Scale Of Preference Quotes

Um, because you're loopier than Flacky McPsycho, Mayor of Crazytown?" "My databases show no record of this Crazytown of which you speak. A brain the size of an entire city burns inside me. My intelligence quotient is beyond the human scale. I would prefer if you did not refer to me in such a fashion." "Oh, poor baby. Did I hurt the mass-murdering psychopathic artificial intelligence's feelings?

I’d suspect most people comment on your eyes,” he said quietly, running a fingertip across her collarbone. “That startling, bright blue.” Surely he could feel her heart scaling her windpipe. He didn’t seem to remember there was anyone else in the room. “But I prefer your mouth.” “You do?” Jess managed. “I do,” he said, and bent, kissing her forehead. “You don’t give those smiles away for free.

Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.

Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility. These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health but also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer- ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe- cility and sanity.

If you put sexual attraction on a scale of one to ten, where ten equals "you can't keep your hands off each other,"five equals "you can take it or leave it," and one equals "repulsed," to support a vibrant relationship, it should be at least a seven, preferably an eight, nine, or ten. With work, you might raise the attraction one notch, but because there is so much biochemistry involved in sexual attraction, it's hard to do much more than that. So if a sexual attraction doesn't evolve, remember, it's not anyone's fault and it's just the what is of your pairing, and you might make better friends than lovers. Sexual attraction doesn't have to be instantaneous on first meeting, but it must eventually flower because it provides a basic glue for successful conjugal union. If we're not sexually alive to our beloved, it often leads to a subdued relationship, loneliness, affairs, or lots of fantasies.

In a 2008 wedding toast to Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power, Leon Wieseltier put it about as well as possible: Brides and grooms are people who have discovered, by means of love, the local nature of happiness. Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctness of this spirit and that flesh. Love prefers deep to wide, and here to there; the grasp to the reach…. Love is, or should be, indifferent to history, immune to it—a soft and sturdy haven from it: when the day is done, and the lights are out, and there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling one’s demons or in greeting one’s angels, it does not matter who the president is. When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect; and so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of oneself. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little.

The idea of meat being viewed as a power symbol was shown in a paper published in the journal "Appetite." The researchers collected a group of participants from a range of backgrounds and found that those who were lower on the economic scale had a greater preference for meat than those higher up it. The researchers concluded that this was "likely because people see meat as substitutable for status", so wanting to eat meat was a reflection of how the participants felt about their own circumstances in life.

Virchow would write, ‘My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.’ He had a knack for aphorism. ‘Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.’ ‘It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.’ ‘Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way to make a living, but to ensure the health of the community.’ ‘The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.’ This last was Farmer’s favorite. Virchow put the world together in a way that made sense to Farmer. ‘Virchow had a comprehensive vision,’ he said. ‘Pathology, social medicine, politics, anthropology. My model.

The world over, people seem to be greatly interested in moralizing, regulating, and generally monitoring other people’s behaviors. This is of course very much the case in small-scale groups, where one lives under the tyranny of the cousins, as some anthropologists described it. But in large, modern societies, we also see that people are greatly interested in others’ mores, sexual preferences, the way they marry or what drugs they take. This certainly goes beyond self-interest and raises the question, Is it part of human nature to meddle?

ECONOMIC RULES OF THE DYSFUNCTIONAL MEDICAL MARKET More treatment is always better. Default to the most expensive option. A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure. Amenities and marketing matter more than good care. As technologies age, prices can rise rather than fall. There is no free choice. Patients are stuck. And they’re stuck buying American. More competitors vying for business doesn’t mean better prices; it can drive prices up, not down. Economies of scale don’t translate to lower prices. With their market power, big providers can simply demand more. There is no such thing as a fixed price for a procedure or test. And the uninsured pay the highest prices of all. There are no standards for billing. There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything. Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them. The 'saved' thief experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man... Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now. Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.'

the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no . . . . when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart . . . . and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape . . . . or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

Reynaldo says that the pacazo is nothing but an uncommonly large iguana. I prefer to believe that it is some imp of history, coincidence made scaled flesh, a god no one worships anymore, not magnificent in its fury like the gods of the Wari or Moche or blood-smeared Chavín but some petty, bitter, local god who hates fat pale pillaging strangers.

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change. The second field of research that has guided me in this inquiry concerns the way we think about the microscopic organisms—or microbes—that cover every inch of the planet. In the last four decades, new technologies have granted unprecedented access to microbial lives. The outcome? For your community of microbes—your “microbiome”—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of thirty-two square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy. For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we

This is not wise!” one of the Scale burbled through the wet plaster. “We’re making you monuments to Justice!” Annabelle shouted. “You know, I think I prefer the Scale when they’re plastered.” Arianne laughed, betraying more than a tinge of vengeful glee. The girls kept pouring bucket after bucket-a full bucket over each of the threatening angels’ heads, until their voices did not carry anymore-until the Outcasts had no need to stand over the Scale with their starshots.

Certainly fossils are a peculiar pleasure. They do not appeal to everyone, for they are the remains of creatures. If you think on it too much, you would wonder at holding in your hands a long dead body. Then too, they are not of this world, but from a past very difficult to imagine. That is why I am drawn to them, but also why I prefer to collect fossilised fish, with their striking patterns of scales and fins, for they resemble fish we eat every Friday, and so seem more a part of the present.

to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as it might be, several ‘thicknesses’ of art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of ‘Chartres Cathedral’ after Corot, of the ‘Fountains of Saint-Cloud’ after Hubert Robert, and of ‘Vesuvius’ after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art.

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive.

Here, reader, thou must pardon us if we stop a while to lament the capriciousness of Nature in forming this charming part of the creation designed to complete the happiness of man; with their soft innocence to allay his ferocity, with their sprightliness to soothe his cares, and with their constant friendship to relieve all the troubles and disappointments which can happen to him. Seeing then that these are the blessings chiefly sought after and generally found in every wife, how must we lament that disposition in these lovely creatures which leads them to prefer in their favour those individuals of the other sex who do not seem intended by nature as so great a masterpiece! For surely, however useful they may be in the creation, as we are taught that nothing, not even a louse, is made in vain, yet these beaus, even that most splendid and honoured part which in this our island nature loves to distinguish in red, are not, as some think, the noblest work of the Creator. For my own part, let any man chuse to himself two beaus, let them be captains or colonels, as well-dressed men as ever lived, I would venture to oppose a single Sir Isaac Newton, a Shakespear, a Milton, or perhaps some few others, to both these beaus; nay, and I very much doubt whether it had not been better for the world in general that neither of these beaus had ever been born than that it should have wanted the benefit arising to it from the labour of any one of those persons. If this be true, how melancholy must be the consideration that any single beau, especially if he have but half a yard of ribbon in his hat, shall weigh heavier in the scale of female affection than twenty Sir Isaac Newtons!

A bare two years after Vasco da Gama’s voyage a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral delivered a letter from the king of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudra-raja or Sea-king), the Hindu ruler of the city-state of Calicut, demanding that he expel all Muslims from his kingdom as they were enemies of the ‘Holy Faith’. He met with a blank refusal; then afterwards the Samudra steadfastly maintained that Calicut had always been open to everyone who wished to trade there… During those early years the people who had traditionally participated in the Indian Ocean trade were taken completely by surprise. In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown, no state or kings or ruling power had ever before tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms. The territorial and dynastic ambitions that were pursued with such determination on land were generally not allowed to spill over into the sea. Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war. When a defeat is as complete as was that of the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of choice and preference. Yet it is worth allowing for the possibility that the peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade may have been, in a quiet and inarticulate way, the product of a rare cultural choice — one that may have owed a great deal to the pacifist customs and beliefs of the Gujarati Jains and Vanias who played such an important part in it. At the time, at least one European was moved to bewilderment by the unfamiliar mores of the region; a response more honest perhaps than the trust in historical inevitability that has supplanted it since. ‘The heathen [of Gujarat]’, wrote Tomé Pires, early in the sixteenth century, ‘held that they must never kill anyone, nor must they have armed men in their company. If they were captured and [their captors] wanted to kill them all, they did not resist. This is the Gujarat law among the heathen.’ It was because of those singular traditions, perhaps, that the rulers of the Indian Ocean ports were utterly confounded by the demands and actions of the Portuguese. Having long been accustomed to the tradesmen’s rules of bargaining and compromise they tried time and time again to reach an understanding with the Europeans — only to discover, as one historian has put it, that the choice was ‘between resistance and submission; co-operation was not offered.’ Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good. And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human welfare on a global scale, but it’s effective where our ancestors needed it to be: at finding mates and building a strong network of allies.

Do you have any cheese preferences?” Jack asked. “All cheese is good cheese, Lend said. “True dat.” I nodded solemnly. “You did not just say ‘true dat,’” Arianna said, walking into the kitchen. “Because if you think you have any ability whatsoever to pull that off, we are going to have to have a long, long talk.” “Can I at least use it ironically? Or ‘dude.’ Can I use ‘dude?’ Because I really want to be able to use ‘dude.’” “No. No, you cannot, but thank you for asking. Besides, ironic use always segues into non-ironic use, and unless you suddenly become far cooler or far more actually Californian than you are now, I simply cannot allow it.” “But on Easton Heights—” “You are not going to bring up Cary’s cousin Trevyn’s multiepisode arc where he’s sent there as punishment for his pot-smoking surf-bum ways, are you? Because that arc sucked, and he wasn’t even very hot. Also, what’s the lunatic doing?” She jerked her head toward Jack. He flipped a gorgeous looking omelet onto a plate and placed it with a flourish in front of Lend. “I am providing insurance against frying pan boy deciding to enact all the very painful fantasies he’s no doubt entertained about me for the last few weeks. An omelet this good should rule out any dismemberment vengeance.” “Have you been reading his diary?” I asked. “Because I’ll bet he got really creative with the violence ideas.” “No, I only ever read yours. But let me tell you, one more exclamation mark dotted with a heart while talking about how good a kisser Lend is and I was about ready to do myself in. You’re rather single-minded when it comes to adoring him.” “True dat,” Arianna said, nodding. “How come you can use ‘true dat’ if I can’t?” I asked, rightfully outraged. “Because I’m dead, and none of the rules apply anymore.” Lend ate his omelet, refusing to answer Jack’s questions about just how delicious it was on a scale from cutting off limbs to just breaking his nose. I gave Jack full points for flavor but noted the texture was slightly off, exempting him from name-calling but not from dirty looks. Arianna lounged against the counter, and when I finished first we debated the usage rules of “dude,” “true dat,” and my favorite, “for serious.” “I kind of wish they’d shut up,” Jack said. “Dude, true dat,” Lend answered. Jack nodded solemnly. “For serious.

According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior. Reason is in the service of this freedom, in a purely instrumental way; it is a person’s capacity to calculate the best means to satisfy his ends. About the ends themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of respect for the autonomy of the individual. To do otherwise would be to risk lapsing into paternalism. Thus does liberal agnosticism about the human good line up with the market ideal of “choice.” We invoke the latter as a content-free meta-good that bathes every actual choice made in the softly egalitarian, flattering light of autonomy. This mutually reinforcing set of posits about freedom and rationality provides the basic framework for the discipline of economics, and for “liberal theory” in departments of political science. It is all wonderfully consistent, even beautiful. But in surveying contemporary life, it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our situation very well. Especially the bit about our preferences expressing a welling-up of the authentic self. Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred—unavailable for rational scrutiny—is to put one’s head in the sand. The resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom and rationality we have inherited from the liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale societal pressures we now face.

1. _______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.   2. _______ I often prefer to express myself in writing.   3. _______ I enjoy solitude.   4. _______ I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status.   5. _______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me.   6. _______ People tell me that I’m a good listener.   7. _______ I’m not a big risk-taker.   8. _______ I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions.   9. _______ I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. 10. _______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.” 11. _______ I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished. 12. _______ I dislike conflict. 13. _______ I do my best work on my own. 14. _______ I tend to think before I speak. 15. _______ I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself. 16. _______ I often let calls go through to voice mail. 17. _______ If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. 18. _______ I don’t enjoy multitasking. 19. _______ I can concentrate easily. 20. _______ In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars.

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridge's contemporaries. The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age. The movement towards greater freedom and democracy in political and social affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and establish a new, more 'democratic' poetic order. To do this, the writers used 'the real language of men' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly involved in political activities themselves. The Romantic age in literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it. The comparison is valuable, for it is not simply two different attitudes to literature which are being compared but two different ways of seeing and experiencing life. The Classical or Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the importance of reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be controlled (although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift improvements in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments in both agricultural and industrial technology, suggested human progress on a grand scale. At the centre of these advances towards a perfect society was mankind, and it must have seemed that everything was within man's grasp if his baser, bestial instincts could be controlled. The Classical temperament trusts reason, intellect, and the head. The Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition, and the heart.

Except for the very poor, for whom income coincides with survival, the main motivators of money-seeking are not necessarily economic. For the billionaire looking for the extra billion, and indeed for the participant in an experimental economics project looking for the extra dollar, money is a proxy for points on a scale of self-regard and achievement. These rewards and punishments, promises and threats, are all in our heads. We carefully keep score of them. They shape our preferences and motivate our actions, like the incentives provided in the social environment. As a result, we refuse to cut losses when doing so would admit failure, we are biased against actions that could lead to regret, and we draw an illusory but sharp distinction between omission and commission, not doing and doing, because the sense of responsibility is greater for one than for the other. The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing that inevitably creates conflicts of interest when the individual acts as an agent on behalf of an organization.

The intellect (mind), indeed, is a correct scale. Its indications are completely certain and in no way wrong. However, the intellect should not be used to weigh such matters as the oneness of God, the other world, the truth of prophecy, the real character of the divine attributes, or anything else that lies beyond the level of the intellect. That would mean to desire the impossible. One might compare it with a man who sees a scale in which gold is being weighed, and wants to weigh mountains in it. The (fact that this is impossible) does not prove that the indications of the scale are not true (when it is used for its proper purpose). However, there is a limit at which the intellect must stop. It cannot go beyond its own level. Thus, it cannot comprehend God and His attributes. It is but one of the atoms of the world of existence which results from (God). This shows that those who give the intellect preference over (traditional) information in such matters are wrong, deficient in understanding, and faulty in reasoning. This, then, explains the true situation in this respect.

For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, 'What is this stuff? It's beautiful!' We tell them its the asparagus patch, and they reply, 'No this, these feathery little trees.' An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon Line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub nose green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get it's neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch until the snake becomes a four foot tree with delicate needles. Contrary to lore, fat spears are no more tender or mature than thin ones. Each shoot begins life with its own particular girth. In the hours after emergence, it lengthens but does not appreciably fatten. To step into another raging asparagus controversy, white spears are botanically no different from their green colleagues. White shoots have been deprived of sunlight by a heavy mulch pulled up over the plant's crown. European growers go to this trouble for consumers who prefer the stalks before they've had their first blush of photosynthesis. Most Americans prefer the more developed taste of green. Uncharacteristically, we're opting for the better nutritional deal here also. The same plant could produce white or green spears in alternate years, depending on how it is treated. If the spears are allowed to proceed beyond their first exploratory six inches, they'll green out and grow tall and feathery like the house plant known as asparagus fern, which is the next of kin. Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots called a crown that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac and the church banned it from nunneries.

There are ideas made of clay, and there are ideas sculpted for the ages out of gold or out of our precious glass. And to determine what material an idea is made of, all you have to do is let a drop of powerful acid fall on it. Even the ancients knew one such acid: reductio ad finem. That’s what they seem to have called it. But they were afraid of this poison. They preferred to see at least some kind of heaven—however clay, however toylike—to this blue nothing. But we are grown-ups, thanks be to the Benefactor, and don’t need toys. Look here—suppose you let a drop fall on the idea of “rights.” Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So, take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side “I” and on the other “We,” OneState. It’s clear, isn’t it?—to assert that “I” has certain “rights” with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

Conservative foreign policy is in the business of shaping habits of behavior, not winning hearts and minds. It announces red lines sparingly but enforces them unsparingly. It is willing to act decisively, or preventively, to punish or prevent blatant transgressions of order—not as a matter of justice but in the interests of deterrence. But it knows it cannot possibly punish or prevent every transgression. It champions its values consistently and confidently, but it doesn’t conflate its values and its interests. It wants to let citizens go about their business as freely and easily as possible. But it knows that security is a prerequisite for civil liberty, not a threat to it. Where it can use a finger, or a hand, to tilt the political scales of society toward liberal democracy, it will do so. But it won’t attempt to tilt the scales in places where the tilting demands all of its weight and strength and endurance. It does not waste its energy or time chasing diplomatic symbols: its ambitions do not revolve around a Nobel Peace Prize. It prefers liberal autocracy to illiberal democracy, because the former is likelier to evolve into democracy than the latter is to evolve into liberalism. It knows the value of hope, and knows also that economic growth based on enterprise and the freest possible movement of goods, services, capital, and labor is the best way of achieving it. And it is mindful of the claims of conscience, which is strengthened by faith.

The Common Perch, _Perca flavescens_, which name describes well the gleaming, golden reflections of its scales as it is drawn out of the water, its red gills standing out in vain in the thin element, is one of the handsomest and most regularly formed of our fishes, and at such a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the picture which wished to be restored to its native element until it had grown larger; and indeed most of this species that are caught are not half grown. In the ponds there is a light-colored and slender kind, which swim in shoals of many hundreds in the sunny water, in company with the shiner, averaging not more than six or seven inches in length, while only a few larger specimens are found in the deepest water, which prey upon their weaker brethren. I have often attracted these small perch to the shore at evening, by rippling the water with my fingers, and they may sometimes be caught while attempting to pass inside your hands. It is a tough and heedless fish, biting from impulse, without nibbling, and from impulse refraining to bite, and sculling indifferently past. It rather prefers the clear water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much choice. It is a true fish, such as the angler loves to put into his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in shady afternoons along the banks of the stream. So many unquestionable fishes he counts, and so many shiners, which he counts and then throws away. Old Josselyn in his "New England's Rarities," published in 1672, mentions the Perch or River Partridge.

Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past -- Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens -- inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and lumsy to our contemporary percetption. The trouble lies in the way these classical evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers and they know their souls are black. And they reason: "I cannot live unless I do evil. So I'll set my father against my brother! I'll drink the victim's sufferings until I'm drunk with them!" Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that's not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human beingto seek a justifaction for his actions. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they have no ideology. Ideology-- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad and in his own and other's eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will received praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their weills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Mother-land; the conolizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

If you’re still not sure where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, you can assess yourself here. Answer each question “true” or “false,” choosing the answer that applies to you more often than not.* ______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. ______ I often prefer to express myself in writing. ______ I enjoy solitude. ______ I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. ______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. ______ People tell me that I’m a good listener. ______ I’m not a big risk-taker. ______ I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions. ______ I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. ______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.” ______ I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished. ______ I dislike conflict. ______ I do my best work on my own. ______ I tend to think before I speak. ______ I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself. ______ I often let calls go through to voice mail. ______ If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. ______ I don’t enjoy multitasking. ______ I can concentrate easily. ______ In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars. The more often you answered “true,” the more introverted you probably are. If you found yourself with a roughly equal number of “true” and “false” answers, then you may be an ambivert—yes, there really is such a word. But even if you answered every single question as an introvert or extrovert, that doesn’t mean that your behavior is predictable across all circumstances. We can’t say that every introvert is a bookworm or every extrovert wears lampshades at parties any more than we can say that every woman is a natural consensus-builder and every man loves contact sports. As Jung felicitously put it, “There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.” This is partly because we are all gloriously complex individuals, but also because there are so many different kinds of introverts and extroverts. Introversion and extroversion interact with our other personality traits and personal histories, producing wildly different kinds of people. So

Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat…the enemy triumphs…the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote and leadballs do their work…the cause is asleep…the strong throats are choked with their own blood…the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass each other…and is liberty gone out of that place? No never. When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go…it waits for all the rest to go…it is the last…When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away…when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators…when the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead…when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people…when I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master—and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves…when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority…when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet—when the swarms of cringers, suckers, dough-faces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no…when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart…and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape…or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago. And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017). These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.

Put crudely, external things do have some value, but they’re not worth getting upset over—it’s a different kind of value. One way Stoics explained this was by saying that if we could put virtue on one side of a set of scales, it wouldn’t matter how many gold coins or other indifferent things piled up on the opposing side—it should never tip the balance. Nevertheless, some external things are preferable to others, and wisdom consists precisely in our ability to make these sorts of value judgments. Life is preferable to death, wealth is preferable to poverty, health is preferable to sickness, friends are preferable to enemies, and so on. As Socrates had put it earlier, such external advantages in life are good only if we use them wisely. However, if something can be used for either good or evil, it cannot truly be good in itself, so it should be classed as “indifferent” or neutral. The Stoics would say that things like health, wealth, and reputation are, at most, advantages or opportunities rather than being good in themselves. Social, material, and physical advantages actually give foolish individuals more opportunity to do harm to themselves and others. Look at lottery winners. Those who squander their sudden wealth often end up more miserable than they could have imagined. When handled badly, external advantages like wealth do more harm than good. The Stoics would go further: the wise and good man may flourish even when faced with sickness, poverty, and enemies. The true goal of life for Stoics isn’t to acquire as many external advantages as possible but to use whatever befalls us wisely, whether it be sickness or health, wealth or poverty, friends or enemies. The Stoic Sage, or wise man, needs nothing but uses everything well; the fool believes himself to “need” countless things, but he uses them all badly. Most important of all, the pursuit of these preferred indifferent things must never be done at the expense of virtue. For instance, wisdom may tell us that wealth is generally preferable to debt, but valuing money more highly than justice is a vice. In order to explain the supreme value placed on wisdom and virtue, the Stoics compared reason, our “ruling faculty,” to a king in relation to his court. Everyone in court is situated somewhere or other on the hierarchy of importance. However, the king is uniquely important because he’s the one who assigns everyone else at court a role in the hierarchy. As mentioned earlier, the Stoics call reason, the king in this metaphor, our “ruling faculty” (hegemonikon). It’s human nature to desire certain things in life, such as sex and food. Reason allows us to step back and question whether what we desire is actually going to be good for us or not. Wisdom itself is uniquely valuable because it allows us to judge the value of external things—it’s the source of everything else’s value. How therefore does it profit a man, the Stoics might say, if he gains the whole world but loses his wisdom and virtue?

College students were instructed to sit by themselves for up to fifteen minutes in a sparsely furnished, unadorned room and “entertain themselves with their thoughts.” They were allowed to think about whatever they liked, the only rules being that they should remain in their seat and stay awake. Before they entered the room they were obliged to surrender any means of distraction they had about their person, such as cell phones, books, or writing materials. Afterward, they were asked to rate the experience on various scales. Unsurprisingly, a majority reported that they found it difficult to concentrate and their minds had wandered, with around half saying they didn’t enjoy the experience. A subsequent experiment, however, revealed that many found being left alone in an empty room with nothing to occupy their minds so unpleasant (this is, after all, what makes solitary confinement such a harsh punishment in prisons) that they would rather give themselves electric shocks. In the first part of this experiment, the volunteers were asked to rate the unpleasantness of a shock delivered via electrodes attached to their ankle and say whether they would pay a small amount of money to avoid having to experience it again. In the second part, during which they were left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes, they were presented with the opportunity to zap themselves once again. Amazingly, among those who had said they would pay to avoid a repeat experience, 67 percent of the men (12 out of 18) and 25 percent of the women (6 out of 24) opted to shock themselves at least once. One of the women gave herself nine electric shocks. One of the men subjected himself to no fewer than 190 shocks, though he was considered exceptional—a statistical “outlier”—and his results were excluded from the final analysis. In their report for the journal Science, the researchers write, “What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.” This goes a long way toward explaining why many people initially find it so hard to meditate, because to sit quietly with your eyes closed is to invite the mind to wander here, there, and everywhere. In a sense, that is the whole point: we are simply learning to notice when this has happened. So the frustrating realization that your thoughts have been straying—yet again—is a sign of progress rather than failure. Only by noticing the way thoughts ricochet about inside our heads like ball bearings in a pinball machine can we learn to observe them dispassionately and simply let them come to rest, resisting the urge to pull back the mental plunger and fire off more of them. One of the benefits of meditation is that one develops the ability to quiet the mind at will. “Without such training,” the psychologists conclude drily in their paper, “people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.

Experiment: To replace negative character labels, try the following steps: 1. Pick a new, positive character label that you would prefer. For example, if your old belief is “I’m incompetent,” you would likely pick “I’m competent.” 2. Rate how much you currently believe the old negative character label on a scale of 0 (= I don’t believe it at all) to 100 (= I believe it completely). Do the same for the new positive belief. For example, you might say you believe “I’m incompetent” at level 95 and believe “I’m competent” at level 10 (the numbers don’t need to add up to 100). 3. Create a Positive Data Log and a Historical Data Log. Strengthening your new, positive character label is often a more helpful approach than attempting to hack away at the old, negative one. I’m going to give you two experiments that will help you do this. Positive Data Log. For two weeks, commit to writing down evidence that supports your new, positive character belief. For example, if you are trying to boost your belief in the thought “I’m competent” and you show up to an appointment on time, you can write that down as evidence. Don’t fall into the cognitive trap of discounting some of the evidence. For example, if you make a mistake and then sort it out, it’s evidence of competence, not incompetence, so you could put that in your Positive Data Log. Historical Data Log. This log looks back at periods of your life and finds evidence from those time periods that supports your positive character belief. This experiment helps people believe that the positive character quality represents part of their enduring nature. To do this experiment, split your life into whatever size chunks you want to split it into, such as four- to six-year periods. If you’re only in your 20s, then you might choose three- or four-year periods. To continue the prior example, if you’re working on the belief “I’m competent,” then evidence from childhood might be things like learning to walk, talk, or make friends. You figured these things out. From your teen years, your evidence of general competency at life might be getting your driver’s license (yes, on the third try still counts). Evidence from your early college years could be things like successfully choosing a major and passing your courses. Evidence for after you finished your formal education might be related to finding work to support yourself and finding housing. You should include evidence in the social domain, like finding someone you wanted to date or figuring out how to break up with someone when you realized that relationship wasn’t the right fit for you. The general idea is to prove to yourself that “I’m competent” is more true than “I’m incompetent.” Other positive character beliefs you might try to strengthen could be things like “I’m strong” (not weak), “I’m worthy of love” (not unlovable), and “I’m worthy of respect” (not worthless). Sometimes the flipside of a negative character belief is obvious, as in the case of strong/weak, but sometimes there are a couple of possible options that could be considered opposites; in this case, you can choose. 4. Rerate how much you believe the negative and positive character labels. There should have been a little bit of change as a result of doing the data logs. For example, you might bow believe “I’m incompetent” at only 50 instead of 95, and believe “I’m competent” at 60 instead of 10. You’ve probably had your negative character belief for a long time, so changing it isn’t like making a pack of instant noodles.

America, I know we have our problems. I realize that the scale and our waistline are foremost among them. I’m willing to make concessions, I really am. I drink, and prefer, skim milk. I’ll take water packed tuna over oil packed tuna any day. I can stomach low-fat ranch or I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Anything. I’ll even look the other way on sugar free ice cream (believe me that one hurts), but I’ll be darned if I’m gonna let somebody take my delicious delicious pig fat from me. I’d rather die.

There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73

May 1915. The Australians, who were about to go into action for the first time in trying circumstances, were cheerful, quiet and confident. There was no sign of nerves nor of excitement. As the moon waned, the boats were swung out, the Australians received their last instructions, and men who six months ago had been living peaceful civilian lives had begun to disembark on a strange and unknown shore in a strange land to attack an enemy of a different race. The boats had almost reached the beach, when a party of Turks, entrenched ashore, opened a terrible fusillade with rifles and a Maxim. Fortunately, the majority of the bullets went high. The Australians rose to the occasion. Not waiting for orders, or for the boats to reach the shore, they sprang into the sea, and, forming a sort of rough line, rushed at the enemy’s trenches. Their magazines were not charged, so they just went in with cold steel. It was over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench were either bayoneted or they ran away, and their Maxim was captured. Then the Australians found themselves facing an almost perpendicular cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery. Somewhere, half-way up, the enemy had a second trench, strongly held, from which they poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to the destroyers for the second landing party. Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but those colonials, practical above all else, went about it in a practical way. They stopped for a few minutes to pull themselves together, got rid of their packs, and charged their magazines. Then this race of athletes proceeded to scale the cliffs without responding to the enemy’s fire. They lost some men, but did not worry. In less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position, either bayoneted or fleeing. But then the Australasians, whose blood was up, instead of entrenching, rushed northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to bayonet. It was difficult country to entrench. Therefore they preferred to advance.

The Likert scale. Respondents are asked to choose where they fall on a range of possible feelings about a thing, generally in the form of “strongly dislike,” “dislike,” “strongly like,” “strongly disagree,” and “strongly agree.” Multiple choice. Respondents are asked to pick from mutually exclusive sets, such as “Republican, Democrat, Independent, other.” Rank order. Respondents are asked to rank order several items. Example: “Rank the following eight activities from least preferred (1) to most preferred (8).” Open ended. Respondents are asked to simply write out a response in any way they like. Example: “Was there anything you were dissatisfied with about our customer service?

Here are eight tips for writing effective cover letters.   Address the cover letter to a specific person, ensuring the correct name, title, company, and address. This shows respect for the person you are sending the résumé to. “To Whom It May Concern” salutations should be used only if you can’t determine the name of the hiring person or the company (for instance, when responding to a blind ad). If you were referred by someone, be sure this is included in the first sentence of the cover letter: “Jennifer Wells suggested I contact you in regard to an accounts receivable position you have open …” It’s an attention grabber. If asked to include salary history or requirements, you must address this or risk being disqualified. Provide a healthy range, such as “Over the past five years I have earned between $35,000 and $48,000. However, I am open to any reasonable offer consistent with my ability to produce results and meet your performance expectations.” If asked for salary requirements, use the same strategy: “I am aware that the salary range for a loss prevention manager in the Houston area averages between $75,000 and $110,000. Given my experience and, most importantly, my ability to make significant contributions to your company, I would hope to be on the upper end of this scale.” If you are sending the résumé out electronically, the cover letter can be inserted as the e-mail itself; just attach your résumé. If you prefer that your cover letter is the first page of the attachment, that’s fine. But the general guideline is not to attach multiple files. Make it easy on the hiring manager and send only one attachment or file to open (unless you have a good reason to do otherwise). Do not rehash what is on the résumé. This is disrespectful of the reader’s time. If you have done a good job with your résumé, you want the cover letter to quickly entice the hiring manager to read your résumé. Cover letters should not be preachy. Sales managers know that sales are the heartbeat of any company; you don’t have to lecture them on this. Nurse supervisors know the importance of compassionate patient care; you don’t have to tell them what they already know. Keep the letter short and concise. The cover letter is not the place to preach or teach. It’s the place to invite recipients to read your résumé! Finally, the four most important words on the cover letter are “I respect your time.” The following cover letter is a sample template to use in these challenging and troubled times. Notice the first four words of the second paragraph.

For example, in a major review of stress research in medical sociology in the mid-1990s, Peggy Thoits (1995: 56) observed that: “Despite attributions of the origins of stress to large-scale social structures or processes, few investigators have attempted to examine the links between macro-level factors and micro-level experiences, preferring to assess, for example, status variations in role strains, powerlessness, or lack of control at the individual level only.

Remedies exist for correcting substantial departures from normality, but these remedies may make matters worse when departures from normality are minimal. The first course of action is to identify and remove any outliers that may affect the mean and standard deviation. The second course of action is variable transformation, which involves transforming the variable, often by taking log(x), of each observation, and then testing the transformed variable for normality. Variable transformation may address excessive skewness by adjusting the measurement scale, thereby helping variables to better approximate normality.8 Substantively, we strongly prefer to make conclusions that satisfy test assumptions, regardless of which measurement scale is chosen.9 Keep in mind that when variables are transformed, the units in which results are expressed are transformed, as well. An example of variable transformation is provided in the second working example. Typically, analysts have different ways to address test violations. Examination of the causes of assumption violations often helps analysts to better understand their data. Different approaches may be successful for addressing test assumptions. Analysts should not merely go by the result of one approach that supports their case, ignoring others that perhaps do not. Rather, analysts should rely on the weight of robust, converging results to support their final test conclusions. Working Example 1 Earlier we discussed efforts to reduce high school violence by enrolling violence-prone students into classes that address anger management. Now, after some time, administrators and managers want to know whether the program is effective. As part of this assessment, students are asked to report their perception of safety at school. An index variable is constructed from different items measuring safety (see Chapter 3). Each item is measured on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree), and the index is constructed such that a high value indicates that students feel safe.10 The survey was initially administered at the beginning of the program. Now, almost a year later, the survey is implemented again.11 Administrators want to know whether students who did not participate in the anger management program feel that the climate is now safer. The analysis included here focuses on 10th graders. For practical purposes, the samples of 10th graders at the beginning of the program and one year later are regarded as independent samples; the subjects are not matched. Descriptive analysis shows that the mean perception of

If students followed the advice given by those who promote ‘good learner strategies’, such as that learners should persist in attempting to communicate at all costs, they will likely come across as either ‘a pest or a simpleton’. ‘Most learners will probably, in deciding what to say (if anything) have a sort of cut-off point for the reduction [of personality] they will tolerate, below which silence is preferable. Instead of seeing silence as the extreme point on the scale of message reduction, it can also be seen as the alternative to it.

We were taking a DC-10 all the way across the country, from the east coast to the west. Together we flew into the Red Centre, the interior of the continent and the location of Ayers Rock--one of Australia’s most recognizable icons. “Have a look at it,” Steve said when we arrived. “It’s the heart of Australia.” I could see why. A huge red mountain rose up out of the flat, sandy landscape. The rock appeared out of place in the great expanse of the desert. The Aborigines knew it as Uluru, and they preferred that tourists did not clamber over their sacred site. We respectfully filmed only the areas we were allowed to access with the local Aborigines’ blessing. As we approached the rock, Steve saw a lizard nearby. He turned to the camera to talk about it. I was concentrating on Steve, Steve was concentrating on the lizard, and John was filming. Bindi was with us, and she could barely take two steps on her own at this point, so I knew I could afford to watch Steve. But after John called out, “Got it,” and we turned back to Bindi, we were amazed at what we saw. Bindi was leaning against the base of Ayer’s Rock. She had placed both her palms against the smooth stone, gently put her cheek up to the rock, and stood there, mesmerized. “She’s listening,” Steve whispered. It was an eerie moment. The whole crew stopped and stared. Then Bindi suddenly seemed to come out of her trance. She plopped down and started stuffing the red sand of Uluru into her mouth like it was delicious. We also filmed a thorny devil busily licking up ants from the sandy soil. The one-of-a-kind lizard is covered with big, lumpy, bumpy scales and spikes. “When it rains,” Steve told the camera, “the water droplets run along its body and end up channeling over its face, so that if there is any rain at all, the thorny devil can get a drink without having to look for water!” It’s a pity she won’t remember any of it, I thought, watching Bindi crouch down to examine the thorny devil’s tongue as it madly ate ants. But we had the photos and the footage. What a lucky little girl, I thought. We’ll have all these special experiences recorded for her to take out and enjoy anytime she wants to remember.

I prefer my first word, 'formidable.' But this was softened by joviality in youth and kindliness in maturity. Genius is formidable and so is goodness; he had both. It is useful in a picture sometimes to introduce a balancing figure to give scale, and I would choose the figure of W. H. Auden as one of comparable impressiveness and goodness, felt as formidable and friendly.

Yet despite these offensive reasons to scale, the most common driver of blitzscaling is the threat of competition. Even without competition, you would still want to achieve first-scaler advantage and climb the learning curve, but you might prefer the less risky fastscaling approach to growth. Ask yourself, “Can somebody else realize this opportunity before me?” If the answer is yes, moving faster probably reduces the risk of competition more than it raises the risk of failure. The more intense the competition, the faster you should try to move.

How to Make a 3D Character Modeling, Character Rigging and Animation By GameYan Studio Using your concept art, create 3D Character modeling with Game Development Studio software like Maya. Then, paint your models to give them a distinct look. Finally, animate your Game Character Modeling Studio to bring them to life. Create 3D models for every character, environment, and item in your game, based on your concept art. Texture is a Add colors, textures, and lighting to your 3D Character modelers to give them a unique look. After modeling and texturing a 3D character Models it is time to make it move. Rigging is the first step in creating a skeletal 3D animation. 3D animation rigging is the process of creating a virtual skeleton of a 3D model. Rigging is Build a control structure for items that need movement, like characters, so animators can bring them to life in the game. Specifically, Character Rigging Service refers to the process of creating the bone structure of a 3D model. This bone structure is used to manipulate the 3D model like a puppet for animation. Rigging is most common in animated characters for games and movies. This technique simplifies the animation process and improves production efficiency. Once rigged with skeletal bones, any 3D object can be controlled and distorted as needed. After a 3D model has been created, a series of bones is constructed representing the skeletal structure. For instance, in a character there may be a group of back bones, a spine, and head bones. These bones can be transformed using digital animation software meaning their position, rotation, and scale can be changed. The rigging process results in a hierarchal structure where each bone is in a parent/child relationship with the bones it connects to. This simplifies the animation process as a whole. When an artist moves a shoulder bone, the forearm and hand bones will move too. The goal is to mimic real life as accurately as possible. Animation Add movement to 3D Character Models and objects to give them life and make your game more fun to play. There are endless possibilities. Our specialty are stylised characters and expressive figures. We offer the whole package from designing a character collaboratively with you, over 3d modelling, rigging, texturing and rendering. We also provide workflows for export to realtime uses like Virtual Reality and Games. Have a look at some work samples we did in the past. GameYan Studio is a trusted Character Animation Company service providing company delivers high-quality character animations in a tight within the stipulated time. Our specialization in 3D Character Animation Studio helps our clients to meet their needs just they prefer.

When you have seen the eddies caused by salinity differences in the Panama locks, one prefers to give a wide berth to similar phenomena when they are on an oceanic scale.

By contrast, Nordic societies have decided to free parents from this burden as it is good for all the individuals and institutions involved: employers, parents, and—not least, of course—the children themselves. Thanks to the Nordic theory of love, every parent in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark has easy access to inexpensive, convenient day care, publicly subsidized and generally paid for on a sliding scale according to a family’s income. Access to day care begins as soon as parents complete their initial parental leaves, and day-care centers are regulated to ensure high quality. Privately run day care is certainly also available in many places, if parents prefer that option.

The “tragedy of the commons,” as exposed by economists, is as follows—the commons being a collective property, say, a forest or fishing waters or your local public park. Collectively, farmers as a community prefer to avoid overgrazing, and fishermen overfishing—the entire resource becomes thus degraded. But every single individual farmer would personally gain from his own overgrazing or overfishing under, of course, the condition that others don’t. And that is what plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism. But it is a critical mistake to think that people can function only under a private property system. What Ostrom found empirically is that there exists a certain community size below which people act as collectivists, protecting the commons, as if the entire unit became rational. Such a commons cannot be too large. It is like a club. Groups behave differently at a different scale. This explains why the municipal is different from the national.

Having a child has become a prodigiously artificial thing. It no longer has anything of the passionately accidental event about it; it has become the parthenogenetic fruit of a calculation of biological, dietary and psychosocial data and you wonder to what extent dream, desire or fatality are still involved. But perhaps the race is losing its interest in sexuality, preferring instead a sort of protozoan transplantation. Leaving out of account that what has been conceived by artificial insemination is very likely to continue its life in artificial intelligence and to die of built-in obsolescence. After the mechanical bride, the mechanical widow. Now every human being is the product of a sexual act, a sexual pact or else we should not be the human race. It takes a sexual copulation successfully to produce a human being, just as, among the Hindus, it takes a copulation between the word and silence for a sacrifice to be successfully carried out. In a sense the child is indeed the continuation of the species. But in another, he or she is a biological vestige of it. The further we go with change, genetic innovations and fashion, the more unreal it becomes, with each new generation, to put our trust in the processes of childbirth and organic growth. The simplicity and slowness of those things are entirely outside the range of our contemporary experience. How can we claim to exercise judgement if we have lost a sense of punishment? How can we claim to judge anything at all if we no longer accept being judged? And if we are no longer able either to judge or be judged, then we lose all hope of being absolved or condemned in the past or the future. Now, what can no longer be reflected in the past or the future takes place in a single instant with all its consequences. The Last Judgement becomes an immediate reality. We have right here before us the unchecked proliferation in epidemic proportions of all processes, the multiplication of all cancers on an epidemic scale.

With investment levels so high and already being misallocated on a massive scale, the central government might have preferred higher consumption. But China’s myriad institutional constraints, which we will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, meant that consumption could not have grown quickly enough except through a surge in household borrowing. Unsurprisingly, given what the Chinese leadership had just seen occur in the United States, there was no interest in a similar experience. That is why the government chose to focus on boosting investment. The most straightforward response to the global financial crisis was a massive boost in infrastructure and housing investment to offset the decline in foreign spending. This simultaneously magnified China’s long-standing imbalances while shifting them inward. China was able to sustain growth even as its current account surplus fell at the cost of a nearly unprecedented surge in Chinese indebtedness. Unproductive investments have failed to pay for themselves.2 The danger is that the Chinese government, having reached the limits of its ability to generate rapid growth through debt-funded investment, will once again attempt to shift the costs of its economic model to the rest of the world through trade surpluses and financial outflows. The only way to prevent this is to rebalance the Chinese economy so that household consumption is prioritized over investment. That means reversing all of the existing mechanisms transferring purchasing power from Chinese workers and retirees to companies and the government—reforms at least as dramatic and politically difficult as the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978. Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsored income concentration creates a potent group of “vested interests”—Premier Li Keqiang’s preferred term—that will fiercely resist any reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment

On this particular evening, we had managed to get a hold of some Quaaludes and we were feeling the effects as we approached the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards. One of us mentioned the trivial fact that this intersection was the busiest in the entire world. We pondered this bit of trivia as the river of cars flowed by in all four directions, and the bigger than life enormous billboard advertising Close Encounters of the Third Kind loomed above. Anthony mentioned that it would be wise if we scaled to the top of this billboard, stood in front of it, and whipped out our cocks and wagged them at the world. So we climbed up there and did it, engulfed by our own laughing hysteria once again. We’d have preferred to have been successfully romancing some Westwood girls, but this was pretty good. Fuck the world anyways.

Dear reader, it may surprise you, but I know you personally. This is how I would sum you up: ‘You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable and sociable while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.’ Do you recognise yourself? On a scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), how was my assessment?

the highly developed urban system, urban traditions and material culture of the pre-modern period, which remained influential until well after the Pacific War. A second key influence has been the dominance of central government in urban affairs, and its consistent prioritisation of economic growth over the public welfare or urban quality of life. This bias is seen both in the preference for large-scale infrastructure projects over local parks or roads, and in the reluctance to regulate private urban land development activity.

Hamilton elite, most of whom deplored incendiary speech. They’d seen the damage it could do not only in the Atlanta riot (where the judge’s son-in-law commandeered state militia troops) but in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, where distant Williams cousin Colonel Alfred Waddell had riled crowds of white men to a frenzy, resulting in wide-scale death and destruction aimed at ridding the city of black leaders and officeholders. Even though the ends in that case were to their liking, they preferred more legalistic means.

You cannot stop a hemorrhage with Band-Aids, however many you apply; for a hemorrhage, you need major surgery. And I worry that as we fritter away our time and energies debating the minutiae of small-scale do-it-yourself-type community initiatives, the patient will bleed to death. Naturally, those who do not want major change would prefer to restrict the conversation to timid, half-hearted preventive efforts. They maintain that we cannot afford to do what preventing violence will require, or that the voters, who in the meantime are not being educated, will not support it - so that this whole argument becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, no expense or cruelty is spared in the effort to inflict as much pain as possible on those whom we use as scapegoats for our own massive failure to create a real family of humankind, namely, a viable social and economic system.

There are five ways technology can boost marketing practices: Make more informed decisions based on big data. The greatest side product of digitalization is big data. In the digital context, every customer touchpoint—transaction, call center inquiry, and email exchange—is recorded. Moreover, customers leave footprints every time they browse the Internet and post something on social media. Privacy concerns aside, those are mountains of insights to extract. With such a rich source of information, marketers can now profile the customers at a granular and individual level, allowing one-to-one marketing at scale. Predict outcomes of marketing strategies and tactics. No marketing investment is a sure bet. But the idea of calculating the return on every marketing action makes marketing more accountable. With artificial intelligence–powered analytics, it is now possible for marketers to predict the outcome before launching new products or releasing new campaigns. The predictive model aims to discover patterns from previous marketing endeavors and understand what works, and based on the learning, recommend the optimized design for future campaigns. It allows marketers to stay ahead of the curve without jeopardizing the brands from possible failures. Bring the contextual digital experience to the physical world. The tracking of Internet users enables digital marketers to provide highly contextual experiences, such as personalized landing pages, relevant ads, and custom-made content. It gives digital-native companies a significant advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Today, the connected devices and sensors—the Internet of Things—empowers businesses to bring contextual touchpoints to the physical space, leveling the playing field while facilitating seamless omnichannel experience. Sensors enable marketers to identify who is coming to the stores and provide personalized treatment. Augment frontline marketers’ capacity to deliver value. Instead of being drawn into the machine-versus-human debate, marketers can focus on building an optimized symbiosis between themselves and digital technologies. AI, along with NLP, can improve the productivity of customer-facing operations by taking over lower-value tasks and empowering frontline personnel to tailor their approach. Chatbots can handle simple, high-volume conversations with an instant response. AR and VR help companies deliver engaging products with minimum human involvement. Thus, frontline marketers can concentrate on delivering highly coveted social interactions only when they need to. Speed up marketing execution. The preferences of always-on customers constantly change, putting pressure on businesses to profit from a shorter window of opportunity. To cope with such a challenge, companies can draw inspiration from the agile practices of lean startups. These startups rely heavily on technology to perform rapid market experiments and real-time validation.

Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.

There is value in ranking our level of certainty about what Scripture teaches. Practically speaking, a scale of four categories is helpful. First are those things about which there is no doubt: the most basic fundamentals of the faith. These are matters of absolute conviction. Second are those matters where we are aware there are differences of opinion, but about which one is pretty certain of the preferred view. We would describe one’s view here as a firm conviction. A third category is another case where there is a difference of opinion, but this time the feeling is that when God brings us to heaven, we may find out the other person was right. This category we would call a soft conviction. Last are those areas where we might as well flip a coin, because none of us really knows. This would be genuine uncertainty.

Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26

A wife is not a commodity to be weighed on the scale of human preferences.

The concept is made even more fascinating when you consider it as a psychological spectrum. Imagine a sliding scale of personalities that range from being an “introvert” to an “extrovert” and placing “ambivert” smack dab in the middle. This linear scale illustrates a continuum of experiences, because these descriptions do not apply to every person at all times. We all have tendencies, preferences, and comfort zones that change according to the people we are surrounded by, the environment we find ourselves in, and our levels of confidence in the moment. Using the scale above, where do you typically fall in the spectrum?

In Boat 6, Margaret Brown had doffed her sables to free her up for rowing. She had encouraged the other women to row as well, defying the quartermaster who railed at her from the stern. But Robert Hichens had chosen the wrong group of women to bully. In addition to the forceful Mrs. Brown, the plucky Mrs. Candee, and the voluble Berthe Mayné, there were two English suffragettes on board, Elsie Bowerman and her mother, Edith Chibnall. Both were active members of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, the most militant of Britain’s votes-for-women organizations. Edith was one of ten women who had accompanied Mrs. Pankhurst on a 1910 deputation to Parliament that had resulted in arrests after a scuffle with police. She had also donated a banner for a Hyde Park demonstration that read “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” A full-scale rebellion against one male tyrant was soon under way in Boat 6. The women tried to taunt the quartermaster into joining them at the oars, but Hichens refused, preferring to stand at the tiller shouting out rowing instructions and doom-filled warnings that they could be lost for days with no food or water. Eventually Boat 16 came near and the two lifeboats tied up together. Margaret Brown spotted a chilled, thinly clad stoker in the adjoining boat and after he jumped over into Boat 6 to help with the rowing, she wrapped him in her sables, tying the tails around his ankles. She then handed him an oar and instructed Boat 16 to cut them loose so they could row to keep warm. Howling curses in protest, Hichens moved to block this but an enraged Mrs. Brown rose up and threatened to throw him overboard. The fur-enveloped stoker reproached Hichens for his foul language in the broadest of Cockney accents: “Soy, don’t you know you are talking to a loidy!

the importance of attractiveness has increased dramatically in the United States in the 20th century (Buss et al., 2001). For example, the importance attached to good looks in a marriage partner on a scale of 0 to 3 increased between 1939 and 1996 from 1.50 to 2.11 for men and from 0.94 to 1.67 for women, showing that mate preferences can change. Indeed, these changes point to the importance of cultural evolution and the impact of input from the social environment. The sex difference, however, so far remains invariant.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

I prefer the pain of change to the bleak despair and silence of totalitarianism.

TABLE 1-2 Assessment of problem preferences Assess your intrinsic interest in solving problems in each of these domains on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means very little interest and 10 means a great deal of interest. Design of appraisal and reward systems __________ Employee morale __________ Equity/fairness

Second, CA provided clients, political and commercial, with a benefit that set the company apart: the accuracy of its predictive algorithms. Dr. Alex Tayler, Dr. Jack Gillett, and CA’s other data scientists constantly ran new algorithms, producing much more than mere psychographic scores. They produced scores for every person in America, predicting on a scale of 0 to 100 percent how likely, for example, each was to vote; how likely each was to belong to a particular political party; or what toothpaste each was likely to prefer.

Soldiers' shoes were the prime necessity. Therefore, a scale was established, by which first shoes and then cartridge-boxes had the preference; after these, artillery-harness, and then saddles and bridles.

The ethical implications of these phenomena are significant on individual, local, and global scales. Our desires and consumption habits reflect the physical and emotional health of our persons and our societies. They shape the activities that bind our family and community lives; the kinds and amounts of natural resources that are extracted, used, priced, and distributed; and the type and amount of environmental waste that is produced by those activities. Not only material goods but increasingly, virtual goods, relationships, and experiences fill the ever-expanding catalog of things we are invited to desire and pursue. Online app and game developers encourage us to spend collective billions of human hours growing virtual crops in Farmville, massacring pigs with Angry Birds, or solving new puzzles in the Candy Kingdom. Advanced techniques of software design psychology magnify the addictive (the preferred software nomenclature is ‘sticky’) qualities of apps, driving users to make more and more in-app purchases, share our monetizable information or contacts, or just keep playing into the wee hours of the night to reach whatever surprises await us on the next game level.

Yet biologists feel that animals are no strangers to aesthetic expression. The New Guinean bowerbird's nest decorations are as good an example as any. The thatched nests can be so large and well-constructed that they once were mistaken for the huts of timid people, who never showed up. The nests often have a doorway with carefully arranged colorful objects, such as berries, flowers, or iridescent beetle wings. The male who built the bower keeps flying in new ornaments, shifting everything around with a critical eye, fussing over the arrangement, moving back to look at the whole from a distant anglelike a human painter with his painting-and then continuing the rearrangement. He is very sensitive to the fading of his flowers, replacing them with fresh ones as soon as necessary. Young males build crude "practice" bowers, tearing them down, then starting over again, until the construction holds up as it should. They also frequently visit the completed bowers of adult males in the neighborhood and see how the ornaments are laid out. There are ample learning opportunities here, and it has been noted that bower decorations differ in color and arrangement from region to region, which suggests culturally transmitted styles. Is this art? One could counter that it isn't: howerbird males are genetically programmed to engage in this activity just to attract females. Yet, while it is true that females select mates on nest quality and their equivalent of a stamp collection, the argument is not nearly as good as it sounds. To contrast these birds with our species requires that one demonstrates that human art does not rest on an inborn aesthetic sense and is produced purely for its own sake, not to impress anyone else. Both are unlikely. In fact, Geoffrey Miller argues in a recent book that impressing others, especially members of the opposite sex, may be the whole point of human art! What if our artistic impulse is ancient, antedating modern humanity, and perhaps even our species? What if it rests on a delight in self-created visual effects and a penchant for certain color combinations, shapes, and visual equilibriums that we share with other animals? Would admission in any of these areas diminish the significance of and pleasure derived from human art? Isn't it possible that our basic distinctions in art, our musical scales, and our preference for symmetrical compositions, go deeper than culture, and relate to basic features of our perceptual systems?

One consequence of all of this has been a severe erosion of democracy, an immediate consequence of sharp concentration of wealth and business power. We’ve discussed some of the means: virtual purchase of elections, radical escalation of lobbying, undermining of voting rights, all facilitated further by the most reactionary Supreme Court in living memory. There is no longer fear of excessive democracy. There’s a lot of fuss, as you know, about alleged Russian meddling in the elections. It is scarcely detectable, but even if it existed on any substantial scale, it would be invisible in comparison with the interference in elections by extreme wealth and corporate power. But these are more things that it wouldn’t do to say. Best to worry about the Russians. One consequence of all of this, also well established in the academic political science literature, is that a considerable majority of the population, those who are lower on the income-wealth scale, are literally disenfranchised. They may cast votes, but it doesn’t much matter. They’re disenfranchised in the sense that when you compare their preferences and attitudes with the decisions made by their own representatives, there’s virtually no correlation. The legislators are listening to other voices. The donor class. During the neoliberal period, the past generation, both parties shifted pretty far to the right. The Democrats abandoned the working class. They delivered them to their class enemies, who try to mobilize them on what are called cultural issues: white supremacy, fundamentalist religion, and in other ways to which we’ll return. And with the promises of decent jobs, which oddly enough are not fulfilled.

Duane waxed lyrical about “the self-respect which every mechanic should feel, as forming part of that great basis upon which society is erected,” and condemned “idle and imbecile” speculators. As to the machinery wielded by the new capitalist class, he reminded his readers that it, too, was “a production of labor and of mechanical rules of art; and that even in its most perfect state, labor is necessary to its operation, as well to contrive and make, as to keep in order and put it in motion.” And he expressed a clear preference for small-scale manufactures, such as could be performed by just “one, two, or three artists, working with simple tools,” and preferably sold by the maker rather than entrusted to a “third person for sale.” America would be an artisan republic, an advanced economy without hierarchy: “a new thing on earth.

Other known alternatives included vapor-phase cracked refinery liquids, benzene blends, and gasoline from naphthenic crudes (containing little or no wax). Why did GM, well aware of these realities, decide not only to pursue just the TEL route but also to claim (despite its own correct understanding) that there were no available alternatives: “So far as we know at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these results”? Several factors help to explain the choice. The ethanol route would have required a mass-scale development of a new industry dedicated to an automotive fuel additive that could not be controlled by GM. Moreover, as already noted, the preferable option, producing ethanol from cellulosic waste (crop residues, wood) rather than from food crops, was too expensive to be practical.

Computers make it easy to construct many scenarios of rapid carbon elimination—but those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just sets of more or less arbitrary and highly improbable assumptions detached from technical and economic realities and ignoring the embedded nature, massive scale, and enormous complexity of our energy and material systems.

Because most societies and companies reward compliance. They do that because when you comply: 1. Your behavior is predictable. 2. You are not a threat to anyone because you are “normal.” 3. People don’t feel inferior because of your special aptitude or attitude. 4. You are easier to understand because you are like everyone else. 5. Companies find it much easier and efficient to apply one standard set of policies and procedures irrespective of your attitude or aptitude and hence prefer those who fit in. This also allows them to scale. So, you can see that being “normal” is mainly for the benefit of others, not for you.

working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.

Danny and Lanir then presented their probabilities to Israel’s Foreign Ministry. (“The National Gamble,” they called their report.) The director-general looked at the numbers and said, “10 percent increase?—that is a small difference.” Danny was stunned: If a 10 percent increase in the chances of full-scale war with Syria wasn’t enough to interest the director-general in Kissinger’s peace process, how much would it take to convince him? That number represented the best estimate of the odds. Apparently the director-general didn’t want to rely on the best estimates. He preferred his own internal probability calculator: his gut. “That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis,” said Danny. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.

It wasn't until a burst of hot flame caressed my left hip that a tingling sensation, not unlike magic, crawled down my skin. Ryker gave a low chuckle. "Of course it's on your perfect ass." I craned my neck to see. Across my hip and indeed partially down my backside until it brushed the very top of the back of my leg, a pattern was revealed just a few shades darker than my skin. It was like having a lighter sort of henna painted across my hip in the design of scales. Dragon scales. "What is that?" I asked, startled. "The mark. My mark." Ryker mused. "The perfect match to my scale pattern, not repeated in any other dragon." Brushing my fingers over the skin, it didn't feel any different than it had before. It was just decorated now. My preferred black dresses would always cover it up, but my mind wandered to my closet and exactly what I owned that would show off a flash of scales at my hip. I needed to go shopping. "So, it was always there?" "Always," Ryker answered, a new sort of interest in his eyes. "How does your chest feel?" I rubbed a hand where the thrumming usually sat, but found it was gone. I had been so distracted by the process of being covered in fire and his taunting hands that didn't burn me that I hadn't noticed when it left. "I always knew I liked your ass," Ryker said. I frowned. "It's on my hip," I insisted. Ryker took one hand and smacked my left cheek, firmly on the mark. Immediately a delicious heat shot through it, running straight between my legs where I twitched in anticipation. Fuck. "What's the matter, Danica?" Ryker teased out my full name again, leaning down to meet my neck with a kiss.

that this genius transcended was his humble origins, which Oxfordians would deprive us of. And so, the Oxfordian position doesn’t just ‘solve the mystery’ of Shakespeare’s accomplishment, doesn’t just demystify the man, it deprives the Shakespeare community of its primary source of power…. In less hyperbolic terms, anti-Stratfordians spoil the fun. They provide an answer to a question that we don’t want answered. They provide the final pieces to a puzzle we’d prefer to keep on solving. How did a young man from the depths of Warwickshire scale the heights of literary fame, armed with nothing more than a grammar school education? Well, he didn’t. Instead, an extremely well-educated, well-off, well-traveled, and well-connected young aristocrat wrote the plays.

that this genius transcended was his humble origins, which Oxfordians would deprive us of. And so, the Oxfordian position doesn’t just ‘solve the mystery’ of Shakespeare’s accomplishment, doesn’t just demystify the man, it deprives the Shakespeare community of its primary source of power…. In less hyperbolic terms, anti-Stratfordians spoil the fun. They provide an answer to a question that we don’t want answered. They provide the final pieces to a puzzle we’d prefer to keep on solving. How did a young man from the depths of Warwickshire scale the heights of literary fame, armed with nothing more than a grammar school education? Well, he didn’t. Instead, an extremely well-educated, well-off, well-traveled, and well-connected young aristocrat wrote the plays. His well-documented life explains everything, in fact, and in so doing leaves little room for speculation.

In large-scale strategy, the presence of numerous troops is linked with an extra-long sword. Smaller numbers are consistent with the use of a short one. Is it not viable for a small number of troops to take the fight to a larger force? The virtue of strategy is precisely that smaller numbers can triumph [if guided correctly]. From the earliest days, there are many examples of small forces crushing big armies. In our school, this kind of narrow-minded preconception is to be rejected above all else. Research this well. (2) About Schools That Use Swords with Force （一、他流におゐてつよみの太刀と云事） One should not consider a sword [stroke] in terms of being strong or weak. The cut will be coarse if the sword is brandished with too much brute force. Such an uneven technique will make victory difficult. You will not succeed in cutting through human flesh and bone if you think only of striking with brute force. It is also bad to use too much power when testing the cutting power of a blade (tameshi-giri).4 When punishing some mortal foe, nobody thinks of cutting feebly or brutishly. “Cutting to kill” it is not achieved with a mind to do it strongly, and certainly not weakly. It is achieved with just enough power to ensure death. Your own sword could break into pieces by hitting the enemy’s sword with excess strength. Consequently, it is senseless to strike with excessive force. In large-scale strategy, relying on force of numbers to rout the enemy will lead to him countering with equal force. Both sides will be the same. Winning at anything is not achievable if correct principles are ignored. Thus, the underlying principle of my school is to defeat the enemy in any situation by applying strategic wisdom, without incorporating anything that is “excessive.”5 This must be researched attentively. (3) Schools That Use Short Swords （一、他流に短き太刀を用る事） Some warriors try to win using only short swords but this is at variance with the true Way. Since antiquity, swords were called tachi and katana, proving that distinctions have long been made between short and longer lengths.6 Warriors of superior strength can brandish a long sword as if it were light and thus there is no reason for them to prefer a shorter sword. They are, in fact, capable of wielding even longer weapons, such as yari (pikes) and naginata (glaives). With shorter swords, it is ill advised to look for openings as the enemy swings his blade and closing the distance to grab him. Aiming for an opening as the opponent attacks gives the impression of relinquishing the initiative and should be avoided as your swords will become entangled.

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]

Soldiers of every army in World War II at times shot considerable numbers of prisoners and committed atrocities against civilians. But no army of World War II committed so few war crimes in relationship to its size as the Americans, with the exception perhaps of the British and Dominion armies. The US Army as a general rule did not allow the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its prisoners as did the Germans on the Eastern Front, and it did not rape, loot, and murder civilians on the scale of depredations of the Red Army or the Japanese. It had no record of institutionalized brutality as did the Italians in Somaliland and Ethiopia; it did not coerce comfort women as did the Japanese, or shoot its former allies as did the Germans with the Italians in Greece. It did not help to organize death squads nor participate in genocide as was true of both the German and Japanese armies. In the end, most enemies preferred surrendering to the Americans or British; most allies sought American support; and most civilians welcomed the presence of Americans. p223

I’m reminded reading Dear Science, that in the world of teaching I’ve inhabited and made most of my living from for three decades, the kinds of students I prefer to teach above all have been artists, athletes, and engineers. The first two—artists and athletes—understand that practice makes different. They understand that repetition is differentiation. They understand, they understand, they understand. And the third group—engineers—aren’t perplexed but rather energized by thinking the interrelations of system and structure in multiple convolutions and extensions, whatever the scale may be.

Anti-porn feminists want us to accept their sexual preferences as gospel. Presumably, their theories are based on solid fact and deep insight. Although they have been born and raised in the same patriarchal culture that has warped other women, radical feminists have somehow escaped unscathed. Just as they have escaped being damaged by the pornography they view. Somehow these women have scaled the pinnacle, from which they now look down and make pronouncements on the lifestyle of those beneath them. Perhaps radical feminists are superwomen. Perhaps they are merely fanatics unwilling to respect any position other than their own. If women's choices are to be trashed, why should radical feminists fare better than other women? Are they the elite? If the choices of pornographic models are not to be taken seriously, radical feminists cannot claim respect for their choices either. If culture negates the free will of women, anti-porn feminists are in the same boat as the rest of us.

Pages 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a laborer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labor was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty laborer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, puts it, “the world is spiky”: People cluster not simply because they like to be around one another or they prefer cosmopolitan centers with lots of amenities, though both those things count. They and their companies also cluster because of the powerful productivity advantages, economies of scale, and knowledge spillovers such density brings. Ideas flow more freely, are honed more sharply, and can be put into practice more quickly when large numbers of innovators, implementers, and financial backers are in constant contact with one another, both in and out of the office.

I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.… It is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.” Ruess scaled remote canyons,

The Scheffe test is the most conservative, the Tukey test is best when many comparisons are made (when there are many groups), and the Bonferroni test is preferred when few comparisons are made. However, these post-hoc tests often support the same conclusions.3 To illustrate, let’s say the independent variable has three categories. Then, a post-hoc test will examine hypotheses for whether . In addition, these tests will also examine which categories have means that are not significantly different from each other, hence, providing homogeneous subsets. An example of this approach is given later in this chapter. Knowing such subsets can be useful when the independent variable has many categories (for example, classes of employees). Figure 13.1 ANOVA: Significant and Insignificant Differences Eta-squared (η2) is a measure of association for mixed nominal-interval variables and is appropriate for ANOVA. Its values range from zero to one, and it is interpreted as the percentage of variation explained. It is a directional measure, and computer programs produce two statistics, alternating specification of the dependent variable. Finally, ANOVA can be used for testing interval-ordinal relationships. We can ask whether the change in means follows a linear pattern that is either increasing or decreasing. For example, assume we want to know whether incomes increase according to the political orientation of respondents, when measured on a seven-point Likert scale that ranges from very liberal to very conservative. If a linear pattern of increase exists, then a linear relationship is said to exist between these variables. Most statistical software packages can test for a variety of progressive relationships. ANOVA Assumptions ANOVA assumptions are essentially the same as those of the t-test: (1) the dependent variable is continuous, and the independent variable is ordinal or nominal, (2) the groups have equal variances, (3) observations are independent, and (4) the variable is normally distributed in each of the groups. The assumptions are tested in a similar manner. Relative to the t-test, ANOVA requires a little more concern regarding the assumptions of normality and homogeneity. First, like the t-test, ANOVA is not robust for the presence of outliers, and analysts examine the presence of outliers for each group. Also, ANOVA appears to be less robust than the t-test for deviations from normality. Second, regarding groups having equal variances, our main concern with homogeneity is that there are no substantial differences in the amount of variance across the groups; the test of homogeneity is a strict test, testing for any departure from equal variances, and in practice, groups may have neither equal variances nor substantial differences in the amount of variances. In these instances, a visual finding of no substantial differences suffices. Other strategies for dealing with heterogeneity are variable transformations and the removal of outliers, which increase variance, especially in small groups. Such outliers are detected by examining boxplots for each group separately. Also, some statistical software packages (such as SPSS), now offer post-hoc tests when equal variances are not assumed.4 A Working Example The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measured the percentage of wetland loss in watersheds between 1982 and 1992, the most recent period for which data are available (government statistics are sometimes a little old).5 An analyst wants to know whether watersheds with large surrounding populations have

The phenomena we encountered in the previous chapters, from e-mail usage to travel patterns, hint that burstiness is deeply linked to human will and intelligence. Prioritizing only reinforces this impression, since it is our preferences that determine whether an action item is seen to immediately or indefinitely be postponed. This would suggest that bursts require the ability to set priorities. But from this perspective, the results discussed above are rather humbling. They indicate that burstiness is not something we invented but was in use well before intelligent life ever emerged on Earth. There's nothing smooth or random int he way life expresses itself, but bursts dominate at all time scales, from milliseconds to hours in our cells; from minutes to weeks in our activity patterns; from weeks to years when it comes to diseases; from millenia to millions of years in evolutionary processes. Bursts are an integral part of the miracle of life, signatures of the continuous struggle for adaptation and survival.

David Buss found that males were consistently more likely than females to regard "no previous sexual intercourse" as an important characteristic of a potential mate. In 23 of the 3 7 samples, males expressed a stronger preference in this regard than did females, while in the other 14 samples "no significant sex differences were found."94 This is the sort of finding that is sometimes taken to be grist for the sociobiologists's mill, since it seems easy to produce an "evolutionary" explanation for this pattern. Yet the same study also found that the overall intensity of this preference varied even more dramatically-from China, where both men and women almost uniformly viewed a potential mate's chastity as "indispensable" (over 2.5 on a 3-point scale) to Sweden, where it was regarded by both sexes as practically "irrelevant" (around 0.25 on the same scale). Within both Chinese and Swedish cultures, however, men were more likely to identify this issue as a concern than women. Yet the difference was only about 0.1 in both cases. What this shows is that the cultural difference was two orders of magnitude greater than the gender difference. This

The illusion that Nature … adopts the same complexity scale used by people … arises each time we face … configuration [space]…. The second law of Thermodynamics, for example, has been interpreted in many textbooks as though Nature exhibits an incurable tendency to disrupt order. Nature, of course, could not prefer one state of affairs to any other simply because we found an elegant description to the former, not more than the sequence HHHHHH is preferred to any other sequence in a coin-flipping experiment. The second law implies only that a … system tends to “escape” from any narrow region of phase space toward regions of larger volume. The illusion of an irreversible trend toward disorder originates with the fact that the volume occupied by states to which people can find concise descriptions … is extremely small compared to the entire space of possibilities. The escape from the [describable] to the [formless] is merely a perceptual distortion of the underlying transition from the narrow to the wider, as people fail to record the much more frequent transitions from the complex to the complex.