Quality Testing Quotes

Dignity will only happen when you realize that having someone in your life doesn’t validate your worth.

Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality, a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices. It is a commitment that demands that you deal with your lust, your greed, your pride, your power, your desire to control, your temper, your patience, and every area of temptation that the Bible clearly talks about. It demands the quality of commitment that Jesus demonstrates in His relationship to us.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

We can't manipulate people into swallowing our boundaries by sugarcoating them. Boundaries are a "litmus test" for the quality of our relationships. Those people in our lives who can respect our boundaries will love our wills, our opinions, our separateness. Those who can't respect our boundaries are telling us that they don't love our nos. They only love our yeses, our compliance. "I only like it when you do what I want.

I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering. “But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action. “The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. “The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. “It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Taking time to relax every day, spending quality time with friends, and practicing mindfulness are some of the tried and tested ways of developing self-compassion.

My definition of democracy is - A form and a method of Government whereby revolutionary changes in the social life are brought about without bloodshed. That is the real test. It is perhaps the severest test. But when you are judging the quality of the material you must put it to the severest test.

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test to the quality of a nation's civilization.

The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention.

Software testing is a sport like hunting, it's bughunting.

For the ancient Greeks, the ultimate test of the educational system was the moral and political quality of the students that it produced

Courage is God's way of testing the virtues you profess to have and your level of commitment to everything you think you are.

A man worth being with is one… That never lies to you Is kind to people that have hurt him A person that respects another’s life That has manners and shows people respect That goes out of his way to help people That feels every person, no matter how difficult, deserves compassion Who believes you are the most beautiful person he has ever met Who brags about your accomplishments with pride Who talks to you about anything and everything because no bad news will make him love you less That is a peacemaker That will see you through illness Who keeps his promises Who doesn’t blame others, but finds the good in them That raises you up and motivates you to reach for the stars That doesn’t need fame, money or anything materialistic to be happy That is gentle and patient with children Who won’t let you lie to yourself; he tells you what you need to hear, in order to help you grow Who lives what he says he believes in Who doesn’t hold a grudge or hold onto the past Who doesn’t ask his family members to deliberately hurt people that have hurt him Who will run with your dreams That makes you laugh at the world and yourself Who forgives and is quick to apologize Who doesn’t betray you by having inappropriate conversations with other women Who doesn’t react when he is angry, decides when he is sad or keep promises he doesn’t plan to keep Who takes his children’s spiritual life very seriously and teaches by example Who never seeks revenge or would ever put another person down Who communicates to solve problems Who doesn’t play games or passive aggressively ignores people to hurt them Who is real and doesn’t pretend to be something he is not Who has the power to free you from yourself through his positive outlook Who has a deep respect for women and treats them like a daughter of God Who doesn’t have an ego or believes he is better than anyone Who is labeled constantly by people as the nicest person they have ever met Who works hard to provide for the family Who doesn’t feel the need to drink alcohol to have a good time, smoke or do drugs Who doesn't have to hang out a bar with his friends, but would rather spend his time with his family Who is morally free from sin Who sees your potential to be great Who doesn't think a woman's place has to be in the home; he supports your life mission, where ever that takes you Who is a gentleman Who is honest and lives with integrity Who never discusses your private business with anyone Who will protect his family Who forgives, forgets, repairs and restores When you find a man that possesses these traits then all the little things you don’t have in common don’t matter. This is the type of man worth being grateful for.

If I want to know my light side, my best self, all I have to do is look in the outer world and look for who I love, who turns me on, who excites me and distinguish the qualities I am seeing in them, and in doing that I will find the best expression of myself. Debbie Ford

Good clothes, when put to the test, survive a change in fortune, as a Roman arch survives the luxury of departed empire.

Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.

And so the test of whether or not we have really gotten the point of the Bible would then be the quality of love that we show.

Quality must be enforced, otherwise it won't happen. We programmers must be required to write tests, otherwise we won't do it.

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software-development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find.

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

The city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason.

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently—possibly almost invariably—analytical and impersonal test will show that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

In his important social psychological experiments with students, Asch found out in simple tests that there was a yielding toward an ERRING MAJORITY opinion in more than a third of his test persons, and 75 percent of subjects experimented upon agreed with the majority in varying degrees. In many persons the weight of authority is more important than the quality of the authority.

The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.

In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.

Influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests.

Nothing so tests the quality of our minds as our use and choice of adjectives. When people know all your adjectives they have come to the end of your treasures.

If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others.

Abelman’s Dry Goods Kansas City, Missouri U.S.A. Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.: We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned. “Why? Why?” You are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview. The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter-length trousers a byword of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.) We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders. Yours in anger, Gus Levy, Pres.

Consider your time valuable and manage it effectively and efficiently. Don’t waste it. Produce high-quality products that will inspire others. Make it a point of duty to add value to your work during the progress. Don’t settle to less; make it your best, strive to win the test!

[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine pampering. Why do I say that? If barons wish to be honoured as they deserve, they spend very little time in their manors and on their own lands. Going to war, attending their prince's court, and traveling are the three primary duties of such a lord. So the lady, his companion, must represent him at home during his absences. Although her husband is served by bailiffs, provosts, rent collectors, and land governors, she must govern them all. To do this according to her right she must conduct herself with such wisdom that she will be both feared and loved. As we have said before, the best possible fear comes from love. When wronged, her men must be able to turn to her for refuge. She must be so skilled and flexible that in each case she can respond suitably. Therefore, she must be knowledgeable in the mores of her locality and instructed in its usages, rights, and customs. She must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient subjects. With the counsellors of her lord and with the advice of elder wise men, she ought to work directly with her people. No one should ever be able to say of her that she acts merely to have her own way. Again, she should have a man's heart. She must know the laws of arms and all things pertaining to warfare, ever prepared to command her men if there is need of it. She has to know both assault and defence tactics to insure that her fortresses are well defended, if she has any expectation of attack or believes she must initiate military action. Testing her men, she will discover their qualities of courage and determination before overly trusting them. She must know the number and strength of her men to gauge accurately her resources, so that she never will have to trust vain or feeble promises. Calculating what force she is capable of providing before her lord arrives with reinforcements, she also must know the financial resources she could call upon to sustain military action. She should avoid oppressing her men, since this is the surest way to incur their hatred. She can best cultivate their loyalty by speaking boldly and consistently to them, according to her council, not giving one reason today and another tomorrow. Speaking words of good courage to her men-at-arms as well as to her other retainers, she will urge them to loyalty and their best efforts.

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.

Real progress in the Christian life is not gauged by our knowledge of scripture, our church attendance, time in prayer, or even our witnessing (although it isn't less than these things) Maturity in the Christian life is measured by only one test: how much closer to his character have we become? the result of the Spirit's work is more not more activity. No, the results of his work are in in our quality of life, they are "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can’t take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can’t Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can’t buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away.

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or “mental worth.” In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created “does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.” Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. “Some recent thinkers,” he said, “[have affirmed] that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing.

Sixteenth-century litigation combined the qualities of tedium, hardship, brutality, and injustice that tested character and endurance, with the element of pure chance that appealed to the gambler, the fear of defeat and ruin, and the hope of victory and humiliation of the enemy. It had everything that war can offer except the delights of shedding blood.

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

there is an almost linear relationship between the methodological quality of a homeopathy trial and the result it gives. The worse the study—which is to say, the less it is a “fair test”—the more likely it is to find that homeopathy is better than placebo.

(If God wills it)... the number of angels... may be infinite... Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. Once upon a time, atoms did not exist. There was no Dalton, no Rutherford. Albert Einstein was nothing more than a theorist, but you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that things invisible exist and bear great power. The power to destroy. Or the power to create... Atoms and angels, reason and faith... One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all... And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angel's exist in open hearts, if we have but faith.

Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. ‘Automatic warfare’ cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance. (...)The advent of ‘automatic warfare’ should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations’ claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people’s fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant.

You can always test the quality of religious teaching by the enthusiastic reception it receives from unsaved men. If the natural man receives it enthusiastically, it is not of the Spirit of God. Paul says plainly that the natural man cannot know spiritual things. To him, spiritual things are plain foolishness (see 1 Cor. 2:14).

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

I had come to New York when I was seventeen because—and maybe I was not fully conscious of this then—the city had seemed like a great place to discover who you are. It just seemed that there was a lot to experience here, as if all you had to do was show up and the city would take care of the rest, making sure you got the education, the maturing, the wising-up you needed. Its crowds, the noise, the endlessness of it all, the perpetual motion, felt exciting then—revealing—just the deep end I needed to jump into. There is something unique about New York, some quality, some matchless, pertinent combination of promise and despair, wizardry and counterfeit, abundance and depletion, that stimulates and allows for a reckoning to occur—maybe even forces it. The city pulls back the curtain on who you are; it tests you and shows you what you are made of in a way that has become iconic in our popular culture, and with good reason. In thirteen years, the city has kicked my ass and made me strong and served me well.

we face the paradox of abundance: Quantity undermines the quality of our engagement. With such a vast and wonderful library spread out before us, we often skim books or read just the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.

Oh, Colin." She dabbed a fingertip to his sticky abdomen, then rubbed her fingers together, as though testing the quality of his seed. "That was fascinating.

Never still believe that your browser has the best security quality Even the earth’s best browser is lately affected with CVE 2019-5786

A blanket could be used to improve the quality of your trumpet playing. Wrap the blanket tightly around and in the horn section before you start blowing, and my ears will thank you.


Thus growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears to be one. It is the pragmatic test suggested by William James, quoting Jesus: “By their fruits you shall know them.” The fruit is love. Indeed, such fruit is the purpose of the Christian life.

As we’ve gone along, I’ve pointed out that a warm childhood relationship with his mother—not maternal education—was significantly related to a man’s verbal test scores, to high salary, to class rank at Harvard, and to military rank at the end of World War II. At the men’s twenty-fifth reunion, it looked, to my surprise, as though the quality of a man’s relationship with his mother had little effect on overall midlife adjustment. However, forty-five years later, to my surprise again, the data suggested that there was a significant positive correlation between the quality of one’s maternal relationship and the absence of cognitive decline. At age ninety, 33 percent of the men with poor maternal relationships, and only 13 percent of men with warm relationships, suffered from dementia.

And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them. They must grow to be knowledgeable, they must learn to be critical. As soon as they begin to spoil something for you ask them why a thing is ugly, demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous. But do not give in, request arguments, and act with this kind of attentiveness and consistency every single time, and the day will come when instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers--perhaps the canniest of all those at work on the building of your life.

When I made it to the living room, I wasn’t surprised to see that the only one actually taking a practice GED was Dean. Lia was filing her nails. Sloane appeared to be constructing some kind of catapult out of pencils and rubber bands. Lia caught sight of me first. “Good morning, sunshine,” she said. “I’m no Michael, but based on the expression on your face, I’m guessing you’ve been spending some quality time with the lovely Agent Sterling.” Lia beamed at me. “Isn’t she the best?” The eerie thing about Lia was that she could make anything sound genuine. Lia wasn’t fond of the FBI in general, and she was the type to flout rules based on principle alone, but even knowing her enthusiasm was feigned, I couldn’t see through it. “There’s something about that Agent Sterling that just makes me want to listen to what she has to say,” Lia continued earnestly. “I think we might be soul mates.” Dean snorted, but didn’t look up from his practice test. Sloane set off her catapult, and I had to duck to keep from taking a pencil to the forehead.

This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda "aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction--rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore--will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates--and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities.

Slow rocking increased the depth of deep sleep, boosted the quality of slow brainwaves, and more than doubled the number of sleep spindles. It is not yet known whether these sway-induced sleep changes enhance memory, since the researchers did not perform any such tests with their participants. Nevertheless, the findings offer a scientific explanation for the ancient practice of rocking a child back and forth in one’s arms, or in a crib, inducing a deep sleep.

He was doing well too: junior quality control at Dimple Robotics, testing the Empathy Module in the automated Customer Fulfillment models. People didn’t just want their groceries bagged, he used to explain to Charmaine: they wanted a total shopping experience, and that included a smile. Smiles were hard; they could turn into grimaces or leers, but if you got a smile right, they’d spend extra for it. Amazing to remember, now, what people would once spend extra for.

The job of a tester is to prove that the software is bug free, while it has to be the other way around: The job of a tester is to prove that the software is broken. The better testers are doing their jobs, the more bugs they manage to find and report.

The job of tests, and the people that develop and runs tests, is to prevent defects, not to find them. A quality assurance organization should champion processes that build quality into the code from the start rather than test quality in later. This is not to say that verification is unnecessary. Final verification is a good idea. It’s just that finding defects should be the exception, not the rule, during verification. If verification routinely triggers test-and-fix cycles, then the development process is defective.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you teach it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Question it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, as to why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you might find it perplexed and embarrassed, or even protesting. Do not give in, but require arguments, and behave this way, attentively and consistently, every single time, and the day will arrive when out of this destroyer will come to be one of your finest workers—perhaps the most ingenious of them all, that build your life.

I write them to improve my productivity as a programmer. Making the quality assurance department happy is just a side effect. Unit tests are highly localized. Each test class works within a single package. It tests the interfaces to other packages, but beyond that it assumes the rest just works. Functional tests are a different animal. They are written to ensure the software as a whole works. They provide quality assurance to the customer and don't care about programmer productivity. They should be developed by a different team, one who delights in finding bugs.

Einstein was filled with good humor and sagacity, both qualities lacking in Gödel, whose intense logic sometimes overwhelmed common sense. This was on glorious display when Gödel decided to become a U.S. citizen in 1947. He took his preparation for the exam very seriously, studied the Constitution carefully, and (as might be expected by the formulator of the incompleteness theory) found what he believed was a logical flaw. There was an internal inconsistency, he insisted, that could allow the entire government to degenerate into tyranny. Concerned, Einstein decided to accompany — or chaperone — Gödel on his visit to Trenton to take the citizenship test, which was to be administered by the same judge who had done so for Einstein. On the drive, he and a third friend tried to distract Gödel and dissuade him from mentioning this perceived flaw, but to no avail. When the judge asked him about the constitution, Gödel launched into his proof that the internal inconsistency made a dictatorship possible. Fortunately, the judge, who by now cherished his connection to Einstein, cut Gödel off. ‘You needn’t go into all that,’ he said, and Gödel’s citizenship was saved.

I find God not in the tests that life imposes on us but in the ability of ordinary people to rise to the challenge, to find within themselves qualities of soul, qualities of courage they did not know they had until the day they needed them. God does not send the problem, the illness, the accident, the hurricane, and God does not take them away when we find the right words and rituals with which to beseech Him. Rather, God sends us strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away. Let

They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer. He had a distinctive style, shooting semi-starved, semi-naked women in strange, unflattering angles. Since his death, the price of his photographs has increased astronomically. I find his stuff rather slick and shallow, to be honest. It has none of the visceral quality of Alicia’s best work. I don’t know enough about art to say whether Alicia Berenson will stand the test of time as a painter. Her talent will always be overshadowed by her notoriety, so it’s hard to be objective. And you might well accuse me of being biased. All I can offer is my opinion, for what it’s worth. And to me, Alicia was a kind of genius. Apart from her technical skill, her paintings have an uncanny ability to grab your attention—by the throat, almost—and hold it in a viselike grip

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

The age-old trick of transfer pricing Taking advantage of the fact that they operate in countries with different tax rates, TNCs [transnational corporations] have their subsidiaries over-charge or under-charge each other – sometimes grossly – so that profits are highest in those subsidiaries operating in countries with the lowest corporate tax rates. In this way, their global post-tax profit is maximized. A 2005 report by Christian Aid, the development charity, documents cases of under-priced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528 and over-priced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896 and French wrenches at $1,089. The Starbucks and Google cases were different from those examples only in that they mainly involved ‘intangible assets’, such as brand licensing fees, patent royalties, interest charges on loans and in-house consultancy (e.g., coffee quality testing, store design), but the principle involved was the same. When TNCs evade taxes through transfer pricing, they use but do not pay for the collective productive inputs financed by tax revenue, such as infrastructure, education and R&D. This means that the host economy is effectively subsidizing TNCs.

Tests are sometimes mistaken with quality assurance. These two notions are not identical: 1) quality assurance ensures that the organization's processes are implemented and applied correctly; 2) testing identifies defects and failures, and provides information on the software and the risks associated with their release to the market

And of a superior quality—as demonstrated by an unnamed “literary test subject” who, in July 1903, while living in a hotel in Washington, D.C., subsisted on a glass of milk and four Fletcherized corn muffins a day. It was a maximally efficient scenario. At the end of eight days, he had produced sixty-four thousand words, and just one BM.

I think most persons who shall have tested it will accept this as the central point of the illumination: That sanity is not the basic quality of intelligence, but is a mere condition which is variable, and like the humming of a wheel, goes up or down the musical gamut according to a physical activity; and that only in sanity is formal or contrasting thought, while the naked life is realized only outside of sanity altogether; and it is the instant contrast of this ‘tasteless water of souls’ with formal thought as we ‘come to that leaves in the patient an astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and a common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the absurd are of equal dignity.

Roney (2003) hypothesized that mere exposure to attractive women would activate cognitive adaptations in men designed to embody the qualities that women want in a mate. Specifically, he predicted that exposure to young attractive women would (1) increase the importance men place on their own financial success, (2) experience feeling more ambitious, and (3) produce self-descriptions that correspond to what women want. Using a cover story to disguise the purpose of the study, Roney had one group of men rate the effectiveness of advertisements containing young, attractive models and another group of men rate the effectiveness of ads containing older, less-attractive models. Following this exposure, the men responded to the key measures to test his hypotheses.

She’s also showing us a deeper truth about spiritual life: that if we’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices, we can have it all. We can have enlightenment and intimacy together. We can know our transcendent bliss-self, and we can realize that bliss in passionate relationship. The secret Parvati shows us is that the relational form of self-realization requires just as much conscious effort as to realize the transcendent self. Both paths begin with self-cultivation. Parvati has realized that she can’t “have” Shiva unless she cultivates in herself the qualities of stillness, stamina, and devotion. To embody love requires absolute commitment, radical courage, and rigorous self-cleansing. The great desire has to be separated from smaller desires and tested in its own fire.

I often wonder if the past looks better to people because they hate the present so much or if it looks better because it was better. Expressions like “the good ole days” implied that life used to be of a higher quality than it is now, but I think everything looks better in retrospect. After all, it’s not like we get the chance to go back and relive it knowing what we know now and test that theory.

Sure, I told him to fuck himself and yes, I paid for it dearly (ruptured spleen). But after my recovery and given the time to reflect, I have a better understanding of who I am penning this for. Not just for the parole board. Not just for wronged Chinese people, not for racist whites, not for my prison therapy group, not for Manny or Jaynuss, not for Momma, not for my once-again estranged father, not even for Lene (though I hope and, in weaker moments, pray she will read this one day), but for others, like myself. Those who lack foresight. Those often overwhelmed by the present. Those ignorant of and indifferent to the past. Those whose worst qualities come to the surface when tested. Those who are fertile ground for dubious moral judgment. Those who feel, in some mysterious but common sense, unmoored.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

But no matter how strenuously everyone denies it, race-based hiring inevitably means lower standards. As Americans begin to wake up to the poor quality of their schools, a few states have begun to test teachers to see if they are up to snuff. Teachers’ unions resist this for obvious reasons, as do “civil rights” organizations. In the California teachers’ examination in 1983, 76 percent of the white teachers passed, but only 26 percent of the black teachers did. In a Florida exam the same year, 90 percent of whites but only 35 percent of blacks passed.772* In the case of the National Teachers’ Examination, 84 percent of whites passed it but only 33 percent of blacks.773 Are lower standards a legitimate price to pay for “role models”? Even if black children were somehow helped by this, it is difficult to see what good such role models can do for white children.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

And criticism - what place is that to have in our culture? Well, I think that the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at all times, and upon all subjects: C'EST UN GRAND AVANTAGE DE N'AVOIR RIEN FAIT, MAIS IL NE FAUT PAS EN ABUSER. It is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any knowledge of the quality of created things. You have listened to PATIENCE for a hundred nights and you have heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert. As little should you judge of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that dances in the beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take your critic for any sane test of art. For the artists, like the Greek gods, are revealed only to one another, as Emerson says somewhere; their real value and place time only can show. In this respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies with them. Art can never have any other claim but her own perfection: it is for the critic to create for art the social aim, too, by teaching the people the spirit in which they are to approach all artistic work, the love they are to give it, the lesson they are to draw from it.

She had, Emma decided, a very particular beauty about her, a quality that required more than the possession of conventionally attractive features. Good looks could be a cliché, which meant that those who satisfied the normal criteria of beauty could fail its more subtle tests. Thus it was that those with very regular features could just miss being beautiful because they lacked some tiny human imperfection, some irregularity that imparted to their appearance the poignancy, the reminder of ordinary humanity, on which real beauty depended. It was quite possible to be too perfect, and end up being plastic, as Hollywood stars so often were, with their well-placed curves or sculpted chins. The heart would not stop at such features, whereas it might well do so when a snub nose, or one not quite dead-center, or ears that were just slightly too large, were combined with eyes that seem to reflect and enhance the light, or with lips that formed a tantalizing bow, or with perfectly unblemished skin.

Regarding a woman, for example, those men who are more modest consider the mere use of the body and sexual gratification a sufficient and satisfying sign of “having,” of possession. Another type, with a more suspicious and demanding thirst for possession, sees the “question mark,” the illusory quality of such “having” and wants subtler tests, above all in order to know whether the woman does not only give herself to him but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to have: only then does she seem to him “possessed.” A third type, however, does not reach the end of his mistrust and desire for having even so: he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not possibly do this for a phantom of him. He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience, and spirituality. One type wants to possess a people—and all the higher arts of a Cagliostro and Catiline suit him to that purpose. Someone else, with a more subtle thirst for possession, says to himself: “One may not deceive where one wants to possess.” The idea that a mask of him might command the heart of the people irritates him and makes him impatient: “So I must let myself be known, and first must know myself.

Life of a software engineer sucks big time during project release. Every single team member contribution is very important. At times, we have to skip breakfast, lunch and even dinner, just to make sure the given ‘TASK’ is completed. Worst thing, that’s the time we get to hear wonderful F* words. It can be on conference calls or on emails, still we have to focus and deliver the end product to a client, without any compromise on quality. Actually, every techie should be saluted. We are the reason for the evolution of Information Technology. We innovate. We love artificial intelligence. We create bots and much more. We take you closer to books. Touch and feel it without the need of carrying a paperback. We created eBook and eBook reader app: it’s basically a code of a software engineer that process the file, keeps up-to-date of your reading history, and gives you a smoother reading experience. We are amazing people. We are more than a saint of those days. Next time, when you meet a software engineer, thank him/her for whatever code he/she developed, tested, designed or whatever he/she did!

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

Caring About The applications for “result apathy” are numerous: Improve your test-taking ability by not caring so much about your grade Be more relaxed in social situations by not caring so much about rejection Deliver a better speech by not caring about mistakes or imperfect delivery Become less anxious by not caring so much about your anxious thoughts and feelings (let them be and don’t fight them) Reduce your depression by caring less about how many negative thoughts you think Improve your productivity by caring less about how much (or what quality of) work you get done

Some people mistakenly refer to software defects as bugs. When called bugs, they seem like pesky things that should be swatted or even ignored. This trivializes a critical problem and fosters a wrong attitude. Thus, when an engineer says there are only a few bugs left in a program, the reaction is one of relief. *Supposed, however, that we called them time bombs instead of bugs.* Would you feel the same sense of relief if a programmer told you that he had thoroughly tested a program and there were only a few time bombs left in it? Just using a different term changes your attitude entirely.

When you read the Bible you are getting advice from a few priests and rabbis who lived in ancient Jerusalem. In contrast, when you listen to your feelings, you follow an algorithm that evolution has developed for millions of years, and that withstood the harshest quality-control tests of natural selection. Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment. Your feelings are not infallible, of course, but they are better than most other sources of guidance. For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world.

But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.

All is not lost, of course. There is still time if we judge teachers, students, and parents, hold them accountable on the same scale, if we truly test teachers, students, and parents, if we make everyone responsible for quality, if we insure that by the end of its sixth year every child in every country can live in libraries to learn almost by osmosis, then our drug, street-gang, rape, and murder scores will suffer themselves near zero. But the Fire Chief, in mid-novel, says it all, predicting the one-minute TV commercial with three images per second and no respite from the bombardment. Listen to him, know what he says, then go sit with your child, open a book, and turn the page.

At Dniepropetrovsk the Stalin regime had made great efforts in construction. We were at first impressed as we approached the suburbs of the city, where we saw outlined the large masonry blocks of the proletarian housing erected by the Soviets. Their lines were modern. The buildings were huge, and there were many of them. Undeniably, the Communist system had done something for the people. If the misery of the peasants was great, at least the worker seemed to have benefited from the new times. Still, it was necessary to visit and examine the buildings. We lived for six months in the Donets coal basin. We had plenty of time to test the conclusions that we had reached at the time of our entrance into Dniepropetrovsk. The buildings, so impressive from a distance, were just a gigantic hoax, intended to fool sightseers shepherded by Intourist [Soviet tourism agency] and the viewers of documentary films. Approaching those housing blocks you were sickened by the stench of mud and excrement that rose from the quagmires surrounding each of the buildings. Around them were neither sidewalks nor gravel nor paving stones. The Russian mud was everywhere, and everywhere the walls peeled and crumbled. The quality of the construction materials was of the lowest order. All the balconies had come loose, and already the cement stairways were worn and grooved, although the buildings were only a few years old.

All changed! Even the thing with the spades. All of a sudden the Negroes are out of the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that Negroes don’t take to LSD. The big thing with spades on the hip scene has always been the quality known as cool. And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead shield known as cool, like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don’t get much of a kick out of the nostalgia for the mud that all the white middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury like, piling into pads and living freaking basic, you understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn’t have, and slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle, just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being hung up on that old American plumbing & hygiene thing, you understand, even grokking the weird medieval vermin diseases that are flashing through every groin—crab lice! you know that thing, man, where you first look down at your lower belly and see these little scars, they look like, little scabs or something, tiny little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it starts crawling! Oh shit! and then they’re all crawling and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls and they’re alive. It’s like a jungle you never saw before,

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

Tessa and I started out with conflicting realities, found that when each of us reality-tested the other’s, it collapsed. But now, instead of mutually destroying each other’s realities, we are shaping a joint one between us. If two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too. This is the idios kosmos, the private dream, contrasted to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are beginning to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos - which scares us, its insubstantiality - and the more than mere vapor quality of the hallucination. Like sf, a third reality is formed halfway between.

DISTINCTIVENESS is the quality that causes a brand expression to stand out from competing messages. If it doesn’t stand out, the game is over. Distinctiveness often requires boldness, innovation, surprise, and clarity, not to mention courage on the part of the company. Is it clear enough and unique enough to pass the swap test? RELEVANCE asks whether a brand expression is appropriate for its goals. Does it pass the hand test? Does it grow naturally from the DNA of the brand? These are good questions, because it’s possible to be attention-getting without being relevant, like a girly calendar issued by an auto parts company. MEMORABILITY is the quality that allows people to recall the brand or brand expression when they need to. Testing for memorability is difficult, because memory proves itself over time. But testing can often reveal the presence of its drivers, such as emotion, surprise, distinctiveness, and relevance. EXTENDIBILITY measures how well a given brand expression will work across media, across cultural boundaries, and across message types. In other words, does it have legs? Can it be extended into a series if necessary? It’s surprisingly easy to create a one-off, single-use piece of communication that paints you into a corner. DEPTH is the ability to communicate with audiences on a number of levels. People, even those in the same brand tribe, connect to ideas in different ways. Some are drawn to information, others to style, and still others to emotion. There are many levels of depth, and skilled communicators are able to create connections at most of them.

Circuitry for self-confidence depends on a child’s ability to locate identity over observable behavior; this comes from growing up in a family that focuses more on what’s “inside” a child (enduring qualities, feelings, ideas) than what is “outside” (accomplishments, outcomes, labels). In regard to your child’s sports team, for example, inside stuff might be her effort in practice, her attitude when winning and losing, and her willingness to try new things; outside stuff might be her number of goals or home runs, or labels like “most valuable player.” When it comes to academics, inside stuff might be willingness to try a bonus math problem, spending time on studying, and showing enthusiasm about a subject; outside stuff might be a grade, a test score, or a label like “smartest kid in class.

5236 rue St. Urbain The baby girl was a quick learner, having synthesized a full range of traits of both of her parents, the charming and the devious. Of all the toddlers in the neighbourhood, she was the first to learn to read and also the first to tear out the pages. Within months she mastered the grilling of the steaks and soon thereafter presented reasons to not grill the steaks. She was the first to promote a new visceral style of physical comedy as a means of reinvigorate the social potential of satire, and the first to declare the movement over. She appreciated the qualities of movement and speed, but also understood the necessity of slowness and leisure. She quickly learned the importance of ladders. She invented games with numerous chess-boards, matches and glasses of unfinished wine. Her parents, being both responsible and duplicitous people, came up with a plan to protect themselves, their apartment and belongings, while also providing an environment to encourage the open development of their daughter's obvious talents. They scheduled time off work, put on their pajamas and let the routines of the apartment go. They put their most cherished books right at her eye-level and gave her a chrome lighter. They blended the contents of the fridge and poured it into bowls they left on the floor. They took to napping in the living room, waking only to wipe their noses on the picture books and look blankly at the costumed characters on the TV shows. They made a fuss for their daughter's attention and cried when she wandered off; they bit or punched each other when she out of the room, and accused the other when she came in, looking frustrated. They made a mess of their pants when she drank too much, and let her figure out the fire extinguisher when their cigarettes set the blankets smoldering. They made her laugh with cute songs and then put clothes pins on the cat's tail. Eventually things found their rhythm. More than once the three of them found their faces waxened with tears, unable to decide if they had been crying, laughing, or if it had all been a reflex, like drooling. They took turns in the bath. Parents and children--it is odd when you trigger instinctive behaviour in either of them--like survival, like nurture. It's alright to test their capabilities, but they can hurt themselves if they go too far. It can be helpful to imagine them all gorging on their favourite food until their bellies ache. Fall came and the family went to school together.

He heard a dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom. She came out dressed all in black, as she almost always did, and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trash can before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined—later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn’t stood in front of the sofa at all—had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point. Later he was certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate, but after a few too many nights of lying awake and considering things, the quality began to erode. In retrospect the sequence of events is a little hazy, images running into each other and becoming slightly confused: she’s across the room, she’s kissing him for a third time—and why doesn’t he look up and kiss her? Her last kiss lands on his head—and putting on her shoes; does she kiss him before she puts on her shoes, or afterward? He can’t swear to it one way or the other. Later on he examined his memory for signs until every detail seemed ominous, but eventually he had to conclude that there was nothing strange about her that day. It was a morning like any other, exquisitely ordinary in every respect.

By selecting a man with symmetrical features, a woman may be selecting a superior complement of genes to be transmitted to her children. Some evidence supports the hypothesis that symmetry is indeed a health cue and that women especially value this quality in mates (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1997; Thornhill & Møeller, 1997). First, facially symmetric individuals score higher on tests of physiological, psychological, and emotional health (Shackelford & Larsen, 1997). Second, there is positive relationship between facial symmetry and judgments of physical attractiveness in both sexes. Third, women judge facially symmetrical men, compared with their more lopsided counterparts, to be more sexually attractive. Facial symmetry is linked to judgments of health (Jones et al., 2001). Men with more symmetrical faces experienced fewer respiratory illnesses, suggesting better disease resistance (Thornhill & Gangestad, 2006). Some researchers, however, question the quality of the studies and conclude that the evidence on the association between symmetry and health is not yet fully convincing (Rhodes, 2006).

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

As in everything, nature is the best instructor, even as regards selection. One couldn't imagine a better activity on nature's part than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another by means of a constant struggle. While we're on the subject, it's somewhat interesting to observe that our upper classes, who've never bothered about the hundreds of thousands of German emigrants or their poverty, give way to a feeling of compassion regarding the fate of the Jews whom we claim the right to expel. Our compatriots forget too easily that the Jews have accomplices all over the world, and that no beings have greater powers of resistance as regards adaptation to climate. Jews can prosper anywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia. All that love and sympathy, since our ruling class is capable of such sentiments, would by rights be applied exclusively—if that class were not corrupt—to the members of our national community. Here Christianity sets the example. What could be more fanatical, more exclusive and more intolerant than this religion which bases everything on the love of the one and only God whom it reveals? The affection that the German ruling class should devote to the good fellow-citizen who faithfully and courageously does his duty to the benefit of the community, why is it not just as fanatical, just as exclusive and just as intolerant? My attachment and sympathy belong in the first place to the front-line German soldier, who has had to overcome the rigours of the past winter. If there is a question of choosing men to rule us, it must not be forgotten that war is also a manifestation of life, that it is even life's most potent and most characteristic expression. Consequently, I consider that the only men suited to become rulers are those who have valiantly proved themselves in a war. In my eyes, firmness of character is more precious than any other quality. A well toughened character can be the characteristic of a man who, in other respects, is quite ignorant. In my view, the men who should be set at the head of an army are the toughest, bravest, boldest, and, above all, the most stubborn and hardest to wear down. The same men are also the best chosen for posts at the head of the State—otherwise the pen ends by rotting away what the sword has conquered. I shall go so far as to say that, in his own sphere, the statesman must be even more courageous than the soldier who leaps from his trench to face the enemy. There are cases, in fact, in which the courageous decision of a single statesman can save the lives of a great number of soldiers. That's why pessimism is a plague amongst statesmen. One should be able to weed out all the pessimists, so that at the decisive moment these men's knowledge may not inhibit their capacity for action. This last winter was a case in point. It supplied a test for the type of man who has extensive knowledge, for all the bookworms who become preoccupied by a situation's analogies, and are sensitive to the generally disastrous epilogue of the examples they invoke. Agreed, those who were capable of resisting the trend needed a hefty dose of optimism. One conclusion is inescapable: in times of crisis, the bookworms are too easily inclined to switch from the positive to the negative. They're waverers who find in public opinion additional encouragement for their wavering. By contrast, the courageous and energetic optimist—even although he has no wide knowledge— will always end, guided by his subconscious or by mere commonsense, in finding a way out.

Again you must learn the point which comes next. Every circle, of those which are by the act of man drawn or even turned on a lathe, is full of that which is opposite to the fifth thing. For everywhere it has contact with the straight. But the circle itself, we say, has nothing in either smaller or greater, of that which is its opposite. We say also that the name is not a thing of permanence for any of them, and that nothing prevents the things now called round from being called straight, and the straight things round; for those who make changes and call things by opposite names, nothing will be less permanent (than a name). Again with regard to the definition, if it is made up of names and verbal forms, the same remark holds that there is no sufficiently durable permanence in it. And there is no end to the instances of the ambiguity from which each of the four suffers; but the greatest of them is that which we mentioned a little earlier, that, whereas there are two things, that which has real being, and that which is only a quality, when the soul is seeking to know, not the quality, but the essence, each of the four, presenting to the soul by word and in act that which it is not seeking (i.e., the quality), a thing open to refutation by the senses, being merely the thing presented to the soul in each particular case whether by statement or the act of showing, fills, one may say, every man with puzzlement and perplexity. [...] But in subjects where we try to compel a man to give a clear answer about the fifth, any one of those who are capable of overthrowing an antagonist gets the better of us, and makes the man, who gives an exposition in speech or writing or in replies to questions, appear to most of his hearers to know nothing of the things on which he is attempting to write or speak; for they are sometimes not aware that it is not the mind of the writer or speaker which is proved to be at fault, but the defective nature of each of the four instruments. The process however of dealing with all of these, as the mind moves up and down to each in turn, does after much effort give birth in a well-constituted mind to knowledge of that which is well constituted. [...] Therefore, if men are not by nature kinship allied to justice and all other things that are honourable, though they may be good at learning and remembering other knowledge of various kinds-or if they have the kinship but are slow learners and have no memory-none of all these will ever learn to the full the truth about virtue and vice. For both must be learnt together; and together also must be learnt, by complete and long continued study, as I said at the beginning, the true and the false about all that has real being. After much effort, as names, definitions, sights, and other data of sense, are brought into contact and friction one with another, in the course of scrutiny and kindly testing by men who proceed by question and answer without ill will, with a sudden flash there shines forth understanding about every problem, and an intelligence whose efforts reach the furthest limits of human powers. Therefore every man of worth, when dealing with matters of worth, will be far from exposing them to ill feeling and misunderstanding among men by committing them to writing. In one word, then, it may be known from this that, if one sees written treatises composed by anyone, either the laws of a lawgiver, or in any other form whatever, these are not for that man the things of most worth, if he is a man of worth, but that his treasures are laid up in the fairest spot that he possesses. But if these things were worked at by him as things of real worth, and committed to writing, then surely, not gods, but men "have themselves bereft him of his wits".

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.