Subsystem Quotes

Do you want to awaken? To stop being a false, artificial, self-benighted being? Then developing and sharpening this sense—the ability to detect fear and the source and emanations of fear—amounts to nothing more than disengaging your own autoimmune system; the subsystem of ego that keeps this poison from making you sick. Yes, to get it out you must let it in, breathe it deep, and allow yourself to become sickened by it. The way out is through, and there can be no rebirth without first a death.

Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.

Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating.

We are made up of an entire parliament of pieces and parts and subsystems. Beyond a collection of local expert systems, we are collections of overlapping, ceaselessly reinvented mechanism, a group of competing factions. The conscious mind fabricates stories to explain the sometimes inexplicable dynamics of the subsystem inside brain. It can be disquieting to consider the extent to which all of our actions are driven by hardwired systems doing what they do best while we overlay stories about choices.

Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect fifty-six hundred defects…

the dysregulation of the body’s neurobiological system, that impairs one’s ability to pay selective attention to one’s surroundings. The world becomes a land without street signs, the individual a car in bad need of a tune-up. The vastness of the attentional system partially accounts for the variation of ADD “types.” Where one individual needs an oil change, the next needs spark plugs replaced. Where one individual is withdrawn and overwhelmed by stimuli, the next is hyperactive and can’t get enough stimuli. Where one is frequently anxious, the other is depressed. To compensate, each develops his or her own coping strategies that developmentally add to, or subtract from, the brain’s various subsystems. So Mr. A becomes a stand-up comedian, and manic. Ms. B becomes an architectural wizard with obsessive-compulsive traits. Their offspring become a sculptor and a stunt pilot. None of them can balance their checkbook. And all of them wish they had more time in the day. With such diversity in the disorder,

The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality.

Tomkins ultimately bases his theory of affect on a principle he calls “analog amplification.” He describes affect as a mechanism that magnifies awareness and intensifies the effects of operations associated with other biological subsystems (drive, cognitive, motor, perceptual, homeostatic) by “co-assembling” with these other vital mechanisms: “The affect amplifies by increasing the urgency of anything with which it is co-assembled. It is what I have called an analog amplifier” (EA,

First, there is the separation cry, which is a young mammal’s distressed vocalization when separated from a caretaker. This cry is actually an attempt to regain attachment upon separation, and thus we call it the attachment cry. Other defensive subsystems include hypervigilance and scanning the environment, flight, freeze with analgesia, fight, total submission with anesthesia, and recuperative states of rest, wound care, isolation from the group, and gradual return to daily activities

Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS).. Secondary structural dissociation is characterized by divideness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EPs that are devoted to flight, fight or freeze, total submission, and so on. (Van der Hart et al., 2004). Gail, a patient of mine, does not have a personality disorder, but describes herself as a "changed person." She survived a horrific car accident that killed several others, and in which she was the driver. Someone not knowing her history might see her as a relatively normal, somewhat anxious and stiff person (ANP). It would not occur to this observer that only a year before, Gail had been a different person: fun-loving, spontaneous, flexible, and untroubled by frightening nightmares and constant anxiety. Fortunately, Gail has been willing to pay attention to her EPs; she has been able to put the process of integration in motion; and she has been able to heal. p134

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed. Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

When the attachment figure is also a threat to the child, two systems with conflicting goals are activated simultaneously or sequentially: the attachment system, whose goal is to seek proximity, and the defense systems, whose goal is to protect. In these contexts, the social engagement system is profoundly compromised and its development interrupted by threatening conditions. This intolerable conflict between the need for attachment and the need for defense with the same caregiver results in the disorganized–disoriented attachment pattern (Main & Solomon, 1986). A contradictory set of behaviors ensues to support the different goals of the animal defense systems and of the attachment system (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999; Main & Morgan, 1996; Steele, van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2001; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006). When the attachment system is stimulated by hunger, discomfort, or threat, the child instinctively seeks proximity to attachment figures. But during proximity with a person who is threatening, the defensive subsystems of flight, fight, freeze, or feigned death/shut down behaviors are mobilized. The cry for help is truncated because the person whom the child would turn to is the threat. Children who suffer attachment trauma fall into the dissociative–disorganized category and are generally unable to effectively auto- or interactively regulate, having experienced extremes of low arousal (as in neglect) and high arousal (as in abuse) that tend to endure over time (Schore, 2009b). In the context of chronic danger, patterns of high sympathetic dominance are apt to become established, along with elevated heart rate, higher cortisol levels, and easily activated alarm responses. Children must be hypervigilantly prepared and on guard to avoid danger yet primed to quickly activate a dorsal vagal feigned death state in the face of inescapable threat. In the context of neglect, instead of increased sympathetic nervous system tone, increased dorsal vagal tone, decreased heart rate, and shutdown (Schore, 2001a) may become chronic, reflecting both the lack of stimulation in the environment and the need to be unobtrusive.

Of the three primary instinctual defense systems, the immobility state is controlled by the most primitive of the physiological subsystems. This neural system (mediated by the unmyelinated portion of the vagus nerve) controls energy conservation and is triggered only when a person perceives that death is imminent—whether from outside, in the form of a mortal threat, or when the threat originates internally, as from illness or serious injury. Both of these challenges require that one hold still and conserve one’s vital energy. When this most archaic system dominates, one does not move; one barely breathes; one’s voice is choked off; and one is too scared to cry. One remains motionless in preparation for either death or cellular restitution.

The result will not be an Orwellian police state. We always prepare ourselves for the previous enemy, even when we face an altogether new menace. Defenders of human individuality stand guard against the tyranny of the collective, without realising that human individuality is now threatened from the opposite direction. The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within. Today corporations and governments pay homage to my individuality, and promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customised to my unique needs and wishes. But in order to so, corporations and governments first need to break me up into biochemical subsystems, monitor these subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms. In the process, the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy. Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs.

The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within. Today corporations and governments pay homage to my individuality, and promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customised to my unique needs and wishes. But in order to so, corporations and governments first need to break me up into biochemical subsystems, monitor these subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms. In the process, the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy.

By what criteria can one decide which of a person's countless beliefs are primitive? The essential factor is that they are taken for granted: a person's primitive beliefs represent the basic truths he holds about physical reality, social reality, and himself and his own nature. Like all beliefs, conscious or unconscious, they have a personal aspect: they are rooted in the individual's experience and in the evidence of his senses. Like all beliefs, they also have a social aspect: with regard to every belief a person forms, he also forms some notion of how many other people have the experience and the knowledge necessary to share it with him, and of how close the agreement is among this group. Unlike other beliefs, however, primitive beliefs are normally not open to discussion or controversy. Either they do not come up in conversation because everyone shares them and everyone takes them for granted, or, if they do come up, they are virtually unassailable by outside forces. The criterion of social support is totally rejected; it is as if the individual said: "Nobody else could possibly know or have experienced what I have." Or, to quote a popular refrain: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen."  A person's primitive beliefs thus lie at the very core of his total system of beliefs, and they represent the subsystem in which he has the heaviest emotional commitment.

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.

In real brains neural networks do not exist in isolation. They communicate with other networks by way of synaptic transmission. For example, in order to see an apple, instead of a roundish, reddish blob, the various features of the stimulus, each processed by different visual subsystems, have to be integrated. As we saw in Chapter 7, the problem of understanding the manner in which this occurs is called the binding problem. One popular solution to this problem is based on the notion of neuronal synchrony. Synchronous (simultaneous) firing, and thus binding, has been proposed as an explanation of consciousness (chap. 7), but our interest here is more in the ability of synchronous firing between cells in different interconnected regions to coordinate plasticity across the regions.

products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more. A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.

Even if patients with a severed corpus callosum are in fact harboring two distinct loci of experience, this does not show that they or individuals with normal brains do not harbor many more experiencers within them, because the behaviors and reports elicited in experiments do not speak to that question. As Thomas Nagel points out in one of the first philosophical treatments of the split-brain phenomenon, there is no reason to think that verbalizability, or, we might add, any motor output capacity, is a necessary condition for subjective experience. Because measurable outputs will generally occur at the level of maximal integration - that is, at the level of the organism as a whole - they say rather little about the presence of subjective experience in subsystems that are nested within the main system, whether these subsystems are neuronal networks or even neurons themselves. The notion of nested experiencers may counterintuitive, but if we have learned any lesson from modern science, it is that the range of things that exist and the range of things that are intuitively plausible often fail to overlap. It is probably best, therefore, to remain agnostic as to whether there are nested experiencers within maximally integrated conscious systems.

The Aleppo Codex is not only the oldest complete codex of the Tiberian Bible text known to us, but it is altogether the earliest complete codex of that Masoretic subsystem which had been perfected by Ben-Ashers.

Some cognitive scientists have taken the moral of the story to be that logic is not enough. To get a behaviorally adroit and resourceful agent, you have to supplement your cognitive system, with its perceptual subsystems and memory subsystems and inference subsystems and the like, with an emotional subsystem (or two or three or more). But we-along with others (e.g., Damasio 1994; de Sousa 1987; Elster 1996; Frank 1988)-want to draw an even more radical conclusion: Emotions are not a set of important subsystems sitting alongside the cognitive subsystems; in the brain, emotions rule. We mean this literally. All control in the brain, all prioritizing, all organizing, all demoting and promoting, starting and stopping, enhancing and squelching within cognitive processes, is done by what we refer to as the cognitive emotions or, more precisely, the epistemic emotions.⁴ These are a set of emotions that, together, have the effect of encouraging the mental behaviors that constitute a certain form of reasoning and epistemic assurance.

the strength of intrinsic connectivity within the ventral ‘salience’ subnetwork is uniquely correlated with the intensity of affective experience, whereas connectivity within the more dorsal subsystem is uniquely correlatedto motor control and changing mental sets

Dimensions for Descriptive Context Dimensions provide the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” context surrounding a business process event. Dimension tables contain the descriptive attributes used by BI applications for filtering and grouping the facts. With the grain of a fact table firmly in mind, all the possible dimensions can be identified. Whenever possible, a dimension should be single valued when associated with a given fact row. Dimension tables are sometimes called the “soul” of the data warehouse because they contain the entry points and descriptive labels that enable the DW/BI system to be leveraged for business analysis. A disproportionate amount of effort is put into the data governance and development of dimension tables because they are the drivers of the user's BI experience. Chapter 1 DW/BI and Dimensional Modeling Primer Chapter 3 Retail Sales Chapter 11 Telecommunications Chapter 18 Dimensional Modeling Process and Tasks Chapter 19 ETL Subsystems and Techniques

final step of the ETL process is the physical structuring and loading of data into the presentation area's target dimensional models. Because the primary mission of the ETL system is to hand off the dimension and fact tables in the delivery step, these subsystems are critical. Many of these defined subsystems focus on dimension table processing, such as surrogate key assignments, code lookups to provide appropriate descriptions, splitting, or combining columns to present the appropriate data values, or joining underlying third normal form table structures into flattened denormalized dimensions. In contrast, fact tables are typically large and time consuming to load, but preparing them for the presentation area is typically straightforward. When the dimension and fact tables in a dimensional model have been updated, indexed, supplied with appropriate aggregates, and further quality assured, the business community is notified that the new data has been published.

When the registered netfilter hook returns NF_STOLEN, it means that the packet was taken over by the netfilter subsystem,

In a tiny company like mine, it’s up to the owner to invent the way the company operates and to design the systems that keep track of what is happening. Fortunately, I find this to be an interesting challenge. If I had wanted to build only furniture, I could have kept myself very busy, but the company would not have grown. Without a rational way to handle information, we would have descended into permanent chaos. Thinking about information is different from ordinary work. The challenge is to find good ways, using data, to describe what’s happening in the real world. It’s aligning the description of the company with the activities of the company. My job as boss is to monitor both of these and to continually modify the description to fit the reality. My employees can’t do it—they each work on their piece of the process. I’m the only one who sees everything. I decide what to keep track of, and how to do it. I have two information systems. First, there’s my subjective impressions of the state of the shop, the mood of the workers, the eagerness of the customers, drawn from my observations and conversations. The second is objective, actual data that lives in separate fiefdoms: the accounting system, in QuickBooks; the contract and productions system, in FileMaker; e-mails and customer folders sit on our server; AdWords data lives in the cloud. So do our shared Google Docs spreadsheets, which act as supplementary databases. There are also a bunch of Excel sheets, dating back to 1997, when I first computerized (twelve years after starting the company). None of these subsystems talk to one another. Information passes between them via the people who use it. I’m the only person in the company who knows how it all fits together.

Before there was a Human Mind System, there was the Sovereign Integral. The HMS is the most opaque and distorted veil that has stood between humanity and its true self, perverting its self-expression within the domains we call reality. The Human Mind System is separated into three primary functional mechanisms: The unconscious or genetic mind, the subconscious, and the conscious. These three components intermingle to form what most people term consciousness. The unconscious, genetic mind is the repository of all humanity; the subconscious is the repository of the family bloodlines; and the conscious mind is the repository of the individual. However, and this is important to understand, the foundational patterns of thought are primarily from the subconscious and genetic mind structures of consciousness. Thus, while the individual believes themselves to be individual, unique, separate, and one-of-a-kind, in reality they are not. Not in the context of HMS. You can conceptualize yourself as a copy of the human family folded inside a copy of your parents and bloodlines, placed into an individualized expression: you. The “You” is an HMS particularized into one expression, but its roots are entirely planted in the soil of humanity and parental lineage, all of which is downloaded into the developing fetus before birth. This is precisely why, after ten thousand generations, we continue to operate in the same patterns of greed, separation, and self-destruction. The image in the mirror is upgraded with better “clothing” and more sophisticated masks, but underneath, the image remains the same feelings, the same thoughts, and the same behaviors. Social and cultural engineering via the entertainment and educational systems conspire to entrain the individual during their developmental years (3-14 years old), activating the programs and subsystems of the HMS to ensure that the individual is properly prepared to conform to the reality matrix of their time and place. Even those who are non-conformists, who fancy themselves “outside the box”, are well within the perimeter of the HMS.

Let’s return to the body metaphor for story. A good story is a “living” system in which the parts work together to make an integrated whole. These parts are themselves systems, each—like character, plot, and theme—hanging together as a unit but also connecting in myriad ways to each of the other subsystems of the story body. We have compared character to the heart and the circulatory system of the story. Structure is the skeleton. Continuing the metaphor, we might say that theme is the brain of the story body, because it expresses the higher design. As the brain, it should lead the writing process, without becoming so dominant that it turns the story—a work of artistry—into a philosophical thesis.

Food insecurity resulting from urban expansion is thus just one facet of a pervasive urban problem: reliance on complex infrastructure subsystems with many moving parts, all of which have to work together for society to function, and which require stable economic and political conditions.

New York was like the internet before the internet. A densely populated, hectic, ever-evolving place that’s always on, that you extract yourself from in order to rest, to catch your breath, and will be there in full force when you’re ready for it again. The city that never sleeps. Interconnected in a grand plexus by a series of subnetworks and subsystems. Shiny parts and seedy parts. Covered in ads, understated and overstated. Multicultural. Everybody’s here, every language is spoken. The anonymous mistaken for the rude: people here get away with saying how they feel, speaking their truths.

We need to change the ways in which we talk about humanity and the environment and in order to do so, we need to change the way in which we think about them, not an easy task given that we use language to think and our languages make us conceive the environment as detached. A possible way out to help us approach problems, without being drawn back by the mental models that fail us, is Systems Dynamics (Meadows 2008; Sterman 2012). Unfortunately, Sterman explains, most efforts made by individuals and institutions to enhance sustainability are directed at the symptoms and not at the causes and systems (any system) will respond to any change introduced with what is known as ‘policy resistance’, that is the existing system will tend to react to change in ways that we had not intended when we first designed the intervention (a few examples are road-building programs designed to reduce congestion that ends up increasing traffic or antibiotics that stimulate the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens—for a longer list and further explanation see Sterman 2012, 24). Systems Dynamics allows us to calculate scientifically the way in which a complex system will react to change and to account beforehand for what we usually describe as ‘side-effects’. Side effects, Sterman argues, ‘are not a feature of reality but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’ (24). As Gonella et al. (2019) explain: ”As long as we consider the geobiosphere as a sub-system (a resources provider) of the human-made economic system, any attempt to fix environmental and social problems by keeping the business as usual, i.e., the mantra of economic growth, will fail. The reality tells us the reverse: geobiosphere is not a sub-system of the economy, economy is a sub-system of geobiosphere. As systems thinkers know, trying to keep alive at any cost the operation of a sub-system will give rise to a re-arrangement of the super-system – the geobiosphere – that will self-reorganize to absorb and make ineffective our attempt, then continuing its own way.” (Gonella et al. 2019)

Once the powerful ecological threat of extinction is removed,’ he wrote, ‘civilization collapses into its sub-systemic attitudes’.38

Despite renewed questioning of our economic circumstances during the current global financial crisis, most of those in positions of influence still buy the orthodox line that there are no serious limits to our capacity to exploit the planet’s resources for our benefit; they ignore the reality that the economy is a sub-system of the environment. As

no complex, nonlinear system can be adequately described by dividing it up into subsystems or into various aspects, defined beforehand.

In a 2006 article in Management Science, Alan MacCormack and Carliss Baldwin document an example of a product that successfully evolved from an integral to a modular architecture.21 When the software was put into the public domain as open source, the commercial firm that owned the copyright invested significant resources to make the transition. This was critical because the software could not have been maintained by distributed teams of volunteer developers if it had not been broken into smaller subsystems.

four fundamental team topologies: ​•​Stream-aligned team ​•​Enabling team ​•​Complicated-subsystem team ​•​Platform team

The conventions of coding or systems of metaphor that make us human are known as "culture" or "cultural configuration" in anthropology. The systems used in science at a given date are known as the models of that period, or sometimes all the models are lumped together into one super-model which is then called "the" paradigm. The general case — the class of all classes of metaphors — is called a group's emic reality (by Dr. Harold Garfinkle who has built a meta-system called ethnomethodology out of the sub-systems of anthropology and social psychology) or its existential reality (by the Existentialists) or its reality-tunnel (by Dr. Timothy Leary, psychologist, philosopher and designer of computer software).

SYNERGY: those behaviors of whole systems which cannot be predicted by analysis of parts or sub-systems. A term popularized by Buckminster Fuller and roughly equivalent to Holism. Cf. Gestalt in psychology and transaction immediately following:

This oral bio-survival system makes a feedback loop from mouth to hypothalamus to neuropeptide system to lymph and blood etc., to immunological system. What Transactional Analysis calls the Wooden Leg Game — evasion of adult responsibility through chronic illness — does not appear conscious in most cases. Rather a Loser Script in this system depresses the sub-systems, including the immunological system, and renders the subject, or victim, statistically prone to more illness than average. Similarly, a Winner Script on this circuit contributes to longevity and may account for cases like Bertrand Russell (still writing philosophy and polemic at 99), George Burns (busy with three careers until 100) etc.

Helping stream-aligned teams achieve this high rate of flow are enabling teams (which identify impediments and cross-team challenges, and simplify the adoption of new approaches), complicated-subsystem teams (if needed, to bring deep specialist expertise to specific parts of the system), and platform teams (which provide the underlying “substrate” on which stream-aligned teams can build and support software products and services with minimal friction).

●   You have discovered Divine Lore:  Your knowledge of Divine magic has expanded greatly!  You know secrets only known to the gods! “Did you just pick up Divine Lore?” Shart groaned.  “Magical secrets known only to the most wizened of sages and you.” “It was technically an accident.  I was thinking about Divine magic,” I defended. “That doesn’t make it any better,” replied Shart.  “If anything, it makes it substantially worse.” “I’m surprised there isn’t a group skill, like a Magical Lore,” I stated.  I actually sighed when nothing appeared. “It's called Mystical Lore, Dum Dum,” stated Shart.  ●   You have discovered Mystical Lore:  Your knowledge of various subsystems of magic have culminated with you learning the most challenging of all Magical Lore skills.  Congratulations!  By achieving level 0 in all primary casting classes, you have successfully unlocked this rare skill.  ●   With your current ranks in Arcane Lore, Divine Lore, Primal Lore, and Psychic Lore, your new skill level will be Unskilled.  Minimum skill rank is Initiate.  Your new rank will be Initiate in Mystical Lore!  All further Skill Point gains will be granted to Mystical Lore.  I coughed.  Shart said nothing for a long moment. “I counted to 100.  I’m good now,” he finally responded.

A whole complex system cannot be inspected, only parts or sub-systems can be inspected.

When you examine the effect of causing you to bend forward, think of the martial implications of striking an opponent and getting that effect. Their stance will be disrupted and their ability to attack will be greatly hindered. They will fold at the waist and their hips will move backward. This will present their head to you for follow-up strikes. This minor adjustment in understanding how to attack the centerline of the body, and the “Human Battery,” will increase your effectiveness as a martial artist. Another curious observation concerning the Governing and Conception Vessels is that according to the point numbering system used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, both vessels appear to flow towards the head. The point numbers start with the low numbers in the pelvic region and become larger as the vessels ascends to the head. After intense study of the Extraordinary Vessel subsystem, it appears that the numbering system for these two vessels are for reference purposes only and are not indicative of the direction of flow of energy.

The physiology of TMS begins in the brain. Here repressed emotions like anxiety and anger set in motion a process in which the autonomic nervous system causes a reduction in blood flow to certain muscles, nerves, tendons, or ligaments, resulting in pain and other kinds of dysfunction in these tissues. The autonomic nervous system is a subsystem of the brain that has the responsibility for controlling all of the body's involuntary functions. It determines how fast the heart beats, how much acid is secreted into the stomach for digestive purposes, how rapidly one breathes, and a host of other moment-to-moment physiologic processes that keep our bodies functioning optimally under everyday circumstances or in emergencies. The so-called fight or flight reaction that all animals share, particularly important in lower animals, is directed by the autonomic system. In order to meet the emergency, every organ and system in the body is properly prepared. For some systems it means total cessation of activity so that the body's resources can be mobilized to deal with the danger more effectively. Typically, most of the body's nutritive and excretory activities are shut down, the heart beats more rapidly, and blood is shunted away from less important functions so as to be available in larger quantities for systems that are crucial to escape or fight, like the muscles. The critical importance of the autonomic system of nerves is obvious. (page: 71)

Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.

To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system—there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing.

The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality. If everyone can work harmoniously toward the same outcome (if all feedback loops are serving the same goal), the results can be amazing. The most familiar examples of this harmonization of goals are mobilizations of economies during wartime, or recovery after war or natural disaster. Another example was Sweden’s population policy. During the 1930s, Sweden’s birth rate dropped precipitously, and, like the governments of Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government worried about that. Unlike Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government assessed its goals and those of the population and decided that there was a basis of agreement, not on the size of the family, but on the quality of child care. Every child should be wanted and nurtured. No child should be in material need. Every child should have access to excellent education and health care. These were goals around which the government and the people could align themselves. The resulting policy looked strange during a time of low birth rate, because it included free contraceptives and abortion—because of the principle that every child should be wanted. The policy also included widespread sex education, easier divorce laws, free obstetrical care, support for families in need, and greatly increased investment in education and health care.4 Since then, the Swedish birth rate has gone up and down several times without causing panic in either direction, because the nation is focused on a far more important goal than the number of Swedes.

​•​Stream-aligned team ​•​Enabling team ​•​Complicated-subsystem team ​•​Platform team

A complicated-subsystem team is responsible for building and maintaining a part of the system that depends heavily on specialist knowledge, to the extent that most team members must be specialists in that area of knowledge in order to understand and make changes to the subsystem. The goal of this team is to reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams working on systems that include or use the complicated subsystem. The team handles the subsystem complexity via specific capabilities and expertise that are typically hard to find or grow.

[Brian] Nosek (2007) has argued that ‘measurement innovations [such as the IAT] have spawned dual-process theories that, among other things, distinguish between the mind as we experience it (explicit), and the mind as it operates automatically, unintentionally, or unconsciously (implicit)’ (2007:184). So we have here the distinct possibility of two largely independent subsystems in the human mind, one that is familiar and one that is not. (Whether we have any ‘conscious’ awareness at all of our implicit thinking, and whether the implicit process is always truly unconscious or whether we have some inkling of the underlying evaluation, remain to be properly investigated. The fact that something cannot be consciously controlled and manipulated does not of course mean that it resides purely and totally in the unconscious.) But how does this divergence between implicit and explicit attitude manifest itself within the individual, and does it have any effect on any aspects of observable behaviour? After all, a hundred years ago or so Freud showed how unconscious (and repressed) thoughts could find articulation through the medium of everyday speech in the form of slips of the tongue. And how might this dissociation impact on people’s willingness or ability to actually do something about climate change? These are potentially important questions from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. It surprised me that nobody until now had attempted to answer them. Nosek, B. A. (2007) Understanding the individual implicitly and explicitly. International Journal of Psychology 42: 184–188.

The more independent the subsystems are, the more you make it safe to focus on one bit of complexity at a time. Carefully defined objects separate concerns so that you can focus on one thing at a time. Packages provide the same benefit at a higher level of aggregation.

At the software-architecture level, the complexity of a problem is reduced by dividing the system into subsystems. Humans have an easier time comprehending several simple pieces of information than one complicated piece.

Levels of Design Design is needed at several different levels of detail in a software system. Some design techniques apply at all levels, and some apply at only one or two. Figure 5-2 illustrates the levels. Figure 5-2. The levels of design in a program. The system (1) is first organized into subsystems (2). The subsystems are further divided into classes (3), and the classes are

So far this does not tell us anything very general about structure except that it is hierarchical. But we can say more. Each assembly or subassembly or part has a task to perform. If it did not it would not be there. Each therefore is a means to a purpose. Each therefore, by my earlier definition, is a technology. This means that the assemblies, subassemblies, and individual parts are all executables-are all technologies. It follows that a technology consists of building blocks that are technologies, which consist of further building blocks that are technologies, which consist of yet further building blocks that are technologies, with the pattern repeating all the way down to the fundamental level of elemental components. Technologies, in other words, have a recursive structure. They consist of technologies within technologies all the way down to the elemental parts. Recursiveness will be the second principle we will be working with. It is not a very familiar concept outside mathematics, physics, and computer science, where it means that structures consist of components that are in some way similar to themselves. In our context of course it does not mean that a jet engine consists of systems and parts that are little jet engines. That would be absurd. It means simply that a jet engine (or more generally, any technology) consists of component building blocks that are also technologies, and these consist of sub-parts that are also technologies, in a repeating (or recurring) pattern. Technologies, then, are built from a hierarchy of technologies, and this has implications for how we should think of them, as wee will see shortly. It also means that whatever we can say in general about technologies-singular must hold also for assemblies or subsystems at lower levels as well. In particular, because a technology consists of main assembly and supporting assemblies, each assembly or subsystem must be organized this way too.

The Five Whys The "Five Whys" is another lean manufacturing tool pioneered by Toyota. When faced with a problem, the first answer will likely be superficial and fail to address the root cause. Asking "why?" five times in succession can help get to the root of the problem. For example, a software company releases a new product feature that caused its service to fail: Why did the service fail? Because a particular server failed. Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way. Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer didn't know how to use it properly. Why didn't he know? Because he was never trained. Why wasn't he trained? Because his manager doesn't believe in training because he and his team are "too busy." Without the Five Whys, most companies would stop at the first question, fix the server and move on. However, pursuing the five whys reveals the root cause which is the manager's negative attitude on training. Without fixing the training problem, issues like this would probably happen again. Note that the process of five whys typically moves the focus from a technical fault towards human error.

My plan is to start from a completely blank state, taking nothing about technology for granted. I will build the argument piece by piece from three fundamental principles. The first will be the one I have been talking about: that technologies, all technologies, are combinations. This simply means that individual technologies are constructed or put together-combined-from components or assemblies or subsystems at hand. The second will be that each component of technology is itself in miniature a technology. This sounds odd and I will have to justify it, but for now think of it as meaning that because components carry out specific purposes just as overall technologies do, they too qualify as technologies. And the third fundamental principle will be that all technologies harness and exploit some effect or phenomenon, usually several.

We have one mind, and it contains both thought and feeling. Passion and reason combine as one in our mind. Only when we are at war with ourselves do they diverge, but this is pathology not a healthy state. They are both parts of the whole, each a subsystem embedded in an integrated, larger system. There is nothing more human than our reason and our emotions. We are probably the most emotional creature on the earth as a result of the complexity and subtlety of our thought, our mind's and body's role in adaptation, and our dependency on other people, all of which are relevant to survival and how we flourish as individuals and a species.

I am not a feminist, because, in my opinion, this is a political ideology. I am a humanist, and I care about the problems of all mankind, and I wonder how these problems can be solved by scientific methods. In this case, I am a positivist, that is, I think that functional dynamics in a social system can be supported by a rational design, taken in a certain space-time continuum, but not by abstract metaphysical concepts, such as freedom, equality, and so on. If we consider humanism as a whole system, then feminism will be its subsystem. If the whole system - all of humanity is in prosperity, then all its subsystems will be a satisfactory condition for this. If our attention is concentrated solely on a specific subsystem, then we can now relatively regenerate it due to the degeneration of the entire system in the long term.

Specific Architectural Topics Is the overall organization of the program clear, including a good architectural overview and justification? Are major building blocks well defined, including their areas of responsibility and their interfaces to other building blocks? Are all the functions listed in the requirements covered sensibly, by neither too many nor too few building blocks? Are the most critical classes described and justified? Is the data design described and justified? Is the database organization and content specified? Are all key business rules identified and their impact on the system described? Is a strategy for the user interface design described? Is the user interface modularized so that changes in it won’t affect the rest of the program? Is a strategy for handling I/O described and justified? Are resource-use estimates and a strategy for resource management described and justified for scarce resources like threads, database connections, handles, network bandwidth, and so on? Are the architecture’s security requirements described? Does the architecture set space and speed budgets for each class, subsystem, or functionality area? Does the architecture describe how scalability will be achieved? Does the architecture address interoperability? Is a strategy for internationalization/localization described? Is a coherent error-handling strategy provided? Is the approach to fault tolerance defined (if any is needed)? Has technical feasibility of all parts of the system been established? Is an approach to overengineering specified? Are necessary buy-vs.-build decisions included? Does the architecture describe how reused code will be made to conform to other architectural objectives? Is the architecture designed to accommodate likely changes? General Architectural Quality Does the architecture account for all the requirements? Is any part overarchitected or underarchitected? Are expectations in this area set out explicitly? Does the whole architecture hang together conceptually? Is the top-level design independent of the machine and language that will be used to implement it? Are the motivations for all major decisions provided? Are you, as a programmer who will implement the system, comfortable with the architecture?

seven” “Watch acceleration drift.” “Compensating.” “Sub-system deviance?” “Standard, minus

Here is where the real novelty lies: we let each distinct subsystem develop according to rules for adaptation, and our role as designers is merely that of facilitator. Namely, we are not going to dictate its design using any preconceived ideas or images (a shocking suggestion for contemporary practitioners), only search for the possibilities that satisfy the constraints of use, site, environment, etc. In this way, the components we have to work with will, in a real sense, “assemble themselves”. This phenomenon is called self-organization — a very important topic that we discuss extensively in our 2011 essay “Frontiers of Design Science: Self-Organization”.

Adaptive design’s principal aim is to facilitate the different components of a particular subsystem so they assemble themselves into a coherent subsystem.

Here is where the real novelty lies: we let each distinct subsystem develop according to rules for adaptation, and our role as designers is merely that of facilitator. Namely, we are not going to dictate its design using any preconceived ideas or images (a shocking suggestion for contemporary practitioners), only search for the possibilities that satisfy the constraints of use, site, environment, etc. In this way, the components we have to work with will, in a real sense, “assemble themselves”. This phenomenon is called self-organization

The cognitive system of the brain is based on the functional operation of several sub-systems. If there is relatively perfect accordance among them, then the mind can reach the harmony and clarity. Each sub-system in mind has got its start point – presuppositions, the deep content of which is hidden in unconsciousness, but in most cases, if not all, actively affects the whole process of rational thinking. You can be aware of mostly its consequences, and you can intuitively sense whether these consequences are logical and clear, or illogical and vague. If the latter is the case, it means that the presuppositions of the sub-systems in mind are incompatible, which in turn influences the functions of whole sub-systems and conclusions that the sub-systems draw as the consequence of these functional operations. Ultimately, the mind would suffer from inevitable disagreement and disharmony, which in turn would constantly keep the mental state under stress. (The Denotation and Connotation of the concept of God)

The main problem related to the presuppositions of the sub-systems is that mainly the denotation of the concepts can be noticed, on a conscious level, but their connotation is mainly hidden in unconsciousness. To explain it in a simple way, the rational mind devotes more attention to the ‘reality’ which, with the use of this concept, it wants to indicate (the denotation) than which essential attributes carries the ‘reality’ indicated in the concept (connotation). However, denotation and connotation are quite different things. Let’s say that the so-called ‘religious’ sub-system of the mind which controls the spiritual state necessarily require the existence of God. Without its existence other ’emotional-motivational’ sub-systems would be blocked, which in turn would deeply affect the whole mental state. Let’s say that with disbelief in God and afterdeath, which closely connected with the God’s existence in the thought, it is impossible or hard to find the ultimate purpose of morality and justice and so on. Therefore, your mind automatically takes it for sure that God exists, its existence is logical and beneficial rather than its non-existence. And your mind denotes some ‘reality’ by the concept of ‘God’, and claims that God exists. The whole process so far is logical in context and quite understandable. (The Denotation and Connotation of the concept of God, Part 2)

However, without its essential attributes the concept of ‘God’ is empty on its own. Like any other concept, it contains some essential features for your mind — at least God is either merely the Creator, or also Regulator of everything in the Universe, including your brain, mind and behavior. On the surface, maybe there is no serious distinction between them, since the majority looks at the surface only, the interchange of their meanings causes little or no discomfort for the intellect. But at the bottom there is clear-cut distinction between them. God as only the creator is the first cause of the Universe, which in turn also affects your brain and mind states through deterministic relationships between everything, visible or invisible for you, in the Universe. But even God itself cannot break that determinism and regulatory. In that context God is passive rather than active super power, he is not omnipotent, he can neither damn nor forgive you. Therefore, there is no need to worship, to perform numerous rituals, sacrifice, struggle for God against God’s enemies and so on and so forth. There is no appearance of any phenomenon, only the deep content related to ’emotional-motivational’ sub-system of mind such as the ultimate purpose of life and after death. The concept of ‘God’ with the meaning of just creator is more philosophical, and in some context more ‘scientific’, than the concept of 'God' with also the meaning of the regulator. In the former meaning you can substitute the concept of ‘energy’, ‘information’, ‘hard determinism’ and so on, in their broader sense, for the concept of ‘God’. But you cannot do it related to the latter meaning, because unlike the former, it is ideological rather than philosophical and ‘scientific’. There is no free thought there, there is no free conceptual analysis there, your contemplation cannot circulate in any direction only on the base of the logical investigation and logical argumentation. it is going to be confined at some point after which would come all-powerful God’s will, expressed in the holy scriptures, and ideological interpretation of that will according to various political-economic interests. (The Denotation and Connotation of the concept of God, Part 3)

the software team needs some way to validate their work before the responses from actual hardware are available. Simulators model behaviors from subsystems through the full system in virtual space — including user behavior. An emulator is a physical device that imitates the behavior of one subsystem, providing realistic inputs and outputs so that another subsystem can be developed independently.

If the group has done its work with emulators, simulators, small subsystem prototypes, convergence and other experiments, the team will be able to deliver a full system prototype that needs less work before moving on to the next phase.

An intriguing aspect of the causal sequence exhibited in the tectonic system is that the subsystems that keep the whole causal chain moving are reciprocally self-formative.