently changing the physical landscape of Jerusalem. He built markets and theaters, palaces and ports, all modeled on the classical Hellenic style.
Reza Aslan (Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth)
Along the way, I began to develop an understanding about not only the process for making a miniature golf course, but the general process for making anything: how to start with an initial idea, develop preliminary plans, create a first version, try it out, ask other people to try it out, revise plans based on what happens—and keep doing that, over and over. By working on my project, I was gaining experience with the Creative Learning Spiral.
Mitchel Resnick (Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play (The MIT Press))
To achieve these goals [of making good landscapes}, there is but one necessity: when preparing and approving plans for new places, or spending money on old places, we must look beyond the confines of each and every project. Gazing at these wider horizons, we shall see that development projects are initiated by specialists who have been imprisioned within "closely drawn technical limits" and "narrowly drawn territorial boundaries" (Weddle 1967; vii).
Tom Turner (Landscape Planning And Environmental Impact Design (Natural and Built Environment Series))
Player investment design lead' is a role that every single collaborative project or crowd initiative should fill in the future. When the game is intrinsically rewarding to play, you don't have to pay people to participate - with real currency, virtual currency, or any other kind of scarce reward. Participation is its own reward, when the player is properly invested in his or her progress, in exploring the world fully, and in the community's success.
Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World)
When I am in a situation where I feel uncomfortable about speaking but it is necessary for me to speak, or if I feel 'put on the spot' my voice sounds strained, really weird, and it feels as if I have no control over how I sound in these situations. Sometimes then my voice is barely audible and I am frequently asked to repeat myself. Attempts at speaking are often embarrassing, shaming experiences for me. I sound quite different when speaking with someone I am more relaxed with, but I don't like the way my voice sounds at the best of times; I was horrified when I heard a recording of myself. Because of this inhibition about speaking, I have never learned to project my voice or to use it effectively. I often feel that I could no more use my vocal cords to break a silence, to get somebody's attention or to initiate an interaction than I could run through fire or do something dangerous in my life.
Carl Sutton (Selective Mutism In Our Own Words: Experiences in Childhood and Adulthood)
The Mysteries at Aegina were popular and continued to be sought out by citizens during the late Roman Era. In one example, Paulina, the wife of Praetextatus, wrote of her husband after his death that he was a pious initiate who internalised that which he found at the sacred rites, who learned many things and adored the Divine. Paulina’s husband had introduced her to ‘all the mysteries’ and in doing so ‘exempted her from death’s destiny’. Named specifically are the Mysteries of Eleusis, Kybele, Mithras and that of Hekate at Aegina, where Paulina was a Hierophant. “… her husband taught to her, the servant of Hecate, her “triple secrets” – whatever these secrets were, the Mysteries provided less “extraordinary experience” than soteriological hope and theological and philosophical knowledge.”[176] It is possible to assume that the beliefs and customs at Aegina had something in common with those at other temples associated with the annual Mysteries said to be established by Orpheus, like those of Eleusis. The Mysteries of Aegina were renowned, as this early Christian writer indicates, and it is possible to conclude that they had an element of oathbound secrecy as we know so little about them today. “For the mysteries of Mithras do not appear to be more famous among the Greeks than those of Eleusis, or than those in Aegina, where individuals are initiated in the rites of Hecate.”[177]
Sorita d'Este (Circle for Hekate - Volume I: History & Mythology (The Circle for Hekate Project Book 1))
When we think of the rain forest, we might think only of the Amazon—the lungs of the Earth—but our mini ecosystems are important as well, and it’s up to us to try to understand their complexities and do all we can to keep them healthy and thriving. My home, Vancouver Island, is a rain forest. I’ve gotten more involved in my own community projects, while still supporting Green Party efforts worldwide and Indigenous and First Nations’ family and culture initiatives.
Pamela Anderson (Love, Pamela: A Memoir)
1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
A CEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins: “I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. Tell me what went wrong?” What?! But we haven’t even launched yet… That’s the point. The CEO is forcing an exercise in hind-sight—in advance. She is using a technique designed by psychologist Gary Klein known as a premortem.
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
ACEO calls her staff into the conference room on the eve of the launch of a major new initiative. They file in and take their seats around the table. She calls the meeting to attention and begins: “I have bad news. The project has failed spectacularly. Tell me what went wrong?” What?! But we haven’t even launched yet . . . That’s the point. The CEO is forcing an exercise in hindsight—in advance. She is using a technique designed by psychologist Gary Klein known as a premortem.
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
If interest rates are kept below their natural level, misguided investments occur: too much time is used in production, or, put another way, the investment returns don’t justify the initial outlay. ‘Malinvestment’, to use a term popularized by Austrian economists, comes in many shapes and sizes. It might involve some expensive white-elephant project, such as constructing a tunnel under the sea, or a pie-in-the-sky technology scheme with no serious prospect of ever turning a profit.
Edward Chancellor (The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest)
We found it helpful to think of such cross-functional projects as a kind of tax, a payment one team had to make in support of the overall forward progress of the company. We tried to minimize such intrusions but could not avoid them altogether. Some teams, through no fault of their own, found themselves in a higher tax bracket than others. The Order Pipeline and Payments teams, for example, had to be involved in almost every new initiative, even though it wasn’t in their original charters.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
In a company known for its inventiveness, separable, single-threaded leadership has been one of Amazon’s most useful inventions. We discuss it in chapter three. This is the organizational strategy that minimizes the drag on efficiency created by intra-organizational dependencies. The basic premise is, for each initiative or project, there is a single leader whose focus is that project and that project alone, and that leader oversees teams of people whose attention is similarly focused on that one project.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
Kevin, that’s just self-defeating crap. From the first day I joined Deloitte—that’s a pretty large consulting firm, right?—I went out of my way to take on projects no one wanted and initiated projects no one had thought of doing. I e-mailed my boss, and sometimes my boss’s boss, ideas. And I did it almost every day. What was the worst thing that could happen? I’d get fired from a job I didn’t like anyway. Alternatively, I’d make the effort to create the job—regardless of where it was—that I thought would make me happy.
Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time)
When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
The Wall as a piece represents large amount of material spread across a range of media: the record, the concerts – enhanced with film, stage effects an props – and a movie. This has been Roger’s intention from the outset. He had already shown his fondness for exploring the possibilities of multimedia, but the Wall took things considerable further. The whole project also covered a large amount of time, a period of work that actually lasted from mid-1978, when Roger was creating the initial version, until 1982, with the release of the movie.
Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd)
Clinton did not stop there. Determined to prove how “tough” he could be on “them,” Clinton also made it easier for federally assisted public housing projects to exclude anyone with a criminal history—an extraordinarily harsh step in the midst of a drug war aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In his announcement of the “One Strike and You’re Out” Initiative, Clinton explained: “From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.”102 The new rule promised to be “the toughest admission and eviction policy that HUD has implemented.”103
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Having to remind your partner to do something doesn’t take that something off your list. It adds to it. And what’s more, reminding is often unfairly characterized as nagging. (Almost every man interviewed in connection with this project said nagging is what they hate most about being married, but they also admit that they wait for their wives to tell them what to do at home.) It’s not a partnership if only one of you is running the show, which means making the important distinction between delegating tasks and handing off ownership of a task. Ownership belongs to the person who first off remembers to plan, then plans, and then follows through on every aspect of executing the plan and completing the task without reminders. A survey conducted by Bright Horizons—an on-site corporate childcare provider—found that 86 percent of working mothers say they handle the majority of family and household responsibilities, “not just making appointments, but also driving to them and mentally calendaring who needs to be where, and when.” In order to save us from big-time burnout, we need our partners to be more than helpers who carry out instructions that we’ve taken time and energy to think through (and then who blame us when things fall through the cracks). We need our partners to take the lead by consistently picking up a task, or “card”—week after week—and completely taking it off our mental to-do list by doing every aspect of what the card requires. Otherwise we still worry about whether the task is being done as we would do it, or done fully, or done at all—which leaves us still shouldering the mental and emotional load for the “help” or the “favor” we had to ask for. But how do we get our partners to take that initiative and own every aspect of a household or childcare responsibility without being (nudge, nudge) told what to do? Or, to simply figure it out?
Eve Rodsky (Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live))
One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions
Daniel Kahneman
Another Damasio patient, “Elliot,” was a successful husband, father, and businessman until undergoing brain surgery on a tumor. The surgery damaged his frontal lobe and thereby affected his ability to carry through on plans. He would embark on a project only to lose sight of his goal in doing so. For example, asked to sort documents, he would go overboard: “He was likely, all of a sudden, to turn from the sorting task he had initiated to reading one of those papers carefully and intelligently, and to spend an entire day doing so. Or he might spend a whole afternoon deliberating on which principle of categorization should be applied.
William B. Irvine (On Desire: Why We Want What We Want)
He must have faltered at the thought of how to balance the reflections that bounce from one figure to another and to control the myriad variables of light, shade, and emotions for such a multitude,” according to the art historian Francesca Fiorani. “Unlike any other artist, he could not ignore an optical problem.”34 It was an unnerving set of iterative tasks. All thirty characters had to reflect light and project shade that would influence, and be influenced by, the light and shadows of those around them. They also had to initiate and reflect emotions, which in turn affected, and were affected by, the emotions emanating from those around them.
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo da Vinci)
a.m. Max Shepherd knew few people who loved working the graveyard shift. But for him, working nights at the institute was about as plum a job as he could have wished for. Just a year into his doctoral program, he had landed a position as research assistant to Dr. Elliot Seaborne, the noted seismologist currently heading up the Lunar Seismology Initiative. A NASA-sponsored project, the LSI was yet another component of the agency’s increasing desire to mount a return to the Moon. A new series of lunar missions had been talked about since Shepherd had been in grammar school. But since NASA had scrapped its shuttle program back in 2011, the Moon had become
Christopher Mari (Ocean of Storms)
The Renaissance of Ba Ga Mohlala ********** HISTORY IN MOTION AND HISTORY IN THE MAKING - RECLAIMING OUR GLORY - OUR PLACE UNDER THE SUN The Book is the snapshot of Ba Ga Mohlala, the past, the present and the future . The history part of the book will help to locate and know Ba Ga Mohlala in, and in relation to Afican and South African History. The present will give on overview or a snapshot of of Ba Ga Ga Mohlala at this present moment, their development, growth, initiatives and milestones. The future will give you Ga Mohlala future perspective, their burning desires and plans to achieve their strategic objectives. The Book was published in December 2017. THIS BOOK WAS PROUDLY PUBLISHED BY BANERENG PROJECTS AND CONSULTING.
Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala
It’s time to recognize that a broad, multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, multinational initiative, guided by a broader, more integrated and unified perspective, should be playing a central role in guiding our scientific agenda in addressing this issue and informing policy. We need a broad and more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantitative, predictive, mechanistic theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the “natural” environment—a framework I call a grand unified theory of sustainability. It’s time to initiate a massive international Manhattan-style project or Apollo-style program dedicated to addressing global sustainability in an integrated, systemic sense.1
Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies)
This embarrassing episode remains one of the most instructive experiences of my professional life. I eventually learned three lessons from it. The first was immediately apparent: I had stumbled onto a distinction between two profoundly different approaches to forecasting, which Amos and I later labeled the inside view and the outside view. The second lesson was that our initial forecasts of about two years for the completion of the project exhibited a planning fallacy. Our estimates were closer to a best-case scenario than to a realistic assessment. I was slower to accept the third lesson, which I call irrational perseverance: the folly we displayed that day in failing to abandon the project. Facing a choice, we gave up rationality rather than give up the enterprise.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite. The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our “soul”, and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all. Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives: -our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and -the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them.
Haroutioun Bochnakian (The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity)
The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20 Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition. Both of these are crucial skills for discovering your voice. It’s completely understandable if you’re thinking, “But wait—I hardly have time to breathe, and now you want me to cram something else into my schedule, just for my own enjoyment?” It’s true that every decision about where we spend our time has an opportunity cost, and dedicating time to Unnecessary Creation seems like a remarkably inefficient choice. In truth, it is inefficient. Consider, however, the opportunity cost of spending your life only on pragmatics. You dedicate your time to pleasing everyone else and delivering on their expectations, but you never get around to discovering your deeper aptitudes and creative capacities. Nothing is worth that.
Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
what. Content strategy asks these questions of stakeholders and clients: Why are we doing this? What are we hoping to accomplish, change, or encourage? How will we measure the success of this initiative and the content in it? What measurements of success or metrics do we need to monitor to know if we are successful? How will we ensure the web remains a priority? What do we need to change in resources, staffing, and budgets to maintain the value of communication within and from the organization? What are we trying to communicate? What's the hierarchy of that messaging? This isn't Sophie's Choice, but when you start prioritizing features on a homepage and allocating budget to your list of features and content needs, get ready to make some tough calls. What content types best meet the needs of our target audience and their changing, multiple contexts? What content types best fit the skills of our
Margot Bloomstein (Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project)
The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War—and the pre-war decades and the war before that—forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option—to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s—was initially very popular in both parts of Europe (a reminder that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears). In eastern Europe some sort of radical transformation was unavoidable. There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough. In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to American aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda—and of Communism—faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn—indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn—had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) that western Europe took the new path with which we are now familiar. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We’re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don’t get the legal help they need. We’re trying to help people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We’re trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We’re trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors—
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
Yes, ma’am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we’re trying to help people on death row. We’re trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We’re trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don’t get the legal help they need. We’re trying to help people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system. We’re trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We’re trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors—
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
But, the Hermetic teaching does not imply a real duality — THE ALL is ONE — the Two Aspects are merely aspects of manifestation. The teaching is that The Masculine Principle manifested by THE ALL stands, in a way, apart from the actual mental creation of the Universe. It projects its Will toward the Feminine Principle (which may be called "Nature") whereupon the latter begins the actual work of the evolution of the Universe, from simple "centres of activity" on to man, and then on and on still higher, all according to well-established and firmly enforced Laws of Nature. If you prefer the old figures of thought, you may think of the Masculine Principle as GOD, the Father, and of the Feminine Principle as NATURE, the Universal Mother, from whose womb) all things have been born. This is more than a mere poetic figure of speech — it is an idea of the actual process of the creation of the Universe. But always remember, that THE ALL is but One, and that in its Infinite Mind the Universe is generated, created and exists.
Three Initiates (Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece)
Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than have all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than has any other one force. More than any other power in history it has impelled men to fight suffering, whether that suffering has come from disease, war or natural disasters. It has built thousands of hospitals, inspired the emergence of the nursing and medical professions, and furthered movement for public health and the relief and prevention of famine. Although explorations and conquests which were in part its outgrowth led to the enslavement of Africans for the plantations of the Americas, men and women whose consciences were awakened by Christianity and whose wills it nerved brought about the abolition of slavery (in England and America). Men and women similarly moved and sustained wrote into the laws of Spain and Portugal provisions to alleviate the ruthless exploitation of the Indians of the New World. Wars have often been waged in the name of Christianity. They have attained their most colossal dimensions through weapons and large–scale organization initiated in (nominal) Christendom. Yet from no other source have there come as many and as strong movements to eliminate or regulate war and to ease the suffering brought by war. From its first centuries, the Christian faith has caused many of its adherents to be uneasy about war. It has led minorities to refuse to have any part in it. It has impelled others to seek to limit war by defining what, in their judgment, from the Christian standpoint is a "just war." In the turbulent Middle Ages of Europe it gave rise to the Truce of God and the Peace of God. In a later era it was the main impulse in the formulation of international law. But for it, the League of Nations and the United Nations would not have been. By its name and symbol, the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross, bears witness to its Christian origin. The list might go on indefinitely. It includes many another humanitarian projects and movements, ideals in government, the reform of prisons and the emergence of criminology, great art and architecture, and outstanding literature.
Kenneth Scott Latourette
Besides increasing or decreasing the stimulation level of the environment, you can also achieve an optimal level of arousal by drinking beverages that have a direct impact on neocortical arousal.38 Alcohol, at least initially, has the effect of lowering arousal. After a couple of glasses of wine the extraverts are more likely to dip below the optimal arousal level, whereas their introverted friends, nudged closer to optimal arousal, may appear unexpectedly garrulous. Coffee, being a stimulant, has the opposite effect. After ingesting about two cups of coffee, extraverts carry out tasks more efficiently, whereas introverts perform less well. This deficit is magnified if the task they are engaged in is quantitative and if it is done under time pressure. For an introvert, an innocent couple of cups of coffee before a meeting may prove challenging, particularly if the purpose of the meeting is a rapid-fire discussion of budget projections, data analysis, or similar quantitative concerns. In the same meeting an extraverted colleague is likely to benefit from a caffeine kick that creates, in the eyes of the introverts, the illusion of competency.
Brian Little (Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being)
As America’s diplomats face budget cuts, China’s coffers are more flush with each passing year. Beijing has poured money into development projects, including a $1.4-trillion slate of infrastructure initiatives around the world that would dwarf the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation. Its spending on foreign assistance is still a fraction of the United States’, but the trend line is striking, with funding growing by an average of more than 20 percent annually since 2005. The rising superpower is making sure the world knows it. In one recent year, the US State Department spent $666 million on public diplomacy, aimed at winning hearts and minds abroad. While it’s difficult to know exactly what China spends on equivalent programs, one analysis put the value of its “external propaganda” programs at about $10 billion a year. In international organizations, Beijing looms large behind a retreating Washington, DC. As the US proposes cuts to its UN spending, China has become the second-largest funder of UN peacekeeping missions. It now has more peacekeepers in conflicts around the world than the four other permanent Security Council members combined. The move is pragmatic: Beijing gets more influence, and plum appointments in the United Nations’ governing bodies.
Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman
John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
NATO paper: Modification of Tropospheric Propagation Conditions, detailed how the atmosphere could be modified to absorb electromagnetic radiation by spraying polymers behind high flying aircraft.  Absorbing microwaves transmitted by HAARP and other atmospheric heaters linked from Puerto Rico, Germany and Russia, these artificial mirrors could heat the air, inducing changes in the weather.  U.S. Patent # 4253190 describes how a mirror made of “polyester resin” could be held aloft by the pressure exerted by electromagnetic radiation from a transmitter like HAARP.   A PhD polymer researcher who wishes to remain anonymous told researcher William Thomas that if HAARP’s frequency output is matched to Earth’s magnetic field, its tightly beamed energy could be imparted to molecules “artificially introduced into this region.” This highly reactive state could then “promote polymerization and the formation of   new compounds,” he explained. Adding magnetic iron oxide powder to polymers exuded by many high flying aircraft can foster the heat generation needed to modify the weather.  Radio frequency absorbing polymers such as Phillips Ryton F 5 PPS are sensitive in the 1 50 MHz regime, HAARP transmits between two and 10 MHz.                  HAARP's U.S. Air Force and Navy sponsors claim that their transmitter will eventually be able to produce 3.6 million watts of radio frequency power. But on page 185 of an October 1991 “Technical Memorandum 195” outlining projected HAARP tests, there is a call by the ionospheric effects division of the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory for HAARP to reach a peak power output of 100 billion watts. Commercial radio stations commonly broadcast at 50,000 watts.  Some hysterical reports state that HAARP type technologies will be used to initiate
Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
He missed the women he’d never get to sleep with. On the other side of the room, tantalizing at the next table, that miracle passing by the taqueria window giving serious wake. They wore too much make up or projected complex emotions onto small animals, smiled exactly so, took his side when no one else would, listened when no one else cared to. They were old money or fretted over ludicrously improbable economic disasters, teetotaled or drank like sailors, pecked like baby birds at his lips or ate him up greedily. They carried slim vocabularies or stooped to conquer in the wordsmith board games he never got the hang of. They were all gone, these faceless unknowables his life’s curator had been saving for just the right moment, to impart a lesson he’d probably never learn. He missed pussies that were raring to go when he slipped a hand beneath the elastic rim of the night-out underwear and he missed tentative but coaxable recesses, stubbled armpits and whorled ankle coins, birthmarks on the ass shaped like Ohio, said resemblance he had to be informed of because he didn’t know what Ohio look like. The size. They were sweet-eyed or sad-eyed or so successful in commanding their inner turbulence so that he could not see the shadows. Flaking toenail polish and the passing remark about the scent of a nouveau cream that initiated a monologue about its provenance, special ingredients, magic powers, and dominance over all the other creams. The alien dent impressed by a freshly removed bra strap, a garment fancy or not fancy but unleashing big or small breasts either way. He liked big breasts and he liked small breasts; small breasts were just another way of doing breasts. Brains a plus but negotiable. Especially at 3:00am, downtown. A fine fur tracing an earlobe, moles at exactly the right spot, imperfections in their divine coordination. He missed the dead he’d never lose himself in, be surprised by, disappointed in.
Colson Whitehead (Zone One)
Construction finally began that winter, and by early 1974 Syncrude’s Mildred Lake site bustled with 1,500 construction workers. But the deal remained tentative as cost estimates grew beyond the initial $1.5 billion to $2 billion or more and the federal government’s new budget arrived with punitive new taxes for oil and gas exports. Then, in the first week of December, one of the Syncrude partners, Atlantic Richfield, summarily quit the consortium, leaving a 30 percent hole in its financing. A mad scramble ensued in search of a solution. Phone calls pinged back and forth between government officials in Edmonton and Ottawa. Finally, on the morning of February 3, 1975, executives from the Syn-crude partner companies and cabinet ministers from the Alberta, Ontario and federal governments met without fanfare and outside the media’s brightest spotlights at an airport hotel in Winnipeg to negotiate a deal to save the project. Lougheed and Ontario premier Bill Davis both attended, along with their energy ministers. Federal mines minister Donald Macdonald represented Pierre Trudeau’s government, accompanied by Trudeau’s ambitious Treasury Board president, Jean Chrétien. Macdonald and Davis, both Upper Canadian patricians in the classic mould, were put off by Lougheed’s blunt style. By midday, the Albertans were convinced Macdonald would not be willing to compromise enough to reach a deal. Rumours in Lougheed’s camp after the fact had it that over lunch, Chrétien persuaded the mines minister to accept the offer on the table. Two days later, Chrétien rose in the House of Commons to announce that the federal government would be taking a 15 percent equity stake in the Syn-crude project, with Alberta owning 10 percent and Ontario the remaining 5 percent. In the coming years, it would be Lougheed, with his steadfast support and multimillion-dollar investments in SAGD, who would be seen as the Patch’s great public sector champion. But it was Chrétien, “the little guy from Shawinigan,” whose backroom deal-making skills had saved Syncrude
Chris Turner (The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands)
How to choose a best website development company RNS IT Solutions is the best Software development company. When choosing a development company for your website, it is very important not only to look at the price, but also the quality of the work you hope to obtain and it is that a good Web of quality, realized of the hand of good engineers who have been working in the sector for years, can make you recover the investment in a short time and generate great benefits in the long term. Of course, to have a quality website the initial investment will probably be greater than you expect and maybe right now you think that the web you need does not require much quality, or a lot of work, but stop to think for a moment and consider the possibility that you are totally wrong, because that may depend on the future of your company as well as Web Development company India.The image that you want to transmit to the clients of the same one and the investment that you will have to do in the web once developed. With all this I do not mean that you have to ask for a loan from the bank to pay for the web. If the project you have in mind takes more work than you initially thought and the budget is out of your expectations, you can always limit and remove features that are dispensable. In this way you can publish the Web as soon as possible, so that once the initial investment is amortized, you can continue investing in adding those features that were left in the background. There are few Web Development Company In India hat right now could not survive, if they were not involved in the online world and it costs much less to make you a quality professional website, with a higher initial investment, to make you a website on which you have to invest, and then large amounts in development and consulting to correct deficiencies initially not contemplated. In the worst case, a bad development, may even force you to throw all the code of the web to the trash, to have to start from scratch. But what is quality of Web Development Services India? Let's see the characteristics that a website must have in order to be considered quality and professional: In any development project, meetings are always held to develop an initial analysis, gathering all the requirements and objectives of the web that the client wants. At this point you should have a proactive attitude, proposing functionalities that could be interesting or alternative ideas that we know can generate good results.
RNSITSOLUTIONS.COM
the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
To their surprise, they found that dopamine actively regulates both the formation and the forgetting of new memories. In the process of creating new memories, the dCA1 receptor was activated. By contrast, forgetting was initiated by the activation of the DAMB receptor. Previously, it was thought that forgetting might be simply the degradation of memories with time, which happens passively by itself. This new study shows that forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine. To prove their point, they showed that by interfering with the action of the dCA1 and DAMB receptors, they could, at will, increase or decrease the ability of fruit flies to remember and forget. A mutation in the dCA1 receptor, for example, impaired the ability of the fruit flies to remember. A mutation in the DAMB receptor decreased their ability to forget. The researchers speculate that this effect, in turn, may be partially responsible for savants’ skills. Perhaps there is a deficiency in their ability to forget. One of the graduate students involved in the study, Jacob Berry, says, “Savants have a high capacity for memory. But maybe it isn’t memory that gives them this capacity; maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This might also be the strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory—what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as a cognitive enhancers?” Assuming that this result holds up in human experiments as well, it could encourage scientists to develop new drugs and neurotransmitters that are able to dampen the forgetting process. One might thus be able to selectively turn on photographic memories when needed by neutralizing the forgetting process. In this way, we wouldn’t have the continuous overflow of extraneous, useless information, which hinders the thinking of people with savant syndrome. What is also exciting is the possibility that the BRAIN project, which is being championed by the Obama administration, might be able to identify the specific pathways involved with acquired savant syndrome. Transcranial magnetic fields are still too crude to pin down the handful of neurons that may be involved. But using nanoprobes and the latest in scanning technologies, the BRAIN project might be able to isolate the precise neural pathways that make possible photographic memory and incredible computational, artistic, and musical skills. Billions of research dollars will be channeled into identifying the specific neural pathways involved with mental disease and other afflictions of the brain, and the secret of savant skills may be revealed in the process. Then it might be possible to take normal individuals and make savants out of them. This has happened many times in the past because of random accidents. In the future, this may become a precise medical process.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.
Lyssa Adkins (Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition)
Properly Defining a Project's Initiation: Projects start going bad at inception --- the customer's inception... The problem is that these are initiatives rather than projects. Managers often fail to include the implementation professionals in these early meetings....stays close to the intended baseline... people are enamored with technology...accept the limited information provided by sales material as definitive and ignore the hidden complexities in the implementation. As a result, during the inception of a project, customers use buzzwords and concepts they believe they understand and make assumptions about the idea's implementation.
Todd C. Williams
Properly Defining a Project's initiation: Experience teaches that when the customer anticipates something without specifically requesting it, and it is missing from the exclusion list while other nonrequested items are included, the customer argues that the anticipated item is in scope.
Todd C. Williams (Rescue the Problem Project: A Complete Guide to Identifying, Preventing, and Recovering from Project Failure)