Quantitative Reasoning Quotes

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the Morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.

We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic

Since CWIL’s discipline-based practice was grounded not only in process but also in New Genre Theory, their criteria included assigning writing that would enable students to engage in the kinds of thinking typical of the discipline, as well as in writing in the genres typical of professional practice. The UCITF, however, was trying to draft criteria for the new Q (quantitative reasoning) and B (breadth) courses as well as for the W-courses. They were motivated to define courses in ways that would be comprehensive and meaningful, but would not impose demands likely to alienate faculty.

what Jaki really did with his insistence that science, the quantitative study of the quantitative aspects of objects in motion, be grounded in exactness was to protect science as science so that other questions of humanity, existence, philosophy, and religion could be considered more fully with the power of reasoned discourse.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened

Animals at the high end of heartbeat longevity, such as mice, cats, dogs, horses, elephants, and whales, have the capacity for as many as a billion heartbeats within their life spans. Human hearts, on the other hand, can sustain nearly three billion beats in a lifetime. This significant difference in humans’ capacity for longevity demands explanation. The human body’s characteristics allowing for such extended activity on all levels (physical, mental, and spiritual) suggests uniqueness of design and purpose. It argues for a qualitative rather than mere quantitative difference between humans and the rest of Earth’s creatures.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce

The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren’t quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment, they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulations could do in the face of built-in universal human machinery. Having said this, though, I now feel no particular impulse to vote Republican. Also, it’s quite possible that someday you could create perfectly unselfish people… if you used sufficiently advanced neurosurgery, drugs, and/or brain-computer interfaces to engineer their brains into a new state that no current human brain occupies. Whether or not this is in fact possible isn’t something that ideology gets to decide. The reasoning errors of past communists can’t prohibit any particular future technological advance from being possible or practical. Having said that, I feel no particular impulse to turn “liberal.

Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conserved, then B’s must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say ‘twas scooped up by my Lord R, who hid it under a rock, lest my Lord M come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any power lost by a Tory is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the people, but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the clink for B’s lost power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many people in those dark salons. I propose a novel theory of power, which is inspired by . . . the engine for raising water by fire. As a mill makes flour, a loom makes cloth and a forge makes steel, so we are assured this engine shall make power. If the backers of this device speak truly, and I have no reason to deprecate their honesty, it proves that power is not a conserved quantity, for of such quantities, it is never possible to make more. The amount of power in the world, it follows, is ever increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of these engines are built. A man who hordes power is therefore like a miser who sits on a heap of coins in a realm where the currency is being continually debased by the production of more coins than the market can bear. So that what was a great fortune, when first he raked it together, insensibly becomes a slag heap, and is found to be devoid of value. When at last he takes it to the marketplace to be spent. Thus my Lord B and his vaunted power hoard what is true of him is likely to be true of his lackeys, particularly his most base and slavish followers such as Mr. Charles White. This varmint has asserted that he owns me. He fancies that to own a man is to have power, yet he has got nothing by claiming to own me, while I who was supposed to be rendered powerless, am now writing for a Grub Street newspaper that is being perused by you, esteemed reader.

Before diving in, consult QuantitativeMedicine.net for the latest list (and pricing). Enter “Blood Test Panels” in the search box. The availability and usefulness of the various tests are moving targets. Several important tests are no longer available. The reasons for this are unknown, but almost surely financial. We hope they return, along with some useful new ones. Good

reason not to aim for a lower number, 100 say, or even 75.

One way to salvage the Becker conjecture is to argue that CEOs, coaches, and other managers who are hired because they have a broad range of skills, which may not include analytical reasoning, could simply hire geeks who would deserve to be members of Becker’s 10% to crunch the numbers for them. But my hunch is that as the importance of a decision grows, the tendency to rely on quantitative analyses done by others tends to shrink.

One way to salvage the Becker conjecture is to argue that CEOs, coaches, and other managers who are hired because they have a broad range of skills, which may not include analytical reasoning, could simply hire geeks who would deserve to be members of Becker’s 10% to crunch the numbers for them. But my hunch is that as the importance of a decision grows, the tendency to rely on quantitative analyses done by others tends to shrink. When the championship or the future of the company is on the line, managers tend to rely on their gut instincts.

As you can easily imagine, out-of-control immune cells could be highly dangerous. For this reason, there is a coordinated chemical communication system. These chemicals, which are secreted and detected, are called interleukins, so named because the white cells themselves are called leukocytes. There are a couple of dozen interleukins with a variety of functions: some are generated by cells needing help, and others are generated by the white blood cells themselves.

predominance of large LDL particles will reduce cardiac events two to threefold. But how can LDL size be controlled? This is quite easy, but the reason it works is rather counterintuitive. LDL particle size tracks inversely with triglycerides. High triglycerides (circulating fat) means small particles and vice versa. This is an important relationship. More in a bit.

If your fasting insulin level is below 3, and you are not hypoglycemic, your Personal Sugar Rule is “Eat More Fruit and Starch.” Low insulin prevents the building of new muscle and bone. However, avoid junk. Eat healthy sugar and starch, such as northern fruits (berries, apples, etc.) and potatoes. A daily amount that seems reasonable should be chosen, and glucose and insulin re-measured after a month or so. If you got an “A” in Sugar (insulin is between 3 and 6 µu/dl and fasting glucose below 80 mg/dl), then it is OK to continue eating the amount of sugar, starch, and fruit currently being consumed. The Personal Sugar Rule is “Hold the Line.” However, low quality food, like cereal, should be swapped out for food richer in micronutrients, like northern fruits or potatoes. Breakfast cereals have little in the way of micronutrients beyond what the manufacturer added for “fortification.” If you got a “B” (insulin is between 6 and 12, and fasting glucose below 90) , then a reduction in sugar, starch, and fruit is called for. The Personal Sugar Rule here is “Reduce the Fruit, Sugar, and Starch.” If you got a “C” (insulin is over 12 or fasting glucose is over 90, all sugar, starch, and fruit should be cut. The Personal Sugar Rule is “Fruit, Sugar, and Starch Are Forbidden.” This is a pre-diabetic condition, or worse. If these have already been cut and the numbers are still high, then more meat should be added and vegetables cut further. Dietary fat, including saturated fat, is ad libitum—all you want.

The tragedy of the Western mind, beautifully described by Koyré, is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. We discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by the light of reason, and which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.”7 Since the real, or that which actually exists external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses. It was this logical sequence that led Descartes to posit the existence of two categorically different domains of existence for immaterial ideas—the res extensa and the res cognitans, or the “extended substance” and the “thinking substance.” Descartes defined the extended substance as the realm of physical reality within which primary mathematical and geometrical forms reside and the thinking substance as the realm of human subjective reality. Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith—God constructed the world, said Descartes, in accordance with the mathematical ideas that our minds are capable of uncovering in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what we term the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]

Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world. A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.

Our deep-time ancestors very likely had the genetic resources needed for formal quantitative reasoning, but without the cultural invention of numerals and a umber line, those resources could not be exploited. The same may be true of language. The central role of cultural learning in the construction and transmission of language (qua social phenomenon) is enough to show that the use of language depends on cultural scaffolds, not just appropriate genetic potential.

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Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.

Churchless born agains are not interested in being pressured into immediate engagement. They left the fold before, and they will do it again if they feel they are being manipulated to participate in programs or activities merely to help an organization reach its quantitative goals. If they return, it will be for spiritual and relational reasons; they do not want to be numbers on the bottom line or cogs in the machine.

Very quickly, the Obama administration lost political momentum. The obscene sight of those who had played a major role in setting the scene for the Crash (men like Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke) effectively returning to the scene of the crime as ‘saviours’, wielding trillions of freshly minted or borrowed dollars to lavish upon their banker ‘mates’, was enough to turn off even the hardiest of Mr Obama’s supporters. The result was predictable: as often happens during a deflationary period (think of the 1930s, for example), those who gainpolitically do not come from the revolutionary Left; they come from the loony Right. In the United States it was the Tea Party that grew on the back of a disdain for bankers, 6 a denunciation of the Fed, a clarion call for ‘honest’, metal-backed money, 7 and a revulsion towards all government. Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced. The reason was simple: once the Obama administration had lost its way, and could not pass any meaningful bills through Congress that might have stimulated the economy, onlyone lever was left with which anyone could steer America’s macroeconomy – the Fed’s monetary policy. And since interest rates were dwelling in the nether world of the first liquidity trap to hit the United States since the 1930s8 (recall Chapter 2 here), the Fed decided that quantitative easing or QE – the strategy that Chapter 8 describes in the context of the 1990s’ ‘lost Japanese decade’ – was all that was left separating America from a repugnant depression.

For example, if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep deprived for six days (averaging, in this study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year-old. And if they are allowed to recover, it will take them almost a week to get back to their 30-year-old systems. Taken together, these studies show that sleep loss cripples thinking in just about every way you can measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge. Eventually, sleep loss affects manual dexterity, including fine motor control, and even gross motor movements, such as the ability to walk on a treadmill.

Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty

There is a perhaps understandable reluctance to come to grips scientifically with the problem of race differences in intelligence—to come to grips with it, that is to say, in the same way the scientists would approach the investigation of any other phenomenon. This reluctance is manifested in a variety of ‘symptoms’ found in most writings and discussions of the psychology of race differences. These symptoms include a tendency to remain on the remotest fringes of the subject, to sidestep central questions, and to blur the issues and tolerate a degree of vagueness in definitions, concepts and inferences that would be unseemly in any other realm of scientific discourse. Many writers express an unwarranted degree of skepticism about reasonably well-established quantitative methods and measurements. They deny or belittle facts already generally accepted—accepted, that is, when brought to bear on inferences outside the realm of race differences—and they demand practically impossible criteria of certainty before even seriously proposing or investigating genetic hypotheses, as contrasted with with extremely uncritical attitudes towards purely environmental hypotheses. There is often a failure to distinguish clearly between scientifically answerable aspects of the question and the moral, political and social policy issues; there is tendency to beat dead horses and set up straw men on what is represented, or misrepresented I should say, as the genetic side of the argument. We see appeals to the notion that the topic is either too unimportant to be worthy of scientific curiosity, or is too complex, or too difficult, or that it will be forever impossible for any kind of research to be feasible, or that answers to key questions are fundamentally ‘unknowable’ in any scientifically accepted sense. Finally, we often see complete denial of intelligence and race as realities, or as quantifiable attributes, or as variables capable of being related to one another. In short, there is an altogether ostrich-like dismissal of the subject.

3.2 Why Programming Is Difficult What makes software development so hard? There’s more than one reason. One is, as discussed in section 1.1, that we’re using the wrong metaphors. That clouds our thinking, but that’s not the only reason. Another problem is that a computer is quantitatively different from a brain. Yes, that’s another problematic metaphor

They were productively adversarial, like superforecasting team discussions. Managers grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions. The process had worked remarkably. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, and all twenty-four flights had returned safely. But on the emergency conference call, that same quantitative culture led them astray. On their engineers’ advice, McDonald and two Thiokol VPs on the call initially supported a no-launch decision. The Challenger had already been cleared, so this was an eleventh-hour reversal. When NASA officials asked Thiokol engineers exactly what temperature range was safe for flight, they recommended setting a limit at 53 degrees, the lower bound of previous experience. NASA manager Larry Mulloy was flabbergasted. He thought the shuttle was supposed to be cleared to launch from 31 to 99 degrees. A last-minute 53-degree limit was setting an entirely new technical criteria for launches. It had never been discussed, was not backed by quantitative data, and meant that suddenly winter was off-limits for space exploration. Mulloy found it frustrating; he later called it “dumb.” How had the engineers arrived at that number? “They said because they had flown at 53 degrees before,” a NASA manager reflected, “which is no reason to me. That’s tradition rather than technology.” Boisjoly was asked again for data to support his claim, “and I said I have none other than what is being presented.” With the conference call at an impasse, a Thiokol VP asked for a five-minute “offline caucus,” during which Thiokol concluded that they had no more data to provide. They returned to the call a half hour later with a new decision: proceed with launch. Their official document read, “temperature data not conclusive on predicting primary O-ring blow-by.” When conference call participants from NASA and Thiokol later spoke with investigators and gave interviews, they repeatedly brought up the “weak engineering position,” as one put it. Their statements comprised a repetitive chorus: “Unable to quantify”; “supporting data was subjective”; “hadn’t done a good technical job”; “just didn’t have enough conclusive data.” NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.

Then there is the extraordinary marriage of observation and mathematics. Mankind, and for some perhaps sociological reason it has been mostly man kind, has developed a sinewy language of the utmost rigour and austerity that has proved to be the perfect tool for teasing out objectively the consequences of an imaginative qualitative leap or of adding spine to a whim so that it can stand up to the harshness of quantitative comparison of prediction with observation. I hasten to add that mathematics does not appear explicitly in this book, but it does lie as a hidden deep foundation beneath it.

If you’re implementing a “take it or leave it” bluff, provide a plausible explanation for why you can’t budge off your current position. Offer a believable reason, data, or a quantitative analysis.

This turns on the lived experiences of individuals and how they have both subjective experiences of the phenomenon and objective experiences of something in common with other people. Thus, there is a refusal of the subjective–objective perspective, and for these reasons, phenomenology lies somewhere on a continuum between qualitative and quantitative research.

Galileo's analysis of the cantilever beam illustrates an extremely important point for understanding how structural accidents can occur: he arrived at what is basically the right qualitative answer to the question he posed himself about the strength of the beam, but his answer was not absolutely correct in a quantitative way. He got the right qualitative answer for the wrong quantitative reason.

Real-time data and quantitative benchmarks are the reason why gamers get consistently better at virtually any game they play: their performance is consistently measured and reflected back to them, with advancing progress bars, points, levels, and achievements.

adjusted close prices here do not match the adjusted close prices displayed in the Yahoo! Finance table. The reason for this is that there have been dividends distributed after 6/9/2005,

To counter the effects of too-early learning, here are some things you can do: Where possible, choose schools that are developmentally sensitive in their curriculum and appropriate for your child. Some kids will do really well as big fish in small ponds. It gives them the confidence to tackle the currents without being afraid of being swept away. They get to grow strong and feel strong. So what if there are bigger fish in bigger ponds? Help your children find the right curricular environments for them. Relax and take a long view, even if no one else around you is. Most kids who learn to read at five aren’t better readers at nine than those who learn to read at six or seven. Bill remembers vividly the mild panicky feeling he and Starr had when their daughter was five years old and some of her friends were starting to read. Even though they knew that kids learn to read much easier at age seven than at age five, and that pushing academics too early was harmful and produced no lasting benefit, Bill and Starr wondered if they were jeopardizing their child’s future by letting her fall behind her peers. They briefly considered pulling her out of her nonacademic kindergarten. But they stuck to their guns and left her in a school that did not push and did not give her any homework until the fourth grade. Despite an unrushed start, she received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-six and is a successful economist. Bill loves telling that story, not to brag (okay, just a little), but to emphasize that it is difficult to buck the tide even when you know the current is carrying you the wrong way. Remember that any gains from rushing development will wash out. Parents often tell Bill that their third grader is doing fourth- or fifth-grade math—but he never hears twenty-six-year-olds brag that they’re more successful than most twenty-eight-year-olds. Don’t go overboard on AP classes. You are doing your child no favors if you let her take more APs at the cost of her mental health and sleep. There’s a reason why kids get more out of Moby-Dick in college than in high school. When we consider the enormous differences in the maturation of their prefrontal cortex—and the associated development in their capacity for abstraction and emotional maturity—it should come as no surprise that the majority of students will understand and appreciate novels written for adults better when they’re older. The same is true for complex scientific theories and data, quantitative concepts, and historical themes, which are easier for most kids to grasp when they are college aged. This isn’t to say that some students aren’t ready for college-level courses when they’re fifteen. The problem is that when this becomes the default for most students (I’ll never get into college if I don’t have five AP classes) it’s destructive.

in the larger population—among politicians, journalists, doctors, bureaucrats, and voters—the ability to reason quantitatively has largely vanished. This is scary.

The typical practical reasons why you might choose to mix methods include: 1. Time does not permit in-depth qualitative research 2. Time does not permit in-depth quantitative research 3. Negotiating access to participants is challenging 4. Finding a large data set is challenging

Music is like Quantitative and Verbal. It gives you a place for reasonings, and aptitudes.

The person must utilize adequate quantitative and/or qualitative reasoning in order to solve both ill and well defined problems for his or her assigned tasks.

1. The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size, strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited. 2. The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.

Diplomacy involves critical thinking that resembles scholarship. But diplomacy is different. It rests on empathy more than received knowledge, texts, or quantitative analysis. It demands insight beyond the purely intellectual into what makes foreigners do foreign things. Diplomacy is grounded in personal experience, apprenticeship, and area knowledge. It is culture-specific, reliant on intuition, attuned to emotion as well as reason as a behavioral determinant, and tested in daily professional interactions with counterparts. Diplomacy is footnote-free, applied scholarship that seeks truth from foreign facts and tries to use this to influence particular foreigners. It embraces the lore of international interactions but does not seek to state broad hypotheses about their nature. It is hostile to deductive reasoning from theory. It seeks satisfaction in the anonymous achievement of change rather than in the credential-building of the publish-or-perish academic potlatch. (Excerpt from One China, Two Freemans)